Cybernetics of Climate - Slides

Here are the slides from the second time I've given a talk by this name.

Against Waxman-Markey

A few months ago when some scientists, notably Jim Hansen, and less notably myself, were expressing doubts about cap-and-trade, the more politically active of our acquaintance were urging us to STFU, since we are presumed totally unrealistic about how Washington works. Notably it was David Roberts (in combination with the impenetrability of the bill's language) that convinced me to drop the matter.

Suddenly, David is running a convincing video that makes the exact case that people like Hansen were making in the first place, viz., that the whole cap-and-trade idea is too complicated and legalistic to work, and that the likelihood of market distortions and loopholes was much larger than for a simple tax-and-rebate scheme.

To David's credit, (and not so much to Obama's) this is a free-speech issue for him. The video's authors are on the federal payroll and have been asked to take it down, even though they were explicit about not speaking for their employer.

But I think we ought to pay attention to the substance of what they say, as well.



I think we ought to be in a hurry to get things right, not in a hurry to "do something, anything". It's better to do something next year that works than something this year that backfires.

If the way the video describes things is right, which seems entirely plausible to me, this is classic politics, getting buy-in from enough constituencies by buying them off. Democrats seem to think buy-in through buy-off is the way to get things passed. It reminds me of how I see some real mistakes working in scientific funding, actually. If everybody gets a piece of the pie, there's nobody left to object. Unfortunately we are left, it seems, with action that is only symbolically effective.

OK, the US congress can only do things in odd-numbered years. (They ought to take a leaf from the Texas State Legislature's book, and not bother to show up in election years at all.) So maybe we wait two years. Maybe that will give us time to do something effective. It's not the end of the world, with probability 0.97 or so...

The issue is which path probabilistically yields the best long range outcome. Yes, there are risks with each further delay, but a broken bill is likely as bad as a delay or worse. Now that Copenhagen is not a big deal anymore, there's no real rush to produce a bill in the US. Let's drop Waxman-Markey and its variants, and take our time to try to come up with something that works.

Troubled Transition

Alex Steffen has made a very cogent complaint about the Transition movement. Although I remain a member of the Transition Austin group, I also remain frustrated at its stubborn attachment to small scales and romantic thinking.

A particularly striking example of the problem (and of obtuseness regarding Steffen's complaints) appears here from Carolyn Baker.

Let me state that I remain an admirer of Rob Hopkins and his approach to things. I'm also an admirer and a friend of most of the people I have met through Transition Austin, a very interesting, kind and decent group indeed. That said, I share Alex's frustrations, and perhaps my reply to Ms Baker will clarify things for those who aren't getting it.

My reply, admittedly perhaps just a little overheated, did not pass moderation. (Update: It appeared moments after I posted this!) And I seem to have the ear of some of my most admired Twitter follows on this one, so here it is for what it's worth.

"Spin it as we will, the human race is precariously poised on the
cliff’s edge, hanging by its fingernails. "

yup.

"Our challenge is not to try to prevent the collapse of the larger systems"

I couldn't be more thoroughly in disagreement with this. It most certainly
IS our main challenge to prevent the collapse of the larger systems.

Anything else is mystification and begging for disaster. I get the
sense that you are practically begging for the death and suffering of
billions of people on an unprecedented scale just so you can have a
chance to try out your beet and turnip pie recipe.

We don't have a choice but to prevent the collapse. Every single thing
we do has to be directed toward the soft landing, not the
post-apocalyptic scenario. We have to steer, not to bail out, because
there is no lifeboat. If worse comes to worst a few survivors will
probably swim to some distant shore, but the Transition movement will
not get to pick them.

"What do I and my loved ones and my community need to do to prepare? "

You are a free person; what happens is therefore in part up to you.

What you need to do is lend a hand to avoid the catastrophe, not to
"prepare" for it. There is no preparation for the worst case, and if
we do avoid the worst case it won't be because people have been upping
their skills for a preindustrial world that can never be returned to
us. "Preparing" rather than "repairing" is hugely irresponsible.

