Global warming “denier” – this is the emotionally laden term that the global warming kool-aid drinkers have decided to use in their propaganda war against dissenters from global warming orthodoxy (I’m sure they will not mind me calling them “kool-aid drinkers” since they have chosen to engage in inflammatory rhetoric themselves in characterizing their opponents).
The stereotypical global warming denier might be a K Street lobbyist who knows darn well that the planet is suffering from a man-induced warming crisis but who is not going to let a little thing like the facts get in the way of his lucrative contracts to represent big oil and other powerful and corrupt business interests.
Bjørn Lomborg does not fit that stereotype. He is Danish. He has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Copenhagen. He is a college professor. He is openly gay. He’s a vegetarian. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the light fixtures in his house were filled with those funny, curly-shaped bulbs that hum and give off a dim, yellowish light.
As an urbane, educated, European working in academia and unafraid to adopt a non-traditional lifestyle, you would think that Lomborg is the kind of person who would be on board with the global warming agenda.
He is not.
He has had the temerity to question environmental alarmism in general and global warming orthodoxy in particular and this has landed him in a big vat of hot water.
Bjørn Lomborg’s story is both interesting and instructive.
After earning his PhD in 1994, Lomborg went to work teaching statistics in the Political Science Department of the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He was aware of what he now calls “The Litany” – that long list of looming environmental disasters that gives us an all pervasive sense that the planet is in bad shape. Lomborg writes:
“We are all familiar with the Litany: the environment is in poor shape here on Earth. Our resources are running out. The population is ever growing, leaving less and less to eat. The air and water are becoming ever more polluted. The planet’s species are becoming extinct … The forests are disappearing, fish stocks are collapsing and coral reefs are dying. We are defiling our Earth, the fertile topsoil is disappearing, we are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere, and will end up killing ourselves in the process. The world’s ecosystem is breaking down …”
In short, he was familiar with the secular environmentalist version of Armageddon – all of the death and destruction but lacking the last minute happy ending of a rescue from the supernatural world.
So Dr Lomborg got his students working on a project to document the extent of these impending environmental catastrophes. He wanted to use statistics to back up the anecdotal stories that were used to illustrate the dire conditions that mankind was creating on our precious planet. And this is where his problems began.
It turned out that the statistical look at these issues did not back up the gloomy outlook of the Litany. Whenever he consulted the statistics, Lomborg discovered that things were getting better instead of worse. This led him to write a book entitled The Skeptical Environmentalist – Measuring the Real State of the World.
The book is a tome. If any mafia hit men are reading this and have run out of cement blocks to weigh down their victims in a nearby river, they can stop by the local Borders and pick up this book as a substitute. It is over 500 pages of very small type although, in fairness, I should note that this includes the 2,930 footnotes and a bibliography that runs to 71 pages.
What was the response to the book? It didn’t take long for the feces to hit the rotating air circulation device.
Several environmental scientists filed a complaint with the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD). This Orwellian sounding organization formally investigated charges that Lomborg deliberately used flawed data, cherry picked his studies and came to completely false conclusions.
After it investigations, the DCSC concurred with the complaints and noted that Lomborg’s book was “deemed to fall within the category of scientific dishonesty” and noted that it was “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.”
Lomborg fought back. He appealed the decision to the MSTI – the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation – an agency with oversight over the DCSD.
The MSTI reversed the decision of the DCSD. It did so partly on the narrow procedural grounds that the DCSD had not shown that The Skeptical Environmentalist was a scientific work that fell within the DCSD’s regulatory authority. However, most of the MSTI’s decision was based on substance. It noted that the DCSC’s ruling “was completely void of argumentation” as to why Lomborg’s book was scientifically deficient.
As a result of this incident, a group of about 300 Danish scientists signed a petition requesting that the DCSD be disbanded. According to this group, the obviously biased treatment of Lomborg was evidence that the DCSD served no useful function. But a competing group of anti-Lomborg activists got almost 600 Danish scientists to sign a petition in support of the DCSD and its action in the Lomborg case.
Scientific American joined the fray with a lengthy and scathing review of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg published a rejoinder. So as to not misrepresent the journal’s position, he quoted each of their allegations at length and then explained why each criticism was unfounded or misguided.
