Texas is evidence that climate change doesn't exist...

Could be worse...

 

Not entirely off-topic, but in health care (where a lot of the hospitals start with "Saint"), there is a long and dubious modern scholarly literature on the efficacy of prayer. Most centers around "remote intercessory prayer", as that is the only type that fits well into a double-blind experiment framework. (That's where somebody you don't know prays for you, from some remote location.)

Many of the studies are great examples of how not to do social science research. OTOH, it's an inherently hard topic to investigate well, particularly when any such study requires obtaining patient permission before proceeding. You tend to get a strong self-selection effect.

But the mid-2000s saw two large and well-designed studies. Both concluded that prayer -- at least that type of prayer -- was ineffective as a medical treatment. See MANTRA and STEP here:
[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_intercessory_prayer"]Studies on intercessory prayer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

This most recent research certainly does not address the benefit that the act of praying has on the individual who is doing the praying. It is plausible that prayer can be beneficial in a non-miraculous way, because other mind-body practices appear to have benefits (e.g., meditation lowers blood pressure, improves mental health.)

The rigorous research only addressed the miraculous aspects of remote intercessionary prayer, on specific health outcomes for persons with well-defined illnesses. And, IMHO, definitively showed that this type of prayer does not work in this case.

Strictly speaking, you can't generalize from that specific example to the type of made-for-TV praying that Gov. Perry engaged in. And probably, you can never test that empirically.

For one thing, you lack controls. Maybe after Perry did his thing, millions of religious Americans with a firm belief in separation of church and state prayed for the opposite result. With the net result being like two high school football teams praying in their respective end zones prior to the game. A spiritual draw, so to speak.

But serious, based on this projection below, Texans better get used to heat and drought as the new norm. And, unfortunately, give it another 80 years, and the same thing will likely apply to pretty much everybody in the US.

Climate change: Drought may threaten much of globe within decades | UCAR

As with all these extreme events, you can't say the event is caused by global warming, just that global warming shifts the odds. You'll only ever know in hindsight which decade was the last decade that un-irrigated crops could profitably be grown in an area. But maybe if we lose enough farm land in the South, enough people will wake up to the danger, and we can get serious about cutting greenhouse gasses before we lose the entire Midwest.

But praying for rain is as old as recorded history. It's part of US popular culture (Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.) I n that sense, Gov. Perry is just the most recent of a long line.

And in some sense, its a completely rational thing to do. You pray when there's no concrete action that you can take. When there's nothing left that you can do. That's mostly harmless. It only becomes harmful when prayer substitutes for real actions you could otherwise take, as in certain religions that disallow the use of modern medicine and instead rely solely on prayer for the recovery of health.

But as usual, I have an economist's perspective on this. The term of art is "revealed preference". That means that, given the costs and benefits that you face, your actions reveal what you really value. (Not your words).

The issue is that prayer really is costless to the pray-er as well. So it doesn't reveal much about an individual's actual faith. If Perry really wanted to see who had the faith and who didn't, he'd have required each participant to bring one-tenth of his or her annual income, in cash, along with a lighter, to make a burnt offering to God. To me, that would reveal who did and did not have faith in the efficacy of prayer in this case.

But in health care, while many Americans believe in the miraculous power of prayer, almost none will forgo modern health care in favor of purely faith-based medical treatment. (People will forgo treatment at the end of life, but that's a different issue.) To me, this is classic revealed preference. It reveals that almost no Americans have a very strong belief in the true efficacy of prayer. Or that they in fact believe that almost no prayers are answered, at least as regards cure for disease.

(I'm not saying that prayer is an effective medical treatment. The scholarly research suggests otherwise. I'm saying that a refusal to rely on prayer alone reveals that most of us do not believe that prayer is a routinely effective medical treatment. When there are real stakes at risk, most of us are pretty firmly reality-based.)

