Economics- the dismal science?
Posted on July 3, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 32 Comments
Dismal economics may be, but a science it is not. Such has been my opinion for at quite 40 years and nothing of late has shaken that opinion. I find it worrying that our welfare is at the mercy of nostrums for which there is neither theoretical backing nor empirical evidence. Some are pure myth, some are mumbo-jumbo, some are self-fulfilling – what happens, happens because we believe it will happen.
A few examples.
The status of gold is irrational. Gold is of no use; you cannot eat it, or burn it or make machines with it. Only small quantities are used in electronics. We dig and refine gold with great effort only to bury it again. If the times are uncertain there is the flight to the “certainty” of gold. The value of gold is just the value we ascribe to it, and “value” is registered in some currency anyway. The position of gold I can only conclude is down to its mythological and mystical status. It really is mumbo-jumbo.
On the ten-pound note that I have before me it says, “I promise to pay the bearer the sum of ten pounds”. It used to be bear the signature of was it the Governor of the Bank of England? If I were to go into my bank, proffer the ten-pound note and ask for ten pounds they would suppose I wanted two fivers or ten pound coins. If I said, ”No, I want ten pounds” the cashier would think me unhinged. The solemnly signed statement on the note is meaningless.
I believe it was Milton Friedman who said that governments could halt inflation at a stroke by limiting the printing on money. Did he mean that if I went into my bank and tried to withdraw £100 the cashier would say, ”Sorry Sir, we are rather short of money. We are rationing each customer to £50”? If not what did he mean? And what about credit cards? I rarely use cash.
Then there is currency trading. This is fundamentally different from other trading since it facilitates nothing. The business exists in a self-contained world. Trading in money is anchored to nothing. Money is made from money and the only beneficiaries are the currency traders. Of course the value of one currency against another or perhaps better against the reserve currency the $US, depends on a number of things, even a few in the real world, but speculation is an undesirable and unproductive factor.
The Bank of England and other central banks have the job of keeping inflation in check. The only tool the bank has is its lending rate – the bank rate. There is no empirical evidence that inflation is checked by a rise in the bank rate. If you point this out you are likely to be told that the effect is masked by other factors and anyway the time taken for a rise to have an effect varies. If we cannot tell if the bank rate affects inflation how is it supposed to work? A rise in the bank rate increases the cost of borrowing and servicing debt is a major cost to industry. It is not clear a fortiori why something that increases costs should keep down prices. I asked the Bank of England, the Treasury and a well-known economic journalist to explain. Each gave a different reason. One said a rise strengthened the currency so making imports cheaper. Perhaps so but the serious down-side to that is to drive the balance of payments into the red – or in the case of USA and the UK even further into the red. Another said it made companies forgo research and development and buying new machinery, in order to keep prices down. Perhaps so, but again not a desirable scheme – jam today. The journalist said it caused firms to lay off staff – or even go bankrupt – so increasing unemployment and hence decreasing the bargaining power of those still employed. Plausible as an explanation but not a good idea. Mr Bernanke the chairman of the Federal Reserve has admitted to “gaps in knowledge about how the actions of central banks affect inflation”. The Bank of England has been told to do a job with a single tool although no one knows how the tool works or if it works at all. My own view is that if raising the bank rate does curb inflation that is only because everyone believes that is what it does.
Then there is stocks and shares. When a company first issues stock it receives the money of those that buy, after those who manage the sale have taken their cut. But the company does not get a penny from subsequent trading of the stock. If a companies stock stands high I believe that makes it easier for it to borrow but that is a secondary benefit. Keynes remarked that making money on the stock market- which he did -was like judging a beauty contest where you were not deciding which of the girls was the prettiest, but which girl the other judges would think the prettiest. Economists agonize over the level of the stock market- the DOW, the Nikki and the FTS - but I cannot see why. The level of the stock market is a consequence not a cause, but one might be forgiven for thinking that economists believe it to be the other way round.
Then there are the economists themselves. The reputations survive of those who remain safely in academia or venture no further than acting as a consultant -that is just telling others what to do. The reputations of those who venture into the real world seldom do. Stocks in Alan Greenspan have gone from triple A to junk bond in a very short time. The reputation of Mervyn King is not what it was. The high priest of down-sizing rashly ventured to take on running Sears Roebuck with disastrous consequences and admitted on his death bed that he had never realized just how difficult actually doing the job was.
