All posts by Deborah Binder

Climate Change and Possible Futures: Part VII

The Environment

What to do about climate change? Initiate the Process. The first few steps being: define the Problem, then specify what you want to accomplish (the goal) and what you want to avoid.

The Problem is the projected ongoing rise in global temperatures (due to increased concentrations of GHGs).  The goal is to keep the rise within this century to no more than 2°C. What we want to avoid is any net increase in human mortality and poverty, as well as any significant decline of non-human species. In other words, limit the extent of climate change and do so in a way that protects the entire biosphere.

Note that protecting the biosphere doesn’t necessarily mean keeping existing wild habitats in their “natural” state.  A 2°C rise in global temperature will still be very disruptive. Human intervention and specie relocation will be part of the story.

Limiting global temperature to +2°C by 2100 would be roughly compatible with two of the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as in the following chart:

 Problem Scenario 2081-2100: Mean and likely range
1 RCP2.6 1.0 (0.3 to 1.7) °C
2 RCP4.5 1.8 (1.1 to 2.6) °C
3 RCP6.0 2.2 (1.4 to 3.1) °C
4 RCP8.5 3.7 (2.6 to 4.8) °C

The goal, then, is to stay within RCP2.6, or at worst, the low end of RCP4.5. Part of figuring out if this is even feasible requires us to look at the assumptions that were required to arrive at RCP2.6 and RCP4.5. Are these assumptions realistic, based on current trends?

Next: looking more closely at RCP2.6 and RCP4.5

In a Nutshell: Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control

Scientific Encounters

Reference: Wilhelm Hofmann, Roy F. Baumeister, Georg Förster, and Kathleen D. Vohs (2012) Everyday Temptations: An Experience Sampling Study of Desire, Conflict, and Self-Control Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 102, No. 6, 1318–1335.

Behavior is motivated by desire to do or have something, either for pleasure or the relief of discomfort. Conflict is the perception that there’s a reason not to act on the desire. Temptations are desires that conflict with one or more of our goals.  We resist temptations through exercising self-control. Successful resistance means we didn’t act on the temptation.   In brief, the four parts of this model are: desire, conflict, resistance, and behavior.

Using beepers, the authors sampled thousands of “desire episodes” of 205 adult subjects, who had also taken personality tests. Here is some of what they found:

  • Subjects were in a state of desire about half the time.
  • They are conflicted about their desires about half the time.
  • Alcohol increases desire strength, sense of conflict, and the likelihood a temptation will be acted on.
  • Self-control (resistance) reduced enactment of desire-related behavior from 70% to 17%.
  • Resisting an “irresistible” desire reduced enactment from 71% to 26%.
  • The personality trait of self-control predicted less intense desire, less conflict, and less resistance to temptations.
  • A sense of “narcissistic entitlement” predicted less conflict about desires.
  • The presence of other people made it less likely one would give in to temptation.
  • However, subjects were more likely to act on temptations if they were in the presence of others doing the same.

A couple take-aways: Self-control works most of the time. The trait of self-control works through anticipatory coping and establishing useful habits and routines, rather than active resistance to temptations.

 

 

Wandering Thoughts: Explorations in Problem Space

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

When attention isn’t focused on the task at hand, cognitive resources are likely to be directed to unfinished business. Much of the time our so-called “wandering minds” are focused on unresolved business. Although “wandering” conveys an impression of thoughts adrift, unanchored and chaotic, it may be more accurate to view such thoughts as triggered by a sense of concern and seeking some resolution.  The Wandering Mind is the  Exploring Mind: exploring the problem space, a few moves at a time.

Climate Change and Possible Futures- Part VI

The Environment

The basic message of the last few posts: climate change projections require assumptions about human behavior and these assumptions may be questionable. For instance, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has presented a “business-as-usual” trajectory of green house gas concentrations that would result in a mean global temperature rise of 3.7°C (2.6 to 4.8°C range) by 2100, meaning that such concentrations are plausible if present trends continue.  Problem is, the “trends” assumed by this trajectory are the exact opposite of what’s actually occurring. Please see previous posts for details.

One could argue that it really doesn’t matter whether climate change projections are reasonable based on the current evidence – what matters is that people and governments are mobilized to take serious action now, the idea being that the specter of sure disaster mobilizes better than the specter of possible harm. This works well enough when most everyone agrees the awfulness will happen soon unless averted by decisive action.

But what if the really, really bad stuff isn’t supposed to happen for decades and there is no consensus about how bad it will be. (The IPCC actually offers a range of possible climate change scenarios, from the manageable and not too scary to the calamitous and super-scary. Guess which one gets the most press?) What if the messenger isn’t considered trustworthy, having raised false alarms in the past?  Will the little boy who cries ‘Wolf!’ get a serious hearing the louder he screams, even though he’s been screaming loudly for a very long time and no wolf is in sight?

Assumptions about the magnitude, rate, and effects of climate change make all the difference in the world if you’re trying to formulate  policies to mitigate and adapt to climate change. All policies involve trade-offs and all have potential downsides. Whatever we do about climate change is bound to help in some ways and hurt in others, whether we take an incremental or aggressive approach.  Sometimes baby steps work best; sometimes great leaps forward. The devil, as always, is in the details.

