Matt Ridley's Blog, page 23

Free movement of genius was crucial to Europe’s prosperity

My column on European fragmentation in the Times (5 December):

 

The Italian referendum and close-shave Austrian election are symptoms of a continent that may be teetering on the brink of political disintegration. It’s just possible that an empire may be collapsing before our eyes, as the Habsburg and Ottoman empires did before it, in or around the same neighbourhood.

With the rise of nationalist parties in Italy, Austria, Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Germany and Britain, the possibility that the Brussels union has fomented, rather than suppressed, nationalism can no longer be dismissed. The Habsburg empire, which also tried to make a whole out of linguistically and culturally diverse parts, and ended in a war sparked by Serbian nationalism, is an unhappy precedent. The European Union may be encouraging precisely what it was founded to avert.

True, it is an empire without a hereditary emperor, founded on high ideals of peace and prosperity. But at least initially, Napoleon’s empire was also founded on the principle of replacing old regimes with a more meritocratic and modern system.

Against this background, it is worth recalling that the leading theory among economic historians for why Europe after 1400 became the wealthiest and most innovative continent is political fragmentation. Precisely because it was not unified, Europe became a laboratory for different ways of governing, enabling the discovery of regimes that allowed free markets and invention to flourish, first in northern Italy and some parts of Germany, then the low countries, then Britain. By contrast, China’s unity under one ruler prevented such experimentation.

It is generally assumed that it was Charles, Baron Montesquieu who first articulated this theory, in De L’Esprit Des Lois (1748). In contrast to the great empires of Asia, he remarked, Europe’s “many medium-sized states” had incubated “a genius for liberty, which makes it very difficult to subjugate each part and to put it under a foreign force other than by laws and by what is useful to its commerce”.

I think David Hume got there first, however. In his 1742 essay Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, he mused on why China’s “considerable stock of politeness and science” had not ripened, and blamed the fact that it was one vast empire, so “the authority of any teacher, such as Confucius, was propagated easily from one corner of the empire to the other. None had courage to resist the torrent of popular opinion.” By contrast, Europe is the continent “most broken by seas, rivers, and mountains” and so “the divisions into small states are favourable to learning, by stopping the progress of authority as well as that of power”.

 

Whoever first thought of it, the idea has gained almost universal agreement among historians that a disunited Europe, while frequently wracked by war, was also prone to innovation and liberty — thanks to the ability of innovators and skilled craftsmen to cross borders in search of more congenial regimes.

In The European Miracle (1981), Eric Jones claimed that “Against the economies of scale that large empires could offer, the decentralisation of Europe’s states-system offered flexibility and a family of experiments in government decision-making”. Since then, the historians Nathan Rosenberg, Paul Kennedy, Jared Diamond and Joel Mokyr have all echoed the same point in books. Mokyr, in a 2007 essay, pointed out that Paracelsus, Comenius, Descartes, Hobbes and Bayle “survived through strategic moves across national boundaries”. He could have added Gutenberg, Columbus, Papin, Voltaire and more to his list.

In the early 18th century an ambitious chemist and would-be alchemist named Johann Friedrich Böttger showed up at the court of Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, claiming to have discovered how to make gold. He was promptly imprisoned in a castle by the prince lest he move on and offer his technology to a rival ruler — thus illustrating Hume’s point. Böttger did not of course know how to make gold, but he did work out how to make fine porcelain to rival China’s. The castle was called Meissen.

During the 18th century, Britain experimented with a light tax burden compared with the Dutch Republic. Dutch businessmen moved to Britain in large numbers, bringing with them their technologies and ideas. In China, they could not have escaped uniform taxes, at whatever level they were. The differential between the Dutch Republic and England narrowed, suggesting that the Dutch authorities were trying to hold taxation back to slow the exodus.

In other words, free movement of genius was crucial to Europe’s success. Perhaps equally important was the free movement of skilled artisans. Jones noted that “the Murano glassmakers spread their arts across Europe despite severe penalties threatened by the Venetian authorities”. But there was a crucial difference from what the European Union means by free movement of people today. These people were moving not because the rules were the same everywhere, but because they were different. The European Commission’s obsession with harmonisation prevents the very pattern of experimentation that encourages innovation.

Whereas the states system positively encouraged governments to be moderate in political, religious and fiscal terms or lose their talent, the commission detests jurisdictional competition, in taxes and regulations. The larger the empire, the less brake there is on governmental excess.

So, an ambitious genetic engineer, who has devised a way in the laboratory to suppress agricultural pests and eradicate disease-carrying mosquitoes, by releasing genetically modified males that cause infertility among their offspring, has nowhere to go within the EU to find a regime that will license his experiment in the wild. Like Columbus leaving Genoa for Spain, he goes to the United States instead, eventually selling his British-born business to an American company that can afford to build a GM-mosquito factory in Brazil to combat the zika and dengue viruses. This is a real example: the company is called Oxitec.

In effect, the European continent is saying to innovative thinkers the opposite of what it said for centuries. Where once it signalled that they could exile themselves and take their ideas with them to sow in more fertile ground, now it is saying: it does not matter how far you move within Europe, we want to be sure you can never escape the same rules. With east-west and north-south differences within the EU building, that feels increasingly like a tension that must break in the years ahead.

Why is the left reviving apartheid?

My Times column on identity politics:

The student union at King’s College London will field a team in University Challenge that contains at least 50 per cent “self-defining women, trans or non-binary students”. The only bad thing Ken Livingstone could bring himself to say about the brutal dictator Fidel Castro was that “initially he wasn’t very good on lesbian and gay rights”. The first page of Hillary Clinton’s campaign website (still up) has links to “African Americans for Hillary, Latinos for Hillary, Asian Americans and Pacific islanders for Hillary, Women for Hillary, Millennials for Hillary”, but none to “men for Hillary”, let alone “white people for Hillary”.

Since when did the left insist on judging people by — to paraphrase Martin Luther King — the colour of their skin rather than the content of their character? The left once admirably championed the right of black people, women and gays to be treated the same as white, straight men. With only slightly less justification, it then moved on to pushing affirmative action to redress past prejudice. Now it has gone further, insisting everybody is defined by his or her identity and certain victim identities must be favoured.

Given the history of such stereotyping, it is baffling that politicians on the left cannot see where this leads. The prime exponents of identity politics in the past were the advocates of apartheid, of antisemitism, and of treating women as the legal chattels of men. “We are sleepwalking our way to segregation,” Trevor Phillips says.

Identity politics is thus very old-fashioned. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism, says equality feminism — fair treatment, respect and dignity — is being eclipsed in universities by a Victorian “fainting couch feminism”, which views women as “fragile flowers who require safe spaces, trigger warnings and special protection from micro-invalidations”. Sure enough, when she said this at Oberlin College, Ohio, 35 students and a “therapy dog” sought refuge in a safe room.

It is just bad biology to focus on race, sex or sexual orientation as if they mattered most about people. We’ve known for decades — and Marxist biologists such as Dick Lewontin used to insist on this point — that the genetic differences between two human beings of the same race are maybe ten times as great as the average genetic difference between two races. Race really is skin deep. Sex goes deeper, for sure, because of developmental pathways, but still the individual differences between men and men, or women and women, or gays and gays, are far more salient than any similarities.

The Republican sweep in the American election cannot be blamed solely on the culture wars, but they surely played a part. Take the “bathroom wars” that broke out during the early stages of the campaign. North Carolina’s legislature heavy-handedly required citizens to use toilets that corresponded to their birth gender. The Obama administration heavy-handedly reacted by insisting that every school district in the country should do no such thing or lose its federal funding. This was a gift to conservatives: “Should a grown man pretending to be a woman be allowed to use . . . the same restroom used by your daughter? Your wife?,” asked Senator Ted Cruz.

There is little doubt that to some extent white men played the identity card at the ballot box in reaction to the identity politics of the left. In a much-discussed essay for The New York Times after the election, Mark Lilla of Columbia University mused that Hillary Clinton’s tendency to “slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, LGBT and women voters at every stop” was a mistake: “If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them.”

He argues that “the fixation on diversity in our schools and the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life . . . By the time they reach college many assume that diversity discourse exhausts political discourse, and have shockingly little to say about such perennial questions as class, war, the economy and the common good.” As many students woke up to discover on November 9, identity politics is “expressive, not persuasive”.

Last week, in an unbearably symbolic move, Hampshire College in Massachusetts removed the American flag — a symbol of unity if ever there was one — from campus in order to make students feel safer. The university president said the removal would “enable us to instead focus our efforts on racist, misogynistic, Islamophobic, anti-immigrant, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and behaviours”. There are such attitudes in America, for sure, but I am willing to bet they are not at their worst at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.

The one group that is increasingly excluded from campuses, with never a peep of complaint from activists, is conservatives. Data from the Higher Education Research Institute show the ratio of left-wing professors to right-wing professors went from 2:1 in 1995 to 6:1 today. The “1” is usually in something such as engineering and keeps his or her head down. Fashionable joke: what’s the opposite of diversity? University.

