RedStateEclectic

The Folly of Commmand and Control - Man's Rationalistic Addiction

Germany’s much ballyhooed Energiewende (transition to renewable energy) was supposed to show the whole world how switching over to green energy sources could reduce CO2 emissions, create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, provide cheap electricity to citizens, and heroically rescue the planet.

Ten years later, the very opposite has happened: Germany’s CO2 emissions have been increasing, electricity prices have skyrocketed, the green jobs bubble has popped, and tens of thousands of jobs have disappeared. Worse: tens of billions are being redistributed from the poor to the rich.

Other countries around the world have noticed and are thus having serious second thoughts about industrializing their landscapes with green energy systems like wind, solar and biogas. Germany has proven that green energy does not work well after all.

The source.

The methodological core of liberty-averse thinking is rationalism. The hallmark of rationalism is an exaggerated trust in the powers of reason to command and control human affairs.

Rationalism is probably the most popular intellectual attitude in the West - not surprisingly for it is thoroughly intuitive, and indeed useful and appropriate in many applications of everyday life and even in more arcane activities such as engineering or the natural sciences dealing with relatively simple types of order.

Rationalism is rooted in the tradition of anthropomorphic reasoning, which seeks to explain phenomena by analogising them to situations that man is used to and capable of handling successfully.

Instead of ascribing order to a transcendental creator, modern rationalism shifts responsibility for any kind of admissible order to the human mind.

There is an entire array of reasons enticing us to take this stance, which I will not go into here - but first and foremost, rationalism is a view point that is unacquainted with modern methods for comprehending orders of higher complexity. These methods could only be discovered when the evolutionary paradigm emerged, which opened the human mind to the possibility to self-creating order, i.e. the kind of orde that does not depend on personal authorship and synoptic mastery by a single intelligent originator.

The importance of cybernetic order is lost on most people, including, I'm afraid, most liberals.

Politics benefits hugely from our cerebral addiction for rationalistic linear causality. It's a great format to make things look intellectually clear cut, easy to comprehend and amenable to direct human control.

In fact, important strands of liberal thinking rely on rationalistic arguments, which Locke for instance takes over from Aquinas highly rationalistic thoughts on natural law. See Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement. The anarcho-capitalists wallow in the crudest rationalism, and the growing fringe of liberals (European sense) who have a hard time distinguishing themselves from anarchists tend to be of a rationalistic bend, unsurprisingly.

On the more mainstream front of rationalism, Keynesianism e.g. is a great relief for the popular mind (and, of course, politicians), because it divests the dismal science of uncomfortable, counter-intuitive features as epitomised in the invisible hand. The Keynesian mindset teaches us that the economy depends on only a few variables that can be handled by government and comprehended by any but the most obdurate minds.

Similarly, reducing the world climate to one factor - CO2 - is one of the great political feats that has been highly successful for a long time as it neatly panders to our rationalistic addiction.

Liberals make a big mistake in not arguing that theirs is the ecological world view. But even if they understood this all-important point, they are not likely to make much of a difference in a world with an insatiable demand for easy solutions geared to the control freak in us.

The folly of command and control is inextinguishable as it feeds on perhaps the most favourite among the patterns for which the human mind is on the lookout.

I have been arguing along these lines for years, and have never ever made a convert to my position. It is simply astounding how well insulated the rationalistic modern mind is against truly ecological thinking. So much for the age of ecological awareness.

See also Science Sick From Too Much Bad Politics, and The Myth Junkie Society.

Wolves and Creative Destruction

Which are the similarities, which the differences between Type I and Type II ?

Creative Destruction - Type I:

 

Creative Destruction - Type II:

 

Green Metamorphosis

Image credit.

If the greens or those with a green agenda (which most political parties have) were truly interested in ecological issues, they would jump on insights like the below one (explaining how global climate operates as a viable self-creating order) - insights that require a veritably ecological way of thinking, and hence the ability to appreciate that ecological orders cannot be comprehended by ordinary deductive reasoning.

