A couple more comments on global warming

Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek did a post yesterday about the political economy of the global warming debate and got a bunch of comment.

One, from me, should have been expanded a bit. The economics of which side you are on really tell you something about why the debate continues to proceed apace. I mentioned in my earlier post, in response to the UN press release, that I thought The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a good starting place for the discussion. While I was in Washington I got a call and a question from a friend who had read my original post but was not familiar with Kuhn's thesis. I short-handed the idea. So here is a bit better treatment. Kuhn argued that science goes forward incrementally mostly. People get an idea and then others help to develop and elaborate it. But at some point, an upstart discovers a problem with the general theory. At first, the supporters of the existing idea defend it, but then the paradigm (a big concept for Kuhn) shifts. Before Copernicus, everyone thought we were geocentric and while the solar centric universe theory was coming into prominence there were still forces which tried to enforce the old idea. I pointed out the parallel to David Kessler's notion of technological innovation - first explained in Michael Lewis' book Next; the Future Just Happened which suggests a broader theory about any idea's elaborations but that longer discussion is for another day.

If Kuhn's basic idea is correct, and I think it is,the cost to a scientist who has questions but goes along with the idea of global warming is very small. The scientist, at least for now, stays a part of the group. They probably, at least for now are held in esteem by their peers and more likely to get peer reviewed research money to prove the hypothesis. On the other hand there is some cost to being on the other side. It may be a bit harder to find funding to disprove a hypothesis - global warming does not exist and you risk being ostracized out of the peer community. The incentives for politicians work in the same way. Those who advocate the problem is real, have a larger incentive than those who do not. They can argue for the trend and when and if definitive evidence comes available they are in all liklihood out of office. There is the added incentive, that for some politicians naming this problem also allows government to help "solve" it.

The Global Warming advocates will soon face a dilemma. It is unlikely that our demands for carbon based fuels will be reduced significantly by demand reductions in needs of the power grid. After you create all of the wind and biomass and geothermal that is feasible it will still be likely to need some additional source - which in my mind suggests nuclear power. That will cause dilemma horns of significant proportions for at least some of the supporters of Global Warming. We're not likely to give up our creature comforts like air conditioning and computers and all of the other technologies (efficiency and alternative technologies) will not breach the growing gap.

The pictures here are of Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is a lepodoptrist who peddled lots of rubbish in the last century about a population bomb. At one point Simon, an economist, challenged Ehrlich to a bet which would disprove Ehrlich's Malthusian projections. He suggested that a market basket of commodities would decline in real value over a decade and he would take the "under" to Ehrlich's "over" on that basket chosen by Ehrlich. In the end Ehrlich lost and Simon was correct in his assumptions. But that did not deter Ehrlich from continuing to preach "chicken little" science.

One final comment. One of the first of these projections like the current debate about global warming was done in the Second Treatise by Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that our ability to procreate exceeded our ability to innovate. ("The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.") Two things should be noted about the Second Treatise. First, it was based on faulty modeling and data. Malthus had used data from growth rates in the American Colonies without discounting for the numbers of immigrants. (The data, at least according to some came from Benjamin Franklin.) Malthus was wrong in part because of the invention and quick implementation of the steel plow. But the second point is even more telling, Malthus wrote the Second Treatise to make a political point. That may be true in this debate also.