Tesla and Ice

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This is a short note on a couple of issues related only in that they say something relevant about the future we should be planning for.

The first relates to Tesla and its production difficulties with the new, lower-priced model 3.  The highly-automated production of the model 3 is well-behind schedule, to the point where it is a big hit to the cash flow of the company.  We mention it here, though, because the delay is an indication that mass production of electric cars is something fundamentally new.

An electric car is a much simpler machine than an ordinary, gas-powered vehicle.  In principle the construction should be both cheaper and easier to automate.  Current production of Teslas is intrinsically a low-volume operation.  The model 3 will be the first indication of what newly-imagined electric car production is like.

I don’t know if we’re in for a shock or not (this is after all a first go at it), but this could be another big change to conventional middle-class employment.  And there will be follow-on effects for gas stations, and especially maintenance and repair.  This is another of many indications that broad, technology-based disruption of jobs is going to happen.

 

The other story is about the commissioning of a new class of Russian icebreaker—targeted at clearing northern ship lanes freed up by the retreat of polar ice with global warming.  The phenomenon is already clear, although the amount of traffic is still small.  The Russians are preparing for the opportunity with multiple classes of new machines planned for release up to 2025.  The Chinese have announced cooperation with the objective of reducing shipping times to Europe by a third.

The US is of course uninterested in consequences of climate change.  The only Coast Guard ice breaker is 40 years old, and they have a hard time getting authorization to get a new one.  The Bering strait, however, could be a shipping lane.

This is a very small example, but climate change affects many things, and as a country we’re trying to avoid finding out about them.

 

The current federal budget is put together for a world where the private sector will take care of everything.  That has always been a fantasy—the efficiency of the private sector comes in large part from its ability to ignore everything not relevant to immediate financial success.  It is particularly false for a world undergoing fundamental change.  We either recognize it and help people through it, or we fall behind and revert to the nightmares of the nineteenth century.

Figure Skating and Math Textbooks

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This odd coupling of topics links two separate frustrations which seem to come from the same core problem.

For figure skating the problem is one particular feature of the new scoring system—the extra points given to jumps in the second half of a program.  There’s no question that those are harder to do—anything is harder to do when you’re dead tired.  The question is why that extra stamina should be rewarded as an achievement!  In the last Olympics, those extra points were primarily an opportunity to game the system.  What was missing in artistic achievement could be made up in pure stamina.  The winner of the woman’s gold medal had all of her jumps in the second half of the program.

The fundamental problem is that from within a system, people are tempted to put a value on anything hard, regardless of whether or not it means something to the outside world.  People who have spent their careers doing and teaching figure skating have a tendency to think that any hard jumps are achievements.

Having just had reason to work my way through a high school algebra textbook, I have to say (based on an admittedly small sample) that the textbook publishers have that problem in spades.  The book was filled with minutia that need to be memorized for exam questions.  Getting through all of that is certainly hard, but it’s not the stuff that will make kids confident and successful in mathematics.  And that certainly won’t make them like it or remember it.  (One more reason it’s tough to be a teacher!)

It seems to me that high school math has a pretty good story to tell.  Core algebra is based on a really brilliant idea, that an answer you are looking for can be handled just like a number.   That lets you create a simple kind of manual computer.  If you can write down the problem, then the manual computer can solve it.  Sort of like doing your taxes with turbo-tax.  The core ideas are simple and don’t need to become a challenge.  From there it’s straightforward to do linear systems, which are part of the vocabulary in science, engineering, finance, or just about anything else.  “Vocabulary” is actually the right word.  For most students, mathematics is a language in which they need to gain confidence and fluency.

Then with quadratic equations you hit a wall.  All the techniques you just learned fail.  But you’re saved by another really good idea you would (probably) never have come up with yourself.  You do a few exercises with that idea, working toward an answer that is basically all you need to know—the quadratic formula.  Any further messing around with higher-order polynomials and rational functions is only supplementary, examples of what you can do with other kinds of problems you might run into.  No more rules to learn.

Going beyond that you have topics with really exciting applications.  Conic sections are geometrically interesting and tied to the whole story of the Copernican revolution, Kepler’s laws (“equal areas swept out in equal time”), and Newton’s gravitation.  (You don’t need calculus to tell the story.)  Sequences and series cover ideas behind every financial analysis students will see.  Permutations and combinations are important for probability and statistics and introduce the first non-trivial example of a group.  Modular arithmetic is a useful feature of every programming language.   Trigonometry is important but can become unnecessarily confusing.   Sine and cosine functions are important parts of the vocabulary, but you can get lost forever in trigonometric identities and formulas.

Mathematics shouldn’t be a drag.  There are few core principles and very little actually to memorize.  You get to see some remarkable solutions to tough problems.  One famous mathematician said that mathematics should be “like floating down a river on your back.”  My father-in-law put it differently: “Mathematics is for people too lazy to do real work.”

Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

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There haven’t been any book reviews on this site before, but Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is something of a special case.  This is a political book with a message that doesn’t quite fit into the current political environment, and it includes a large body of relevant history.  Not surprisingly, Pinker finds Trump antithetical to the Enlightenment precepts he is defending.  But he also finds plenty of guilt to go around.

To start with, the book seems to have two competing objectives:

  1. Validating the fact of human progress and documenting how it has been achieved. This is really a call to action based on humanistic goals.
  2. Providing reasons for optimism about the future. This is different—good things that are going to happen for reasons such as demographics, outside the scope of specific human actors.

On the face of it, a reader expects the first subject to be primary, if only because (at this point in time) you expect any political book to end up with recommendations for what to do.  But that’s not quite where Pinker is going.  He’s trying to view history not just as a demonstration of what works, but also as a way to understand where things are going longer term.  Since the two objectives are different, it helps to treat them one-by-one.

