Unions and the Politics of Budget Cutting

So, I guess my post on Ronald Reagan didn't exactly whip the conservative masses into a polemical frenzy.  Here an issue that's a little more timely.

I've been following with interest the goings on in Wisconsin and other states as well as the political posturing over the federal budget.  I have to admit that public service employee unions were never particularly near and dear to my heart.   The one time I attended a local school committee meeting the teacher's union, trying to move along difficult contract negotiations, was out in force.  I felt very sorry for the school committee members as they had to listen to endless harangues and put up with what struck me as an appalling lack of basic civility. I could also never understand the concept of teacher tenure.  I always assumed that tenure existed to protect scholars from political interference in their academic research, not to guarantee school teachers lifetime employment.  And I've been dismayed at times by the behavior of police and fireman's unions whose concept of solidarity seems to mean defending their members who abuse their power regardless of the circumstances.

So I certainly can see how public service unions could be improved, and I don't dispute that the budget crises facing states are very real.  But looking at what the Republicans have undertaken, I can help but conclude that reforming the public service sector and balancing the budget are secondary concerns at best, and that the real motive is to enact a political agenda.  It's hard to take Republican new found religion on budget deficits seriously, first of all, when they have done so much to create the deficits with their mania for tax cuts and military spending.  Rather, they are using the pretext of budget cutting to launch an all-out assault on the state run social safety net in general and on unions in particular.   It is very revealing that that the governor of Wisconsin has refused to conduct any negotiations at all with the public employee unions despite their willing to agree to all the financial concessions he has proposed.  If his primary goal was balancing the budget, this should have been enough, but it's clear that he has other goals in mind, goals shared by his right wing sponsors who funded his electoral campaign and helped put him in power.

I know my friend Lev has very different views on these matters, and I'm interested to hear his response. 

On the Mythologization of Ronald Reagan

We're back after a hiatus of sorts, but here's a topic that liable to get the polemical juices flowing--the legacy of Ronald Reagan.

It’s Reagan’s 100^th birthday and all his admirers are out in force.  I don’t recall exactly how or when it happened, but over the last decade or so Reagan has become something like a latter day founding father—a wise, skillful politician whose judgments were invariably spot-on.  It’s as if he set the gold standard, and Republicans ever since have been trying to find someone who could measure up  I wouldn't be surprised if they're clearing away space for him on Mt. Rushmore at this very moment.

Funny thing is, this is not at all how I remember Reagan.  Of course, I can’t speak to his image in what we now know of as the Red States (imagine how that would have sounded when Reagan came into office!), although I do recall that there were times, particularly in his first term when his popularity dropped quite low—well below anything Obama has encountered.  But his image in circles that I frequented was overwhelmingly negative.  If you had asked my take on him back then, probably the best I could had said was that he was well trained actor.  He put on a good show, but nothing was as it seemed.  He preached family values, but he divorced his first wife and was estranged from his children.  He courted the Christian right, but was indifferent to religion in his own life.  He was touted as the “Great Communicator,” but only when he was reading Peggy Noonan’s speeches off a teleprompter.  Off the cuff, he could barely string together a complete sentence.  He claimed to be standing up for the common man, but no one was a better friend of the corporate world.  In short, whatever it was about him that was charming the American public, I didn’t get it. 

The other thing I would have said about Reagan, particularly during his first term, was that he was dangerous.  He was a fanatic anti-communist dead set on bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation.  All of the progress that had been made in moderating Cold War confrontation was lost under Reagan.  Of course no one could possible have imagined what would happen to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and so Reagan’s path of confrontation seemed to border on insanity. 

Well, that was then.  Now with 30 years of hindsight, and a whole different worldview, how does Reagan measure up?   Does he deserve all the brouhaha? 

I would have to admit that in retrospective, I do have more positive feelings toward Reagan, as least on a personal level.  If you asked me now, I would say that not only was Reagan a good actor, he was also a good politician.  Two things in particular come to mind.  First, is his human touch, his ability to connect with people, even his ideological opponents, on a personal level.  As a result, he was never afraid to engage in give and take and work toward practical solutions. This leads to my second positive characteristic- his flexibility.  Of course no one could argue that Reagan was not a person of strong beliefs.  But he could also be pragmatic—whether it was in negotiations with the Democratic Congress or in arms control talks with Gorbachev.   And it was precisely this ability to allow his positions to evolve as circumstances changed that led to his greatest achievement—helping to create the conditions under which the Cold War could come to an end. 

