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[edit] Postnormal Times

Campaign adventures

I spent a good part of the afternoon knocking on doors for the Obama campaign, on the other side of the Potomac river in Loudoun County VA - which happens to be Neddie Jingo's neighborhood. It seems that most of the action happened right before we got there.  For historical context, and to find out more about "the real Virginia" see the links on the front page of his blog to a series of posts about "The John Mobberly Story." As for my own campaign adventure, I got to see who some of the "undecideds" are. Yes, they still exist, and they say they don't need any more information to make up their minds. Which makes me wonder how they go about actually making up their minds. Whatever...

 

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Yohe and Lomborg "shake hands", sort of

In my posts (here and here) about the Yohe/Lomborg dust-up, I deliberately avoided larger questions about the role economics has played over the past few decades in framing  the debate and in justifying a delayed policy response - that larger topic could easily be a book and I actually have other things to do at the moment. The point was, that even if one fully accepts the tenets of neo-classical economics and cost-benefit analysis, and all of the shaky assumptions that come with it, Lomborg's arguments are crap, and dangerously misleading because he misrepresents the trade-offs and ignores the qualifications. Even though Gary Yohe and Bjorn Lomborg "shook hands" this week, the points they agree on seem rather thin, and Lomborg seems to have conceded a key point, in agreeing "that adaptation, CO2-cuts and R&D in some combination are all necessary to tackle global warming", though he has elsewhere supported a modest carbon tax. Roger Pielke's defense of Lomborg makes no sense but he gets kudos for getting all of the above to chime in on his comment  threads, where this was all hashed out in greater detail.

Yohe also makes it clear that Lomborg was able to reach the conclusion that the "constrained 'mitigation alone' option failed the cost-benefit test" because of artificial constraints on the design of the study, and by ignoring numerous inconvenient qualifications that are far from buried in the report by Yohe, Tol, Richels and Blanford. Given that they recognized the implications of these constraints, getting a stupid answer should not have come as any more of a surprise than Katrina, so it isn't clear why they even bothered, A take home message for both economists and climate scientists, is that in science for policy, there are no disinterested bystanders - one needs to be aware of how findings will be used in the policy arena. It also makes the case for me that "framing" - a topic on which there has been a lot of ink in the science blogs, needs to be considered in the design stage of the research, and not merely in how the results are presented.

That said, it is also important to consider the appropriateness of CBA itself as a basis for climate policies, given that it only compares the values of gradual incremental changes to a business-as-usual scenario. It should be clear to anyone who has studied a watershed, or disasters, or history, that most changes, not only those associated with climate impacts, occur in conjunction with extreme and often catastrophic even if predictable events. And unless they listen to scientists, this is also when people have an opportunity to learn and reconsider what their values even are. In other words, if Katrina surprised anyone, it was probably only because it didn't fit the analytical framework normally used to justify public policy decisions. Stephen Colbert put this into plain English when he asked Lomborg ?How can you say [a 4.7 C rise in temperature] won?t be a problem if it has never happened? (He didn't answer that but he is invited to do so here on the comment thread.)

Lomborg's pattern of ignoring inconvenient qualifications is far from unusual. Even though those we will call the conventional economists generally acknowledge the limitations of CBA and throw in all of the qualifications, and do now make the case for at least some policy intervention, the line of reasoning inherent in CBA has generally been relied on to justify delay in adopting policies that address climate change, just as it is relied on by Lomborg as a mantle of authority. What is unusual is the amount of media attention Lomborg has received, as the "voice of the reasonable middle", even from people who should know better.

In all of this, science has been little more than a backdrop. I've been planning to blog a set of papers that Eli Rabbett linked to a few months ago regarding the historical context, and will have much more to say eventually. In the meantime, Eli pulled out a relevant quote in a comment he left on my last post on this topic, which makes that case that, instead of refuting scientific evidence that global warming was an immediate concern, the economic framework simply made it practically irrelevant for policy. The paper is From Chicken Little to Dr. Pangloss: William Nierenberg, Global Warming and the Social Deconstruction of Scientific Knowledge by Oreskes, Conway and Matthew Shindell, where they discuss the preparation of an NAS report published in 1983, that never should have made it through peer review:

Chapter 1, written by Nordhaus, Ausubel, and Gary Yohe, an economics professor at Wesleyan University brought in mid-stream as a consultant, focused on future energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. The long and detailed chapter was perhaps the first serious study of the problem that looked at many variables, and did not assume linear extrapolations. It began by acknowledging the ?widespread agreement that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have been rising steadily, primarily driven by the combustion of fossil fuels.? The emphasis here, however, was not so much on what was known, but on what was not known: the ?enormous uncertainty? beyond 2000, and the ?even greater uncertainty? about the ?social and economic impacts of possible future trajectories of carbon dioxide.? This uncertainty provided the basis for an argument that no meaningful action could be taken now. They used the uncertainty to hide the pea, acknowledging the possibility of rapid and damaging changes, but then only considering far off and lesser threats from climate change. Moving the danger far enough in the future meant that it did not have to be confronted, which is what Nierenberg wanted as a conclusion Nor did Nierenberg attempt to deny the legitimacy of the existing science. Rather, he accepted the scientific facts while adopting a conceptual framework in which those facts were irrelevant. The essence of the report is the reframing of climate change as something that policymakers and politicians should ignore, which in the United States at least, for the next two decades, they largely did The actions of William Nierenberg belie that assumption. Nierenberg did not engage his scientific colleagues over the technical basis of their scientific views. He did not produce new or competing claims about how the Earth would respond to increased CO2. In short, he did not try to construct knowledge about the Earth. Rather, while accepting his colleagues? technical conclusions, he dismissed the interferences that they (and others) had drawn from those conclusions, substituting an alternative framework that insisted that those inferences were wrong. Rather than constructing knowledge, William Nierenberg de-constructed it.
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A few convention highlights

Just a few convention highlights :

Josh Marshall has it on good authority that John Kerry wrote his whole speech himself - here is an excerpt that bears repeating:

I have known and been friends with John McCain for almost 22 years. But every day now I learn something new about candidate McCain. To those who still believe in the myth of a maverick instead of the reality of a politician, I say, let?s compare Senator McCain to candidate McCain.

Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain?s own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you?re against it.

Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.

TPM also has a videoclip of the whole thing.

And Bill Clinton said "Thanks but no thanks" to what the last 8 years has given us - excerpt from the NYT transcript:

But on the two great questions of this election -- how to rebuild the American dream and how to restore America's leadership in the world -- he still embraces the extreme philosophy that has defined his party for more than 25 years.

(APPLAUSE)

And it is, to be fair to all the Americans who aren't as hard- core Democrats as we, it's a philosophy the American people never actually had a chance to see in action fully until 2001, when the Republicans finally gained control of both the White House and the Congress.

Then we saw what would happen to America if the policies they had talked about for decades actually were implemented. And look what happened.

They took us from record surpluses to an exploding debt; from over 22 million new jobs to just 5 million; from increasing working families' incomes to nearly $7,500 a year to a decline of more than $2,000 a year; from almost 8 million Americans lifted out of poverty to more than 5.5 million driven into poverty; and millions more losing their health insurance.

Now, in spite of all this evidence, their candidate is actually promising more of the same.

(AUDIENCE BOOS)

Think about it: more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans that will swell the deficit, increase inequality, and weaken the economy; more Band-Aids for health care that will enrich insurance companies, impoverish families, and increase the number of uninsured; more going it alone in the world, instead of building the shared responsibilities and shared opportunities necessary to advance our security and restore our influence.

They actually want us to reward them for the last eight years by giving them four more.

AUDIENCE: No!

CLINTON: Now, let's send them a message that will echo from the Rockies all across America, a simple message: Thanks, but no thanks.

(Bill Clinton on youtube).  If you can spare a dime, you might want to help get this ad on the air during the Republican convention next week, from the Campaign for America's Future, saying "Thanks for the memories - we'll take it from here"

And if you missed it, watch, (vs read) what Dennis Kucinich had to say. He was never seen as a realistic contender during the campaign, but I met someone from him home district who told me that much of his base is actually formerly Republican Democrats who he won over when he fought against privatization of the power company, and won. And during the primaries, he was the only candidate to show up in person at a candidates forum at the NCSE annual conference that addressed climate issues. So I think he at least deserves a bit more respect than he has received.

It looks like you can see all of the video clips at the Dem Convention site if you have the right software installed.

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More economists weigh in on The Lomborg

In follow-up to the last post -  now both Gary Yohe, and Richard Tol, both co-authors of an economics paper that Lomborg cited, incorrectly, in an article in the Guardian, and that is also the foundation for his "Copenhagen Consensus", conclude that he is misrepresenting their work and deliberately confusing things. For details, see the comment thread on Pielke's post. So Lomborg has no legs to stand on. In theory, that means he is history. But I expect he will continue to repeat what he has been saying, as long as there is anyone listening.

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A challenge to economists

Last fall, in a series of posts about what I dubbed The Lomborg I made the case that Lomborg was misusing Cost-Benefit Analysis to say that cuts in CO2 emissions will cost more than they are worth. I also added that "I hope we will hear from some environmental economists on this" - and also get statements from those experts listed as signing off on the " Copenhagen Consensus" ? an expert group convened by Lomborg to rank priorities for addressing the major challenges of our time, based on their costs and benefits.