On the first subject, Pinker does a remarkable job of demonstrating the successes that humanity has achieved—In the longer term, in the last century, and in the past few decades. This involves health, security, standard of living, and many other quantitative measures of human welfare.   Much of this is unfamiliar because, as he says, this kind of thing just doesn’t make news.  The book is worth reading for this part alone.  Pinker does a good job of demonstrating progress and what is responsible for that progress:  science, rationality, and a broad-based desire to create a better world for everyone.  It is hard to argue with the historical fact that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

In passing Pinker tries to dispose of past arguments against enlightenment humanism.  As examples:  Humans are inherently irrational (except when they want to make a point).  Humanism is a white racist production (its advocates were on the anti-imperialist side).   Science ignores human values (just plain not true).

Predicting the future is harder, and overall I’d say that Pinker is not well-served by his desire to make things look positive.  He tries to say that nuclear war is improbable, but we know that just one outlier is bad enough.  He treats the climate change movement as a kind of hysteria, because science will just take care of it in time (based on mostly anecdotal evidence).  He views the populist phenomenon as a brief episode of backsliding until more liberal generations take over from the ones now on the verge of dying out.

So in the end it seems a shame that the future predictions tend to dominate discussions of the book, when it’s the first part—the defense of progress—that is its greatest contribution.

And then there is the question of the call to action.  What Pinker espouses is humanism—the broad-based, rational process that has delivered progress.  The problem is that humanism doesn’t have a political party.

Pinker points out that much of the political process just doesn’t work:  Issue-based movements systematically deny progress for fear of losing momentum (even though that means they frequently get caught in the bind of asking for more money to continue going nowhere).  Discussion of issues is based on faulty statistics and dishonest patterns of argument.  Democracy as a whole is not as rational or responsive as we would like to think (the chapter on that subject is well worth reading).  He gives plenty of examples of bad behavior on both the left and the right.  Both sides contributed to the grim view of reality that was instrumental in producing Trump.

So where do we go from here?  Individuals can learn to be more rational in their behavior and in their evaluation of what they see and read.  They can work with the flawed organizations that are fighting bad actors such as Trump.  They can involve themselves with specific issues and help to push them along.  All told—incremental change but no miracle solution.

That’s actually the optimism of the book.   There’s no silver bullet, but the process has worked thus far.  And hopefully we will keep it going.

Update on Climate Change

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This note is an update to the climate change article from last year.  The story hasn’t gotten any better, but there is enough that’s new to warrant a revisit.

The most fundamental piece of bad news is the opening figure, which comes from the Global Carbon Project.  After three years of seeming stability, the world production of carbon dioxide increased significantly in 2017.  (The figure says “projection” just to indicate that the final computations are in process.)  Without too much evidence we might as well call that the Trump bump.  As we noted last time, worldwide unanimity on climate change is important precisely because the advantages of cheating are so obvious.  We—with probably the most to gain from the Paris Agreement process—are the cheaters in chief.  So it’s not surprising others will have fewer second thoughts as well.

We have to put this change into perspective.  Even a stable value of CO2 emission means things are getting worse, because it is the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that drives temperature change, and it all adds up.  The stable value was attractive, because it seemed to indicate that CO2 had finally peaked and might start to decline.  And the decline might mean the total CO2 could be bounded.  We’re now back to worrying about the peak, with no idea how bad things will get.

Two more new slides from the Global Carbon Project show what we stand to gain from Paris Agreement unanimity.  The first shows the current per capita production of carbon dioxide.

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As has been true for many years US per capita usage sits way above everyone else, more than twice both Europe and China.  That is a direct expression of our carbon-powered standard of living.

The second slide shows who is going to have to make changes to protect that US standard of living from the effects of climate change.

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This shows that the major growth in carbon dioxide production is not from the biggest economies (note that even China has stabilized), it’s from the have-nots trying to achieve some fraction of our standard of living.   We are asking them to ignore not only our past exploitation of fossil fuel resources but even our current high per capita use and to delay their own immediate hopes for a better life in order to make the world a safer place for everyone.  So much for the question of who benefits from the Paris Agreement process!

That introduces the next topic—public attitudes to climate change.  There were enough strange weather events in the past year to give people pause, so we’re getting close to—but still not over—the hump.  The latest poll numbers have both good news and bad.  First the good news:

Overall, 45 percent of those surveyed said global warming would pose a serious threat in their lifetimes, the highest overall percentage recorded since Gallup first asked the question in 1997. Despite partisan divisions, majorities of Americans as a whole continue to believe by wide margins that most scientists think global warming is taking place, that it is caused by human activities and that its effects have begun.

Then the bad—the improvement is only partisan:

Gallup asked whether people agreed that most scientists believe global warming is occurring, and 42 percent of Republicans said yes, down from 53 percent a year earlier and back to a level last seen in 2014. Just 35 percent of Republicans said that they believe global warming is caused by human activities, down from 40 percent.

This seems like another proof of a much-discussed feature of human nature—when people are confronted with proof that their beliefs are wrong, they double down on defending those beliefs.   Unfortunately those are the people running the show.

How can that turn around?  A recent Steven Pinker book made an interesting point.  Much of the rhetoric around climate change focuses on conservation and a new world view of collective responsibility.  But conservation actually isn’t the main point—since we’re not repealing the industrial revolution, the main point has to be new energy sources.  We’re not creating a new world where no one drives Chevy Suburbans anymore, we’re just changing the power source.  Conservation, however important, is about buying time until we can get there.  Perhaps that’s one way to get climate change out of the culture wars (as it should be).

In any case the focus has to be on the reality of climate change, and everything else is tactics. With tactics it’s easier to be bipartisan.   One indication is that Congress, over Trump’s objection, passed a bill continuing tax breaks for solar, nuclear, geothermal, and carbon-capture projects.  This effort united left-wing and right-wing approaches to climate change largely under the radar.  However, it must be recognized that even with such efforts the US is now lagging far behind in support for the technology of climate change.