Please get real. It's like you're in a car falling asleep at the wheel
and your only thought is to make sure your airbag is charged. What you
need to do is to pull over. You need to acknowledge that the tragedies
we might face will be your own fault as much as anyone else's if you
don't bend your will toward avoiding them. I am sorry but I read your
position as deeply and terrifyingly selfish and immoral. I'm sure you
don't think that of yourself, but our responses to the current
predicament couldn't be more different.

Count me with Alex.

Odd Concordance

When Peggy Noonan http://is.gd/4Lb4z and James H Kunstler http://is.g/4Lb6x share an iconoclastic point of view it's worthy of note. It's not surprising that neither is happy with Obama, but it's surprising how similarly they express it.

The most sophisticated Americans, experienced in how the country works on the ground, can't figure a way out. Have you heard, "If only we follow Obama and the Democrats, it will all get better"? Or, "If only we follow the Republicans, they'll make it all work again"? I bet you haven't, or not much.

This is historic. This is something new in modern political history, and I'm not sure we're fully noticing it. Americans are starting to think the problems we are facing cannot be solved.

Part of the reason is that the problems—debt, spending, war—seem too big. But a larger part is that our government, from the White House through Congress and so many state and local governments, seems to be demonstrating every day that they cannot make things better. They are not offering a new path, they are only offering old paths—spend more, regulate more, tax more in an attempt to make us more healthy locally and nationally. And in the long term everyone—well, not those in government, but most everyone else—seems to know that won't work. It's not a way out. It's not a path through.

and

If you think we have been in a crisis of finance and economy for the past year or so, consider that we have also been sunk in a comprehensive crisis of leadership. Nobody in authority is willing to face the truth, state the truth, and offer a reality-based idea about how to meet the truth, This is a leadership failure not just in politics and government, but also in business, in the university faculties, in the editorial and production offices of the news media, and even among a barely-breathing clergy.

Americans look around and see nobody standing up for their interests. Their greatest interest is a vision of a fruitful society that they can help build and be a part of beyond the current wreckage of revolving-debt consumerism. It will have to be a vision based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living. It will have to recognize losses frankly, and enable us to let go of things whose time is over, whether that is Happy Motoring, college-for-everybody, vast industries devoted to vanished leisure, or procedures geared to getting something-for-nothing.

Can you tell which is which? Well, Kunstler is a little more gonzo in style, so yeah, I guess. But what they're saying is alarmingly similar, isn't it?

'Tis not Mete. Or is it?

Well, my dog food calculations went awry, as Richard Reiss pointed out in the comments. I slipped a digit.

To recall, there have been recent allegations that having a dog does as much damage as driving a large SUV, on account of the carnivorous habits of the dog. Now there's some question as to how much of the damage due to meat should be attributed to the dog, but even given a proportionate impact by weight, I found at a rough cut that supporting the dog was the equivalent of driving the SUV no more than 5 miles per day. It turns out that my particular calculation was wrong by an order of magnitude, and that it has to be corrected, but it needs to be corrected AWAY from the calculations of Vale & Vale, in favor of the dog. Even fed a diet of sirloin, it appears that the dog's daily impact is on the order of driving about a half mile.

But this leaves me in a quandary. My prior result was in the same ballpark as Eshel & Martin's famous result that personal transportation and personal food consumption in the US are of comparable scale insofar as greenhouse gas impact is concerned. Counting the human as triple the dog, and the vehicle thus as driven 15 miles per day, seemed consistent with that estimate. But now I'm left at a loss, since the meat impact is now coming out as tiny.

And now here comes a Worldwatch white paper claiming that meat dominates transportation!

This level of confusion is ridiculous. How the hell are we supposed to cap and trade stuff that we have such a fuzzy grasp of?

