The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change

Matt Ridley has just written his last “Mind and Matter” column for the Wall Street Journal. We will miss the column and wish him the best in his future endeavors.

To mark the occasion Ridley explains how he came to doubt the “settled science” about global climate change.

It ought to be obvious to every sentient soul that the celebrities who are hawking this pseudo-science do not know enough to examine the data and to draw a rational conclusion. Like their mentor Al Gore, they want to belong to the group of right-thinking people who believe in AGW, as it is called, because it is the “consensus” view among scientists.

If you are a know-nothing, you will do everything in your power to be perceived as belonging to the cognoscenti. It doesn’t matter whether you are right or wrong. It matters that your public thinks that you belong to the intellectual elite. Better that than to be considered just another pretty face who makes a living pretending to be someone he is not.

Ridley opens his column by recounting a conversation he had with a friend. The friend asked how Ridley could reject the “scientific consensus” about climate change.

Ridley recounts the conversation:

Last week a friend chided me for not agreeing with the scientific consensus that climate change is likely to be dangerous. I responded that, according to polls, the "consensus" about climate change only extends to the propositions that it has been happening and is partly man-made, both of which I readily agree with. Forecasts show huge uncertainty.

Besides, science does not respect consensus. There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA) and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false. Science, Richard Feyman once said, is "the belief in the ignorance of experts."

The point has been made before. No harm is done by making it again. The fact that a majority of scientists agree on something does not make it science. Like everyone else scientists are susceptible to the pull of the crowd. Too often, their careers, their promotions and their funding depend on toeing the party line.

Ten years ago Ridley had been convinced that global climate change was “settled science.” Upon reflection and upon examination of further data, he concluded that the science had been falsified to present a view that served the interests of the ideologues who want to return us to the Stone Age.

Ridley explains how he changed his mind:

 A decade ago, I was persuaded by two pieces of data to drop my skepticism and accept that dangerous climate change was likely. The first, based on the Vostok ice core, was a graph showing carbon dioxide and temperature varying in lock step over the last half million years. The second, the famous "hockey stick" graph, showed recent temperatures shooting up faster and higher than at any time in the past millennium.

Within a few years, however, I discovered that the first of these graphs told the opposite story from what I had inferred. In the ice cores, it is now clear that temperature drives changes in the level of carbon dioxide, not vice versa.

As for the "hockey stick" graph, it was effectively critiqued by Steven McIntyre, a Canadian businessman with a mathematical interest in climatology. He showed that the graph depended heavily on unreliable data, especially samples of tree rings from bristlecone pine trees, the growth patterns of which were often not responding to temperature at all. It also depended on a type of statistical filter that overweighted any samples showing sharp rises in the 20th century.

As I said, we will miss Matt Ridley.

Turning 80

In two days famed neurologist Oliver Sacks will turn 80. The author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is rejoicing, and not just because being alive is better than the alternative.

Part of his happiness comes from looking back at his accomplishments:

At nearly 80, with a scattering of medical and surgical problems, none disabling, I feel glad to be alive — “I’m glad I’m not dead!” sometimes bursts out of me when the weather is perfect. (This is in contrast to a story I heard from a friend who, walking with Samuel Beckett in Paris on a perfect spring morning, said to him, “Doesn’t a day like this make you glad to be alive?” to which Beckett answered, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”) I am grateful that I have experienced many things — some wonderful, some horrible — and that I have been able to write a dozen books, to receive innumerable letters from friends, colleagues and readers, and to enjoy what Nathaniel Hawthorne called “an intercourse with the world.”

Most people, dare I say, dread the aging process. Surely, they will breathe a sigh of relief if they can still breathe on their eightieth birthday, but they are terrified at the decrepitude that comes with elderhood.

Yet, I suspect that those who look forward to being 80 are more likely to attain it.

In a culture that idolizes youth, aging is not your friend. If you consider how much money so many people spend to pretend that they are still in the prime of youth, well, the number is frightening.

By happenstance, this morning’s Daily Mail has a cover story about the Hollywood stars who have used cosmetic surgery to turn their faces into what the paper calls: “waxwork horrors.”

There are worse things in life than looking your age.