Not that I had anything to do with it but, shortly after that, Nature published a book review by Sir Partha Dasgupta ? a well-known and respected economist, that reinforced my point. Which is that, even if you fully accept the tenets of neo-classical economics, Lomborg's arguments are basically crap. And that's without even going into the flaws in his argument about expected sea level rise (which has been repeatedly debunked but, without responding to any of his critics, Lomborg keeps repeating the same thing. This post is not a response to him but to all publications that have given him a platform.)

Now we also have some critical words from Gary Yohe ? an economist who was a member of the IPCC, and also participated in Lomborg's ?Copenhagen Consensus? project, for which he wrote the principal climate paper, on which Lomborg's conclusions are based. Responding to a Lomborg article in the Guardian, Yohe says:

But there's just one problem: as one of the authors of the Copenhagen Consensus Project's principal climate paper, I can say with certainty that Lomborg is misrepresenting our findings thanks to a highly selective memory.

Lomborg claims that our "bottom line is that benefits from global warming right now outweigh the costs" and that "[g]lobal warming will continue to be a net benefit until about 2070." This is a deliberate distortion of our conclusions.

We did find that climate change will result in some benefits for developed countries, but only for modest climate change (up to global temperature increases of 2C - not the 4 degrees that Lomborg is discussing in his piece). But developed countries are relatively prepared to handle climate change's effects - they tend to be in colder areas, and they have the infrastructure to mitigate severe depletion of resources like fresh water and arable land.

That is precisely why our analysis concluded - and Lomborg ignores - that climate change will cause immediate losses for developing countries and the planet's most vulnerable, millions of whom are already facing challenges that climate change will exacerbate.

Downplaying the threat of climate change allows Lomborg to focus on his claim that "unlike even moderate CO2 cuts, which cost more than they do good, we should focus on investing in finding cheaper low-carbon energy." He attributes this finding to our analysis as well, but again he overlooks a key element of our work.

Of course the world needs to make significant investments in cheaper, low-carbon energy. But making those investments without also implementing a constraint on emissions would fail to address the problem. ...

To make things even more confusing, Roger Pielke in turn cherry picks Yohe's remarks to say that he doesn't see where Yohe's conclusions differ from how they are represented by Lomborg, citing the Yohe et al analysis which concludes ?[g]lobal warming will continue to be a net benefit until about 2070.? But he ignores Yohe's qualification that that only applies to developed countries, and assumes temperature changes within two degrees by that time, rather than the four degree plausible scenario that Lomborg is reacting to, commented on in another Guardian article by Oliver Tickell. Since the expected temperature change by the end of the century under a business as usual scenario is 3.5 degrees, Roger can't figure out the discrepancy, but if you click the links, you will find that Oliver Tickell was responding to a recommendation made by Bob Watson, the former chair of the IPCC and now Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, that the UK should plan for a 4 degree C change in temperature, which has a 20% chance of occurring by the end of the century.

As Lomborg notes, the IPCC projection is between 1.8 and 6, Celsius. The sea level rise projection is 18-59 centimeters. But he fails to note that the IPCC projections explicitly exclude consideration of "rapid dynamical changes in ice flow", or melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. Lomborg's basic pattern is to simply pick conservative or mid-range estimates, without any justification, and to ignore the qualifications. But there are many good arguments as to why the IPCC analysis, and science in general, tend to err on the side of being conservative to begin with. And there is a good argument why even the economic damage estimates such as those presented by Yohe et al are likely to be a serious underestimate, as was explained by Paul Baer, in his discussion of The worth of an ice sheet. All worthy of further comment.

For now, I would simply like to challenge all economists is to get on the bandwagon, and make as big of a fuss about Lomborg as they did about an infamous paper that added up the ?values? of ecosystem services to $33 trillion...

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[edit] Joseph Reagle

Python Class Tools

So much time in teaching is spent on trivial but time-consuming tasks. Having taught for a couple of years now, some things have gotten easier, but many chores remain. I've tried various free tools, and there are many proprietary solutions, but none satisfy. The following are personal -- and poorly documented -- hacks that are useful to me.

Grade sheet

I used to use a sophisticated Excel spreadsheet I found on the Web, but the author has since taken it proprietary/commercial, plus it didn't support a simple point system (e.g., 100 points allocated throughout the semester). Also, my sheet now accommodates some of my idiosyncratic policies for class responses and attendance (e.g., dropping the lowest X grades, Y freebie absences).

Grade Reports

This Python script makes use of the XLRD library to read an instance of the above, and generate a report for the whole class or a single student, to the console or as a messages in my drafts mailbox.

Class Calendar

Given the duration of the semester, the days on which a class meets, university holidays, and the class on which an assignment is due, this generates a calendar for the syllabus. (A surprisingly time-consuming manual task.) I hope to incorporate Jewish holidays into this if I can find such a library.