Let's revisit the fuzziest numbers in my calculation. I erred by a factor of 10 in the power consumption of the vehicle going at 40 mph, which I took to be 10KW but was listed at 100KW. The first number seemed more plausible to me, but it;s easy to check. Let's suppose the vehicle is getting 20 mpg. Then it is consuming two gallons of gasoline per hour. Googling "energy per gallon of gasoline" is immediately successful, yielding US gallon = 115000 Btu = 121 MJ along with another handy energy conversion reference page. So I get 33,700 W, neatly splitting the difference between the small number I expected and the large number I should have used!

OK, now it's an extra factor of 3 in favor of the dog (compared with prior calculations). A dog eating ribeye steaks is worth about two miles of SUV travel daily; a human about six.

The per capita mileage in Martin & Eshel was 200 per week, supposedly compatable to human impact, so I have only a factor of five to make up. Still a bit awkward. (Update: And half of that comes back because most people aren't riding SUVs. As Marcus points out in the comments, some of that comes from my neglect of methane and nitrous oxide in the dietary impact. So maybe we are still in the irght ballpark.)

This past weekend I saw a presentation at the Texas Book Fair (at the State Capitol, an innovation for which I have Laura Bush to thank, of all people) on the subject of Texas barbecue as a repository of authentic rural Texas culture. I love Texas barbecue; not the famous places like the Salt Lick, but the still-authentic ones like Black's in Lockhart. It would be a real pity to have to sacrifice this oddly satisfying and evocative bit of authenticity to sustainability. It's just not the same with barbecuing a chicken. Never mind a tofu.

To be sure, there are real ethical issues with even the smallest bit of meat. I don't deny that for a moment. But the environmental ones are new, and they need to be properly calibrated. I'm afraid the numbers are all over the map.

I'm totally unconvinced that the impact of a dog compares to that of an SUV, even lightly driven. My latest calculation moves things a factor of three in further favor of the dog, although to be sure the dog cannot carry as much cargo. But I'd really like to pin down just how guilty I should feel when I bite into a Texas brisket sandwich. Are these pleasures of the blessed or pleasures of the damned? The estimates have way too much variance. This question has a real answer, maybe not within a factor of two, but surely within a factor of fifty!

Let's get quantitative. How many miles in an SUV is a piece of brisket worth? Surely I should feel more guilty that I drove my Prius the thirty miles to Lockhart than that I stopped there for supper?

Oh, yeah, I parked the Prius around the block.

You cain't really pull into Black's in a Prius. It's hoard to expline. Sort of a Tixes thang.

Against Overstating or Understating the Case

The ethics of lying are easy; you're off the hook. You just make up whatever suits you and see what sticks.

The ethics of telling the truth are more complicated, especially if the purpose of your speech is to affect the opinions of the public.

Here's an interesting article on the Times of London that goes to this point.

Consider on the other hand this piece by Karl Wunsch from a couple of years back. I would consider the piece strictly speaking true but strikingly ineffective. He probably wanted to conclude with "you can never be 100% sure of anything" but noted that was a self-contradictory statement (What's the opposite of a tautology?) in that "never" expresses 100% certainty. So he backed off to "we have not as yet achieved 100% certainty about attribution", even though, well, you really can never get to 100% certainty in statistical attribution, can you? What he's left us with is a pile of doubt that Wunsch seems to have intended as a call to action!

Stop me if you've heard this one before.

So there are two managers who are balloonists for a hobby, and they get blown off track and a bit lost. So one of them yells at someone he sees down on the ground:

"Heyyy! Yes youuu! Wherre arre weeee?"

to which the reply comes back

"You're in a balloooooon!"

The balloonist shrugs and says ruefully to his companion "That must be an engineer. He responded exactly to my question, everything he said was precisely correct, and yet I am no better off than I was before."

Getting the right balance is not easy. Stephen Schneider got into terrible trouble (which has never entirely abated) with a sound bite that tried to make that point.

In the end, like an old person who is always too cold when the temperature is below 75 F and always too warm when it's above 70 F, the best you can do seems to be when both tendencies, toward precision and toward influence, are a little bit stressed.