The response? Initially, Scientific American threatened Lomborg with a lawsuit for copyright infringement if he did not retract his paper – they were upset because he quoted the Scientific American article without permission! Ah – how nice to see an organization which is ostensibly dedicated to the free, open and dispassionate pursuit of scientific inquiry respond with such substance and grace.
I asserted earlier that Lomborg’s story is instructive and this is where it begins to be so.
We have all been told the story of poor Galileo. The scientific community has told the story (actually, they have largely mis-told the story) with great relish. This, they say, show what happens when sincere and honest truth-seeking scientists run afoul of people who let faith rather than reason dictate their view of the world.
But the Lomborg incident gives us a different and a better perspective. The Galileo case is not one of science against religion or faith against reason. It shows us what happens frequently when someone challenges the cherished beliefs of those in authority in any community be it religious, philosophical, scientific, political, cultural or national.
In this case, we have a reigning scientific paradigm about the environment that is being challenged and the ruling authorities in that scientific community do not like it one bit. The Lomborg story shows us that bias and an unreasonably strong commitment to certain points of view and the desire to punish those who deviate from orthodoxy are not particularly religious phenomena but are common human failings that infect all types of human endeavors.
And there is another and even more important lesson to be learned from the Lomborg incident.
Strictly speaking, Lomborg is not a global warming “denier”. He believes that global warming is occurring and that it is caused, at least in part, by the activities of man. However, he believes that the results of global warming will not be catastrophic, that some of the effects will be positive and that most of the proposed cures will be worse than the disease.
Lomborg has started a project called The Copenhagen Consensus. He brought economists together in 2004 to perform a cost/benefit analysis on a variety of proposals to mitigate human suffering and improve the environment. An expanded group met again in 2006 and it will meet yet again in 2008. Their mission is to determine which projects can do the most good for the greatest number of people at a given cost. Global warming projects tend to rate very poorly in this kind of evaluation – requiring a lot of dollars for marginal benefits.
Lomborg points out that the only resource that is always in short supply is money and that we need to focus on spending money wisely. If we choose our projects poorly, we end up doing less good than we could otherwise have achieved and we may even make matters worse.
Lomborg argues that we live in a world that is full of “inconvenient truths”. Over 15 million people die each year from preventable diseases like malaria and cholera and HIV. Half of the people in the world are malnourished. A billion people do not have clean drinking water and almost as many lack basic education. The UN, according to Lomborg, claims that $75 billion a year over the next century would largely solve these problems.
In contrast, he claims that the Kyoto Protocol will cost $150 billion annually if fully implemented and it will only delay, not eliminate, our warming trend. According to Lomborg, the temperature we will reach in the year 2100 without any action on climate change is the same temperature we will reach in the year 2106 with a fully implemented Kyoto agreement! Lomborg’s rhetoric is forceful:
“… Gore argues that future generations will chastise us for not having committed ourselves to the Kyoto Protocol. More likely, they will wonder why, in a world overflowing with ‘inconvenient truths’, Gore focused on the one where we could achieve the least good for the highest cost.”
Again, this is one of those aspects of his story that makes it even more instructive. Lomborg agrees that global warming is occurring. He is only dissenting from the public policy prescriptions that grow out of the global warming phenomenon and this causes the wrath of the kool-aid drinkers to descend on him.
This suggests strongly to me that it is the public policy prescriptions that are more important to the global warming crowd than the issue of global warming itself. Global warming gives them an excuse to pursue public policies like higher taxes and more government regulation – policies that they have supported long before global warming was on anyone’s radar screen. In fact, I’m pretty sure that Al Gore’s political leanings are no different in 2006 than they were in 1976 when one of the nation’s popular news magazines warned us the earth was cooling and that we were threatened with a new ice age.
In other words, a warming world is no good to global warming advocates if it does not allow them to seize the kind of control and power that they desire. Why else would they react with such vitriol and vehemence against such a non-stereotypical global warming skeptic as Lomborg?