That brings me to “confidence”. The former Governor of the Bank of England Sir Robin Leigh-Pemberton, once said, “It is difficult to stop a currency rising when sentiment is running in its favour”. No doubt true but scarcely illuminating. An article in the Economist tells me that the “textbook account puts expectations at the heart of the inflation process”. One way of “divining expected inflation is to ask people what they think the inflation rate will be”! The other is the “gap between conventional and index linked bonds” which amounts to the same thing. If a collective guess is the best economists can do, economics has no business calling itself a science. Marks and Spencer’s today issued a profit warning following a drop in sales put down to lack of “consumer confidence”. I would have that the more likely explanation is people buying less. The way economists talk of “confidence” one might think it was something tangible that could be weighed and measured, not merely a collective belief.
I find it odd that banks lend each other money and even odder that their doing so is fundamental to the working of the whole financial system. It looks to me like taking in each other’s washing.
Then there are “financial services”. Whatever those are they are secondary. It worries me that in the developed world and in Britain especially, the primary activity of making and manufacturing has declined. There will soon be nothing in Britain for the secondary activities to be secondary to. But the financial services seem to be able exist largely without serving anything concrete. Surely that can’t go on; perhaps it is already collapsing. It is like the cartoon character that runs off the edge of a cliff and momentarily keeps running in thin air.
The world is financially in a mess. The acceptance of economics as a science is the reason; we have accepted as proven and inevitable what is neither. It is no good looking to those who have got us into this mess, to get us out of it.
Intelligence and the Intelligence Quotient
Posted on July 1, 2008
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Strictly a test score shows only the ability to score in that test. The relevance of the score to the world beyond the examination room varies with the type of test. Someone who passes a driving test is likely to be able to drive a car. But with for example, a degree in History the matter is less clear. Coupled with a teaching diploma it would be some assurance of an ability to teach History. It is claimed that the study of History develops an ability to marshal evidence, assess the evidence and present that assessment. Perhaps so; perhaps not.
The Intelligence Quotient is a test that is supposed to measure “intelligence”. Clearly an ability to do I Q tests is not a useful talent in itself so an I Q score if it means anything, should be related to something useful in the real world. Intelligence is obviously desirable; unfortunately intelligence is a vague and many-faceted quality. It is difficult to pin down. The Shorter Oxford defines intelligence as, “the faculty of understanding; intellect; quickness of mental apprehension, sagacity.” That does not get us far.
The “intelligence” that I Q is supposed to measure is thought of as some innate mental capacity. As such it is not influenced by education or training or social position to any significant degree. Unfortunately it is logically impossible to measure anything innate; one can only measure what is manifest. However it is dressed up, the proposition that I Q measures intelligence requires the definition of intelligence to be the I Q score! What is intelligence? Intelligence is the IQ score.
The underlying notion that intelligence is some undifferentiated mental “horse-power” is preposterous anyway. Gary Kasparov and Stephen Hawking are both clever fellows who may well have much the same IQ. But it simply is not plausible to suppose that they started with near identical “intelligence”, and that it has been just chance that turned one into a chess champion and the other into a theoretical physicist. The two have different brains. They cannot be compared in any strict way, anymore than one can say that Tiger Woods is a better athlete than Roger Federer, or vice versa. Both are undoubtedly fine athletes but athleticism cannot be quantified in a useful way, although I am sure an athletic test – an A Q ?– could be devised.
Mean I Q scores have risen steadily with the years but are we really getting more and more intelligent? If I Q measures something we are born with and in no part something we acquire, the mean cannot possibly have changed in such a short time and moreover changed for the better. Then white Americans score on average 15 I Q points more than black. Fifteen is quite a lot where the absolute range is in the region of 100. Are blacks really more stupid on average than whites and by a fair amount? Unlikely and certainly unacceptable - politically very incorrect.
The claims made for the fundamental nature of the I Q test cannot be supported logically and are not borne out in practice. I suppose the I Q test may have its uses although I’m blessed if I can think of one.
Man and woman created he them.
Posted on February 18, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 113 Comments
Men and women are physiologically different, a fact I have confirmed by observation and experiment, and as evidence of my investigations I have three fine children. It seems to me not inherently absurd to suppose that the genders are intellectually different; not one better than the other but different. But when Larry Summers then President of Harvard suggested that the reason so few physicists are women might be because women - on the whole and by and large - just might not be very good at physics, women stormed out of the hall in outrage and the poor fellow was forced to resign.
