Global Warming: What They Don't Tell You

Deer in the meadow

The discomforting news: A lead essay in the Economist magazine reports that assumptions under the 2015 Paris climate accord include not just reducing CO2 emissions. The proposed temperature target of trying to limit temperature increase to less than 2ᵒ C includes removing about 890 billion tons of atmospheric CO2 by 2100. In scientific terms, that's a lot. That point is not well-reported.

The Economist sums it up: “Stopping the flow of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not enough. It has to be sucked out, too. . . . Unless policymakers take negative emissions seriously, the promise of Paris will ring ever more hollow.”

The good news: In summarizing promising technology advances for 2017, Scientific American reports on progress in technology that removes CO2 from air and converts it to fuel. Scientists have been working for decades on an artificial ‘leaf’ that uses sunlight, water and CO2 in the air to make alcohol fuels. In a significant advance, scientists at Harvard reported an artificial leaf that was much more efficient in converting CO2 and water to alcohol fuels than plant leaves are at converting CO2 and water to sugars (biological fuels).

In using sunlight for energy production, a plant uses about 1% of the energy in sunlight to make glucose (a carbohydrate or sugar). By contrast, the artificial leaf operated at 10% sunlight efficiency in converting CO2 in air to fuel. That system pulled 6.3 oz of CO2 from air per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated.

The scientists are in talks with industry to prototype large scale facilities to generate tons of fuels.

The technology includes (i) a non-toxic, biocompatible catalyst that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight, and (ii) genetically engineered bacteria that use CO2 and the hydrogen to make fuel. The lead scientist envisions also using genetically engineered bacteria in soil to take CO2 and nitrogen from air to make fertilizers for plants.

So long as climate change deniers don't decide to intervene to stop or impede research,[1] there are developing technologies that can potentially have an impact on CO2 emissions. Presumably this technology an also be used to achieve at least some of the negative CO2 emissions that are believed necessary to stabilize the climate.

The unknown: Whether this and other developing technologies can be scaled up and still be economically competitive in time to make any difference is unknowable. It is possible that humans have already set in motion biological-geological processes that could lead to human extinction, e.g., anoxic oceans leading to a toxic atmosphere. The timescales and odds for very bad outcomes are impossible to know with any degree of certainty.

Footnote:
1. In the case of gun control research, gun advocates and political conservatives have successfully blocked funding for research on the public health impacts of gun ownership since 1996. Conservatives in congress today want to cut funding for Earth and climate science research to block research and new information that reveals the scope and nature of climate change. In this case, conservatives and/or economic interest who feel threatened by this new source of energy cold stop research and or development of this new technology. Much of the effort to stop science and new knowledge is well-funded and operating in as much secrecy as possible.

Where does this path lead, survival or extinction?

B&B orig: 12/31/17

Essentially Contested Concepts: What is Hate?

Essentially contested concepts involve widespread agreement on a concept (e.g., hate, fairness, constitutional, legal, moral, good, evil, etc.), but not on the best realization or definition thereof. They are concepts the proper definition or use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper definitions or uses on the part of their users. These disputes cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone. The disputes are unresolvable, but unfortunately are quite common in politics. Disputes over essentially contested concepts cannot be resolved by anything other than compromise, an imperfect resolution, because the definitions are heavily influenced by personal cognitive and social factors such as morals, political ideology, and social- and self-identity.

A Washington Post article discusses whether the hate group list that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has compiled is fair, dangerous or otherwise detrimental. The article starts with a member of the Family Research Council (FRC) pointing out the bullet holes in the group's lobby. The FRC, a conservative Christian anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage advocacy and political lobbying group, is listed by the SPLC as a hate group. A deranged man with a gun came to kill people in the FRC because the FRC was on the SPLC hate list.

Is it fair or safe to identify groups like the FRC with the same language, hate group, as the Klu Klux Klan? What is the definition of hate in the context of politics?

The WaPo writes: “‘Labeling people hate groups is an effort to hold them accountable for their rhetoric and the ideas they are pushing. Obviously the hate label is a blunt one,’ Cohen concedes when I ask whether advocates like the FRC, or proponents of less immigration like the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), or conservative legal stalwarts like the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), really have so much in common with neo-Nazis and the Klan that they belong in the same bucket of shame. “It’s one of the things that gives it power, and it’s one of the things that can make it controversial. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it’s without nuance.’ … But we’ve always thought that hate in the mainstream is much more dangerous than hate outside of it. The fact that a group like the FRC or a group like FAIR can have congressional allies and can testify before congressional committees, the fact that a group like ADF can get in front of the Supreme Court — to me that makes them more dangerous, not less so. … It’s the hate in the business suit that is a greater danger to our country than the hate in a Klan robe.’”

