Matt Ridley's Blog, page 18

Amara's Law

My Times column on Amara's Law:

 

Alongside a great many foolish things that have been said about the future, only one really clever thing stands out. It was a “law” coined by a Stanford University computer scientist and long-time head of the Institute for the Future by the name of Roy Amara. He said that we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short run, but we underestimate it in the long run. Quite when he said it and in what context is not clear but colleagues suggest he was articulating it from some time in the 1960s or 1970s.

Along comes an invention or a discovery and soon we are wildly excited about the imminent possibilities that it opens up for flying to the stars or tuning our children’s piano-playing genes. Then, about ten years go by and nothing much seems to happen. Soon the “whatever happened to . . .” cynics are starting to say the whole thing was hype and we’ve been duped. Which turns out to be just the inflexion point when the technology turns ubiquitous and disruptive.

Amara’s Law implies that between the early disappointment and the later underestimate there must be a moment when we get it about right; I reckon these days it is 15 years down the line. We expect too much of an innovation in the first ten years and too little in the first 20, but get it about right at 15. Think about the internet. In William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, he foresaw a world of “cyberspace” in which every computer in the world was linked, with profound effects on society. This looked a bit overrated 15 years years later, when the dotcom bubble burst. The Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote in 1998 that “by 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s”. He went on: “As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly.”

Amara’s Law has a habit of trapping people into such foolhardy remarks after the initial hype subsides, but just before the second wave.

Much the same cycle happened with the human genome project, which released a first draft sequence in 2000, with simultaneous press conferences at the White House and 10 Downing Street. “It is now conceivable that our children’s children will know the term cancer only as a constellation of stars,” said Bill Clinton. It was “a breakthrough that takes humankind across a frontier and into a new era”, said Tony Blair. I cringed at some of that. Sure enough, ten years later, as genomics delivered relatively little of medical use, there were plenty of critics saying it was all hype. However, as gene therapy and gene editing start to tackle cancer, chronic diseases and even ageing, the tide is turning.

The cycle was probably slower in the past. The computer was invented at the end of the Second World War and its potential was not lost on people. By the 1970s it had become a bit of a joke, a chuntering beast that lurked in the basement of big corporations and made life complicated for the rest of us. It appeared that the computer revolution might even be running out of steam. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” said the president and chief executive of one of the world’s most successful computer companies, Ken Olsen of Digital Equipment Corporation, in 1977. Today, personal computers are not just in our homes but in our pockets.

Going farther back, the development of electricity in the 19th century seemed to promise so much: light bulbs, dynamos, turbines and motors were all perfected by 1885 but it was not until the early decades of the 20th century that electricity began to transform not just lighting but factories as well.

A century earlier, the first steam locomotive was developed by Richard Trevithick in 1802. The poet, physician and inventor Erasmus Darwin had written a stanza full of hyperbole in 1791: “Soon shall thy arm, unconquer’d steam! Afar/Drag the slow barge, or drive the rapid car;/Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear/The flying-chariot through the fields of air.” Yet, by the time George Stephenson started assembling his Blücher engine at Killingworth colliery in 1814, the technology was generally considered a busted flush: neat idea, not really practical. Interest in steam locomotion had waned. Then Stephenson’s locomotives unleashed us all into a world of unprecedented speed.

The Amara hype cycle is unfolding today with respect to machine learning. Artificial intelligence has been heralded as imminent for a couple of decades. The neural networks and parallel processors that are today enabling computers to learn from deep draughts of data have been around in rudimentary form since the 1960s. However, those who rushed into the field expecting to found great enterprises generally ended up disappointed as the “AI winter” closed down their hopes; they slunk back into philosophy departments of universities.

Today that looks like changing. Thanks to a new kind of chip invented by Andrew Ng, called the graphics processing unit, new kinds of algorithms perfected by Geoffrey Hinton, and a new cornucopia of data, deep-learning programs seem to be on the brink of something special. The success of London-based Deep Mind’s AlphaGo, a program that learns how to win the immensely complicated game of Go without being taught, and humiliates world champions in front of huge television audiences, suggests that something big is afoot.

Self-driving cars are in the early stages of an Amara hype cycle. I am repeatedly being told that lorry drivers and Uber cabbies will soon all be redundant. I would almost guarantee that ten years from now there will be a rash of reports about how the reality has failed to match the forecasts, that there are more jobs for drivers then ever and the self-driving car may be a lot farther away than we thought. I will venture that ten years after that such pessimism will look foolish as autonomous vehicles suddenly start popping up everywhere.

Forecasting technological change is almost impossibly hard and nobody — yes, nobody — is an expert at it. The only sensible course is to be wary of the initial hype but wary too of the later scepticism.

 

Footnote:

 

Given that this concept is often misattributed, eg to Arthur C Clarke, it may be useful to note what Paul Saffo told me about the origin of Roy Amara's observation:

 

Roy was my boss for well over a decade beginning in 1984, and a close friend until he passed away in the early 2000s.  He first articulated the idea long before I first met him, so I expect the first instance is buried in a report from some time in the 1960s or maybe the 1970s...I am certain I have it written it down in several places in my research journals from the mid-1980s as well, but that of course doesn’t qualify as publication.

Just as Gordon Moore didn’t name Moore’s law, Roy is not the person who named the observed expectation/diffusion lag  “Amara’s Law.”  He was a restrained and modest man and always avoided tooting his own horn.  He was always a bit uncomfortable having the phenomenon named as “his” law. Which for me is a sign of true intellectual integrity.  There is nothing more tedious than people naming laws after them selves.

Also like Gordon Moore, Roy considered it more an observation (and thus a heuristic) than an actual law.  He didn’t feel any ownership of it, as he saw it as an obvious observed phenomena. Moreover, the observation pops up in vaguer forms all the way back to the early 1900s in various forms. In terms of modern history, the idea is a fixture in diffusion studies going back at least as far as Ev Rogers 1st ed of “Diffusion of Innovations” in the early 1960s . Ev taught at Stanford in the mid-70s and then was at USC in the ’80’s - ’90’s.  He of course is the person who coined the brilliant but much-abused term “early adopters” and thus he wrote and spoke at length about the expectation/diffusion lag in his own way.

Roy’s unique contribution is that he articulated it crisply and clearly and explicitly tied the phenomenon to the domain of business forecasting. 

 

Britian's population growth requires building more houses

My Times column on demography, immigration and the building of houses, roads and runways:

 

The Office for National Statistics says it expects Britain’s population to grow slightly more slowly than it thought three years ago, partly because of lower immigration after Brexit and partly because of slowing increases in life expectancy. But it still forecasts the figure to pass 70 million in a little more than ten years from now. That is not necessarily a bad thing, unless we remain as reluctant to build new houses, roads, schools and hospitals as we currently are. Britain can thrive as a dense city-state, a big Singapore, but not if it hates development. Openness to immigration and antipathy to building cannot both persist.

The ONS may be wrong, of course. In 1965 it expected that there would be 76 million Britons by 2000. Then the birth rate collapsed and immigration slowed, so by 1994 the statisticians were expecting a population of just over 60 million and falling by 2020. Ten years later they were back to projecting an acceleration upwards and by 2014 they predicted 74 million by 2039 and rising. The forecasts of demographers are little better than those of soothsayers gazing at the entrails of chickens.

Still, we are adding about half a million people a year, most of which is from net immigration and the higher birth rate of immigrants. Of the 1,447 people that Britain added every day in the 12 months to the end of June last year, roughly 529 were births minus deaths, 518 were net arrivals from the European Union, and 537 net arrivals from elsewhere, minus 137 departing British citizens. Given such a flow, our unemployment rate of 4.3 per cent and employment rate of 75.1 per cent are remarkable, if not miraculous. We are one of the world’s great workplaces, which, of course, is why people come.

A recent paper from the think tank Civitas, Britain’s Demographic Challenge: The implications of the UK’s rapidly increasing population, by Lord (Robin) Hodgson makes the point that we are not facing up to the implications of the rate of population expansion. He takes the previous ONS projections for four similar-sized towns — Dundee, Norwich, Stockton-on-Tees and Guildford — and calculates how much land must be built on to accommodate the expected increase in population to 2039. Taking into account not just housing, but roads, shops, offices, schools and such, he arrives at the conclusion that Guildford and Norwich will need to build on at least 65 acres every year, Stockton 55 and Dundee 40. That’s several fields a year.

Britain is already more densely populated than France, Italy and Germany but only in the southeast and the northwest of England do we begin to approach the population density of the Netherlands. Yet Schiphol airport has six runways, to Heathrow’s two, Dutch roads are far less congested, and the price of a flat outside a city centre is almost 30 per cent lower than in Britain. What are we doing wrong?