When Reagan came into office, he was as rabid a cold warrior as they came. His key advisers on Soviet affairs were Richard Pipes and Richard Perle whose take on the communist world was basically—nuke ‘em!  Rollback replaced containment and detente as the governing doctrine.  But around the middle of his presidency Reagan’s views began to shift.  The story I’ve heard is that Nancy Reagan prevailed upon him to start meeting with a writer on Russian culture, Susan Massie, who in the course of a series of meetings, helped bring him toward a more nuanced view.   This shift in his viewpoint helped to make him more receptive toward Gorbachev and allowed him to give Gorbachev the reassurances he needed to launch his attempts at reform.  I certainly don’t buy the triumphalist myth that Reagan ‘won’ the Cold War, through his arms build-up.  But I do think that by signaling his willingness to enter into serious dialogue on arms control, he helped to create the atmosphere that made Gorbachev’s perestroika possible.   

So I do give Reagan some credit for positive achievements.   But what gets lost in the rush to canonize him are the deep and lasting costs of his many misguided ventures.   We can see this both domestically and internationally.  In foreign policy, Reagan subordinated every possible consideration of human rights, social justice and democracy to his fanatical anti-communism.  Sure, he talked a good talk about liberal values when it was a matter of condemning communist abuses, but he was perfectly happy to funnel massive amounts to aid to the military in El Salvador to support the likes of Roberto D’Aubuisson (AKA Blowtorch Bob), described by a former ambassador as a “pathological killer,” who organized horrific death squads and ordered the murder of untold thousands including Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns.  And I won’t even go into the story of the Nicaraguan contras, whose violence and brutality were legendary.

One could argue that Reagan’s Latin American misadventures were essentially episodic.  They were regrettable, of course, but once Reagan left office and the Cold War ended the countries involved could resolve their inner conflicts and more or less go back to normal life.  Personally, I simply don’t know enough about the recent history of these countries to make a judgment either way.  But this could certainly not be said about Afghanistan, where the legacy of the policies of the 1980s still haunts us to this day.   There’s even a word for it—blowback.  We built up a force to further our Cold War interests and now it has turned against us.   Who would have thought that these valiant Muslim “freedom fighters,” to whom we were funneling billions of dollars, would form the nucleus of Al Queda and the Taliban?  With all that Cold War noise buzzing in Reagan’s ears, who could have expected him to actually listen his beloved mujahedeen long enough to understand just how antithetical their ideas and aspirations were to the values of the Western democracy?  It didn’t matter.  Our enemy’s enemy is our friend.  But as they say, with friends like that who needs enemies.

But perhaps the most profound negative aspect of Reagan’s legacy is precisely what he is most lauded for by his conservative admirers.  It was Reagan, I believe, who did more than anyone else to infect mainstream conservative discourse with the anti-government virus that it suffers from to this day.   Reagan got a lot of mileage, particularly while on the campaign trail, assailing the power of the state – “government is the problem not the solution,” “most frightening phrase in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” etc. etc.   Once he was President, of course, Reagan’s anti-government bluster quickly dissipated.  He raised taxes on numerous occasions, did little or nothing to cut back on the size of government and if fact actually added new government agencies while in power.   I always found it appropriate that the Ronald Reagan building on Pennsylvania Ave that opened in the mid 1990s was the most expensive Federal office building every constructed. 

But if Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric turned out to be largely smoke and mirrors, the same cannot be said of his latter-day admirers, who are threatening to inflict immense damage to the American way of life in their zeal to “starve the beast.”   We got a hint of this during the Bush II administration when the ineffectiveness of government agencies became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: cut back funding, fire the best people, replace them with incompetent cronies, remove any kind of meaningful oversight, and then when the agencies mess up proclaim—“see we told you government couldn’t do anything right.”  Now, thank goodness, the grownups are back in control of the agencies, but the Tea Party wingnuts have their hands on the fiscal spigot and are threatening to cut off funding willy-nilly.  The recent budget proposals in the House are a monument to shortsightedness and irresponsibility.  Of course they will never pass, but even a “compromise” could do enormous damage.  And it’s all in Reagan’s name.

