Today's example of Big Brains gone haywire is far more subtle than the two previous examples. It involves behavioral economics and the cognitive bias known as loss aversion, which also plays a significant role in behavioral economics. Behavioral economics has enjoyed a renaissance ever since millions of Big Brains all over the world went haywire during the Housing Bubble in the United States.
You may recall that this craziness caused a meltdown of the global financial system and economy. I only say that now in 2015 because it seems that nearly everybody on Earth has already forgotten it.
The Wall Street Journal runs a column in which people seek advice from MIT psychologist and behavioral economist Dan Ariely about their personal lives.
Although the story speaks for itself, I have added some helpful emphasis in the text.
Transcript (as it appears on the NPR website, with a few clarifying edits)
In 2012, Ian Thorson was found dead in a cave in Arizona. He and his wife had been kicked out of a silent Buddhist retreat that was supposed to last three years, but they decided to finish out the time alone in the desert — and that extreme quest for spiritual enlightenment eventually killed him.
Scott Carney tells that story in his new book, A Death on Diamond Mountain. Carney tells NPR's Rachel Martin that he was drawn to Ian Thorson's story because it felt eerily familiar. Back in 2006, he was leading a program for American students in India. They learned about Buddhism, practiced meditation, and one day, they undertook a particularly dark exercise: It involved imagining themselves as decaying corpses.
Humans are desperately seeking an explanation as to why a 27-year-old German pilot "intentionally" crashed the plane he was co-piloting, killing the other 149 people on-board. I put the word 'intentionally' in quotes here because it really is very, very hard to make sense of what humans mean when they use that word in this context.
Evidence collected at apartment didn’t include suicide note or indication of motive
The Germanwings co-pilot who appeared to intentionally crash an airliner into a French mountainside, killing himself and 149 passengers and crew, received a note from a doctor excusing him from work but apparently tore it up, a German prosecutor said.
The prosecutor said evidence collected in a search of the apartment of Andreas Lubitz didn't include a suicide note and gave no indication of a political or religious motive for his apparent decision to crash the plane.
“However, documents were confiscated that contained medical information indicating an existing medical treatment,” the Düsseldorf prosecutor said in a statement.
Documents in the apartment showed Mr. Lubitz received a note from his doctor excusing him from work for a period covering the day of the incident, according to the statement. Other such notes were also found...
And so on.
The more perceptive among you may have noticed that Big Brains go haywire all the time, often with disastrous and tragic consequences for other humans or other animals. If you are looking for a "motive" in this or similar cases, you can stop that foolishness right now.
In 2015 the Bad News keeps pouring in. The latest in a series of ominous reports is the early weakening of the AMOC, as Stephen Rahmstorf reports in What's going in the North Atlantic? at Real Climate. Look at that article to get the context for this quote.
It happens to be just that area for which climate models predict a cooling when the Gulf Stream System weakens (experts speak of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation or AMOC, as part of the global thermohaline circulation). That this might happen as a result of global warming is discussed in the scientific community since the 1980s – since Wally Broecker’s classical Nature article “Unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse?” Meanwhile evidence is mounting that the long-feared circulation decline is already well underway.
The weakening is "early" with respect to climate model predictions.
Climate models have long predicted such a slowdown – both the current 5th and the previous 4th IPCC report call a slowdown in this century “very likely”, which means at least 90% probability. When emissions continue unabated (RCP8.5 scenario), the IPCC expects 12% to 54% decline by 2100 (see also the current probabilistic projections of Schleussner et al. 2014)...
If our analysis is correct, then this indicates that climate models underestimate the weakening of the Atlantic circulation in response to global warming – probably because the flow in these models is too stable (see Hofmann and Rahmstorf 2009). Although these models predict a significant weakening for the future, they do not suggest this as early as the observations show it (see Fig. 2 of our paper). That the real flow may be more unstable than previously thought would be bad news for the future.
So now we know that the weakening is "already well underway," which would be "bad news for the future." I'm getting a little tired of climate models "underestimating" this or that, know what I mean?
... But [the UN report found that] those who did the least to cause climate change would be the first in the line of fire: the poor and the weak, and communities that were subjected to discrimination, the report found.