Ecological causality is complex and cyclical - the comfortable idea that an effect is always preceded by a cause does not hold. Complicated, constantly emerging feedback loops create a type of orderly system very different from simple causal mechanisms.

This, however, is beyond the green mind.

Ironically most liberals (European sense of the word) don't get it either. Worst are the anarcho-capitalists, who are given to the most naive rationalism, trying to reduce freedom to first principles, instead of understanding her as an emergent order, an evolutionary product that waxes and wanes with no need of an axiomatic origin to please the vanity of rationalistic control freaks.

Modern green thinking is simplistic, mechanistic, relying on causal relations simple enough to make command-and-control solutions appear credible. Nature is a machine, with the greens at the operating desk. For nature to be in a healthy state, she must obey the schemes that the green planners deem right. The communist penchant for command and control has been transposed by the green movement from the (hoped for but unsustainable socialist) economy to what they call nature (which is suffering at their hands as she did under outright socialism). In both efforts they are bound to fail for the same reason: neither do the greens understand the ecological nature of an economy nor of nature. They just want to be right - so as to be powerful. Intricate stories - as told by the genuine ecologist - are of little help on the march toward power.

If we lived in a truly ecological age (which politically we don't), the below story would be all the rage - and soon people would begin to realise that a free society and a free economy are ecological environments deserving to be respected and protected by us.

Ironically, we seem instead to marshall increasing amounts of societal wealth to uphold and cover-up anti-ecological untruths.

The Mann-made global warming believers continue their crusade to convince us that the 'missing' heat 'trapped' by CO2 is hiding somewhere, anywhere, other than having been lost forever to space. 

 

The inconvenient truth is that satellite and radiosonde observations show outgoing infrared radiation to space has increased over the past 62 years, the opposite of AGW model predictions of "heat trapping" by greenhouse gases causing a decrease of outgoing radiation. The NASA ERBE and Terra satellites alone show that for 26 years and counting, carbon dioxide emissions have directly and indirectly 'trapped' far less heat than alarmist computer models have predicted.

The fact that this has occurred is obvious from the 'basic physics' of the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, which states outgoing radiation from the Earth increases to the fourth power of temperature. This serves as a very strong negative feedback and acts as an automatic thermostat regulating Earth's temperature, relegating 'tipping points' and the 'runaway greenhouse' theory to the dust bin.

[...]

This may sound to some like an abstract question of scientific research. It is not. There are many, including the President’s science czar, who would like to make fundamental changes in our way of life — even dictating how many children we can have — in order to combat the threat of “man-made global warming.”

To such anti-people ideologues we may add the profiteers. The United Nations, joined by dozens of nonprofits, has literally raised billions of dollars by frightening both politicians and ordinary people with the specter of the planet overheating. It is safe to say that there are thousands of people who, one way or another, profit from climate alarmism.

 

In a sane world, the Spencer-Braswell study should sound the death knell for the theory that, by releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are making the planet unlivable.

 

Unfortunately, radical environmentalist and population control groups are largely immune to facts. For example, they continue to propagate the myth of overpopulation even as the populations of country after country age and die. Why should the myth of man-made global warming be any different?

 

Then, too, the Global Warming establishment has built up considerable forward momentum by this point. Movements with millions of adherents and billions of dollars in resources simply do not go quietly into their graves.

 

Still, while Global Warming alarmists like Al Gore continue to hyperventilate over the supposed danger of increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and call for increased funding for abortion and fertility reduction programs — the rest of us can breathe easier.

 

It’s becoming abundantly clear that the only thing “man-made” about Global Warming is the hoax itself.

 

The source.

 

See also Cost-Benefit Analysis - CO2 and Government, Science Sick From Too Much Bad Politics, Man-Made CO2 Does Not Drive Climate Change.

Cost-Benefit Analysis - CO2 and Government

Depending on the subject matter, benefit-cost analysis (bca) may come more or less close to the precision insinuated by its numeric results - like the benefit-cost ratio of 50 : 1 (or even higher) estimated in the below bca concerning CO2 emissions.

