Bogus Gold

Cap and Trade Draws an Ace - Rebuilding The House of Cards

Doug Williams — 2009-06-12T22:06+00:00

The scariest thing you'll read this week is something you'll probably be tempted to overlook. It is this:

Carbon Emissions Linked To Global Warming In Simple Linear Relationship

Damon Matthews, a professor in Concordia University's Department of Geography, Planning and the Environment has found a direct relationship between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. Matthews, together with colleagues from Victoria and the U.K., used a combination of global climate models and historical climate data to show that there is a simple linear relationship between total cumulative emissions and global temperature change.

Big deal, you might say. All those already upon the Global Warming bandwagon have been acting like this was already known for a couple of decades now. That's how we came up with the "carbon dioxide is pollution" nonsense. That's how we got ideas floating around like "carbon taxes" and "Cap and Trade" schemes.

Well yes, but... No one is seriously proposing a flat out carbon tax simply because opposition to it is a political no-brainer. People like to vote for taxes on other people. It's political suicide to be the politician (or the party) who wants to raise everyone's taxes.

Which is the whole reason Cap and Trade has been the preferred route for democratic governments to go in their attempt to restrict carbon emissions. It cloaks massive new taxes under a veneer of markets and trading and capitalist enterprise. When higher prices are subsequently passed on to consumers, they never get to see a direct correlation between the defacto carbon taxes and the resulting increase in consumer prices.

But implementing Cap and Trade is not as easy as it sounds, and especially so in a litigious society like our own. The problem with the entire philosophy underlying Cap and Trade is that it has always been very, very complex to measure the true impact - and therefore the measurable value - of carbon emissions versus offsetting activities. The climate is not a linear system after all. It's complex and chaotic. How do you set the definitions around your basic tradable commodities if there isn't a simple, quantifiable and therefore measurable basis underlying the whole thing? You'd end up in endless and expensive legal disputes over the relative impact of carbon in one case versus another based on all kinds of potentially offsetting conditions. That has been a formidable barrier to the successful implementation of Cap and Trade from the start.

So how does this seemingly innocuous and virtually redundant study change things? I'm so glad you asked. From the same article linked above:

Until now, it has been difficult to estimate how much climate will warm in response to a given carbon dioxide emissions scenario because of the complex interactions between human emissions, carbon sinks, atmospheric concentrations and temperature change. Matthews and colleagues show that despite these uncertainties, each emission of carbon dioxide results in the same global temperature increase, regardless of when or over what period of time the emission occurs.

So there's this incredibly complex relationship running between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming running through all sorts of complicated factors. This very complexity has previously prevented a simple basis for bundling all the different circumstances of carbon dioxide emissions together to determine their impact. But now, suddenly, through clever use of modeling against a particular set of climate data, we now have that previously elusive formula by which we can take a single variable - in this case carbon dioxide emitted - ignore every other related factor and state with certainty what its proper impact in the overall "global warming" scheme will be! Amazing!

Why, that means it will be a snap to get this Cap and Trade thing under way. We now have a reliable means allowing us to ignore all the complicated uncertainties that could otherwise derail things.

Now where have I ever heard of anything like that before? Hmmm...

Oh yeah! It reminds me of a similar great discovery in the financial sector not too long ago. Remember this?

It was a brilliant simplification of an intractable problem. And Li didn't just radically dumb down the difficulty of working out correlations; he decided not to even bother trying to map and calculate all the nearly infinite relationships between the various loans that made up a pool. What happens when the number of pool members increases or when you mix negative correlations with positive ones? Never mind all that, he said. The only thing that matters is the final correlation number—one clean, simple, all-sufficient figure that sums up everything.

That's from Felix Salmon's brilliant article explaining how a single model built to simplify correlations of risk between different securities based on mortgages lead directly to the recent financial implosion. But of course, this model didn't operate in a vaccuum. In order to allow such a simple thing to wreak maximum damage throughout all the world's finances, one more thing was necessary.

No one knew all of this better than [the model's inventor] David X. Li: "Very few people understand the essence of the model," he told The Wall Street Journal way back in fall 2005.

"Li can't be blamed," says Gilkes of CreditSights. After all, he just invented the model. Instead, we should blame the bankers who misinterpreted it. And even then, the real danger was created not because any given trader adopted it but because every trader did. In financial markets, everybody doing the same thing is the classic recipe for a bubble and inevitable bust.

So what happened to the financial markets was:

A. A model was discovered which made previously impossible correlations simple and quantifiable.

B. The model was seized upon by people who didn't really understand it so that they could use the resulting quantification to commence buying and selling in areas previously too complex for them to attempt.

