Thursday
Jun072012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Worstall again
Jun 7, 2012 Climate: WG3 Having fired up quite a lot of people with his riffing on carbon taxes, Tim Worstall is now riffing on the actual governmental responses to climate change.
So this is where I identify the conspiracy in climate change. Not in the basic science, which I'm perfectly happy to accept. But in the discussion, the rules, the regulations, about what we should do about it. Just about every decision that is actually being made seems to flow from ignorance, mendacity or even, as with the CCL and nuclear, just plain flat-out stupidity.
I still haven't worked out whether this is simply a conspiracy of damn fool idiots or whether they really do have it in for us.
Here, I think, there will be a much greater level of agreement.
Reader Comments (56)
Surely, if a 'simple carbon tax' is the answer, the question is still wrong? Obviously the lowering, or removal, of the mad anti-CO2 taxes we currently have would indeed be welcome. But simplifying on the premise of a lie is a bit like saying 'These people will charge you £18 bn a year to protect you from unicorn farts. I can simplify and do the job for far less!'
Give governments a simple carbon tax and it won't stay simple or low (or revenue neutral) for long. This is why it would not be doing the right thing for the wrong reason - it would still be the wrong thing. Remember, when income tax was brought in to fight the Napoleonic wars, it was levied at a rate of just 10% and only applied to the rich. Now it's still here, is on average 25-30% and is levied on almost everybody. It has enabled the state to bloat and stick its nose into all sorts of areas which make people very unhappy. More and more people hate it, as they see their money robbed from them on threat of imprisonment and then splurged on huge wasteful projects, often things the givers do not prioritise or even, in some cases, want at all. The more money you give governments, the worse the choices they make.
I appreciate the arguments, but initiating a 'carbon tax' (must we really keep calling it that?) is really just handing governments a stick to beat current and future generations with - on the basis of a lie. It's immoral. Tim is offering to wash the emperor's new clothes, instead of dry-cleaning them. At least Napoleon really existed.
A carbon tax - especially at a vindictive high rate of 80 dollars a ton - is a terrible idea, no matter who's proposing it. Doesn't matter if it's 'good old Tim' or not.
Barbara pretty much sums up my position, in a more articulate way.
Jonathan,
If Worstall really only accepts the IPCC at face value, and is proceeding to make his case like a devil's advocate, how come he is poking fun at sceptics who've actually looked at the IPCC's case and do not accept it?
I'd rather take him at his word, i.e., what you say he's doing with the IPCC.
Sorry, Bishop, but it's a very woolly and badly written article and with 'friends' like that...... For instance, he writes;
'Our system gives higher subsidies to the more expensive technologies: clearly ludicrous. We have some limited amount of money, whatever that limit is, and we thus want to get as much renewable power as we can from that limited money. But we give five times more money per unit of power to the most expensive technology, solar, than we do to the cheapest, hydro. What have the politicians been smoking to deliberately spend our money in the most inefficient manner possible?'
But quite obviously, if you accept the premise of subsidies for 'renewables' then the more expensive the renewable the more you must pay. Logic 101. Because, like most commentators, he excepts and, therefore, will not question the 'premise', the 'science' as he calls it, he gets himself, like almost everyone else, into absurd knots. He does not like what it means but will not question the meaning. For to question the 'science' ( and we know that means the politics) does not require some especial expertise but rather a clear eye. It is moral cowardice not to question the 'science'. Your example always proves this point, your courage to question.
Lewis Deane:
Some questions. Were you in this fight before Richard Lindzen joined it in 1988 (when he heard of Al Gore shutting down debate in Washington even then)? How lonely do you think those early years were for MIT man? Wouldn't you say that Professor Lindzen is a superb example of moral courage on the science? Now another kind of question. Why on earth would Lindzen write a positive review of Nigel Lawson's book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming? In it Lawson, apart from one chapter, takes the IPCC picture of the science as correct, for the sake of argument. So is Lawson a moral pygmy? And where does this leave Lindzen?
I yield to no man in my admiration for my host but I deeply dislike the way you've framed this. Moral cowardice is a real problem in the climate area but I'd like some clear answers to all the above questions before deciding that you're anywhere near hitting the right targets.
The "selection on the dependent variable" problem is well recognized in other fields. In climate science, temperature is the independent variable and trees (growth rings) are the dependent variable.
Climate science selects only those cases where the dependent variable correlates with the independent variable. Substitute “climate science” for “comparative politics” in the paper below:
How the Cases You Choose Affect the Answers You Get:
http://cooley.libarts.wsu.edu/schwartj/pdf/Geddes1.pdf
....
Most graduate students learn in the statistics courses forced upon them that selection on the dependent variable is forbidden, but few remember why, or what the implications of violating this taboo are for their own work. And so, comparativists often ignore or forget about it when carrying out or assessing nonquantitative comparative research.
....
This is not to say that studies of cases selected on the dependent variable have no place in comparative politics. They are ideal for digging into the details of how phenomena come about and for developing insights. They identify plausible causal variables. They bring to light anomalies that current theories cannot accommodate. In so doing, they contribute to building and revising theories. By themselves, however, they cannot test the theories they propose and, hence, cannot contribute to the accumulation of theoretical knowledge (compare Achen and SnidaI1989). To develop and test theories, one must select cases in a way that does not undermine the logic of explanation.
If we want to begin accumulating a body of theoretical knowledge in comparative politics, we need to change the conventions governing the kinds of evidence we regard as theoretically relevant. Speculative arguments based on cases selected on the dependent variable have a long and distinguished history in the subfield, and they will continue to be important as generators of insights and hypotheses. For arguments with knowledge-building pretensions,however, more rigorous standards of evidence are essential.