IPCC Report

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BRUTE
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by BRUTE »

yes that's nice. but in some fields, experiments are more difficult than having an apple fall on one's head. calling those fields "not science" seems absurd and very limiting to brute.

George the original one
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by George the original one »

I've noticed brute thinks a lot of things are absurd and very limiting ;-)

jacob
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by jacob »

Oh, shots fired!

OTOH, I consider viewtopic.php?p=176777#p176777 to be the forum post of the week or month in terms of insightfulness.

"America" was an attempt to build a tribe based on an idea rather than birthright. This attempt is currently struggling as the US is currently demonstrating as much tribal parochialism as any other nation. In order for civilization to make the transition to an altered climate, it requires a tribal identity that includes not only people from other places but also future generations. In practice, humans only pay lip service to the latter. As much as everybody seems to love babies, very few give much thought to the world those babies will grow old in. It's basically not on the radar of concern.

BRUTE
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by BRUTE »

George the original one wrote: I've noticed brute thinks a lot of things are absurd and very limiting ;-)
brute sure does. absurd is the word that, in brute's mind, describes the human condition best.
jacob wrote:
Sun Nov 04, 2018 5:19 pm
OTOH, I consider viewtopic.php?p=176777#p176777 to be the forum post of the week or month in terms of insightfulness.
awww
"America" was an attempt to build a tribe based on an idea rather than birthright. This attempt is currently struggling as the US is currently demonstrating as much tribal parochialism as any other nation. In order for civilization to make the transition to an altered climate, it requires a tribal identity that includes not only people from other places but also future generations. In practice, humans only pay lip service to the latter. As much as everybody seems to love babies, very few give much thought to the world those babies will grow old in. It's basically not on the radar of concern.
it seems an issue of the current times. Teddy Roosevelt quotes conserving nature in parks his greatest achievement. conservation used to be a thing. but now, humans don't even read newspaper articles because they have more than 140/280 characters.

conditioned by all those instant dopamine hits, it's no wonder humans don't plan ahead even for their own lifetimes, as evidenced by the median retirement savings in this country.

brute never thought he'd say this, but there's a little too much Carpe Diem (or is it YOLO now?) going on. Epicurus is probably turning over in his grave.

Campitor
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by Campitor »

I prefer the Marcus Aurelius interpretation of living well over the simplistic and somewhat immature YOLO philosophy:

Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.

7Wannabe5
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

How about the argument that although economics is a science, it is currently pretty damn weak?

For instance, the book I am currently reading, "Energy and the Wealth of Nations", the inputs to production described as being important by economists have varied according to historical era, because there has not yet been full recognition of the importance of energy as an input (or degraded energy as an output.) So, for the first economists land was an important input, because energy was mostly available in the form of solar acreage. However, when increased coal use allowed for the expansion of industrial production (or vice-versa), the initial expense of large machinery became the most relevant factor, and the actual energy source was disappeared into Total Factor Productivity in the Cobb-Douglas Production Function:

Image
IOW, it is not fully recognized that A is highly determined by base price of energy source and sink as well as efficiency of organization and delivery system, because this has been a relatively minor factor throughout the industrial age which is also the age of Neoclassical Economics. In simplest terms, I (as a unit of labor) will be more productive producing corn operating a giant computerized piece of robotic machinery from the comfort of my air-conditioned cubicle, than pulling a plow out in the hot sun, until/unless the cost/availability of petroleum or other liquid fuels or keeping giant batteries charged renders my giant piece of equipment inoperable.

IOW, the fact that A has mostly been increasing over the modern era creates the illusion of perpetual possibility for economic growth simply on the basis of human ingenuity and does not recognize the historical importance of fossil fuel use. Kind of like if you imagine a factory making fullest use of division of labor and nearby availability of materials and watch-mechanism type tool maker ingenuity towards production vs. a factory that makes most efficient use of cheap high density fuel to power production, the cheap fuel factory will definitely win the competition, but this is not recognized in the math used by most economists. Something like that...