C. This model was adopted universally, meaning any flaw within it would have a universal impact.

D. When the underlying reality hit a situation the model couldn't handle the entire house of cards collapsed.

Interesting parallel, you might be thinking. But surely these things are so unalike as to make any such comparison irrelevant. After all, what would buying and selling carbon permits and offsets have to do with buying and selling mortgages?

The answer may surprise you.

You've heard of credit default swaps and subprime mortgages. Are carbon default swaps and subprime offsets next? If the Waxman-Markey [that's the main Cap and Trade legislation - ed.] climate bill is signed into law, it will generate, almost as an afterthought, a new market for carbon derivatives. That market will be vast, complicated, and dauntingly difficult to monitor. And if Washington doesn't get the rules right, it will be vulnerable to speculation and manipulation by the very same players who brought us the financial meltdown.

That article linked above is only really scratching the surface here because, while noticing the financial peril by identifying some of the same specific financial instruments as were involved in the housing crisis, it misses the larger picture: Cap and Trade requires a means to simply and universally quantify economic activity surrounding carbon dioxide in a way that translates into "warming impact." Only once this is determined can the market mechanism underlying the concept begin to work. And the way it would work (the way it is intended to work it should be noted - this is by design, not a loophole) is to issue emissions permits and offsets which subsequently market forces could buy and sell and trade and do whatever else it wants with them.

Obviously this would require some kind of regulation. And that is already taking shape.

Cap and trade would create what Commodity Futures Trading commissioner Bart Chilton anticipates as a $2 trillion market, "the biggest of any [commodities] derivatives product in the next five years." That derivatives market will be based on two main instruments. First, there are the carbon allowance permits that form the nuts and bolts of any cap-and-trade scheme. Under cap and trade, the government would issue permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. Companies that emit too much can buy allowances from companies that produce less than their limit. Then there are carbon offsets, which allow companies to emit greenhouse gases in excess of a federally mandated cap if they invest in a project that cuts emissions somewhere else-usually in developing countries. Polluters can pay Brazilian villagers to not cut down trees, for instance, or Filipino farmers to trap methane in pig manure.

Let's think about those two main instruments for a moment: carbon allowance permits and carbon offsets. They're based on the same metric, one stated as a positive and the other as a negative. An allowance permit covers situations where carbon is emmitted - added. An offset covers situations where the warming impact of carbon is countered - subtracted. Which one is more valuable? Neither one, obviously. They are of equal value because they're both expressions of exactly the same thing - warming impact. How is this measured? By converting carbon dioxide into a single "warming" metric.

What's so important about that single "warming" metric is that you need it to allow any business to determine how many permits or offsets - in any combination - they would require to engage in a planned activity. That number will drive their demand. And the aggregation of that demand throughout the entire economy would create a tremendous new market for permits and offsets - which would susequently create the opportunity for incredible fortunes to be made in speculating upon their value. That is not just "kind of similar" to what happened in the mortgage market, that is exactly what happened in the mortgage market.

For the sake of clarity I'll draw the parallel more explicitly. In the case of mortgages the complex element in need of a single quantifiable metric was "default risk." In the Cap and Trade market, that element is "warming impact."

In the case of mortages the complexity was overcome, not by solving for the complexity, but rather by finding a model which allowed them to ignore it entirely. In the case of cap and trade that very same kind of model is the "grand discovery" being trumpted in the article I noted at the beginning of this post.

In the case of mortgages the availability of this newly quantifiable metric spun off dizzying arrays of new financial derivatives greatly amplifying the importance and reach of all transactions based upon the certainty of their key measure - "default risk." In the case of cap and trade - well things are shaping up exactly the same. The only difference is the metric itself is "warming impact." And surely the model producing that could never prove prone to error.

In the case of mortgages the model achieved maximum impact throughout the financial system by its near universal adoption by those who scarcely understood the model itself. In the case of Cap and Trade that same effect is intended to be achieved by legislation mandating the adoption of such a model by implication. Think this is overstatement? Then try to think how a market would react to a wandering and arbitrary standard driven by political whim rather than predictable formula. That kind of uncertainty would kill this thing in the cradle. The only way to get this plan off the ground is to base it in the certainty of science and mutually agreed upon fact (or at least a compelling illusion of the same). That's why this "simple linear relationship" between carbon emissions and warming cited at the top of this post is so significant. It hands legislators a tool which doesn't require them to understand anything about the climate itself - they just need to measure one single thing. Once they have that legislated... Voilà! The market will do the rest.

Beware of conclusions that go searching for their supporting research. Double plus beware of such conclusions when trillions of dollars are on the line. And triple plus beware when the subsequently discovered supporting research relies upon speculative modeling in lieu of solid evidence. Taken together these have a collective quality of wish fulfillment. But genies belong in fairy tales and not our markets.