All of which brings us back to Mamet's Law, the insight that started this blog in the first place.

"Law, politics and commerce are based on lies. That is, the premises giving rise to opposition are real, but the debate occurs not between these premises but between their proxy, substitute positions. The two parties to a legal dispute (as the opponents in an election) each select an essentially absurd position. "I did not kill my wife and Ron Goldman," "A rising tide raises all boats," "Tobacco does not cause cancer." Should one be able to support this position, such that it prevails over the nonsense of his opponent, he is awarded the decision. ...

"In these fibbing competitions, the party actually wronged, the party with an actual practicable program, or possessing an actually beneficial product, is at a severe disadvantage; he is stuck with a position he cannot abandon, and, thus, cannot engage his talents for elaboration, distraction, drama and subterfuge."

David Mamet in "Bambi vs Godzilla: Why art loses in Hollywood", Harper's, June 2005.

So the good news is that we are much smarter than the opposition. But the bad news is that we'd better be.

Dogs, SUV's, and Freaks

Ray's excellent takedown of Freakonomics in RealClimate has me shaking my head about people's abilities to discuss even the arithmetic, never mind the algebra or calculus or statistics, of global sustainability issues.

Of course, Ray is exactly right, not just in the substance, but in the fact that the substantial argument in question is elementary.

Now I am going to say something harsh, but I'm afraid it needs saying.

Anybody who writes on this stuff ought to be able to figure as much out on why the solar panel/albedo question is moot in a few minutes. I mean ANYBODY, not just economists, who writes on this stuff. To be clear that includes journalists. If you lack the skills to do the arithmetic, in my opinion you should not actually be writing on sustainability issues. Period. Also, if you missed the fact that any albedo effect is swamped by the greenhouse effect, if the question didn't instantly jump out at you on reading the claim, you should be asking yourself very seriously whether your grasp of climate change is sufficient to write about it.

The same holds for many other "consider a spherical cow" type questions. If you can't do math with large numbers you should find another beat. What you are doing is the opposite of helping. (That said, what am I to make of Joe Romm's "they are not black, they are blue!" response to the panel albedo issue?)

While I was pondering these matters, a tweet arrived from @Revkin way:

Your dog a bigger CO2 source than an SUV? http://j.mp/PetCarbon (Finally had chance to read; math seems to hold up?)

Well, at least there's that question mark, but as you can see, it generated a lot of retweets.



Best to nip this one in the bud. I found a very handy page for back-of-envelope energy calculations. Please let me know if you find errors on it, because I plan to refer to it a lot in future.

So, it claims that the energy of a human is about 100 watts (seems about right) and of a car going a sustained 40 mph is about 10000 watts (also seems believable; it's about 13.4 HP). So let's figure a dog is about a third of a human, consuming about 1/300 of the car. Roughly speaking, then, the energy of a dog day is equivalent to the energy of driving a car for about 5 minutes, or a big SUV for about two and a half.

So at first glance it appears that there's really no contest. Even though the referenced article presumed only 10,000 km per year (6300 miles) that's still about 20 miles per day which is a long way to drive in 2 and a half minutes, especially at 40 mph.

For this to come out in favor of the SUV, we need to get up to a half hour, (even leaving aside the manufacturing and ancillary costs which the original article claims). To do this, we have to make a very unfavorable comparison between food energy and petroleum energy, a factor of about 8.

Now, there are claims that the food we eat consumes about 400 gallons of gasoline per year. This is a few bucks a day, and sounds plausible to me. So about a gallon a day, or a third of a gallon for the dog, if the dog's consumption is equivalent. Which will get your SUV about 4 miles further. Still not enough to get the 20 miles though.

Then there's the fact that most of the meat your dog eats is by-product of meat production for humans, rather than independently produced. I'd argue that proportion is free, which greatly reduces the impact of the dog.

However, consider the cost of a meat-eating full grown adolescent child. You will find the child's food supply (or yours) is indeed comparable to the cost of a lightly driven SUV.