Carbon capture (separating out CO2 and storing it underground or elsewhere) deserves some special mention, because it has become a bigger topic in the past year.  On one hand this is an idea that has been around for decades without going very far, and what’s more the coal industry supports it as a lifeline.  On the other hand the technology seems to be improving, the Obama administration supported it as a transitional technology, and even the IPCC climate studies assume some form of it will be used.  It currently exists as an expensive add-on for power plants, and some still-speculative variants have been proposed to pull carbon dioxide straight out of the air.  Both the power plant and out-of-the-air applications have a common need for CO2 storage technology, of which there are many variants.

The biggest issue with carbon capture is that it can be (and is being) used to delay doing anything about climate change—why worry about carbon getting into the atmosphere if we’ll pull it all out later.  The problem is that the technology still has such big questions about cost and scaling, that “later” could be very late or never (and some effects, such as melting glaciers, are irreversible).  Even the cheapest estimates say it will cost continuing trillions.  What you have to say is that the technology investment is necessary and at worst it at least gets the climate dialog past the hoax stage.  And if we could just get the Kochs interested in that business (which is largely oil industry technology), it would settle the Republican perception of climate change once and for all!

Returning to reality, we have to conclude the past year seems like a pause for progress.  After Trump took the US out of the Paris Agreement, many wanted to talk about all that could be done to maintain momentum nonetheless.  The chart at the beginning shows the limits of that point of view.  There are other indicators as well:

– The auto industry’s step back from future fuel efficiency standards

– Exxon’s declaration that climate change is no risk to their profits

– Business as usual in the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook:

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– Even the new preoccupation with carbon capture has to be viewed as a vote of no-confidence in the progress of conservation.   If prevention isn’t going to happen, then repair is all we’ve got.

What’s more than there has even been a preoccupation with a more drastic step, so-called geo-engineering.  This means injecting chemicals or particles into the atmosphere so as to dim the sun and cool the earth despite the increasing CO2 concentration.  There are many risks:  continuing ocean acidification, reduced photosynthesis and food supply, and weaponization of the technology.  Since CO2 would continue to accumulate, any loss of protection would have disastrous effects.  These are desperate measures.

As to what we should be doing, the picture is not too different from last year, but we can be perhaps more explicit.

  1. Because burning carbon is now recognized to have definite costs (i.e. whatever is necessary to counteract the CO2 increase), we need some kind of carbon tax so that the free market economy can react correctly. Since that cost is not currently captured, our economy is incurring a significant distortion that needs to be fixed.
  2. We need to get back into the Paris Agreement process to return focus to the goal. To repeat the obvious, the Paris process was always intended to be iterative—with countries readjusting their goals to eventually reach the target. We’re only at step one, so we had better help the world get back on-track.
  3. We have to recognize that at this stage we’re in no position to judge winners and losers among contributing technologies. So the solution has to be all of the above: nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, batteries, carbon capture, even substituting gas for coal as a temporary measure.  The IPCC gave us what they called a carbon dioxide budget—the amount of CO2 we can add and still stay below a global temperature rise of 2 ⁰ C.  In 2014 (the year of the report) it was 800 giga-tons.  It is now below 700.
  4. People have to recognize that despite confusing news reports, we are all in this together. Some people will be hit by sea-level rise, some by drought, some by sheer temperature, some by storms, some by an effect we haven’t seen yet. Some may even be a little later.  But ultimately there’s nowhere to hide, and even “later” comes fast.
  5. There is no excuse for not funding research in all the contributing technologies and also research to understand the climate effects we are going to live with for however many years it takes to get past fossil fuels.
  6. Ideally all elements of society should be involved in planning such major changes. The carbon tax will help make that happen, but it’s not the whole story. We can’t keep fighting about this.

This administration likes to talk about itself as bringing business practices to government.   The evidence for climate change is such that any reasonable business would be doing its best to quantify the risk, so as to take appropriate action.   Businesses that choose to ignore disruptive new technologies or entrants are the ones that disappear—along with their disparaging comments on how the new stuff will never amount to anything.

Unless we choose to wake up—that’s us.  We’ll act now or pay far more dearly later.

 

Private Sector Fantasies

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This note is about a subject with perhaps more deliberately-sown confusion than any other:  the role of government in a market economy.

We start with the saint of free markets Adam Smith.   Adam Smith had no delusions that the free market system would somehow manage itself.   He saw three roles for government in a market economy:  defense, justice, and education.  Further he understood that the private sector and the free market were not the same thing—one of the roles of justice was to prevent the private sector from creating monopolies and thus perverting the free market.  In other words even as an ideal, the free market was neither self -policing (it needed to be protected against its own tendency to create abuses) nor self-sustaining (it needed government to create the population of educated workers).

With that as introduction, we want to talk more about the relations of business and government.  There are three sections.  The first two expand on policing and sustaining of the free market, as just discussed.  The third talks about scope—what objectives for society are in or out of scope for the free market. The Trump administration has positioned itself as the defender of free markets against government.  Instead they are defenders of something rather different, with real dangers as a result.

 

Policing the free market

Monopolies are bad.  they raise prices and stifle progress.  They are also by many measures growing in power.  But they are not the only area where the free market needs to be protected from itself.   For example, lack of business transparency perverts the capital markets, so the SEC plays a crucial role.