Though a densely populated country, Britain is not in any sense running out of land. Only about 7 per cent of the land area is classified as urban, rising to almost 11 per cent in England. But of that 11 per cent a great deal is still not concrete: gardens, parks, water and so forth. So the actual paved-over percentage, even just in England, is about 2.27 per cent according to the National Ecosystem Assessment in 2012, and more like 1 per cent for Britain as a whole. This is why a flight over southern England, let alone the Pennines, gives a very different impression from a car journey through the ribbon development along the roads: there is vastly more farmland and woodland (13 per cent of Britain and rising) than concrete.

Yet every time somebody wants to build a bypass, or housing development, let alone a runway, there is fury from nimbys and their lobby groups. Green belts, national parks, areas of outstanding natural beauty and other designations, together with planning delays and inquiries, constrain and increase the price of every attempt to provide the annual half a million extra Britons with houses, roads and schools.

What is more, I am guessing that the very people who rail against building development are more often than not the people who are most enthusiastic about immigration. The educated and wealthy tend to dominate nimbyism and also to dominate the argument for more immigration, whether out of admirable compassion for refugees or for good economic reasons. Whereas the people who most object to immigration, the urban working class, on the whole tend not to join the protest groups that oppose development. I am not taking sides here, just pointing out an irony.

There is no escape route in saying you are in favour of development but only on derelict or unused urban land. It is fanciful to think that the demands of the rising population can be met from “brownfield” sites alone. Fields and woods will have to go too. A recent paper by John Myers (founder of the group London Yes In My Back Yard) for the Adam Smith Institute, called Yimby: how to end the housing crisis, boost the economy and win more votes, recommends sensible reforms to get people behind sensitive development, mainly by giving streets and parishes control over their destinies. He estimates that a building boom to deliver more housing could raise GDP per capita by a gigantic 25-30 per cent.

Environmentalists were once more honest about this. It is often forgotten just how right-wing the roots of the environmental movement are, especially on population and immigration. Take the book that more than any other defined the birth of the environmental movement as a political force in Britain. It was called A Blueprint for Survival and it began life as a special issue of The Ecologist magazine in 1972. Signed by the great and the good of the green movement and written by Edward Goldsmith, it sold 750,000 copies. It called on the world’s governments to “declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigration”.

This is misanthropic, and unrealistic, but at least they had the courage of their convictions. They wanted to save the world, or the country, from (other) people, so they wanted fewer people. Those of us, and at least partly I include myself here, who like the preservation of all green spaces but also like welcoming immigrants should surely recognise that we are being hypocritical. We cannot have both.

The glyphosate scandal

My Times column on the scientific and legal scandal behind the attempt to ban a weedkiller.

 

Bad news is always more newsworthy than good. The widely reported finding that insect abundance is down by 75 per cent in Germany over 27 years was big news, while, for example, the finding in May that ocean acidification is a lesser threat to corals than had been thought caused barely a ripple. The study, published in the leading journal Nature, found that corals’ ability to make skeletons is “largely independent of changes in seawater carbonate chemistry, and hence ocean acidification”. But good news is no news.

And bad news is big news. The German insect study, in a pay-to-publish journal, may indeed be a cause for concern, but its findings should be treated with caution, my professional biologist friends tell me. It did not actually compare the same sites over time. Indeed most locations were only sampled once, and the scientists used mathematical models to extract a tentative trend from the inconsistent sampling.

Greens were quick to use the insect study to argue for a ban on the widely used herbicide glyphosate, also known as Roundup, despite no evidence for a connection. Glyphosate is made by Monsanto and sometimes used in conjunction with genetically modified crops.

Their campaign comes to a head this Wednesday in Brussels, where an expert committee of the European Commission will decide whether to ban glyphosate. The European parliament has already voted to do so, though its vote carries no weight. The committee will probably defer a decision until December, amid signs that the commission is getting fed up with the way French politicians in particular demand a ban in public then argue against it in private.

The entire case against glyphosate is one “monograph” from an obscure World Health Organisation body called the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which concluded that glyphosate might cause cancer at very high doses. It admitted that by the same criteria, sausages and sawdust should also be classified as carcinogens.

Indeed, pound for pound coffee is more carcinogenic than the herbicide, with the big difference that people pour coffee down their throats every day, which they don’t glyphosate. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was recently found to contain glyphosate at a concentration of up to 1.23 parts per billion. At that rate a child would have to eat more than three tonnes of ice cream every day to reach the level at which any health effect could be measured.

The IARC finding is contradicted by the European Food Safety Authority as well as the key state safety agencies in America, Australia and elsewhere. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment looked at more than 3,000 studies and found no evidence of any risk to human beings at realistic doses: carcinogenic, mutagenic, neurotoxic or reproductive. Since glyphosate is a molecule that interferes with a metabolic process found in all plants but no animals, this is hardly surprising.

Meanwhile, glyphosate has huge environmental benefits for gardeners and farmers. In particular, it is an alternative to the destructive practice of ploughing to control weeds. It allows no-till agriculture, a burgeoning practice that preserves soil structure, moisture and carbon content, enabling worms and insects to flourish, improving drainage and biodiversity while allowing the high-yield farming that is essential if we are to feed humanity without cultivating more land. Organic farmers rely on frequent tillage.

How did the IARC paper come to its alarmist conclusion? Well, we now know, thanks to Reuters, which reported that IARC prepared a draft which somebody altered in ten different places. “In each case, a negative conclusion about glyphosate leading to tumors was either deleted or replaced with a neutral or positive one.”

Last week, The Times reported how the scientist who advised the IARC to classify glyphosate as carcinogenic received $160,000 from law firms suing Monsanto on behalf of cancer victims. Christopher Portier began advising one of the firms about two months before IARC’s decision on glyphosate. He said that he had been hired to advise on an unrelated matter and his contract to advise on glyphosate was dated nine days after the IARC announcement in 2015.

Dr Portier has denied that his advice was influenced by financial interest. He told The Times that he “probably should have” declared his links with the law firms in an open letter sent to the European health commissioner urging him to disregard the European Food Safety Authority’s finding before he did so.

The Corporate European Observatory, which claims that it is in the business of “exposing the power of corporate lobbying in the EU”, nevertheless rushed to the defence of Dr Portier. It argued that reports about the scientist should be seen as “outright attempts at character assassination”. 

As David Zaruk of the Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, replied: “You forgot to mention Portier's…belief that he had no conflict of interest working for the Environmental Defense Fund [an anti-pesticide lobby group].”

Here is Zaruk's version of events:

This blog is based on statements in Christopher Portier’s deposition in the liability litigation hearings related to the cases against Monsanto’s Roundup (commonly known as the “Monsanto Papers”). Portier was the external special adviser to the IARC working group that prepared their famous “glyphosate is probably carcinogenic” decision.  This exposé will highlight the following information:

During the same week that IARC had published its opinion on glyphosate’s carcinogenicity, Christopher Portier signed a lucrative contract to be a litigation consultant for two law firms preparing to sue Monsanto on behalf of glyphosate cancer victims.


This contract has remunerated Portier for at least 160,000 USD (until June, 2017) for initial preparatory work as a litigation consultant (plus travel).


This contract contained a confidentiality clause restricting Portier from transparently declaring this employment to others he comes in contact with. Further to that, Portier has even stated that he has not been paid a cent for work he’s done on glyphosate.


It became clear, in emails provided in the deposition, that Portier’s role in the ban-glyphosate movement was crucial. He promised in an email to IARC that he would protect their reputation, the monograph conclusion and handle the BfR and EFSA rejections of IARC’s findings.


Portier admitted in the deposition that prior to the IARC glyphosate meetings, where he served as the only external expert adviser, he had never worked and had no experience with glyphosate.

I am still too shocked to know where to start!

And here is Portier's response to my inquiries:

"All of the letters I wrote concerning the scientific quality of the reviews by EFSA, EChA and the US EPA have been done on my own time, using my own resources, and written by myself or in collaboration with my co-authors. Where appropriate, I have declared my conflict of interest and I can provide you with details of this as appropriate.

When I was asked to speak with the EC Health Commissioner, I notified his staff that I was working with the law firm, and the subject of that work, but that I was coming as an expert academic scientist to explain the differences between the IARC review and the EFSA review along with my colleagues.  They asked all of us to register on the EC Transparency Registry, so I did.  However, a few days later, they concluded that I did not need to register and informed me they would be removing my name from the registry.  The record of this is available here…  https://lobbyfacts.eu/representative/a499b84a26c7409ca0fbc4acd9776ccf/c-portier-consultations.  As you can see, I am not in the registry currently, but I was on it on December 21, 2015. So, the first date I notified the EC Commissioners office about my working with a law firm on glyphosate would have been before December 21, 2015.  As of this date, I had spent less than 4 hours working for the law firm.

Both my recent letters to President Juncker (disclosure after my signature) and my testimony at the European Parliament (slide 2) disclose this arrangement.  I also made the disclosure in my 2016 paper in JECH (attached) And I disclosed it in advance to the EU Parliament staffer when I was asked to participant. I also disclosed it to the EPA staffer in advance of the comments I sent to them.

