Rants – Page 24 – a sibilant intake of breath

I hate hovercards

You know the deal: some website decides that it would be super slick to show a preview of linked pages when you hover your mouse over a link, or a preview of someone’s profile when you hover over their Gravatar.

The trouble is, it is obtrusive and distracting. Moving a mouse over a website shouldn’t cause dramatic new things to happen. When they do, they break concentration and cause frustration.

It is acceptable to have menus that enlarge when you hover a mouse over them. Mouseover text for images is also perfectly fine, since it takes a moment to appear and is thus effectively requested rather than imposed. By contrast, website elements that pop out of nowhere just because a cursor crossed something are bad form in the same way as universally despised pop-up ads.

Thankfully, many such unwanted features are killed by AdBlock and NoScript.

Canada doesn’t deserve a UN Security Council seat

At the moment, Canada is competing for one of the ten non-permanent seats in the United Nations Security Council – the principal international body charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Canada thinks of itself as an internationalist country that has committed itself to peacekeeping and other forms of international assistance. Unfortunately, Canada is also doing virtually everything in its power to worsen the most pressing medium-term threat to international security, namely climate change.

At the moment, the United Nations process designed to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol is going nowhere. While that situation has many causes, one of the most important has been the unwillingness of developed states to make real commitments and take meaningful domestic action. For its part, Canada has adopted targets that would be better than nothing, but which are neither fair now adequate. In order for the world to avoid dangerous climate change, other countries would need to pick up the slack created by Canada’s lack of ambition. Even worse, Canada has no credible plan to meet those targets, and has taken no serious domestic action on climate change.

Right now, Canada is flirting with some of the most dangerous energy options out there. These include unconventional oil and gas, including the oil sands and shale gas, as well as fossil fuel reserves in formerly inaccessible places like the Arctic. Chasing those fossil fuels is foolishness. It commits us to perpetuating an energy system that profoundly threatens future generations, and redirects resources from the task of building a sustainable basis for our society.

As long as Canada continues to behave with such reckless disregard for those outside its borders, including those who are not yet born, it doesn’t deserve the prestige associated with a Security Council seat. To be sure, some of Canada’s international actions have been and are praiseworthy, but that doesn’t counterbalance the way in which Canada is helping to commit the world to a colossal blunder. Ultimately, it may require Canada becoming an international pariah before our government will stand up to the oil and gas sector. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. If Canada loses its bid for this seat on the basis of domestic and international disapproval of our environmental record, perhaps it will be a much-needed signal that our recent conduct has been unacceptable.

[Update: 12 October 2010] Canada’s bid was unsuccessful. Hopefully, the embarassment will encourage Canada to play a more constructive role in future climate change negotiations.

Colds and the immune system

The New York Times recently printed a timely op-ed about the common cold, arguing that the remedies people take for them are generally useless and that the disease itself is misunderstood:

Here was a new insight in cold science: the symptoms are caused not by the virus but by its host — by the body’s inflammatory response. Chemical agents manufactured by our immune system inflame our cells and tissues, causing our nose to run and our throat to swell. The enemy is us.

Indeed, it’s possible to create the full storm of cold symptoms with no cold virus at all, but only a potent cocktail of the so-called inflammatory mediators that the body makes itself — among them, cytokines, kinins, prostaglandins and interleukins, powerful little chemical messengers that cause the blood vessels in the nose to dilate and leak, stimulate the secretion of mucus, activate sneeze and cough reflexes and set off pain in our nerve fibers.

So susceptibility to cold symptoms is not a sign of a weakened immune system, but quite the opposite. And if you’re looking to quell those symptoms, strengthening your immune system may be counterproductive. It could aggravate the symptoms by amplifying the very inflammatory agents that cause them.

I always find it a bit weird that whole industries exist to sell products that are either useless or actively harmful. While that is understandable enough when it comes to harmful-but-fun products like alcohol and tobacco, it is more ethically dubious in the case of things like cold medications that do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. Quite probably, they should bear warning labels from some kind of consumer protection agency saying: “As far as science has been able to establish, this product is useless for reducing the duration of colds.”

How to meet Canada’s climate targets

The biggest problem with Canada’s climate change policy is that our plans are not sufficient to meet our targets. Furthermore, our plans aren’t even being implemented.