Irrespective of its numerical precision, the one great virtue of bca is that it forces you to look at the vital issues of a project and attempt to determine to what degree of precision and confidence benefits and costs are ascertainable. It requires one to make his assumptions explicit and gives others a chance to acquaint themselves with these assumptions and probe into them.

In a word, if properly done, bca is a commendable auxiliary for a realistic, comprehensive and fair look at a project. It can be the basis for a critical discourse. For that reason, I tend to think, it is an important means to ensure transparent government decisions. We should ask of government agencies to disclose the bca underlying their proposals or decisions.

Bezden and Driessen demonstrate what a critical look at government bca can bring to light.

The IWG process hypothesizes almost every conceivable carbon “cost” – including costs to agriculture, forestry, water resources, forced migration, human health and disease, coastal cities, ecosystems and wetlands. Yet it fails to estimate any carbon benefits. Even more incredibly, the agencies have done this in complete disregard of EO 12866 and a recent OMB declaration that careful consideration of both costs and benefits is important in determining whether a regulation is worth implementing at all.

Bezden and Driessen conclude:

Prodigious amounts of fossil fuels will be required to sustain future economic growth, especially in the non-OECD nations. If the world is serious about lessening the need for human, animal, wood and dung energy, maintaining and increasing economic growth, reducing energy deprivation and human poverty, improving human and civil rights, and increasing standards of living, health and longevity in the non-OECD nations – then massive fossil fuel utilization will be required, for decades to come.

Achieving these benefits for billions of poor people worldwide – while also maintaining them for American, European and other developed nation families – translates into a simple fact: the benefits of fossil fuels far outweigh any conceivable costs, and will continue to do so for decades to come.

Similarly, the benefits of carbon dioxide emitted in the process of producing this energy also overwhelmingly outweigh the claimed and estimated costs associated with that CO₂ – no matter which SCC estimates or assumptions are used. In fact, compared to the benefits of carbon dioxide for forest, grassland and food crop growth, the SCC cost estimates are relatively so small as to be in the statistical noise of the estimated CO₂ benefits.

In this context, there is also a critical need far more a balanced, broad-based and honest assessment of “dangerous manmade climate change” claims. Literally thousands of scientists do not agree that human carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of climate change, or that any changes in our weather or climate are bound to be harmful, dangerous or even catastrophic. However, their views have been deliberately and systematically ignored and taken out of the policy-making process, because the process has unfortunately become political and ideological, rather than science-based and analytical.

These facts must be used to inform energy, environmental, and regulatory policies. Otherwise, the regulations will continue to be far worse than the harms they supposedly redress. For the Interagency Working Group, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, Department of the Interior and other Federal agencies to continue ignoring the true costs and benefits, the requirements of law under EO 12866, and sixty years of informed benefit-cost protocols and practices, is illegal, unethical and contrary to the best interests of our nation, its citizens and all humans.

The source.

See also Science Sick From Too Much Bad Politics, and Man-Made CO2 Does Not Drive Climate Change.

Science Sick From Too Much Bad Politics

 

Make sure to read more on complex adaptive systems at the source of the above image.

As for this little chap, I couldn't agree more:

 

The global warming hype is a prime example of how bad politics is necessarily anti-ecological, and so is politicised science.

(I don't believe that the opposite of and the solutions to bad politics is no politics, but good politics).

Ecological systems are complex, their intricate manner of functioning does not lend itself to sensational story telling with mass impact. Hence, demagogic politics will almost certainly reduce genuinely ecological issues to simple, improperly mechanistic formulae. Our social democratic age - based on a denial of the ecological nature of modern human civilization - is of a distinctly unecological spirit.