Context: For context, the FRC operates ‘crisis pregnancy centers’, which are set up in poor neighborhoods. From the outside, they appear to be medical centers that provide professional medical access to abortion services. These centers have been called unethical for deceiving pregnant women by applying pressure tactics that range from lying about abortion options, e.g., falsely telling a woman that abortion is illegal or unavailable, to exerting intense psychological pressure to prevent a woman from having an abortion. These centers often seek to delay long enough so that a woman is forced by law to give birth. People running crisis pregnancy centers typically have no formal medical training at all and instead are Christian activists in white lab coats trying to prevent abortions by any means possible short of illegal actions such as threats of physical violence.

In view of lies, deceit and misery that crisis pregnancy centers were inflicting on low income women who were being tricked into bearing a child, California passed a law “intended to compel crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) to offer factual information about all options available to pregnant women and to disclose if a facility is unlicensed. . . . . NPCC asserts that 91% of unlicensed CPCs provided defective medical information such as a false link between abortion and breast cancer or suicide.”

What is hate? Do deceit-driven tactics related to abortion, like what the FRC and other groups engage in, amount to hate? Do other activities such as lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges to abortion or same-sex marriage amount to hate?

Hate (verb): to feel intense or passionate dislike for someone, a concept, e.g., the idea of abortion, or something.
Hate (noun): an intense or passionate dislike or loathing for someone, a concept or something.

Clearly, lobbying congress and mounting legal challenges are legal political activities. Can legal activities amount to hate? If it isn't hate, what can it more reasonably be called? Aggressive conservative or Christian activism? Immorality or unethical?

It appears that much or most of the activities the groups on the SPLC’s hate list amount to mostly legal activism infused with a rigid unwillingness to compromise. If one believes that, for politics in a liberal democracy, compromise is a core moral value and necessary for democracy to function properly (a concept or belief advocated here), then a refusal to compromise can be seen as immoral.

Is immorality the same as hate? If the definitions of hate given above are generally accepted as maybe incomplete but generally accurate enough, then it would logically seem that refusal to compromise alone will often or usually include a component of hate in it. Is that reasoning sound or flawed? Is compromise the only or best form of resolution for disputes over contested concepts?

The WaPo is right to raise this issue. A deranged man with a gun used the SPLC hate list to find a target for murder. That would seem to be no different than president Trump continually referring to journalists as ‘the enemy of the people’, thereby inciting a few people to begin to act to kill journalists. Is that hate?

If nothing else, one can see from the foregoing why essentially contested concepts lead to intractable disputes and how the disputed concepts can foster actions that lead to misery or even social conflict and outright murder. Essentially contested concepts can be dangerous because of the heavy cognitive (moral) and social (identity and social context) loads they carry. From that point of view, it is easy to see why (i) disagreements over essentially contested concepts are not resolvable, and (ii) compromise must necessarily be a pillar of peaceful, non-tyrant, democratic society.

B&B orig: 11/15/18

Propaganda, Social Media & A Weakening Union

Managing editor Mark Gimein’s essay in November 16 issue of The Week is interesting.

“How you whip up hatred and distrust has never been much of a secret. More than 50 years ago, Jaques Ellul, in his landmark book Propaganda, wrote, ‘Those who read the press of their group and listen to the radio of their group are constantly reinforced in their allegiance. They learn more and more that their group is right, and that it’s actions are justified; thus their beliefs are strengthened.’ Substitute ‘tweets’ and ‘memes’ and you have social media today, in which an algorithm feeds you the information you are likely to click on -- because you have clicked or retweeted or reposted something j ust like it. The techniques that once worked on TV and radio have been supercharged by microtargeting. This is not merely an echo chamber: It’s a pinball machine, into which manipulators cynically drop memes -- the Black Panthers support the democrats! -- to bounce around and amplify.

