Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 278

Science, Climate And Skepticism

I have to say that one of the most depressing features of the decline of conservative thinking in the US has been the resistance to the overwhelming data behind carbon and climate change. I don’t get it, however much I try. Check out Jon Chait’s takedown of George Will’s and Charles Krauthammer’s “arguments” on the subject. It’s deeply dispiriting. And it helps explain why the GOP is such an extreme outlier among right-of-center parties in the Western world on this issue.

There is an obvious role for conservatism here at every stage. I favor maximal skepticism toward scientific theories that might prompt us to change our lives and societies in radical ways. If there were any use for a conservatism of doubt, it would be to counter such over-reach. The calls for skepticism in this field are absolutely legitimate, given the scale of the consequences. I also favor maximal skepticism in figuring out the best way to deal with such change – a debate well worth having, but which has languished because the US right won’t even agree to the premise.

But the truth is: on this question, scientific skepticism has been abundant, while the data on the core reality continues to mount. In many ways, the skeptics have garnered more media attention than the climate-change consensus-mongers. And of course there’s always a chance that we’ll stumble upon some new evidence or theory that would throw this entire edifice into doubt (it happens). And it would be awesome. But, at this point, the overwhelming scientific consensus is clear enough, and the argument behind it powerful. The world’s climate is changing; and it will mean huge challenges for humanity’s habitat. I simply cannot see why any sane person would not wish to try and mitigate that change or prepare for such an eventuality. It’s not about ideology so much as simple prudence. Even if you view the likelihood of a much warmer planet as small, its huge potential impact still makes it worth confronting. Low-probability-high-impact events are like that. And conservatives, properly understood, attend to such contingent problems prudently; only ideologues or fools decide it would be better to do nothing and hope for the best.

More to the point, the efforts to counter climate change are mainly win-win. If solar power could run the planet, wouldn’t that be great?

So why all the mockery? If we managed to discover a new low-carbon fuel that would provide us with energy at minimal environmental cost, why wouldn’t that also be a wonderful thing? Ditto wind power or carbon capture technologies. Sure there will be waste and dead ends in a green economy. We should be attuned to that as well as the need to mitigate change for the fossil fuel industries, and the people who work in them, as best we can. But there will be lots of technological and economic gains as well. So I just don’t see the core reason for conservative resistance. (Cue the groan chorus from Corey Robin, et al.)

Then there is the fashionable tendency among conservatives to describe the habits of mind of environmentalists as alien or weird: i.e. the Greens are like the early Nazis in their love of nature; enviros treat the planet as a God; it’s all about therapy; or some secular version of sin. These observations can carry some insight, of course (the Nazis were pretty green), as well as some cheap points. Here’s what Krauthammer came up with on that theme:

And you always see that no matter what happens, whether it’s a flood or it’s a drought, whether it’s one — it’s warming or cooling, it’s always a result of what is ultimately what we’re talking about here, human sin with the pollution of carbon. It’s the oldest superstition around. It was in the Old Testament. It’s in the rain dance of the Native Americans. If you sin, the skies will not cooperate. This is quite superstitious, and I’m waiting for science which doesn’t declare itself definitive but is otherwise convincing.

Okaaay. Sure, there may well be patterns of thought among climate change scientists that echo or mimic other social movements. It’s a meme-ridden world. I’m sure some climate change scientists have beards and smoke weed and like “Orange Is The New Black”. Others may love classical music or be crypto-socialists. But that’s not an argument about the data. It’s an argument about style and culture and habits of thought behind the data. The data exist independently of all of that. And no set of evidence declares itself “definitive” either, as Krauthammer asserts. All of the evidence is obviously ongoing and more data will emerge, and more reports will be published and better understanding will result. That’s how science works. And over time, theories that work better prevail. That’s called the scientific method – and skepticism is embedded in it at almost every stage.