All of this becomes terribly important since we have an upcoming election. Global warming will be one issue. Many voters, especially younger ones, are increasingly concerned about social justice and want the United States to do more in this area. Their hearts are in the right place and I'm sure that their minds are capable of evaluating complex issues. Regretably, few have the time or take the time to become informed? On this particular issue, who has the time to read a 500-page book or to digest the recommendations of The Copenhagen Consensus?
As a result, decisions get made on the superficial coverage that floats around in the main-stream media and this may end up being disastrous. To slightly modify a well-known and oft quoted phrase: All that is needed for evil to triumph is for well-intentioned people to make misinformed decisions. Good intentions will not prevent the bad consequences that arise from poor choices.
And, as I said, I fear that decisions on this issue will get made based on the lopsided coverage of the issue by the main-stream media. They report only the message of the global warming advocates and this message is simple: Sit down. Shut up. The debate is over. Anyone who disagrees is stupid or dishonest or co-opted by a special interest.
Kool-aid, anyone?
Suggested Reading:
At a minimum, go here for a brief article by Lomborg that summarizes his critic of global warming orthodoxy. It is very short and succinct.
The Skeptical Environmentalist – Measuring the Real State of the World. Most people will not have time to read this lengthy book but go to your library or book store and read Chapter 1. That chapter alone will give you a different look at the environment than you are getting through popular media sources.
Lomborg’s newest book is entitled Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet but I’m looking forward to it.
Monday, February 25, 2008
Friday, February 8, 2008
Worried to Death about Debt
George Barna, the pollster who specializes in comparing the attitudes of evangelical Christians in the U. S. to those of Americans in general, has released some new research.
What does it tell us? It tells us that Americans, both believers and unbelievers, are worried sick about debt.
The Barna survey asked respondents to rate the seriousness of ten problems facing the nation. Personal indebtedness was tied for first with 78% of all those surveyed ranking it as a “major problem”. Evangelical Christians share this perception with 79% of them ranking personal indebtedness as a major problem for the country.
No wonder. The fear-mongering media regularly run stories about the “debt crisis”. Consumer debt of all kinds is at an all time high, we are told. Americans owe almost a trillion dollars on their credit cards alone. And the federal government has put over $9 trillion on its VISA card! (Wouldn’t you like to have those frequent flyer miles?)
But stop and think about this for a minute. Debt, in and of itself, is a meaningless number.
Trying to ascertain the financial health of a family or company or nation by knowing its debt alone is like trying to tell if a man is obese by knowing only his weight.
My friend John is 187 pounds. Is he overweight? You don’t know. You don’t have enough information to make a judgment on this matter. You need to know his height.
Well set your mind at ease about John. At just over 6 feet tall, he is quite slim and trim and fit. However, if he was only 4’ 7”, you might think it was time to get a court order to put him on Weight Watchers (although even then there might be other factors such as genetics or medical history that would need to be known before labeling John as a lazy slob).
Just as you can’t assess physical health based on weight alone, you can’t assess financial health by looking at debt alone. You need to know something about the income or assets that offset that debt. If you stop and think about it for a moment, you know this intuitively.
Would you rather be Jane who owes $300,000 on her house or Mary who owes $100,000 on her house? If Jane’s house is worth $700,000 and Mary’s house is worth $80,000, you’d rather be Jane even though she has three times as much debt as Mary.
Would you rather be David with monthly debt payments of $2,500 or Sam with monthly payments of only $500? If David makes $15,000 per month while Sam only makes $1,000 per month, you’d rather be David even though his debt payments are five times higher than Sam’s.
So we need some information on the assets and income of Americans if we want to evaluate the seriousness of the debt that Americans owe. What do we know about this topic?
One resource we can turn to is the Federal Reserve. Those nice people keep track of the net worth of the American people. Net worth is simply the difference between the value of everything you own after subtracting the value of everything you owe. In the example above and based on her home alone, Mary has a net worth of $400,000 (the difference between her home’s $700,000 value and the $300,000 she owes on it). Jane’s net worth is -$20,000.
Here are the data on the net worth of Americans:
The net worth of Americans is at an all time high! Net worth went up by almost $20 trillion just since 2002.