A more complicated but equally crucial role is regulation of the boom and bust cycles (with bank failures and human misery) that used to be endemic to capitalism.  Government has two responsibilities for controlling those cycles:

  1. It needs to act “countercyclically”. Despite the jargon term, this is so basic as to be biblical—save in good times to prepare for bad. In a recession the government is the only party able to stop the spiral of low sales -> layoffs -> even lower sales-> even more layoffs.  It does that by injecting money into the economy to stabilize sales.  But in a recession, tax revenues are down, and the money has to come from somewhere–preferably savings but if necessary debt.  In 2008 George W. Bush had just fought an off-budget 3 trillion-dollar war, so the cupboard was bare.  Republicans screamed about increasing the deficit, even proposing constitutional amendments for balanced budgets.  Their line “real people tighten their belts when they have to” was a deliberate misrepresentation.  Real people save for bad times; otherwise they have to borrow to put food on the table.
  2. Government needs to recognize and control the excesses that can creep in to cause havoc in the business cycle. While many factors contributed to the 2008 crash, the most spectacularly deadly was the perversion of the banking system caused by mortgage-backed securities. In the giddiness of deregulation no one was looking.  The aftermath produced the Dodd-Frank legislation as an antidote.

Finally, as a last example, there are categories of risk where you can’t count on the business decision-making process to do the job.  Low-probability/high costs events (plane crashes, oil rig blow-outs) should in theory be prevented by rational decision-making, but in practice it’s hard to refrain from increasing profits by ignoring something that “really isn’t going to happen”.  So there is a role for government there too—protecting both the public and the businesses.

Current status:

– The administration’s anti-trust position remains to be seen.  Trump campaigned against mergers, but appointed an industry-representing trust lawyer to head the anti-trust division.

– There seems to be no recognition of business cycle issues.  Trump’s tax plan runs a big deficit to stimulate an economy close to full employment.  This runs the risk of repeating 2008 with an even worse debt position to fight it.  He also wants to repeal Dodd-Frank and says he won’t enforce it now.

– The general rule is that any regulation opposed by any business is bad.

=>  There is no serious recognition that the financial system needs policing.  Trump runs the show based on what he has wanted to see for his own businesses.  This is a blind dash into another 2008 or worse.

 

Sustaining the free market

Adam Smith pointed out the need for government to supply a suitably-trained workforce.   In the eighteenth century that meant simply literacy.   The definition of suitably-trained has changed over time.  By 1940 a then astounding 50% of American students finished high school.  In that era no other country approached that level of broad education support.   Then the GI bill made college possible for veterans, and public colleges expanded widely throughout the 1960’s and 70’s.  This coincided with unquestioned American economic dominance.  An educated workforce (at all levels) remains a critical national requirement.

You can take that one step farther.  Equality of opportunity is usually discussed in terms of social effects, but there is a corresponding benefit to the free market.   Business and the market benefit when all persons are able to achieve up to their capabilities.  The United States used to lead the world in upward mobility, but with rising inequality it now ranks behind most developed countries.

There is one more government role that fits here as well, namely research.  Government support of research produces people to be hired by cutting-edge businesses, and also supports the creation of new businesses to exploit the progress of science and technology.

Current status:

– For college, the student debt crisis speaks for itself.  A whole generation of students can’t imagine when they will be able to get out of debt.  This is compounded by De Vos’ support of shady lenders and weakening of controls on fraudulent educational institutions.

– For K- 12 education, states have retreated in funding, and De Vos is proposing a voucher system that will abandon the broader population.  Vouchers will be fixed in dollar value, to be augmented by surcharges at the now-privatized schools.   If you want a good education you pay for it; if you can’t, there is no guarantee of what you get.  This is institutionalized separate and unequal.

– Trump’s budget essentially abandons the government’s role in research, and his appointees have attempted to minimize the role of science.

=> There is surprisingly little recognition that government has an important role here at all–except to privatize it!

 

Scope of the free market

Adam Smith felt that the private sector could not be trusted even to defend free markets.  So it is not surprising that there are other aspects of society that need defending as well.

We give a few examples:

– Well-being of workers.   Smith describes effects of supply and demand on workers, and he even points out that adequately-paid workers may be more productive, but he makes no claim of utopia from the free market.   In fact in Smith’s description, workers’ welfare depends on a market for labor in which individuals have little bargaining power.

– Resources and the environment

Enterprises will use the environment for their own benefit, unless there are rules to the contrary.

– Infrastructure

Public resources such as roads, bridge, airports, internet, etc. should be built and maintained as needed by everyone.

Current status:

– Trump has pushed to limit OSHA workrules, opposes unions, and has no plans to raise the minimum wage.

– The EPA is being severely cut and redirected to helping businesses.

– The stated approach to infrastructure is via private investment, which will go where the money is.

=> There is no recognition that areas such as these can be out of scope for the private sector.  Instead there is a blind belief that growth solves everything.

 

From this summary it should be clear how far we are from free market economics.

The current national policy is that the private sector just needs to be encouraged to go do its thing.   We don’t have to care about policing its risk, we can let it take care of education and research, and nothing other than its success is needed to solve every other problem in society.  Just make sure it’s flush with cash and let it go.

That was the history of the nineteenth century, and for vast part of the population it was no picnic.  And it is worth remembering that 1929 really did happen.

Even thinking of the more recent past there’s an eerie familiarity about our situation.  We have a supremely confident lunatic fringe with the power to run amok.  The last lunatic fringe to take control of our government (remember the neocons?) gave us the Iraq war—which destabilized the Middle East and bankrupted the country—and the crash of 2008.

This time it could well be worse.

Strange Revisionist History

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You can almost call it a conspiracy.   The right and the left have decided to rewrite the history of the last election in remarkably similar ways:

The Right:  The election was a thumping rejection of everything liberals stand for.  The public was finally given the opportunity to say so, and it rejected the administrative state and all its policies, both foreign and domestic.

The Left:  The election was a thumping rejection of centrism and its coddling of the right.  Trump’s core voted for him, because the Democrats have become too close to Republicans in outlook.  Other traditionally Democratic constituencies either went to Trump or didn’t vote for the same reason.   The only way to save the country is for the party is to return to its ideological roots on the left.

