Phatic Hiatus

Peculiar Arguments for Climate Change Skeptism: Giant Snakes Like It Hot!

In one of the odder articles I've seen arguing against global warming panic, the author points out that the earth has much hotter in the past, and it didn't turn the world into a baking desert. Instead, it turned the world into a steamy jungle full of 40-foot long "Titan Boas" that would have regarded human beings as "a light snack". Great, I'm sold. Sign me up for another 2 degrees!

The authors hasten to add that no one is suggesting that such giant snakes would actually reappear. Sorry, I'm not convinced. The invasion is already underway. Well, I, for one, welcome....

Evolution and Evangelicals: Exploring Barriers

Scot McKnight, at beliefnet.com, has a fairly thoughtful and irenic contribution to the creation/evolution debate. Since thoughtful and irenic contributions are rare to the point of nonexistence these days, I've made a point of avoiding the debate entirely over the last decade. I can't see that anything useful is accomplished in rehashing old arguments, and for the most part it's just a philosophical and religious disagreement ("How does God exercise supernatural agency?") pretending to be a scientific disagreement. That annoys scientists, who can't figure out why they aren't "winning" as they fight an essentially endless scientific war.

In my opinion, the scientific arguments for evolution are persuasive to the extent that you accept the premises of a naturalistic worldview. Evolutionary biology is the best we can do, subject to the boundary conditions placed on the project of natural history in secular academia. So there's nothing wrong, I think, with giving evolutionary biologists a lot of credit for being clever at playing the game they insist that everyone ought to play: How best can we explain the world, if God is a passive or absent agent?

At the same time, I think we can give a lot of credit to believers who, a priori, insist that God can't be a passive or absent agent, and feel an obligation to invent a decisive role for Him in natural history that reflects the centrality of God as Creator in Christian theology. Subject to that boundary condition on the project of natural history, I think that the modern ID movement is doing about they best they can, at devising a theory that does justice both to an active and essential role for God, while otherwise giving science a great deal of autonomy to discover truths (say, how to cure cancer) that are unconstrained by that condition.

Finally, I'd even say that fairly "pure" fundamentalist organizations (like Answers in Genesis) are doing about the best job that they can do, subject to the far more restrictive condition of a concordist reading of the Genesis creation narratives. In some respects I respect them the most, since they're attempting the hardest project. Whether it's a necessary project or not, of course, is very much a matter of debate, but once you decide it is, then I don't think you could vastly improve on catastrophism as a paradigm for understanding the past.

My own opinion is that the scientific data set is too small to usefully distinguish between these competing epistemologies, so I've given up trying. I'm not persuaded by arguments that evolution is so improbable that it becomes necessary to believe in God. But at the same time, it's impossible to prove (barring time travel) that God didn't employ some form of supernatural agency to (say) manipulate the human genetic code at some arbitrary point in the past, so really we're always just going to find ourselves debating theological assumptions rather than science. The scientific debate is a smokescreen.

Anyway, I'd like to take a stab at answering McKnight's question, speaking as both a Christian and a physics professor. What are some of my barriers to actively embracing evolution, as opposed to claiming agnosticism and opting out of the debate entirely? (Incidentally, all my points are made in favor of humble agnosticism, rather than in favor of strongly rejecting evolution.)