Another way to look at it would be that high tech workers do not earn/warrant high salaries mostly because they are ingenious, but rather because their ingenuity is eventually at some level (s) applied to machinery that makes use of cheap fossil fuels. Of course, the need for a degraded energy sink for high tech level is immediately realized at the level of the cooling fan for the computer and the portion of air conditioning needed to compensate for the heat coming off the tech worker's brain case. OTOH, if the tech worker were to instead, for instance, to be employed shoveling compost early in the morning in Michigan in October, then the tech worker might actually choose to wear a wool hat in order to retain the brain case heat loss. So, it is pretty obvious which option would be more sustainable and resilient vs. efficient due to the Second Law of Thermodynamics which is obviously based on more solid science than the current price of corn.

End Argument.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by ThisDinosaur »

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HA ... efinitions
Is economics a "science?"
Is gymnastics a "sport?"

Dont argue by definition. Everyone here agrees that economics is a systematic acquisition of knowledge using evidence and logic. That is the relevant usage of "science" here.
7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 7:07 am
IOW, the fact that A has mostly been increasing over the modern era creates the illusion of perpetual possibility for economic growth simply on the basis of human ingenuity and does not recognize the historical importance of fossil fuel use.
We maybe shouldn't underestimate ingenuity any more than we should overestimate it. Since the time of Adam Smith, humanity has been threatened by impending resource depletion catastrophes. It was once thought we'd run out of firewood, before we started using whale oil lamps. Then we discovered extinction was a thing, and we might soon run out of whales. Then someone found oil in the rocks.... Maybe the future will resemble the past in this way.

It's considered intellectually respectable to be a pessimist, and naiive to be an optimist. But theres no neutral reason that either bias should be correct. Consider that fossil fuel use represents a time compressed use of solar energy. Photosynthetic organisms spend more time gathering the sunlight than we spend burning it up. One could imagine a space compressed ues of solar energy instead. Less than one one-billionth of the sun's energy reaches earth. Some sort of space based solar power collector scheme near Mercury's orbit is feasible with known physics. And with technology we've been developing for sixty years.

William Gibson said, "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."

7Wannabe5
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@ThisDinosaur:

I don't disagree. I have read "The Rational Optimist" by Ridley, Thomas Sowell, and next to next on my stack is "Capitalism in America" by Wooldridge and Greenspan (highly recommended by my multi-millionaire capitalist friend who keeps assuring me in a fatherly manner that I needn't worry about peak oil due to high likelihood of nuclear fusion breaking more than even-lol.) I just think the pessimists are a bit more convincing. Maybe because although I am by nature an optimist, I am also old enough and experienced enough to have personally outlived a few significant S-Curves.

vexed87
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by vexed87 »

I agree it would be unwise to rule out all possibility of success of transitioning from oil to another dense primary energy source, or at least obtaining a source with sufficient EROEI to support a technological advanced civilisation, but not out of hopes of salvation. If it is possible, we may be in a worse position than the pessimists think we are in now! Some pessimists believe that oil production peaking introduces hard limits to the amount of CO2 we can practically emit before the entire extraction economy cannot be sustained any longer. Even if human ingenuity comes up with a solution to the energy production problem, arguably it's the very assumption that we are separate entities to the ecosystems that we depend on and we can consume as much energy as we like without any blowback that got us into this climate and pollution mess in the first place. This is what most mainstream economists can't grasp, despite the huge economic damage it will wreak.

Putting aside the possibility of diverting immense quantities of solar energy from space (wouldn't this just heat the earth up faster?) or fusion reactors producing energy that's too cheap to meter, perhaps the best outcome we can hope for is a gradual tapering of EROEI with a little help from renewables to smooth out the bumps until we get back to sustainable levels of resource consumption, (i.e. the rate at which plant life regrows may). Organic agrarian levels seems to be optimal for human civic life, despite less than ideal social mobility and less than stellar healthcare, history shows we have been able to manage the fall out of over-consumption by curtailing it when necessary with social customs, e.g. well managed fish stocks, Easter island etc. The loss of great forests in Europe etc. Yes the following years were lean and hard, but not on the apocalyptic scale which we are about to endure.