This is not a smug, anti-American argument. British universities are hurtling down the same divisive path. Feminists including Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel and Kate Smurthwaite have been “no-platformed” at British universities, along with speakers for Ukip and Israel, but not Islamic State. Universities are becoming like Victorian aunts, brooking no criticism of religion, treating women as delicate flowers and turning up their noses at Jews.

The government is conducting an “independent” review into Britain’s sharia courts, which effectively allow women to be treated differently if they are Muslim. The review is chaired by a Muslim and advised by two imams. And far too many government forms still insist on knowing whether the applicant is (I have taken the list from the Office for National Statistics guidance): “Gypsy or Irish Traveller, White and Black Caribbean, White and Black African, White and Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, African, Caribbean, Arab, or any other ethnic group”. So bleeding what?

The left has vacated the moral high ground on which it won so many fine battles to treat human beings equally. The right must occupy that ground and stand for universal human values and equal treatment for all.

Artificial Intelligence is not going to cause mass unemployment

My Times column on the overdone threat from robots:

 

The tech industry, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is populated largely by enthusiastic optimists, who want to change the world and think they can. But there is one strand of pessimism that you hear a lot there: that the robots are going to take all our jobs. With artificial intelligence looming, human beings are facing redundancy and obsolescence. I think this neo-Luddite worry is as wrong now as in Ned Ludd’s day.

“Any job that is on some level routine is likely to be automated and if we are to see a future of prosperity rather than catastrophe we must act now,” warns Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in his book The Rise of the Robots. “With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast,” says another Silicon Valley guru, Vivek Wadhwa.

“Think of it as a kind of digital social Darwinism, with clear winners and losers: Those with the talent and skills to work seamlessly with technology and compete in the global marketplace are increasingly rewarded, while those whose jobs can just as easily be done by foreigners, robots or a few thousand lines of code suffer accordingly,” says the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen in his book Average is Over.

Yet we have been automating work for two centuries and so far the effect is to create more jobs, not fewer. Farming once employed more than 90% of people, and without them we would have starved. Today, it’s just a few percent. The followers of the mysterious “Captain Swing” who destroyed threshing machines in 1830 were convinced that machines stole work. Instead of which, farm labourers became factory workers; factory workers later became call-centre workers. In both transitions, pay rose and work became safer, less physically demanding and less exposed to the elements.

In 1949, the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener warned that computers in factories could usher in “an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty”. In 1964, a panel of the great and the good, including the Nobel prize winners Linus Pauling and Gunnar Myrdal, warned that automation would mean “potentially unlimited output by systems of machines which will require little cooperation from human beings”. This hoary old myth just keeps coming round again and again.

This time it’s different, I hear you cry. Those were just peasants or factory hands: now it’s software developers, accountants and perhaps even lawyers who face obsolescence through automation. Or academics and journalists! People – oh horror! – like us. But if we could lose most of the jobs in farming and manufacturing to automation and still have a record proportion of the population in employment, even while bringing women into the workforce in vastly higher numbers, why should we be unduly alarmed if some white-collar folk now suffer the same fate?

The argument that artificial intelligence will cause mass unemployment is as unpersuasive as the argument that threshing machines, machine tools, dishwashers or computers would cause mass unemployment. These technologies simply free people to do other things and fulfill other needs. And they make people more productive, which increases their ability to buy other forms of labour. “The bogeyman of automation consumes worrying capacity that should be saved for real problems,” scoffed the economist Herbert Simon in the 1960s. 

Yes, but what if there are no more needs to fulfill? Might there come a point where all the work we can ever need is done by machines, leaving nothing for us to do? When even pet-grooming salons and yoga teachers have ben replaced by robots. If so, and if the machines belong mainly to the wealthy, then the economic problem will be one of distribution, not of scarcity, so we may need to consider such radical ideas as the “basic income” in which everybody gets a salary from the government.

But it is not going to come to that. There are infinite new ways we can think of fulfilling each other’s needs and desires in exchange for reward. Look at the way modernity’s spectacular productivity has allowed the revival of crafts or the resurgence in live performance.

And in the unlikely even that this end point were ever reached, so what? A world in which machines do literally everything we can ever think of needing done (“Take me to Mars, Hal, and on the way rewrite Shakespeare as rap”) is a world in which we can spend our entire time consuming the products of those machines’ work. After all, the purpose of all work is consumption, as Adam Smith nearly said. The Tim Worstall puts it this way: “There will continue to be jobs for humans as long as there are unsatisfied human wants and desires. Once all of those are satisfied then jobs don’t matter, do they?”

We are sharing out less work already. In 1856 an average British man worked 149,700 hours over the course of his lifetime. By 1981 that number had almost halved to 88,000 hours – despite the fact that he lived much longer. He now spent more time in education, on holiday, in retirement or leaving work early. In 1960 a British worker spent nearly 12% percent of his or her life at work; by 2010 that number dropped to less than 9% (and I bet she spends some of the “work” time on his home life, reading emails, paying bills).

The final argument of the pessimists is that automation is “hollowing out” the workforce by replacing the jobs of the middle-skill professions, so we will be left with a world of hedge-fund managers and their maids. There has been some disproportionate losses of middle-income jobs in America and Europe since 1980, but as the MIT economist David Autor argues, it’s as much to do with competition from China as automation per se. You cannot outsource maids. And he thinks it is running out of steam anyway. Journalists, he says “tend to overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities between automation and labor that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for labor.” [Besides, the stagnation of incomes is not really true: see here.] 

Cheer up. Far from a mass of unemployed Morlocks living miserably poor lives while the digital Eloi monopolise the few well-paid jobs, automation is granting us ever more time, as well as more goods and services. [A reader pointed out that in H.G.Wells's book, the Morlocks were actually in charge...]

 

End

 

 

 

 

People took Trump seriously, but not literally -- the media vice-versa

My Times column on Trump's electoral triumph (originally published 14 November):

Years of compensating for the media’s tendency to look on the dark side of everything has taught me that it generally pays to seek silver linings. It’s possible of course that Donald Trump will start a culture war, a trade war and a nuclear war, but it’s also just possible that, while behaving like an oaf, he will preside over a competent administration. So here, after a few days of talking to people in America’s two biggest economies, California and Texas, are ten reasons why I think a Trump presidency may not be as awful as many think, even if, like me, you heard the news of his victory with a sinking feeling.

1 Just as after Brexit, the markets went up, not down. Virtually all analysts agreed that if Mr Trump won the stock market would fall — most estimates ranged from 2 per cent to 7 per cent. Instead the S&P 500 was up 3.8 per cent by the end of last week. The markets are betting that financial deregulation will encourage growth.

2 He is already watering down his more outlandish threats. As Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and Trump supporter, perceptively put it before the election, the media took Mr Trump literally but not seriously, whereas the public took him seriously but not literally. When he said he would build a wall and get the Mexicans to pay for it, people heard “he’ll get tough on illegal immigration”.

 

He has already said he will keep some parts of Obamacare. He has stopped talking about imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports. He’s not likely to try to jail Hillary Clinton. These are screeching U-turns that show him to be a hypocrite, if you like, but are welcome ones as far as moderates are concerned.

3 The presidency is nothing like as powerful a job as it seems. Although Barack Obama has set a dangerous precedent by vastly expanding the use of the president’s executive authority since he lost control of both houses of Congress, much of what Mr Trump wants to achieve will require legislation. Congress is not about to lie down. The Republican majority in the Senate is wafer thin and includes people, such as John McCain, who cannot stand Mr Trump and owe him no favours. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, is a formidable figure who will now effectively decide how much of Mr Trump’s programme will happen.

4 The Democratic Party will soon be back and hounding Mr Trump, if only in the courts. Admittedly, Mr Obama’s tenure has eviscerated the party: he lost as many Senate, House, governor and state-legislature seats as any postwar president, giving the Republicans a dominance they last had in the 1920s. But pendulums swing; it may even sink in with Democrats that populism is popular.

5 Mr Trump is already surrounding himself with reasonably sensible people; many who shunned him during the campaign are suddenly fired with ambition to serve him. The chairman and director of his transition team are vice-president-elect Mike Pence and Rick Dearborn, the chief of staff to Senator Jeff Sessions — Washington insiders both. Mr Pence is a creationist and religious conservative, which is not my cup of tea, but he is at least an experienced congressman and governor who knows how to cut deals in Washington. Rudy Giuliani was a good mayor of New York. Newt Gingrich is an intellectual and political heavyweight. Steven Mnuchin, the likely Treasury secretary, is from Goldman Sachs, for goodness sake. These are not flaky folk: they are from the very establishment Mr Trump campaigned against. Again, ironic but reassuring.

6 Some of his policies are not so bad. If he and Mr Ryan can reform taxes by abolishing loopholes and deductions, while cutting rates, as happened in 1986, then he could make the whole system more progressive, because it is the rich who benefit most from tax breaks. As he said in a debate with Hillary Clinton, she was in the Senate passing the laws that allowed him to avoid taxes. And America’s 35 per cent corporation tax is now way out of line with other countries.