In this at least, the Old Testament had it right with Abraham and Isaac. Compared to that, driving to the football stadium to listen to some Christian rock and offer a few cheers, and bemoan the state of America, that strikes me as pretty nearly sacrilegious.

 

^ thank you pastor chogan2.

 

No chance. Chogan is a bright, rational fellow.

 

Its a little soon for jokes. The fires are still out of control, bastrop is only 30% contained. Everyone here knows someone that has lost everything.

 

One event in Texas is not evidence of climate change. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) climate is the means and extremes over the most recent 30-year period (1981-2010).

 

Correct, climate change would be something like Hudson Bay being ice free for 2 months longer in the 21st century than in the 17th century. One hot summer with a defective Governor is not climate change

Hudson Bay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

By the time we all agree on the cause, let alone take effective, collective action, it will be far too late. Rome didn't fall in a day, either, but it's already burning.

 

see . . . it's not that I (dis?)agree one way or the other with this ... it's just that I wish the environmental thread was in FHOP - where all the other similar stuff lands ... fwiw. Yes, the glaciers are melting ... just like they've done for thousands & thousands of years. Only now, folks want to fight & die over whether part of it's man made. sheesh. If we grasp the finite nature of carbon based fuel ... and reduce accordingly, we win because our kids can finish off the remaining carbon - sometime down the road ... and because we kill funds going to al queda flight training ... and we get cleaner air/water etc ... and c02 drops collaterally. And we don't even have to worry about whether natural warming is accelerated by mankind. Somehow ... some folks just can't find those reasons (to get clean power) to be valid enough. That's what I don't get. Anyone care to take a whack at that?

.

 

1) We burn it because it's cheap, right now, as long as we ignore the environmental consequences. Though with the trends in solar cell prices, that's getting increasingly questionable for personal electricity consumption (levels of PV use below which you don't have to modify the grid to accommodate the PV).

2) And if you suggest raising private out-of-pocket costs, then some people are completely primed and ready to make political hay out of that. And raising costs makes you less competitive internationally, so if everybody else does it, you "have to".

3) Most people are sleepwalking into the future, and I'd guess that most Americans don't really acknowledge that these are exhaustible resources.

3') And as a corollary, if I conserve, that doesn't mean that there is more left for my kids. This must be done collectively to be effective policy. But there's an entire swath of the US population that denies that there is any possible reason for any type of collective action.

3'') And ditto for the environmental effects. That has to be done collectively. The impact of my decisions on the environment is negligible. So all of that is a prisoner's dilemma. And right now we here in the US are in the stupid square (where we all end up dead, because we each have to act independently) rather than the cooperative square (where we maximize overall well-being, even though this limits the maximum possible profits for any one participant).

4) It is not part of the culture. As a kid, I was scarred by the '70s oil crises. My kids? I can't convince them this is a problem. It's not that they are stupid -- quite the contrary -- it's just that conservation and worrying about these issues is old-fogey-ish. They've never seen it in real life. It's the SUV/Hummer generation. It'll take another crisis to pound that into a lot of people.

5) What economists call "the shutdown point". You may think that the average cost of new renewables generation is about the same as the average cost of fossil fuel generation. Or at least somewhere in the ballpark. But that's not the comparison that matters, for making any rapid transition to renewables.

What matters for rapid change is the "shutdown point" for existing fossil fuel fired plans. That sets an upper limit on the speed of change -- the speed at which plant owners will voluntarily switch functional fossil-fuel-fired for renewable generation (assuming that it is technically feasible to so, and roughly equal average cost).

What is the shutdown point? That's the point at which the revenues being generated no longer cover marginal cost -- just the cost of running the plant, not the cost of repaying the initial capital investment. (Shutdown point is a concept that applies to all types of manufacturing, not just electricity generation.)

With regulated rates, then, for utilities, it's a question of whether they'd make more profit by continuing to run a functioning fossil fuel plant, or shutting that down and building a new renewables plant.