Sacks wants to make a more important point. With age, he says, comes wisdom, and wisdom should not be dismissed so easily:

My father, who lived to 94, often said that the 80s had been one of the most enjoyable decades of his life. He felt, as I begin to feel, not a shrinking but an enlargement of mental life and perspective. One has had a long experience of life, not only one’s own life, but others’, too. One has seen triumphs and tragedies, booms and busts, revolutions and wars, great achievements and deep ambiguities, too. One has seen grand theories rise, only to be toppled by stubborn facts. One is more conscious of transience and, perhaps, of beauty. At 80, one can take a long view and have a vivid, lived sense of history not possible at an earlier age. I can imagine, feel in my bones, what a century is like, which I could not do when I was 40 or 60. I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.

I am looking forward to being 80.

It would be a better world if we all learned to age gracefully. And it would be a far better world if we respected the wisdom that comes with age more than we idolize the intemperate passions of youth.

The Feminist Guilt Trip

On the face of it you would think that Lisa Endlich Heffernan has done well, by herself, by her children, by her marriage.

True, she had to give up her career to stay at home with her three young sons, but she could afford to do it. Her boys are now grown and mostly on their own.

You would think that she would manifest some pride in her achievement. Bringing up three boys and maintaining a solid and stable marriage for well over two decades give her the right to feel some measure of  pride.

But, she doesn’t. Now that her children are grown, she has launched a new career as a sad feminist whiner. She bemoans what she lost, what she gave up, what she sacrificed for her children, her home and her family.

Her article on the Huffington Post shows her indulging an embarrassing bout of moral self-flagellation. Somehow or other, feminism has taught her to drown her natural pride in self-criticism. If she wasn’t depressed before she turned down this dead end street, she soon will be.

Since it is well known that self-deprecating criticism is the root of depression, one is justified in saying that the feminist mindset produces depression. Heffernan’s is a classic in glass-half-empty thinking.

For those who think that feminism promotes the freedom for women to choose to live their lives as they see fit, note well that for Heffernan, making a choice that contradicts feminist dogma is very costly indeed.

Why did Heffernan quit her job? She notes that while she was working full time, she had two small children, with another on the way. Despite the best efforts of her super-competent Nanny, her household was complete chaos.

Yet, her mind, addled by feminist pieties, does not look back at the advantages that her children gained by her being a stay-at-home-mom. In retrospect, she can only see the cost. As she looks at the fine young men her boys have become Heffernan is obsessed with how much income she would have earned if she had stayed on the job.

In her words:

The most expensive decision of my life I made alone. There was no realtor, no car dealer and no travel agent when I chose to leave the paid workforce. There was just me looking at my husband, my children and the chaos that was our lives. At no point did I calculate the lifetime impact of diminished earnings and prospects. I looked at the year we were in and the following year, and I bolted.

No part of my brain sat itself down and thought, What is the price, both in this year's dollars and my lifetime earnings, to leaving the workforce, and is it a decision that I might regret a decade or two from now? At no point did I examine the non-monetary cost that would loom just as large. At the time, it seemed forgone: We had two demanding careers, two small children and another on the way, and two adult lives hopelessly out of control.

She ought to feel some shame for quantifying the benefits that have accrued to her and her family. Instead, she feels genuine “remorse,” that is, guilt, for missing out on all that extra income and for having let down feminism.

Her children’s well-being pales in comparison to the “cosmic” importance of feminism.

Heffernan explains:

In some cosmic way I feel that I let down a generation of women who made it possible to dream big, even though I know the real goal of the Women's Movement was to be able to dream anything.

She adds that since she used her driver’s license more than her degree, she was letting down those who had educated her. She says nothing about whether her education might have made her a better mother and whether she might have imparted some of that learning to her children.

She was actively engaged in volunteer work throughout, but she considers that activities like serving on hospital boards were, in the end, a waste of time:

Some of this work was deeply meaningful and some of it trivial in the extreme. Whether it is sitting on a hospital board or raising funds for a nursery school, volunteer activities involve a flurry of activity, but at the end of the day, those who are running the organization carry on and my job was over.

Living in a tony suburb allowed Heffernan to make wonderful friends. Yet, she happily discovers the downside of those friendships: they lacked diversity.

In her words:

During the years at home with my children, I made the most wonderful friends, women I hope to know all of my life. But living in the suburbs among women of shockingly similar backgrounds, interests and aspirations narrowed the scope of people with whom I interacted. In the workplace, my contacts and friends included both genders and people of every description, and I was better for it.

