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Monday, July 1, 2019

THE BEGINNING OF A THOUGHT


The two greatest problems facing the human race are, in order of their seriousness, global warming and the inequality of wealth and income.  About the first I have nothing new to say.  The threat is existential, the causes are known, the appropriate response is clear, and the failure of large segments of the plutocracy to respond appropriately would, if there were a God, damn them to eternal hellfire.

I have written at length about the second on this blog, most recently last December, drawing on the insights of Marx and the recent work of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman.  Piketty et al. make it statistically evident that capitalism is structurally organized to generate ever greater inequality, despite the contrary appearance of the three decades or so after the Second World War.

Nobody running for President has made this fundamental insight a part of his or her campaign, not even Bernie, for all his welcome animadversions against what Teddy Roosevelt called the malefactors of great wealth.  I am all for taxing the rich and redistributing the proceeds, something that we already do, of course, but such taxation does not in the slightest address the root causes of the income and wealth inequality central to capitalism.

Even to begin to think concretely and not merely formulaically about an alternative to the structure of capitalism is a task that would give a young radical pause, and I, alas, cannot be described as young by any contortion of ordinary English, but perhaps in the next day or two I will say a few words by way of introduction to the subject.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm distressed to see that you are falling into the trap of commenting on "global warming" without having spent time to understand the science. I would recommend Richard Lindzen of MIT, Roy Spencer of University of Alabama Huntsville, Judith Curry formerly chair of climate science department of Georgia Tech but "let go" when she turned from "insider" to "skeptic", and Roger Pielke Jr. who was hounded from his specialty in climate political policy
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Curry
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_A._Pielke_Jr.

First, a disclaimer: every climate scientist will agree that CO2 is a "greenhouse gas". (They will debate the term "greenhouse" and the role that CO2 plays, but they accept the basic idea.)

Where there is debate -- or should be debate -- is the role that CO2 plays. The doomsday cultists claim that CO2 is a "control knob" that determines warming. But in fact CO2 is fairly insignificant compared to H2O, a much more powerful "greenhouse" gas and far more prevalent in the atmosphere (something like 500 times more H2O than CO2).

The problem lies in climate "models". They are unvalidated and unverified (I used to build models of computer system performance so I'm very sensitive to how models can mislead and how assumptions can guide the results, so V&V, i.e. verificiation and validation, are extremely important.)

Please look at this web page:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/06/why-climate-models-run-hot/
especially at the graph entitled Tropical Mid-Tropospheric Temperature Variations Models vs Observations. The problem is that the "models" are not able to "predict" what has actually been observed. This despite being "tuned" and adjusted to "retrodict" periods in the past to try to fit them to the actual climate. The only model which is close to observations is the Russian INMCM4 model.

The models are "parameterized" since the complexity of a highly dynamic and chaotic physical system can't be captured by a digital simulation. Since cell size is quite crude, the behaviour of clouds are missing. The behaviour of ocean circulation is crudely represented. The result is a "model" which poorly represents measured global climate. But you never hear this discussed because "the science is settled" and the claim of "97% consensus". Both of these are preposterous and anti-scientific claims.

So, it is sad to see you joining the chorus of the latest doomsday cult! I've lived long enough to have gone through several of these pseudo-scientific episodes:
- the 1960s "Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich promising mass famines and collapse
- the 1970s Club of Rome with their book Limits to Growth claiming that resource depletion would doom earth within 20 years
- the 1980s fears over emergent diseases like hemorrhagic fevers, Marburg disease, dengue fever, ebola, etc.
- the 1990s Y2K and the end of civilization when our computers would stop running
and so forth. The new "flavour of the day" is "global warming" AKA "climate change", "global climate disruption", "climate catastrophe" etc.

I know you are old and wise. I fear you've been duped into the latest craze. Hopefully you will take the time to "read up" and learn that there is more to the story that what the literati, the journalists, the media "talking heads", and the idiot-savants like Greta Thunberg are telling us.

Anonymous said...

I forgot to mention... I do fully agree that income inequality is a great problem of today. But there are many others:
- the decline of civic discourse
- the failure of pragmatism in politics
- the revolution of "social media" which is destroying traditional media and seeding radical fanaticism with alt-news and propaganda
- the failure of democracy as it cedes power to populists and nationalists
- the disruption of the economy by "globalization" which has destroyed jobs in developed countries and shipped them to sweat shops in "developing" countries
- the destruction of unions
- the ever rising "credentialism" that is putting our youth onto an evering lengthening treadmill of "education" while at the same time there is ridulous rising costs for a university education
- the collapse of the medical system under manipulation of pricing by drug companies, the failure to control doctor and hospitalization costs, etc.
... and on and on.
The world is full of "doomsday" crises. It always has been. We muddle through. Having survived the "nuclear age" with threat of imminent incineration, I see this as just more of the same. We don't have lions, cave bears, etc. scaring the bejeezus out of us. We just have the modern versions of this age old problem.

Robert Paul Wolff said...

I freely admit that I am a creature of the consensus gentium on global warming. If you are correct that I have nothing to fear from global warming, then I shall be delighted.

Willard said...

Robert,

You might like the following matrix:

https://contrarianmatrix.wordpress.com/

Besides denial of basic scientific facts, it covers most luckwarm talking points.

For the sum of all the "but CAGW" which begs the question at hand, your guest is invited to submit his concerns on my twitter feed @nevaudit.

With my thanks in advance,

W

Howie said...

Could you live with the mixed regime as evident in New York or presumably California, both leaning Progressive?

Sonic said...

Anonymous sure seems... Suspicious. I appreciate that you've lived through several doomsday cults, but I've only lived through one. That's right, climate change has been an impending issue for almost as long as I have been. Clearly not the fad of the decade, as it enters its third or fourth now already. And the results seem consistent with what we expected.

Jim said...

Professor Wolff --

Despite the efforts by Anonymous to cast doubt upon the subject, climate change is indeed the greatest threat facing life as we know it today.


Turning to your final sentence: "Even to begin to think concretely and not merely formulaically about an alternative to the structure of capitalism is a task that would give a young radical pause..."reminds me of a statement attributed to Fredric Jameson: "Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism."


Capitalism has become so ingrained and accepted as the only feasible method of doing business that is has limited our ability to imagine alternatives. This is why climate change deniers exist. Accepting and confronting the full implications of climate change requires fundamentally altering "business as usual." There are many interests that do not want that to happen -- at any cost -- including millions of human and animal lives. Welcome to the Anthropocene.


-- Jim

Anonymous said...

Not to worry. Global warming will do us all in by 2050. The working classes will believe most of what Trump tells them, so real political change will not happen. Sit back and watch Sampson pull down the temple. And don't forget to dodge.

Anonymous said...

You forgot the highly granular and continuous, tech-enabled surveillance program that is being carried out by states and corporations, against the backdrop of which a climate driven planetary level extinction event might even appear as mercy.

L.B. said...

> Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.

You guys are funny. Nothing to imagine. It's been done already. At least once. And I don't mean the end of the world.

Jim said...

LB:

To paraphrase JHC in "Jesus Christ Superstar," I must be "shallow, thick, and slow." I'm a literal guy -- you gotta fill me in. Please explain.


-- Jim