So given what Reagan’s presidency actually represented, why has this cult of Reagan emerged.   The easy answer is that it is useful.  Larger than life heroes are the lifeblood of ideological movements, and when you’re building a cult of personality, the last thing you want to do is sully it with the messy details of real life.  Of course it takes time (at least in an open society) to pull this off.   As late as 1992, more Americans had an unfavorable than a favorable view of Reagan and a substantial plurality felt that they were worse off as a result of his presidency.   But by the end of the 1990s memories had begun to fade, a process eased along by the general prosperity of the Clinton years and the three ring circus put on by Ken Starr and co.   My first recollection of a changing image came around the 2000 election when Bush Jr. was deliberately marketed as a kind of latter-day Reagan—a warm-hearted no nonsense kind of guy who shot from the hip, thought from the gut and would bring back those happy days.   Reagan’s death in 2004 brought a new wave of fond remembrances, soon to be encapsulated in pithy YouTube clips replaying the best of Reagan’s made for TV moments—“Mr Gorbachev—tear down this wall!”  And once the ideological right rediscovered its mojo after Obama’s election, the image of Reagan was there waiting for them, indelibly etched, clear and bright and safely removed from the messy reality of his presidency.

A few technical arguments to clear the fog surrounding the science of global warming

I did not want to write a technical post on global warming. There is plenty of information on this issue available on the Internet, and I thought that everyone with an interest in the subject would just go ahead and read. Still, after it had become clear that my discussion of this issue with Nathan in non-technical terms hit the wall, and I was accused in dismissing offhandedly the entire “scientific field of climatology”, I gave up and started researching this post. I did not intend to become an expert climatologist, but I did go as far as to read a few original research papers in peer-reviewed climatology journals such as Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research and such. I am obviously still not qualified to judge who is right in the climate change debate, the majority of the alarmist, or the minority of the skeptics, but this much I feel qualified to say: despite the vocal claims to the opposite, the science of the climate change is very far away from being fully understood and settled. Frankly speaking, I was appalled by an extremely low, by standards of my own area of science, level of argumentation and analysis of the data presented in the papers I have read. But I am running a little bit ahead of myself here, so let’s go back to basic.

The physical foundation of the global warming theory is so called “greenhouse effect”. To understand this effect one needs to realize that the solar radiation falling on the Earth comes in many different varieties: radio waves, infrared radiation, visible and ultraviolet light. All of this is essentially just electromagnetic waves, which differ from each other by their wavelengths: longest for radio waves and shortest for ultraviolet light. Waves with different wavelengths interact differently with atmosphere, oceans, ground, living organisms, etc. It is crucially important that the atmosphere is transparent to the visible light (this is why we can see it), but is not transparent to the infrared radiation. The reason for the latter is the presence in the atmosphere molecules, mainly water vapor, and to a lesser extent carbon dioxide and others, which are oblivious to other forms of electromagnetic radiation, but strongly absorb infrared waves. Therefore, the visible light travels almost unobstructed through the atmosphere, where it is either reflected back or absorbed. When electromagnetic radiation is absorbed, it is necessarily re-emitted, but in the form of infrared light, which cannot get through the atmosphere. Thus, a significant portion of the energy of light radiation remains trapped in the Earth-atmosphere system. The atmosphere still emits certain amount of infrared radiation as determined by its temperature to the outer space. This temperature is defined by the equilibrium between amount of absorbed sunlight and the emitted radiation (the Earth warms up or cools down until it emits as much energy as absorbs).

The greenhouse effect is a well-understood physical phenomenon, which plays positive and essential role for life on this planet. Without it, the temperature here would have been too low for any life to be possible. However, while being the physical foundation of the global warming theory (GWT), the greenhouse effect by itself is not part of it.

GWT can be presented in the form of three postulates

1. The average temperature on the Earth increases


2. This increase is due to extra amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere because of human industrial activity. This extra CO2 results in more solar radiation being absorbed, and, therefore, warms up the Earth to balance out this increased absorption with more emission.


3. Increase in temperature will result in drastic climate changes with catastrophic consequences for Earth’s ecosystem, including human population.

Let me begin with the first of these statements, which is the least controversial, and this is what most people have in mind when they talk about the overwhelming empirical evidences of global warming. I will not discuss in too many details the actual observational base of this statement, even though there is still some controversy between temperature measured by the land-based stations, and data obtained from satellites (the latter show much smaller warming). Instead, I want to focus on meaning of the concept of average temperature.

The concept of “averages” is one of the most widely used and most misunderstood ideas in natural and social sciences. One uses this concept to replace a complex set of apparently random data with a single number, which can be done with a clearly defined mathematical procedure (just add all your data together and divide by the number of entries in your data-set). What is not that obvious is the actual meaning and usability of the derived number. An example of a meaningless average is “the average temperature of patients in a hospital”. On the other hand, the average number of votes projected for a candidate for political office is an example of meaningful average. What is the difference between these examples? In the later example, winning or losing an election is determined by the cumulative effect of many voters making their choices, while in the former case there is no quantity whose value would depend on the cumulative effect of individual patient’s temperatures. I suspect that the average temperature in the context of global warming is akin to the average temperature in the hospital because none of the essential climate related quantities is determined by cumulative effects of daily, monthly or annually changing temperatures.

