I think his views on anthropogenic global warming are, on balance, bollocks. The science is settled.
I wouldn’t say I am a Moldbug fan, but I did read an exorbitant amount of his writing. I do treat his views on AGW as evidence against his other opinions, in the same way I would if he wrote a similar tract on evolution, general relativity, the germ theory of disease, etc.
(I don’t currently have the time to go re-read the linked essay of approximately 15,000 words, so this comment is based solely on my memory/impression of his arguments. Memories being what they are, please take my comment with as much salt as appropriate.)
Don’t worry, I just did reread it, and it is just as I remembered. A lot of applause lights for the crowd that believes that the current state of climate science is driven by funding pressure from the US government DoE. His “argument” is based almost exclusively on the tone of popular texts, and anecdotal evidence that Joe Romm was an asshole and pushing bad policy at DoE during the Clinton administration. Considerations of what happened during the 8 years of a GWB administration that was actively hostile to the people JoeR favored are ignored.
Temperatures are described as “flat since the 90s” which is based on a massive misreading of the data, giving one exceptionally hot year (1998) the same evidentiary weight as the 8 of 10 hottest years on record which have occurred since then. Conveniently, when he wants to spread FUD about the current state of climate science, he will talk about natural variability and uncertainty in the climate. OTOH, he judges the shape of the data since the 1990s in a way that completely ignores that variability and uncertainty.
Bollocks is spot on and I absolutely treat his writings on global warming as evidence against his other opinions. That said, I am hardly a fan, and consider his argumentation logically weak, full of applause lights and other confusing nonsense across the board. Generally in a agreement with lukeprog.
I’ve read as much as I have, because he is from a vastly different tribe, and willing to express taboo opinions, which include some nuggets of truth or interesting mistakes worth thinking about.
Temperatures are described as “flat since the 90s” which is based on a massive misreading of the data, giving one exceptionally hot year (1998) the same evidentiary weight as the 8 of 10 hottest years on record which have occurred since then.
“Flat since the 90s” is a statement about the rate of change of temperature. “8 of 10 hottest years on record [...] have occurred since then” is a statement about the value of the temperature. These are almost entirely unrelated factoids, are completely compatible with one another, and I wish people would stop presenting the latter as some kind of slamdunk refutation of the former. It doesn’t support the warmist case, it weakens it.
the running 11 year average of global temperature has not flattened since 1990, but continued upward at almost the same pace with only a moderate decrease in slope since the outlier 1998 year. The 11 years 2000-2010 global mean temperature is significantly higher than the 10 years 1990-2000.
That is not “flat since the 90s”. The only way to get “flat since the 90s” is to compare 1998 to various more recent years noting that it was nearly as hot as 2005 and 2010 etc. and slightly hotter than other years in the 2000s, as if 1 year matters as much as 10 in a noisy data set.
If he had said “flat since 1998” that might be technically true in a way, but it’s a little like saying the stock market has been flat since 2007.
That doesn’t even consider using climate knowledge to adjust for some of the variance, for instance that El Niño years are hotter, and that 1998 was the biggest El Niño year on record.
I’m a Moldbug fan in the sense that I think his model of the Cathedral and power in America is probably correct or at the very least useful.
He is right on the state of climatology and while and global warming pretty much clearly is happening we simply are not good at predicting the climates future behaviour. This makes cost benefit analysis for policy hard. Since the early 2000s it seems to have obviously become attached to a political struggle where the actual truth of the matter has little relevance to the tribes involved.
I’m a Moldbug fan, and I agree with most of what he says about AGW, assuming I have read him correctly. His writings are dense and can be difficult to parse.
As he says, we do not have the scientific tools to make sensible climate predictions for the next, say, 50 years, because there are far too many free parameters, and you cannot do an experiment (i.e. perturb the climate and observe the response in order to establish the parameters). The fact that he mentions macroeconomics next in the article is amusing because there you have the exact same modelling procedures, but the difference is that macro economists freely admit this problem. Moldbug freely concedes the sign of the effect (i.e. CO2 increases temperature) but this is meaningless if you don’t know the magnitude. I also agree with him that the assumption that warmer temperatures are purely bad is absurd—of course there will be benefits too.
I think that on climate science, he is saying that there is no conspiracy as such, but that, like in every other scientific field, there is little interest in funding any dis-confirmatory studies. Therefore the only research or modelling that gets carried out is that which is expected to support the consensus, and the only stuff that gets published is that which beats the margin of statistical significance. This is hardly unique to climatology, but the problem is worse there because the field is so politicised; climatologists see their work as part of a public policy debate in a way that (say) biochemists don’t, and the effect of government funding is so pernicious. At least that’s what I think Moldbug is saying, if he is saying there is a grand conspiracy I disagree. I wholeheartedly agree that Science is often not science, and that Science is an arm of the state, but you don’t need Moldbug for that, Hayek wrote extensively and brilliantly on the subject.
Where I disagree with Moldbug is on the precautionary principle. I do think there is a difference between a 3 degree temperature rise caused by humans, and one caused by “natural effects,” in that we are more likely to be able to remedy the former than the latter.
None of this is to say that global warming isn’t “real,” btw.
This neither raises nor lowers my confidence in the rest of his writings.
like in every other scientific field, there is little interest in funding any dis-confirmatory studies
Really? There has been masses of funding from groups environmental policy would adversely affect (fossil fuel companies mainly) to find discomfirmatory evidence or muddy the waters, and they leap on any evidence that appears to be on their side (see the ‘climategate’ emails).