As to the contractual agreement I have with a U.S. law firm, in 2015 and 2016, I did approximately 30 hours of work in total for the firm.  That translates to less than 1.5 hours per month.  The remuneration I received that was asked about in Monsanto's deposition of me was almost entirely earned since March of this year when I was asked to be an expert witness in a U.S. court case on glyphosate.  This expert work required me to do a thorough review of all of the available evidence, to read all of the epidemiology, toxicology and genotoxicity studies, and to reanalyze most of the studies I could re-analyze based on the availability of the data. Indeed, in this work I even identified tumors in the animal studies not identified in the EFSA, EChA or EPA evaluations.  This took more than 2 months of me working full time.  If you care to read the 250 page expert report, it is available below along with the full deposition:

https://usrtk.org/pesticides/mdl-monsanto-glyphosate-cancer-case-key-documents-analysis/

It also required me to spend time and effort to respond to the Expert Reports by Monsanto’s experts (7 of them) which took a few weeks of my time.  So, to be clear, the comments I sent to EFSA, EChA, EPA were not done at the behest of the law firm, and in fact preceded the report I wrote as an expert witness in this one case.

It is important to realise that Europe banning glyphosate would open up a litigation bonanza in the US. Bounty-hunting law firms are in cahoots with environmental NGOs, to bring them business putting companies under pressure based on the theory that barely detectable doses of chemicals might do harm. Johnson & Johnson faces claims over the alleged carcinogenicity of talcum powder, for instance.

The technique, says David Zaruk, is to “manipulate public perception, create fear or outrage by co-operating with activists, gurus and NGOs, find a corporate scapegoat and litigate the hell out of them”. The glyphosate story is a scandal, of the kind that would be front-page news if it happened in industry, rather than a branch of WHO. But the BBC has not covered the Reuters story. Indeed, its presenter Chris Packham campaigns to get glyphosate banned. WHO itself shows no sign of investigating, although the US Congress, a major funder of IARC, is starting to take an interest.

The episode lifts the lid on a questionable network of activist scientists, NGOs, and financiers, not to mention useful-idiot politicians. Scientists raise a scare, lawyers sue on the back of it, bureaucrats give themselves work, all profit. Cancer victims are misled, consumers deceived, farmers’ livelihoods destroyed and environmental benefits undone. But who cares if there is money to be made?

Note: I have never been paid by Monsanto.

How to turn fishermen into conservationists

My recent Times column on Britain's opportunity for fisheries reform post Brexit:

 

A richly abundant sea fish population is one of the great wonders of the world that my generation has rarely seen. Last week I was lucky enough to be aboard a boat off California, surrounded by five humpback whales, more than 2,000 common dolphins, plus hundreds of sea lions and shearwaters all gorging on anchovies. There is no reason that properly managed British waters could not be as healthy and diverse as this.

Among the few certainties of Brexit, one is that we will need a new, bespoke, British fisheries policy. The prime minister has confirmed that we will be leaving the Common Fisheries Policy. The fishing industry, though a small part of the economy, is highly symbolic, having been cheaply betrayed on entry into the European Union, when we donated to our EU partners the chance to fish a vast sea area.

On leaving, Britain will control not only its 12-mile territorial waters, but also its 200-mile exclusive economic zone. This is a golden opportunity to learn from the management of fisheries around the world and design a system of exploiting our fish that is sustainable, conservationist and profitable.

Michael Gove, the environment secretary, is shortly to announce his preference for how we do this. His starting point should be recognition of the failure of the Common Fisheries Policy approach, so that we do not replicate its shortcomings. The European Union takes decisions on how many fish of a particular species can be caught and where, for an entire continent’s waters, usually late at night in Brussels and based on data that are deficient and six months out of date.

The result has been chronic overfishing and a scandalously wasteful discarding of the “wrong” species of fish for which a boat does not have quota, but which it cannot avoid catching. In an attempt to remedy this, the EU is now about to ban discarding by ensuring that quotas count what is caught, rather than just what is landed. The result will be perverse, as recent pilots demonstrated.

In 2013 one family business attempted to replicate a catch-quota, discard-ban fishery. In only five weeks the vessels had to call off the trial as it was impossible to keep fishing legally. Hake stocks were much higher than officialdom thought, so the vessels’ hake allocation was used quickly and they could not source more quota — they estimated that two vessels alone could have used the entire British North Sea hake allocation.

This “choke” species problem (in which the first species to hit quota limit stops all fishing for other species) is peculiarly hard to deal with in British waters, where most trawlers will be fishing in a rich diversity of different species: cod, haddock, hake, whiting, prawns and more. It is the reason that Britain may not be able to emulate Iceland, the Falklands and New Zealand in their method of fishery regulation.

They operate the ITQ system, or “individual transferable quotas”. A total sustainable catch is decided on, with scientific advice, and then divided among the fishing fleet according to each vessel’s owned share. That share can be bought or sold, so every participant has skin in the game and vested interest in increasing the overall quota — by fishing responsibly, policing others’ behaviour and detecting pirates.

Such ITQs work well in Iceland and the Falklands. A vital ingredient is rapid reaction to the latest data, shutting down a fishery that is getting overfished and releasing extra quota in one that is richer than expected: no CFP-like waiting for bureaucrats to meet. However, ITQs work poorly in mixed-species areas where boats cannot cleanly catch a quota of one species. They also tend to concentrate ownership of quota in the hands of a few large owners — something that is creating pressure for reform in Iceland at present. Also, Britain effectively already operates a de facto ITQ system in the way it administers its EU quota share.

The alternative method of regulation is “effort-based”. In this system the government would give each vessel a limited number of days at sea, based on an estimate of how much would be caught. As long ago as 2005 Owen Paterson MP, then the shadow fisheries minister, recommended this system after an exhaustive study of fisheries policies around the world. He is again pushing it, as are many fishermen who see it as a way of allowing more operators to remain independent in the industry: good for the economy of ports.

The big environmental organisations are sceptical. They see effort-based regulation as licensing a sort of short-lived free-for-all in which boats dash out to collect as much as they can of whatever species with scant regard to the balance of the ecosystem — a “race to fish”. However, the advance of technology has changed this. With transponders on boats and nets recording depth, temperature and location precisely, it is now possible to track vessels minute by minute.

The “race to fish” can be discouraged by “flexible catch composition” percentages, in which vessels must try to catch a balanced catch composition of species. Instead of having to discard the “wrong” species, vessels could retain the fish in exchange for a loss of time equivalent to the value of the fish. Conversely, vessels could get extra time at sea with conservation credits earned by using more selective gear.

The result would be a balanced harvest of a slice of species. Rather than imposing a bureaucratic, rigid system upon the dynamic marine environment, it would turn fishing crews into self-financed conservation teams, giving continuous data on fish abundance and distribution. Discard-free, the systems would enable Britain to fulfil her international obligation under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, while letting large and small owners prosper to the benefit of coastal communities.

I think technology may have now tipped the balance in favour of “days at sea” in the British, mixed-species seas. There is no reason that a fishery cannot be improved by the digital revolution, just as a factory can be. But there is an easy way to find out if I am right: pilots. Mr Gove should commission trials of both ITQs and effort-control in a couple of different fisheries or sea areas during 2018, and see which one works best.

 

The curse of good intentions

My Times column on how intentions are taken to matter more than what works:

 

The curse of modern politics is an epidemic of good intentions and bad outcomes. Policy after policy is chosen and voted on according to whether it means well, not whether it works. And the most frustrated politicians are those who keep trying to sell policies based on their efficacy, rather than their motives. It used to be possible to approach politics as a conversation between adults, and argue for unfashionable but effective medicine. In the 140-character world this is tricky (I speak from experience).

The fact that it was Milton Friedman who said “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results” rather proves the point. He was one of the most successful of all economists in getting results in terms of raising living standards, yet is widely despised today by both the left and centre as evil because he did not bother to do much virtue signalling.

The commentator James Bartholomew popularised the term “virtue signalling” for those who posture empathetically but emptily. “Je suis Charlie” (but I won’t show cartoons of the prophet), “Refugees welcome” (but not in my home) or “Ban fossil fuels” (let’s not talk about my private jet). You see it everywhere. The policies unveiled at the Conservative Party conference show that the party is aware of this and (alas) embracing it. On student fees, housing costs and energy bills, the Tories proposed symbolic changes that would do nothing to solve the underlying problem, indeed might make them worse in some cases, but which at least showed they cared. I doubt it worked. They ended up sounding like pale imitations of Labour, or doing political dad-dancing.

“Our election campaign portrayed us as a party devoid of values,” said Robert Halfon MP in June.

“The Labour Party now has circa 700,000 members that want nothing from the Labour Party but views and values they agree with,” lamented Ben Harris-Quinney of the Bow Group last week. I think that what politicians mean by “values” is “intentions”.