Of course there is still prejudice and stereotyping. The very fact that many physicists think Summers is right means that a women setting out to be a physicist faces entrenched scepticism. That society in general agrees with Summers means from birth a girl is not expected to take to science and most young people conform to what is expected.
However, there are a several fields of endeavour where a number of women have overcome prejudice where one would have thought prejudice to be at its strongest but others where women have failed to make a mark where prejudice is probably weaker. There are also similar fields where there is no reason to suppose prejudice would be different but in which women have done well in one and poorly in the other
Let me say before any woman who reads this starts to stick pins into my effigy that I believe in assessing everyone on his or her merits. With the Austral;ian Plague Locust Commission that I set up I practised what I preached. Roughly a third of my staff were women including Field Officers who had to operate, often on their own, in some of the remotest bits of interior Australia. This was though thought dangerously eccentric; there are no women on the staff now. The only actual complaints came from wives of male Field Officers who telephoned me more than once to berate me for putting their husbands in the path of temptation.
To put the matter in another way, the range of intellectual ability in every field is great, so even if the means for men and women differ that will have no relevance when it comes down to the individual. This whole business is no more than a parlour game.
The existence of certain differences is a fact and one of importance in practical ways. There are few women physicists, a matter of some relevance to the provision of toilet facilities in a laboratory complex. The explanation of the fact is something else.
The practical question does pose a dilemma in other circumstances. Every week a youth is stabbed to death. Both the victim and the assailant are almost invariably black. If the police pick out blacks to stop and search that is understandably resented by the black community and opens the police to the charge of racism. But if the police stop and search white and black youths in proportion to their respective number, the police will prevent fewer stabbings. Justice is blind but ought the police to be as well?
But I digress. I can think of four fields where no women has been outstanding or where women of the first rank have been exceedingly few. There has been no outstanding woman chess player; I believe only one has achieved Grand Master and that quite recently. There have been no major women composers. There may well be woman composers who have been unjustly overlooked but Hildegard of Bingen is not an undervalued Guillaume de Machaut nor is Dame Ethel Smythe a neglected Vaughan Williams. If there have been any original female mathematicians it has not been my good fortune to come across one. No women is listed in the roll of great philosophers.
During the few years long ago when I was a schoolmaster I ran the chess club. There was of course nothing to stop girls joining and some did. But very few kept it up and none every made the team. Any girl who wanted to get on the team and had the talent could have made it.
The best evidence of gender difference comes as I have suggested from similar areas of endeavour where achievement is dissimilar. To write you have needed only pen, paper and time. You could if you must publish under a male pseudonym, although that has not been required for near 200 years. The canon of 19th Century British literature is evenly balanced; against Dickens and Trollope and Thackeray there is Jane Austin, the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot. Not a bad team. Poets though don’t do so well. Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson - against who? Christina Rossetti? Philosophers and thinkers? John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Shaw, but no woman of note. Of course in all these fields a woman had a harder task than a man but not obviously harder in poetry than in the novel. Why then the success in the latter but not to anything like the same degree in the former? Women’s lives were more circumscribed than men’s - on the whole. Novels could be written about a woman’s small world; but then so could poetry.
I have mentioned the dearth of women composers, but there has been no lack of outstanding women performers for well over half a century. Surely no more difficult to be the former than the latter.
One might argue that women have the ability but lack the desire. It is though not obvious why women should want to write novels but not poems, or play an instrument but not compose. Lack of desire might perhaps be the explanation for the lack of a female string quartet of note. I cannot call to mind a single quartet that has more than two female members and most have none. But there are enough fine women violinists, viola players and cellists to form a first class all woman quartet. In any case lack of interest simply replaces one possible source of gender difference by another.
Lack of interest not as feminists always assume, just male prejudice might well explain the under represtation of women in parliament. It might be prejudice that explains the paucity of women candidates but if enough women joined a political party, male prejudice would be undone. In practice few women can be bothered and I for one do not blame them.
It does not matter whether the lack of a woman World Chess Champion is because women’s brains don’t work in the required way or because a woman can’t see the point of devoting her life to pushing curiously shaped pieces round a board marked in squares, and if the later whether that concentration on the practically useful has been genetically imprinted or socially driven.