The climate scientists do understand this, and it seems to me that average temperature data are constructed mostly for external consumption: politicians, journalists, and political activists of all persuasions. For internal discussions, other measures of global warming are used. One of the most meaningful metrics is global heat content of the oceans. I was surprised, however, to discover that this indicator shows a lot of volatility even though one would expect the changes of the total thermal energy of the oceans to be very slow reacting only to cumulative effects. Still, these numbers are much more indicative then average temperatures, and they show that starting from about 2000 the heat content of the ocean is flat or even decreases indicating absence of warming. This point is of course being debated on both sides up to now, but the very existence of this debate shows that even with the first postulate of GWT, the situation is not as settled, as its proponents would like us to believe.

Another popular indicator used as a proof of the first postulate of GWT employs the mass of ice in Antarctic. This indicator, however, is not as clear-cut as the ocean heat content because there exist too many different phenomena that could influence melting of ice in Antarctic, such as direct sun light, ozone layer, cosmic rays and others. But even the melting phenomenon itself is not that straightforward: while the land ice in Antarctic does melt, the amount of sea ice shows unprecedented growth. It is interesting to note that the melting of Antarctic ice occurs faster than predicted by the climate models. While this fact is taken by the advocates of global warming as its even “stronger than expected” confirmation, it is really not. This fact simply shows that climate models are not reliable, their predictions are not trustworthy, and that no one really understand why the Antarctic melts.

The situation with the second postulate of the global warming theory is even worse. No one argues that industrial activity increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At the same time no one also disputes the fact that the direct contribution of CO2 into greenhouse effect is very small - about one degree of centigrade for doubling of the amount of CO2, and we are still far away from this threshold. However, this small effect can be amplified through so-called feedback mechanisms. This means that rise in temperature due to small increase of CO2, which would have been otherwise negligible, stimulate additional processes, which affect the climate in a much stronger way by either enhancing the warming effect (positive feedback) or reducing it (negative feedback). The cornerstone of the global warming science is the assumption that main feedback mechanism is water vapor feedback, which is strongly positive, and, therefore, even small changes in CO2 concentration results in exponentially increasing temperature. The physical origin of this feedback lies in a simple fact that warmer air can contain more water vapor, which in its turn, absorbs more sunlight producing more warming. The problem with this picture is that this is not the only possible feedback mechanism.

Everybody agrees that clouds whose formation is affected by increased water vapor content of the atmosphere, also provide an important feedback mechanism. What scientists cannot agree upon is the type of this feedback: on one hand, clouds reflect more radiation back to space (negative feedback), but on the other hand, they trap more radiation emitted by Earth (positive feedback). Richard Lindzen of MIT argues that the cloud feedback is strongly negative so that it cancels the positive water feedback. Dessler of A&M University and others find the cloud feedback to be either positive or small negative. The uncertainty in the cloud feedback has not yet been resolved as admitted in 2010 Science article by Dessler, which makes it very difficult to know the overall feedback with any certainty.

This overall feedback determines so-called climate sensitivity, which is the crucial parameter for the GWT. If this parameter is large and positive, then the climate is indeed very sensitive to even small changes of CO2 and the humanity is in danger, but if this parameter is small or negative, we still have some hope to survive without wrecking our economy.

Another approach to determining the total feedback is based on statistical analysis of empirical data such as surface temperature and radiation imbalance (difference between incoming and outgoing radiations) in the upper atmosphere. I already mentioned that average temperature does not really measure much, and even if it does, whatever it measures depends on a number of quite arbitrary decisions, and is, therefore, highly uncertain. Given these uncertainties of the input data and a number of arbitrary assumptions unavoidable in this type of analysis, it is not surprising that different researchers come up with opposite conclusions. Therefore, I personally think than none of the results obtained with this approach can be taken seriously and that level of certainty of our knowledge of climate sensitivity implied by the Intergovernmental Panel and the media is strongly overblown.