7 His adviser on climate and energy, Myron Ebell, whom I know (not to brag, but we are both among the top ten climate “deniers” according to the website of Leonardo DiCaprio’s film Before the Flood), is right that climate change policy has become a gravy train for the rich that hurts the poor. Mr Obama’s “clean power plan” and opposition to oil pipelines were not going to cut emissions much if at all, but were going to push up energy prices at the expense of manufacturing jobs. If Mr Trump unleashes more gas production, that will cut emissions and drive out coal faster than renewable energy ever could.

8 The promised “swamp draining” — in the unlikely event Mr Trump pulls it off — will be cathartic. He has promised term limits on Congress, a five-year ban on public servants becoming lobbyists and a total ban on White House officials becoming lobbyists for foreign governments. Plus a hiring freeze and a one-in-two-out rule for new regulations. This is just the sort of diet Leviathan needs to go on.

9 His reprehensible attitude to women, minorities and the disabled, though setting a terrible example, is fortunately unlikely to result in actual persecution by the government. The presidency is not where these things are decided, and the media will be vigilant. Compared with many Republicans, Mr Trump is positively liberal on matters such as abortion and religion.

10 The idea that this is the end of democracy or the start of fascism, as some hyperventilating luvvies are saying, is nonsense. A disorganised campaign outspent by its opponents, derided by most of the establishment and hated by most of the media, without a ground game, just won a democratic election. If Mr Trump makes a mess of things he will be gone in four years — or sooner.

Admittedly there are some horrendous policy promises, of which trade protectionism is the most worrying. If he really does kill the North American Free Trade Agreement as well as the transpacific and transatlantic trade treaties, and imposes tariffs, he will assuredly cause a recession that hurts blue-collar workers in the rust belt more than free trade ever did. And he might crash the world economy. I can see few silver linings there.

 

The wisdom of crowds

My Times column on the wisdom of crowds, published the day before election day in the US:

‘In these democratic days, any investigation into the trustworthiness and peculiarities of popular judgments is of interest.” So begins an article entitled Vox Populi, which is not about Donald Trump but was published in 1907 by Francis Galton, a pioneer of statistics, by then 85 years old. He had analysed the results of a sweepstake competition held at the West of England Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition in Plymouth.

An ox was on display. Visitors could buy a postcard for sixpence and write their guess as to the weight of the ox, once slaughtered and dressed. Of 800 cards filled out, Galton rejected 13 as illegible and averaged the rest. The arithmetic mean of the 787 guesses came to 1,197lb. The true dressed weight of the ox was — yes — 1,197lb (Galton reported slightly different results, but recent reanalysis by Kenneth Wallis of Warwick University finds the match was exact).

The message is that a crowd is at least as wise as any expert (only one guess was spot on). In a large group of people, ignorance in one direction cancels out ignorance in another. Thus, to take another example, roughly ten million people will eat lunch in London today. Working out exactly what they will decide to eat, where, and in what quantities, is a vastly complicated exercise. Fortunately, we do not entrust the problem to a very well-paid and highly qualified London Lunch Commissioner, but to something called the market, which uses millions of signals of supply and demand to “crowd-source” the answer. And it works remarkably well every single day.

With Donald Trump possibly on the brink of election to the most powerful job in the world, many people are tempted to lose faith in the wisdom of crowds. It is common now to hear the argument that democracy is giving voice mainly to the ignorant and must therefore be somehow curtailed, with power handed back to the knowledgeable.

“It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses,” read the headline of an article by James Traub in Foreign Policy in June this year, referring to both Trump’s nomination and the Brexit referendum result. I think he is wrong. The crowd still has a wisdom that no individual can match, and the results of modern elections do not contradict this. We need more, not less, crowd wisdom.

A new book called Against Democracy by an American political philosopher, Jason Brennan, argues that democracy is “the rule of the ignorant and the irrational” and that “political participation and democratic deliberation actually tend to make people worse — more irrational, biased, and mean”. (You can see why he published the book this year.) In its place he recommends “epistocracy”, where you should have to earn the right to vote by showing a modicum of knowledge.

Professor Brennan’s Plato-like proposal is a bit vague as to detail. We might have to sit an exam to get a vote. Those with degrees might get extra votes (as Oxbridge once did). A council of epistocrats might veto certain applicants. If you think these ideas ludicrous and dangerous, it might be worth reminding you that this is how a great many decisions are indeed taken: a committee of experts is set up; a quango is staffed; a civil servant allocates a budget.

To a large extent we do live in such an epistocracy. Fortunately, we cling to the idea that every few years, and on certain constitutional questions, the populi — all of them — can have a vox. And rightly so, because the ideal future government of a country is too complicated a question for any expert, even if, like Mr Brennan, he is the associate professor of strategy, economics, ethics and public policy at the McDonough School of Business, at Georgetown University. Besides, there is no such thing as general ignorance or general expertise. Every brilliant person I know is also astonishingly ignorant on certain matters.

Paul Flynn, a Labour MP, says the result of the European referendum was illegitimate because most of the people who voted were ignorant. A slightly more sophisticated argument against plebiscites was common among the intelligentsia in the wake of the Brexit vote. Richard Dawkins, among others, argued that he should not have had to vote on a matter he did not understand. He says that is what parliament is for: to hand such decisions to experts, who understand the details.

 

But members of parliament are not experts, let alone omniscient ones. Whether Britain is right or wrong to leave the European Union is a question that nobody, however clever, can possibly know the right answer to. That is precisely why, like the weight of Galton’s ox, it is a question that should be decided by averaging popular opinion, and 34 million guesses are better than 650. The ignorances, biases, prejudices and hunches of everybody should be thrown into a giant blender. During the campaign some were persuaded that the ox was heavier, some that it was lighter than it was.

So what about Donald Trump? If tomorrow he becomes president-elect, am I arguing that this is a good decision because the crowd wills it? No, and here is why. The American people are not being asked, en masse, “who is the best person you can think of to occupy the White House?” They are being asked: “From among a very small group of very rich, very famous people, winnowed down for you to two, and that winnowing done by the less than 10 per cent of the population extreme and unrepresentative enough to belong to and turn out to vote in the party primary elections, which is the least awful?” That is very different from crowd-sourcing . . . I think!

A minority has foisted its choice on the majority. Likewise, Jeremy Corbyn is leader of the Labour Party, not because a large crowd has decided in its wisdom that he is the best leader of the opposition, but because a small and unrepresentative crowd, with the megaphone of social media at its disposal, has so decided.

If presidential elections were more, not less, like ox-weight guessing competitions, they might produce better results. The paradox of today is that technology, which ought surely to make testing the wisdom of crowds by giving everybody equal weight easier, may instead be giving undue weight to a minority of extreme voices.

Poverty, not wealth, is the greater threat to wildlife

My Times column on the surprising correlation between prosperity and improving conservation outcomes:

As foxes move into cities and deer, badgers and otters grow ever-more numerous, along with birds such as ospreys, buzzards and red kites, you might be thinking much of Britain’s wildlife is doing well. Yet last week the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), together with the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), published their latest assessment of the state of the world’s mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish: the Living Planet Report 2016. They found that on average populations of such animals declined by about 58 per cent between 1970 and 2012.

The report also provides evidence that while wildlife populations are doing poorly in poor countries, they are generally doing well in rich countries. I spent a happy few hours on virtual safari through the detailed database behind the findings (so I can report that granulated catfish in Paraguay are doing well, while grey-necked picathartes in Cameroon are doing badly), and this pattern emerges clearly.

Take large mammals: throughout Africa the populations of elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions and many antelopes are in headlong retreat. Throughout Europe the populations of deer, moose, boar, ibex, bear, wolf, beaver, otter and grey seals are booming. The report notes that lynx numbers in Europe have quadrupled over the past 50 years.

It is the same in North America. Deer, coyotes, bears and even cougars are growing their numbers, expanding their range and edging into the suburbs, while humpback and grey whales are booming along America’s coasts.

There are exceptions, of course, but some of them prove the rule. Sea otters are now doing badly off Alaska, largely because resurgent killer whales are eating them; hedgehogs are doing badly in Britain, largely because resurgent badgers are eating them.

As with mammals, so with many birds. Bald eagles, once teetering on the brink of extinction, have increased so fast that they were taken off the American endangered species list in 2007. Goose numbers have grown so much in both Europe and North America that they have become pests. Cranes are back in Britain after hundreds of years.

The impression that prosperity generally helps wildlife is confirmed by the fact that middle-income countries are in between: wildlife populations have often ceased falling and are beginning to show signs of recovery. China’s giant panda population is rising (although the Yangtze river dolphin is probably extinct); India’s tiger population has inched up in recent years, although its vultures have done badly. Brazil’s Amazon river dolphin is still fairly numerous, although threatened by various risks.

