More climate change consensus contradictions

Theory #1;

Ocean acidification is the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth's oceans, caused by the uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. Seawater is slightly basic (meaning pH > 7), and ocean acidification involves a shift towards pH-neutral conditions rather than a transition to acidic conditions (pH < 7). An estimated 30–40% of the carbon dioxide from human activity released into the atmosphere dissolves into oceans, rivers and lakes.

Fair enough, the small print explains that oceans are not becoming acidic, but less alkaline, and the actual theory stacks up on a scientific level.

Theory #2:

As the world’s oceans warm, their massive stores of dissolved carbon dioxide may be quick to bubble back out into the atmosphere and amplify the greenhouse effect, according to a new study.

Again, on a scientific level, the theory stacks up; warmer water can hold more dissolved solids (try dissolving sugar in cold water) but less gas (try warming up lemonade).
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But which is it? Will oceans absorb more CO2 (A Bad Thing) or release more CO2 (also A Bad Thing)?

The second article tries to weave its way through the contradiction. The only way to reconcile the contradiction is to believe in a sort of J-curve, at first, oceans will absorb CO2 and then there will be a tipping point and they will release it all again. How quickly..?

Previous studies have suggested that it takes between 400 and 1300 years for this to happen. But now the most precise analysis to date has whittled that figure down.

“We now think the delay is more like 200 years, possibly even less,” says Tas van Ommen from the Australian Antarctic Division, in Hobart, who led the study.

Fair do's. If you are predicting that The End Is Nigh, it is wise to choose a longer time frame before you can be proven to be wrong, but the Alarmists just can't help themselves:

And while more precise than the others, the team’s study also comes with significant uncertainty: plus or minus 200 years, meaning there could actually be no lag time between rising temperatures and gases being released from the atmosphere.

“They’ve nailed it,” says Paul Fraser, a greenhouse gas researcher at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). He adds that despite the uncertainty, “this is a really good data set that they’ve got.”

In which case:

a) there is a tacit admission that global warming leads to increases in CO2 levels, not the other way round. Skeptical Science bends logic to fix the problem - in the past, a small naturally caused temperature increases kick started proceedings and led to higher CO2 levels, which caused further temperature increases. Only this time it was different and a small man-made increases in CO2 levels has kick started things.

b) there won't be any ocean acidification as the oceans will be releasing CO2 faster than they can absorb it. I've searched Skeptical Science and they don't appear to have sneered at this one yet.

Killer Arguments Against Citizen's Income, Not (22)

Emailed in by Sackerson, from the Foundation for Economic Education. The first paragraphs are just lies and distortions, skip those and get to the KCNs:

Second, universal basic income payments would be given to all citizens, including middle- and high-income earners. By not targeting payments to those with low incomes, the proposal would transfer funds away from the vulnerable to the relatively affluent.

Bollocks. It's the middle- and high-income earners paying all the tax to fund the UBI, from their point of view, it is just a modest tax refund. By and large, it is downward redistribution.

To defuse this, all you would need is to give people the choice between
a) Claiming the UBI but not also getting a tax-free personal allowance; and
b) Waiving the UBI and getting a tax-free personal allowance instead.

For example, UK income tax rate 20%, UBI = £50/week. If the personal allowance is £12,500 (which it is in the UK), then anybody earning more than £12,500 wouldn't bother claiming £50/week UBI and would choose a £50/week higher net wage instead. They will literally not receive a UBI, end of discussion.

Only those who are pretty sure they won't be regularly earning at least £1,000-odd a month for the foreseeable will claim the UBI. Which is the much same people as those currently entitled to some form of welfare payment.

But the most apparent flaw with the concept is that it fails to require work or work preparation for its recipients. Although the current welfare system does little to encourage self-support, a comprehensive universal basic income policy would remove the idea of personal responsibility entirely.

What the heck does that have to do with it? There are loads of benefits which do not require people to be looking for paid work - the right to vote at elections, use a public library or call the police, entitlement to state-school place or NHS treatment, maternity pay, sick pay, redundancy pay, child benefit, old age pensions, carer's allowance, student grants, incapacity benefit (which I think is being phased out, it was disguised unemployment benefit without a requirement to look for work), plus all sorts of variants at different times and in different countries.