Next: what details?

 

The Romantic Appeal of a Basic Income Guarantee

Explorations Outside the Box, Politics and Economics

I’ve often suspected that one of the appeals of a Basic Income Guarantee (BIG) is the idea that in the ideal society, people would only do what they feel like doing and that people shouldn’t feel compelled to do something they didn’t feel like doing (a teenage boy utopia). For some, this ideal is about to be realized because work is about to go the way of the dinosaurs, thanks to robots.

Leaving aside the issue of whether work is actually facing extinction (which it isn’t – see, e.g., http://www.economist….­), think about what work is: an exchange relationship, in which both sides feel what they get is worth more than what they give. There are lots of things people wouldn’t do unless they got something in return (e.g., praise, respect, sex, the joy of complying with a cultural norm) and there is the myth of self-originating autonomous action, unfolding out of pure ebullience: a traditionalist view of things, steeped in the Old Europe of Rousseau and his fellow Romantics.

Idealism and its Opposite

Scientific Encounters

I work in scientific research and have seen its dirty underbelly. Diving in headlong, full of idealism about the scientific method and its inherent humility.  What I’ve seen is ambition, hype, and a willingness to avoid hard questions in favor of advancing one’s pet theory of how things work and should be. I see self-proclaimed “skeptics” apply their corrosive reason inconsistently, mainly to make easy targets look stupid but sparing those they see as on the “same side”. Rationalization and hypocrisy: quick to find flaws and quick to forgive flaws, depending.

Climate Change and Possible Futures – Part V

The Environment

This is a continuing series of posts on the “Representative Concentration Pathways” (RCPs), presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as possible trajectories of atmospheric concentrations of green house gases (GHGs) over the next century. The RCPs start with a target GHG concentration, on the basis of which they estimate global temperature over various time periods. The scariest is RCP8.5, which projects a mean global temperature rise of 3.7°C by 2100. The story line of RCP8.5 has been described as  a “conservative business as usual” scenario that assumes “a 10 fold increase in the use of coal as a power source and a move away from natural gas as an energy source”.

“Business as usual” usually means the way things are expected to be if current trends continue. So, is the global use of coal on the upswing? Here is what the  International Energy Agency has to say:

“Coal is the slowest-growing energy source in the IEO2016 Reference case, with 0.6%/year average increases in total world coal consumption from 2012 to 2040, considerably slower than the 2.2%/year average over the past 30 years. The EIA forecasts declines from 40% of total generation in 2012 to 29% in 2040.”

Here’s what a recent Goldman Sacks analysis concludes:

“Unlike most other commodities, thermal coal is unlikely to experience another period of tightness ever again because investment in new coal-fired generation is becoming less common and the implied decline in long-term demand appears to be irreversible.”

And here is what David Rutledge, Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the California Institute of Technology, predicts:

“If the current trends continue, 90% of the coal would be produced by 2067.”

Once again, in the case of coal, there is no way RCP8.5 represents a plausible “business as usual” trajectory.

That completes this series on RCP8.5. I suspect that many people would say the plausibility of climate change scenarios is beside the point, and that the point is: unless you scare people shitless, they won’t take sufficient action, and if they don’t act now, and act decisively, the future of the biosphere – including humanity –  is going to be very, very bleak.

 

Next up: really?

 

Who are The Rich?

Politics and Economics

According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 1979 and 2011, gross median household income, adjusted for inflation, rose from $59,400 to $75,200, or 26.5%. However, once adjusted for household size and looking at taxes from an after-tax perspective, real median household income grew 46%. A lot of the stats about the stagnation of household income ignore changes in household size, which has declined over the years. Two-earner households currently have a medium income of about $88K. Over the past 20 years, one-earner households have grown much more than any other household size. And then there’s the churn*  in household income: 3/4 of households will make it into the top quintile for at least a year; and just .6% of households in the top 1% stay there for 10 consecutive years. It’s less that there’s a permanent class of the rich than that the returns to age and education are greater than they used to be, so that the relative income of the older and most educated is a lot higher than it used to be.

None of this isn’t to say the poor shouldn’t be helped. But it’s less the case that “the rich are getting richer” than that for any given year, more income is reported at the higher end of the income distribution than it used to be, relative to the rest – but the people  up there change a lot from year to year.

* Reference:

Auten, Gerald, Geoffrey Gee, and Nicholas Turner. 2013. “Income Inequality, Mobility, and Turnover at the Top in the US, 1987-2010.” American Economic Review, 103(3): 168-72.

 

Imaginary Conversations and Happiness

Explorations Outside the Box, Observing Mindfulness

Imaginary conversations and scenarios are like the brain running through hypotheticals and counterfactuals, just in case. The imagined events may never happen but something like them may and the process of playing them out in the brain is a kind of problem-solving exercise that can sharpen one’s readiness for whatever may come one’s way. Even though these imaginary events are often fueled by a vague sense of potential threat, that doesn’t mean one’s underlying anxiety or stress level is excessive. Alertness to the possibility of undesirable things happening may cause an uptick in cortisol. Not to mention a downtick on the happy-ometer. So what?