Notice also that in the tropics, large wild animals are increasingly confined to national parks and nature reserves. In Europe and North America even big animals are starting to recolonise areas heavily populated by people. In a suburb of Boston I was warned to watch out for gangs of aggressive turkeys. Bears are turning up in cities. Foxes have moved into British towns. A wolf has been filmed crossing a busy road in the Netherlands. I sometimes see peregrine falcons flying from Westminster Abbey to the Houses of Parliament clutching pigeons in their claws.

In terms of habitats, a similar contrast can be seen. Rich countries are steadily expanding their forests, while poor countries are still chopping them down. All of Europe is getting ever-more thickly wooded, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, as satellite images confirm. (See this excellent animation.) Britain has doubled its woodland cover in a century and is now as forested as it was in 1750. New England was once mostly farmland; it is now mostly woodland.

The transition from deforestation to reforestation generally seems to happen when a country’s GDP per capita reaches about $4,600 a year in today’s money. Costa Rica went from 75 per cent forest to 25 per cent between the 1940s and 1980s, at which point it passed that threshold and today it is back at over 50 per cent forested. China and India are both now reforesting.

Yet the prevailing theory among environmentalists is that it is affluence that is killing wildlife: that if we lived simpler lives closer to nature we would save more species. Although it is true that some of the demand for the resources of poor countries comes from rich countries, this is not the whole story. Rhinos and elephants are doing badly because of demand for their products from increasingly affluent Asian people, yet much of the pressure on tropical wildlife is domestically generated.

Desperately poor people in the Congo rainforest, catching bushmeat for food or for sale for a pittance in a local market, are a greater threat to monkeys than are tycoons on yachts in Monte Carlo.

Indeed, go back tens of thousands of years and the lesson is even clearer. Sparse populations of Stone Age hunter-gatherers, armed with little more than bows and arrows, wiped out a majority of the large mammal species — from mammoths and sabre-tooths to giant sloths and giant kangaroos — within an archaeological eyeblink of arriving on each continent, and with no help from the wealthy, because there were no wealthy. In North America, 45 of 61 large mammal groups went extinct coincident with the arrival of people; in South America 58 of 71; in Australia 17 of 18. Much later, the first people likewise devastated the giant lemurs of Madagascar, and the giant birds of New Zealand.

The reason rich people are now able to live alongside wildlife in a way that poor people do not is partly because, once liberated from mere subsistence, they can afford to care. It is also because wealth partly decouples the life of human beings from dependence on wild ecosystems. By eating farmed food, moving to cities, using minerals instead of organic materials, we reduce the need to exploit, or compete with, wildlife.

This phenomenon is known as sustainable intensification. So when the ZSL/WWF report blames the consumer society and the intensification of agriculture for the plight of wildlife, as it does, it has it exactly backwards. It argues that global economic growth, while reducing poverty, has resulted in “culturally entrenched aspirations for material consumption” and has gone “beyond what can be supported by the carrying capacity of a single Earth”. Yet if a billion Africans had the high farm yields of Europe, relied less on forests for fuel and materials, and had high living standards, it’s a fair bet that there would be a lot more lions and elephants.

 

Batteries won't make renewables into reliables

My Times column on batteries:

 

Batteries are no longer boring. Whether catching fire in Samsung Note 7s, being hailed as the answer to future electricity grids thanks to breakthrough chemical innovation, or being manufactured on a gigantic scale in Elon Musk’s gigafactory in Nevada, batteries are box office. And though battery technology is indeed advancing by leaps and bounds, there is a considerable quantity of balderdash being talked about it too.

If only we could store electricity! Then we could make it in the summer sun and on windy days, for use on cold winter nights. All right, let’s do a simple calculation. Britain uses about a terawatt-hour of electricity during an average winter day. If we wanted to store just two days’ worth of power, after making almost all transport and heating run on electricity — for that’s the plan, remember — then we would need nearly ten times as many car and lorry batteries as there are on the entire planet. (I borrowed this calculation from a similar one for Germany by the physicist Clive Best.)

Yes, but we would not use car batteries; we would use bigger units, and more efficient and newer lithium-ion batteries. All right, let’s buy Tesla Powerwalls instead. We would need 160 million of them to cover a day’s consumption, or 3.3 billion to cover a week when we’ve electrified heat and transport too. They retail for $3,000, so that’s about £8 trillion. For a system that would only rarely be needed in full. Maybe we could get a discount.

You begin to see why nuclear and gas make sense. But even if you only stored enough juice to turn our existing fleet of wind turbines into reliables — able to provide baseload electricity on demand — the cost would still be huge. The late David MacKay, former chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, in his invaluable book Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, reckoned that about a terawatt-hour of storage would be needed to turn 33 gigawatts of wind capacity into a reliable source. That implies that we would need 400 gigawatt-hours of batteries to turn today’s 14GW of wind capacity into 4GW of electricity on demand: which would cost north of £130 billion today.

Yes, but the price is coming down. That’s true. Battery costs have more than halved in about five or six years. One study says: “Industry-wide cost estimates declined by approximately 14 per cent annually between 2007 and 2014, from above $1,000 per kWh to around $410 per kWh.” However, that’s still an awful lot more expensive than the principal current method of storing energy: in oil tanks, gas tanks, piles of coal and even the fuel tanks of vehicles, plus to a much lesser extent by pumping water uphill in Wales. Such methods of storing energy both cost and waste very little. (I declare my commercial interest in coal, as usual.)

Perhaps, since we are all going to drive electric cars, we can store electricity in the batteries of our electric cars: plug them in and the grid could draw down the power during times of peak use when the wind does not blow. Well, if all Britain’s cars were electric they would store less than a day’s worth of power — and they would mostly be plugged in at night when demand for electricity is at its lowest. Besides, I don’t imagine people would be too happy to wake up and find their car’s flat because it was not very windy last night during Strictly.

There is a further problem. Any energy technology must generate more energy over its lifetime than was used in its manufacture and operation, by a ratio of at least seven, otherwise it is a waste of money. This is known as energy return on energy invested. The oil coming out of an oil well, or the electricity from a wind turbine must be much more than will be used in drilling the next well or making the next turbine: because it has to provide useful energy to the economy too, and to provide people with the wherewithal to build and repair machines and structures. It’s believed that medieval agrarian economies teetered close to the brink of this energy return threshold, getting not much more energy out of a windmill or food from a cornfield than had gone into it in terms of muscle power.

By this measure, solar power is actually negative and makes no sense at all in cloudy Britain, and nor does growing biofuels, since the tractors and chemicals use up about as much energy as is produced from the crop. According to a German study, wind power is viable by this measure, but not if you factor in the energy needed to store electricity to make it reliable, at which point it fails the test — and that’s assuming pumped water-storage, which is much cheaper than batteries.

 

You could deduce from all this not that it’s unaffordable but that there’s going to be huge, if not limitless, demand for batteries, especially if they get more efficient. Mr Musk’s investors are betting big on batteries. His Nevada gigafactory, built as a joint venture with Panasonic, is expected to cut the cost of batteries by 30 per cent and will produce 50 gigawatt-hours of batteries a year by 2018, enough to power Britain for 20 minutes if we electrify heat and transport. Other giga-scale battery factories have already opened in Asia.

There is no doubt that production of batteries has increased dramatically and batteries are going to be playing a big part in our lives, even without trying to store grid electricity. And no, we are not going to run out of lithium.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Mr Musk has had $4.9 billion of subsidies for his three main ventures: Tesla Motors, SolarCity (now bought by Tesla) and Space Exploration Technologies. He has yet to turn a profit and the losses are growing: some analysts think Tesla is burning through $1 billion a quarter. American taxpayers had better hope they have not been investing in a pyramid scheme. Enron, too, used to boast about its green credentials.

Here in Britain, you get a bribe of up to £4,500 from the government if you buy an electric car, so it’s no wonder that motor manufacturers are rushing to open factories. In terms of noise and pollution, electric vehicles clearly make a lot of sense. However, their cost is still huge, and their Achilles heel is the long time it takes to recharge. That’s a problem on the way to being solved, but not without risk: there seems to be evidence that it is rapid charging that increases the risk of internal shorting and this may be one of the problems within the Samsung batteries, leading to melting, oxygen release and explosion.

 

Following this article, there was an attempt to demolish my article by Chris Goodall. Unfortunately for him it was so deliberately misleading as to be an act of self demolition.

He said I gave $410 as the current cost per kWh of batteries. No I did not. I said that was the figure cited for 2014 in a paper. He simply misrepresented me. I said the price has more than halved in five or six years.

He said I was wrong to say that the Musk gigafactory would produce 50 gWh of batteries by 2018. No I was not. That is the correct figure. True, in a second phase, the factory hopes to expand to produce 150 gWh by 2020. Mr Goodall thinks that by citing the second figure he discredits the first. Strange. in any case that would mean enough batteries for storing an hour's worth of UK usage, up from 20 minutes. Big deal.

And he insists that solar power does provide positive EROEI in the UK. He plainly has not read Ferroni and Hopkirk's paper here. Goodall assumed a 35-year life for solar farms. I will believe that when I see it.