The government says it wants to cut Canadian emissions to 17% below 2006 levels by 2020, and to 60-70% below by 2050. If they really wanted to do that, they could achieve that outcome simply by doing the following:

Choose a series of annual emissions targets, starting this year and running out to 2050 and beyond.
In each of those years, auction a quantity of permits for the production and import of fossil fuels. Also require permits for activities that generate other greenhouse gases, such as methane. Anybody who wanted to produce fossil fuels, import them, or emit greenhouse gases in other ways would require a quantity of permits equal to their emissions. The price of the permits would be determined by auctioning.
Take the auction revenues and send an equal share to every Canadian each quarter by direct bank account deposit or cheque.

This approach would be simple and fair. It would not cost much to administer, since the permits would be auctioned at as high a level as possible. It would conform to the polluter pays principle, since they would do just that. It would send price signals to consumers, as the firms that bought permits passed along the cost. And the whole system would be revenue neutral, since all the revenues would be returned to Canadians. Critically, it would ensure that Canada hit its greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, each and every year.

This kind of approach is known as cap and dividend.

So, why doesn’t the government just go ahead and do this? The major reason is that people who have emitted greenhouse gases in the past feel that gives them the right to do so in the future. If this plan was put in place, all the industries that have been using the atmosphere as a free dumping ground for CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases would suddenly need to pay for their waste disposal. This could seriously affect the growth prospects of some industries.

That said, since the cap would begin at current levels and gradually shrink down toward the target, no businesses would get obliterated immediately. They would simply need to adapt, in a fair way, to the kinds of business models required to meet the government’s stated climate change targets. The fact that the government is not pursuing an approach that would cause them to do so is the clearest indication that Canada’s government is not serious about dealing with the issue of climate change.

The melt rate in Greenland and Antarctica

The latest issue of Nature Geoscience features an article by David Bromwich and Julien Nicolas, in which they produce an estimate of the rate at which the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are melting in response to climate change. Their estimate is based on satellite gravimetry using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission (mentioned before). They concluded that previous estimates hadn’t properly taken into account the phenomenon of isostatic rebound and that, as a consequence, the rate of ice loss is about half what was estimated before:

With glacial isostatic adjustment modelled in, the loss from Greenland is put at 104 gigatonnes, plus or minus 23 gigatonnes, and 64 gigatonnes from West Antarctica, plus or minus 32 gigatonnes.

On the basis of this, they concluded that icesheet loss accounts for about 30% of observed sea level rise, rather than the 50% estimated before. The remainder is the result of the oceans expanding as they warm up.

Inevitably, the reduced ice melt estimates will be jumped upon by climate change delayers and deniers. This once again re-enforces the asymmetry in the debate between scientists and those who argue for inaction on climate. The latter never admit their mistakes but jump on any correction, error, or update from scientists as proof that climate science is deeply uncertain, and that no action should be taken now.

Bad times ahead

In the wake of the failure of the current U.S. administration to pass climate legislation, Grist’s David Roberts asks ‘How bad are the next few years going to suck?‘

He predicts that “Democrats are going to get shellacked in the midterms” but that they will probably retain control of the senate. The economy will quite probably remain weak, which significantly worsens Obama’s prospects for a second term. Finally, he says “[b]y 2016 my son will be a teenager and atmospheric CO2 will be flirting with 400 ppm” and calls for people to take local action, while central leadership is lacking.

That’s more useful than saying ‘throw up your hands in despair, we are dooming the world’ but it doesn’t strike me (or Roberts) as an adequate response to the problem. Humanity’s level of collective intelligence still looks pretty low.

Reforming the IPCC

Alternative title: What to do when everybody ignores you?

In the wake of University of East Anglia email scandal, there has been yet another review of the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This one was chaired by Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor, and concluded that “[t]he U.N. climate panel should only make predictions when it has solid evidence and should avoid policy advocacy.”

The IPCC has certainly made some mistakes: issuing some untrue statements, and evaluating some evidence imperfectly. That being said, the details they got wrong were largely of a nitpicky character. The core claims of the IPCC reports – that climate change is real, caused by humans, and dangerous – remain supremely justified. The trouble is, governments aren’t willing to take action on anything like the appropriate scale.

The situation is akin to a doctor giving a patient a diagnosis of cancer, after which the patient decides that he will try to cut down on his consumption of sugary drinks. That might improve the patient’s health a bit, but it is not an adequate response to the problem described. At that point, it would be sensible for the doctor to engage in a bit of ‘policy advocacy’ and stress how the proposed solution is dangerously inadequate.