It’s a misguided approach.

No it's not, and the very next paragraph explains why:

People Enjoy Working

Public opinion and social psychology indicate that adopting policies with a demonstrated track record of discouraging work would be a bad development. In the 2016 General Social Survey, for example, 70 percent of Americans agreed that they would enjoy working in a paying job, even if they didn’t need the money.

So why waste column inches explaining that UBI would destroy the work ethic when real life shows us otherwise? We see that most people want to (and do) earn much more than the bare minimum they need to live, which is all a UBI would pay for. It's not going to change a thing for those with regular earnings of more than the personal allowance, who wouldn't bother applying for the UBI, that is just needless bureaucracy.

If the KCN held water, then nobody would bother earning more than a bare subsistence level.

"The Landmine that Just Got Laid for Elizabeth Warren"

From PoliticoMagazine:

The moment came when the 10 participants were asked, by a show of hands, who would dispense entirely with private health insurance. Only New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and Warren signaled “yes.”

That's when former Rep. John Delaney, one of the least visible of the 24 announced candidates, weighed in. After pushing back on the idea of taking something away from Americans that most are reasonably happy with, Delaney said this:

“Also it’s bad policy. If you go to every hospital in this country and you ask them one question, which is how would it have been for you last year if every one of your bills were paid at the Medicare rate? Every single hospital administrator said they would close. And the Medicare for All bill requires payments to stay at current Medicare rates. So to some extent we’re basically supporting a bill that will have every hospital closed.”

The writer reckons that the Republican candidate (i.e. Donald Trump) will repeat this endlessly during the next campaign - "Even Democrats admit that their plan will have every hospital closed."

The problem is that the claim is nonsense to start with.  Delaney is presumably in the pay of the US healthcare lobby, a massive rent-seeking enterprise, which charges about three or four times as much for treatment as the nationalised/regulated systems in Europe, and 'hospital administrators' are hardly going to admit they have been price gouging for decades, are they?

European healthcare works fine and there are plenty of hospitals, so assuming Medicare payments are at European levels, nothing terrible will happen. They'll just make normal profits and earn normal salaries instead of making super-profits and earning inflated salaries. Coverage will improve and the US economy will grow by ten or fifteen percent; the US healthcare lobby is currently soaking up about ten or fifteen per cent of US GDP in super-profits.

That said, trying to ban private health insurance is a daft idea and entirely unnecessary, as the European example shows. If you have private insurance, you get much the same treatment as under the default system, just at double or treble the cost. Which is why most people don't bother.

What I wish Prince William had said...

From the BBC:

Prince William has said he would "fully support" it if one of his uncles came out as gay, but admitted he would "worry" about the added pressures he would face. It was something he had thought about since becoming an uncle, he said.

"I wish we lived in a world where it's really normal and cool, but particularly for my family, and the position that we are in, that's the bit I am nervous about," he said...

The duke said he backed "whatever decisions" one of his uncles might make, but added: "It does worry me from a nephew's point of view. How many barriers you know, hateful words, persecution, all that and discrimination that might come, that's the bit that really would trouble him.

"But that's for all of us to try and help correct and make sure we can put that to the past and not come back to that sort of stuff.

"In case you're wondering, I mean Edward."

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

I think it's only fair we help out Harry and Meghan with their home alterations, as I imagine their mortgage payments must be enormous.

Bruce, Edinburgh.
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As to the endless comments about it not being fair that Tory party members will be electing the next Prime Minister:

Firstly, if you want a vote, join the Tory party.

Secondly, every party can decide its own rules for choosing a leader, by election or lottery or anything else.

Thirdly, it is the House of Commons which decides whether somebody can be/can continue to be Prime Minister, traditionally they choose the leader of the party with most MPs.

Fourthly, Neville Chamberlain*, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Alec Douglas-Home, Jim Callaghan, John Major, Gordon Brown and Theresa May. Which is half the people who have become PM since the late 1930s.