Having discovered "the visible hand", i.e. self-generating order, the philosophy of freedom is asking us to treat human society as an ecological order. Inconveniently, however, orders of the self-generatig kind are counter-intuitive, hard to understand and hard to "sell". This is the root cause why liberty is generally rather unpopular, often laughed at or even despised. People like simple stories. People like to think about society, the economy, in fact, everything the way they think about most matters that concern them in their daily lives: that is, they expect simple causal relations easily mapped by ordinary deductive reasoning.

Thus, the greens - communists who've forgotten their origins - will tell the ordinary propaganda consumer that CO2 emissions, temperatures, and industrialisation have increased in tandem, insinuating a simple story line: capitalism creates catastrophic warming.

By contrast, consider some of the key facts that strip the thesis of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming of its credibility:

CO2 is following global temperatures, now and consistently since several hundred of thousand years.

96% of CO2 emissions are of non anthropogenic origin (volcanoes, animals, rotting vegetation, and especially oceans). Why should the tiny contingent of CO2 generated by humans be the culprit?

Most of the warming occurred well before industrial emissions began to skyrocket in the 1940s, after which temperatures, in fact, fell for 4 consecutive decades, starting to climb again only when global recession set in in the 1970s.

Most CO2 emissions are registered in areas without human populations or industrial activities - especially the oceans.

In the past, world climate has been much hotter with substantially more CO2 in the atmosphere than today. These much higher levels have elicited no catastrophic results - polar bears had a good time as well as the vikings who at the time had good grounds to call a certain land mass Greenland.

We still live in an ice age that has been in decline, i.e. warming, since the 1800s. The present warming trend is part of a perfectly normal climate cycle.

Only 1% of all species live in the Arctic zones - creatures thrive under warmer conditions.

Higher temperatures and more CO2 are beneficial to life on earth, not only to human life.

BUT:

Science changed dramatically in the 1970s, when the reward structure in the profession began to revolve around the acquisition of massive amounts of taxpayer funding that was external to the normal budgets of the universities and federal laboratories. In climate science, this meant portraying the issue in dire terms, often in alliance with environmental advocacy organizations. Predictably, scientists (and their institutions) became addicted to the wealth, fame, and travel in the front of the airplane (quoting Garth Paltridge, one of the world’s most respected atmospheric scientists):

“A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences—this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.”

Every incentive reinforced this behavior, as the self-selected community of climate boffins now began to speak for both science and in the service of drastic regulatory policies.

The source.

The view from the White House:

 

Broadening the picture:

 

Pouring it down the rat hole:

 

Man-Made CO2 Does Not Drive Climate Change

Beforehand, a brief and rather entertaining introduction to the broader issue:

 

Climate scientist Dr. Murry Salby [not the gentleman in the above video], Professor and Climate Chair at Macquarie University, Australia explains in a recent, highly-recommended lecture presented at Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg, Germany, why man-made CO2 is not the driver of atmospheric CO2 or climate change. Dr. Salby demonstrates:

• CO2 lags temperature on both short [~1-2 year] and long [~1000 year] time scales
• The IPCC claim that "All of the increases [in CO2 concentrations since pre-industrial times] are caused by human activity" is impossible
• "Man-made emissions of CO2 are clearly not the source of atmospheric CO2 levels"

• Satellite observations show the highest levels of CO2 are present over non-industrialized regions, e.g. the Amazon, not over industrialized regions
• 96% of CO2 emissions are from natural sources, only 4% is man-made
• Net global emissions from all sources correlate almost perfectly with short-term temperature changes [R2=.93] rather than man-made emissions
• Methane levels are also controlled by temperature, not man-made emissions
• Climate model predictions track only a single independent variable - CO2 - and disregard all the other, much more important independent variables including clouds and water vapor.
• The 1% of the global energy budget controlled by CO2 cannot wag the other 99%
• Climate models have been falsified by observations over the past 15+ years
• Climate models have no predictive value
• Feynman's quote "It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with the data, it’s wrong" applies to the theory of man-made global warming.

The source.

