The Ambrosini Critique

I was born and grew up there and now its a movie. The movie looks like it might be pretty good.

I can tell you that the movie, if the trailer is an indication, gives entirely the wrong impression about the weather in Humboldt County. Its cloudy and in the 60s every day. Every day. I’m sure those views of the ocean would be spectacular if you ever actually got to see the ocean through the fog and rain.

That said, I’m not just being sentimental when I say that my birthplace is one of the most beautiful places of all those places I’ve been to. Craggy mountains, lush rivers, slopping green hills, wide valleys, giant redwood forests and those partially obscured ocean views were my backyard. Ironically, because these things were so normal I didn’t really appreciate them until I left. If fact, I hadn’t visited the famous Redwood National Forest nor the other tourist attractions¹, as a tourist, until a couple years ago

Beautiful, all if it.

Oh, they’ve made a couple other movies up there: Salem’s Lot, Outbreak and The Majestic.

1. Ye gawds, what a terrible web site my home town has. [↩]

Env-econ has a go at the “sunspots cause warming” theory.

This, I believe, is my brother and his girlfriend’s song (you know, “their song”):

(h/t information aesthetics)

Paternalism is the use of coercion to force people to do or refrain from something against their will for their own good. Liberals of all stripes generally reject paternalism for reasons most lucidly laid out in J.S. Mill’s masterpiece On Liberty. First, we assume the individual is the best judge of her own good. Second, whether or not the individual is the best judge of her own good, we rightly doubt that another individual (or assembly thereof) has the legitimate moral authority to substitute their judgment for the individual’s by force — especially in light of widespread disagreement about the nature of a good life. Third, truth is hard to come by, and none of us can be fully certain we’ve pinned it down. Allowing people to act on diverse opinions about morality (or rationality) broadens the search for truth about good lives by setting up a decentralized system of social laboratories where experiments in living succeed or fail in plain view. So, unless an action harms somebody else, people should be at liberty to satisfy their preferences, whether saintly or sinful, coolly rational or impulsively emotional.

— Wilkinson

… but at the very least it makes for an entertaining spectator sport:

Starbucks, which last week announced 600 layoffs, plans to temporarily close its 7,100 U.S. stores on Tuesday for three hours of employee training.
…
Dunkin’ Donuts – “to ensure that no coffee lover is denied a delicious espresso-based beverage” – announced that it will offer small lattes, cappuccinos or espresso drinks for a promotional price of 99 cents on Tuesday from 1 p.m. to 10 p.m.

(h/t env-econ)

(h/t Twenty Sided)

Will Wilkinson goes all reductio on Henry Farrell. Henry says that people not donating money to the general fund isn’t evidence that people don’t like to give money to the government.

Apparently, collective action problems with the provision of public goods cause there to be collective action problems in areas that otherwise wouldn’t have collective action problems. No wait. That can’t be it. Oh, here it is: people can identify when something is unfair, but they can only act to remedy that unfairness when they’ve convinced every one else to do so. Shoot. That can’t be it either.

Jeez, there must be some subtle argument that can muddy the issue enough to obfuscate the obvious message in the data.

Bayesian estimation is a likelihood-based method, in which the impact of facts and experience is blunted and smoothed by prejudice.

— Schalizi

The Dyson Critique (the Lucas Critique for the macro-climate) says that climate models that assume constant feedback effects with the increase of CO2 are unreliable predictors of climate change. Here’s another great discussion of the issue:

If that is not enough, changes in CO2 in the real world would almost certainly be associated with other changes in the atmosphere – sulfur dioxide, mineral aerosols (dust), ozone, black carbon, and who knows what else would vary through time and complicate the “all else held constant” picture. By the way, the Sun varies its output as well. And when discussing climate change over the next century, even more uncertainties come from estimations of economic growth, adoption of various energy alternatives, human population growth, land use changes, and … you get the message.

He goes on to say there have been recent estimates of, what economists would call, the reduced form parameter — the sensitivity of the atmosphere in terms of temperature increases to increasing CO2 levels. Basically, by looking at levels of atmospheric dust, and their correlation with CO2 levels, during previous warming periods, scientist were able to estimate the reduced form parameter. He reports that their conclusion is that climate sensitivity is lower than previous estimates which means we should expect less warming than previously estimated.

There is no discussion, however, of what economists call the structural parameters. Why is there a connection between CO2 levels and dust levels, for example? If there’s a third force that is driving both CO2 levels and dust levels, then its not clear the new estimates of sensitivity are applicable to the climate today. My understanding is that in the past, CO2 wasn’t driving climate change, climate change was driving CO2 levels and CO2 was acting as a positive feedback. The earth warmed, the ocean’s emitted their stores of CO2 causing further warming. Given the climate didn’t become unstable, I assume there were also negative feedbacks that brought the system back into equilibrium.

Its not clear though that those negative feedbacks had anything to do with CO2 levels. The pertinent question then is: can historical data tell us anything about the climate feedbacks from increasing CO2 levels today?