The rest of his piece is similarly misleading, employing the usual trick of the renewable-gullible folk of quoting something else as if it contradicts what I said when it does not.

 

Britain's broken land-use planning system

My recent Times column on the planning paralysis holding back Britain:

At last, the government is about to decide on a third runway at Heathrow airport — by the end of this month, I hear. It’s only been ten years since Tony Blair’s government first proposed the plan. Yet it will be three years until planning permission is granted and another six before the runway is finished. That’s two decades. Heathrow’s original three runways in 1946 took less than two years to build from scratch in a war-ravaged country depleted of funds and fuel. Why do such projects now take so inordinately long?

Land-use planning in Britain is not a joke; it’s a disgrace. The present system is grotesquely biased, not so much in favour of opponents or proponents of development, but in favour of delay and cost. I happen to think HS2 and Hinkley Point C are mistakes, but if I’ve lost those battles — and I probably have — then at least let’s get on and build them quickly, rather than spend the next decade paying lawyers and consultants to slow them down and inflate their costs.

In the case of shale gas, nearly a decade after it first started applying to do so Cuadrilla is to be allowed to drill a single well in Fylde, Lancashire, under strict environmental conditions, using a technique — horizontal drilling and fracking — that has been tested tens of thousands of times in America with very few environmental problems. In that decade, America has used this technique to smash the oil and gas price, transform its economy and cut its carbon emissions. We’ve spent the decade in a futile attempt to placate a handful of implacable green fanatics.

It’s tempting to blame nimbyism. But in Lancashire the problem is the opposite of nimbyism. The inundating of local councillors came not from locals but from outsiders. According to council officers, of 13,448 objections received, fewer than one in ten were actual letters (as opposed to forms thrust in front of people by pressure groups, mainly Friends of the Earth) and fewer than one in seven came from Fylde. So just 2.9 per cent of the adult population of Fylde objected to shale gas drilling. Remember that next time the BBC starts bleating about “fierce local opposition”.

Planning paralysis is the product of a timid state. Our cowardly lion of a bureaucracy throws issue after issue into the long grass when confronted by the mice that roar. Today it faces the challenge of one-click techno-protesters in alliance with a resurgent, campaigning “charity” industry. That industry is full of businesses — for that is what they are — reliant on generating a constant stream of lividness to motivate giving and agitation. Some are huge conglomerate marketing models that pull in protest donations, private revenues and government grants.

The latest accounts of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds show that this anti-fracking, pro-wind farm protest group pulled in £137 million last year, £21 million from government grants. Yet it and other protest groups are unfettered by any meaningful accountability, while they routinely second their staff to government departments with the strategic purpose of knowing how to gain grants and orchestrate policy.

 

Whenever they fear that the Charity Commission might express concern, such pressure groups shift the campaign to limited companies outside the commission’s reach — Friends of the Earth’s lawyers are experts at this game. Just occasionally they collide with reality. This newspaper recently broke the news on how, after eight months of investigation into Friends of the Earth, the Advertising Standards Authority had come to the initial conclusion that the group’s claims on fracking were misleading statements that it had failed to substantiate.

Even with planning permission, Cuadrilla faces an uphill task. It and its suppliers have to run a gauntlet of “direct action” — in the form of threats, abuse and intimidation — with very little help from the police and courts. The publicity-hungry pressure groups will probably team up with publicity-hungry law firms to bring judicial review suits on behalf of a handful of objectors, forcing the company to make its case all over again. (Likewise with Heathrow, threatens Zac Goldsmith MP.) Because these suits are dressed up as environmental challenges, they almost always succeed in getting a cost-protection order from the court, so that even if they fail the company cannot recover its huge cost in defending itself against the claim.

Meanwhile, a citizen of Lancashire or Britain who likes the idea of affordable energy with a small environmental impact has no such weapon at his disposal. He can’t sue anybody. Officialdom has almost as big an incentive to delay as the protest industry. The ranks of planners, consultants, inspectors, lawyers and surveyors of bats and newts generally benefit from things taking longer. The taxpayer and consumer are largely unrepresented in the system.

I am not arguing that people be stopped from objecting to development. I am criticising the time and cost of planning indecisions. There’s a political theory to explain what has gone wrong, called “public choice theory”. It argues that people within public bodies may be partly motivated by the public good, but they are also — inevitably and not surprisingly — motivated by budget maximisation. The same is true for charities and pressure groups. And, for that matter, companies, but then everybody already knows that private firms are profit maximisers.

As C Northcote Parkinson might have put it (as an example of his eponymous law), the civil servant who delays a decision because he is inundated with protests, then pleads a backlog of work as a reason for needing a bigger budget and expanded team, is not being irrational; far from it. But nor is he taking decisions solely in the public interest. The protester whose actions lead to a goldmine of publicity and the besieged public servant who thereby gets a budget increase, and the lawyer who interrogates both in court — are all benefiting from delay.

If this government wants to govern it must grasp how this process works. The risk is not just that the state is ineffective but that it gets consumed. Like a caterpillar full of parasitic wasp larvae that will eat its vital organs last, Britain can still inch forward in the world economy despite its ridiculous planning system and its powerful protest industry. But not for ever. Somehow we have to rebalance the incentives in favour of faster and cheaper decision-making.

Brexit should mean opening the doors to foreign scientists

My recent Times column from 10 October on immigration and the European Union:

Michael Kosterlitz, one of the four British-born but American-resident winners of Nobel prizes in science this year, is so incensed by Brexit that he is considering renouncing his British citizenship: “The idea of not being able to travel and work freely in Europe is unthinkable to me.” He has been misled — not by Leavers but by Remainers.

It’s not just that the overseas press have consistently portrayed Brexit as a nativist retreat, despite Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Daniel Hannan consistently saying the very opposite. Throughout the referendum campaign — and, shamefully, since — academics have been told by their lobby groups (such as Universities UK) that Brexit probably means losing access to European research funds, European scientific collaborations and European talent.

They knew, and know, that this was, to borrow a word thrown at Leavers a lot, “a lie”. The main European research funding programme, Horizon 2020, includes as members Norway, Iceland, Tunisia, Georgia, Turkey, Israel, Serbia and eight other non-EU countries. Project co-ordinators, who control the money, are appointed from Iceland more often — not less often — than from any EU country, in proportion to population. Switzerland and Israel get the most grant funding, per capita, from the prestigious European Research Council.

The major European science collaborations — in particle physics (CERN), molecular biology (EMBO), nuclear fusion (ITER), space research (ESA) — are nothing to do with the European Union and include non-EU member nations. Throughout the referendum campaign, the leaders of universities either did not know or chose to ignore these facts. No wonder academics were so alarmed when the result came in.

Where was the contingency planning to reassure their colleagues in the (highly possible) event that the country voted Leave? To say: “Although we hope Britain votes to remain, if it votes to leave, this should not affect our membership of European research collaborations, and it is highly likely we will still be able to access Horizon 2020 funds by joining the programme in the same way as 15 other non-EU European countries. So please don’t worry: we are unlikely to be excluded from a club that includes Albania and Moldova.”

Collaborations such as CERN are nothing to do with the EUAfter the vote there was a vogue for research laboratories to take group photographs of their members with flags denoting their country of origin, to show how international they were. This backfired because so many of the flags were Asian, South or North American, African or Australasian — exactly the point we Leavers had been making, that science is a global, not a regional, activity. It’s a fair bet that foreign researchers in British labs who come from continents beginning with A outnumber those from continents beginning with E. Professor Kosterlitz is a prime example of the fact that the top destination for ambitious British scientists heading overseas is America.

Now, to make matters worse, comes the home secretary, Amber Rudd, and her clumsy floating of the idea — which Justine Greening and Michael Fallon have rowed back on — of threatening to name and shame employers, presumably including universities, who employ too many foreigners. This could not have been better calculated to reinforce fears among scientists. Never once during the campaign did I hear anybody prominent on the Leave side ask for anything remotely as xenophobic as this.

Roland Rudd (her brother), a leader of the Remain campaign, said “those of us who want a sensible Brexit, who want Britain to remain a beacon of tolerance and who find the denigration of non-British workers appalling have a duty to speak out”. Steve Hilton, a leader of the Leave campaign, called the proposals “divisive, repugnant and insanely bureaucratic”.

At the very least, there is clearly a problem of people who campaigned for Remain having caricatured the Leave argument among themselves and then believed the caricature. (It’s a given of political debates that people don’t read their opponents’ views so much as their friends’ accounts of their opponents’ views.) Ms Rudd seems to think that northern Britain thinks the way north London intellectuals think it thinks.

It doesn’t. I recall a conversation over a garden fence on a housing estate in Gateshead on referendum day with a shaven-headed, tattooed and pierced, Rottweiler-restraining gentleman. Have you voted, I asked him. Yes, Leave, he replied. Mind if we ask why, said my friend: was it about immigration? No, he replied, I don’t mind immigrants, though I think we’ve been unfair on the Commonwealth ones, wouldn’t mind seeing more of them, and we’ve let in too many east Europeans instead. No, it’s about making our own laws.