Actually, she was living in a community that was long on social harmony. Nothing prevented her from moving to a community that was short on social harmony and long on diversity, but she chose not to do so. Why do you think she didn’t? Could it be that social harmony contributes to emotional well-being while too much diversity risks producing anomie?

Among the other indignities of being a SAHM, Heffernan found herself functioning as a wife and homemaker. To her that means becoming something that feminists have consistently disparaged.

She does not think that if she had made a different choice she might, at this point, have a fat bank account and a dead marriage. And, she does not seem to recognize that her wonderful children might have been less wonderful if they had felt abandoned by two working parents.

Heffernan says that she has lost confidence in herself, but since feminism does not allow her to gain confidence from the good job she has done with her children, she is forced to define confidence solely in terms of career success:

What I hadn't realized was how my constant focus on my family would result in my aspirations for myself slipping away. And despite it being obvious, I did not focus on the inevitable obsolescence that my job as mom held.

Strangely enough, she is saying that her aspirations for herself did not include being a good mother and a good wife. She is right to say that children, as they grow up, need their mothers less. It’s a sign that she has done a great job at bringing them up to be independent adults.

But, not too independent. A mother who writes an open letter to her children telling them how much she sacrificed for them, is also telling them how much they owe her. Heffernan is now passing her feminist guilt trip on to the next generation.

As Egypt Burns ...

Most articles about the Egyptian coup have focused on the conflict between Islam and democracy. They have analyzed the events by saying that  the military was forced to overthrow the government of Mohamed Morsi because he had tried to institute an Islamist power grab.

Those who believe that liberal democracy is a panacea have been disappointed with the postscript to the Arab Spring.

Then again, as I have been saying and as Fraser Nelson points out in the London Telegraph today, the Arab world needs capitalism far more than it needs democracy. One thing is certain, the Islamist governments that have popped up around the Middle East are not going to promote capitalism.

David Brooks said it well in his column today:

It has become clear — in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere — that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death. “Dying for the sake of God is more sublime than anything,” declared one speaker at a pro-Morsi rally in Cairo on Tuesday.

So, perhaps we should not feel overly chagrined at the premature ending of the Morsi presidency. 

The fall of Mohamed Morsi also exposes the errors of conventional American wisdom about foreign policy. 

Caroline Glick has never been fooled by anyone’s conventional wisdom. Yesterday, she wrote:

The American foreign policy establishment's rush to romanticize as the Arab Spring the political instability that engulfed the Arab world following the self-immolation of a Tunisian peddler in December 2010 was perhaps the greatest demonstration ever given of the members of that establishment's utter cluelessness about the nature of Arab politics and society. Their enthusiastic embrace of protesters who have now brought down President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood regime indicates that it takes more than a complete repudiation of their core assumptions to convince them to abandon them.

For those who are still tempted to see the Egyptian coup in terms of a yearning for liberal democracy, David Goldman has, as always, tried to show us the reality on the ground. The Egyptian people turned against the Muslim Brotherhood because… they were starving.

Goldman had noted it previously and I have reported it on this blog.

Yesterday, Goldman said:

Starvation is the unstated subject of this week’s military coup. For the past several months, the bottom half of Egypt’s population has had little to eat besides government-subsidized bread, and now the bread supply is threatened by a shortage of imported wheat. Despite $8 billion of aid from Qatar and smidgens from Libya, Turkey, and others, Egypt is struggling to meet a financing gap of perhaps $20 billion a year, made worse by the collapse of its major cash earner — the tourist industry. Malnutrition is epidemic in the form of extreme protein deficiency in a country where 40% of the adult population is already “stunted” by poor diet, according to the World Food Program. It is not that hard to get 14 million people into the streets if there is nothing to eat at home.

Nearly half of Egyptians are illiterate. Seventy percent of them live on the land, yet the country imports half its food. Its only cash-earning industry, namely tourism, is in ruins. Sixty years of military dictatorship have left it with college graduates unfit for the world market, and a few t-shirt factories turning Asian polyester into cut-rate exports. It cannot feed itself and it cannot earn enough to feed itself, as I have explained in a series of recent articles. Someone has to subsidize them, or a lot of them will starve. Unlike Mexico, Egypt can’t ship its rural poor to industrial nations in the north.