The government of the US was constructed, as James Madison wrote, ‘to break and control the violence of faction’. Now faction is ascendant, and it is the union that is breaking. There are no more big tents. Centrist Republicans such as Bob Corker and Jeff Flake have quit politics; centrist red-state democrats Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp didn’t survive Tuesday’s vote. In congress, it becomes harder for elected representatives to do anything but vote in lockstep with their parties. When Donald Trump was elected, it was said that he had ‘broken’ the republican party. The opposite is true: The parties are stronger than ever. Except now party loyalty is enforced by you own friends and acquaintances, who will make sure you don’t step out of line on Twitter or Facebook. That’s something that autocrats[1] and demagogues of the past could only dream of. How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused? In the coming two years of divided government, we will most likely find out.”

When Gimein asserts that how to whip up hatred and distrust is common knowledge, he seems to miss the mark. America has witnessed the whipping up of hatred and distrust to an amazing extent since President Trump came to power.[2] The minds now driven by hate and distrust do not know that they have been manipulated and used. They think that happened to the opposition, not themselves. Manipulators certainly know how to do it. But if everyone knew the trick, it would be harder for that manipulated mindset change to happen on such a large scale in such a short time.

This is an example of what can happen to a society whose people are untrained in defense against the dark arts. The American people are, for the most part, defenseless against manipulation by dark free speech** operating ways that social media make more effective than ever before.

**Dark free speech: Lies, deceit, misinformation, unwarranted opacity and truth hiding, unwarranted emotional manipulation, mostly fomenting fear, anger, hate, distrust, and/or disgust, bogus (partisan) logic, unwarranted character assassination, etc.

Gimein’s reference to Bob Corker and Jeff Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’ reflects the power of rhetoric to obscure unreasonable extremism in the mantle of a reasonable-sounding label like centrist in the context of the republican party. By standards of 25-30 years ago, Corker and Flake would have been seen as far right conservatives on most issues by the republican party. There is nothing centrist about them now. Sure, on a few occasions they ineffectively squeaked at their colleagues in feeble protest over something or another, but it didn't amount to a hill of beans.[3] They both voted the republican way about 84% of the time. By no stretch of the imagination of anyone neutral is it possible to argue that there was not extremism in many of those votes.

That someone today refers to Corker and Flake as ‘centrist Republicans’, shows how extreme the republican party has become and how well the right and/or trapped minds has obscured that fact. Gimein is deceived and wrong. A better label for folks like Corker and Flake is something along the lines of far right republican, with the rest of the party being extreme right. The concept of centrism has no place in the republican party at present. Decades of RINO hunts have insured a thorough ideological and moral cleansing.

Finally, Gimein asks a question with an interesting tell in it: “How else can the dark powers of social media be manipulated and misused?”

Mr Gimein apparently disapproves of dark free speech being deployed on social media to deceive and manipulate the public. Otherwise he would not see it as manipulation or misuse. Presumably, he also sees the same tactics on all other sources of media the same way. For better or worse, there is not a thing anyone can do about it. It is all constitutionally protected free speech, no matter how dark and deadly it is. Therein lies democracy’s greatest weakness.

Footnotes:
1. Gimein made a mistake by referring to autocrats and demagogues in the same breath. As we all know, that pairing seems discordant with Aristotle’s taxonomy of political regimes. Gimein probably meant either autocrats and monarchs or, more likely, he meant oligarchs and demagogues.

2. Yes, partisan hate and distrust had been building for decades, especially since influencers like Lee Atwater and Newt Gingrich injected their poison into politics a few decades ago. Trump brought the emotion to a whole new, more toxic level. It is reasonable to think that Trump was probably helped significantly by years of Russian propaganda fomenting hate and distrust among the American people. That said, it is far and balanced to give Trump most of the credit for us being where we are today. As long as he is in power, the buck stops with Trump whether he likes it or not.

3. For example, both Corker and Flake voted for the nuclear option for supreme court nominees, thereby killing the filibuster. That was not centrist, not even close.

B&B orig: 11/17/18

The Anti-Bias Ideology: A Simplified Explanation

CONTEXT: A reasonable belief holds that existing political ideologies are more bad than good for various reasons related to cognitive biology and social behavior and influences. That is what B&B argues. Ideologies tend to foster in-group thinking and behaviors and that tends to make it easy to distort reality, facts, truths and thinking into beliefs that are unreasonably detached from reality, facts and truths. It makes politics more irrational than it has to be. One idea would propose that people simply adopt a science mindset that looks to impose more rationality into politics.