To conclude the discussion of the 2nd postulate of GWT I want to make another point. Even if the value for the climate sensitivity provided by the Intergovernmental Panel is close to reality, the estimates of the future based on this number are seriously flawed for another reason. The whole concept of feedbacks and climate sensitivity assumes that these parameters themselves remain constant over time. This type of assumption is called linear approximation. This approximation is only valid in the close vicinity of equilibrium. When a system moves farther away from equilibrium, and this is exactly what is being implied by GWT, the linear approximation unavoidably breaks down. In order to know how far from equilibrium a system can go before this happens, we must have models going beyond the linear approximation. I am yet to find papers seriously discussing this issue, and without such a discussion, conclusions based on linear models do not worth much.

Finally, I will say just a few words about the third postulate of the GWT. It is not necessary, though, because analysis of the second postulate already has shown that Freeman Dyson was completely correct saying that the climate science is in a crappy shape. Still, I want to add a few words about long-term predictions of the climate models. Climate is a complicated nonlinear system, and if we know anything about generic nonlinear systems, it is that their dynamics is extremely sensitive to initial conditions and values of the parameters. This means that even a smallest change of one of the parameter can result in completely different predictions, and I do not mean different numbers, I mean different equilibrium states. This conclusion is a rigorous mathematical result in the theory of nonlinear dynamic systems, of which climate is one of the examples. (For those familiar with nonlinear dynamics: I do realize that situation is more complex: there are regions of parameters and initial conditions with stable behavior, as well as those with unstable; there are different types of equilibrium,or better steady states, which can be reached from different initial conditions, but these too much technicalities for this post intended for general public. I am afraid I have already bored everyone to death.) For instance, modern computer climate models include only interaction between atmosphere and oceans, but do not include effects of biosphere (trees, plants, CO2 eating plankton in the oceans, etc.). Even though, these effects appear small, over a long time interval due to the instability of the nonlinear dynamics, they can completely change the fate of the climate. How long is this long time interval? May be some climate scientists know, but they do not share this knowledge with broader public. These arguments do not mean to say that no catastrophic events can ever happen; they mean that these events are not predictable and not controllable.

To conclude, I believe I made a good point showing that the climate science does not yet have a well-established paradigm, and that its unresolved difficulties are of fundamental nature, which has to be resolved before any real paradigm can be formulated. Accordingly, I believe that it is quite irresponsible to force any political and economical actions with global consequences based on this kind of theory.

Science and Politics: View from the other side

A logical series is a sequence of symbols constructed according to a certain rule. For instance, the series 1,2,3,4, where each number exceeds the preceding one by unity, has a simple and easily recognizable structure. One can also design series according to more complex and not so easily discernible rules. Logical series are very popular among creators of standardized tests and were even used in the plot of movie plot ( Oxford Murders ).

What does it all have to do with our discussion? In his previous posts, Nathan proposed his own logical series: history, evolution, climate change. The rule used to construct this series is not very complex: these are the fields of inquiry being attacked by "right wingers". While at first glance it seems that there is some logic in this series, a deeper analysis reveals its fallacious nature. The moniker “right wing” is so broad and covers such a multitude of opposing political positions that its use does not seem to serve any useful purpose in general and even less so in this particular discussion. Indeed, while the belief in creationism strongly correlates with political affiliation of the faithful, the skepticism with regard to global warming by itself is a scientific and not a political position. I do not deny, of course, that it is often used to promote particular political interests, but it does not define the political views of scientists supporting this position. For instance, one of the most prominent “skeptics” Freeman Dyson , is quite liberal in his political views. After all, “alarmist” views on the global warming issue are also used to advance a clearly defined political agenda, but I would stop short of prescribing liberal views to all scientists holding the alarmist position.

Nathan also puts forward the idea that evolution and global warming have a shared property of being “normal sciences” in the terminology of Kuhn. In other words, both evolution theory and global warming are “mature” scientific fields with established consensus regarding their respective basic principles. I think, however, that if someone scratches below the surface of the obvious, some significant peculiarities of the climate science would emerge. It is interesting, for instance, that while in biological community no one has been paying any attention to creationism as a serious alternative to evolution for many years, the supporters of global warming theory are still in bitter fight with their opponents. It is even more peculiar that this fight has taken the form very different from what is generally accepted as normal scientific discussion. Normally, scientific consensus is not supposed to be established with the help of governmental and even intergovernmental bodies. It is also very uncharacteristic for “normal” science to carry out “scientific” discussions by either smearing opponents as somebody’s (in this case oil/gas/coal industry’s) puppets or dismissing them as incompetents. This happened in the past, of course, with rather detrimental results for science. Something rather similar occurred in the Middle Ages in Europe, when Christian Church was preventing any deviation from “consensus” on Aristotelian -Ptolemaic systems, and in Soviet Union, when the Communist Party forced the “theory” of Academician Lysenko to be accepted as “consensus” of Soviet biologists.