So whether you're the greenest of the green, or a card carrying global warming skeptic, you have plenty of reason for alarm. Another house of cards is being built before our eyes before we've even recovered from the collapse of the last one.

Garbage In

Doug Williams — 2009-05-11T18:05+00:00

Anthony Watts has been performing a long running survey of the surface stations monitoring temperature in the United States. With 70% of his survey completed, he posted his updated report, entitled: Is the U.S. Temperature Record Reliable?

From the executive summary (all emphases mine):

Global warming is one of the most serious issues of our times. Some experts claim the rise in temperature during the past century was “unprecedented” and proof that immediate action to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions must begin. Other experts say the warming was very modest and the case for action has yet to be made.

The reliability of data used to document temperature trends is of great importance in this debate. We can’t know for sure if global warming is a problem if we can’t trust the data.

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.

The obvious truth of the first statement I bolded above renders the final sentence nearly scandalous.

As anyone who works with data in the private sector knows, challenges to the integrity of data happen routinely - especially when the data seems to point to unexpected or alarming issues. If your project produces a report that suggests a multi-million dollar strategic initiative is failing, you'd better be damned certain that your numbers will hold up under the kind of intense scrutiny such a conclusion will inevitably bring. That's how it works in the private sector anyway.

And yet, here we are, how many years into a full blown "climate change crisis", and the government agency responsible for collecting a great deal of the data upon which the alarm is based hasn't bothered to check to see if there might be a data quality problem at the data collection points. This isn't just a minor matter. The current administration has announced plans to "transform" the entire energy sector of the economy based to a large extent on this very data.

Of course, if this survey was performed and only a few minor problems were discovered it wouldn't be much on an issue. Unfortunately for the NOAA, that is not what is being found:

In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source.

In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.

A failure rate of 20% should be considered appalling in this case. But a failure rate of 90%? Words fail.

Garbage in, garbage out - that's one of the essential aphorisms in the world of computing, and it applies especially to situations where one is relying on predictive modeling. It is only owing to such predictive models that a "climate crisis" has been declared. And yet for some reason no government agency has bothered to check the input for the kind of "garbage" Mr. Watts has uncovered on his own initiative.

There is very good reason for skeptics to question the honesty of those who grow shrill about the impending catastrophe coming from human induced climate change when the most basic of tests for data integrity seem to have escaped their attention.

Watt's conclusion is inevitable and yet still remarkable:

The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.

The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7º C (about 1.2º F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows that the global database is likely similarly compromised and unreliable.

That statement about the global database is remarkable for two reasons. The first is that it would beg for an explanation of why and how the notion of U. S. temperature record gained such a lofty reputation. Obviously something other than actual evidence was involved here, and it certainly wasn't any track record of rigorous attention to detail.

Secondly, with all the money being thrown around by governments of the world toward "combatting global warming," shouldn't there be some spare funds to pay for a similar surface station survey outside the U. S.? Let's find out where the data truly may be reliable, and weed out where it isn't.

Read the full report (pdf link) for a far more detailed picture of the situation. The extent to which Watt's survey is ignored by the very government agencies responsible will tell us a lot about their dedication to science and integrity.

The Coming Clone Wars

Doug Williams — 2009-03-13T20:03+00:00

In the course of noting that President Obama's reversal of the federal embryonic stem cell funding ban may have been undone when he signed the omnibus spending bill two days later, Ed Morrissey makes the following observation about embryonic stem cell therapies:

The promise of stem-cell research lies in the ability of pluripotential cells to generate new human tissue to cure diseases. ...

We can do that now, of course, but we call it something else: transplants. We can take numerous kinds of human tissue and transplant them from one human to another — kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, pancreases, and now even faces. We face two obstacles to making this a massively available technology, though; inventory of replacement materials and the need to suppress the immune system to allow the transplants to succeed.

...only adult stem-cell therapies address the second problem. The body’s immune system can detect foreign tissue and attacks it. Without immunosuppressive therapy, most transplants (excepting, I believe, corneal transplants) would fail and the patient will die.

Ed goes on to detail his personal experience in helping his wife cope with her own immunosuppresive therapy. It's a good illustration of a major issue confronting those who intend to derive therapies.

But it's not entirely accurate to say it's an issue embryonic stem cell researchers have not been addressing. In fact, the reason the issue of cloning is often raised in conjunction with embryonic stem cell research is precisely this. Cloning - often called therapeutic cloning, or more clinically somatic cell nuclear transfer - is intended to resolve the issue of immune system rejection of embryonic stem cells.