Let me try a simple numerical example. You just built a coal-fired plant with an expected average cost of 5 cents per KWH. And that breaks down to 2.5 cents for the coal (and repairs and personnel) and 2.5 cents for the initial capital cost of building the thing.

How cheap does a new renewables plant have to be, before you would increase your profits by shutting down the existing, functioning coal fired plant? Hint: The answer isn't "less than 5 cents".

The answer is that if you can get your electricity for less than the marginal cost of the coal plant (under 2.5 cents), then you'd make money by shutting down the coal plant. The 2.5 cent capital cost, you owe that regardless. But if you shut down the plant, you save the 2.5 cent marginal cost.

So new capacity has to have an average cost of under 2.5 cents, in this example, to get voluntary shutdown of functioning existing capacity.

This is a long explanation, but the point is that you've got two processes at work. For replacing a worn-out plant, fossil-fuel and renewables compete on the same basis -- average cost. For shutting down an existing plant? Profit maximizing plant owners will only do that when the full average cost of the new plant is below the marginal cost of the existing plant. Absent government intervention, renewables will have to be dirt cheap before they will create widespread voluntary early shutdowns of existing fossil-fuel-fired capacity. So you should expect a slow pace. All you can hope for out of the market is a very slow transition.

 

Soon to be president.

 

History has shown a noticable gap between a problem is first identified, seriously publicised, widely educated, and resulting actions taken.

Ozone destruction was first understood in the mid 1970s, but the resulting actions started to take place in the late 1980s.

Acid Rain had the same time course. A significant lag between the recognized need for scrubbers on coal plants and the actual installation.

DDT has a similar course.

Overfishing in a few locations has been addressed successfully and we may yet save a lot more fisheries from destruction. Good Science is always present at the successes.

What is impressive is that action occurred for all these examples and many others. A small fraction of hard working and smart folks forged the path that the rest of the world's population followed. There is good chance that we are not really suffering from inaction, but the painful education and formulation period that must preceed the massive changes needed. This is a much harder issue to solve and will take decades. In the meantime, a whole lot of effort will be going into mitigation of inevitable changes. But things are happening under the radar.

 

Call me pessimistic, but as much as the wired generation and the internet are thought to speed things up, this particular process almost seems like one that's slowed down by it. Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but from the perspective of a 38 year old, it seems like a lot of people today are much stupider and more resistant to education than in the days before that segment of the public had access to the internet. It seems like this technology actually adds lag to the process in this sort of situation.

 

There is certainly a lot of truth about new technologies causing as much retreat as advancement. Unfortunately, I cannot extract how much of the slow progress is due to information technology changes. What is clear is that changing over power plants and cars will take the better part of a century or more. Fortunately the indicators are good. Here are two:
1) A lot of planned coal plants have been canceled. Not the highly visible thing that attracts any media attention, but a clear step in the right direction.
2) Hybrids and EVs are long past the "novelity" stage. Most people have figure out that the Prius does not (for the most part) need to be plugged in. It still remains for most people to figure out that they should want one that plugs in.

 

There's reason for both optimism and pessimism. Some technologies have become more sustainable, and there is more awareness of our impact. But the crushing weight of rapid population increases tends to cancel that out. Human population has more than doubled just within my short lifetime, and could well double again before I die.

A local lake provides a microcosmic example: the pollution controls get better every year, yet total pollution levels continue to rise.

 

Texas is evidence that intelligent life on Earth doesn't exist.

 

The Internet provides easy access to a wealth of information. Sadly, though, many individuals sift through all of this information looking for facts to support preconceived notions. This leads to groups of like minded people living in virtual isolation, convinced that theirs is the only valid view.

Tom

 

Global villages.

Edit: Well, I thought it was a clever phrase. Surely you remember the 'global village' concept that suggested information technology would make the world small enough to be a metaphorical village, enabling interactive communication for all. By making the phrase plural, I was suggesting that perhaps not much has changed, despite the vast increases in communication technology. We've come full circle, and still dwell in 'villages' of like-minded thought.