And that’s where we are. No amount of denial or distraction can change that fact. Either we adjust or we face the consequences. Or both. But pretending we live on another planet in another era does not seem to me to be a conservative position. It is, in Chait’s words, “absolutely bonkers.”

The Best Of The Dish Today

The intrepid FOIA work by San Francisco gadfly and AIDSy role model, Michael Petrelis, gave us proof in Jo Becker’s own words that her book tour and promotion for Forcing The Spring were being jointly “coordinated” by her publisher, Penguin, and the Human Rights Campaign and AFER. So HRC’s head, Chad Griffin, was integrally involved in the promotion of a book that describes him as the gay Rosa Parks on the first page. We also learned that Becker tried to get another much-praised source, San Francisco City Attorney, Dennis Herrera, to bulk purchase the book for sale and hold an event at San Francisco City Hall.

Petrelis has also – through FOIA – made another discovery. Herrera paid Chad Griffin’s p.r. firm $17,500 in late 2008 to help him reach out to donors who may not have seen marriage equality as a cause to support. The conflicts of interest here are myriad. And, given the NYT’s embrace of the book – the cover of the magazine, the Book Review, the first choice of New York Times editors for a book in print, and Becker’s liberal use of her New York Times affiliation, it’s a good thing that the NYT Public Editor has decided to investigate. Stay tuned.

Earlier today I tried to tackle the question of culture, conservatism and immigration – by looking at the British political scene. We got a first-hand account of what it’s like to live on Soylent – the high-tech food substitute that tempts me so. And a reader turned the question around as our first Book Club discussion wound down: what if modernity needs Christianity to survive?

The most popular post of the day was “And Sometimes There Is A Smoking Gun Email,” followed by my post yesterday on the new world and a new era for American foreign policy, “Letting Go Of Global Hegemony, Ctd.“

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Mourners gather to pay their respects as the cortege passes by following the repatriation of five British servicemen who were killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan at RAF Brize Norton, on May 6, 2014 in Brize Norton, near Oxfordshire, England. Captain Thomas Clarke, Warrant Officer Spencer Faulkner and Corporal James Walters, of the Army Air Corps (AAC), who were serving as the Lynx aircrafts three-man team when they died alongside Flight Lieutenant Rakesh Chauhan of the Royal Air Force and Lance Corporal Oliver Thomas of the Intelligence Corps, were believed to have been passengers on the flight. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has denied claims by the Taliban that insurgents shot the helicopter down in Kandahar province on April 26, claiming it was a tragic accident rather than enemy action that caused of the crash. By Dan Kitwood/Getty Images.)

The Teen Pregnancy Crisis That Isn’t

Derek Thompson relays the findings of a new report (pdf) from the Guttmacher Institute showing that teen pregnancy has become much less common over the past 30 years and that abortions among teens are also on the decline:

Even though increasing proportions of women ages 18 and 19 reported having sex, the smallest portion on record are getting pregnant. “Changes in contraceptive use are likely driving this trend,” write authors Kathryn Kost and Stanley Henshaw. Previous studies have found that media awareness of teen moms, like the eponymous MTV show “Teen Moms,” are also responsible for declining pregnancies, although the 30-year trend suggests that there’s something else (presumably sex education and wider use of contraceptives) besides a new MTV show driving the trend.

Katie McDonough thanks birth control and sex ed:

Reproductive rights advocates echoed the sentiment. “The good news is that we know what works to prevent teen pregnancy. Sex education works. Ensuring that teens have access to birth control works,” Leslie Kantor, Planned Parenthood’s vice president of education, said of the report. “When young people have accurate information and resources, they make responsible decisions.” Someone should alert Bill O’Reilly about this news so that maybe he’ll stop obsessing over Beyoncé already.