The reasoning behind this technique is simple: if the embryonic stem cells are an exact genetic match to the patient, there should be no immune system rejection of the therapeutically introduced stem cells, or of the tissue which develops from them. To accomplish this genetic match, a researcher begins with a donated human egg cell. The nucleus of the egg cell is removed and replaced with material from the nucleus of a somatic cell (e.g. a skin cell) from the intended stem cell recipient. The cell is induced to begin dividing, and allowed to develop for several days before the resulting stem cells are extracted. During the extraction process the developing embryo is destroyed. By this method a researcher is able to obtain embryonic stem cells genetically matching an intended patient. Immune system rejection resolved.

Of course there may be a slight problem with this. Many of the most vociferous advocates of embryonic stem cell research insist that the cloning of human embryos is entirely beyond the pale, and something they would never countenance. Many go to great pains to call out their opposition to cloning at the same time they call for the advancement of embryonic stem cell research. I suspect such advocates have little understanding of the conflict such a position creates.

However, I also don't believe their desire for embryonic stem cell derived therapies is going to be held up by such a contradiction. What I would expect is something like this, which is the position of the American Association of Medical Colleges:

Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer (SCNT) or therapeutic cloning involves removing the nucleus of an unfertilized egg cell, replacing it with the material from the nucleus of a "somatic cell" (a skin, heart, or nerve cell, for example), and stimulating this cell to begin dividing. Once the cell begins dividing, stem cells can be extracted 5-6 days later and used for research. The AAMC supports on-going research into SCNT and has endorsed legislation that would allow such research to flourish.

Reproductive cloning, on the other hand, is intended to create human beings by cloning human embryos. The AAMC and the National Academy of Sciences recommend a ban on all forms of this type of cloning.

When is a clone not a clone? The answer, according to the AAMC, is when you don't intend to use it for human reproduction. The process for creating the cloned human for other purposes remains the same. This is, after all, the same process used to create such celebrity lab experiments as Dolly the Sheep. The only concrete distinction is whether or not the resulting embryo is destroyed early in development or not.

And so, prepare for the political version of the "clone wars." It's closer than you think.

UPDATE:

Well that didn't take long. From a New York Times editorial today:

Let us hope that the N.I.H. broadens the range of stem cells that can be studied.

Scientists believe that one way to obtain the matched cells needed to study diseases is to use a cell from an adult afflicted with that disease to create a genetically matched embryo and extract its stem cells. This approach — known as somatic cell nuclear transfer — is difficult, and no one has yet done it. ...

When the N.I.H. sets the rules for federally financed research, the main criterion should be whether a proposal has high scientific merit.

Note the careful avoidance of the hot-button word "cloning." That's probably how most of the press will frame this issue - avoid clear terminology in favor of obscure technical terms. That way most of the public won't even realize how this issue relates to human cloning.

But once this genie is out of the bottle, it will be very difficult to control it. High scientific merit is easy to link to the ability to clone humans for research purposes. It's only the ethics of it that constrain the issue, and our science media seem to have lost theirs.

The Man Who Sold The World

Doug Williams — 2009-02-24T22:02+00:00

The worldwide financial crisis has prompted me to do a bit of research into the field of finance just to try to make sense of what happened and why. From a layman's perspective, it doesn't seem to make sense that someone defaulting on a mortgage in Minnesota, or Arizona, or Idaho could crash the stock markets around the world. And yet, we have been semi-informed by various news reports that this is exactly what happened.

Okay, so we know something went wrong in the financial sector. My big questions are "What?" and "How?" I've never quite been satisfied with the answers I hear most often. I surely can't trust the spin coming from the politicians, who respectfully blame President Bush (from the Democrats), the Democratic Congress and/or President Clinton(from the Republicans), and corruption (aimed at each other). As the saying goes, fixing the blame isn't the same as fixing the problem. And I've discovered it's not very good at explaining the problem either.

When digging a little deeper on my own, I discovered arcane terms I'd never heard of before deeply embedded into the bloody corpse of our economy... terms like "credit default swaps," "mortgage-backed securities," "LIBOR," and "quants." Making sense of this stuff is quite a challenge to someone who hadn't previously been interested enough in this topic to even know these things existed, let alone how they were supposed to work. And you can't really understand how and why these things failed without knowing that much.

Thankfully there remain a few people out there who do know this stuff, and are able to make sense of it. And that's how I found out that this was all caused by David X. Li, the man who sold the world.

Alright, it's not really fair to say he "sold" the world. But he did something pretty close. He gave others the mechanism by which they thought the world was salable, setting off an explosion of new financial activity as they set about buying and selling it. This activity looked almost like it was making money out of thin air, and that's exactly how you inflate a bubble - with air. But at least now I understand more about what got the air blowing. And that brings us back to Mr. Li.