It can be argued that the IPCC works best when it presents the bare facts and leaves others to make policy decisions. The trouble is, people don’t take the considered opinions of this huge group of scientists sufficiently seriously. They are happy to let crackpots tell them that there is no problem or that no action needs to be taken. While scientists should not be saying: “Here is what your government’s climate change policy should be” they should definitely be saying: “Here are the plausible consequences of the policy you are pursuing now, and they don’t match with the outcomes you say you want to achieve (like avoiding over 2°C of temperature increase)”. They could also very legitimately say: “If you want to avoid handing a transformed world over to future generations, here is the minimum that must be done”. James Hansen accomplishes this task rather well:

Today we are faced with the need to achieve rapid reductions in global fossil fuel emissions and to nearly phase out fossil fuel emissions by the middle of the century. Most governments are saying that they recognize these imperatives. And they say that they will meet these objectives with a Kyoto-like approach. Ladies and gentleman, your governments are lying through their teeth. You may wish to use softer language, but the truth is that they know that their planned approach will not come anywhere near achieving the intended global objectives. Moreover, they are now taking actions that, if we do not stop them, will lock in guaranteed failure to achieve the targets that they have nominally accepted.

Scientists don’t lose their integrity when they present scientific information in a way that policy-makers and citizens can understand. Indeed, it can be argued that they show a lack of integrity when they hide behind technical language that keeps people from grasping the implications of science.

Misled by Palin?

Sarah Palin has been a political spectacle ever since her unlikely selection as John McCain’s running mate in August 2008. She is especially frightening for political liberals, given how she espouses causes that are anathema to them, and does so in such a maddening manner. Rather than provide any kind of intellectual justification for her views, she seems to assert them on the basis of simple slogans and a superficial world view. Slate magazine has a regular feature called ‘Palinisms’ where they mock her statements, accompanied by a ‘Grand Unified Theory’ to explain them. The Economist highlighted the superficial nature of her political views:

On policy, Mrs Palin’s book is negligible. Her call for “commonsense conservatism” is a string of clichés. She favours free markets and a robust defence, but other than that she offers few specifics about how she would grapple with the big problems America actually faces. She sometimes says things that make no sense: whatever its flaws, cap-and-trade is not a Ponzi scheme.

Certainly, Sarah Palin does not behave like a woman who wants her views to be evaluated on the basis of logic and evidence. At the same time, I wonder whether her opponents have misunderstood her in a way that is harmful for the quality of overall political discourse. Specifically, if people on the political left have been too quick to assume that she is representative of the positions and styles of their political opponents.

If Palin helps to make those on the right a caricature to those on the left, the effect is to stifle real political conversation. She may be partly to blame for that effect, but I think those being misled have some responsibility as well. It is easy and psychologically satisfying to pick out the craziest person in a camp you oppose, and then hold them up as an example of what people in that camp are like. While you may be justified in pointing out that one person’s flaws, you may well be guilty of faulty extrapolation for assuming them to be properties of the group at large.

It also seems plausible that there are people on the political left who have a similar effect on moderate conservatives – people who are very outspoken, but who do not provide a convincing justification for their views. If such people make liberals into caricatures in conservative minds, the effect is also to reduce the calibre of political debate.

Democracy and minority rights

Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s ruling on California’s Proposition 8 is a good demonstration of how it is possible for the serious expert consideration of ethics and law to produce better policy-making than direct or representative democracy does:

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.

Gay marriage is restricted around the world not for any rational reason whatsoever, but because large numbers of voters are prejudiced and uncomfortable with the idea.

While it is encouraging when gay marriage is legalized by legislation or popular referendum, I think it is ethically preferable when courts assert its necessity. That is because the power to determine the scope of minority rights should not rest with the will of the general public. Establishing minority rights on that basis is precarious and unjust. Rather, societies that aspire to be ethical have to acknowledge the fact that the majority cannot be allowed to strip minorities of fundamental rights, and that laws that do so ought to be struck down, regardless of how popular they are.

Pickup artists

I find the phenomenon of ‘pickup artists‘ somewhat disturbing.

Basically, these are individuals who exploit quirks of human psychology in order to get people to sleep with them easily. Human behaviour is predictable to such an extent that many tricks are effective against a sizable proportion of the population. For example, you can use a minor insult called a ‘neg’ to make a person feel like they have to prove themselves to you. A long piece on pickup artists in The Point Magazine describes how this is at the core of the technique: “the key to the method is, unquestionably, that the pickup artist ignore, tease, or even insult the targeted female, accustomed as she is to constant, beleaguering attention from men.” There is also the whole collection of cold reading tricks long employed by psychics and con artists to give the false sense that they have special insight into you.

If people were widely aware that such tricks can be effective, the practice of people using them would be less worrisome. When they are employed against unwitting subjects, however, they strike me as exploitative and potentially unethical. The article linked above contains a detailed discussion of the ethics and psychology of this unusual set of skills.