And here is an even better way of looking at the same data. The graph below (also from Federal Reserve data) shows trends in the net worth of households in real (inflation adjusted) dollars:
Of course, we have a lot more households in the country in 2007 compared to 1947 and a dollar does not buy as much in 2007 as it did in 1947. Both of these factors have been accounted for in the chart above. In other words, households could actually purchase over five times as much "stuff" with their household wealth in 2007 as they could in 1947.
How can this be? We have a housing bubble. Home prices are going down. But keep in mind that the estimated value of all residential real estate in the U. S. is about $20 trillion (so I've been told but I need to verify this and find a source for it). The national median home value declined 1.4% in 2007 compared to 2006 and this would only lower net worth by about $0.3 trillion if everything else stayed the same.
Of course, everything else does not stay the same. Even though 2007 showed a slight decline in home values, the value of stock market investments rose in 2007 and this more than offset the small loss in home values.
In fact, here are data from the Investment Company Institute on retirement savings in the United States:
As you can see, the value of retirement accounts went up by $0.9 trillion in 2007 and this more than offset the loss in home values.
So Americans have plenty of assets to cover their indebtedness.
But what about income? Are Americans making enough money to pay their debts each month? Here are some data (again from the Federal Reserve) on debt service as a percentage of income over the last few years:
People are spending about the same percentage of their income on debt service in 2004 as they were in 1998. (By the way, this study is being updated by the Federal Reserve thru the year 2007 and it will show trends from 1989 to 2007 but the study will not be available until Feb. 2009).
Bottom line: Any way you look at this, personal debt does not seem to be a significant problem.
But what about that national debt? It is $9 trillion! Certainly, this is not good.
The best way to evaluate the federal debt is to compare it to the Gross National Product (GNP) which, roughly speaking, is a measure of the value of all the goods and services produced by the U. S. Here are those data:
As you can see, we've been in serious trouble before with the national debt. It was more than 120% of the GNP right after World War II. The percentage declined pretty steadily until the 1980s. It then increased until about 1995 and it has bumped around in the 58% to 66% range since then.
So the national debt does not look like an overwhelming problem from an historical perspective. I'm not suggesting that we should not be addressing this issue. We need to get that trend line going down again. I'm just pointing out that current debt levels do not represent a crisis in terms of the amount of the debt.
.
[By the way, I hear a lot about the issue of who holds the national debt -- that so much of our debt is being financed by China and that this could allow them to crater our economy. This is a separate issue from the amount of debt and I know nothing about it. I'll just point out that the fear over the China/debt issue is something I hear about repeatedly in the main stream media and, since those rascals are so often biased and slanted and wrong in their reporting of other matters, I would not be surprised to find that they have overblown the China issue also.]
.
So stop worrying about debt. The stories you hear about this issue in the main stream media are sloppy journalism at best and largely propaganda.
.
Okay. I feel better now. I've just solved a problem that 78% of the American people rate as a major concern. If only I could get the word out to all of them!
.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
What does it tell us? It tells us that Americans, both believers and unbelievers, are worried sick about debt.
The Barna survey asked respondents to rate the seriousness of ten problems facing the nation. Personal indebtedness was tied for first with 78% of all those surveyed ranking it as a “major problem”. Evangelical Christians share this perception with 79% of them ranking personal indebtedness as a major problem for the country.
No wonder. The fear-mongering media regularly run stories about the “debt crisis”. Consumer debt of all kinds is at an all time high, we are told. Americans owe almost a trillion dollars on their credit cards alone. And the federal government has put over $9 trillion on its VISA card! (Wouldn’t you like to have those frequent flyer miles?)
But stop and think about this for a minute. Debt, in and of itself, is a meaningless number.
Trying to ascertain the financial health of a family or company or nation by knowing its debt alone is like trying to tell if a man is obese by knowing only his weight.
My friend John is 187 pounds. Is he overweight? You don’t know. You don’t have enough information to make a judgment on this matter. You need to know his height.
Well set your mind at ease about John. At just over 6 feet tall, he is quite slim and trim and fit. However, if he was only 4’ 7”, you might think it was time to get a court order to put him on Weight Watchers (although even then there might be other factors such as genetics or medical history that would need to be known before labeling John as a lazy slob).