For starters, one of the most outrageous events in the history of the United States has disappeared from the narrative—the FBI’s deliberate effort to throw the election.   They got away with it, and we may never know what was behind it.   What’s more, of all the elections in recent history, this has got to be the one least fought on the issues.   By all reports, Hillary Clinton’s emails were the only subject on the news for the last two weeks prior to voting.  In fact one of the many national myths that died in this election was the place of truth in our much-vaunted free press.  Finally the Trump phenomenon itself has been whitewashed out of existence.

This is not a trivial matter, because it affects where we as a country go from here.  What follows is a quick summary (from the outside) of what the election was about and what conclusions should be drawn from it.

 

The basic story of this election was simple.  The Clinton campaign tried to make Trump’s character the major issue in hopes of attracting bipartisan support.  Other specific issues came out primarily during the debates, where she was successful (Clinton won the first and third, and tied the second), but not so often after the debates were over.  The focus on character seemed to work well at first, in particular with the discovery of the Trump sex tape.  But it was undermined by the (unsupported) innuendo of the first FBI letter—she was just another crook.  By then it was too late to change tactics, because the press was obsessed with her emails.  More innuendo in the second FBI letter sealed the deal.

For Trump voters this election was a religious experience.  For the rest Clinton’s emails were the issue.  Republicans now voted Republican, the effect of the Russian leaks was amplified, Sanders voters and misogynists had their fears confirmed, and the belief that Clinton would win made for general Democratic complacency.   With the character issue gone, too many people bought Trump’s simplistic economics—“he’s a businessman, I’ll make a buck” or else just didn’t vote.   One example statistic—at Penn State less than half of students registered prior to the election actually voted.  In swing states Clinton lost 4.5 percentage points of advantage in the two weeks following the FBI letter and lost the election by less than 200,000 total votes in four states.  This was so close that even Jill Stein was significant in most of them. (See here for a detailed discussion of factors influencing the election.)  Republican control of Congress was another side of the same coin.

It remains to talk about the Trump phenomenon.   Donald Trump is a demagogue outside the limits of what either party has produced in the recent past.   He is a professional huckster and promised salvation.  He created scapegoats and whipped up his audiences so that they were ready to kill. You can argue that Democrats should have done more for his target population (although the Republican Congress essentially shut down the government for six years), but in the election no honest proposal would have competed with Trump’s lies.  Demagogues are a real problem in a democracy.  A chilling thought is that in Athens, our original model for democracy, once they elected a demagogue it was never possible to go back.

 

This is not to deny that the Clinton campaign made mistakes, but that wasn’t why she lost.  This is my list, always easy after the fact:

– Excessive focus on Trump’s character.  I would have liked more issue-oriented ads.  People needed to understand the reasons to fear Trump’s “change”.  (But that would have complicated a non-partisan appeal.)

– Handling the FBI letters.  Clinton should have taken the high ground—welcomed the examination of her letters as a way to settle the email issue once and for all.  Contrast with Trump’s taxes.  (But the innuendo was still there, and at the time no one could believe that the FBI itself was corrupt.)

– Despite Trump’s comment, Clinton wasn’t nasty enough.  She and the Obamas liked to say “when they go low, we go high”.  This was not a time for class.  She should have gone after Trump as a businessman, with testimonials from the people who denied him financing.  At the end of the campaign Clinton talked about bringing the country together; Trump talked about locking her up.

– Countering Trump’s tweets.  This is a strategy problem going forward.   Tweets seemed to keep Trump on people’s minds much better than traditional grass-roots organizing.

– Top-down campaign.   As canvassers we were told not to change a word of the canvassing scripts, and there was little interest in our impressions of the voters’ concerns.  Trump’s people had ears to the ground.

 

Some Conclusions

– This was not a campaign on the issues, and we shouldn’t pretend it was.  There was no mandate to take the country to the land of the alt-right, and also no proof that the Democratic Party does or doesn’t need ideological changes.

– A major influence on this election was corruption in the FBI—an unimaginable failure of our criminal justice system—and we had better worry about what that says.  The concern is not just for elections but more generally how governments can use the FBI against opposition.   (Anyone who questions the corruption should reread the Comey letters. There have been many explanations of why the letters were written, but none explain the carefully crafted—and unsupported—”she’s a crook” innuendo.)

– The core Trump supporters are not going to change allegiance any time soon regardless of what we propose.  They’ve been promised salvation, and they’ll wait a long time for it.   As one book on group violence puts it, fanatical allegiance may grow out of economic issues, but once it gets going it has a life of its own.  We should understand their problems,  but they’re not going to help in 2018.

– Not all Trump voters are the same.  Those is a good chunk of traditional Republicans who were given a reason to ignore what he is.   Those people are harder to get now that they voted for Trump, but they’re not like the Trump core.  For 2018 if they are worried enough—and they ought to be even on economic grounds—they will come.

– Many things had to go wrong for Democrats to lose this election, starting with the FBI.  The election was so close, just about any one of them effectively decided the vote.   Here is one list:

– First FBI letter

– Russians and Wikileaks

– Misogyny

– Bitter Primary fight

– Second FBI letter

– Obama’s decision not to mention the Russian investigation of Trump

– Belief that Clinton would win (further suppressed vote)

There is no question that an inclusive Democratic party can win.  The biggest issues going forward are voter restrictions (Kobach) and gerrymandering.

– We should not take this election as proof that we need to remake the Democratic Party based on what made Trump successful.  Trump won by lying, not because he had a better solution.  What we do need to do is be preemptively sensitive to all constituencies who have problems.   By the time there is a Trump in the picture he will be hard to beat.

– We have a responsibility to address the problems of Trump core voters, and those problems are both hard and pervasive.   Trump’s win is clear evidence that this is fertile ground for demagogues (here and elsewhere).  It is a real challenge to develop workable, salable economic policy.

– Finally, on a more mundane level, there is clear evidence that campaigns have changed.  The effectiveness of Twitter shows we need to go back to first principles about what works.  This has become a scary, high-tech business, and we had better be sure we’re equipped for the fight.

