The Post-Normal Times

Benny Peiser isn’t the only person who continues to believe his conclusions even after the “research” supporting them has been thoroughly discredited, and after finally conceding that there were indeed errors in how he reached those conclusions. Now I’ll concede that, prior to the election, with climate denialists in control of key congressional committees and being given airtime disproportionate to the merits of their arguments, I gave higher priority to commenting on bad arguments for bad causes than to bad arguments for good causes. Roger Pielke has commented extensively on the latter and this paper by Steve Rayner that he links to is absolutely worth reading. I don’t have anything more to add to what I have already said on climate change and hurricanes.

Now I want to draw attention to some of the nonsense that has been circulating about the value of ecosystem services, and a paper that just won’t die, no matter how thoroughly discredited. I really hate to give it yet another citation but that paper would be the infamous one by Costanza et al (1997) on The value of the world’s ecosystem services and natural capital, that was a cover story in Nature, and that tallied up the value of ecosystem services to an average of $33 trillion. If you don’t know why this is impossible as well as meaningless for purposes of decision-making, see the Environmental Economics and the Ecological Economics blogs, which both agree on this point (here, here, and here). And the full paper by Nancy Bockstael et al, which can be found here (in prepublication form). The main argument being that this is in excess of ability to pay, since total GNP that year was estimated at $18 trillion. As they point out:

While no doubt well intentioned, this estimate is, on one level, absurd; it suggests that the peoples of the world would be willing to sacrifice more than global gross national product (GNP) for these services. If interpreted literally, it suggests that a family earning $30,000 annually would pay $40,000 each year for ecosystem protection.

I could add more arguments to this but the point is that it still gets cited by those who don’t know any better, or who think it is useful to waive big numbers around just to bring attention to how important ecosystem services are. And the lead author, who generally claims it is just a starting point, continues to get funding to build on this baseless approach to valuation. What those
who cite it fail to understand is that values reflect trade-offs people are willing to make among choices that they actually have. Or as Al Gore illustrated in An Inconvenient Truth, without the earth, you can’t choose the gold ingots.

And yes, it is very unfortunate that, as Dave Iverson points out, those in the field of ecological economics are often dismissed as guilty by association when there are many different perspectives and approaches within that field. Full disclosure: I started graduate school in that field, and the lead author of that infamous paper was my first advisor but I switched programs after a number of irreconcileable differences that had nothing to do with that paper, that I also had nothing to do with. I give Costanza credit for creating that big tent, which allowed for some collaboration across fields that might not have otherwise occurred. But I’m much happier calling myself a geographer and note that, Gilbert White began to question deterministic approaches to economics and cost benefit analysis in 1945, in his work on human adjustment to floods, which was regarded as a major break from the deterministic school of thought often found in economics. It also addresses a major lacuna in science as well as in economics, i.e., context.

Addendum: and sometimes it takes a flood, or some other form of “learning opportunity” for people to consider or reconsider what their values are – i.e., what trade-offs they are willing to make, particularly for those things not normally traded in markets, like, say, maintaining a cherished way of life, or say, having to choose between soylent blue and Soylent Green. In the movie Soylent Green, even that was no longer a choice… For now, we have more choices than that but, 2022 isn’t that far away.

(edited 9-25-06)

Or should I say “made”? Time will tell but, in case you were wondering what might have been, Brent Budowsky channels JFK on this 43rd anniversary of his assassination, with a message that puts the predicaments of 2006 into some historical context. Absolutely required reading for anyone not old enough to remember that day, which really did change everything. And just to stay on the topic of this blog – science won’t help
to make he world a better place or lead to better policy without a bold vision of what it is we want to accomplish.

I came across this while digging up links for another post in progress, which I probably won’t finish until after Thanksgiving… Also forthcoming is a guest contribution from Paul Baer regarding the Stern report. Stay tuned.

Just so you know, I spent election day handing out REAL Official Democratic Sample Ballots, at the Muddy Spring polling place in Montgomery County Maryland (where I also live and vote), and may even have persuaded a few undecided voters. But towards evening, as the news trickled out about the dirty tricks being played in the neighboring PG county, the two of us working at the poll began to be viewed with suspicion and
were even told, “we know all about you.” Coincidentally, I had just failed to persuade someone that, just because he lived in Maryland, it was not ok to vote for a 3rd party candidate, because, to win, Democrats need a big enough majority in this state to overcome the kinds of dirty tricks played by Ehrlich and Steele in 2002 – and because the Democratic party – and our government, is what we make
it. And last but not least, because Cardin will make a great Senator. As Steele pointed out in one of the campaign debates, Cardin is “good at policy.” Which is why I voted for him in both the primary and in the general election. He was hardly annointed. As much as I would have liked to vote for Mfume in the primary, and believe that sometimes we need those willing and able to shut down the whole process when it isn’t working, I could not overlook Cardin’s distinguished record. He earned his Senate seat.