A year ago, it was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might someday earn a Nobel Prize. After all, financial economists—even Wall Street quants—have received the Nobel in economics before, and Li's work on measuring risk has had more impact, more quickly, than previous Nobel Prize-winning contributions to the field. ...

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

Emphasis mine, and it's just there to justify my characterization. Li was not to blame for the financial bubble, per se. But in a way he invented the air that inflated it. People started buying and selling all sorts of things in ways they simply could not have done without Li's formula.

There's much, much more to this story, and I'm grateful to Felix Salmon for telling it so clearly. I'll encourage everyone to head over and dig into it for yourself. It will be well worth your time, and help you make better sense of the mess we're in. But I will skip ahead to the conclusion to point out an important warning from this story.

In the world of finance, too many quants see only the numbers before them and forget about the concrete reality the figures are supposed to represent. They think they can model just a few years' worth of data and come up with probabilities for things that may happen only once every 10,000 years. Then people invest on the basis of those probabilities, without stopping to wonder whether the numbers make any sense at all.

As Li himself said of his own model: "The most dangerous part is when people believe everything coming out of it."

Sounds like something I've heard somewhere before.

Happy Darwin Day

Doug Williams — 2009-02-12T05:02+00:00

Today, February 12, 2009, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, the father of the Theory of Evolution. That's an important thing and a pretty big deal to those of us who majored in anthropology, no matter how long ago.

It's apparently a big deal to a lot of other people too, but to put it charitably I'm suspicious of their motives. I'll get to that in a moment.

In honor of this day Gallup helpfully polled the U. S. public only to discover that only 4 in 10 of us "believe in the theory of evolution." This is probably not the best outcome anyone might hope for. I mean... if it's true, you want everyone to see that and believe it. If it's false (spoiler alert: it's not), you want everyone to see that and believe it. But that's not the part that most bothered me.

The part that most bothered me is that I know that within those "4 out of 10" are a considerable number of people who believe in something they call evolution, but which is very much at odds with Mr. Darwin's theory. I met these people when I attempted to help my professor teach "Introduction to Physical Anthropology" as an undergraduate teaching assistant. I was staggered by the number of people flunking our quizzes who insisted they hated the idea of creationism and believed in evolution. (Me the undergrad TA: Hey, that's fine. Good luck with that anti-creationist stuff. But can we talk about why you got every question describing the fundamental mechanisms of evolution wrong? I mean... I thought we went over this after you failed the last time.)

See, my problem isn't so much that people understand the theories of Mr. Darwin and choose to reject them. My problem is that so few people understand them in the first place. Including many of those who profess deep abiding belief in them.

The sad thing I reflect on upon the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth is that his scientific discoveries and ideas have gotten to far fewer people than can be measured by Gallup asking who believes in them. And honest to God, the basics of this stuff aren't that hard to grasp.

All the same, Happy Birthday Chuck!

The Green Movement Bombs Again

Doug Williams — 2009-02-09T22:02+00:00

Why is it that the modern Green movement is starting to resemble an aging 70's era band reuniting to play their greatest hits? A while back I noted how, carbon reduction be damned, Greenies say nuclear energy is bad, mmkay?

And now I discover the freakin' Population Bomb is back.

I'll pull out the gist of it to save you from crawling through the rest of the retread (emphasis below is mine):

Here’s the truth: we are running out of resources and we are running out of time. The International Committee on Climate Change has said we have thee to five years to curb our ways or the current environmental disaster is irreversible. Irreversible means that the little economic hiccup we’re feeling today isn’t even the warn up round. It’s T-ball compared to the major leagues.

You think the economy is bad now—wait a few years. Wait until we’re almost completely out of oil and food and water and available land and really I could go on for two more pages listing everything we’re running out of. Why? Because we are quite literally running out of everything.

So how long do you have to wait to be starving, thirsty, and all the rest?

Truthfully, it shouldn’t be long now.

And the main reason it shouldn’t be long now is because there are already way too many of us. By now, everyone knows the current population stats. The earth is close to holding 7 billion people. If things don’t stop soon, by 2050, conservative estimates put the number at 9.2 billion.

Blah, blah, yada, yada. You've heard it all before, so we'll not belabor the point. The catchy new rallying cry is a call for a mandatory freeze on human reproduction for five years, with the well-thought-through implementation strategy of:

"So here’s my answer: Personal responsibility. A grassroots movement means we mean it. It means people having children in year six would feel shame and embarrassment at their unbelievable selfishness."

And mind you this grassroots movement is, like, totally going to be global. Global and grassroots. We'll pull that one off by umm... (mumble, mumble, mumble)... and then the world will be as one. Someone queue up John Lennon on the iPod!