Coincidentally, I was recently reading Moldbug, and I though: “What would his LW fans think about his opinions on global warming?”
Second question: “If you are Moldbug’s fan and you disagree with him on this topic, do you treat it as an evidence against his other opinions?”
I think his views on anthropogenic global warming are, on balance, bollocks. The science is settled.
I wouldn’t say I am a Moldbug fan, but I did read an exorbitant amount of his writing. I do treat his views on AGW as evidence against his other opinions, in the same way I would if he wrote a similar tract on evolution, general relativity, the germ theory of disease, etc.
(I don’t currently have the time to go re-read the linked essay of approximately 15,000 words, so this comment is based solely on my memory/impression of his arguments. Memories being what they are, please take my comment with as much salt as appropriate.)
Don’t worry, I just did reread it, and it is just as I remembered. A lot of applause lights for the crowd that believes that the current state of climate science is driven by funding pressure from the US government DoE. His “argument” is based almost exclusively on the tone of popular texts, and anecdotal evidence that Joe Romm was an asshole and pushing bad policy at DoE during the Clinton administration. Considerations of what happened during the 8 years of a GWB administration that was actively hostile to the people JoeR favored are ignored.
Temperatures are described as “flat since the 90s” which is based on a massive misreading of the data, giving one exceptionally hot year (1998) the same evidentiary weight as the 8 of 10 hottest years on record which have occurred since then. Conveniently, when he wants to spread FUD about the current state of climate science, he will talk about natural variability and uncertainty in the climate. OTOH, he judges the shape of the data since the 1990s in a way that completely ignores that variability and uncertainty.
Bollocks is spot on and I absolutely treat his writings on global warming as evidence against his other opinions. That said, I am hardly a fan, and consider his argumentation logically weak, full of applause lights and other confusing nonsense across the board. Generally in a agreement with lukeprog.
I’ve read as much as I have, because he is from a vastly different tribe, and willing to express taboo opinions, which include some nuggets of truth or interesting mistakes worth thinking about.
“Flat since the 90s” is a statement about the rate of change of temperature. “8 of 10 hottest years on record [...] have occurred since then” is a statement about the value of the temperature. These are almost entirely unrelated factoids, are completely compatible with one another, and I wish people would stop presenting the latter as some kind of slamdunk refutation of the former. It doesn’t support the warmist case, it weakens it.
the running 11 year average of global temperature has not flattened since 1990, but continued upward at almost the same pace with only a moderate decrease in slope since the outlier 1998 year. The 11 years 2000-2010 global mean temperature is significantly higher than the 10 years 1990-2000.
That is not “flat since the 90s”. The only way to get “flat since the 90s” is to compare 1998 to various more recent years noting that it was nearly as hot as 2005 and 2010 etc. and slightly hotter than other years in the 2000s, as if 1 year matters as much as 10 in a noisy data set.
If he had said “flat since 1998” that might be technically true in a way, but it’s a little like saying the stock market has been flat since 2007.
That doesn’t even consider using climate knowledge to adjust for some of the variance, for instance that El Niño years are hotter, and that 1998 was the biggest El Niño year on record.
I think an honest eyeball will recognize a plateau in temperatures going back to 2003. It would be the highest plateau, but still a plateau.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png
I’m a Moldbug fan in the sense that I think his model of the Cathedral and power in America is probably correct or at the very least useful.
He is right on the state of climatology and while and global warming pretty much clearly is happening we simply are not good at predicting the climates future behaviour. This makes cost benefit analysis for policy hard. Since the early 2000s it seems to have obviously become attached to a political struggle where the actual truth of the matter has little relevance to the tribes involved.
I’m a Moldbug fan, and I agree with most of what he says about AGW, assuming I have read him correctly. His writings are dense and can be difficult to parse.
As he says, we do not have the scientific tools to make sensible climate predictions for the next, say, 50 years, because there are far too many free parameters, and you cannot do an experiment (i.e. perturb the climate and observe the response in order to establish the parameters). The fact that he mentions macroeconomics next in the article is amusing because there you have the exact same modelling procedures, but the difference is that macro economists freely admit this problem. Moldbug freely concedes the sign of the effect (i.e. CO2 increases temperature) but this is meaningless if you don’t know the magnitude. I also agree with him that the assumption that warmer temperatures are purely bad is absurd—of course there will be benefits too.
I think that on climate science, he is saying that there is no conspiracy as such, but that, like in every other scientific field, there is little interest in funding any dis-confirmatory studies. Therefore the only research or modelling that gets carried out is that which is expected to support the consensus, and the only stuff that gets published is that which beats the margin of statistical significance. This is hardly unique to climatology, but the problem is worse there because the field is so politicised; climatologists see their work as part of a public policy debate in a way that (say) biochemists don’t, and the effect of government funding is so pernicious. At least that’s what I think Moldbug is saying, if he is saying there is a grand conspiracy I disagree. I wholeheartedly agree that Science is often not science, and that Science is an arm of the state, but you don’t need Moldbug for that, Hayek wrote extensively and brilliantly on the subject.
Where I disagree with Moldbug is on the precautionary principle. I do think there is a difference between a 3 degree temperature rise caused by humans, and one caused by “natural effects,” in that we are more likely to be able to remedy the former than the latter.
None of this is to say that global warming isn’t “real,” btw.
This neither raises nor lowers my confidence in the rest of his writings.
Really? There has been masses of funding from groups environmental policy would adversely affect (fossil fuel companies mainly) to find discomfirmatory evidence or muddy the waters, and they leap on any evidence that appears to be on their side (see the ‘climategate’ emails).