Climate and Herding
The following is a synthesis of two essays that originally appeared in The Elliott Wave Theorist in June and July 2007.
On May 9, 2007, NASA issued this press release, which appeared in different forms throughout the national media. USA Today introduced the report, “Warnings about global warming may not be dire enough.” If you are wondering how it would be possible for warnings about global warming to be any more strident, here is an excerpt from the agency’s press release:
A new study by NASA scientists suggests that greenhouse-gas warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern United States nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.
“There is the potential for extremely hot summertime temperatures in the future, especially during summers with less-than-average frequent rainfall,” said lead author Barry Lynn of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University, New York.The research found that eastern U.S. summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low-to-mid-80s (degrees Fahrenheit) will most likely soar into the low-to-mid-90s during typical summers by the 2080s. In extreme seasons – when precipitation falls infrequently – July and August daily high temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees Fahrenheit in cities such as Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.
To reach their conclusions, the researchers analyzed nearly 30 years of observational temperature and precipitation data and also used computer model simulations that considered soil, atmospheric, and oceanic conditions and projected changes in greenhouse gases. The simulations were produced using a widely-used weather prediction model coupled to a global model developed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The global model, one of the models used in the recently issued climate report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was utilized in this study to identify future changes in large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns due to the build up of greenhouse gases. This information was then fed into the weather prediction model to forecast summer-to-summer temperature variability in the eastern United States during the 2080s.
“Since the weather prediction model simulated the frequency and timing of summer precipitation more reliably than the global model, its daily high temperature predictions for the future are also believed to be more accurate,” added co-author Leonard Druyan, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University.
“Using high-resolution weather prediction models, we were able to show how greenhouse gases enhance feedbacks between precipitation, radiation, and atmospheric circulations that will likely lead to extreme temperatures in our not so distant future,” said Lynn.
The study is published in the April 2007 issue of the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate.
According to the researchers, this is just the good news. Citing one of the authors of the study, AP reported as follows:
But Druyan said the problem is most computer models, especially when compared to their predictions of past observations, underestimate how bad global warming is. That’s because they see too many rainy days, which tends to cool temperatures off, he said. “I’m sorry for the bad news,” Druyan said. “It gets worse everywhere.”
And the chief peer reviewer said this:
Andrew Weaver of the University of Victoria, editor of the journal Climate but not of this study, praised the paper, saying “it makes perfect sense.”
So this study uses 30 centuries…oops, sorry, 30 decades…oops, sorry, less than 30 years of data to make predictions of an unprecedented temperature rise over the next 63 years? As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Extrapolating 30 years’ worth of data to make conclusions about cycles taking millennia does not seem to meet that standard. It does not make “perfect sense.”
Evidence for man-made global warming falls far short of delineating the idea from a pure myth, and the hysteria over it may turn out to be little more than bear-market herding. Sometimes scientists herd as much as investors do, and this study appears to be a case of extreme expression following a long-established trend.
If you want to read the global warming advocates’ case, a good site is www.realclimate.org.
It is also true, however, that professors, PhDs and lifelong climatologists who attempt to raise objections to the evidence for global warming are ridiculed, shouted down, exiled and dismissed from their posts (there is a short list in Wikipedia under “Richard Lindzen”). Perhaps this tactic can attend good theories, but it is a notorious aspect of theories whose advocates feel personally threatened by opposition. When Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre of Canada’s Carleton University, says that his work with cores of mud from Western Canada’s fjords covering 5000 years shows “a direct correlation between variations in the brightness of the sun and earthly climate indicators”; when Reid Bryson, Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology, citing historical and archeological records of the warmth of Greenland in Medieval times, says it’s warming “because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air”; when Dr. William Gray, professor emeritus of the atmospheric department at Colorado State University, says that “fluctuations in hurricane intensity and frequency have nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels or human activity but with natural variations in ocean currents, [and] the ocean circulation pattern [is] a major cause of climate change”; when Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at MIT, notes that despite increasing carbon emissions, the rise in earth’s temperature is less than theory would predict (global warming theorists blame the inconvenient cooling period in the last century on another atmospheric chemical reaction caused by humans); when Freeman Dyson, physicist at Princeton, calls the global warming threat “grossly exaggerated” and says that existing climate prediction models “do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans [but] a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests [and] do not begin to describe the real world that we live in; when “Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on earth” (Investors Business Daily, April 9, June 26; Wikipedia; Internet); global warming advocates, aside from labeling such people as “stooges for the oil companies” and such, say, quite accurately, that the people’s research is not peer-reviewed.