Ipsos Mori conducted a poll last year asking people if they wanted more, fewer or the same number of different kinds of immigrants. While 63 per cent of people wanted fewer low-skilled immigrants, just 24 per cent wanted fewer immigrant university students, and only 15 per cent wanted fewer immigrant scientists and researchers.

 

This is a rational response. For the average Briton, as opposed to the wealthy customers of waiters, plumbers and nannies, unskilled migrants are a potential threat, putting downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on waiting lists for housing and services. Migrant scientists and students, let alone doctors or nurses, by contrast, are unambiguously good for the economy.

People voted to escape the subordination of our laws to unelected Brussels bureaucrats on June 23. To the extent that they also minded about immigration, the great majority of them wanted it controlled, not halted, let alone reversed by discrimination and repatriation. And biased towards people who bring skills, investment and ideas, and away from people who compete for public services: that’s what the “points system” argument was all about.

The impression left by the Conservative Party conference was that foreigners are less welcome, even if they are about to start a business or win a Nobel prize. Where is the expedited academic talent visa, like America has? America, Canada and Australia have a higher proportion of overseas researchers than Britain, Germany or France — alongside stricter general immigration policies.

If we are to thrive, Britain must redouble its efforts to be a beacon for talent, attracting ambitious students, scientists and entrepreneurs from India, China and elsewhere, in the same way that America attracted Michael Kosterlitz and his fellow Nobel laureates.

Global greening versus global warming

The text of a lecture given at the Royal Society on 17 October 2016:

 

I am a passionate champion of science.

I have devoted most of my career to celebrating and chronicling scientific discovery. I think the scientific method is humankind’s greatest achievement, and that there is no higher calling.

So what I am about to say this evening about the state of climate science is not in any sense anti-science. It is anti the distortion and betrayal of science.

I am still in love with science as a philosophy; I greatly admire and like the vast majority of scientists I meet; but I am increasingly disaffected from science as an institution.

The way it handles climate change is a big part of the reason.

After covering global warming debates as a journalist on and off for almost 30 years, with initial credulity, then growing skepticism, I have come to the conclusion that the risk of dangerous global warming, now and in the future, has been greatly exaggerated while the policies enacted to mitigate the risk have done more harm than good, both economically and environmentally, and will continue to do so.

And I am treated as some kind of pariah for coming to this conclusion.

Why do I think the risk from global warming is being exaggerated? For four principal reasons.

1. All environmental predictions of doom always are;

2. the models have been consistently wrong for more than 30 years;

3. the best evidence indicates that climate sensitivity is relatively low;

4. the climate science establishment has a vested interest in alarm.

Global greening

I will come to those four points in a moment. But first I want to talk about global greening, the gradual, but large, increase in green vegetation on the planet.

I think this is one of the most momentous discoveries of recent years and one that transforms the scientific background to climate policy, though you would never know it from the way it has been reported. And it is a story in which I have been both vilified and vindicated.

In December 2012, the environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University drew my attention to a video online of a lecture given by Ranga Myneni of Boston University.

In this lecture Myneni presented ingenious analysis of data from satellites proving that much of the vegetated area of the planet was getting greener, only a little bit was getting browner, and that overall in 30 years there had been a roughly 14% increase in green vegetation on planet Earth.

In this slide he argued that this was occurring in all vegetation types – tropical rain forests, subarctic taiga, grasslands, semi-deserts, farmland, everywhere.

What is more, Myneni argued that by various means he could calculate that about half of this greening was a direct result of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, rather than the application of agricultural fertiliser, irrigation, warmer temperatures or increased rainfall.

Carbon dioxide, along with water, is the raw material that plants use to make carbohydrates, with the help of sunlight, so it stands to reason that raising its concentration should help plants grow.

I was startled by Myneni’s data. I knew that there had been thousands of so-called free-air concentration (FACE) experiments, in which levels of CO2 had been increased over crops or wild ecosystems to find out if it boosted their growth (it did), and that commercial greenhouse owners now routinely maintain CO2 levels in their greenhouses at more than double ambient levels – because it makes their tomatoes grow faster.

But the global effect of CO2 levels on the quantity of vegetation had not, as far as I could tell, been measured till now.

Other lines of evidence also pointed to this global greening:

* the increased rate of growth of forest trees,

* the increased amplitude of seasonal carbon dioxide variation measured in Hawaii and elsewhere,

* photographic surveys of vegetation,

* the increased growth rate of phytoplankton, marine plants and some corals, and so on.

I published an article in the Wall Street Journal in January 2013 on these various lines of evidence, including Myneni’s satellite analysis, pointing to the increase in green vegetation.

This was probably the very first article in the mainstream media on the satellite evidence for global greening.

For this I was subjected online to withering scorn by the usual climate spin doctors, but even they had to admit I was “factually accurate”.

Six months later  Randall Donohue and colleagues in Australia published a paper using satellite data to conclude that the arid parts of the planet, such as western Australia and the Sahel region, had seen a net greening of 11% over 30 years – similar results to Myneni’s.

Myneni’s results, however, remained unpublished. I was puzzled by this. Then I realized that one of the IPCC’s periodic assessment reports was in preparation, and that probably Dr Myneni and colleagues might delay the publication of their results until after that report was published, lest “the skeptics have a field day” with it.

That last phrase, by the way, is from one of the Climategate emails, the one on 22 September 1999 in which Dr Michael Mann approves the deletion of inconvenient data.

Sure enough, Myneni’s results were eventually published three years later in April 2016 in a paper in Nature Climate Change, with 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries – when the IPCC report was safely in the public domain and the great Paris climate jamboree was over.

His results were now even stronger than he had concluded in his 2012 lecture. Now he said that 70% of the cause of greening was carbon dioxide – up from half.

As Myneni’s co-author Zaichun Zhu, of Beijing University, puts it, it’s equivalent to adding a green continent twice the size of mainland USA.

Frankly, I think this is big news. A new continent’s worth of green vegetation in a single human generation.

At the end of 2015, when his paper had been under peer review for eight months so he knew these results were coming, Dr Myneni, criticized me specifically, saying on a green blog that “[Ridley] falsely claims that CO2 fertilisation is responsible for the greening of the earth”. Yet a few months later he himself published evidence that “CO2 fertilisation explains 70% of the greening trend”.

In the press release accompanying the article in April 2016 he once again referred to me by name:

“The beneficial aspect of CO2 fertilization in promoting plant growth has been used by contrarians, notably Lord Ridley…to argue against cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate climate change…"

As Richard Tol commented: “The new paper vindicates what Matt Ridley and others have been saying all along — yet they apparently deserve to be kicked nonetheless.”

I wrote to Dr Myneni politely asking him to justify his criticism of me with specific examples. He was unable to do so. “There are no ‘up-sides’ to having too much CO2 in the air,” was all he said.

In the very same issue of the same journal was another paper from an international team about a further benefit of global greening, which concluded that CO2 fertilisation is likely to increase crop water productivity throughout the world, for example by up to 48% for rain-fed wheat in arid areas, and that “If realized in the fields, the effects of elevated [CO2] could considerably mitigate global yield losses whilst reducing agricultural consumptive water use (4–17%).”

Their chart shows that without CO2 fertilisation, crops will become more water-stressed during the current century; with it they will become LESS water-stressed.

These are huge benefits for the earth and for people. The CO2 fertilisation effect is already worth trillions of dollars, according to detailed calculations by Craig Idso.

At this point Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit drew attention to my vindication on twitter. Richard Betts, the Met Office’s twitter frequenter, protested that global greening was well known and had been referred to in the IPCC’s report.

This was misleading at best and false at worst. The Summary for Policy Makers of Working Group 2 refers to global greening not at all. The full report of WG2, produced six months after the Summary for Policy Makers in that reprehensible fashion so beloved of the IPCC, does very gently hint at there being some evidence of greening, but in a dismissive way, and far too late to catch the attention of journalists. These are the only mentions I could find:

“Satellite observations from 1982–2010 show an 11% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments…Higher CO2 concentrations enhance photosynthesis and growth (up to a point) and reduce water use by the plant…these effects are mostly beneficial; however, high CO2 also has negative effects.”

“In summary, there is high confidence that net terrestrial ecosystem productivity at the global scale has increased relative to the preindustrial era. There is low confidence in attribution of these trends to climate change. Most studies speculate that rising CO2 concentrations are contributing to this trend through stimulation of photosynthesis but there is no clear, consistent signal of a climate change contribution.”

The main text of Working Group 1 contains an even briefer statement:

“Warming (and possibly the CO2 fertilisation effect) has also been correlated with global trends in satellite greenness observations, which resulted in an estimated 6% increase of global NPP, or the accumulation of 3.4 PgC on land over the period 1982–1999 (Nemani et al., 2003).”