Fifthly, for my Scottish viewers, Nicola Sturgeon.

Sixthly, as Farage said, the key to democracy is accepting an outcome you don't like. I didn't vote Tory, and I wouldn't vote for Hunt or the overgrown public schoolboy, but enough people do, and that's that.

* Baldwin and MacDonald seem to have taken it in turns since the 1920s, without a general election each time they swapped.

How to visualise the dangerous increase in CO2 levels since pre-industrial times

The two squares represent relative levels of nitrogen and oxygen as white (nearly 80%); average water vapour as darker blue (2%); peak water vapour as pale blue (another 2%); and CO2 levels as black (pre-industrial levels about 300 ppm; current levels about 400 ppm; or 0.03% and 0.04%).

The upper square shows represents pre-industrial levels (three blocks) and the lower square represents current levels (four blocks).

Scary stuff, huh?

Bill Gates has rare honest moment

From CNBC:

Gates admitted his “greatest mistake ever” was allowing Google to develop Android — one of Apple’s biggest smartphone competitors — before Microsoft could develop a competing mobile operating system, he told Eventbrite co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz Thursday at a Village Global event.

“That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win,” he said. Gates said he blames his own poor “mismanagement,” since he didn’t guide his team to jump on the opportunity. He also partially blames Microsoft’s antitrust problems in the early 2000′s for allowing Google to get ahead.

Google moved on mobile shortly after Apple did, when it acquired Android in 2005. Google later released it first Android device in September 2008, a little more than a year after Apple released its first iPhone on June 29, 2007.

“These are winner-takes-all markets. So the greatest mistake ever is whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is,” he said. Gates added that there is now only room for one “non-Apple” operating system, and that market is worth $400 billion.

He added that if Microsoft would have “got that one right,” Microsoft would be the top technology company in the game right now. “We would be the company. But oh well, ” he said.

Yup. These things are natural monopolies, it's easiest if everybody uses the same platform-system-language, whether it's perfect or not (and nothing is).

He got this one right with Windows, and IBM has been kicking itself ever since for buying in Microsoft software for its PCs, rather than just developing its own; hiring Bill Gates; or snapping up Microsoft for cheap forty years ago, in the same way that Google snapped up Android in 2005. Once IBM used it, other PC manufacturers used it etc.

What goes around, comes around, but key to this is the tacit admission that Microsoft also holds a natural monopoly, and most of its income is simply unearned rent. However rubbish its updates are, it knows it can sell a billion new licences every year with a marginal cost of 0.001c.

"Selfie deaths: 259 people reported dead seeking the perfect picture"

From the BBC:

News reports... were analysed to compile the study.

They found that selfie-related deaths are most common in India, Russia, the United States and Pakistan and 72.5% of those reported are men.

That last sentence is hardly surprising.

It contains three of the world's five most populous countries. We don't know whether the Chinese and Indonesians are more sensible or whether suicide-by-selfie is simply under-reported.

That leaves Russia, which is only ninth by population but third most suicidal (most suicidal if ranked by male suicides). If you multiply those numbers up, there are probably more suicides in Russia than in any other country.

And most of the suicides-by-selfie are by men. Well duh, men are more reckless and like showing off how brave they are.

Tip-top climate change porn

From The Independent:

Plummeting insect numbers. A sixth mass extinction. Thinning of ice sheets. Sea level rise. Wildfires in California. Thawing Arctic permafrost. The full tragedy of climate change is unravelling before our eyes.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, we have 12 years to stop this catastrophe. Climate action has become part of the zeitgeist, yet global emissions keep inching up and reports of Earth’s ecosystems collapsing come thick and fast.

Donald Trump is still in denial.

In 1958 scientists first noticed levels of carbon dioxide creeping up. In the 1980s global temperatures began to rise but warnings were ignored and covered up. For most people, the first nail in the coffin came 40 years later with the 2018 IPCC report, which said we faced major environmental catastrophe within our lifetimes, and potentially as soon as 2040.