In fact none of all this matters in the least. People are individuals and if a women becomes the World Chess Champion that will be that - and I’ll eat my hat.
Jan 2008
Man and woman created he them.
Posted on February 18, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized | 113 Comments
Men and women are physiologically different, a fact I have confirmed by observation and experiment, and as evidence of my investigations I have three fine children. It seems to me not inherently absurd to suppose that the genders are intellectually different; not one better than the other but different. But when Larry Summers then President of Harvard suggested that the reason so few physicists are women might be because women - on the whole and by and large - just might not be very good at physics, women stormed out of the hall in outrage and the poor fellow was forced to resign.
Of course there is still prejudice and stereotyping. The very fact that many physicists think Summers is right means that a women setting out to be a physicist faces entrenched scepticism. That society in general agrees with Summers means from birth a girl is not expected to take to science and most young people conform to what is expected.
However, there are a several fields of endeavour where a number of women have overcome prejudice where one would have thought prejudice to be at its strongest but others where women have failed to make a mark where prejudice is probably weaker. There are also similar fields where there is no reason to suppose prejudice would be different but in which women have done well in one and poorly in the other
Let me say before any woman who reads this starts to stick pins into my effigy that I believe in assessing everyone on his or her merits. With the Austral;ian Plague Locust Commission that I set up I practised what I preached. Roughly a third of my staff were women including Field Officers who had to operate, often on their own, in some of the remotest bits of interior Australia. This was though thought dangerously eccentric; there are no women on the staff now. The only actual complaints came from wives of male Field Officers who telephoned me more than once to berate me for putting their husbands in the path of temptation.
To put the matter in another way, the range of intellectual ability in every field is great, so even if the means for men and women differ that will have no relevance when it comes down to the individual. This whole business is no more than a parlour game.
The existence of certain differences is a fact and one of importance in practical ways. There are few women physicists, a matter of some relevance to the provision of toilet facilities in a laboratory complex. The explanation of the fact is something else.
The practical question does pose a dilemma in other circumstances. Every week a youth is stabbed to death. Both the victim and the assailant are almost invariably black. If the police pick out blacks to stop and search that is understandably resented by the black community and opens the police to the charge of racism. But if the police stop and search white and black youths in proportion to their respective number, the police will prevent fewer stabbings. Justice is blind but ought the police to be as well?
But I digress. I can think of four fields where no women has been outstanding or where women of the first rank have been exceedingly few. There has been no outstanding woman chess player; I believe only one has achieved Grand Master and that quite recently. There have been no major women composers. There may well be woman composers who have been unjustly overlooked but Hildegard of Bingen is not an undervalued Guillaume de Machaut nor is Dame Ethel Smythe a neglected Vaughan Williams. If there have been any original female mathematicians it has not been my good fortune to come across one. No women is listed in the roll of great philosophers.
During the few years long ago when I was a schoolmaster I ran the chess club. There was of course nothing to stop girls joining and some did. But very few kept it up and none every made the team. Any girl who wanted to get on the team and had the talent could have made it.
The best evidence of gender difference comes as I have suggested from similar areas of endeavour where achievement is dissimilar. To write you have needed only pen, paper and time. You could if you must publish under a male pseudonym, although that has not been required for near 200 years. The canon of 19th Century British literature is evenly balanced; against Dickens and Trollope and Thackeray there is Jane Austin, the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot. Not a bad team. Poets though don’t do so well. Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, Browning, Tennyson - against who? Christina Rossetti? Philosophers and thinkers? John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin, Shaw, but no woman of note. Of course in all these fields a woman had a harder task than a man but not obviously harder in poetry than in the novel. Why then the success in the latter but not to anything like the same degree in the former? Women’s lives were more circumscribed than men’s - on the whole. Novels could be written about a woman’s small world; but then so could poetry.
I have mentioned the dearth of women composers, but there has been no lack of outstanding women performers for well over half a century. Surely no more difficult to be the former than the latter.
One might argue that women have the ability but lack the desire. It is though not obvious why women should want to write novels but not poems, or play an instrument but not compose. Lack of desire might perhaps be the explanation for the lack of a female string quartet of note. I cannot call to mind a single quartet that has more than two female members and most have none. But there are enough fine women violinists, viola players and cellists to form a first class all woman quartet. In any case lack of interest simply replaces one possible source of gender difference by another.