Mailbox Prettyprint

Instead of using the inaccessible and proprietary BlackBoard product, I ask students to e-mail their responses which are automatically sorted into a mailbox. Before class, this script will prettyprint all responses sent since the last class to an HTML page, including (now) MS Word attachments.

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New Chapter on Wikipedia Consensus

I have spent much of the summer working on revising the dissertation into a book manuscript. One of the big changes is a new chapter on Wikipedia consensus. If you would be willing to provide me with feedback, I would be happy to share a draft:

H. G. Wells (1936) thought the "World Encyclopedia" should be more than an information repository, it should also be an institution of "adjustment and adjudication; a clearinghouse of misunderstandings" (p. 921). Wikipedia certainly has its share of misunderstandings, some imported from the conflicted world it documents and some unique to its own undertaking. An example of a contagious real world conflict is the already discussed "Creation-Evolution Controversy" (Wkipedia 2008cec). Also, political and ethnic differences are often mirrored at Wikipedia, prompting the formation of a "Working Group on Ethnic and Cultural Edit Wars" (Wikipedia 2008wgo). There are also plenty of local "misunderstandings," such as whether every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer deserves its own article. I raised this dispute earlier to illustrate two opposing philosophies at Wikipedia: inclusionism and deletionism. This issue, and the proliferation of articles, gave rise to an even more trivial -- though no less bellicose -- debate: If every television show episode has its own article, how should they be named so as not to conflict with other articles? This discussion reveals possible misunderstandings about consensus, and the difficulties of this decision-making practice in an open community.
In this chapter, I identify the difficulties of consensus decision-making, and its meaning and practice at Wikipedia. I consider this relative to insights from literature about consensus in "real life" communities, such as the Quakers, and the collaborators who built the Internet and Web using "rough consensus and running code."
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Chicago Notes in BibLatex

I am indebted to the help I received on comp.text.tex in formatting my dissertation and dealing with bibliography issues. When I turned to the book manuscript, I decided I wanted to move from APA parenthetical citations towards Chicago footnotes. Unfortunately, this is a complex system, and nothing was up to the task. Fortunately, the biblatex package, an absolutely brilliant piece of work by Philipp Lehman for defining bibliographic styles, became available in beta form. Unfortunately, there were very few styles available in this format. Fortunately, I found a work in progress by Charles Schaum, and began making my own changes to improve compliance with the Chicago Manual of Style. I worked on this through a number of revisions, but eventually came up short. Now, David Fussner has published an amazing package using and demonstrating the power biblatex. I don't imagine there is any bibliographic system out there that is as accommodating to the nuances of Chicago footnotes style.

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Interdisciplinary Research on Wiki Communities

I don't often post CFPs and I won't be able to attend WikiSym this year, but I am looking forward to reading the submissions and papers. I've been mulling over what it means when people describe "interdisciplinary" -- or "multidisciplinary" -- research and haven't reached any definitive conclusions, but as Inigo Montoya once said to Vizzini, I sometimes think: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." In any case, I hope this workshop might shed some light on the question in the context of wiki community studies.

Interdisciplinary Research on Wiki Communities, September 8, 2008

The array of approaches to studying wikis is a source of wealth but also a possible source of confusion: What are appropriate methodologies for the analysis of wiki communities? Which are the most critical parameters (both quantitative and qualitative) for study in wiki evolution and outcomes? Is it possible to find effective interdisciplinary approaches to augment our overall understanding of these dynamic creative environments? This workshop intends to provide an opportunity to explore these questions by researchers and practitioners willing to participate in a "brainstorming research meeting".

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NPOV and Working Together

The Wikipedia Weekly interview with Jimmy Wales turned to a topic dear to my heart: the role of Neutral Point of View in collaboration. Wales explicitly articulated -- in minute 33 -- one of the main themes of my work:

31 Wales: The idea that we should focus on the facts of reality, something I very much believe in, on the other hand, much of Wikipedia tends to focus on which facts of reality, and they tend to be about facts about what other people said. In other words, we are looking for reliable sources and things like that.

32 Wales: Outsources truth? I kind of like that. There's something, a thing that is sometimes said, and I don't care much for it, which is "verifiability not truth." And, the problem I have with that, is that it sort of suggests that we don't care about the truth. We only care about some artificial game of verifiability. What I would say is that we care about verifiability and truth. In other words, the verifiable truth. Things that people with very divergent views can look at and agree. We may not agree with what happened that day, but we can certainly agree on what the New York Times said about it. That is a lot easier to agree on. And it's not that we don't care what the truth is, but we care to write down the truths that we all can agree on.

33 Wales: The whole concept of Neutral Point of View, as I originally envisioned it, was this idea of a social concept, for helping people get along: to avoid or sidestep a lot of philosophical debates. Someone who believes that that truth is socially constructed, and somebody who believes that truth is a correspondence to the facts in reality, they can still work together.

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[edit] Ragesoss

[edit] Question Technology




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