The forgiving of good intentions lies behind the double standard by which we judge totalitarians. Whereas fascists are rightly condemned in schools, newspapers and social media as evil, communists get a much easier ride, despite killing more people. “For all its flaws, the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big,” read a New York Times headline last month.

“For all its flaws, Nazi Germany did help bring Volkswagen and BMW to the car-buying public,” replied one wag on Twitter.

Imagine anybody getting away with saying of Mussolini or Franco what John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn said of Fidel Castro or Hugo Chávez. The reason for this double standard is the apparently good intentions of communist dictators: unlike Nazis, communists were at least trying to make a workers’ paradise; they just got it wrong. Again and again and again.

Though Jeremy Corbyn is a leading exponent, elevating intentions over outcomes is not entirely a monopoly of the left. It is something that the coalition government kept trying, in emulation of Tony Blair. Hugging huskies and gay marriage were pursued mainly for the signal they sent, rather than for the result they achieved. (Student loans, to be fair, were the opposite.) Indeed, George Osborne’s constant talk of austerity, while increasing spending in real terms, was an example of the gap between intention and outcome, albeit less sugar-coated.

I can draw up a list as long as your arm of issues where the road to failure is paved with counterproductive benevolence. Gordon Brown’s 50p top tax rate brought in less tax from the richest. Banning foxhunting has led to the killing of more foxes. Opposition to badger culls made no ecological sense, for cattle, hedgehogs, people — or badger health. Mandating a percentage of GDP for foreign aid was a virtuous gesture that causes real inefficiency and corruption — and (unlike private philanthropy) also tended to transfer money from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

Or take organic farming, which has been shown repeatedly to produce trivial or zero health benefits, while any environmental benefits are grossly outweighed by the low yields that mean it requires taking more land from nature. Yet the BBC’s output on farming is dominated by coverage of the 2 per cent of farming that is organic, and is remorselessly obsequious. Why? Because organic farmers say they are trying to be nice to the planet.

My objection to wind farms is based on the outcome of the policy, whereas most people’s support is based largely on the intention. There they stand, 300ft tall, visibly advertising their virtue as signals of our commitment to devotion to Gaia. The fact that each one requires 150 tonnes of coal to make, that it needs fossil fuel back-up for when the wind is not blowing, that it is subsidised disproportionately by poor people and the rewards go disproportionately to rich people, and that its impact on emissions is so small as to be unmeasurable — none of these matter. It’s the thought that counts.

The Paris climate accord is one big virtue-signalling prayer, whose promises, if implemented, would make a difference in the temperature of the atmosphere in 2100 so small it is practically within the measuring error. But it’s the thought that counts. Donald Trump just does not care.

One politician who has always refused to play the intention game is Nigel Lawson. Rather than rest on the laurels of his political career, he has devoted his retirement to exposing the gap between rhetoric and reality in two great movements: European integration and climate change mitigation. In his book An Appeal to Reason, he pointed out that on the UN’s official forecasts, climate change, unchecked, would mean the average person will be 8.5 times as rich in 2100 as today, rather than 9.5 times if we stopped the warming. And to achieve this goal we are to punish the poor of today with painful policies? This isn’t “taking tough decisions”; this is prescribing chemotherapy for a cold.

Yet the truth is, Lord Lawson and I and others like us have so far largely lost the argument on climate change entirely on the grounds of intentions. Being against global warming is a way of saying you care about the future. Not being a headless chicken — however well argue your case — leads to accusations you do not care.

Montesquieu's "sweet commerce" and Cobden's "God's diplomacy"

My Times column on free markets and free trade:

 

The “ultimatum game” is a fiendish invention of economists to test people’s selfishness. One player is asked to share a windfall of cash with another player, but the entire windfall is cancelled if the second player rejects the offer. How much should you share? When people from the Machiguenga tribe in Peru were asked to play this game, they behaved selfishly, wanting to share little of the windfall. Not far away, the Achuar in Ecuador were much more generous, offering almost half the money to the other player — which is roughly how people in the developed world react.

What explains the difference? The Machiguenga are largely isolated from the world of markets and commerce. The Achuar are used to buying and selling to and from strangers at markets. The same pattern emerges throughout 15 small-state societies all over the world, in a fascinating study done by the Harvard anthropologist Joe Henrich and his colleagues. The more integrated into the commercial world people are, the more generous they are. As one of the authors, the economist Herb Gintis, summarises the results: “Societies that use markets extensively develop a culture of co-operation, fairness and respect for the individual.”

This would not have surprised Montesquieu, who spoke of “sweet commerce”, or Voltaire, who marvelled at the friendly collaboration of “the Jew, the Mahometan and the Christian” on the floor of the London stock exchange, or Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Richard Cobden, the radical champions of free trade in the early years of the industrial revolution.

Cobden said: “Free trade is God’s diplomacy and there is no other certain way of uniting people in the bonds of peace.” He was right. Recent studies have confirmed that commerce is the main cause of peace. “Within the developing world, economic development leads to interstate peace, whereas democracy does not,” concludes Faruk Ekmekci of Ipek University in Turkey. The evidence is overwhelming that markets do not just make people richer, they make people nicer too, less likely to fight and more likely to help each other.

So why on earth has it become accepted wisdom that every move towards free markets and free trade is towards selfishness, conflict and greed, whereas the state is the source of all kindness? When Daniel Hannan launched the Institute for Free Trade at the Foreign Office last week it was attacked by critics as an inappropriately “hard Brexit” initiative, even though free trade has been the British government’s ambition on and off since 1846. As Liam Fox put it at the launch: “Long before Brexit and long before the EU, the United Kingdom was the champion of global free trade.”

If freer trade is to be defined as “hard Brexit”, what does that say about the European Union? The critics are implicitly conceding what Remainers usually deny: that the EU prevents us being a global trader. They cannot criticise the “global Britain” Leavers, like Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, without admitting that the EU is a protectionist empire devoted to imperial-preference trade behind an external barrier — a discredited economic philosophy from the 1930s.

Hannan’s critics, such as the misleadingly named campaign Open Britain, imply that free trade is unkind in another way: it leads to lower standards of welfare provision, but this is demonstrably nonsense. Is welfare worse in free-trading New Zealand or protectionist Venezuela? In South or North Korea? In Singapore or Burma? The correlation between free trade and high living standards, including high welfare standards, is tight and causal. Government intervention in social policy goes hand in hand with economic development.

The astonishing enrichment of the world in the past 50 years, when extreme poverty has fallen from more than 50 per cent to below 10 per cent of the world population, could not have happened without free commerce and the innovation it delivers. No serious economist denies this. The liberalisation of world trade since the Second World War has been responsible for making the world not just wealthier but healthier, happier and kinder too. If that sounds incredible to millennials, then perhaps they should ask their professors to give them some less Marx-inspired reading matter.

Ah yes, say Remainers, but look at the Bombardier case. With the help of mercantilist American regulations, big Boeing bullies a rival Canadian aircraft manufacturer with a vital plant in Belfast, reminding us that we need to stay in the European Union so that we can resist such tactics. There are four problems with this argument: first, we are in the EU now; second, being inside the EU has not shielded Airbus from similar disputes with Boeing; third, Britain with its strong defence links to America can lean on America more than Brussels; and fourth and most convincingly, small countries have outperformed big ones in world trade. Look at New Zealand, Iceland, Singapore and Switzerland.

Remember that the EU and the US have been discussing a free-trade agreement for a third of a century. It always falls foul of protectionist interests on both sides: Italian textiles, French films, American aircraft. Outside the EU, Britain, the least protectionist of all major economies, would long ago have done a bilateral deal with America and made illegal the imposition of unilateral tariffs on manufactured goods.

The Bombardier case shows that the old approach to anti-dumping does not work in a world of integrated international supply chains, where the effects could be spread all over the globe, damaging consumers all along the way. It does nothing to justify trade blocs, but underlines the need to revive the impetus towards world free trade, which is stalling. According to the OECD, the G20 countries were running about 300 non-tariff barriers in 2010. Five years later that number had quadrupled.

As for domestic politics, the champions of markets and enterprise need to recapture the radicalism of Cobden, Ricardo and Smith. Somehow in recent years we have let the authoritarians redefine free commerce as a regressive step, oppressive on the workers, yet free trade creates jobs and raises wages. It is the most radical and liberating idea ever conceived: that people should be free to exchange goods and services with each other as they please, whether they live in different villages, cities or countries, and without governments being able to stop them.

The Conservatives cannot compete with Labour by offering pale imitations of its patronising paternalism. They should offer the young something more revolutionary, liberating, egalitarian, disruptive, co-operative and democratic than stale statism. It’s called freedom.

Is the Enlightenment dimming?