By Goldman’s analysis, the Egyptian people turned to the military because they knew that the Saudis would offer financial aid. As the old saying goes… beggars can’t be choosy.

Egypt’s people embraced the military because they remember that the military used to feed them. In fact, the military probably can alleviate the food crisis, because — unlike the Muslim Brotherhood– Egypt’s generals should be able to count on the support of Saudi Arabia. Saudi King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz congratulated Egypt’s military-appointed interim president on Wednesday night, while the United Arab Emirates expressed “satisfaction” at the course of events.

Like Glick, Goldman recommends that we get over our belief that we must honor the outcomes of all elections. The willingness of America’s foreign policy elite to endorse the Muslim Brotherhood was unseemly, to the point of being delusional.

Goldman explained:

No one should mourn the Brotherhood, a totalitarian organization with a Nazi past and an extreme anti-Semitic ideology.

The notion that this band of Jew-hating jihadi thugs might become the vehicle for a transition to a functioning Muslim democracy was perhaps the stupidest notion to circulate in Washington in living memory.

Obviously, the Obama administration foreign policy team is completely out of its depth. For having backed Morsi, it has lost its credibility with the Egyptian people. In the absence of effective American leadership, the Saudis, especially former ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar, are now in charge:

In the Beltway, to be sure, the same folk on left and right who thought the “Arab Spring” would usher in a golden era of Muslim democracy are wringing their hands over the tragic fate of Egypt’s first democratically elected government. These include Republicans as well as Democrats, whom I qualified as “Dumb and Dumber” in a May 20 essay forTablet. The sequel — call it “Dumb and Dumberer” — is still playing on CNN and Fox News. No matter: the important matters are now in the competent hands of Prince Bandar, whose judgment I prefer to that of John Kerry or Susan Rice or John McCain any day of the week. The best-case scenario would be for the grown-ups in the region to ignore the blandishments of the Obama administration as well as the advice of the Republican establishment, and to do what they have to do regardless.

Given the importance of the crisis in Egypt, President Obama convened his National Security Council yesterday. Conspicuous by his absence was Secretary of State John Kerry.

Caroline Glick emphasizes that while Egypt was burning John Kerry was indulging in yet another fruitless effort to reconcile the Israelis and the Palestinians:

Secretary of State John Kerry was the personification of the incredible shrinkage of America this week as he maintained his obsessive focus on getting Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians.

In a Middle East engulfed by civil war, revolution and chronic instability, Israel is the only country at peace. The image of Kerry extolling his success in "narrowing the gaps" between Israel and the Palestinians before he boarded his airplane at Ben-Gurion Airport, as millions assembled to bring down the government of Egypt, is the image of a small, irrelevant America.

And as the anti-American posters in Tahrir Square this week showed, America's self-induced smallness is a tragedy that will harm the region and endanger the US.

It needs to be noted that while the Obama foreign policy team was working on the Egypt crisis, Secretary of State John Kerry was not there. He was in Nantucket on one of his yachts.

The Boston Herald reported a sighting:

Secretary of State John Kerry is spending a sun-splashed Fourth of July on Nantucket, even as a chaotic overthrow of the government rocks Egypt and continues to test diplomatic relations in Washington.

Kerry, who has a house and a yacht on the ritzy island getaway, was seen strolling down Federal Street away from July Fourth festivities on Main Street, a source told the Herald.

Some will say, with some justice, that it is better for John Kerry to be on vacation. He can do far less damage on his yacht than he can in the corridors of power.

Thanks to Barack Obama American influence in he world has diminished. Like a ship without a captain, a world without a leader is heading for trouble.

Winners and Losers in Egypt

It’s too soon to say who won the latest showdown between the Egyptian people and Islamic fundamentalism, but we know who lost.

We do not know whether Egypt’s new rulers will put it on the road to liberal democracy, or better, whether they will promote free enterprise, but we do know that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE are cheering the military coup in Egypt. They, as opposed to the Obama administration, know what the Muslim Brotherhood is really about.

Today, as the new rulers of Egypt round up leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration has again been shown to be inept and incompetent.