I also worked at the polls in 2002, where I recall that, in addition to the Ehrlich and Steele shenanigans in PG county, there was a Republican urging people to vote for the Green Party candidate as one of the delegates, so as to split the Democratic vote in favor of a Republican candidate. And no, I didn’t get paid for it.

Update: The Daily Howler adds a few details not included in the Washington Post Story:

2) Ehrlich and Steele used the homeless in 2002 just as they did this year. Their apparent motto? Use the homeless; fool the blacks! Unfortunately, Mosk omits one part of the story from 2002. In that day, the Ehrlich-Steele campaign bussed homeless people from DC shelters to Maryland’s Prince Georges County, where they spent Election Day distributing materials. But uh-oh! At day’s end, some of the homeless were simply abandoned. Busses didn’t appear to return them to their shelters. And it took
a near-riot the next day to get them their pay—pay which was believed to be illegal at the time. (A state law barring such payments was later declared unconstitutional.) …

…4) One unfortunate omission. Unfortunately, Mosk didn’t quote the brilliant Steele, who gave his own absurd explanation this Sunday, on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal. During the program, Donna Brazile cited the misleading fliers—fliers designed to make voters think that Steele had been endorsed by several major black Democrats. (The fliers also suggested that Ehrlich and Steele were Democrats themselves.) “I have to laugh at that,” Steele responded, “because that’s the same tactic that the Democrats
have used in previous campaigns against each other. And I borrowed from that.” A few moments later, he expounded further. Remember, he’s talking about fliers which falsely suggested that he’d been endorsed by two major black Dems—Jack Johnson and Kweisi Mfume. Johnson and Mfume had actually endorsed Steele’s opponent, Ben Cardin:

STEELE (11/12/06): I think again, we used information to try to convey a perception or to create a perception. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t…Wayne Curry did endorse me. Jack and Kweisi are friends. Certainly we’ve worked with them over the last four years. And I think the thinking was that these were Democrats that we’ve worked with and we’ve supported, have supported the [Ehrlich-Steele] administration. It just didn’t translate well.

But for a caricature of Steele, see this pre-election video clip of P.K. Winsome, who appeared on the Colbert Report as a black entrepreneur to explain why he became a Republican, and again, in another clip (part 1) (part
2) in which he goes back to his old neighborhood to get-out-the-vote.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you are probably already aware of the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change. Since (here in the US) we have an election, tomorrow, I have only read the executive summary and seen some quibbling elsewhere in the blogosphere about how the calculations were done and the assumptions made. But what is perhaps most
valuable about the report is that it lays out the full range of projected potential changes in average temperature at various possible levels of stabilization of carbon in the atmosphere, and the range of potential consequences – (all nicely summarized in the executive summary in Figure 2). So for example, even at the low end, we can see that even a small change in temperature can have severe consequences – particularly in dry and marginal areas that depend on melting glaciers for their water supply. But one
does not have to go beyond the United States to find scenarios in which small changes have tremendous consequences. Given that changes in climate are expected to go beyond the range of variation to which humans are adapted, and that we have increased our vulnerability to such changes, e.g., through development of dry regions and coastal areas, there is and will always be plenty of uncertainty about its magnitude and consequences, even with a well-founded consensus that human induced changes are significant.

So none of the intellectually honest quibbling negates the main message of the report, “that international collective action will be critical in driving an effective, efficient and equitable response on the scale required.” It goes on to point out that much deeper international co-operation will be required to create “price signals and markets for carbon, spurring technology research, development and deployment, and promoting adaptation.” In other words, it begins to lay out what choices are still available,
and makes a good case that the longer we wait, the fewer choices we will have to make.