IMO, if adding more energy, all signs point to just enabling us to consume non-energy resources faster, thus increasing the likelihood of our extinction or supplanting our position at the top of the foodchain. Because renewable energy production is not growing faster than demand for total energy, and current social customs are not reducing demand for non-renewable energy, so it isn't falling faster than the growth of 'green' energy, perversely green tech then enables us to consume other resources faster than we might have otherwise when fossil energy supplies peak! Unless green energy production grows much faster than energy demand, we are stuffed. If green energy enables us to extract more oil/coal, we're doubly stuffed.

Even whilst some forward thinking individuals cut down demand and consumption, in theory other individuals pick up the slack. I hope someone has a compelling counter argument!

tonyedgecombe
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Similar to the green paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_paradox
The green paradox is the title of a controversial book by German economist, Hans-Werner Sinn, describing the observation that an environmental policy that becomes greener with the passage of time acts like an announced expropriation for the owners of fossil fuel resources, inducing them to accelerate resource extraction and hence to accelerate global warming.

7Wannabe5
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

vexed87 wrote:Some pessimists believe that oil production peaking introduces hard limits to the amount of CO2 we can practically emit before the entire extraction economy cannot be sustained any longer.
This is my current belief with 50.001% confidence. This is mostly based on an analogy between oil reserves and the books available at a particular book sale. First 15 minutes of the sale, you run and grab all the books you can from the best sections, only pausing briefly to use your brain to filter. Then you slow down a bit and start making intermittent use of your technology (price scanner), and finally you move on to more and more less likely profitable sections and make constant use of your scanner, and then you and all the other dealers leave at right around the same time, but there will still be many books left in the room after all the dealers fold. So, any objective estimate of total value or volume of books available at sale at beginning of sale will not equal total number or value of books "produced." So, even if remaining reserves = 2 X total production thus far, it is obvious that the oil producers have already been using their technology for a relatively long time, so I think maybe only half-hour until the dealers start to cash out = maybe 25 years. Something like that.

George the original one
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by George the original one »

Thinking CO2 emissions is limited to oil production ignores the other big fossil fuel (coal).

BRUTE
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by BRUTE »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 7:07 am
How about the argument that although economics is a science, it is currently pretty damn weak?
...
End Argument.
certainly most mainstream economists would agree that workers earning high salaries do not possess inherent salary-earning capabilities, but instead profit from living/working in a highly productive because highly capitalized economy, of which energy use is definitely a part.

if one factory uses cheaper fuel, certainly economists would recognize the competitive advantage over the competition.

saying that the laws of thermodynamics are based on more solid science than the price of corn is meaningless, especially in this context. first, economists do not determine the price of corn, or anything. "the price of corn" is an abstraction that typically means something like "the last price two parties agree to make a trade on a bunch of corn". thus it is a historical fact, unlike the second law of thermodynamics. it's like the fact that the sky was blue today or that it rained last year. it is therefore probably the most rock-solid thing there is, but it's hardly science to record the price, unless maybe as part of a time series on historical corn prices.

energy is just one, if an important, factor of production. there is always something that is currently the scarcest input in the system. sometimes that's energy, sometimes it isn't.

brute has the feeling that climate believers are upset with economist because economists do not recognize that energy is "special". for economists, energy is just another input into production, just like labor, rocks, iron ore, or bushels of corn.

it reminds brute of humans that say "there shouldn't be a price on X", e.g. "there shouldn't be a price on health care", or "there shouldn't be a price on the environment".

there is always a price on health care, and on the environment. maybe the price isn't denominated in dollars. but just because the price is not determined in the common currency, anything that is scarce in the economic sense will undergo decisions as to its use. just like the republican "death panels", that would decide which humans live and which die. or the city council will vote.

but then the price is denominated in public goodwill, in bribery, in social pull, or whatever. this price is much harder to quantify than a dollar amount, and seems to make humans feel warm and fuzzy on the inside.

but there's a price nonetheless. if humans refuse to put a dollar price onto something, it will be priced in another currency. now it can be argued that 7Wannabe5 prefers to price things in social pull because she has more than she has dollars. but brute suggests not pretending that this is anything more than personal preference.

brute will fully agree that many economists, both mainstream and fringe, are fuller of shit than the average colonoscopy bag. like many sciences where things are hard to nail down and prove in the lab, bad economics is used by sycophants to and justifiers of the powerful. it's easy in economics to come to the exact conclusion one was looking for. an example is Paul Krugman, who's NYT column is pure bigoted, unscientific political opinion.