Jonathan Tobin offered a concise analysis on the Commentary Contentions blog:

The end of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt is a blow to the cause of radical Islam. The rise of the Brotherhood and the now deposed President Mohamed Morsi was a disaster for Egypt as well as for the West. Had Morsi and his party been left in place to continue their drive to impose their Islamist vision on the world’s most populous Arab country it might have been impossible to depose them, thus locking Egypt into the same nightmare scenario of theocratic tyranny that we have seen unfold in Iran in the last generation.

Tobin explainedthat the Obama administration, having pinned its hopes and illusions on the Muslim Brotherhood, had told the Egyptian Army not to intervene. Happily for Egypt, the Army ignored the earnest entreaties of our incompetent president.

Tobin wrote:

The even better news is that the Egyptian Army didn’t listen to the Obama administration when it asked them not to launch what is, for all intents and purposes, a military coup that toppled a democratically elected government. The embrace of Morsi and the Brotherhood by President Obama and his foreign policy over the last year has further poisoned Egyptian public opinion against the United States as well as strengthened the confidence of Islamists that America will not oppose their efforts to transform the region. After having been intimidated by U.S. pressure aimed at ensuring that the military would not prevent Morsi’s election, the military ran the risk that this time Obama meant what he said about using the billions in aid Egypt gets from the United States to prevent them from stopping the Brotherhood’s push for power. The willingness of the Egyptian army to step in and stop the confrontation in the streets not only avoided clashes that might have produced unimaginable casualties but also kept open the possibility that a new government could emerge in Cairo without having to fight a civil war in order to survive.

Since the Obama administration wanted Egypt to be transformed into another Turkey, the popular uprising and the military coup was not at all to its liking. One suspects that it did not like being revealed as incompetent and that it did not want the world to see how widely it was reviled in Egypt.

After the administration offered its first comment on the events in Cairo, Tobin commented:

… you don’t have to read too closely between the lines to understand that Obama is angrier about regime change in Cairo than he ever was about the Islamist attempt to remake Egypt in their own image.

President Obama stood by passively for a year as Morsi and the Brotherhood began to seize total power, repress critics and pave the way for a complete transformation of Egypt into an Islamist state without threatening a cutoff of U.S. aid. Now Obama has finally found the guts to use America’s leverage over the country but only to register his protest against the downfall of the Brotherhood.

Tobin said that Obama is doubling down on failure. One would not be surprised. Yet, there might be another piece of good news in the debacle of the Obama administration foreign policy. Perhaps another reputation has been damaged:

 

Happy Independence Day

The Value of Self-Control

Thanks largely to Freud most of us believe that self-control is a form of repression. Nowadays, people call it self-denial.

Freud’s view was not science and it wasn't true, but it’s a nice image: you bottle up your feelings until one day, like compressed gas, they explode.

Of course, Freud also believed in delayed gratification. His view was Stoic, even ascetic. At best, he was suggesting that if you renounce immediate gratification you will achieve satisfaction—i.e., an eternal reward-- at some point in the future.

Freud was rejecting the idea that self-control could be satisfying in and of itself. He saw it as a necessary evil, not as a positive achievement, to be encouraged.

According to a study performed by University of Chicago researcher Wilhelm Hofmann, individuals who exercised more self-control were happier in the short term as well as in the long term. Specifically, he asked people whether they had or had not acted on their desires.

The Atlantic summarized the results:

The more self-control people reported having, the more satisfied they reported being with their lives. And contrary to what the researchers were expecting, people with more self-control were also more likely to be happy in the short-term. In fact, when they further analyzed the data, they found that such people's increased happiness to a large extent accounted for the increased life satisfaction.  

Also:

As they go about their daily lives, people with a lot of self-control appear to generally be in higher spirits; in the long run, they're happier with their lives. To explain why this would be so, the researchers conducted another online survey. What they figured out is that instead of constantly denying themselves, people high in self-control are simply less likely to find themselves in situations where that's even an issue. They don't waste time fighting inner battles over whether or not to eat a second piece of cake. They're above such petty temptations. And that, it would seem, makes them happier ... if still just a little bit sad.

Of course, it all depends on how you define happiness. If you see it, as Freud did, modeled on the most extreme form of instinctual gratification, you will continue to disparage self-control.

More interesting here is the note on temptation. Apparently, once you have learned the habit of self-control—by practicing it, of course—you will find yourself less susceptible to temptation. You will find that you will not feel as tempted to eat or drink or do anything else in excess. And you will be so contented with your life that you will no longer believe that extreme gratification will bring happiness.