Hurricane Harvey and the Burden of Proof

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Hurricane Harvey was an extraordinary event.   The rainfall totals and flooding were without precedent even in the hurricane-prone Texas Gulf region.  The New York Times pointed out that fully 40% of the flooded buildings were in areas classified as “of minimal flood hazard.”

Scientists have been very circumspect about what part of this to attribute to climate change.   Michael Mann gave a careful summary of contributing factors, principally sea-level rise and water temperature.  The message is that climate change didn’t cause the hurricane, but did make it worse.  No one can quantify just how much worse, and certainly out-of-control development in Houston contributed to the destructive effects.

However, the fact remains this was an unimaginable storm.   It was out of the range of what anyone thought to see from weather, even from hurricanes.  That is the threat of climate change.  Weather isn’t limited to what we know and understand.  Once we perturb the system, the power of the elements can surpass anything we are used to—that is what’s at stake.  We can’t even guarantee the changes will be gradual.

The evidence behind climate change is considerable and increasing.  A previous post here discussed one particular way of looking at it.  Any reasonable business, faced with a risk of this magnitude, would be doing its best to quantify that risk, so as to take appropriate action.   Businesses that choose to ignore disruptive new technologies or entrants are the ones that disappear—along with their disparaging comments on how the new stuff will never amount to anything.

That’s us.   Coal and oil interests (Koch brothers and their cohorts) are horrified that anyone would even think about keeping their assets in the ground.   With this administration anything that any business doesn’t like is bad–and for climate change we actually have Koch representatives (Scott Pruitt, Mike Pence) running the show.  So climate change doesn’t exist.  Can’t even talk about it.   Come back to me when things are so bad I can’t laugh at you.

What is the burden of proof here?  We are long past the stage of serious concern.   We haven’t reached the stage where people with something to lose are ready to give in, but that’s not going to be until their businesses blow up in a storm.   With climate change you have to act early if you want to prevent a future of weather run amok.   Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just adds up.  If you wait for things to get bad, they will go from bad to continually worse through all the years it takes to get off coal, oil, and gas—and then stay that way for many decades more.

We are at the stage where the appropriate response to risk is action.  Research and the Paris Agreement process are imperatives.  CEO’s of failed companies can always go on to the next one, but with climate change there’s nowhere to go.

Forecasting Climate Change

/ ontheoutside / 5 Comments

This note is an introduction to the task of forecasting climate change.  It avoids most details of the climate simulation models, but it does try to give a feel for what we know and why.  This fits with the previous more general post on climate change and the Paris Agreement.

At its basis climate change is straightforward:  the burning of fossil fuels puts extra carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air.   That raises the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  And that in turn causes temperatures to rise.

You can go a long way with just that, but as we’ll see the story is ultimately far from simple.   The story here has two parts:

  1. Projecting historical trends
  2. New factors in a warming world

The two parts are quite different.   The first identifies clear patterns from the data going back over the past 70 years.   The second is necessarily more difficult, as it covers new phenomena resulting from climate change itself.  The first functions as a baseline, with the second adding new effects to the base.

Part 1 – Projecting historical trends

The point of departure here is the correlation of CO2 in the atmosphere (in “parts per million”, abbreviated ppm) and temperature change.  The following slide shows how that looks over time.  (“Temperature anomaly” just means temperature rise since the start of the industrial revolution.)  The temperature rise and CO2 concentration are clearly tied closely together.

Figure 1

Forecast1

 

We can do better than Figure 1 however, just by explicitly correlating annual temperature values and CO2 concentrations.  We use online data from 1959 to 2016 for the calculation, taking temperature values from here and CO2 concentrations from here.

When we plot it up, the result is a remarkably clear trendline:

Forecast2

In the trendline the temperature value y (in degrees C) is related to the concentration x (in ppm) by the equation y = .0105x – 3.3886.  The slope .0105 is particularly important.  It says that on average whenever the ppm value increases by 1, the temperature increases by .0105 degrees Centigrade.   As in the previous chart the temperature scale here shows degrees above the pre-industrial world temperature (i.e. the temperature pre-1880).

(To be clear, the linear relation between temperature and ppm is remarkably obvious in the data, but not a surprise.   The temperature rise comes from reflection of infrared radiation back to earth.  The probability of that happening is the probability of radiation interacting with a CO2 molecule–and that is proportional to the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.)

We have now have a precise statement of how CO2 concentration changes affect the temperature.  The next step to see how the CO2 production affects those concentration changes. For that we need another slide as introduction.

Figure 3

Forecast3

What this says is that the first thing to understand about the effect of CO2 production is how much CO2 actually ends up in the atmosphere.  We’ll talk about each side of the slide separately.

The left side points out that CO2 from fossil fuel burning is only 91% of the total, because there is another factor that is completely different—deforestation and similar land use changes.  For our purposes we will simply inflate our production number by 10% to get to the correct total.

The right side then points out that of the total (inflated) production number, only 44% actually stays in the atmosphere.   The rest is absorbed by trees and oceans.

Hence we have the simple equation:

CO2 added to the atmosphere = CO2 produced x (1.1) x (.44).   (For what follows you should know that CO2 production is reported in “gigatons”, abbreviated Gt.)

Next we need to get from gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere to CO2 concentration in ppm.   That, however, is just physics—counting molecules in the air—and it has a standard answer:

Increased CO2 concentration (in ppm) = Added CO2 (in Gt) / 7.81.

