Decline of the Empire

Millennial-Scale Earth System Sensitivity

A new paper in Nature by Carolyn Snyder called Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years comes to a startling conclusion—

... A comparison of the new temperature reconstruction with radiative forcing from greenhouse gases estimates an Earth system sensitivity of 9 degrees Celsius (range 7 to 13 degrees Celsius, 95 per cent credible interval) change in global average surface temperature per doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide over millennium timescales.

This result suggests that stabilization at today’s greenhouse gas levels may already commit Earth to an eventual total warming of 5 degrees Celsius (range 3 to 7 degrees Celsius, 95 per cent credible interval) over the next few millennia as ice sheets, vegetation and atmospheric dust continue to respond to global warming.

For reasons Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate explains, Carolyn Snyder's conclusion here is almost certainly wrong on the high side.

I recently posted a summary of why you can’t constrain ‘Earth System Sensitivity’ (ESS, the long term response of the climate system, including ice sheets, vegetation etc.) just by looking at the regression between the forcing from CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) over the ice age cycles. That regression has been looked at before, and Snyder (2016) updates that with her new (and slightly higher amplitude) temperature reconstruction. Unfortunately, she then associates this regression with the Earth System Sensitivity (which it is not) to get a value of ~9ºC for a doubling of CO₂.

In the previous post [same link as above], I outlined how the combination of carbon cycle feedbacks to the Milankovitch forcing and the climate system response to CO₂ gives rise to this correlation and that – by itself – it can’t be used to define the latter term. Furthermore, because the regression is being defined over ice age cycles where the biggest changes are related to the (now disappeared) North American and Fenno-Scandanavian ice sheets, the regression might well be much less for situations where only Greenland and West Antarctica are “in play”.

So, what do we think the ESS is, and how does that impact our view of committed warming today?

Good question, Gavin!

The Much-Anticipated Showdown

Tonight Hillary Clinton will square off against Donald Trump at Hofstra University on Long Insland. This is the first of three presidential debates.

It is estimated that this much-anticipated showdown will draw as many as 100 million viewers.

This morning a guy on National Public Radio suggested that if you wanted to know who "won" the debate, it would be best to watch it with the sound off.

To best determine the "winner" of this slugfest, I suggest it would be even better to watch it with both the sound and the screen off. Better yet, to achieve maximum effect, simply unplug your TV.

That's how I'm going to watch it 

What Makes The United States Special?

A while back I came across an article called Most Welfare Dollars Don’t Go Directly To Poor People Anymore (fivethiryeight, August 25, 2016). Let's cut to the chase.

The result [of Welfare "reform" in the 1990s] has been a dramatic shift of resources away from cash assistance and toward spending on other programs. In 1998, nearly 60 percent of welfare spending was on cash benefits, categorized as “basic assistance.” By 2014, it was only about one-quarter of TANF [Welfare] spending. That shift has happened despite a burgeoning economics literature suggesting that direct cash transfers are in many cases the most efficient tool to fight poverty.

So, welfare in the United States is fucked up (see the article for the gory details).

My reaction to that article was "well, of course welfare is fucked up. Everything in the United States is fucked up."

When I used the word "special" in the title, I didn't mean special in a good way. But there is a deeper question — what makes the United States so special? (at least among the developed nations).

That question arises because I believe humans are the same wherever you go. I think there is an identifiable human nature. I am a determinist. Cultural differences among nations shouldn't make much difference. And yet, when we look at the United States now, it seems clear that things that probably work well enough in other places (e.g., welfare programs in Europe) don't work at all in the United States. Why is this?

Sam Esmail Has A Lot Of Explaining To Do

Update — consider this an open thread. I'll be putting whatever I have to say in the comments. You should do the same.

This thread will be open for a month, though I'll probably write some things before that. As I've said, I'm pretty disgusted with humans right now.

— Dave

Outside of playing some guitar, the only thing I want to do today is watch the season 2 finale of Mr. Robot. I doubt that anybody reading DOTE gives a damn about Mr. Robot, but then again I don't care.

In so far as I am living in a very crazy world, and given that humans don't have the first clue about how batshit crazy they truly are, I feel perfectly justified in devoting this post to a TV show (videos below). 

Spoiler Alert!

The Doomer Hustle

Reader MP alerted me to Bloomberg's Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge, Wall Street's Renegade Blog (April 29, 2016). I assume DOTE readers are familiar with the site. Colin Lokey was one of the "Tyler Durdens" writing the content. Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is the well-known character from the cult movie Fight Club.