But Tara Culp-Ressler notes that most adults think teen pregnancy is on the rise:

Perhaps it seems like things are getting worse because there’s always a new trend that inspires moral panic about teens’ risky sexual behavior — like sexting, “raunchy” pop songs, the college “hook up culture,” and TV shows’ supposed “glamorization” of teen pregnancy. Social conservatives also often raise concerns about the fact that Americans are increasingly having sex and children outside of marriage, equating changing family structures with bad choices. And it doesn’t help that the public health campaigns to discourage teen pregnancy often rely on doom-and-gloom messages to shame teens for making terrible decisions that will ruin their lives.

Ultimately, the fact that more teens are successfully using birth control doesn’t fit into our larger societal narrative that kids are always irresponsible. Americans tend to be reluctant to trust teenagers to manage their own sexual health, and often treat sex as something that’s totally outside kids’ realm of understanding.

Hathos Alert

Or it could be a poseur alert. It’s longer than most but the pleasure and the pain ramp up relentlessly into a truly hathetic concoction.

Seattle Maxes Out The Minimum Wage, Ctd

David Dayen lays into Jordan Weissmann’s “scare tactics” regarding Seattle’s proposed $15 minimum wage:

Seattle actually sought out studies on what would happen after a large minimum wage increase. In March, Mayor Murray released a report from three professors at UC Berkeley who looked at the impact of local wage laws on employment, and specifically whether businesses move outside local borders for lower labor costs. Simply put, the researchers found no such dynamic.

Matt Taylor also doubts the wage hike will crash the city’s economy:

“What is important is the phase-in period rather than the number,” said Dean Baker, an economist and founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“It’s fair to say if we were going to make it $15 next year I’d be very worried. But if you make it [that] over 7 years, there’s 15 percent inflation or somewhere around there, so in today’s dollars a $15 minimum wage would be something in the order of $12.75 [by the time it takes effect]. Right off the bat that sounds less worrisome. You’re not going to see firms going out of business because of this.” …

So please, let’s not start panicking about endtimes for Seattle and its utopian ideals of economic fairness. It’s necessary to at least pause and consider research that shows minimum wage hikes can have a modest negative affect on overall employment—specifically among teenagers—but as Slate’s $15 wage critic Jordan Weissmann himself points out, that side effect is perfectly acceptable so long as most workers are making out better in the long run. What data is there to suggest that will not be the case for Seattle?

Danny Vinik thinks it’s an important experiment even if it runs the risk of backfiring:

Massachusetts implemented the first non-compulsory minimum-wage law in 1912. Within the next eight years, 12 other states and the District of Columbia had their own minimum wage laws, although the Supreme Court struck down D.C.’s law that set a minimum wage for women and child laborers. In 1938, Congress passed a national minimum wage as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act and it eventually withstood a Supreme Court challenge.

The Massachusetts law could have been a disaster for its citizens, as no one knew for sure how a minimum wage would affect the economy. Instead, it laid the groundwork for a national minimum wage. Seattle’s low-wage workers may ultimately suffer for its $15 minimum wage, as conservatives and even some liberals are predicting. If it succeeds, though, Democrats would have a case for a higher national minimum wage than $10.10. We won’t know unless we try—a scary prospect for Seattle, but exciting for the rest of us.

The Psychology Of Rock, Paper, Scissors

A new study on the game has found that “the strategy of real players looks random on average but actually consists of predictable patterns that a wily opponent could exploit to gain a vital edge”:

On average, the players in all the groups chose each action about a third of the time, which is exactly as expected if their choices were random. But a closer inspection of their behavior reveals something else. Zhijian [Wang] and co say that players who win tend to stick with the same action while those who lose switch to the next action in a clockwise direction (where R → P → S is clockwise). This is known in game theory as a conditional response and has never been observed before in Rock-Paper-Scissors experiments. Zhijian and co speculate that this is probably because previous experiments have all been done on a much smaller scale. … In fact, a “win-stay, lose-shift” strategy is entirely plausible from a psychological point of view: people tend to stick with a winning strategy.

More Rock-Paper-Scissors tips, from a couple years ago, here. Just don’t try them on this robot.