The “non-traditional” methods of scientific discussion are justified by the need to respond to political intrigues of the “right wingers”. While it is true that scientific nature of skeptics’ arguments is to some extent discredited by the political campaign organized by the fossil fuel industry and supporting it politicians, there are several points to be considered when discussing this issue. First, it should be understood that the political resistance to the immediate actions based on alarmist’s views reflects enormous economical and political consequences of these actions. At stakes are not just lavish lifestyles of a few CEOS, but hundreds of thousands of jobs around the world, the pace of world economic development, and ultimately the amount of wealth in the world. Without this wealth, none of the programs designed to help poor and developing nations can be possible. It seems that world “left-wing movement”, which almost universally supports the alarmist views on global warming and the redistributive programs of international assistance, is actually shooting itself in the foot, causing one doubt their sincerity.

This brings me to the second important point. To talk about political “intrigues” of the right while ignoring the influence of political left on the issue of global warming is, mildly speaking, hypocritical. While I do not subscribe to the theory of centrally organized conspiracy beyond the global warming problem, it is impossible not to see the complex network of interests of various groups benefiting from and exploiting the “threat” of global warming. Some of these interests have been exposed in a number of publications and films presented in this Wikipedia article . While I do not endorse or agree with some of the claims cited in this article, it gives a comprehensive overview of various groups benefiting from the global warming scare. I will mention only some of them whose influence is, in my view, most important. Climate scientists, who were once seen by many as providers of the material to TV weather anchors, suddenly found themselves at the forefront of public attention. It is very tempting to keep it this way because it is just nice to feel yourself important and besides along with attention usually come the money in the form of governmental grants. I am not saying that all climate scientists behave this way, but being a scientist itself and seeing similar behavior, while on much smaller scale, in my own scientific community, I understand that this kind of temptation is very difficult to resist. In additional global warming issue is a golden goose for UN bureaucracy, which finally found a way to extend its power over economic activity of most of industrialized world. National governments can use this issue in a variety of ways from distracting population from other problems, acquiring means for even larger control over their societies, etc. Finally, for the socialists of all kinds , organizing anti-globalization and other protests, the global warming scare is “once in a life-time” opportunity to finally crush the spinal chord of so much hated capitalism, which will undoubtedly result in massive unrest with a lucrative power grabbing opportunities. All these interests are converging at one point: global warming is a very real opportunity to replace free market economy with central planning, which is a dream of all bureaucracies and professional socialists.

This deep interconnection between the global warming science and world economics and politics drastically distinguishes it from other “normal sciences” and thus, the so-called “consensus” in climate discussion should be considered with a great suspicion. It is interesting that Mike Hulme of University of East Anglia, who is one the leading alarmists, after being caught with red hands (climatgate scandal) admits this much in his article in Wall Street Journal : “Yes, science has clearly revealed that humans are influencing global climate and will continue to do so, but we don't know the full scale of the risks involved, nor how rapidly they will evolve, nor indeed—with clear insight—the relative roles of all the forcing agents involved at different scales”. So much for the alarmist consensus. In the same article Hulme openly admits that the debate over the global warming is not over scientific but moral differences: “Too often, when we think we are arguing over scientific evidence for climate change, we are in fact disagreeing about our different political preferences, ethical principles and value systems.” I rest my case.

Tea Party history and "Big Picture"