(To be precise, the reference gives the equation: extra CO2 ppm = added carbon / 2.13.  To get the equation for CO2 instead of carbon, you correct for the relative atomic weights of CO2 vs carbon.  Since CO2 has two oxygen atoms in addition to carbon, that means 2.13 is replaced in the formula by 2.13 x 44/12 = 7.81)

Putting the two equations together we get this simple relationship:

Increased CO2 concentration (in ppm) = CO2 produced (in Gt) x (1.1) x (.44) / 7.81.  That is

Increased CO2 concentration (in ppm) = CO2 produced (in Gt) x (.0614)

Since annual CO2 production figures are also available online, we can actually verify this result using real data.  The following figure gives the result (computed using rolling 5-year averages for the annual incremental ppm):

Forecast4

As before slope of the line is most important, because it gives the added ppm resulting from a 1 Gt of CO2 produced.   In other words, .0625 is the observed value corresponding to the theoretical .0614 we just mentioned.  Remarkably close given all the factors involved.  (As additional confirmation, it should be noted that there are even studies based on carbon isotopes identifying the extra CO2 in the atmosphere as coming specifically from burning of fossil fuels.)

 

We can now put the two stages of our argument together.

We have found two results:

  1. For each additional Gt of CO2 produced, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases by .0614 ppm.
  2. For each concentration increase of 1 ppm, we get a temperature increase of .0105 degrees C.

Putting those together we get:

For each Gt of CO2 produced, the temperature can be expected to rise by .0614 x .0105 = .0006447 degrees C.  You can’t get much more explicit than that.

 

Using that formula we can establish a baseline for climate change.

First we need to clarify that the 2 ⁰ C upper limit in Figure 2 was there for a reason.  For quite some time, a 2 ⁰ C temperature increase has been regarded as a tipping point, where temperature-related changes become both serious and irreversible.  For that reason the Paris Climate Agreement is targeted specifically at avoiding a temperature rise of that magnitude.  (More details on the tipping point can be found here.)

First question:  how much more CO2 can we emit before we hit the limit?

In stating this question we have implicitly used an important fact about CO2 that underlies much of the analysis of climate change:  carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for decades, so long in fact that for analysis purposes we can assume it just adds up.  For that reason the IPCC (“Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”—the key international research body for climate change) refers to a so-called “CO2 budget”.  The CO2 budget is the amount of carbon dioxide you can put in the atmosphere and still stay under the 2 ⁰ C target temperature limit.  The idea is that it doesn’t matter when or how you do it, that’s the budget you’ve got.

For 2016 the current world temperature was estimated to be .99 ⁰ C above the per-industrial level.  Since we are at .99 ⁰ C above the pre-industrial value, we are 1.01 ⁰ C from the limit value of 2 ⁰ C.

From our final equation we have as baseline

(Gt’s to get there) x .0006447 = 1.01 degrees.   So the limit is = 1.01/.0006447 = 1567  Gt’s of CO2.

Next question:  How long will it take to get there at current production levels?

To answer that we need to look at the following chart of historical CO2 production levels:

Figure 5

s08_FossilFuel_and_Cement_emissions

 

At least for now production seems to be stabilizing, so we will use the 2016 value of 36.4 Gt for the annual CO2 production.  With that we get, again as baseline,

Time to 2 ⁰ C limit = 1567/36.4 = 43 years.  So if nothing changes we hit disaster in 2059. (Of course avoiding disaster means acting earlier.  We’ll return to that later.)

What this number means

As we’ve been careful to say, this isn’t the whole story.   However what it does say is that the trend of the last 70 years is unambiguous and specific.   It yields a carbon dioxide budget and a date to reckon with.   Even this most straightforward calculation says we have a serious problem.

The reason that isn’t the whole story is that climate change itself has produced new phenomena that add to the baseline.   Examples include

– Temperature change in the oceans

– Acidity change in the oceans

– Decline in arctic sea ice

– Melting of ice caps

– Melting of permafrost

So before we can be precise about carbon budgets and timeframes we need to incorporate the effects of these new kinds of changes, because it all adds up.

Since this is new territory, we can’t rely on history for this new piece.   It requires both new science to understand the effects and new simulation models to track their interactions.   That effort is the subject of the next section.

 

Part2 – New factors in a warming world

For the newer changes to the environment, the only way to understand the future is to learn enough to model the actual behavior.  That effort is a major goal of ongoing climate science.

Then, since the effects are linked with each other, they must be tied together into a simulation model of the natural environment.   Of necessity, this must include not only the atmosphere but land and water effects as well.  The IPCC currently has four major simulation projects, to model scenarios with low, medium, and high levels of retained heat in the atmosphere.  Those simulations are enormously complicated; they model specific per-year patterns of greenhouse gas generation in particular geographic locations with associated ocean currents, forests, glaciers, and so forth.

While the complexity of the models is beyond the scope here (see this overview for a summary), what we can do is describe some of the issues that are modeled, with an indication of ongoing work to support the results.

We should also underline the importance of this work.   Because warming trends already put us in new territory, there is no history to estimate or even bound the magnitude of these new interrelated effects.  Without looking in detail, we just plain don’t know what is going to happen.  One sobering lesson from the longer historical record is that with climate, small changes can produce big effects.

With that as introduction, we now look at some of the important issues under study.  In this we’ll see how the changes mentioned earlier actually come into play.

CO2 uptake in the oceans and on land

As we noted earlier, only 44% of the CO2 that is produced ends up in the atmosphere.  The following chart shows how that has evolved over time.  What gets into the atmosphere is what isn’t captured by the ocean and land sinks.

Figure 6

Forecast6

Any change in the absorptive capacity of the ocean or land sinks has a big effect on climate, by multiplying the impact of whatever carbon dioxide is produced.  And there have been concerns, particularly recently, that the absorptive capacity may be reaching a saturation limit.  So there is considerable ongoing work to understand the mechanisms responsible for the uptake.

For the oceans the story turns out to have several parts:

– The oceans are warming, and warmer water has less capacity for CO2.   That part is relatively easy to quantify.

– A large part of the uptake, however, is due to photoplankton in the water.  It turns out that there are multiple species and issues to be understood.  Very significantly, the photophlankton are sensitive to the rise in acidity of the oceans.   So there are a quantifiable scenarios where rising acidity will reduce the ocean uptake by killing photoplankton.