(Quick aside: I'm not sure how this article belongs in a magazine about psychology. A case study in mass-hysteria, perhaps?)

How often do we have to go through this particular panic? It started with Malthus, comes around every couple of decades, and yet every time its adherents are absolutely convinced they're making a totally different point this time. The failure of all previous "population bomb" predictions not only doesn't disprove it this time, but has only lead to a "false sense of security" from which our new doom-sayers must take radical action to awaken us.

I don't have the time or patience to pick apart every rancid argument and assumption that goes into this particular alarmism. I'll simply call out a couple of broad points that will sail entirely over the head of anyone doltish enough to believe in this in the first place. In other words, I'm not talking to them. I'm talking to you, my far more enlightened reader. Saves a lot of time.

Point the first: The argument they make here is at its roots an economic argument. You know, resources are presumed to be growing scarce, therefore what are the implications to consumption rates, resource allocation, etc. The conclusion is always "We're doomed unless we get rid of all the people." But the argument that leads there is an economic one. Therefore, wouldn't you expect the principal adherents and advocates of it to be, oh I don't know, economists maybe? But for some strange reason they never are. Paul Erlich, who made his fame (and, one should note, his fortune - how's that for sustainable resource allocation) advocating this stupid argument throughout the 60's and 70's, is an entomologist specializing in butterflies. The dude advocating the same thing now (I know, I know, to some it's a totally different thing he's advocating, but they're morons and I'm not talking to them) is... um... he's a... err... well all his magazine bio tells us is:

"Steven Kotler is the author of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief. His magazine writing has appeared in more than 31 publications."

That and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee.

Previous articles by this fellow bear titles such as, "Psychic Dogs, Eco-Psychology and Complexity Theory," "Self-Deception, Over-Confidence and Disposable Men: A Risky Proposition," and "Lying To Yourself, It's Not Always A Bad Idea." I'm going to go out on a limb and guess he's got some kind of psychology background, which is why he's doing his ranting about economics in the pages of "Psychology Today." For all I know he's the world's greatest living psychologist, and can turn a phrase with such skill William Faulkner would be begging for tips. But I see no evidence that he's also an economist, and giving the general crappitude of his argument I'm disinclined to extend him the assumption.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as a bad economist, or stupid economic theories. Obviously there are. The point is this particular catastrophist theory seems to emanate from people who aren't well versed in how to think through economic questions. That leads them to make wild overstatements and ridiculously broad assumptions on the basis of... well a whole lot of feeling and very little evidence. They seemingly don't believe they need evidence in places where any self-respecting economist would at least have the alacrity to fake it. That's why the catastrophic predictions stemming from this "theory" always turn out to be wrong. They're making economic predictions without bothering to do the economic analysis.

This was how Julian Simon, an economics hobbyist and all around swell guy, was able to make a fool of Paul Erlich the last time this disaster theory was being peddled. Simon knew his economics and therefore could spot that particular gobsmacking deficiency in this kind of argument.

Point the second: It's growing increasingly tiresome to listen to modern Greenies "discover" through "careful analysis" that mankind is the equivalent of some kind of virus infecting an otherwise healthy planet. Has it never occurred to these people that such a conclusion is more likely to demonstrate a problem with their assumptions and values than it is to argue for the elimination of the human race?

It's not hard to come to conclusions that lead one to see human beings as some kind of a "problem" to be "solved." All you need to do is start by presuming something is more valuable than human life, and look for all the ways human's going about their lives might impact that thing. The greater the impact and/or the higher the value placed in this other thing, the more human life looks like a problem.

At which point healthy people stop, reflect, and realize they've made an error in their values.

In the case of the Green movement, they've conceptualized some Eden which is the world they imagine would exist naturally if humankind didn't exist. Humans use up resources and chop down trees and stuff, and this is seen as making the world worse than it would otherwise be. Why they prefer that world, which is one they'd never get to experience because, umm... well I hope that's pretty obvious (I'm not talking to the dummies, remember?) is one of the mysteries of the Green movement. Increasingly gaining adherence among these same Greenies is the notion that this Eden is even more valuable than human life itself. It is that fundamental assumption that leads them ever more regularly down the logical ladder to the "discovery" that we need to reduce or eliminate human lives in order to make things "better."

The notion that "better" is itself inherently subjective gets staggeringly little contemplation among this crowd. Nor do they contemplate let alone articulate the core values that lead them to their anti-human life conclusions.

That's a problem because it's the difference between sensible environmentalism - which values a healthy environment in definable, measurable, and... most importantly... human terms - and anti-human zealotry, from which craziness and its associated nastiness emerges.

The 70's may be over but, as this issue illustrates, the bad ideas it left us didn't end with Disco.