1. The eschatology problem: Christianity demands a strong commitment to a vision of the future that involves a miraculous restoration of the entire cosmic order, not just the rescuing of human souls to an incorporeal heaven. That means that the future can't be the slow entropic death suggested by most current models of cosmology, nor the alternative of a "Big Crunch". It must be something distinctly supernatural. It's philosophically inconsistent, in my mind, to hold rigidly to a naturalistic explanation of the past, and yet have a fiercely supernaturalistic vision of the future. At some point, I fear, the commitment to the former will drive theistic evolutionists to deny the latter.
2. The narrative theology problem: God's involvement in natural history, it seems to me, should be identifiably similar to God's involvement in human history. They should display a common modus operandi. In human  history, God is a more hidden participant for long periods, but then steps strongly into history to accomplish decisive action. This occurs most drastically in the example of redemption from sin. I don't see any good reason to insist that God endowed the natural world with a seamless "functional integrity" from the moment of creation, capable of running itself, while at the same time having a reading of human history that involves us being totally dependent on God's periodic outside agency to rescue us from sin.
3. The "we've already crossed that line" problem: Since recent divine activity (the creation of the Church, for example) has already influenced the natural world (for better or worse, since some Christians both do environmental harm, but some also work to repair it), it can be argued that God has changed history in such a way as to alter the "natural" development of speciation quite recently. The effects that humans, including Christian humans, exert on the environment, suggests that God could have allowed other beings under his direct influence to change natural history also. (Angels, or maybe even extraterrestrials from another galaxy, if you don't mind being fanciful!) This provides an inoffensive mechanism for similar interventions in natural history in the more distant past.
4. The essentially relational nature of God: The Biblical record depicts a God who is constantly interested in strong communion with creation. Evangelicals, in particular, speak about God as wanting a "personal relationship" with human beings, and also a desire to bring us into conformity as bearers of the divine image. This implies a strong teleological constraint on history. If there is an ultimate purpose to creation, it does not appear sensible to me to believe that God would wait for several billion years before beginning to structure or influence history toward that end. For example, I think the emergence of intelligent life is a necessary, rather than a contingent, characteristic of the cosmos. Imposition of that constraint amounts to exclusion of many (probably infinitely many) physically possible universes. To me, exclusion of alternate states of the universe represents a very strong form of supernatural agency, regardless of the mechanism by which it is accomplished.

None of these are, to me, arguments against the idea that evolutionary biology might locally be an explanation for some features of the natural world. They are only arguments against a strong philosophical demand that only naturalistic mechanisms are consistent with the behavior of the God of traditional Christian theology.

Gas Station Shell Game

Last week the reinflation of consumer gas prices took a breather, as oil prices themselves dropped back from their recent highs around $75 to settle near $65. This happened despite the news that petroleum stockpiles (which ballooned during the credit crunch, as no one had credit to buy anything, including fuel) suffered their ninth consecutive decline. If oil reserves are shrinking, then why are prices going down?

The standard explanation (here from Bloomberg) is that although petroleum stocks are dwindling again (back down to the normal range) the stocks of finished products (the gasoline made from the oil) are growing. This is a bearish indicator to the market, since a glut of finished products means that less petroleum will be needed in the future.

There's a serious flaw in this analysis, and it's something that's been slowly brewing over the last few years. I figure this is as good a time as any to point it out. Let's take a look at some of the recent changes in the way that petroleum and petroleum-based products are stockpiled. First, lets look at the EIA's accounting of total petroleum products (including crude, gasoline, jet fuel, heating oil, and everything else). That shows the following trend:
That looks rather reassuring, doesn't it? Clearly we have at least a hundred million barrels more of oily-stuff than we were storing back in 2006, and about two hundred million more than we had over most of the 1990s.

But that's not the whole story. We need to break down this aggregated data into it's components, which the EIA helpfully reports indepdently. Let's try to figure out where the increase is appearing. Is it crude itself, or one of the finished products? If the latter, then which finished product?

Here's crude oil itself, minus the portion diverted to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve:

The spike during the credit crunch, after adjusting for an overshoot, has returned us to the value it held during the 1990s, around 350 million barrels. This is close to the normal range. Since the size of the country (and GDP) has increased over the last decade, this actually amounts to a small decline, relative to the size of the economy. It's a recovery over the last couple years, of course, which is why we aren't back up at $150 a barrel like last summer. But overall, crude is not the place where the total product surplus is accumulating.

Maybe it's gasoline. Let's look at finished motor gasoline, the stuff you buy at the pump. This comes in two basic types, conventional and reformulated (i.e., spiked with ethanol). Here's what the finished stocks look like:
That's a bit sobering. It looks like a fairly grim downhill slope. Not only are we not building stocks of finished gasoline, we've actually shed more than 50% of them! This can't possibly be a candidate for the build. If the markets are perceiving this as the "supply", they should be more bullish than ever.

