South Dakota Politics

Global Warming Leveling Off?

I have been blogging about climate change for several years. My general view of the issue, stated early on, is as follows:

1. Global warming has been real over the last century.
2. Human activity may have been a significant factor in forcing that warming.
3. It is very difficult to tell what the causes of the warming are and how much of an impact human activity actually had.
4. It is not at all certain whether the effects of warming have been or will be, on balance, good or bad for human beings.
5. There is no reasonable chance that global treaties or nation-specific policies will have any impact on human carbon emissions.

I think I am right on all five counts. The global treaty initiatives have come a cropper. Nations committed to reducing carbon emissions have, for the most part, failed to achieve that aim. Actual reductions in carbon emissions have come from economic distress and from the application of new technologies such as fracking.

Now comes a finding from The Research Council of Norway that pokes a hole in the climate change balloon.

After Earth's mean surface temperature climbed sharply through the 1990s, the increase has leveled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilized somewhat, despite the fact that CO2 emissions and other anthropogenic factors thought to contribute to global warming are still on the rise.

This, in scientific terms, is what counts as a negative finding. Despite increased carbon emissions, warming has leveled off. The Norwegian project used the same framework as the IPCC. What would be the effect of doubling carbon emissions from pre-industrial levels?

Uncertainties about the overall results of feedback mechanisms make it very difficult to predict just how much of the rise in Earth's mean surface temperature is due to manmade emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the climate sensitivity to doubled atmospheric CO2 levels is probably between 2°C and 4.5°C, with the most probable being 3°C of warming.

In the Norwegian project, however, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of warming.

This confirms my points 3, 4, and 5. We don't really know how much human activity is contributing to climate change and we don't have any good reason to suppose that the current trajectory of climate change will be bad. If the Norwegians are right, we will at worst achieve a level of climate change that the IPCC thought we should aim at without any help from global treaties.

Climate change should be taken seriously. Science can tell us a lot but much of what it tells us is ambiguous. Just right now, climate change looks to be something less than a crisis. It certainly doesn't justify hobbling our economies, which is something we weren't going to do anyway.

On Guns, HB 1087

I will use this space to pump my semi-regular column for the Pierre Capital Journal.  The lastest is entitled "Don't Pass Laws That Don't Solve Problems."  It is on HB 1087, which would put guns in the hands of "sentinels" in our schools.  A sample:

If one looks at the data over the last four decades regarding mass shootings, defined as shootings of four or more people, the pattern is that there is no pattern. Sometimes the number is high, sometimes it is low. There is no evidence that there is an epidemic of mass shootings.

FBI crime statistics say the same about crime in general. A mini-crime wave in the late 1980s peaked in 1991. Since that time, the nation’s homicide rate, violent crime rate, and property crime rate have all dropped by almost half. There is no epidemic of homicide and violence in our nation.

Read the whole thing.

 

 

 

Women in Combat

The Pentagon has announced that it is lifting the ban on women in combat roles. The New York Times is elated.

The Pentagon's decision to end its ban on women in combat is a triumph for equality and common sense. By opening infantry, artillery and other battlefield jobs to all qualified service members regardless of sex, the military is showing that categorical discrimination has no place in a society that honors fairness and equal opportunity.

It is typical of the Times specifically and liberal opinion in general that it leads with the political angle and adjusts any strategic questions accordingly. The Times views the military as one more goody to be distributed and is not much interested in the question of whether putting women in combat roles will actually make the armed forces weaker or stronger.

As it happens, I delivered a paper this summer on this very topic. I began with a general analysis of military virtue. Here is a bit of my paper.

Courage, understood both as steadfastness in defense in the face of great peril and a readiness to exploit opportunities by going on the offensive, is for good reason recognized as the key military virtue. This implies, of course, that one can recognize when it is the right time to retreat, or make a stand, or attack; accordingly, prudence is a military virtue in generals and, to a lesser degree, in all military officers. Prudence is not obviously a virtue of the soldier in the line, as the integrity of the army requires that the soldiers act as units in a larger whole rather than as individuals. Thus moderation and justice, as Plato's Socrates understood them, may be seen as key military virtues. Moderation exists where authority is obeyed. Justice exists when each part of the whole does its own specific work.

That, it seems to me, is how to begin thinking about the question. What capacities do we need in our persons at arms? The above focuses on psychological virtues but there are also physical virtues to consider, reading virtue here in the larger Greek sense.