Just as you can’t assess physical health based on weight alone, you can’t assess financial health by looking at debt alone. You need to know something about the income or assets that offset that debt. If you stop and think about it for a moment, you know this intuitively.
Would you rather be Jane who owes $300,000 on her house or Mary who owes $100,000 on her house? If Jane’s house is worth $700,000 and Mary’s house is worth $80,000, you’d rather be Jane even though she has three times as much debt as Mary.
Would you rather be David with monthly debt payments of $2,500 or Sam with monthly payments of only $500? If David makes $15,000 per month while Sam only makes $1,000 per month, you’d rather be David even though his debt payments are five times higher than Sam’s.
So we need some information on the assets and income of Americans if we want to evaluate the seriousness of the debt that Americans owe. What do we know about this topic?
One resource we can turn to is the Federal Reserve. Those nice people keep track of the net worth of the American people. Net worth is simply the difference between the value of everything you own after subtracting the value of everything you owe. In the example above and based on her home alone, Mary has a net worth of $400,000 (the difference between her home’s $700,000 value and the $300,000 she owes on it). Jane’s net worth is -$20,000.
Here are the data on the net worth of Americans:
The net worth of Americans is at an all time high! Net worth went up by almost $20 trillion just since 2002.
And here is an even better way of looking at the same data. The graph below (also from Federal Reserve data) shows trends in the net worth of households in real (inflation adjusted) dollars:
Of course, we have a lot more households in the country in 2007 compared to 1947 and a dollar does not buy as much in 2007 as it did in 1947. Both of these factors have been accounted for in the chart above. In other words, households could actually purchase over five times as much "stuff" with their household wealth in 2007 as they could in 1947.
How can this be? We have a housing bubble. Home prices are going down. But keep in mind that the estimated value of all residential real estate in the U. S. is about $20 trillion (so I've been told but I need to verify this and find a source for it). The national median home value declined 1.4% in 2007 compared to 2006 and this would only lower net worth by about $0.3 trillion if everything else stayed the same.
Of course, everything else does not stay the same. Even though 2007 showed a slight decline in home values, the value of stock market investments rose in 2007 and this more than offset the small loss in home values.
In fact, here are data from the Investment Company Institute on retirement savings in the United States:
As you can see, the value of retirement accounts went up by $0.9 trillion in 2007 and this more than offset the loss in home values.
So Americans have plenty of assets to cover their indebtedness.
But what about income? Are Americans making enough money to pay their debts each month? Here are some data (again from the Federal Reserve) on debt service as a percentage of income over the last few years:
People are spending about the same percentage of their income on debt service in 2004 as they were in 1998. (By the way, this study is being updated by the Federal Reserve thru the year 2007 and it will show trends from 1989 to 2007 but the study will not be available until Feb. 2009).
Bottom line: Any way you look at this, personal debt does not seem to be a significant problem.
But what about that national debt? It is $9 trillion! Certainly, this is not good.
The best way to evaluate the federal debt is to compare it to the Gross National Product (GNP) which, roughly speaking, is a measure of the value of all the goods and services produced by the U. S. Here are those data:
As you can see, we've been in serious trouble before with the national debt. It was more than 120% of the GNP right after World War II. The percentage declined pretty steadily until the 1980s. It then increased until about 1995 and it has bumped around in the 58% to 66% range since then.
So the national debt does not look like an overwhelming problem from an historical perspective. I'm not suggesting that we should not be addressing this issue. We need to get that trend line going down again. I'm just pointing out that current debt levels do not represent a crisis in terms of the amount of the debt.
.
[By the way, I hear a lot about the issue of who holds the national debt -- that so much of our debt is being financed by China and that this could allow them to crater our economy. This is a separate issue from the amount of debt and I know nothing about it. I'll just point out that the fear over the China/debt issue is something I hear about repeatedly in the main stream media and, since those rascals are so often biased and slanted and wrong in their reporting of other matters, I would not be surprised to find that they have overblown the China issue also.]
.
So stop worrying about debt. The stories you hear about this issue in the main stream media are sloppy journalism at best and largely propaganda.
.
Okay. I feel better now. I've just solved a problem that 78% of the American people rate as a major concern. If only I could get the word out to all of them!
.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.
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