My Times column on threats to the enlightenment itself:

Mel Brooks said last week that comedy is becoming impossible in this censorious age and he never could have made his 1974 film Blazing Saddles today. A recent poll found that 38 per cent of Britons and 70 per cent of Germans think the government should be able to prevent speech that is offensive to minorities. If you give a commencement speech at a US university these days and don’t attract a shouty mob, you’re clearly a nobody. “There’s an almost religious quality to many of the protests,” says Jonathan Haidt of New York University, citing the denunciations.

Bret Weinstein tweeted last week: “We are witnessing the sabotage of the core principle of a free society — rationalised as self-defence.” He is a left-wing former biology professor at Evergreen College in Washington state, who objected to white students and professors being asked to stay away from the university for a day on the grounds that this was a form of racism. For this he was confronted by a mob, and the university authorities told the campus police to stand down rather than protect him.

The statue-toppling mob has now turned its wrath on Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. In a display of “virtue signalling . . . written with the sanctimonious purity of a Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution”, as the biologist Jerry Coyne puts it, a Harvard academic has written in The Guardian that Crick’s name should be removed from the Francis Crick Institute because of some things he once said about eugenics.

The no-platforming, safe-space, trigger-warning culture is no longer confined to academia, or to America, but lies behind the judgmentalism of many social media campaigns. Every writer I know feels that he or she is one remark away from disgrace. A de facto blasphemy prohibition has re-emerged in western society and is being enforced not just by the Islamists who murder cartoonists, but, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black, feminist victim of female genital mutilation has experienced, by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which called her an anti-Muslim extremist.

Countries where in my youth women wore mini-skirts in public now enforce hijabs or burkas. Sharia law, homophobia and explicit antisemitism are spreading in Britain, where in some state-funded schools four-year-olds are made to wear hijabs. Turkey’s government has joined US Christian evangelicals in trying to expunge evolution from the school curriculum.

This is not just about Islam, though it is curious how silent feminists are on Islamic sexism. The enforcement of dogma is happening everywhere. Members of a transgender campaign group have refused to condemn an activist for punching a feminist. Anybody questioning the idea that climate change is an imminent catastrophe, however gently, is quickly labelled a “denier” (ie, blasphemer). How bad is this spasm of intolerance going to get? Perhaps it is a brief hiatus in rationalism, a dimming of the hard-won secular enlightenment, which will soon re-brighten after doing little harm. Or perhaps it is like China’s Cultural Revolution: a short-lived but vicious phenomenon confined to one part of the world that will do terrible harm then cease.

Or maybe the entire world is heading into a great endarkenment, in which an atmosphere of illiberal orthodoxy threatens the achievement of recent centuries. “The world simply cannot afford an American descent into illiberal tyranny,” says Professor Weinstein.

My optimism, usually rather robust, has been shaken by an eloquent new book, The Darkening Age, by Catherine Nixey, a writer for this newspaper. Her topic is the Christian takeover of the Roman empire, and her argument is that it was more violent, intolerant and destructive than we have been led to believe. Edward Gibbon argued in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Christianity was more damaging than barbarian invasions to classical civilisation. But Nixey tells the tale with fresh passion and horrifying detail.

As she recounts, in the fourth and fifth centuries, in Alexandria, Athens, Rome and elsewhere, “the Christian church demolished, vandalised and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground . . . many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked . . . monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ — and brilliant — ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away.”

In 415AD Hypatia of Alexandria, the finest mathematician and philosopher of her day, was seized by a Christian mob, urged on by “Saint” Cyril, who objected to her symbols and astrolabes, which seemed to prove she was an emissary of Satan. They dragged her to a church, stripped her naked, flayed her alive, gouged out her eyes and burnt her body. In 529AD the philosopher Damascius was forced by Christians to close the Academy in Athens, more than 900 years after it began its history of rich intellectual inquiry. In the words of the Princeton historian Brent Shaw, the Christians brought “a hectoring moralising of the individual, and a ceaseless management of the minutiae of everyday life. Above all, it was a form of speech marked by an absence of humour. It was a morose and a deadly serious world. The joke, the humorous kick, the hilarious satires, the funny cut-them-down-to-size jibe, have vanished.”If this reminds you of Mel Brooks’s remark, or Evergreen College, or sounds a bit like Isis today, note that the Christians also desecrated Palmyra.

The struggle to shake off this censorious culture was long and difficult. Although Christianity became less nasty, as late as the 18th century Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and Smith had to watch what they said for fear of persecution. Bit by bit, however, they won the right to question everything, mock anything and challenge everybody.

I am fairly certain that the Enlightenment is not over, that discovery and reason will overwhelm dogma and superstition. Seven years ago my book The Rational Optimist set out a positive vision of the world. But the spread of fundamentalist Islam, the growth of Hindu nationalism and Russian autocracy, the intolerance of dissent in western universities and the puritanical hectoring of social media give grounds for concern that the flowering of freedom in the past several centuries may come under threat. We have a fight on our hands.

 

Robot farming will bring great benefits to all

My recent column in the Times on robots in agriculture:

 

If you will forgive the outburst of alliteration, the harvesting of a “hands-free hectare” at Harper Adams University has made headlines all around the world, in the technology press as well as the farming press. A crop of Shropshire barley was sown, fertilised, sprayed and harvested by robot tractors, drones and a robot combine harvester, without a human being setting foot in the field.

The yield was low and the cost was high, but the point was made. The mechanisation of agriculture is progressing rapidly towards the point that some crops can be grown with almost no labour. In one sense this is merely the culmination of a trend that began with oxen pulling ploughs instead of people wielding hoes, then continued through the invention of threshing machines, tractors and combine harvesters.

Modern, GPS-guided combines can already cut a field without the driver touching the steering wheel for much of the time, and can cut and thresh a quantity of grain in a day — enough to make half a million loaves of bread — that would have required the work of a thousand peasants in the 18th century.

Harper Adams, an internationally successful technical university, is teaching robots to recognise weeds so they can be hit with tiny spots of herbicide instead of indiscriminate sprays, or better still be zapped with lasers. This could save money, energy and wildlife.

Professor Simon Blackmore, head of engineering, argues that an even bigger benefit could be in providing fleets of small, light robots, perhaps aided by drones, to replace vast and heavy tractors that plough the land mainly to undo the damage done by soil compaction caused by . . . vast and heavy tractors. Robot tractors could be smaller mainly because they don’t have to justify the wages of a driver, and they could work all night, and in co-ordinated platoons.

This labour-saving could be even more useful in other areas. Harper Adams is working on robot fruit pickers, which could be vital to apple and strawberry farmers once we leave the European Union and perhaps lose access to the cheap labour of tens of thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians. It is one of the anomalies of the world that in a highly advanced place such as Britain or California, where just about everything seems to be mechanised and modern, you can still see gangs of immigrant workers toiling away for small wages in all weather, in a manner little changed since ancient times.

Watch a video online of celery picking and you will see just how these two worlds combine. A celery-picking machine is something the size of a small house that a tractor pulls very slowly through a field. It takes celery plants out of the ground automatically but passes them up a conveyor to a row of people whose job is to trim and bag them by hand. In comparison with what happens in most factories, it is crying out for full automation.

In the case of fruit and vegetable picking, even though the labour may be “cheap” by the standards of most jobs, the cost of employing it is high, because of low productivity. Moreover, at least 20 per cent of the crop, sometimes much more, does not meet supermarket standards because it is too small, misshapen or blemished. A robot could selectively harvest only vegetables and fruit of the right quality.

It is not inevitable that robots will replace people in any particular kind of farming. Some areas will surely change quicker than others. It will only happen if it pays, if it simplifies rather than complicates the farmer’s life, and if the robots are easy to manage. For example, employing a drone to herd sheep will only happen if a drone’s electricity costs less than a dog’s food and the drone is easier to operate and train than the dog. People will still be needed to plan, decide, and work with the robots.

Just how much has access to cheap labour held back the automation of British farming (and a few other sectors)? History is fairly clear on this point: that if labour is cheap, people do not invest in labour-saving inventions. Slaves were cheap in ancient Rome, so it was not until centuries later that the draught horse, and the crucial horse collar, were invented. Likewise in Japan in the 18th century, there was an “industrious” rather than industrial revolution, fuelled by rapid population growth, in which draught animals and machines such as water mills were abandoned in favour of labour-intensive alternatives. Rice was threshed and milled by men on treadles. By contrast, in 18th-century Newcastle the price of energy was low because of local coal mining, and the price of labour was sky-high, compared with Paris, London or Beijing, according to calculations by the historian Professor Robert Allen. There was every incentive to find ways of getting coal to do the work of people, and mechanisation thrived.