Let us address this latter point. Global warming advocates who contacted me all said pretty much the same thing: “Man-made global warming is a fact; no credible scientist disputes it; no peer-reviewed literature makes a case against it.” In the 1970s and 1980s, economists said the same thing about the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Random Walk in the stock market. And on two points they were right: No credible economist disputed it; no peer-reviewed literature made a case against it. One reason is that the club door was shut so tight that no learned opposition was allowed. We heard recently from an MIT professor who said that his paper on stock market cycles was “blackballed” in the early 1980s by the powerful proponents of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. But a key word that Efficient Market Hypothesis supporters omitted about the lack of peer-reviewed research was “yet.” No one had amassed the counter-attack in academic literature yet. Today, Random Walk is discredited and the Efficient Market Hypothesis is on the run. But it took a whole new way of looking at data, and new theories, to bring about the change. Before that shift, many people had evidence contradicting the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Random Walk, but its presentation was not yet up to academic standards. Likewise, evidence exists that there are climatic cycles millennia long and that there were rapid temperature changes in short periods of time prior to the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps it has not made it into scientific journals yet, but from what I read about ongoing research and theory-building, I expect that it will. It takes time to mount a defense to initially accepted theories. Building a credible case for why temperature can move up and down over 30 years whether man is present or not takes time. The Efficient Market Hypothesis survived unchallenged at the academic level for 20 years, and after 40 years it is still the dominant theory, awaiting a replacement. We don’t know whether our socionomic theory of finance will help boot the Efficient Market Hypothesis into the closet of formerly accepted theories, but we hope so.
The Herding Aspect
Now back to my main point: The fact remains that there is powerful evidence
of herding at the social level on the global warming issue. Commentary on
the subject is even selling theater tickets. And like all past social trends
that were ending, there is a rush to extrapolate. The temperature data from
which modelers at NASA derive their extrapolation are scant, the projection
is extreme and their tone is strident. When any writers, including scientists,
extrapolate 29 years’ worth of temperature data to predict an imminent apocalypse
of Biblical proportions in an environment of waxing social focus, rising panic
and calls for government obstruction, one must acknowledge the likelihood
of social-psychological forces behind such a report and investigate whether
the data support the prediction.
It’s fine to describe chemistry. It’s fine to offer a theory of atmospheric and temperature change. But there seems to be a degree of statistical selectivity behind this specific prediction from NASA.
Global warming advocates told me that doubting man-made global warming was akin to denying evolution, but the global warming movement has not a little taste of old-time religion in its accompanying admonition of humanity: Man is evil; he is destroying the earth; he is “fouling his own nest,” as one scientist on the web says. Scientists are usually good at their fields but not necessarily at recognizing their own political, moral and economic biases.
My primary intent is to take a look at the question from the point of view of a social psychologist to decide whether it appears to be the result of hysteria. One thoughtful scientist took issue with the term, “hysteria.” But the term applies here to social activity, not the overt behavior of any particular individual. In 2005, when I was speaking about real estate hysteria and warning people against investing in property, people sporting a rather bemused expression would coolly respond, as if instructing an alien who lacked understanding of the way things worked on Earth, “They are not making any more land” and “it’s all about location.” They would say this with utmost calm. They had thought about it and sifted through the evidence. They were not hysterical but rational and thoughtful. At least, this was the appearance of behavior at the individual level. At the collective level, something else was going on. The number of people participating in the real estate market was unprecedented, and their borrowing, building and bidding activities, collectively, were extreme. Advocates of man-made global warming may appear sober as judges individually, but they are participating in a mass movement, complete with press releases, student rallies, pop concerts, movie documentaries and an underlying tone of moral crusade.
As one advocate for global warming admitted, the issue does become problematic when politics enters the picture. This is an understatement. Collective fears come and go, but public policy in response to them usually causes real horrors. Millions of people in the world are infected with malaria thanks to the DDT ban. The US starves for oil and emits more greenhouse gasses thanks to the ban on building nuclear plants, which could have powered a clean rail system.
Perhaps global warming is an exception to the overwhelming tendency of mass fears to prove unfounded. Perhaps NASA’s spectacular extrapolation of more than a 10 percent rise in temperature in the span of a single lifetime is accurate. But the advocates of government restrictions on productive activity had better be right, or they will once again have to answer for the “collateral damage” they will do with their proposals.
So, would I call man-made global warming a hoax, as a recent television program did? Definitely not; it has a strong scientific basis. Is the social environment with respect to the issue one of mass herding in an emotional state? It most definitely is. Should you believe predictions that climate change will usher in mass doom in coming decades? I don’t. I think the current frenzy over the subject is probably a symptom of peaking cycles in both climatic temperature and social psychology. But unfortunately 70 years from now most of us won’t be around to know the answer.
What I expect, based upon observing mass movements, is that this fear, too, will go away. Like the sweeping prison-yard spotlight that catches glimpses of external causes for stock-market behavior and then passes over them after a few years, crescendos of commentary on various foci of social fear almost always go away. Before my lifetime ends, global warming will probably fade as a focus of concern, and some new mass fear will be on the front page of USA Today. Nevertheless, I caution that only my views on the social aspects of the matter—not the meteorological aspects—are adequately informed