Taking Creative Liberty With Artists’ Lives

Noel Murray unpacks why so many biographers of artists tend to depict their subjects at their worst:

Maybe biographies and biopics about artists dwell on the shady side because creative inspiration is hard to explain, and hard to dramatize. I’ve interviewed enough artsy folks over the years to know that when I ask about their process, the answers are usually either “hell if I know” or mundane and technical. And while I actually like the mundane and technical stuff, I know that doesn’t sell books or tickets. …

[I]t could just be that biographers go overboard in trying to humanize people who are seen as untouchable icons. If so, I get it. There’s an aspirational aspect to a lot of biographies and biopics: Here’s how a great person made it, and here’s why you the reader or viewer aren’t so different. But too often, the fascination with weakness doesn’t come off as it may have been intended. “Flawed” too easily becomes “fatally flawed,” even when the real evidence—the movies, the novels, the paintings, the plays, the performances, the music—suggests otherwise.

Face Of The Day

Voters wait in long lines at the Pine Road Voting Station in Greenpoint district of Khayelitsha Township in Cape Town, South Africa on May 7, 2014. Polls have opened in South Africa’s fifth general election since the end of apartheid over 20 years ago. President Jacob Zuma is expected to return to power with the ANC party, but he is expected to lose some ground to other parties after his election campaign has been marred by allegations of corruption. By Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images.

The Closed Mind Of Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A must-read from Damon Linker:

Go ahead, listen for yourself, beginning at 20:19 — and behold the spectacle of an otherwise intelligent man and gifted teacher sounding every bit as anti-intellectual as a corporate middle manager or used-car salesman. He proudly proclaims his irritation with “asking deep questions” that lead to a “pointless delay in your progress” in tackling “this whole big world of unknowns out there.” When a scientist encounters someone inclined to think philosophically, his response should be to say, “I’m moving on, I’m leaving you behind, and you can’t even cross the street because you’re distracted by deep questions you’ve asked of yourself. I don’t have time for that.”

“I don’t have time for that.”

Chart Of The Day

Sarah Dykstra, Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur explain the overnight change in global poverty levels:

Global poverty numbers involve two sets of data: national income and consumption surveys (collated in the World Bank’s PovcalNet) and international data about prices around the world.   The [International Comparison Program (ICP)] is in charge of this second set of data.  It compares what people buy and at what local currency price they buy those things to come up with a ‘purchasing power parity’ exchange rate, a ratio that is designed to equalize the power of a rupee to buy what Indians buy with the power of a dollar to buy what an American buys.  Tuesday [last week], the ICP released their estimates for what those purchasing power exchange rates looked like in 2011.

In short, the new PPP numbers suggest a lot of poor countries are richer than we thought.

China’s improved PPP numbers got the most attention last week, but the change is much bigger than that:

India’s 2011 current GDP PPP per capita from the World Bank World Development Indicators is $3,677.  The new ICP number: $4,735.  Bangladesh’s 2011 GDP PPP per capita according to the WDI is $1,733; the ICP suggests that number should be $2,800. Nigeria goes from $2,485 to $3,146.

Dylan Matthews takes a closer look at the data:

The reasons the rate fell so dramatically are fairly technical. To figure out what $1.25 a day means in different countries, economists generally compare the price of a “basket” of goods across those countries. The results they get are thus pretty sensitive to the point in time when you compare baskets. The old data used a comparison from 2005; the new one is from 2011.

Basically, the World Bank found that prices of goods included in the basket were lower than the extrapolation from 2005 data had predicted they would be.

He adds some caveats about the quality of this data. Another important point:

[T]he biggest reason not to get too excited is that the 8.5 percent of the world that’s no longer counted as poor by this metric is still, by any objective measure, not faring well at all. “The people who have just been classified as ‘not absolutely poor’ don’t actually have any more money than they did yesterday, and will still struggle in terms of getting a decent job,” Dykstra, Kenny, and Sandefur note, “Many still face grim daily tradeoffs between buying school supplies or ensuring their kids are well nourished.”