Lack of interest not as feminists always assume, just male prejudice might well explain the under represtation of women in parliament. It might be prejudice that explains the paucity of women candidates but if enough women joined a political party, male prejudice would be undone. In practice few women can be bothered and I for one do not blame them.
It does not matter whether the lack of a woman World Chess Champion is because women’s brains don’t work in the required way or because a woman can’t see the point of devoting her life to pushing curiously shaped pieces round a board marked in squares, and if the later whether that concentration on the practically useful has been genetically imprinted or socially driven.
In fact none of all this matters in the least. People are individuals and if a women becomes the World Chess Champion that will be that - and I’ll eat my hat.
Jan 2008
Greenhouse gases- the facts?
Posted on December 31, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized | 146 Comments
The facts? There are very few of them. I will try to deal with the matter by question and answer.
The basic difficulty is that if greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming we are in deep trouble. But unless people are told that greenhouse gases ARE the cause - no doubt about it - no one will do anything. The case has been put with a certainty that is not warranted but perhaps that is the right thing to do. I don’t like it though - not my way.
1 Has the world got warmer?
Yes it has over the last 150 years.
2 What is the evidence?
There is a lot of indirect evidence - melting glaciers, plants colonising pole wards and so on. The direct evidence comes from temperature records.
3 Is the analysis of the temperature records fair?
No not completely but I doubt that has made a major difference. Anyway it is all we have to go on numerically. I will call these the “actual temperatures” to distinguish them from model estimates.
4 If the warming continues what will be the result?
No one knows and those who say what WILL happen are simply talking nonsense- with the exception of rising sea levels due mainly to expansion of water not melting ice sheets. All we know is that there will be changes to the weather and any change will cause problems.
5 Will warming continue?
Yes it probably will if for no other reason that weather and climate go in cycles- to be more accurate are auto correlated. That means tomorrow’s weather is usually like today’s and next year’s like this year’s. So it goes on being wet and windy until one day the weather turns calm and sunny; it stays that way until another wet and windy spell. The 17th Century was cold - the “little ice age” with ox roasting on the frozen Thames; the Roman period was warm with grapes grown as far north as Ely.
6 Are greenhouse gases the cause?
This is the key question. There are 3 lines of evidence.
The only explanation
The greenhouse effect is a fact so greenhouse gases are a possible explanation and there isn’t another. However, nor is there any explanation for past climate changes that certainly did not involve greenhouse gases. People will invoke sunspot cycles and the change in the earth’s angle on its elliptical orbit - precession of the equinoxes - but they don’t add up.
Models
There are computer “models” that simulate the heating effect of greenhouse gases. Clearly the models cannot do that taking into account the weather for every part of the world on every day; the models that predict just tomorrow’s weather use some of the most powerful computers and they can still get it wrong at times. The greenhouse gas models are quite different. The published papers don’t make the structure of the models clear and even if they did I doubt I could follow.
What I do know is that models of the greenhouse gas type are sets of equations. All equation have variables and constants. For example, a car might do 10 k/litre (at a steady 80k/h on the motorway). So for 2 litres the car would cover 10*2 km and for 3 litres 10*3 km. 10 is a constant; litres and km are variables. By convention constants are indicated by the first letters of the alphabet and variables by the last - both in lower case. The general form of our car equation is y=a*x where a=10.
Sometimes you can find the value of a constant by considering a bit of the model in isolation. But the greenhouse gas models will have equations with many variables and many constants. You then have to chose values of the constants that give the best result; in the greenhouse gas case the constants that give a value of the (annual mean) temperature closest to the actual value (Question 3). There are statistical ways of doing this, though multivariate analysis is a complicated field of statistics. Or you can get the computer to put in lots of values- trial and error. However, with just 5 levels of 5 constants you are already in over 3000 possibilities. This is all quite permissible but you cannot then test your model by comparing it with the data you have used to adjust the model. That is obvious enough but if you go through enough complicated manoeuvers you can fool yourself.