I'm going to quote only one section of Bloomberg's story.

Profit Motive

Despite holding itself out as a town crier for market angst, transcripts from Zero Hedge internal chat sessions provided by Colin Lokey reveal a focus on Web traffic by the Durdens.

Headlines are debated and a relentless publishing schedule maintained to keep readers sated. Lokey said the emphasis on profit—and what he considered political bias at the site—motivated him to quit. 

He pointed to the wealth of the Durdens as a factor. Daniel Ivandjiiski has a multimillion-dollar mansion in Mahwah, N.J., and Tim Backshall lives in a plush San Francisco suburb—not exactly reflections of [Brad] Pitt's anticapitalist icon.

“What you are reading at Zero Hedge is nonsense. And you shouldn’t support it,” Lokey wrote in an e-mail. “Two guys who live a lifestyle you only dream of are pretending to speak for you.”

Lokey adds: “Durden lives in a castle. If you’ve seen Fight Club, you know how ironic that is.”

A former “director of contributor success” at website Seeking Alpha, Lokey said he joined Zero Hedge for $6,000 a month and received an annual bonus of $50,000, earning more than $100,000 last year.

His salary helped pay the rent on a “very nice” condominium on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island, he said. Despite the compensation, he contends that he left because he disagreed with the site's editorial vision. “Reality checks are great. But Zero Hedge ceased to serve that public service years ago,” Lokey wrote. “They care what generates page views. Clicks. Money.”

Zero Hedge founder Ivandjiiski defended the site, adding that it's designed to be a for-profit entity. “Ultimately, the website makes money, and it’s profitable, which is also why we’ve never had to seek outside funding or any outside money—our only revenue is from advertising, always has been since day one,” he said.

“Obviously, every publisher’s mission is to maximize revenue and page views, and we think that we do it in a way that is appropriate.”

Obviously.

Macro-Economic Phlogiston

The phlogiston theory is an archaic scientific hypothesis, which stated that phlogiston, a fire-like element, is contained within things that are able to burn and is actually released during the burning process... Despite its [widespread] use, the theory could not explain many phenomena...
    — What Is Phlogiston?

Because of their lack of formal macro-economic training, or in spite of it, some people are able to make useful observations about the state of the U.S. economy. These observations are always data-based, even though in many cases there is good reason to believe that the data is flawed.

For example, we now know that income and wealth inequality is much worse than it was during the Golden Age after World War II.  And we now know that corporate CEOs made 949 times as much as the average American worker in 2014, not the previously reported 373 times as much. (More on this another time.)

We can observe that output growth (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) has slowed dramatically in recent decades, and especially in the last year. We can also observe that the weaker output growth becomes, the more devalued that variable becomes when the observer has a vested interest in making the economy look better than it actually seems to most workers. And we can almost certainly expect an October surprise after three straight quarters of anemic GDP growth.

(Note: I say that not because there is conspiracy to make the economy look better than it seems to most working Americans. I say that because human beings are fuck-ups, and that's the most fucked up that could happen 11 days before the election. You know, an unfortunately but timely application of lipstick on the pig.)

So we know some things at the macro-level. All the time, economists tell us how much better the future will be, even though in the recent past they have erred on the optimistic side almost all of the time.

What do macro-economists base these predictions on? What do macro-economists actually know?

Humans Will Believe Anything

Nearly 24 hours have passed since I posted yesterday's critique of the Census Bureau's rosy view of household median income (HMI). The huge, historic leap (5.2%) in HMI was simply not credible on the face of it. There had to be something going on. In fact, it turned out there were several interacting factors which inflated the headline HMI number.

(Also, see this important New York Times article from August, 2016, which I incorporated into yesterday's post. That article describes the Sentier results I discussed yesterday.)

If you do the right Google searches, you will find only two reports critiquing the Census report—mine and the New York Post article I cited. If you do a Google News search, you will find only the New York Post article because Google doesn't consider DOTE to be a news source.

Today you will find one uncritical discussion after another celebrating the Good News. The dubious Census report was swallowed hook, line and sinker without debate. 

It doesn't matter that all measurements of things like median household income are bound to be flawed, not least because humans with hidden agendas are doing the measuring.

What matters is that the historically standard measurement was modified to make the results look better than they would have been under the previous standard. Moreover, extraordinary factors (e.g.,  very low energy prices leading to very low inflation) further distorted the Census results, given their standard method for accounting for inflation (see yesterday's post).