The introduction of ethanol has created a new category of products. "Blended" components are portions of gasoline that can be mixed with ethanol in order to provide "instant" reformulated gasoline. A refinery sends these products out, and they can be mixed directly with ethanol to make E10, or E15, or E20. Since ethanol has a very high octane rating (over 110), it can be mixed with much lower quality components of gasoline (naphtha, which has only around a 60-70 octane rating) in order to make gasoline that burns just like the "regular" 87-octane gasoline that we know and love.

Here's a picture of what CBOB (conventional blendstock for oxygenate blending) has been doing over the last decade:

This is a winner! Over the last few years, this has really taken off. Of course, it's just replaced the old reformulated stocks themselves, which already contained the ethanol.

Here's the full story. Back in 1995, ethanol was first introduced. Conventional gasoline stocks declined, and were replaced by reformulated gasoline. Then in 2006, reformulated gasoline was replaced with a precursor product, CBOB. I'm simplifying a bit here, since there's also another product (RBOB) that's midway between reformulated and CBOB. But the bottom line is that we followed the sequence below.

• conventional gasoline was replaced by
• reformulated (ethanol-containing) gasoline, was replaced by
• blending components for making reformulated gasoline.

We don't actually have more gasoline. What we have in larger quantities is low-quality naphtha-containing sub-gasoline, which we could potentially turn into something like gasoline by mixing it with ethanol.

This is not good news. There are all sorts of problems with ethanol, the biggest of which is that it's quite possibly a net energy sink, or at best just short of being one. That is, it takes more energy to create ethanol than we get by burning it. From a consumer's standpoint, ethanol just isn't appealing beyond the E10 level because it gets poor gas mileage, a consequence of having a lower density than conventional formulations. Moreover, most car engines can't burn anything beyond E10 or maybe E20 without being damaged, and the odds of quickly replacing the US light vehicle fleet are poor in the current macroeconomic climate.

So we're stockpiling a lot of low-quality semi-gasoline (blending components), at the same time as our stocks of real gasoline are dwindling away. The blending components aren't good for anything unless mixed with ethanol, but the ethanol market is saturated and going bust. The supply data amounts to a sort of Potemkin village, designed to create the impression of abundance even as we become impoverished. To put it another way, if CBOB is such wonderful stuff and fully equivalent to conventional gasoline in quality, then why are we letting it accumulate unused in tanks as we continue to burn away our meager stockpiles of conventional fuel?

I think the finished gasoline stockpiles tell the more honest story. Even as the credit crunch is crushing demand, we can't manage to rebuild our stocks of gasoline. Since around 2007, we've had more blending components than actual gas, and now we have 50% more of the former than the latter. That would be great if two thirds of the gas we were selling was E10 or better. But currently it's the other way around; conventional gasoline is outselling reformulated by 2-to-1.

We're in the middle of a 70's-style supply crunch, and we're failing to notice it due to a combination of suppressed demand courtesy of the recession, and the ethanol shell game exposed above. This has happened despite record prices. Even the trough this year, aroun $30 a barrel, was comfortably above the long-term historical average of the 20th century.

Talking about an "economic recovery" is foolishness. There will be no recovery. At best, there will be some additional shell games. But the clock continues to run out on our badly designed "American way of life". At some point the tricks will be exposed, and then everything will come grinding to a dismal halt, all the more painful and inescapable for the deceit which has concealed the severity of the underlying problem.

If we had allowed a direct transition from gas to electric, we wouldn't have ended up in this peculiar cul-de-sac. Now it's not clear that there's any way to back out of it. In a growing economy, we could have made a smooth technological shift. Now we're deprived of the capital investments and discretionary income necessary for this to occur painlessly. I'm not even sure it can happen painfully. We're going to be stuck with an undriveable fleet of cars, and a country that can't function without them.

Summer Harvest

Today I hit the farmer's market in the parking lot outside my building, which is just starting up for the summer. They had a fair selection of strawberries and early vegetables, and I picked up some potatoes and cherry tomatoes.