One way in which I am sure the models have been adjusted is by setting a base temperature. The models produce a temperature estimate but that may be usually a bit too high or a bit too low. The actual temperatures are not given in degrees above zero but in degrees above (or below) the mean for a base period. The period used is 1863 to 1889. If the global mean for that period was 20 deg C and the global mean for 2006 is say 22 deg C that would be given as an “anomaly” of +2 deg C. The technical expression is “forced to zero” for the base period. I have found on looking at the model outputs that they also have been forced to zero for the same period. In other words the models have been adjusted - or calibrated- to give the same mean value for the period 1863 to 1889 as the measured temperature. That the model should give exactly the same answer is not possible. Nothing wrong with this but it is not something you will be told.
Since the computer models have almost certainly been adjusted to give the best fit with the actual temperatures you would expect the fit to be very good. In fact the fit is not good at all. Neither the Met Office nor the Tyndal Centre nor anyone else has been able to find me a single published paper comparing the actual and model temperatures. I wonder why. The IPPC Reports list many hundred publications but you will not find one entitled, “A comparison of global annual mean temperatures estimated from daily temperatures and model estimates” or some such.
What you will see are graphs of the actual and model anomalies against the year. Both show a similar increase but then so do many other things - the cost of living index for example. The graphs are treated as a time series and time series analysis is a dodgy business. One book on statistics has a chapter “Time series and fortune telling”. Perhaps that is why IPPC claim the actual and model estimates can’t be compared statistically. The best IPCC can do is claim that “Several models are able to reproduce the major trend in surface air temperature”; a feeble and unspecific claim.
Annual global temperature just looks like a time series because you can plot it against year. But in a time series one year’s value depends largely on the previous year’s. For example, the number of cars on the road this year is the number last year minus write-offs plus purchases. There is a carry over. But the amount of petrol used this year does not depend on the amount used last year; there is no carry over; last year’s petrol has gone. Annual petrol consumption is in statistical terminology an independent variable. Global mean temperature is also an independent variable. Next year’s temperature does not depend on this year’s; heat is not stored up by the earth. With the level of greenhouse gases - as with the number of cars - there will be carry over; greenhouse gases is a time series. But the temperature will depend on the heat reaching the earth from the sun in that year. So global temperature is not a time series. That means you can compare actual and model temperatures. But before doing so I must make a technical statistical point.
In statistics we use a number of common words with a quite different meaning from the one you will find in a dictionary. “Significant” is one. In statistics significant does not mean important but probably true- in fact a 95% probability of being true; “highly significant’ is 99%. But the statistical significance level depends in part on the number of cases - the size of the sample. So something can be statistically highly significant but practically not significant at all. What are called the “confidence limits” decrease by the square root of the size of the sample. So if we want to measure something twice as reliably we need 4 times more examples.
The first test is to see whether the actual and model temperatures for the same year are about the same, technically are they correlated. We work out what is call the correlation coefficient. If the two were exactly the same the value would be 1; if they were completely opposite it would be -1, and if they were all over the place the correlation coefficient would be zero. In this case the correlation coefficient for the years from 1956 to 2003 is 0.77 and of course that is “significant”. It would be astonishing if that were not so since we know greenhouse gas levels and temperatures have increased and 48 is quite a large number of cases.
To get one matter out of the way, correlation does not mean causal connection. For example, there is- or probably was- a correlation in Sweden between the number of nesting stork and the number of children in the household; stork I am confident do not bring babies. Another is the correlation between Nonconformist Ministers and convictions for drunkenness, although I suppose you might argue that Nonconformist Ministers drive the populace to take to the bottle.
Is a correlation coefficient of 0. 77 near 1 or not? That is not easy to say. You need to turn to what in statistics is called “regression” - again the statistical meaning is quite different from the dictionary meaning. I deal with regression later. First I want to see if there is anything better correlated with the actual temperatures than the model outputs.
The levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been measured since 1955 at Manna Loa in Hawaii. There are now a couple of other stations operating but It is said that one station is sufficient because weather mixes air round the world. Somewhat surprising but there it is. In any case the Manna Loa figures are what must go into the models. Now the interesting point is that the correlation of the actual temperature with the raw carbon dioxide values from Manna Loa before they have been put through the model mill, is better at 0. 85 than with the model values. In other words the models are useless; they are a clever -and expensive - way of arriving worse off than you started. In Gulley Jimson’s words in the Horses Mouth the models are, ” like farting Annie Laurie through a keyhole; clever but not much point in it”.