In his blog post at Neurologica entitled, Against Ideology, skeptic Steven Novella discusses some thinking about problems with existing political ideologies. Novella comments on problems with ideology and the exhilarating experience of walking away from one: “The skeptical movement has always struggled with some unavoidable ironies. We are like a group for people who don’t like to join groups. We actively tell our audience not to trust us (don’t trust any single source – verify with logic and evidence). Our belief is that you really should not have beliefs, only tentative conclusions. Essentially, our ideology is anti-ideology.

This approach is both empowering and freeing. One of the most common observations I hear from those who, after consuming skeptical media for a time, abandon some prior belief system or ideology, is that they feel as if a huge weight has been lifted from their shoulders. They feel free from the oppressive burden of having to support one side or ideology, even against evidence and reason. Now they are free to think whatever they want, whatever is supported by the evidence. They don’t have to carry water for their ‘team.’

At the same time, this is one of the greatest challenges for skeptical thinking, because it seems to run upstream against a strong current of human nature. We are tribal, we pick a side and defend it, especially if it gets wrapped up in our identity or world-view.”

That, in a nutshell, is one of the biggest problems with standard ideologies, all of which are fairly called ‘pro-bias’ ideologies. Existing ideologies are powerful motivators to distort reality, facts, truths, and reason whenever those any of those things contradict or undercut the chosen ideology. Distortion and ensuing irrationality is probably the norm, not the exception.

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The Anti-Bias Ideology: A Simplified Explanation 

Some years ago, it made sense to reject ideology as a framework for doing and thinking about politics. The science mindset of pragmatic, evidence-driven trial, error and course corrections seemed to be the best approach. Then, after some years of looking into cognitive biology and social behavior, it seemed that one cannot eliminate emotion and morals from the process. That lead to a science- and morals-based 'anti-bias' political ideology that focuses on the the key sources of irrationality, incivility and failure. Four core moral principles seem to be the most anti-biasing. The morals are (i) fidelity to trying seeing fact and truth with less bias, (ii) fidelity to applying less biased conscious reason to the facts and truths, (iii) service to the public interest (defined as a transparent competition of ideas among competing interests) based on the facts, truths and reason, and (iv) willingness to reasonably compromise according to political, economic and environmental circumstances point to.

After considering politics through human history, most or all bad leaders (tyrants, oligarchs, kleptocrats, etc.) seem to share the four key traits. They generally disregard, deny or hide facts and truths when it is politically convenient to do so, which is most of the time. Bad leaders also routinely apply biased (bogus) reasoning to facts, fake or not, typically to foment unwarranted emotional responses such as fear, anger, bigotry, racism and distrust-hate toward out-groups or ‘the enemy’. All of that irrationality is focused in service to a corrupt self-serving conception of the public interest, and it is reinforced by a corrupt, self-serving unwillingness to compromise.

If one accepts that those four bad traits of bad leaders are real and the norm, then arguably the four core moral values of a pragmatic, evidence-based anti-bias political ideology would seem to make sense if one wants to fight against the rise and ability of bad leaders to gain power and then do bad things to people and societies.

The question is, would this ‘anti-bias’ mindset or ideology work. Maybe. Maybe not. The experiment appears to not have been tried in modern times with modern means for mass communication of dark free speech (lies, deceit, unwarranted opacity, unwarranted emotional manipulation, mostly fomenting unwarranted fear, intolerance, anger, and hate, etc.). Testing an anti-bias ideology for success or failure is a multi-generational social engineering experiment. It would be great to see it tried. Even if it failed, the failure might shed enough light on the human condition and politics to reveal another more civilized, sustainable and efficient way to do politics.

Anti-bias is not just the scientific method applied to politics: The anti-bias ideology isn't just adoption of a scientific method mindset. It expressly includes moral values and treats them as such. In science, there tends to be less outright lying and grossly bogus reasoning. Those things tend to get called out and careers then tend to crash and burn if a course correction isn't made. In science, errors happen, but they are typically mistakes, not lies. Flawed reasoning in science tends to be honest support of a hypothesis, not sloppy thinking in defense of an indefensible ideological belief. In these regards, the anti-bias ideology directly accounts for human nature. Science tends to downplay that in a belief that fact and logic will quench errors to a reasonable extent. That may be generally true for science, but it is clearly not true for politics. Science and politics are simply not the same thing, at least not yet with existing pro-bias ideologies that dominate.

White-faced whistling ducks guarding the waterfall

B&B orig: 12/8/18