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Monday, March 29, 2010
Trends And Processes
HMPH! If that Fran person thinks he can out-philosophize a Curmudgeon Emeritus, he's got another think coming! This Christian stuff is just a smokescreen, you know; he's really a secret Illuminatus, one of their elders, in fact, and they've got big plans.
Well, anyway. It's high time someone addressed one of the epistemological fundamentals we seem to lack: the significance of a trend of some objective sort, and how one determines it.
On any given day, the temperature of the ambient air begins to rise with the rising of the Sun. Here on Long Island, the difference between the temperature at dawn and the temperature at Noon is sometimes as high as fifty Fahrenheit degrees. That ciphers out to a temperature rate of seven to eight Fahrenheit degrees per hour.
HEAVENS! If that trend continues, it could be 200° by midnight! A crisis is upon us! We must drop everything else and act now!!
Of course not, but why not? Because we grasp the process that's driving that increase in temperature. We know how it works, and have observed it in action for long enough that we're confident it won't "run away" today, or any other day. Natural laws are involved.
Comparable things could be said about the "global warming" thesis. Those promoting it assembled some numbers -- let's leave aside for the moment whether those numbers bore any demonstrable relation to reality -- argued that they displayed an upward trend, and plunged immediately to the depths of crisis-mongering. The world is running a fever, and Mankind is the reason! This must be combated at once! Sell your SUV and buy a Prius!
That set of assertions bears considerable resemblance to the extremely foolish one described above it. Even if the temperature measurements beneath them were trustworthy, the most important aspect of the matter, the underlying processes causing temperature escalation, would be undetermined. The argument of the warmistas has been:
- We have this mechanism called the greenhouse effect;
- It's driven by certain types of atmospheric gases, including the effluents from the use of fossil fuels;
- Mankind's use of fossil fuels is therefore a contributor to global warming;
- Therefore, Mankind must sharply curb, perhaps eliminate altogether, its use of fossil fuels.
But the warmistas' argument is badly founded, on process grounds:
- The greenhouse effect is a laboratory phenomenon that has been reproducibly demonstrated only in a closed volume of gas, not something that verifiably causes a temperature increment in the Earth's huge, open-to-the-sky atmosphere.
- We know of other temperature-influencing mechanisms of demonstrated power, including radiative input, radiative output, precipitation, albedo regulation, and convection against the Earth's surface;
- The nomination of a single highly controversial mechanism, whose power is not yet established and might never be, as the source of the postulated warming, while dismissing all the others as irrelevant is arguable at the very least; it certainly isn't "settled science."
In other words, even were there absolutely no doubt that the atmosphere is warming, we could not be certain what's causing that, given our current knowledge and the data we've amassed. A trend is not probative until one is certain what process is driving the trend.
Just now there's an enormous political contest over whether domestic American oil exploration, extraction, and refinement should increase. You might think the notion absurd, but nevertheless, there are interest groups, the warmistas prominent among them, arguing that the expansion of any aspect of our domestic oil industry should be prohibited by law. They've advanced a number of reasons: the anthropogenic global warming thesis; the environmental impacts of drilling, extraction, and refining; dislike of corporations; and opposition to the advancement of technological civilization. The reason you'll hear will depend upon what particular species of activist is haranguing you at the moment.
A new one, which your Curmudgeon has only heard recently, is that further domestic exploration for oil is pointless. After all, the U.S. only has a few percent of the world's proven reserves of oil, so why look for more when we know it's not there?
Such folks should have chosen periods other than Vocabulary to catch their naps. "Proven reserves" are deposits of oil that have already been found and verified seismologically. Our proven reserves at any given instant reflect only the amount of exploration and verification done to this point; we cannot base on them any non-risible statements about what we haven't found.
Alongside that, there are political and economic considerations. When the price of oil is low, there's no great incentive to find further deposits; when it rises, that incentive rises as well. Advances in exploration and extraction technology also play their part. Equally to the point and possibly more important than all else, when political forces forbid oil exploration or extraction -- particularly in likely-looking regions such as the continental shelf or Prudhoe Bay -- it will not occur, freezing the "proven reserves" at whatever figure they attained before such bans were enacted.
The process that drives changes in the proven-reserves figure is quite as important as the one that drives changes in the atmosphere's temperature.
Among America's contested social issues, few are more hotly argued than that over sex education in our government-run schools. You might recall that the big campaign for such curricula began in the late 1960s and flowered fully in the 1970s. The result has been the institution of mandatory sex education courses in the great majority of the government-run high schools in the United States.
The original argument for those courses was that they were a necessary component in the public-health campaign to reduce teen pregnancies and teen venereal disease. Yet subsequent to the wide institution of those courses, teen pregnancy rates and teen venereal disease rates both experienced substantial increases. Those increases have confounded the proponents of mandatory sex education ever since. The closest they came to a response was to claim that "things would have been worse" without the courses. This is an assertion that can never be verified or falsified; it's an article of faith.
Ironically, the pre-sex-education decades had been a time of declining teen pregnancy and venereal disease rates. If the public-health data of the time can be trusted, they'd been slowly but steadily declining for about twenty years. That trend lacks a definitive explanation as well. It's possible that demographics were involved, or perhaps the widening availability of contraceptives in those years. But we cannot know.
When we cannot know, we cannot be legitimately doctrinaire about "what to do."
Much of the special-interest activity of our time is advanced through the tendentious use of trends, whether actual or fictional. Few of those trends are firmly tied to an underlying process in which we can repose confidence. Large-scale systems such as the Earth's atmosphere remain beyond our grasp. Our understanding of social forces is partial as well; it contains many anomalies and exceptions. We know more about quantum mechanics than about the thermodynamics of the atmosphere. We know far more about the physiology of the brain than about what moves a people toward this or that sort of behavior, the conceits of psychologists and sociologists notwithstanding.
You'd think the members of our "intellectual elite" would draw the moral. You'd think they'd be reluctant to take firm positions about such things, especially considering how foolish being doctrinaire but wholly mistaken would make them look, some years down the road.
You'd be wrong.
Comments
Or, as Mr. Koch used to reiterate in BSCS science at North Shore in Glen Head, correlation does not necessarily equal causation.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/29/2010 at 01:48 PMLooking foolish is rarely a problem for the Left because they rejected Truth long ago, and with that all logic.
They can see the Emperor’s new clothes. Can you not see them?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/29/2010 at 02:57 PMAn excellent post.
As a devout libertarian I must proffer the following anecdotal testimony from the perspective of a former employee of a major player in the energy production sector of of the US economy; to wit the Continental oil Company now known as Conoco Philips.
It was common practice for Conoco in the 1950’s and earlier to fire long time employees who were approaching “retirement” under the contractual plan 12 months prior to those employees qualifying for retirement. I have first hand knowledge of this practice due to the treatment of a fellow employee who I know performed his duties adequately as I worked at his side for 5+ years. I found this act morally wrong and in violation of Conoco’s contractual commitment to its employees.Although, as a collective bargaining representative of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers international union I was successful in forcing Conoco to abide by its agreement, I was subsequently, due to: “low seniority; laid off due to lack of work” probably the greatest gift this humble spartan has ever received.
I have come to oppose Unionization of employees from a libertarian viewpoint but cannot regret my efforts to enforce adherence to contractual agreements.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 03/29/2010 at 10:48 PM
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