Scientists went to great lengths in the report to single out people and communities who would be most at risk of climate change, with detailed descriptions of locations and demographics.
"People who are socially, economically, culturally, politically, institutionally or otherwise marginalized are especially vulnerable to climate change," it said.
I always laugh when I read this kind of nonsense, for a couple of reasons. First, when did the poor not suffer the most in this best of all possible worlds? And second, this is a delusional story that rich people, usually well-off, liberal white people, like to tell themselves for lots of reasons we need not get into here.
You know, you might get the impression reading this blog that the Human Condition is fucked up beyond all repair. And if you look at things from a Flatland perspective, that's no doubt true.
But, really, just LISTEN to this tune. Is the Human Condition TOTALLY fucked up? I think not.
Historically, there's been a tight relationship between economic growth and the carbon dioxide emissions driving climate change. As the world's economy expands, we've built more power plants and factories and driven more cars and trucks. That's long meant burning more coal, gas, and oil.
If we ever hope to stop global warming, we'll have to sever that relationship — and figure out how to have economic growthwhile reducing emissions. (Alternatively, we could halt economic growth, but no one wants that.)
And that ends the discussion of economic growth in Plumer's post. He then goes into a long analysis of stuff which, superficially, looks very sophisticated to the average human but doesn't matter at all in so far as he skipped the only thing that matters in his 2nd paragraph.
Think about it this way—there are two variables in the phrase "decoupling growth (X) and emissions (Y)".
Humans are able to talk about Y, and do so endlessly to no effect. The vast majority of humans (>99.8%) are "unwilling" to talk about X. I put the word 'unwilling' in quotes because there is certainly something fishy about X being a taboo subject, excepting a few marginalized oddballs. And Plumer certainly wouldn't be writing for vox.com if he was one of those crackpots.
And if X is taboo, then Plumer's assertion that "alternatively, we could halt X, but no one wants [to halt X]" becomes incoherent.
Yo! Brad! If no one wants to halt X, or even discuss it, then what is it, exactly, you're saying we humans could do?
Makes ya' think, doesn't it? Where's that alien anthropologist when you need him?
Plumer's post also ends the DOTE discussion of growth and emissions. In the grand scheme of things, that discussion has been pointless, but I had some fun writing it all down.
Let's end on a positive note. Here is Snarky Puppy's Sleeper.
The International Energy Agency dropped a bombshell on Friday, announcing that—
Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) indicate that global emissions of carbon dioxide from the energy sector stalled in 2014, marking the first time in 40 years in which there was a halt or reduction in emissions of the greenhouse gas that was not tied to an economic downturn.
"This gives me even more hope that humankind will be able to work together to combat climate change, the most important threat facing us today," said IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol, recently named to take over from Maria van der Hoeven as the next IEA Executive Director.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide stood at 32.3 billion tonnes in 2014, unchanged from the preceding year. The preliminary IEA data suggest that efforts to mitigate climate change may be having a more pronounced effect on emissions than had previously been thought...
In the 40 years in which the IEA has been collecting data on carbon dioxide emissions, there have only been three times in which emissions have stood still or fallen compared to the previous year, and all were associated with global economic weakness: the early 1980's; 1992 and 2009. In 2014, however, the global economy expanded by 3%.
After the IEA announcement, there has been much celebrating by the usual suspects, the ones who believe that WE CAN HAVE OUR CAKE (achieve more growth) AND EAT IT TOO (decrease energy consumption and emissions).
Many aspects of Flatland show up in We must reclaim the climate change debate from the political extremes, an article by Mark Lynas published in The Guardian's environment section. In so far as I am a hopeless pedant, I saw fit to reprint it here on DOTE with some short but very enlightening commentary. This was fun to do, so I hope you find it as entertaining to read as I did to write.
First, we note that Lynas starts off with a common fallacy, more formally called the argument to moderation (Latin, argumentum ad temperantiam).
Climate change is real, caused almost entirely by humans, and presents a potentially existential threat to human civilization. Solving climate change does not mean rolling back capitalism, suspending the free market or stopping economic growth.
That is the fallacious mean (middle ground) Lynas will defend.