An industrious revolution is a dead-end in terms of human welfare, giving a country an economy with low productivity and so a low consumer surplus to support other jobs, entrenching poverty. Is it even possible that access to cheap labour from eastern Europe, to run the farming and catering industries, partly explains Britain’s sluggish productivity growth in recent years? Together with the subsidising of low-productivity jobs through in-work benefits, we have been pursuing somewhat “industrious policies” — with good results in terms of record low unemployment rates, but perhaps at the expense of automation. Forcing up minimum wages does deprive poor people and students of employment opportunities, but it is also likely that it stimulates automation and the creation of better jobs elsewhere.

Though every job lost is painful for someone, robot tractors are almost certainly going to create more jobs in the long run than they destroy. For a start, there are just not that many jobs left in farming. In medieval Britain farming must have once accounted for 80 per cent of employment, perhaps more. Now it is less than 1 per cent. Automating agriculture further will not throw huge numbers of people out of work. Indeed, if it makes British farming more competitive, it will create more jobs in the processing and marketing industries, as well as in the rest of the economy where the profits of farming are spent: Range Rover dealerships as well as robot dealerships.

 

Hurricanes happen

My recent Times column on Hurricanes Harvey and Irma:

 

As Hurricane Irma batters Florida, with Anguilla, Barbuda and Cuba clearing up and Houston drying out after Harvey, it is reasonable to ask whether such tropical cyclones are getting more frequent or fiercer.

The answer to the first question is easy: no. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it recently: “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century.” The trend in numbers of major hurricanes making landfall in the United States has been slightly downward over the past century. Harvey and Irma have ended an unprecedented 12-year hurricane drought, in which not a single category 4 or 5 hurricane made American landfall. So whatever global warming is doing or will do, it is not so far increasing the frequency of such storms.

The answer to the second question is less certain. Hurricane Irma is certainly breaking records: probably the strongest storm in the Atlantic outside the Gulf of Mexico, almost rivalling Hurricane Allen (1980) for the strongest hurricane ever to make landfall, wider in its impact than Hurricane Charley (2004) or Andrew (1992). Last week it sustained its 185mph winds for 37 hours, comfortably beating a record set by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013.

But how much of this is down to better measurement? We will never know exactly how ferocious the winds of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 were, or the great Barbados hurricane of 1780. An analysis published last month by the American government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory stated: “It is premature to conclude that human activities, and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity.”

It remains possible that tropical cyclones are becoming slightly fiercer, but slightly less frequent, which would be consistent with some predictions of climate-change theory.

Incidentally, as the climatologist Judith Curry said of Hurricane Irma last week: “The surprising thing about this development into a major hurricane was that it developed over relatively cool waters in the Atlantic, 26.5C, when the rule of thumb is 28.5C for a major hurricane”. So it was not exceptional warmth, but exceptionally low wind shear (high-altitude wind) that led to Irma’s birth.

Let’s assume that there is a trend towards slightly fewer but slightly more intense hurricanes. What does it mean for policy? Pause to notice one truly spectacular feature of Harvey and Irma: how few people they have killed so far. By stalling near the Texas coast, Harvey caused huge floods in Houston, not quite rivalling those of 1935 in the city but still devastating to many people. Yet they killed only about 60 people. Compare this relatively low number (given the huge population of Houston) with the 10,000 dead in Galveston in 1900, or the 138,000 who died in Cyclone Nargis in impoverished Burma in 2008.

It is a similar story with Irma. That Anguilla and Barbuda have been reduced to rubble with the death of only one person on each is astonishing. I am writing this before Irma fully strikes western Florida, but the state has had more warning than for Hurricane Andrew, which killed 65. People in countries or islands with sufficient prosperity and technology to warn, defend and protect each other are far less likely to die than in the past. Indeed the death rate from droughts, floods and storms globally is about 98 per cent lower than it was a century ago. Wealth is the best defence against storms.

While the cost of damage from storms goes up and up, that’s because there are more buildings and more people in places such as Florida. But as a percentage of GDP the damage done by tropical cyclones has been declining steadily for decades.

Houston’s recovery from Harvey is truly remarkable. Less than two weeks after the storm the airport was open, the water system was working and the electrical grid (which stayed on throughout for most people) was in good order. Hotels are no longer clogged with flood refugees and are taking normal bookings. The Convention Centre, to which victims of the flooding were taken, is reopening for conventions soon. Note that this survivability depends heavily on non-renewable energy: wind farms and solar panels are no use during hurricanes, while gas plants work fine, as do outboard motors on rescue boats.

Adaptation is and always will be the way to survive storms. Given that hurricanes were hitting Florida, Texas and the Caribbean long before the industrial revolution, let alone the 20th century, it would be absurd to suggest that they could somehow be prevented by any climate-change policy. It would be no more absurd to try to promote calm weather through climate policies. (To be clear, I said the same about the record cold December in 2010: it’s not global cooling; it’s weather.) Adapting to cope with possible future storms will be necessary whether they become more intense or not.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conceded this in its last report. Vicente Barros, the co-chairman of Working Group 2, said at its launch that “investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future . . . adaptation can play a key role in decreasing these risks”.

Nigel Lawson pointed out 11 years ago in his book An Appeal to Reason that adaptation policies had benefits over carbon-reduction policies: they work unilaterally; can be applied locally; produce results quickly; can capture any benefits of warming while reducing risks; address existing problems that are exacerbated by warming; and bring benefits even if global warming proves to have been exaggerated.

The temptation to blame Irma on fossil fuels or Donald Trump, milking natural disasters for political gain, proved irresistible to some. This makes no more sense than blaming the Syrian civil war on climate change, rather than man’s inhumanity to man, which Barack Obama, the Prince of Wales, Bernie Sanders, Friends of the Earth and the World Bank were all tempted into doing. “In our assessment,” said a study last week by social and climate scientists, “there is thus no good evidence to conclude that global climate change-related drought in Syria was a contributory causal factor in the country’s civil war.”

The poor are carrying the cost of today's climate policies

This is the text of a chapter I wrote for a new book entitled Climate Change - The Facts 2017, edited by Jennifer Marohasy. The book is worth buying for Clive James's chapter alone.

 

Here is a simple fact about the world today:


• climate change is doing more good than harm.


Here is another fact:


• climate change policy is doing more harm than good.

These are both well-established facts, supported by a great deal of data, as I will demonstrate. Do these facts surprise you? It’s certainly not the impression most politicians, scientists or journalists give. Yet the well-informed ones would not deny it if pressed. They would merely insist, instead, that this position will reverse later in the 21st century and that by then climate change, unchecked, will be doing more harm than climate policy. The eventual ends will begin to justify the painful means.

They may be right; we will see. But, today, we are deliberately causing suffering in partly futile efforts to stop something that is currently doing more good than harm, mostly to poor people.

And that should give us pause, at the very least. Is it right to ask today’s poorest people – on whom the pain of climate policies fall most heavily – to make sacrifices for the sake of tomorrow’s probably much richer people? Yet even to ask this question is to run a gauntlet of abuse from people, mostly paid by taxpayers, who accuse you of moral failings.

On no other topic that I write about do I get such vitriol and bitter criticism of my morality. When I made the argument on television once that climate change policy was hurting the poor, a prominent and wealthy left-wing commentator replied, ‘But what about my grandchildren?’ I am genuinely baffled as to why is it considered virtuous to cause pain to poor people today, and reward rich people, for the sake of the rich people’s perhaps-even-richer grandchildren.

Eugenicists and population control advocates, incidentally, have made the same argument; we must harden our hearts and do painful things today for the sake of posterity.

During the great Irish famine, Charles Trevelyan, the Assistant Secretary to the Treasury in London, who had been a pupil of Malthus, called starvation an ‘effective mechanism for reducing surplus population’, adding: ‘Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.’

In 1912 Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, argued, ‘if wide-spread eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization’.

The ecologist Paul Ehrlich is an unabashed advocate of coercion to achieve population control, having said that to achieve it ‘the operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense.’ He called this ‘coercion in a good cause’.

California’s forced sterilisation programs in the 1920s, Germany’s mass murders in the 1940s, India’s semi-compulsory sterilisations in the 1960s, and China’s one-child policy in the 1980s all justified huge suffering on the grounds that they would benefit future generations. Yet the demographic transition showed that the best way to reduce population growth is to be kind, not cruel; once babies survive, people plan smaller families.

My argument is not to be confused with the claim that climate change is not happening. Of course it is. Nor with the claim that it is all natural; I think it is highly likely that the increase in concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) over the past half century from an average of about 0.03% to an average of 0.04% of the atmosphere, small though it is, has had a warming effect. I am a card-carrying member of the overwhelming consensus that climate change is real and partly man-made. I also concede that climate change probably does already cause some harm in some places. The point is rather that the harm is currently smaller than the good it is doing, through longer growing seasons, milder winters, slightly higher rainfall, and faster growth rates of crops and forests because of CO2 fertilisation. And that net good stands in stark contrast to the net harm caused by climate change policy.