There is another simple test that anyone can make. The actual temperatures go up and down although the trend is up. The model temperatures also go up and down but when the actual temperature is higher than the year before the model temperature is lower almost precisely half the time; the result is exactly what you would get by tossing a - slightly biased - coin. That is, the ups and downs of the model temperatures is purely cosmetic. Indeed since carbon dioxide levels have increased steadily I do not see how the model outputs can oscillate. I suspect the models have become so complicated that the authors have managed to fool themselves.
Scientists say so
The majority of scientists assure us that greenhouse gases are almost certainly the cause of global warming and who I am I to question the opinion of thousands of scientists? To answer that you have to understand how science works - not scientists but science. Science is not a democracy. The opinion of a scientist is not a scientific opinion; opinion has no place in science. So although the opinion of scientists in the relevant field should not be ignored, that is not in itself evidence.
But what is the relevant field and who are the relevant scientists? The greenhouse gas case rests on the models. Do all these thousands of scientists understand the models and have assured themselves that the models are almost certain evidence for the case? Not a chance. The Chief Government Scientist - a ridiculous post since no one now can know about “science”; there is vastly too much of it - assures us that greenhouse gases are the cause of global warming. But he is a biochemist; his field is much further from the global warming business than mine. There are I would guess no more than 20 world wide engaged on greenhouse gas models and they are not likely to be over critical. Turkeys and voting for Christmas comes to mind.
The whole green house gas business is not really science anyway. A scientific statement must be testable and the test repeatable. The test does not prove but may disprove; to be science a statement must be disprovable. The greenhouse gas case is not disprovable; no test is possible. The fact that green house gases and temperatures have both risen does not prove a connection nor will it if both continue to rise. But if temperatures were to fall whilst gas levels rose, that would more-or-less disprove a connection.
But you may say the papers about the models have appeared in scientific journals and published papers must pass referees; referees are anonymous in theory but in fact you can always tell who the chap is. Science is a lot of very small words. Refereeing is not an infallible system. I would never get a paper published setting out what I have written here; I am an outsider and science is in practice a set of closed shops,not far removed from medieval guilds. I can in practice publish only in the field of the closed shop of which I am a member.
I am not impressed by the “2000 scientists can’t be wrong” line. It is an appeal to authority. When someone resorts to that you know he has lost the argument.
Where does this leave the greenhouse gas business?
I really don’t know. Nothing that I have said precludes greenhouse gases being the cause of global warming. However, if greenhouse gases are the cause, there are still things I can say. If you plot the actual temperatures against the model temperatures on a graph and draw the best line -technically the line of best fit - through the scatter of points you will notice two things. The slope of the line ought to be 45 deg - if we write as an equation that ought to be y= 1*x where y is the actual temperature and x is the model (Tangent 45 deg =1) . In fact the equation is y = 0.75*x (the model is MO3 -Met Office 3 -in this cae). That means the model is likely to overestimate temperatures with higher levels of greenhouse gases by 25%. The second point is that the scatter of points is quite large so we can not even rely on a steady over estimate; judged at 95% probability, that 0.75 could have been anything from 0.65 to 0.95- anything from about right to an over estimate at the upper levels of greenhouse gases of quite a third. But there is another even greater source of unreliability. When you use a relationship outside the range it is based on - when you extrapolate - reliability goes rapidly and increasingly to pot. So we have no real idea what temperatures might be for future higher levels of greenhouse gases. And remember the models start with a figure for greenhouse gases so every estimate of future temperatures - very uncertain anyway - assumes a future level of greenhouse gases.
My own view is that we ought to look for a technical fix to reduce the amount of heat getting through from the sun, firstly because greenhouses gases may not be the cause - or not the only cause - of global warming and secondly with China bringing a new coal fired generator on stream every week - or is it every day? - Americans being Americans and various like matters, the chance of pegging, let alone reducing, global greenhouse gas levels is, as they say in the mathematics text books, “vanishingly small”. There are a number of schemes that might work and which would not cost much to try out. IPPC dismisses them all but whatever the IPCC members might be they are not engineers. Sometimes I think we don’t want a solution; I think many half welcome the prospect of doom as punishment for our profligate ways. A good topic for a Ph D - “Global warming and the Nonconformist mind set”?