Kenneth Miller on Evolution and Intelligent Design

Doug Williams — 2009-01-10T05:01+00:00

A very good popular presentation here by Kenneth Miller on the topic of evolution and intelligent design. No science degree required to understand this. You'll get annoyed by the camera guy refusing to show the screen where Miller is showing his graphics, but he explains them well enough they're not really necessary.

I've defended certain ID researchers and the ID movement in general when I've seen them unfairly attacked, or attacked with bad arguments. But, as I've mentioned repeatedly, I don't find ID arguments persuasive. And I especially don't like the kind Miller is going after here.

More interesting to me ...

The citation of Alan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind" and it's relevance to this. He's right, and it's the single biggest problem for even the good (i.e. properly scientifically framed) ID research.

The exposure of a certain ID text intended for high schoolers as clearly a work where ID equals a faith statement. Because it's important to remember that, just because you can point to a responsible ID scientist, that doesn't mean there's nothing amiss here.

A very cool explanation of the chromosome difference between humans and the great apes I'd never heard about previously.

A palpable pride coming from Mr. Miller in regards to the sciences in the U.S., amounting to devotion to the notion of American Exceptionalism.

An excellent explanation of the reason "it's a theory not a fact" is most often a fallacy.

He takes a question about stem cell research as an opportunity to explain why embryos are becoming irrelevant to that entire branch of research, taking the ethical issue off the table.

He takes a break from political neutrality to take a shot at the Huckajesus and Ron Paul. Hooya! (and no, the shots are not gratuitous - they pertain entirely to his topic.)

His admirable consistency in talking about how sound scientific theories make predictions. And these predictions can be tested. Good stuff to keep in mind when other scientific theories come up.

There's more good stuff in there too. It's well worth an hour (technically a wee bit more than an hour if you watch the Q&A period) of your time.

Dog Envy: A Columnist's Curious Call For Treating Humans More Like Dogs

Doug Williams — 2008-12-31T01:12+00:00

A word of advice to one of our foundering local newspapers: Don't allow scientifically illiterate columnists to file columns about cutting edge new medical treatments without subjecting them to some fact checking by someone, oh I dunno, NOT scientifically illiterate perhaps. Let's take today's column by Bob Shaw for example.

Shaw thinks he's found an interesting angle to give his column. One can see why he thinks so. It has an attention grabbing "stem cell" angle. It has dogs getting better treatment than people. It's got a miracle breakthrough cure. And so, understandably, Shaw launches in with the zest of a modern day Zola...

Stem cells can cure the dog, but the human has to wait

Glen Kothe is jealous of his dog.

The pooch was plagued for a year with a cartilage tear in his rear leg. Today, the dog seems to be healed, thanks to controversial stem cell treatments.

"I asked the vet, 'When you are done with my dog, can you do the same thing for me?' " Kothe said.

The answer was no — proof that in some ways, the American medical system is working better for dogs than for humans.

Wow! Doesn't that just zing you in the gut? How could we let this happen? People are being treated worse than dogs by our health care system! Feel the outrage!

Except... well as Shaw tries to explain further his case begins to unravel. And it's at this point a fact checker might have been useful, as Shaw seems entirely unaware as the unraveling occurs. Let's take a look...

Stem cell treatments for people are mired in politics, religion and a complicated approval process. But there are no such hurdles for animals.

Not exactly. Stem cell treatments are only mired in that "complicated approval process" (we'll get to why the "politics and religion" issue isn't applicable here a bit later.). And that is because, due to matters of law and ethics, treatments must be proven safe before they are allowed to be performed on humans. Without going into too much detail, it's fair to say we set the standard a bit lower when it comes to animal rather than human safety.

The strange thing here is that this concept seems to be both new and shocking to Shaw, who reports on it in a sophomoric manner...

For example, dogs can get a vaccine for Lyme disease. People can't. Cattle have access to reproductive technology that childless human couples don't.

"It is a little curious," said Jeffrey Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics. "I guess there should be some thought about investing resources to support animal health without supporting human health. Why do animals get better access to newer treatments?"

The reason is that animal research is easy and cheap. A scientist seeking to develop a new drug for animals can readily find a large group to test effectiveness, side effects and proper dosing.

What if one of them gets hurt? It's not even close to the legal or moral nightmare of an injury to a human.

"You have way more attorneys representing humans than animals," said Dr. Wayne Scanlon, the veterinarian who helped Kothe's dog.

Umm... right. And, I hasten to add, this is generally considered a feature rather than a flaw in our medical system. We test on animals before we test on humans. And that was considered the right thing to do well before the first lawyer started chasing an ambulance.