Importantly, those extraordinary factors went unacknowledged by the Census Bureau and those in the media evaluating its household median income results.

With those caveats in mind, let's call previous, undistorted standard measurements "reality" (even if it is relative, as it always is).

Let's ask a simple question — how can we explain this astonishing disparity between reality and human perceptions of it? 

Well, it's not that we haven't seen this kind of thing before. That's what Flatland is all about. But let's be specific—

• Humans love good news. More than anything, humans want to believe that they're not fucking up. You can throw out the old adage which says if something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. If the news is good, human credulity is unbounded. If the news is good, humans will believe anything.

• For those with a vested interest in the status quo, or those with a particular political bias, confirmation bias makes it self-evident that the good news must be true, no matter how implausible the news is on the face of it.

• Humans automatically (unconsciously) submit or defer to authority. The modern incarnation of authority is expertise. The sacred Census Bureau represents authority in this context. 

• Anyone rejecting the good news, or questioning it, risks social ostracism or marginalization. Doing so poses a subtle existential threat to the existing social order. So it doesn't happen very often. Regarding marginalization, skeptical voices will simply be ignored (filtered). Under this interpretation, me and the New York Post guy are invisible.

This list is not complete, but that's what I've got for you today. 

Deconstructing Median Income Bullshit

When I learned yesterday, 55 days before the 2016 election, that the Census Bureau and the White House had announced an historic leap in real (inflation-adjusted) median household income, my bullshit detector went into the red, went right off the scale and then ceased functioning. I'll have to get a new one 

Look at that jump! The biggest since 1967 when record keeping began.

How fucking likely is that?

The Backfire Effect

American's elites are all in with Hillary, yet in the polls she leads Donald Trump on average by 2.4 percentage points. How can this be? 

Donald keeps telling one outrageous lie after another. Then the lame-stream elite media does a bunch of fact-checking to expose the lies. They say, "See? He's lying!" That's supposed to convince people to vote for Hillary, but it doesn't.

Well, this is politics, which is tribal conflict. And there's a psychological defense mechanism—it's an evolutionary feature, not a bug —called the "backfire effect". When their tribal identify is put at risk, which poses an existential threat in Flatland terms, humans filter threatening information. The more our elites proclaim that Trump is an irresponsible liar, the stronger his support becomes within his political tribe. Presented with facts in this situation, people do not change their minds; they dig in.

And there is more. Americans don't trust our mainstream elite media. In fact, the vast majority of Americans think our elite media types are akin to pond scum. People are dumb, but they are not so dumb as to believe that the Washington Post or ABC News has their best interests at heart. So the strong, persistent drumbeat for Hillary in the media strengthens the backfire effect. If people you don't trust constantly tell you to do something, you are more likely to do the opposite. 

Finally, there is the truth about our situation here in God's Country.

Trump gets specific facts wrong all the time, but on the big issues that matter, he is right. Trump says the political system is corrupt. Of course it is. Trump says the economy is rigged. Of course it is. Trump's supporters know where Hillary's real interests lie.

I believe it is this last factor that is playing the decisive role in making this election close.

Defiant Realism

Writing in Adbusters, Sam Alexander wrote a piece called The pain you feel on September 6, 2016.  Morris Berman quoted Alexander's post approvingly on his blog Dark Ages America, which led me to the original. Alexander's post reflects in part Berman's "dual process" theory of the future (and read here.)

Here's Alexander's short post—

I was drifting through cyberspace recently, not really absorbing the words in front of me, when I came across a sentence that tripped me up, so to speak, and forced me to pay attention.

That sentence read: “The pain you feel is capitalism dying.”

Alexander is quoting this analysis, which appeared on medium.com earlier this year.

The writer went on to explain that it hurts because we are inside this dying system, we are inside this unsustainable form of civilization while it is undermining the life support system we call Earth, and what is perhaps most unsettling about this is that it’s not yet clear what comes next; nor is it obvious that the global problems we face even have smooth, painless solutions. The hour is dark and a bright new dawn is not guaranteed.

The words left an impression on me I think because they describe that strange, existential ache that we probably have all felt at some time or another, when contemplating how we should live our lives in a world that seems so tragically off track.

I am referring here to the emotional or what one might even call the spiritual challenge of living in an age of crisis; of living in an age when the myths and stories that have shaped and grounded our cultures and even our identities have begun to breakdown, unsettling our sense of purpose and place in a fast-changing world.

That's a nice summary of what life in the early 21st century feels like. And now, Alexander provides the obligatory hope (emphasis added).