In one of his comments in the thread on all the things wrong with the Tea Party version of history (see here ) Nathan accused Dr. McClanahan of the Tenthers movement, and by extension all other authors sharing this ideological platform, in methodologically wrong approach to history. Two main points of Nathan's indictment were: 1. McClanahan cherry picks historical facts and quotes of historical figures that suite his political agenda, and 2. He uses a "welter of detail" (thanks, Nathan I learned a new word!), without showing the place of these details in a bigger picture. Well, Nathan, in my opinion, this criticism is not entirely fair, and is based on misinterpretation of objectives of McClanahan's article. If McClanahan tried to argue that the ideas of the compact theory and of strictly limited federal government with enumerated powers in early American history was the singular or at least a prevailing point of view, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with you. However, his objective, at least the way I saw it, was very different and much narrower. All what he tried to do was to repudiate the notion that these ideas, which were the basis of the Tenthers movement, never played an important role in earlier American political discourse or as Mr. Millhiser (McClanahan's liberal opponent) put it "tentherism has no basis in the Constitution or its history. President George Washington himself rejected tentherism early in American history, and this radical view of the Constitution gained no traction at all until fairly late in American history." With this limited goal in mind, I think that McClanahan's use of quotes from Hamilton or Marshall is justified. Dr. McClanahan is obviously well aware of political positions of both these men and of devastating effect on the "compact theory" of the Marshall's ruling in McCulloch v. Maryland . This circumstance, however, makes these quotes all more important because they essentially confirm the point that the ideas supported by the Tenthers were pretty much on the mind of the leading politicians of the time including those who eventually accepted the opposite point of view. I am not arrogant enough to think that I can say anything new about Marshall's ruling in this case, which is probably one of the most studied and written about Supreme Court cases in US history, but I would like to bring to attention the opening phrase of his arguments, which says: "This government is acknowledged by all, to be one of enumerated powers. The principle, that it can exercise only the powers granted to it, would seem too apparent, to have required to be enforced by all those arguments, which its enlightened friends, while it was depending before the people, found it necessary to urge; that principle is now universally admitted." This statement is in direct contradiction with Millhiser's assertions, and even though Marshall continues to establish the idea of implied powers and to negate the compact theory, this opening confirms than the notion of enumerated powers is not the figment of Tenthers' imagination, but played an important part in establishing American Constitutional order.

These quotes also play an important role in understanding the "Big Picture", which you, Nathan, are so concerned about. I agree with you that the key members of the Founding generation were complex people, who constantly debated the ideas that laid the foundation of American Constitution, revising and developing them and their own views on various principles of organization of American republic. They were not a uniform group of people, there were fractions and counter-fractions and political maneuvering sometimes of the worst kind. One thing, however, united them all, and this is my understanding of the Big Picture. They participated in the birth of a new political order, which was a product of the rebellion of people against the King. This idea of the King, understood in a broad metaphorical sense as any arbitrary rule with unlimited powers over men, was pretty much on the minds of everybody in the Revolutionary generation. The new order, which they created, was supposed to eliminate the King, make it impossible for any person or institution to become the King. Thus, the idea of limiting the power of government, particularly, federal government was the central theme of all the debates that seek to find the right compromise between the form of government that could actually govern without becoming the King. In this context, the quotes from leading proponents of stronger government, which were cited by McClanahan, are very important. They allow to suggest that when Hamilton, or Marshall, or Madison talked about strong central government they actually meant something different from what present days supporters of the strong government have in mind. This is a frequently occurring but not too often acknowledged linguistic and gnoseological phenomenon - the substitution of the meaning. The phrase "strong central government" is just a "meaning holder", an empty frame, which is being filled with different meanings in different cultural and political contexts. I do not think that Hamilton in his wildest dreams envisioned that his views of strong government would be taken to give the government the power to establish the Department of Education, to control the minimum wage or hiring practices of private businesses, or to establish the system of public welfare. All these things might or might not be justified on various grounds, but to use the position of Hamilton to justify them is historically and logically wrong. Take the case of Madison, for instance, who is said to be flip-flopping on the issue of the strong federal - versus state governments. You mentioned that Madison became a supporter of the former, but the context of this flip-flop is very telling. He just lost a humiliating war against Britain and realized that one cannot fight a war with state militias, without a centrally commanded standing army and without centralized means to finance it. Thus, he became a supporter of the "strong federal power", but for him it meant just two things: to have an army and to be able to issue federal currency. This is a far cry from "implied powers" of today's federal government.
This is essentially the "Big Picture" how I see it. And in my mind this picture only proves how right was Jefferson, when he warned against the dangers of federal government without explicitly specified limits on its power. The history demonstrates that governments behave like gases: just as a gas expands to occupy all available to it volume, governments expand to grab all the power, which is not explicitly denied to them. It is sadly ironic, of course, that Jefferson himself contributed to the demise of his concept of limited government through his Louisiana Purchase. This story, however, is more complex than your, Nathan, comment suggests (see its nice recapitulation here . Jefferson understood very well that this act was unconstitutional and wanted to pass a Constitutional amendment to remedy this situation, but he fell the victim to the political expediency as so many other great men after him. Unfortunately, his weakness opened the flood gates of federal activism and expansion of federal powers, which sometimes, indeed, have been used for good, but most often, were detrimental to the development of the country.