nevertheless brute has found incredible wisdom and tranquility in the understanding of economic human interaction. this goes far beyond production functions and demand/supply curves. Austrian economics has helped brute understand dating, the job market, company politics, friendships, and much more. almost all inter-human relations can be viewed through the Austrian lens, and many are easily explainable.

at the same time, many of the insights of the Austrians are so fundamental and obvious that trying to prove/disprove them in an experiment would be absurd. for example, one of the first things Mises explain in Human Action is roughly this: at any given moment, there is something a given human prefers to all other things (or technically, several could rank equal, leading to indecision or inaction). then there is a next-desired thing, and so on. thus, humans have a ranked list of preferences. this is not even necessarily a conscious homo economicus thing, it's just that the alternative is unfathomable. large parts of Mises' system of thought is built this way.

what would an experiment look like to disprove this? round up a statistically significant group of humans, and ask them repeatedly if they currently do prefer some things to other things, or not? if they answered, they preferred answering to not answering, if they kept quiet, the opposite.

thus, the critique that "economics is not evidence-based" merely makes brute smile.

7Wannabe5
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

GTOO wrote:Thinking CO2 emissions is limited to oil production ignores the other big fossil fuel (coal).
True, but coal is not a new option with a fresh development curve to exploit. It has already been in competition with petroleum for 150 years. So, if/when it does become viable option, the world-wide economy will not be in great shape, because 80% of the cost (as opposed to price) of everything will be ratcheted way up. I have noticed that having to pay $250/month for car insurance puts a good number of Detroit dwellers out of a car which doesn't make them happy. Having to consistently pay $80/barrel for liquified coal will put a lot of people out of a lot of stuff, including food in some locations, which won't make them very happy.
BRUTE wrote:but there's a price nonetheless. if humans refuse to put a dollar price onto something, it will be priced in another currency. now it can be argued that 7Wannabe5 prefers to price things in social pull because she has more than she has dollars. but brute suggests not pretending that this is anything more than personal preference.
I really don't think that is an accurate description of my behavior since I am the only female in my acquaintance who does make some attempt to quantify her social pull even though it makes for some messy looking excel sheets.

energy is just one, if an important, factor of production. there is always something that is currently the scarcest input in the system. sometimes that's energy, sometimes it isn't.
Not true, because you can't produce anything without inputting high quality energy and outputting waste heat. Another way to look at it is that material and energy and information have inherently different flows. They aren't infinitely able to be substituted one for the other, and the core equations of neoclassical economics do not reflect this reality. IOW, economics is really more like ecology, but a lot of economists pretend like it is like physics, or even pure math.

daylen
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by daylen »

Science is a fuzzy concept, because not all humans agree on what science is. The meaning is best interpreted from the actions of scientists.

Performing experiments to falsify hypotheses is a significant part of what scientists do. Praxeological researchers do very little of this, therefore economists are hardly scientists. Just like nurses are hardly doctors even though they may do some of the same things.
Last edited by daylen on Wed Nov 07, 2018 9:24 am, edited 3 times in total.

vexed87
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by vexed87 »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 6:14 am
IOW, economics is really more like ecology, but a lot of economists pretend like it is like physics, or even pure math.
You've summed up what I was really trying to say here rather nicely, even if I hadn't completely formulated a coherent argument! ;) :geek:

/tip of the hat!

Campitor
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by Campitor »

vexed87 wrote:
Wed Nov 07, 2018 6:46 am
You've summed up what I was really trying to say here rather nicely, even if I hadn't completely formulated a coherent argument! ;) :geek:

/tip of the hat!
Because of the highly variable inputs that affect economics such as humans and culture, it's impossible to "science" economics insofar as science is being defined by 7wb or Daylen. I kind of think of how scientist are working on string theory but have no way of reproducing extra-dimensional objects or observing nth dimension behavior that exceed our 3 dimensions.

Other aspects of science also fall into this "un-provable" category such as the big bang which has only been confirmed via observation (movement/behavior of celestial objects). As far as I know no one has produced, beyond a computer simulation, a big-bang (I prefer big expansion) in a laboratory.