To be able to make any of the choices presented in the Stern review, we first need to choose between reality and truthy sciencey fiction – tomorrow at the polls, where we will have the opportunity to restore some measure of accountability to our government. One of the ways we can begin to build the capacity to take the kinds of collective action required to address climate change is by getting our neighbors out to vote, and vote out the thugs who have poisoned public discourse. Robert Justin Lipkin,
on a new blog, Essentially Contested America compares Bush-Rove Campaign “Politics” to Brooklyn Street Fighting:

Gang members hurt one another, and they hurt innocent bystanders, but the ultimate damage was poisoning the ambience of the neighborhood. Gangs placed otherwise enjoying activities such as playing basketball in the schoolyard, sitting on the benches of Ocean Pkway, or just hanging out–now called “chillin”–in the candy store, in an unpredictable shadow where one was never quite sure whether attacks were imminent.

Just as Brooklyn street fighting threatened to poison the joy of growing up in the Brooklyn, Bush-Rove electoral campaigning debases electoral politics. It becomes an activity made for and driven by sociopaths. How President Bush can claim to be a practicing Christian while sanctioning the most transparently dishonest attacks on his opponents–whether Democrats or fellow republicans such as John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina Republican primary–is inexplicable.His incapacity or unwillingness to assume the
moral high ground reveals a raging cynicism that makes the worst postmodern conception of nihilism tremble in its presence. Bush and Rove are paradigmatic nihilists. Nothing is beyond the pale. In their value-empty world where nothing matters, certainly not moral principles, conscience cannot constrain. There’s no place for conscience. If a tactic works to hurt your enemy, it is eo ipso acceptable. The one salient value in Bush-Rove
nihilism is to retain power at all costs….

…Just as Brooklyn street fighting impoverished the neighborhood, the Bush-Rove ADL impoverishes political campaigning and threatens to deal a death blow to an already moribund deliberative democracy.

The remedy? We are beyond appealing to the better angels of their nature. Nothing like “Have you no shame?” has a chance of working. Perhaps Democrats and victimized Republicans need to become even bigger, badder bullies. When gangs like the Bush-Rove ADL get going, the only effective response seems to be retaliation in kind. Ay, there’s the rub. When George Bush and Karl Rove see nothing wrong in embracing dishonesty and vilification, it impoverishes us all. We desperately feel the need to fight back. But how?
Perhaps we need to import Brooklyn street fighters to wage war against the Bush-Rove Anti-Decency League. On second thought, that would be egregiously unfair to Brooklyn street fighters.

And in today’s post he provides a reminder that: “Seldom in a republican democracy, does the citizenry have a chance to correct the course its own government has duplicitously directed the nation. Tuesday, November 7, 2006, represents such a day. Ours is a moment when we can begin to redirect the course of history for our benefit and for the world’s.”

As for the intellectually dishonest quibbles, Michael Kinsley calls the tolerance for it the biggest flaw in American democracy but other remarks in the same article make me wonder about Kinsley himself, i.e., where he refers to “the growing power of unelected television comedians to set the political agenda,” failing to recognize that these comedians he refers to became popular precisely
because they expose this dishonesty. That remark probably has something to do with sour grapes – Kinsley used to work on Crossfire, which went off the air after Jon Stewart refused to be a comedian on what is suppose to be a news program. But Frank Rich gets it:

When the premises for war were being sold four years ago, you could turn to the fake news of Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” to find the skepticism that might poke holes in the propaganda. Four years later, the press is much chastened by its failure to do its job back then,
but not all of the press. While both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert made sport of the media’s overkill on the Kerry story, their counterparts in “real” television news, especially but not exclusively on cable, flogged it incessantly….

…In retrospect, the defining moment of the 2006 campaign may well have been back in April, when Mr. Colbert appeared at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Call it a cultural primary. His performance was judged a bomb by the

Washington

press corps, which yukked it up instead for a Bush impersonator who joined the president in a benign sketch commissioned by the White House. But millions of Americans watching C-Span and the Web did get Mr. Colbert’s routine. They recognized that the Beltway establishment sitting stone-faced in his audience was the butt of his jokes, especially the very news media that had parroted Bush administration fictions leading
America
into the quagmire of

Iraq

.

I mostly quit watching CNN a long time ago, when it switched from providing News to providing “Newstainment.” But it has gotten worse. Flipping channels on Saturday evening, looking for campaign news, both of the CNN channels had comedians on, trying to make the news not only entertaining but also funny. It wasn’t. It was worse than when Bush tried to be funny by looking for WMDs. I’ll watch TV news again when it is reported with some gravitas. For comedy, I watch real comedians.