Red Herring in the Pipeline

Bird Watching

I was struck by the popularity of some of the pastimes of the British: bell-ringing, for instance. Oh, and bird watching (no, I don't mean looking at girls). Not that bird watching is a particularly odd hobby at all, but it seemed so incredibly popular and specialised as practiced in Britain. As a German, I suppose, you expect most people, even those with a pronounced interest in the environment, to take a general interest in nature - plants, birds, game etc. - rather than focusing narrowly on one part of it.

Be this as it may, here are some really interesting bird watching results.

 

The source.

In Praise of Politics - Freedom Bites Back

Freedom bites back. Freedom is reality-based. The brain farts of bad politics peter out at some point when their unintended consequences become overwhelming. The Sisyphean efforts of good politics begin to earn more visible rewards. Civil society is like a supertanker that takes a long time to make a turn. Germany's eco-mania is facing resistance like never before. More and more politicians are succeeding in bringing down the chimera bit by bit.

For a taste of it see: Consumers Rebel ... and Bavaria ... Moves To Kill Off ... Wind Industry

Reality has overtaken hype in Germany, which has been marketing itself as a world leader in "green energy":

Reports The Australian:

IT'S been a black Christmas for green thinkers as Germany, the world leader in rooftop solar and pride of the renewable energy revolution has confirmed its rapid return to coal. --    

Countries such as Germany that have been most outspoken about climate change mitigation are reporting increasing carbon emissions and rising energy costs.

The US - derided by environmental campaigners as too slow to respond to the climate change challenge - has reduced its carbon emissions significantly while simultaneously lowering energy prices, fuelling a much needed resurgence in manufacturing.

The divergence has come about largely because while Europe has pushed headlong into renewables with generous public subsidies, the US has harnessed new technology to unlock vast resources of unconventional oil and gas.

This meant in 2012 the US spent about one-third as much as the EU on renewable energy subsidies, $21 billion against $57bn, according to IEA figures.

It all adds an ironic twist to the campaign mounted against the US by European nations for its refusal to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

While the German wind and solar energy lobbies have been busy peddling the "success" of their subsidized production facilities, the reality on the ground looked somewhat different in early December:

The scale of the "intermittency" problem for renewables - and the problem it presents for policymakers and energy consumers - was outlined in Die Welt, which reported that Germany's wind and solar power production effectively stopped in early December.

"More than 23,000 wind turbines stood still," it said. "One million photovoltaic systems stopped work completely.

"For a whole week, coal, nuclear and gas power plants had to generate an estimated 95 per cent of Germany's electricity supply."

The doldrums are the flip side to the triumphant statements from renewable energy companies when production figures spike in times of favourable weather.

This is a primary reason why political support for renewables is starting to wear thin. Indications are a Europe-wide squeeze is on, with the European Commission reportedly preparing to order an end to price subsidies for wind and solar by the end of the decade.

According to Britain's The Telegraph, the commission, which oversees the European single market, is preparing to argue that the onshore wind and solar power industries are mature and should be allowed to operate without support from taxpayers.

Frustration is also increasing at the costly failure of several multi-billion-dollar offshore wind farm developments which had once been widely touted as the future of renewable power.

Learn more at the source.

See also Congratulations Texas.

What Even Is a Broccoli? The Paleo-Myths

While munching away on my paleo-dietary carrot, I enjoyed watching the enlightening presentation below; all the more as the paleo diet happens to work wonderfully with me - apparently, however, for reasons other than the ones I used to believe in. Truth to tell, I never dug too deeply into the scientific side of it. I was just happy to get rid of the heartburn, slim down to a comfortable weight within a fortnight, and just generally feel better. It' s pretty likely that I suffer from pronounced grain intolerance and if I leave the alcohol (pastis and beer) out as well and add exercise into the mix (as I tend to during summer), I begin to "paleo-"flourish in no time. Though, I do miss the bread (salami sandwich etc.) terribly.

See also Getting Fit, and Politically Correct Nourishment - Too Much and Too Little Economics. And: Looks Like the Paleo Diet Wasn't Always So Hot For Ancient Teeth.