via Friday Funny – the scientific method | Watts Up With That?.
The scientific method | Watts Up With That?
24 May 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, environmentalism Tags: data mining
The intriguing public choice history of the Kyoto protocol
21 Mar 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, environmental economics, Public Choice Tags: Al Gore, Copenhagen Summit, expressive voting, Kyoto Protocol
The US Senate voted 95-0 in July 1997 that the Kyoto Protocol would not be ratified because it excluded certain developing countries, including India and China, from having to comply with new emissions standards.
Disregarding the Senate Resolution, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the Protocol on November 12, 1998.
Knowing that the Kyoto Protocol would not be passed without the inclusion of developing countries in some way, Clinton did not even send the Protocol to the U.S. Senate for ratification. Clinton had 801 days in office to submit it, but did not. As it was going to be rejected, it cost him nothing to sign it and he won the support of expressive voters. Bush was criticised for not doing what Clinton also failed to do.
The EU made demands that the USA would not accept so that the treaty would not include the USA. This allowed EU ministers to look good to expressive voters back home by standing staunch and not compromising.
US non-participation made participation cheaper for the EU because the USA would not be competing for carbon credits, so the price of carbon would be much less.
There was an emergency night time meeting to save the Copenhagen Summit called by Gordon Brown. He was joined by Obama, Sarkozy, Merkel and PM Hatoyama of Japan. To make a point, China sent a rather out-spoken vice foreign minister of foreign affairs. He was the smartest guy in the room.
How to negotiate a treaty on global warming
20 Mar 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, economics, environmental economics, politics, Thomas Schelling Tags: credible commitments, free riding, international collective action, treaty negotiations
I found the best writer on global warming to be Thomas Schelling. Schelling has been involved with the global warming debate since chairing a commission on the subject for President Carter in 1980.
Schelling is an economist who specialises in strategy so he focuses on climate change as a bargaining problem. Schelling drew from his experiences with the negotiation of the Marshall Plan and NATO.
International agreements rarely work if they talk in terms of results. They work better if signatories promise to supply specific inputs – to perform specific actions now.
- Individual NATO members did not, for example, promise to slow the Soviet invasion by 90 minutes if it happened after 1962.
- NATO members promised to raise and train troops, procure equipment and supplies, and immediately deploy these assets geographically. All of these actions can be observed, estimated and compared quickly. The NATO treaty was a few pages long.
The Kyoto Protocol commitments were not based on actions but on results, to be measured after more than a decade and several elections and a recession or two in between.
Climate treaties should promise to do certain actions now such as invest in R&D and develop carbon taxes that return the revenue as tax cuts. If the carbon tax revenue is fully refunded as tax cuts, less reliable countries, in particular, have an additional incentive to collect the carbon tax properly to keep their budget deficits under control.
Due deference to experts in public policy making
19 Mar 2014 Leave a comment
in climate change, environmental economics, Public Choice Tags: attack on science, expert advice, global warming, GMOs, James Delingpole, medical care industry, Sir Paul Nurse, trade-offs
I caught Sir Paul Nurse’s Attack on Science on cable recently. He was exploring why people were unwilling to accept the word of science.
Sir Paul believes that people should defer to experts. He named two expert consensuses: global warming and GMOs.
In his 2012 Dimbleby Lecture Sir Paul called for a re-opening of the debate about GM crops based on scientific facts and analysis:
“We need to consider what the science has to say about risks and benefits, uncoloured by commercial interests and ideological opinion.
It is not acceptable if we deny the world’s poorest access to ways that could help their food security, if that denial is based on fashion and ill-informed opinion rather than good science.”
Many activists, without blinking an eye, will reject the science of GMOs but will hound from the temple anyone who defies another consensus they agree with.
Sir Paul interviewed James Delingpole. After they agreed that science does not proceed on the basis of consensus, Sir Paul asked Delingpole why he rejected the scientific consensus on global warming but accepted the scientific consensus on cancer.
Delingpole said he did not accept the analogy, but he was otherwise flat-footed. I suggest the following answer:
- Medicine proceeds on the basis of double blind trials and other small field experiments. Control and treatment groups are used before any treatment is applied widely. Medicine is not perfect as was the case with the misdiagnosis of the causes of stomach ulcers.
- The lag between cause and effect are short as would be the case if you rejected emergency treatment after a car accident or cancer treatment.
- Medicine tests the efficacy of invasive treatments, weighs side-effects and encourages adaptation and prevention.
- The staying power of self-interest in medicine is well-known: much higher rates of surgery when there is fee for service and much lower rates of surgery if the patient is a doctor’s wife. The efforts of the medical profession to suppress new entry to inflate their own incomes are well-known.
Ken Arrow in the early 1960s famously concluded that virtually all the special features of the medical care industry could “be explained as social adaptations to the existence of uncertainty in the incidence of disease and in the efficacy of treatment”.
- Physicians may not agree on the medical condition causing the symptoms the patient presents.
- Even if physicians agree on their diagnoses, they often do not agree on the efficacy of alternative responses — for example, surgery or medical management for lower-back pain.
- Third, information on diagnosis and likely consequences of treatment are asymmetrically allocated between providers and patients.
- The reason patients seek advice and treatment in the first place is that they expect physicians to have vastly superior knowledge about the proper diagnosis and efficacy of treatment.
Like all experts, doctors can advise you of the options open to you.
You must weigh those options in light of the costs and benefits to you and those costs and benefits are known only to you.
An old mate, who was in his thirties, had to consider back surgery that had a 10% chance of leaving him in a wheelchair for life. Experts cannot tell you what to do with those odds. After months of terrible pain and incapacity, his back slowly recovered without the surgery.
Most of the debate over global warming is explained by uncertainty about both the extent and incidence of global warming and the efficacy of prevention versus adaptation.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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