It's reassuring to see a renewed cultural acquaintance with the origins of food. In a sign of the lingering disconnect, the top story on Drudge today is this piece on Michelle Obama's appearance at a pea-picking photo op. The link tag, "Michelle's Miracle Grow", is intended, I suppose, to express skepticism about the possibility that the White House garden could have produced anything edible this quickly. Drudge is no fan of Obama, and I'm sure he'd love to sniff out another Lewinsky-sized cover-up. But all the crops (lettuces, snap peas) are early summer producers in the central Atlantic zone, and so the skepticism just reveals the naivety of Drudge (as a perhaps average American) in failing to realize that not all vegetables are harvested in the fall.

I think all the media swooning about how "beautiful" or "stylish" Michelle looks is a bit embarrassing, just as the fascination with Barack's photogenic mugshots reveals how easily the press (and the country) can be seduced by an attractive multiethnic face. But growing a garden takes a bit of work, and I can think of dozens of less worthy ways for a politician's wife to spend her time. I'm not naive enough to think she's actually out there pulling the weeds (she has people for that) but it seems like a far more positive approach toward improving nutrition and promoting sound ecology than a barrage of taxation and regulation.

I Forgive You, Newsweek

I just can't stay angry at the magazine in the same week that Wealth of Nations blogger Barrett Sheridan links to Mike "Mish" Shedlock in a post on the demographic doom looming over the stock market. (He links to the wrong post, but give him credit for trying.)

It's a little weird that they call this "blaming" the Baby Boomers, though, as though the Boomer generation had any choice about growing older or needing investments for retirement. One can't even fault them for failing to procreate enough, not when we're bumping up against hard limits in energy and commodities. There's little point in assigning culpability to a force of nature.

If you jump out of the botched link and look at the latest analysis by Mish, you can find all sorts of interesting critiques of the official administration story. For example, here's a one-punch takedown of the banking stress tests, and presumably also a whole slew of other budgetary and revenue projection assumptions:

Desperation

About three months ago, Newsweek ran a scary tabloid cover all about how Rush Limbaugh was taking over the Republican party. Or at least was, outrageously, more popular with Republicans than David Frum and a bunch of other minor pundits who constantly write about how much they dislike the Republican party. Or something like that. The argument never made much sense.

This week, they're being guest-edited by Stephen Colbert. He wastes no time in hamming it up. Here's a sample:

But despite our continued victories, Americans have many lingering questions about Iraq. For example: where is Iraq? My guess is somewhere near Paraguay.

I wanted to find the answers. So when Jon Meacham asked me to guest-edit NEWSWEEK, I jumped at the chance, particularly because my guest editorship at Mature -Honeys fell through. I guess my photo essay of sexy housewives reenacting the Battle of Fallujah was too "real" for them.

Oy.

Spreading, Not Imposing

This Newsweek editorial by Elanor Clift tiptoes cautiously around criticism of Obama's Afghanistan policy, suggesting a slowly awakening realization that Obama's surge there is pretty much indistinguishable from Bush's surge in Iraq. I've been wondering exactly how the difference would be parsed, or if someone influential on the left would simply refuse to go along and start proclaiming that the emperor has no clothes.

Here's the spin so far:

President Obama's speech in Cairo provided a nice counterpoint for discussion with its emphasis on a new beginning in how America interacts with the Muslim world. My buddies in the small seminar group to which I was assigned saw the speech as a strong signal that Obama understands that the fight against Islamic extremism can't be won by military might, and that American power must be projected in other ways. They had fun parsing his words, especially when he talked about spreading democracy but not imposing it. How different is this from President Bush's pro-democracy agenda? "If I spread butter on my toast, I'm not imposing butter," suggested one participant. In the Middle East, even a difference without a distinction matters.

I'm sure it's a high quality speech and all, billowed by Obama's trademark cascades of ornate rhetoric, but I'm not sure precisely how much coverage it can provide for a $100 billion war appropriations bill that essentially relocates all the surge troops from Iraq to Afghanistan to impose spread democracy.