Dec 2007
PS I have just read an article by James Lovelock, the venerable and venerated environmental scientist. I doubt his views on climate change are mine but his thoughts on science are. He writes,”Because I am a heretic, peer reviewers would not allow me to publish; free expression was extended only to the orthodox” and later, “We fall in love with our numerical models as easily as Pygmalion did with his statue. So it is with the forecasts and conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change … those who manage science believe that research money is better spent on modeling and brainstorming sessions than on messy experiments and observations”.
Bravura display of arrogant ignorance by Tristram Hunt
Posted on October 10, 2007
Filed Under Reviews | 173 Comments
This is an article in the Weekly Guardian. The article is a counter attack and an intemperate one, to the assault on religion led by by Hitchens, Dawkins and Dennet. This gives some notion of the tenor of the piece. “It (a book by Hitchens) is a bravura display of arrogance, ignorance and ceaseless solipsism. It is another contribution to a voguish literature lacking any sense of history, unwilling to appreciate a progressive religious legacy and needlessly belittling our public discourse.” Hunt lists the worthy people who have been believers and the good that they have done. He also wishes to claim much science for religion on the grounds that Newton and Priestly and many more were believers.
The title describes the article perfectly. I suppose Hunt thought one good rant deserved another. “The opposite of a slap on the left cheek is not a slap on the right cheek.” i will try to avoid slapping.
No one of sense will deny that believers have done good and harm, both of which directly motivated and justified by their belief. The problem for the believer is the grounds for distinguishing the good from the bad. For most Anglicans the contraceptive pill would be counted as a good thing; for a Catholic its use is a sin. Who is right? I know, and I can give grounds for my conclusion albeit with some difficulty, but I am not a believer. If the Anglican relied, as I am sure he would, on arguments similar to mine, he would be using “humanist” criteria as the arbiter between different religious interpretations. If he did not, he would simply be saying to the Catholic, “I have interpreted God’s will correctly; you have got it wrong.” The Catholic would reply as he did to the Anglican’s appeal that, ”We both worship the same God.” “Yes, you in your way;I in His.” “True” interpretation of the Koran does not condone terrorism, I am told, but clearly many Moslems interpret the Koran differently. Honour killings, female circumcision, stoning for adultery are infringements of human rights but human rights is not a religious concept. Christ said much about individual responsibility but nothing that can be construed as relating to human rights.
Religion is belief and you can’t argue with belief; however much the believer dresses it up, he must in the end say simply “I know” .
Hunt is not I take it a scientist nor is Eagleton nor on the other side is Hitchens. Even Dawkins is not a practising scientist. For the research worker belief is usually irrelevant. Newton’s law of gravity is attested by scientific criteria. That, according to Hunt, Newton thought gravity divinely inspired is irrelevant. For a believer everything comes from God. Nothing a scientist can discover can possibly change that. For a Protestant if a scientific finding appears to be in conflict with his belief then he has not understood God’s will correctly. Darwin worried about the implications of natural selection but he never doubted that the fault was his in failing to understand God. The position of a Catholic scientist is less clear. There is something verging on blasphemy in trying rudely to shake the “truth” out of God; we should just regard God’s works with wonder. Catholic scientists I have known tend to labour diligently hoping that if they are worthy God will reveal a little of the truth. And for Catholic authority, belief is more important than scientific “truth”. So research findings that appear to conflict with current teaching are not welcome. The trial of Galileo was not really about whether the earth went round the sun but about the inconvenience of saying so. To make essentially the same point in another way, I do not know the religious beliefs of most of my scientific colleagues and where I do know the reason is personal not professional. I suspect I would know if the belief was strongly held. In that case Catholic scientists are rare in my field; most are unbelievers or at least non-practising. To put the matter differently again, research flourishes in some societies but not in others; Britain easily outscores every other country in science Nobel prizes per head and in Britain the active church membership is tiny. In research Catholic countries score badly. This is not the consequence of religion per se but of the society that belief or its lack, produces. France does not do well in research either although it is a fiercely secular state. But French society is rigid and hierarchical; the senior is not to be questioned; even in Universities discussion is frowned upon. I do not know how other religions bear on the practice of scientific research - what in the material world are matters of dogma. Moslem countries were long ago in the forefront of research; they now hardly rate at all.
Science is a rational business. The hypotheses may come from anywhere but the testing must obey the rules. Similar rules - rationality if you like- ought to apply generally. The result might well be a “milquetoast lacking the radical energy of religious faith”. I’d settle for that.