The biggest way in which CO2 emissions do good is through global greening. Ranga Myneni and colleagues (Zaichun et al. 2016) recently published evidence derived from satellite data showing that 25 to 50% of the vegetated parts of the planet has grown greener and just 4% browner, and that 70% of the greening can be attributed to an increased level of CO2. The overall increase in green vegetation, which has occurred in all kinds of habitats – from the tropics to the Arctic, from deserts to farmland – is now estimated to be 14% during the last 30 years. This startling fact is confirmed by multiple other lines of evidence: tree growth rates; free-air concentration experiments in which the CO2 level is enhanced over crops and natural habitats; increases in the amplitude of the CO2 changes in the Northern Hemisphere each year; and so on.

Dr Zaichun Zhu from Peking University, the lead author of the Myneni paper (2016), described these results as follows: ‘The greening over the past 33 years reported in this study is equivalent to adding a green continent about two times the size of mainland USA (18 million km2), and has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system.’

Now just imagine if Zhu and Myneni had discovered the opposite: a 14% reduction in overall plant productivity over 30 years with browning in 37% of pixels and greening in only 4%. Most politicians, scientists, and journalists would have been screaming about it from the rooftops as an example of the harm caused by climate change. Behold the inherent bias towards suppressing good news that has plagued all debates about the environment for the past half century, and which has systematically misled the public. As I have consistently argued for years, the failure of doomsday predictions again and again is highly relevant data in this debate. But it is routinely ignored.

But back to global greening: if there is 14% more vegetation on the planet than 30 years ago, and 70% of this can be directly attributed to CO2 fertilisation, this means there is more food for humans, animals, microbes, and fungi, and less land is needed to grow human food. Therefore, more land is available for nature than would otherwise have been the case if we had not raised CO2 levels. It means richer biodiversity and less drought. It means lower food prices and less starvation. It means richer rainforests and less desert.

For many years, Dr Craig Idso has been quietly and systematically collating the evidence as to how much faster crops have grown as a result of the CO2 increase, detailing the many experiments that show very clearly that a higher CO2 level makes plants more resistant to droughts – because they need to open their pores less and they lose less water as a result (Idso & Idso 2011). He has estimated the increased value of the world’s crops as a result of the CO2 fertilisation effect – over 30 years this increase comes to US$3.2 trillion (Idso 2013). That’s $3,200,000,000,000.

Now if you argue that coal producers – like the one operating on my family’s land, so, yes, I declare an interest – should be paying recompense for the damage they have done the world, you must also admit that they can take into account any benefit they have done. It’s the net cost that counts. At the moment, it is mathematically indisputable that farmers owe coal producers a huge sum for supplying them with free CO2 fertiliser. The burning of fossil fuels has boosted farm yields.

Incidentally, the CO2 fertilisation effect seems to be working in the sea as well as on land. Some studies of eelgrasses (Palacios & Zimmer- man 2007), seaweeds, other marine algae, and also corals (D’Olivio et al. 2013) indicate a positive effect from CO2 enrichment. So do some studies of phytoplankton, which are responsible for much marine photosynthesis.

One laboratory experiment grew two strains of a diatom species and a coccolithophore species at 390 ppm and 750 ppm and found that ‘increased CO2 led to increased growth rates in all three strains ... enhancing growth rates 20%–40%.’ They concluded that ‘there could be a net increase in capacity for primary productivity at 750 ppm of CO2, at least with regard to small diatoms and coccolithophores in coastal environments’ (McCarthy et al. 2012).

Furthermore, numerous studies suggest that the slightly lower pH of seawater resulting from CO2 enrichment does not seem to adversely affect growth rates in such calcifying phytoplankton. For example, one study concluded that ‘the coccolithophore, E. huxleyi, has an ability to respond positively to acidification with CO2 enrichment’. This ‘suggests that physiological activities of E. huxleyi cells will not be seriously damaged by ocean acidification at least up to 1200 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere’ (Fukuda et al. 2014). Another study concluded that ‘carbonate chemistry is not the sole and overriding control over coccolithophore calcification’, and that this should, ‘seriously call into question’ the notion that ‘ocean acidification will lead to a replacement of heavily calcified coccolithophores by lightly-calcified ones’ (Smith et al. 2012).

Laboratory experiments using a common reef-building coral found that its growth rate increased as the CO2 level was raised and remained high even with a CO2 level of 0.06%, that is to say, half again as high as today’s.

Global warming itself has benefits for people, too. They include: fewer winter deaths; lower energy costs; better agricultural yields; probably fewer droughts because of increased rainfall; and maybe richer biodiversity. These turn out to be real and large effects.

Climate change policies

The policies designed to slow global warming, meanwhile, have huge costs. Let me walk you through the details in case you are doubtful. Here are ten examples of the harm done by policies designed to solve the problem of climate change.

1. Ethanol subsidies

Ethanol subsidies in the United States, Brazil and in Europe were introduced specifically and explicitly to reduce CO2 emissions. Yet they did environmental harm. As Bloomberg (2016) reports:

The Natural Resources Defense Council used a 96-page report in 2004 to proclaim boundless biofuel benefits: slashed global warming emissions, improved air quality and more wildlife habitat. Instead, farmers ploughed millions of acres of prairie grasses to grow corn for making ethanol, with fertilizer runoff contributing to a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists warned that carbon dioxide emissions associated with corn-based ethanol were higher than expected.

And they did very little if anything to reduce emissions.

Ethanol has now displaced a bit more than 0.5% of world oil use. This ethanol conversion consumes about 5% of the world’s grain crop, which in turn raises food prices. The United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization produced a report concluding it was one of the main reasons that the price of food shot up in 2008, and stayed high for some years afterwards until harvests began to catch up, worsening malnutrition and starvation, and encouraging the destruction of rain- forest to cultivate more land. The policy of ethanol subsidies steals land from nature. Worse, it steals food from poor people and puts it in rich people’s cars.

Indur Goklany has estimated that this policy kills almost 200,000 people a year (Bryce 2010). As a farm owner, I probably benefit a little bit from these programmes, so I have no vested interest in criticising them. But that’s not going to stop me.

2. Biodiesel programmes

Biodiesel programmes for making motor fuel from palm oil in the tropics, and from rapeseed oil in Europe, are all subsidised by the European Union specifically to reduce emissions, but they actually increase them. Transport & Environment, a green group, has calculated that by 2020, biodiesel will increase emissions from transport by 4% compared with using fossil-diesel, equivalent to putting an extra 12 million cars to the road (Gosden 2016). The subsidies also encourage the destruction of rainforest and the cultivation of land that would otherwise be available to nature. As a farm owner, I probably benefit slightly from this harmful policy.

3. The promotion of diesel cars

Europe mandates the promotion of diesel cars through the tax system as a deliberate policy to reduce CO2 emissions. Diesel engines have lower CO2 emissions than petrol engines, but higher emissions of nitrogen oxides and particulate emissions, which are more dangerous.

A study by Steve Yim and Steve Barrett (2012) determined that there were nearly 5000 deaths each year caused by these type of vehicle emissions. This policy, therefore, exacerbated this issue, contributing to these deaths. The scandal only came to light when it emerged that Volkswagen and other car manufacturers cheated on the emissions tests. As a diesel car driver, I benefited from this lethal policy.

4. Burning pellets derived from wood products

Britain is now burning pellets derived from wood products in power stations to produce electricity. The pellets, euphemistically called ‘biomass’, are harvested from forests in South Carolina and other parts of the United States (Ernstig 2015). Contrary to popular myth, these are derived not from wood by-products of a harvest primarily taken for other purposes, but from roundwood.1 Wood residues are used to dry the biomass prior to pelletisation (Stephenson & MacKay 2014; Rose 2015).

Burning wood produces more CO2 than burning coal, for every unit of energy generated. It also encourages deforestation and habitat destruction, raises the price of electricity for consumers, and requires shipping combustible material a third of the way around the world. That wood regrows but coal does not is of little comfort given that wood takes several decades to regrow. As a landowner, this policy helps me; the higher price of wood has helped reduce my losses on managing woodland. But it also hurts me because I make money from coal.

5. Wind power

Many countries have littered their rural beauty spots with 120-metre towers of steel, standing in massive reinforced concrete bases and equipped with electrical dynamos, whose two-ton magnets are about 50% rare-earth metals – usually neodymium, which is mined and refined in a very dirty process in China with toxic and radioactive waste as a by-product. These windmills produce expensive, unreliable, and intermittent electricity far from where and when it is needed, requiring expensive back-up power, and costly and unsightly power lines. They are subject to huge subsidies, which go mostly to the rich, including landowners like me, and which hit the poor harder than taxes would do because the money for these subsidies are levied on electricity bills. Indeed, I get some income from a wind turbine built on land I do not own but for which I have the mineral rights, beneath. They kill thousands of rare birds of prey, gannets, swifts, and other soaring birds, as well as large numbers of bats. And they do very little to reduce emissions (Fisher & Fitsimmons 2013; Hughes 2012; Ridley 2012).