So far so blah, here's the fun part:

For many, the news was a bereavement – a calamity we engineered without knowing it. “You’re talking about a mix of confusing feelings, including depression, grief, rage, despair, hopelessness, guilt and shame. All of those feelings come with it,” says Caroline Hickman, a teaching fellow at the University of Bath and member of the Climate Psychology Alliance.

For many, these conflicted feelings are now part of daily life. The American Psychological Association describe this “chronic fear of environmental doom” as eco-anxiety.

Ms Hickman has been a psychotherapist for more than 20 years and before last year she had two or three patients at any one time with eco-anxiety.

“Pretty much everybody is referring to it now. Lots of people are saying they won’t have children. Other people say they don’t want to feel guilty about having a child and bringing it into a world where they know there’ll be lots of problems.

"One woman told me she fantasised about killing her child. In fact I’ve had eight women who have said that to me. These are women desperately thinking about how to protect their children. They’re talking about despair, impotence and powerlessness."

More school statistics...

... which most people would have guessed anyway if they thought about it for a few moments, and which can be used to support any particular point of view/prejudice:

From The Telegraph:

Choosing a nursery could be more important than secondary school when it comes to ultimate academic achievement, a study has found. The contribution of a school to variation in pupil attainment is in fact “relatively small”, according to researchers at University College London's (UCL) Institute of Education. 

I wonder when another university will do the same analysis of whether universities make much difference either, for a given standard of student...

This means that sending children to what they regard as a “good” secondary school - meaning one that fares well in GCSE results and official progress measures - only adds a small amount more value than if they went to a “bad” secondary school.

The report, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, found that once you control for the characteristics of pupils within each school, the difference in attainment linked to school is below ten per cent of the total variance between children.

Professor Alex Bryson, UCL’s Chair of quantitative social science a co-author of the report, added: “Schools do still matter, but they don’t matter as much as people think. What perhaps is slightly surprising is that an awful lot of time and effort goes into trying to improve schools – but over the 13 year period we looked at, the variability accounted for by schools has remained fairly constant.”

Which would happen if all schools were to improve by the same amount, so this does not mean that schools haven't improved.

But:

Researchers found that school competition, measured by the number of schools within 5.5 kilometres of each school, accounts for up to seven per cent of the variation in pupils’ attainment.

That could be 'competition driving up standards' (hooray), or just as possible, slightly cleverer kisd getting into the perceived better schools and vice versa, leading to a widening gap between schools perceived as better or worse.

Meanwhile the pupil-teacher ratio - an indication of how well resourced the school is - only accounts for around one per cent of the variation. A report last year by researchers at King’s College London found that genetics are a bigger determinant of academic success than sending your child to a grammar school.

We could have guess the last bit, it's genetics and parents pushing their kids to do their homework etc.
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On the subject of competition between schools and/or competition for better pupils between schools, from the BBC:

Most families do not choose to send their children to their nearest school, shows the biggest ever study of state secondary school choices in England. More than 60% opt for a school that is further away - usually because it is higher achieving.

"Contrary to a widely-held belief, only a minority of parents choose their local school as their first option," say researchers.

Why would parents not put down a perceived better school as their first choice? Be daft not to; and what are the chances that the perceived best school within reasonable travel distance is not the nearest one? Fairly high, I would have thought. Bear in mind my point above that there is likely to be a wider perceived gap between two nearby schools than between two isolated schools which all children in an area attend, simply because there are is no realistic alternative.

It also debunks the idea that richer families are more engaged with choices... Despite any assumptions about the "sharp elbows" of middle-class families, there was no significant difference in behaviour between wealthier and more disadvantaged parents.

Again, that doesn't really prove anything.

If a school is perceived as good, then higher income families will choose to move near it and will drive out lower income families from the area. This leads to the self-enforcing gap between the areas. Higher income families, having paid over the odds to access the 'free' education they've paid for two or three times over (income tax and higher house prices) will of course send their children to the nearest school - because that one is perceived as best (or else they wouldn't have moved there etc).

The reverse applies to low income families where parents 'just want the best for their children'. They can't afford to live close the perceived best schools, but they can still put them as first choice on their applications.

And so on. All quite fascinating in a Freakonomics kind of way.