The reasoning here is rather plain, but oddly it seems to be the opposite to how Shaw spins it. We are more cautious approving new treatments for humans than we are for animals because we value human life more, not less. There are serious risks (well beyond the threat of lawsuits) involved when you start performing medical experiments on people. There are risks for animals too of course, but once again we're talking about which one should be more protected here.

I state this rather obvious matter for a reason. Shaw apparently never gave this matter much thought until just now, as he continues...

Kahn said there has been great concern about harm done to animals through animal testing. But there are benefits from being on science's cutting edge — and animals often reap them, he said.

Scanlon sometimes dabbles with made-for-human products when dealing with sick animals.

"I have called a doctor friend of mine and said that I am having no luck with a certain bacterial infection in an animal," Scanlon said. "We will try a human-licensed product."

See, he stumbled right over the main issue yet didn't quite see it. He's reporting as if no one has ever discovered that there are separate research and approval tracks for treating dogs and humans, and that human treatment is more carefully regulated. But in fact this is well known by all but the most cranial deprived among his readers. Further, in an implicit endorsement of the guinea pig lifestyle, Shaw gives no acknowledgment that there may be a down side to "being on science's cutting edge."

As if the matter of animal versus human experimentation has been sufficiently addressed, we then race back into the stem cell matter...

Stem cells have been hailed as nature's jack-of-all-trades, capable of morphing into nerves, organs and other tissues. But the cells were found in embryos, and since the 1980s the U.S. government has banned embryonic stem cell research.

In 2003, a San Diego company called VetStem began offering stem cell treatments to horses. The process doesn't involve embryos. Instead, the company is able to take a small piece of an animal's fat — a good repository for stem cells — and isolate and concentrate the cells.

The stem cell controversy is not relevant to this article even though Shaw thinks it is. Here is where that fact-checker could have really cleared things up for Mr. Shaw.

There are many types of stem cells, obtained from many different sources.

Only those obtained from human embryos are embroiled in ethical controversy.

And that controversy pertains to the source of research material, not its availability for human treatment because...

There are no known treatments for humans or animals involving embryonic stem cells due to a host of yet-to-be overcome scientific challenges regardless of the ethics.

The treatment being discussed in this column does not involve the embryonic kind of stem cells anyway, ergo it's not associated to these other issues.

There are many human treatments using non-embryonic stem cells already in use today.

I'll skip ahead a bit through the explanation about how this specific treatment came from the research lab to treating Glen Kothe's dog. In summary, the dog in question got the treatment and seems to be doing well from it.

Then we come to the crux of the matter...

[The veteranarian who treated Kothe's dog] is bothered by the injustice of Micah getting better medical care than his owners.

"I do not understand why this wouldn't work on people," Scanlon said. "It is ludicrous not to work along the same lines."

Hear, hear! How can medical researches be such idiots as to not think of applying this treatment to humans?!

In fact, Johnson said, human trials for the technique are under way. But it could take years before the stem cell treatments are widely available.

Oh.

So, umm... We're still outraged by the delay, right? Surely Shaw is about to point to some kind of ridiculous red-tape in the approval process that needs reform. I mean this is about speeding up approval for human treatments to be more aligned with treating animals, surely he's got some kind of evidence that the human approval process is unnecessarily lengthy. We surely don't want humans treated as carelessly as we might treat dogs, right?

In the meantime, Scanlon [that's the vet - ed.] said, other countries easily could leapfrog the U.S.

"You will probably be able to go down to Mexico and get it done," he said.

If the treatments become available for humans, Scanlon knows one willing customer.

"I have one knee that is barking at me" from arthritis, he said. "I would love to see some of my own fat injected into my knee."

So wait a moment. The justification for speeding up the approval process for human treatment amounts to:

1. Dogs don't have their treatments as rigorously tested as humans before approval
2. Mexico's example of quality medical care should shame us.
3. Some veterinarian would really like his bum knee treated.

Not exactly an airtight case, but at least he's made a shot at it. I'm no fan of big government, but he certainly hasn't sold me yet.

This is not, however the headline may blare, a case that has anything to do with the Great Controversial Embryonic Stem Cell Debate™ (which really shouldn't be so controversial anymore as there is a new technique for achieving pluripotency in adult stem cells negating the need for an embryonic cell source, but if Shaw isn't savvy enough to know he's not even talking about that debate, I wouldn't expect him to have kept up on such things).

Anyway there are two very basic problems with this column. The first is that Shaw is opining in an area of science he apparently lacks very basic knowledge about (Science-journalism: All the whiz-bang and drama of science fiction, without the realization they're frequently making stuff up). The second is that Shaw's point isn't even about what he thinks it is, but seems to rather be a call to lessen the regulatory burden on bringing medical treatments to market; with a kind of endorsement that the medical standards for dogs should be good enough for us.