I don't want to derail this thread. I only want to caution anyone against dismissing economics because it currently can't be "scienced" like physics. Economics is still a very valuable tool and much can be learned via observation even if the results can't be reproduced in a lab. For the record, I don't think 7wb or Daylen are dismissive of economics.

daylen
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by daylen »

Like campitor says, I am not denying the utility of praxeology. I see science as more than a collection of disciplines(*). Science is a social institution where different people (or components of the institution) contribute to different degrees, hence from this perspective there exist different degrees of scientists.

An experimental particle physicist is more of a scientist than a theorist working on string theory.

(*) Disciplines are ill-defined. A discipline is just the study of some fuzzy set of objects that are identifyiable in reality.

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Re: IPCC Report

Post by jacob »

One way to "rank" disciplines is by the achievable confidence level (precision) of predictive measurements.
In that case, we have something like:

Consider these the correlations required to make practitioners happy in terms of whether reality fits the prediction of the theory.

Best physics measurement: 99.9999999995% accurate (Hydrogen maser frequency. I might have counted a 9 wrong)
Typical physics measurements: 99.9+%
Chemistry: 98+%
Astronomy: 95+%
Humans are the dominant cause of climate change: 95%+
Tobacco causes lung cancer: 90-95%+
Medicine: 80-90%
Biology: 70%
Quant finance: 60%
Sociology: 55%
Economics: ??%

Fundamentally, these numbers can be interpreted as the general strength of the theory or science. For example, atomic physics is incredibly strong, whereas sociology is mostly weak sauce.

More importantly, due to the complexity of the fields and the limit to computational resources, researchers are often forced to simplify their computational/modelling field by treating things outside their field as boundary conditions. The Cobb-Douglas equation is an excellent example. Here the entire fields of science and technological along with all the human ingenuity and support systems required get reduced to a single parameter, alpha. It's no wonder that economists have enormous faith in the innovative capability of the STEM crowd when this crowd is nothing but the parameter alpha which supply of innovation can be dialed up whenever there's economic demand for it. According to Cobb-Douglas, it should be possible to pull parachutes out of thin air as long as the skydiver has enough funds on their bank account. It's stuff like that which causes "visionaries" to have immense confidence because, hey, maybe that problem could be solved with an app that delivers the chute by drone. Doesn't that sound at least exciting if not plausible?

Similarly, to the scientists, the economy is but a black box that emits CO2. They're somewhat cognizant that the economy can respond to climate change. This is why various models have been proposed. First SRES, then RCP, and now SSP. However, thinking of the political economy and human culture as a bunch of time-dependent output-functions also makes it incredibly easy to suggest that "there's still hope, if only we act now"---as if changing was as easy as switching from SSP5 to SSP1 and recompiling/rerunning the simulation.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: IPCC Report

Post by ThisDinosaur »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:23 am
I just think the pessimists are a bit more convincing.
#Me, too. But I think that's because I am, by nature, a pessimist. So i try to compensate for my biases. There is a matrix jacob has discussed before wrt investing:
Would you rather be:

1)Right when the market is Right,
2)Right when the market is Wrong,
3)Wrong when the market is Right,
4)Wrong when the market is Wrong.

I think I mostly try to avoid #3. I would be ecstatic with #2, and I would be stoically accepting with #4. In the context of this discussion, #3 looks to me like being a luddite doomer living in an isolated cabin while my former suburban neighbors are planning a SpaceX cruise to Venus while their robots do the housework.
vexed87 wrote:
Tue Nov 06, 2018 10:56 am
IMO, if adding more energy, all signs point to just enabling us to consume non-energy resources faster, thus increasing the likelihood of our extinction or supplanting our position at the top of the foodchain.
This is always the case. The ERE book mentions Liebig's law; growth is not determined by total resources, but by the scarcest resource. It's why I keep pushing the algal bloom analogy. We are the algae, fossil fuels are the fertilizer. Our population/civilization is growing and will continue to do so until we run out of whatever is the scarcest resource. At which point our population will collapse and we will take much of the ecosystem with us.

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