In human populations, as in other species of apes and a wide range of other mammals, males are larger and stronger than females. Males have an advantage in stamina and are more resistant to injury. The explanation for this is uncontroversial among theorists who rely on Darwinian mechanics. For human males as for chimpanzees, the frequency of successful mating is generally proportional to reproductive success. The more females to which a male gains access, the more offspring he is likely to sire. The reverse is not true for females. As a result, males directly compete with one another for mates and the competition is often violent. Certain elements of physique that enhance military virtue are thus selected for over very long periods of time.

It seems clear that women on average will be less fit than men for the physical rigors of combat. However, less fit doesn't mean unfit. Modern weapons do not, for the most part, depend on upper body strength as previous military technologies did. Whether women in general are capable of the demands of combat service can only be determined by testing them.

Unfortunately, testing requires honesty and here I see a problem. Commentators on Fox News took the President at his word. Let women compete in military training and let those who demonstrate fitness serve accordingly. That strikes me as the obviously sensible approach. It is not the approach we will take.

The question of rights and equality will trump any concern for military effectiveness. If too many women fail to meet reasonable standards for combat fitness, then the standards will be lowered. This is what has always happened in the past and it will not change. Women are going to be integrated into combat units in numbers that please the President and Congress, regardless of who demonstrates fitness for what.

Plato's Socrates was in favor of military training for women and so am I. I think that any woman willing and able to serve in combat should be allowed to do so. I think, however, that women should be held to the same standards as men. I think there is very little chance that that will happen so long as we put rights talk above a concern for an effective military.

Social Security & Carbon

I have so far avoided explicitly political questions on this blog, but I have always planned to post on issues involving technology and the environment. Here is a sample.

It has occurred to me that the Democratic Party is dramatically at odds with itself concerning energy and the environment. On the one hand, Democrats are almost exclusively concerned about climate change. The failed cap and trade legislation pursued by the President in his first term is one example. The federal mandate on light bulbs is another. All policies proposed to curb carbon emissions work (if they did or could work) to curb energy consumption.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party is much more firmly committed to maintaining and increasing federal spending. This is especially true when it comes to the major entitlement programs. It seems obvious that the Democrats will do whatever is necessary to prevent any significant reductions in entitlement spending. I could point out the problems in fiscal logic involved here, but I will focus on something else.

More and more over time, federal spending has become and will increasingly become devoted to maintaining consumption. The whole point of most social policy and particularly of entitlements is to make sure that as many people as possible have as much to spend as possible. Social Security directly funds consumption. Medicare and Medicaid make it possible for people to get medical care without diverting their resources away from consumption.

The result is that more people have more floor space, comfortably heated and well lit. They have more cars and fuel to put in the tank. They have more wealth to spend on trips about the country, in RVs or airliners, to see the grand kids or visit the Grand Canyon. This is pretty obviously a good thing as far as it goes.

However, consumption requires production and production requires the extraction and burning of energy. Not all the energy efficient light bulbs or all the hybrid vehicles encouraged or mandated by federal law will count as anything next to the consumption levels that our social policies are designed to maintain. If we know anything about energy use, it is that every increase in energy efficiency is more than matched by an increase in energy use in bigger houses and kitchens, larger TVs and more devices.

The social policies that the Democrats religiously protect fund ever higher levels of energy consumption, thus wiping away whatever good may come from their environmental policies. If environmentalists were really serious about curbing energy consumption, they would switch to the Republican Party and push hard for entitlement reform.

Of course, they won't ever do that. Environmental politics is, like all politics, polemical. Polemical thinking makes it hard to reconsider who your friends and enemies are. That Democrats are the party that cares more about the environment weighs more heavily than the fact that Democrats may not be the party that is actually good for the environment.

Another reason that the environmental will not abandon the Democrats is that the Democrats bring clout to the table. Democrats can actually block the Keystone pipeline. They can do this in part because they have the unions and the AARP behind them. It would require amazing courage and imagination to give up that support in order to move toward really effective environmental policy. Don't hold your breath.

I am not saying that we should impose draconian limits on consumption to save the planet. While it is true that technological innovations favoring energy consumption have so far been outmatched by energy consumption for new and more expensive living conditions, the ratio will eventually shift if technological advance continues at the present rate. Sooner or later we will be able to live in very comfortable housing at a negligible cost to the environment, if we continue to innovate.

I just point out a major contradiction in environmentalist support for the Democratic Party at the present time. Right now, rising consumption in the developing world is the major driver of carbon emissions. In the US, emissions are rather stable. This is due to new technologies like fracking. Still, personal consumption is the major driver of energy use here as well. Social Security may be good for the elderly, but it is not good for reducing carbon emissions. Just sayin'.