Arbitrary Partisanship

The constant media reports of a massive sea-change toward Obama in the last election were never quite borne out by detailed statistics. More to the point, they occurred at the same time as a shift in the reverse direction (from social-democratic governments toward center-right governments) in Europe. This suggests that the real message of the last election wasn't anything more complicated than "It's a bad idea to be the party in power during a massive global recession". That doesn't make the results any less fatal for the Republicans, but it does suggest that the path out of irrelevancy might be outside of their control. Parties win until they fail, and then they lose until the other party fails.

Underemployment Lingers

Another good analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco:

Even more dramatic, however, has been the break from past patterns in the number of workers who are involuntarily employed part-time. Numerous reports tell of workers being furloughed for a set number of days in a month or asked to work fewer hours each day.These anecdotes are supported by the monthly data. Indeed, the number of workers employed part-time against their wishes is at historical highs.The fraction of the labor force that reports working part-time for economic reasons has increased from 3.0% in December 2007 to 5.8% in April 2009.This increase has been broad-based, occurring in a wide range of occupations. Moreover, the reduction in hours has not been trivial, with more than half of such workers experiencing reductions of five hours per week or more.

The softness in the labor market goes beyond the headline unemployment figure, suggesting that the recovery will not create many jobs during its initial stages. Most employers will find it easier to return part-time employees to full-time status, rather than seek new hires. This is compatible with the observed recovery lag of labor markets in the previous recession as well, although the current recession is far deeper and more severe, and a repetition of that phenomenon will be proportionally more painful this time around.

I, For One, Welcome Our New XX Overlords

No, this isn't a reference to my impending marriage!

Via Andrew Sullivan comes this rather spectacular image of the divergence between degree-earning male and female students over the last 40 years. The trend line shows no signs of leveling off:

That includes degrees at all levels, up to PhD. This is a staggering inversion, and occurs on top of what many feminists would argue (fairly, I think) is a substantial amount of institutional inertia in favor of male education. Women had plenty of opportunities to see positive role models who weren't educated (mothers and grandmothers), and men felt a heavy obligation to become salaried income-earners. Nevertheless, men are being completely wiped out in this competition, even with their huge head start.

Christina Hoff Summers points out in concluding this article that the transition has occurred in the developed world, and the lot of women in Sub-Saharan Africa is still pretty bleak. So this is, by no means, the end of feminism. But it's the beginning of a new social problem, where men are increasingly vulnerable to job losses in a new economic reality that no longer emphasizes their natural biological advantages of strength and size. Almost all high-income jobs today require skills in small motor coordination (typing and texting), social networking, emotional balance, and verbal skills. Women are better than men at all of these things.

Distinctive male skills (physical energy, and a focus on technical aptitude at the expense of socialization) are increasingly being "medicalized" as symptoms of "autism" or "ADHD", causing young boys to be locked by their well-meaning parents into a mental haze of psychotropic drugs which leaves them minimally functional and feeling like failures. Pharmacological modification gives young boys the docility and obedience of girls, but without any of the corresponding skills, reconstructing them as inferior imitations of their female peers.

What precisely should we do with the leftover men who fail to find jobs, as deteriorating economic conditions over the next century create a permanent downsizing that returns us to the conditions of the 19th century, when half of all adults (the female half, then) held no employment? The principle of comparative advantage requires that, when one economic agent has uniformly better skills than another, the superior agent should do the most valuable work. If Alice is a better lawyer than Bob, and Alice is also a better secretary than Bob, then in order to maximize economic output, Alice should be the lawyer and Bob should be the secretary. If women are better educated than men, then they will consistently get better jobs than men, the more pressure is placed on households struggling against unfavorable economic headwinds.

Regrettably, there's no cultural template for determining where these unemployed men are going to find fulfillment. I suspect they'll end up on sofas in front of the television, or playing video games. More frightening alternatives include drug use and criminal activities. I can't imagine them settling happily into the aprons of their great-grandmothers, as dedicated and conscientious homemakers. A world in which men are the educationally inferior sex is going to a much bleaker one than the one in which women were the educationally inferior sex.