Science and Politics

Toward the end of our previous thread, Lev took me to task for “lumping together” examples from three disparate fields, history, global warming and evolution, to show the propensity of certain present day conservatives to advocate positions that are fundamentally at odds with reality. Regarding history, Lev writes: “Interpretation of history, the way I see it, (please correct me if I am completely off the mark here) is unavoidably ideological. I remember our discussions of Orientalism, and how you pointed out the great role of ideology in interpretations of the relationship between West and East.”  But while history cannot, in Lev’s view, be separated from ideology, global warming and evolution, “belong to domain of empirical science, which is much less prone to ideological influences.”  Still, Lev notes a significant difference between these two fields: Darwinian evolution has been around for 150 years and is a well established element of modern biology. On the other hand, the science behind the model of global warming particularly as it relates to human causality is much less developed and remains a matter of legitimate scientific debate.  Unfortunately, Lev writes, “both sides of the debate have vested economical interest in its outcome, and, therefore, something that should be a purely scientific matter has turned into a political circus.”  Lev puts most of the blame for this on the “alarmist” side which has prematurely advanced preliminary and not fully confirmed results.  Lev considers it naïve to attribute humanitarian motives to the “alarmists” and feels that they have “set a very bad precedent from the point of view of the integrity of scientific discourse.  While I am not a climatologist,” he writes, “I have enough training to understand the complexity of the problem they try to model and the unreliability of any results in this area."

I would like to respond both to the general point about lumping things together and also to Lev's suggestion that history is always intertwined with ideology.  

What's wrong with Tea Party history?

 Note--Our previous thread was getting a little tangled with different topics, so I thought it would be helpful to separate the discussion of history as a separate posting.   Here's what I wrote:

Lev's previous post raised two questions, one concerning the nature of historical objectivity and the other concerning the specific interpretation of early American history put forth by the Tea Party. The first is of course one of the great issues in the philosophy of history. I'm happy to chime in with my two cents worth, but I think I'll save this for another time.

I do want to say a few words about the second question. First, some additional reading. I'm not a specialist on Early American history, so I don't want to go too deep in arguing the specifics. But Jill Lepore at Harvard has just come out with a book that addresses precisely this issue: The Whites of Their Eyes:
The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History. I haven't read Lepore's book, but I have read an article she wrote in the New Yorker, which I assume touches on many of the ideas in the book.

To tell you the truth, I actually found Lepore's article a little annoying mainly because she tries to do too many things at once. She is constantly shifting between the American Revolution, the present-day Tea Party, and the bicentennial events in Boston in the 1970s. (Incidentally, I remember these events very well. I was one of the 30,000 protesters at the "People's Bicentennial" at Concord in April 1975 that Lepore mentions briefly). In the midst of all this shifting around, her point gets rather muddled. But she certainly makes her views clear on the Tea Party version of the American Revolution, and these points apply to the link that Lev provided.

So what's wrong with the Tea Party view of history? First, it is simplistic. The Tea Partiers take a period that was rife with discussion, debate and dissent and homogenize it all into a uniform image of the "Founding Fathers" -- as if they agreed on everything and spoke with one voice. The tenth amendment is a good example of this. It's clear that there was intense disagreement in the 1780s and 1790s about the powers of the federal government. Yet the tea party enshrines one set of voices in these debates as dogma--this despite the fact that it was the anti-federalists calling for a weak and circumscribed government who essentially lost the argument.

My second point is that the Tea Party's view of history is tendentious. A conscientious historian, even when arguing a controversial thesis, will present the full range of evidence and craft an argument that accounts for all its elements. What the Tea Partiers do, in contrast, is to pick out of a very rich and diverse base of evidence the pieces that seem to support their interpretation. The link Lev provided is a good example of this. The author traces the debates leading to the inclusion of the tenth amendments and the adoption of the constitution. He cites several petitions from states calling for an explicit listing of the powers of the Federal government in the constitution. He does not, however, acknowledge the numerous arguments put forward in favor of a strong central government whose powers were implied but not enumerated in the constitution. Nor does he acknowledge the more nuanced position of some of the key figures. For example, he might have noted that Madison himself insisted that the word "expressly" be deleted from the phrase "powers expressly delegated" that appeared in the original draft of the 10th amendment. Clearly Madison believed that powers in the constitution could be implied and not explicitly listed. The positions of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington on these questions are barely noted at all.

My final point is that the Tea Party's history is "presentist" enterprise stemming from a need to create a usable past rather than understand history in its own terms. This is most apparent in the tone of the tea party arguments--the over the top polemics, name calling, empty rhetoric masquerading as argument. The author rails against "statist zombies" who are all wrong because "they don't know what they're talking about." Obviously this guy has a pretty serious political agenda and is drawing on history for support. This is understandable, but it doesn't make for good history.