6. Solar farms

In cloudy Britain and Germany very large sums have been diverted from relatively poor people to wealthy landowners to cover good agricultural land with solar farms, which produce very little electricity, and do so mainly when it is least needed on warm summer afternoons. These solar farms shade the ground preventing the growth of plants that could feed either people or wildlife. ey also mean less land is available for nature. Their contribution is trivial; to the nearest whole number, solar power still produces zero percent of global energy needs. As a landowner, I have been offered large annual incomes for installing solar plants. To the consternation of my accountant, I have refused them. At last a climate policy that has not benefited me.

7. Renewables, only

Western governments, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank have all said that to avoid increasing emissions they are no longer willing to grant aid for the building of fossil-fuel plants in the poorest countries. They prefer to spend the money on renewables instead, where it goes less than half as far. The result is that the death toll of those who die as a result of cooking over open wood and dung res for lack of electricity – currently about three million people a year – will not fall as fast as it should, while millions more are missing out on the benefits of electricity, including refrigeration and education.

The Center for Global Development has estimated that US$10 billion invested in gas-fired generation in sub-Saharan Africa would meet the needs of 90 million people. The same sum spent on renewable energy technology would help just 27 million people (Moss & Leo 2014). The overall conclusion from this study was that more than 60 million additional people in poor nations could gain access to electricity if investment were allowed in natural gas projects, not just renewables.

8. Fuel poverty

The effect of renewable energy is to drive many poorer people into fuel poverty, so that they struggle to stay warm in cold winters. Today, through- out the world, far more people die of cold than of heat. One study (Public Health England 2014) concluded that winter deaths exceeded summer deaths in all 31 European countries, on average by 14%, and the total excess winter deaths between 2002–03 and 2010–11 was more than two million. On average, 65 British people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly. So climate change helps to reduce winter mortality; climate change policy helps to increase it again.

9. High energy costs

e high energy costs resulting from climate policies have resulted in the closure of heavy-industrial plants throughout Britain and other parts of western Europe, throwing many thousands out of work (Montford 2015). Few emissions savings have resulted, however, because many of the jobs have simply moved to China and India. e total cost of Britain’s climate policies during the 21st century is on course to reach £1.8 trillion. The total benefit from that spending is expected to be a lowering of the average temperature by about 0.005 °C — that’s half of one-hundredth of a degree. And for that we are destroying industry.

10. The neglect of more serious environmental problems

The immense diversion of political energy and finance into studying and mitigating climate change has starved attention from far more imminent, serious and soluble environmental problems, such as invasive plant and animal pests, habitat loss, and the over fishing of the oceans. These are neglected and underfunded because so much money and prestige is spent on climate change.

Conclusion

I could go on, but you get the point. Climate policies really hurt people and the planet.

Notice, by the way, that the beneficiaries of these policies are mostly comparatively rich people: landowners, investors, scientists, policy advisers, the employees of non-profit organisations (NGO). The victims are mostly poor people: subsistence farmers, poorer pensioners, manual workers. None of this is controversial, let alone imaginary. All these effects are real. Environmentalists concede that these things are happening. Some claim that they are justified because they will avert future disasters. Indeed, some claim such disasters are already upon us.

But are they? There has been no increase in extreme weather: no trend towards stronger or more frequent storms, no consistent change in the occurrence or intensity of tornadoes or cyclones or lesser storms. The IPCC has confirmed this again and again. The cost of storm damage has increased, but this is entirely due to the increase in the value of property, not the worsening of storms. Indeed, as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) storm damage has been falling, not rising. Flooding is worse in many parts of the world, but largely because of land-use changes – usually deforestation or drainage – causing run-off to be more rapid.

As for droughts, there has been, if anything, a very slight decline in the frequency and severity of drought over recent decades, while famine has largely vanished from the face of the Earth for the first time in recorded history, except under a few autocratic regimes like that of North Korea. The vast famines that plagued the twentieth century are not happening in the 21st.

Again, these facts have been confirmed by the IPCC itself.
 In its latest report, it backs off claims made in its previous one:

The most recent and most comprehensive analyses of river runoff do not support the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) conclusion that global runoff has increased during the 20th century. New results also indicate that the AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in droughts since the 1970s are no longer supported. There is low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall), owing to lack of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice and geographical inconsistencies in the trends.

As far as we can tell – the interpretation of global sea-level data is not straightforward because of changes in techniques and adjustment for local tectonic factors – sea level has not risen much faster, if at all, in the past three decades than it did in most of the past century. Satellites suggest it is currently going up at about 34 cm a century – which is about 3.4 mm a year.2 Small, uninhabited islands are sometimes lost to the sea mainly because of tectonic sinking rather than sea-level change. A study by Webb and Kench (2010) of 27 coral atolls in the central Pacific over several decades found that more atolls increased in size than decreased, despite rising sea levels. As they stated, it is in the nature of atolls to rise with sea level through coral growth and sand accumulation: ‘Islands are geomorphologically persistent features on atoll reef platforms and can increase in island area despite sea-level change’ (Webb & Kench 2010).

Arctic sea ice has declined in summer, but Antarctic sea ice has increased, and the decline in Arctic sea ice has had no measurable deleterious effect on either people or polar bears. Indeed, the trend in polar bear numbers is not down and may be upward as they recover from past hunting.3 Most glaciers have retreated, as they have since about 1850 (that is, before man-made climate change), but again without significant impact on human welfare.

So, it is very clear that climate change has done very little harm so far and is doing very little harm today. On balance it has done net good. As I explained in the beginning, most well-informed politicians, journalists and scientists accept that this is the case. So, does the IPCC. They all say the damage will nearly all be in the future. So I am not saying anything controversial here, let alone outside the consensus.

Studies of the ‘social cost of carbon’ and of the economic impacts of climate change on average find that climate change is not yet doing net harm, and will only do so when the temperature reaches about 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC confirmed this in its latest assessment report. The opening words of the executive summary of Chapter 10 of Working Group 2’s report reads (Field et al. eds. 2014):

For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers (medium evidence, high agreement). Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, life- style, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.

Globally, climate change policy is doing harm, while climate change is doing good. Locally, in the poorest countries, the effect can be even more stark. Here the pain of policy is most acute and the gain of changing the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is most dramatic.

Take Niger, the fourth poorest country in the world with a per capita GDP about 1% of Britain’s. One reason for that poverty is the very low level of energy available to Niger’s people, final energy consumption being one of the lowest in the world. The small amount of electricity available to a small proportion of the population comes from one tiny coal-fired power station, some diesel power stations, and an interconnector from Nigeria. About 90% of Niger’s households depend on wood for cooking – which means appalling levels of premature death from smoke inhalation. The government has this to say:

Butane gas or LPG, a fuel currently available in sufficient quantity in Niger (44,000 tons per year) and which should be the solution to replace firewood as cooking fuel used by households, requires the acquisition of accessories for its use. These are accessories that, although available on the market, are not within the reach of low-income households and thus many in Niger have no other choice than to make use of traditional energy sources (Gado 2015).

So, thousands of lives could be saved, and living standards raised if the aid money could be to used to buy butane stoves. That would stop the continuing devastation of Niger’s forests and scrublands, too. Instead, many westerners insist that Niger must go green: ‘Niger needs to develop an energy policy that embraces renewables as part of a longer- term energy vision,’ says the International Renewable Energy Agency (2013). Wood is, of course, renewable, but that is not what they mean. Wind and solar power are dreadfully expensive, as well as unreliable, and Niger cannot afford them. The refusal of the West to support fossil fuels in such countries kills people and damages the environment.

Niger has one thing in its favour. It is smack in the middle of the Sahel, the region that has seen the fastest global greening. Because of the increase in CO2 in the air, as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, plants in this semi-arid area can now grow faster and lose less water from the pores in their leaves as they do so: water efficiency improves. An increase in rainfall in the Sahel is also a result of global warming.

‘Recent trends show good signs on the recovery of the region, and the relative vegetation index (NDVI) presented for the country of Niger in this map shows increases in the period from 1982 to 1999,’ reads a recent report (Ahlenius 2006). Some imaginative land-management policies have helped. So Niger has seen an increase in woody vegetation, even as its people desperately chop away at it to provide themselves with cooking fuel.

Niger is a perfect example of the horrible hypocrisy of the climate establishment. Niger’s extreme poverty makes it vulnerable to the effects of climate policy; but it currently benefits from climate change itself.

I say to my greener friends:

Where do you get your insouciance about the clear evidence that the poorest people in the world are the ones hardest hit by climate change policy today? 

Where do you get your indomitable certainty that the end justifies these means? 

Where do you find the evidence that we must cause certain pain to today’s poor in order to forestall the small possibility of suffering among tomorrow’s rich? 

And where do you find the hubris to occupy the moral high ground?