If that’s a clear and prominent statement that carbon dioxide emissions have increased green vegetation on the planet by 14% and are significantly reducing the water requirements of agriculture, then I’m the Queen of Sheba.

Back in 1908 Svante Arrhenius, the father of the greenhouse theory, said the following:

“By the influence of the increasing percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere, we may hope to enjoy ages with more equable and better climates.”

It appears he was not wrong.

The consensus

Now let me back to global warming.

Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and UN Special representative on Climate Change, said in a speech in 2007 that “it is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral to question the seriousness of the situation. The time for diagnosis is over. Now it is time to act”.

I disagree. It is irresponsible not to challenge the evidence properly, especially if the policies pursued in its name are causing suffering.

Increasingly, many people would like to outlaw, suppress, prosecute and censor all discussion of what they call “the science” rather than engage in debate.

“We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change,” said three professors at the University of Colorado in an email to their students recently.

Shamefully, much of the scientific establishment and the media are prepared to go along with that program. And to bully any academic or journalist who steps out of line.

This coercion was displayed all too vividly when the distinguished scientist Lennart Bengtsson was bullied into resigning from the academic advisory council of GWPF in 2014 by colleagues’ threats. He even began to “worry about my health and safety…”

And when Philippe Verdier was sacked as weather forecaster in France for writing an honest book. And when Roger Pielke was dropped by the 538 website for telling the truth about storms.

No wonder that I talk frequently to scientists who are skeptical, but dare not say so openly. That is a ridiculous state of affairs.

We’re told that it’s impertinent to question “the science” and that we must think as we are told. But arguments from authority are the refuge of priests.

Thomas Henry Huxley put it this way: “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”

What keeps science honest, what stops it from succumbing entirely to confirmation bias, is that it is decentralized, allowing one lab to challenge another.

That’s how truth is arrived at in science, not by scientists challenging their own theories (that’s a myth), but by scientists disputing each other’s theories.

These days there is a legion of well paid climate spin doctors. Their job is to keep the debate binary: either you believe climate change is real and dangerous or you’re a denier who thinks it’s a hoax.

But there’s a third possibility they refuse to acknowledge: that it’s real but not dangerous. That’s what I mean by lukewarming, and I think it is by far the most likely prognosis.

I am not claiming that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas; it is.

I am not saying that its concentration in the atmosphere is not increasing; it is.

I am not saying the main cause of that increase is not the burning of fossil fuels; it is.

I am not saying the climate does not change; it does.

I am not saying that the atmosphere is not warmer today than it was 50 or 100 years ago; it is.

And I am not saying that carbon dioxide emissions are not likely to have caused some (probably more than half) of the warming since 1950.

I agree with the consensus on all these points.

I am not in any sense a “denier”, that unpleasant, modern term of abuse for blasphemers against the climate dogma, though the Guardian and New Scientist never let the facts get in the way of their prejudices on such matters. I am a lukewarmer.

Incidentally, some of my scientific friends accuse me of inconsistently agreeing with the scientific consensus that genetic modification of crops is safe and beneficial, but refusing to agree with the scientific consensus that climate change is dangerous. Other people – Prince Charles, for example — do the exact opposite.

Well, my friends are wrong. I agree with the scientific consensus on GM crops not because it is a consensus but because I’ve looked at sufficient evidence.

And in any case, as I say, I am not disagreeing with the consensus on climate change.

There is no consensus that climate change is going to be dangerous. Even the IPCC says there is a range of possible outcomes, from harmless to catastrophic. I’m in that range: I think the top of that range is very unlikely. But the IPCC also thinks the top of its range is very unlikely.

The supposed 97% consensus, based on a hilariously bogus study by John Cook, refers only to the proposition that climate change is real and partly man-made. Nobody has ever shown anything like a consensus among scientists for the proposition that climate change is going to be dangerous.

Professor Daniel Sarewitz put it well recently: “Even the vaunted scientific consensus around climate change…applies only to a narrow claim about the discernible human impact on global warming. The minute you get into questions about the rate and severity of future impacts, or the costs of and best pathways for addressing them, no semblance of consensus among experts remains.”

Besides, consensus is a reasonable guide to data about the past but is no guide to the future and never has been. In non-linear systems with feedbacks, like economies or atmospheres, experts are notoriously bad at forecasting events. There is no such thing as an expert on the future.

So, as my good friend Christopher Hitchens once said: “Don’t take refuge in the false security of consensus.”

And remember, as Richard Feynman said, “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”.

The track record on doom

I said that one reason to be skeptical about dangerous climate change is that environmental predictions of doom are always wrong.

Here’s a list of predictions made with much fanfare and extensive coverage in the media in the 1970s, when I was young and green, in both senses of the word:

the population explosion would be unstoppable;
global famine would be inevitable;
crop yields would fall;
a cancer epidemic caused by pesticides would shorten lifespan;
the desert would advance at two miles a year;
rainforests would disappear;
acid rain would destroy forests;
oil spills would worsen;
oil and gas would run out;
and so would copper, zinc, chrome and many other natural resources;
the Great Lakes would die;
dozens of bird and mammal species would become extinct each year;
and a new ice age would begin;

All these were trumpeted loudly in the mainstream media. Not one of them has come even close to meeting the apocalyptic expectations of their promoters. Sometimes this was because we took action to avert the danger. Sometimes it is because the jury is still out. More often it was because the scare was exaggerated in the first place.

These were later joined by more predictions of doom:

sperm counts would fall;
mad cow disease would kill hundreds of thousands of people;
genetically modified weeds would devastate ecosystems;
nanotechnology would run riot;
computers would crash at the dawn of the millennium, bringing down civilisation;
the hole in the ozone layer would cause blindness and cancer on a huge scale;

Many predictions of climate doom have already been proved wrong, as this cartoon points out.

Many of the impacts of global warming have not happened as predicted either:

malaria was going to get worse because of rising temperatures; it didn’t.

 

snow would become a thing of the past; yet northern hemisphere snow cover shows no trend

 

hurricanes/cyclones would get worse; they haven’t.

 

droughts would get worse; they haven’t

 

the Arctic sea ice would be gone by 2013; it wasn’t.

 

glacier retreat would accelerate; yet more than half the retreat of glaciers happened before 1950.

 

sea level rise would accelerate; it hasn’t

 

the Gulf Stream would falter, as this clip from the movie the Day After Tomorrow latched on to.

All these predictions have also failed so far.

The death toll from droughts, floods and storms has been going down dramatically. Not because weather has got safer, but because of technology and prosperity.

James Hansen in 1988 said that by the year 2000, “the West Side Highway will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there.”

The UNEP predicted in 2005 that by 2010 there would be 50 million climate refugees. In 2010 it tried to delete the web link.

Ten years ago, Al Gore said that within ten years we would have reached the point of no return. [Inconvenient truth]

So we should take predictions of doom with a pinch of salt.

The models

The climate models have failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC has confirmed, for the period since 1998,

“111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations”. [IPCC Synthesis report 2014, p 43]

That is to say there is a consensus that the models are exaggerating the rate of global warming.

The warming has so far resulted in no significant or consistent change in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover.

As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy, have put it,

“We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.”

In 1990, the first IPCC assessment included this statement, forecasting a temperature increase of 0.3 Cº per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 Cº to 0.5 Cº).

In fact in the two and half decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the business-as-usual scenario, the temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.15 C per decade based on surface measurements, or 0.12C per decade based on satellite data; that is, less than half as fast as expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range!

What about 2015 and 2016 both being record hot years? Well, because of the massive El Nino, the HADCRUT4 surface temperature line just about inched up briefly in early 2016 into respectable territory in among the lower half of the model runs for a few months before dropping back out again [Clive Best chart]. That’s all.

Notice also that the warming has been twice as fast in the Northern hemisphere as the southern, that it has been concentrated in colder areas, colder seasons and at night. The difference between the red and blue lines on this chart is 20 years of global warming.

Notice too that the warming has definitely not taken us into uncharted territory. We are in the cooling part of the current interglacial, as shown by Greenland’s ice cores, and tree lines in the Urals are still lower than they were in the middle ages.

By the way, I trust the satellites more than the surface temperature data sets.

The latter are hopelessly contaminated by failures to correct properly for urbanization around measuring stations and a habit among those who control these data sets of “adjusting” old temperatures downwards without giving good reason. The global temperature in 1910 has been mysteriously falling over the last eight years. The global temperature in 2000 has been mysteriously rising.

But – and here is the amazing thing – even if you take the surface data sets, the rate of global warming is far slower than predicted by the models.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is 95% sure that more than half of the warming since 1950 is man made. If you use the surface temperature sets that still implies less than half a degree of man-made warming in more than half a century.

This is still nothing like a dangerous change. At this rate dangerous warming is at least a century away. And the slower it happens the less dangerous it is, and the easier to adapt to.

Sensitivity

So why is the atmosphere not doing what it is told?

Actually it is. These results are precisely in line with the physics of the greenhouse effect.