– Additionally, all of the ocean uptake involves a relatively thin layer of surface water.  That upper layer is refreshed by the operation of ocean currents.   As we’ll discuss in a minute, the currents themselves are vulnerable for disruption by climate change, so refresh rates will change in some scenarios.

For land sinks the story is simpler—threats to forests from rising temperatures, and new forest areas created by natural or artificial means.  Note that the land sinks have been historically volatile, as you can see in Figure 6, so modeling has to be explicit and detailed.

Melting ice caps

One of the most obvious effects of climate change has been the melting of ice caps and glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica, and elsewhere.   This melting contributes to warming by reducing reflectivity of ice-covered surface, but can later increase carbon uptake if the glacier is replaced by forest.  Both effects are included in the models.

Glacial melting now appears to be happening faster than expected, so there is active work on the timetable.  The melting also affects the salinity and therefore density of the surrounding water, which in turn can affect ocean currents.  And that, as we just saw, affects ocean uptake of CO2.

It should be noted that melting of glaciers is one of the longest lasting effects of climate change.   Once ice sheets begin movement toward the sea, the process becomes virtually unstoppable.  Which means locking-in many meters of sea level rise in long-term projections.  The Greenland ice cap alone represents 7 meters of sea level rise.

Ocean currents

Over the past few decades, it has become clear that ocean currents are linked with each other in a more comprehensive way than was understood before.  The current view (the “ocean conveyer belt” or “thermohaline circulation”) is shown in the following simplified figure.

Figure 7

Figure7

What is relatively new is the notion of deep water currents connecting surface flows—so disruption of any part of the circuit affects the flow overall.

Disruption of the circuit has many consequences.  We have already seen it can affect carbon dioxide uptake by the oceans.  It also affects upwelling of nutrients and hence most life in the oceans, as well as the weather worldwide.

One important special case is the down-welling in the north Atlantic, in that it appears to be affected by melting of the Greenland ice cap.   That directly impacts the Gulf Stream, but the via the “conveyer belt” the effects would be felt worldwide.   Details are described here.

Other greenhouse gases

Thus far we have talked only about CO2, because its residence time in the atmosphere is much longer than for other greenhouse gases, such as methane.  Methane, however, is much more potent molecule-for-molecule, so there are examples where it needs to be taken specifically into account.

One such example is permafrost melting in the Asian tundra.   Since permafrost is partially-decayed vegetable matter, melting of permafrost actually releases methane directly.   The methane only persists in the atmosphere for about a year, but because of its potency it creates a short-term effect on climate that has been incorporated into the models.

Note that because permafrost is a phenomenon of the tundra, this is a case where the models need to react to the specific effects in particular geographic regions.

Cloud cover

Cloud cover is a surprisingly contentious subject.  On one hand it is nothing new, so in that sense it is already in the baseline.  On the other, it has such large potential effects both positive and negative, that it is hard to dismiss as something that might fundamentally change.

The basic arguments are straightforward:   clouds reduce warming by reflecting sunlight back but they also trap heat coming from the earth.   In general for high clouds the warming effect is predominant and for low clouds the cooling effect is.

There has been considerable effort to decide upon the net effect, which for now appears weakly warming.

Carbon capture

Carbon capture is a technological idea that has been around for some time without ever maturing to the point where it can be called real.   The idea is that CO2 would be captured at emission or even removed from the atmosphere and either stored somewhere (underground or at the sea bottom) or handled by a biological process that would render it harmless.

Anyone who thinks the current IPCC models are deliberately alarmist should realize that the models actually include carbon capture technology starting as early as 2030.  As this indicates, the models are in fact a best shot at the future and should not be thought of as a worst case.

Darken the sun

Finally, as a last item, we mention one more category of climate work that does not fit in the IPCC models.  These are the speculative “if all else fails” projects.   They are directed to the case where the IPCC process has failed, and the world is locked into an unlivable future.  For that case they propose gases or particles to be dispersed around the earth to cut down the strength of solar radiation.

While such projects turn up occasionally in the press, all of them have very serious downsides—to start with they reduce photosynthesis and hence food production everywhere on earth—and the people working on them recognize that explicitly.  It is important to realize those are not alternatives but risky and desperate measures for a future we are trying to avoid.

 

That ends our short summary of modeling issues.

While we have given only a few examples, it should be clear that the effects are potentially large.  And we see that in the last IPCC report from 2014. (That was the 5th such report.  The next one is scheduled for 2018.)

By incorporating all effects, the IPCC’s carbon dioxide budget drops to about half of the baseline–800 Gt starting from the end of 2014.  That means the time to exhaust the CO2 budget is also about half—twenty years.  The specific effects are described in some detail in the IPCC report itself.

Figure 8 presents the IPCC conclusions as a single key chart.

Figure 8

s51_JacksonBridge15_Fig1_lines

The chart shows that with current fuel consumption (black curve) we will get to 2 degrees C in about 20 years, but in that scenario the temperature just keeps rising afterwards. If we want to stay below 2 degrees C, we need to be cutting carbon dioxide production much sooner, about 2020 in the -4% per year scenario.  Recall that since CO2 just adds up, things only stop getting worse when we are essentially done with coal, oil, and gas.

That summarizes the scientific consensus.  Time is short to stay under the 2 ⁰ C limit.  But as discussed in the overview post on climate change, getting there requires action but not miracles.

To end, it is worth emphasizing the importance of research going forward.   There are two points:

1. The world’s climate has already changed in unprecedented ways, and we’ve had little time to understand all its new workings and dangers. This is a very complicated system, and we have perturbed it in a significant way.   There are no guarantees that all changes will be gradual.  The world needs the most accurate possible view of the future.

2. For the transition from fossil fuels—we’ve said we don’t need miracles. But it’s a big job to do, so the more we know the better!