We think recent warming was mainly caused by a change in the composition of the atmosphere, an increase from 0.03% to 0.04% carbon dioxide.

We know that the next 0.01% increment, expected soon after mid century, will have a lesser effect than the last 0.01% – that’s basic physics, the diminishing returns or logarithmic nature of the curve, as shown by Guy Callender in 1938.

A doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot on its own produce dangerous warming.

The sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2 is about 1.2C per doubling. That is the consensus, spelled out clearly (if obscurely) by the IPCC several times over the years. And that’s what we are on course for at the moment.

So what is the problem? Well, the theory of dangerous climate change depends on a whole extra step in the argument, one that very few politicians and journalists seem even to know about – the supposed threefold amplification of carbon dioxide’s warming potential, principally by extra water vapour released into the atmosphere by a warming ocean, and accumulating at high altitudes.

This is Warren Meyer’s diagram to show the difference.

This is where the evidence is much more shaky. Some studies find an increase in water vapour high in the atmosphere, others do not. One complication is that water vapour condenses into clouds and we cannot either measure or model clouds anything like adequately yet.

We know that clouds keep the surface warm at night, while low clouds in particular cool it during the day by reflecting sunlight back into space. But whereas the models generally claim that there is a positive correlation between the net cloud radiative effect and temperature, boosting the water vapour amplification, NASA’s CERES data show that there is a strong and significant, negative correlation: that higher temperatures lead to more cloud cooling. That’s a glaring discrepancy between models and data.

Consistent with these discrepancies, recent attempts to measure the sensitivity of the climate system to carbon dioxide using real data nearly all find that it is much lower than the models assume, as Nic Lewis, Marcel Crok, Judith Curry and Pat Michaels have shown in recent years.

Of particular note, the cooling effect of sulphate aerosols is smaller than thought, so cannot be an excuse for the slowness of recent warming.

So, if it’s consensus that floats your boat, there is an emerging consensus from observational estimates that climate sensitivity is low.

The models are assuming too rich a feedback.

What’s more, all the high estimates of warming are based on an economic and demographic scenario called RCP 8.5, which is a very, very unrealistic one.

It assumes that population growth stops decelerating and speeds up again.

It assumes that trade and innovation largely cease.

It assumes that the ability of the oceans to absorb CO2 fails.

It assumes that despite all this the income of the average person trebles.

And most absurd of all, it assumes that we go back to using coal for almost everything, including to make motor fuel, so that by 2100 we are using ten times as much coal as we are today.

In short, it is a barking mad scenario, yet whenever you hear a scientist or a politician say something like we are committed to warming of “up to” four degrees, that – and implausibly high sensitivity – is what they are assuming, often without knowing it.

Vested interests

Let me turn to the topic of fossil fuels.

To paraphrase Monty Python, What have fossil fuels done for us?

Apart from a new continent’s worth of green vegetation.

And removing the need to cook over a wood fire, the smoke from which is one of the biggest killers in the world, dispatching over three million people a year according to the World Health Organisation.

And removing the need to fetch wood from the forest and dismantle an ecosystem in doing so.

Apart from that what have fossil fuels done for us?

Well, I suppose they supply the power to pump water so that it does not have to be fetched.

They allow electric light and hence help literacy and education.

They bring the refrigeration of food and vaccines.

They enable the child to catch a lift to school.

They make the fertilizer that raises farm yields, ending most hunger and sparing land for wildlife.

Yes, but apart from ending starvation, enabling kids to get to school, refrigerating vaccines, boosting literacy, pumping water, reducing the pressure on forests, reducing indoor air pollution, and creating 14% more green vegetation – apart from all this, what have fossil fuels done for us?

“Fossil fuels don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they take a dangerous climate and make it safe,” says Alex Epstein.

From time to time, I stand accused of letting the fact that I have a commercial interest in coal, which I have declared many times and hereby do again, influence my assessment of climate science.

But if my critics argue that way about me, then I can argue that way about them. Perhaps Al Gore’s commercial interest in renewable energy influences his assessment of climate science. Perhaps Michael Mann’s grants and James Hansen’s prizes for studying man-made climate change influence his conclusions. I don’t think they should be censored, so why should I be?

If climate change is not dangerous then there’s no justification for renewable energy subsidies.

It is beyond question that global warming has generated enormous research funds, measured in many billions, that this has stimulated all sorts of scientists, from botany to psychiatry, to link their work to climate change, and that almost none of this money flows to those with sceptical views.

As the distinguished NASA climate scientist Roy Spencer has written,

“If you fund scientists to find evidence of something, they will be happy to find it for you. For over 20 years we have been funding them to find evidence of the human influence on climate. And they dutifully found it everywhere, hiding under every rock, glacier, ocean, and in every cloud, hurricane, tornado, raindrop, and snowflake. So, just tell scientists 20% of their funds will be targeted for studying natural sources of climate change. They will find those, too.”

Opportunity cost

Suppose I am right and our grandchildren find that we were greatly exaggerating the risks, and underestimating the benefits of CO2.

Suppose they do indeed experience carbon dioxide levels of 600 parts per million or more, but do not experience dangerous global warming, or more extreme weather, just a mild and decelerating increase in global average temperatures, especially at high latitudes, at night and in winter, accompanied by spectacular global greening and less water stress for both people and crops.

Does it matter that our politicians panicked in the early 2000s? Surely better safe than sorry?

Here’s why it matters. Our current policy carries not just huge economic costs, which hit the poorest people hardest, but huge environmental costs too.

We are encouraging forest destruction by burning wood, ethanol and biodiesel.

We are denying poor people the cheapest forms of electricity, which forces them to continue relying on wood for fuel, at great cost to their health.

We are using the landscape, the rivers, the estuaries, the hills, the fields for making energy, when we could be handing land back to nature, and relying on forms of energy that nature does not compete for – fossil and nuclear.

But there is a further reason why it matters. Real environmental problems are being neglected. The emphasis on climate change as the pre-eminent environmental threat means that we pay too little attention to the genuine environmental problems in the world.

We bang on about ocean acidification when it is overfishing and run-off that is most hurting coral reefs.

We misdiagnose climate change as the cause of floods when it is land drainage and urban development that is the cause.

We claim climate change as the cause of extinctions, when it is invasive species that disrupt and damage ecosystems and drive out rare species.

We say climate change is a threat to air quality, when it is climate policy that has hindered progress in improving air quality.

We talk about losing seabird colonies to warming seas and then build wind farms that slaughter the birds while turning a blind eye to overfishing.

Here’s why I really mind about the exaggeration: it has downgraded, displaced and discredited real environmentalism, of the kind I have devoted part of my life to working on.

I have worked on wildlife conservation projects in India, Pakistan and elsewhere. Climate change is the least of the problems facing birds like the western tragopan, the lesser florican, the cheer pheasant and the grey phalarope, rare species that I once studied and published peer-reviewed papers about.

The climate obsession has used up money and energy and political will that could have been used for getting rid of grey squirrels, for protecting coral reefs, for preventing deforestation and overfishing, for weaning the rural poor in Africa off bushmeat and wood fuel.

Please remember that the IPCC agrees with me that, in terms of its economic impact, climate change is a minor issue. Once again, I am not departing from the consensus.

The opening words of the executive summary of working group 3’s report on the impacts of climate change in AR5 read as follows:

“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, lifestyle, 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.”

That’s the IPCC’s consensus view.

Renewables

And here is the maddest thing of all. Current policy is not even achieving decarbonisation. Whatever your views on the urgency of reducing emissions, the policy of subsidizing renewable energy is not achieving it.

Switching to biodiesel or ethanol actually increases emissions. So does burning wood in power stations. So does solar power in cloudy Germany. So do wind farms because they prevent the replacement of coal by gas or nuclear.

In 2012 Bjorn Lomborg calculated that 20 years of climate policy had reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent. During that time the world had spent more than a trillion dollars to subsidise wind and solar power, yet between them they had still not achieved 1% of world energy provision. In this country, they have just passed 2%.

In Germany, a 20% increase in renewables between 1999 and 2014 has resulted in no change in emissions at all.

Testifying to Congress in 2014, Professor Judith Curry, chair of Earth Sciences at Georgia Tech University said:

“Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile.”

Winning the argument

When Nigel Lawson set up GWPF in 2009, virtually everybody agreed that global warming was the greatest threat to humankind in the twenty-first century. Now almost nobody except those with a vested interest thinks that.

The proportion of Americans who are not worried at all about global warming has doubled since 1990. [Gallup poll, 1989-2015]

The presidential candidates are not talking about climate change because voters consider other issues more pressing. In one recent poll of Americans, just 3% said they think climate is the most important issue.

Most devastating of all, to those who have spent a fortune on propaganda, in a huge United Nations online poll of people all around the world, called My World, to which almost ten million people have now responded, action on climate change comes dead last, 16th, and by some margin – well behind the 15th priority, which is phone and internet access.

The sceptics, with their shoestring budgets, with zero public money, under constant assault, are winning the argument.

Thank you.