Wildfires Are Devastating: But Not A Cause For Urgent Climate Action

It’s easy to observe things like the awful Dunwich Heath fire, and the recent droughts and high temperatures, and declare that this is exactly the kind of thing that should galvanise us towards more urgent climate action. But here I’ll show why that’s wrong. It’s true we can expect hotter, drier summers, and that this shapes the conditions in which fires and droughts happen. But the big miscalculation of the ‘urgent climate action’ brigade is that this isn’t a problem to fix like one cleans up some spilled milk or disentangles a knotted fishing net - it’s a natural part of the evolution of our industrial, technological, and climate story that involves prudence and careful discernment of complex trade-offs.

You see, in terms of the whole, multifaceted, interconnected picture, we couldn’t have done very much better in harnessing energy, raising living standards, and developing our industries as we have in the timescale we did. In other words, humanity didn’t recklessly choose this path, we have grown into it via the only workable route for billions of people to survive, flourish, and build the modern world. People who look at only the negative effects in a complex, multifaceted set of trade-offs and complain solely on that basis have usually not thought things through beyond their own immediate interest and reputation: they care more about how they look to others than how proficiently they deal with complex matters.

Every society in the past 200 years has faced the same challenge at different speeds – the challenge of how to lift people out of poverty, feed them, heal them, connect them, and power their lives – and the only viable means by which we’ve achieved this is by working together as a species to use coal, oil, and gas to transform our species. We used fossil fuels as primary resources because they were the best tools we had, and in most cases, still have. They were the engines of prosperity, medicine, sanitation, food security, education, and global stability. Sure, they came with costs – but they made life expectancy double; they made infant mortality collapse; and they made mass starvation the exception instead of the rule.

As I said, it wasn’t all perfect, of course – nothing ever can be – but utilising cheap energy to engender the most remarkable progression-explosion is something for which humanity should be immensely thankful and grateful, not so entitled and judgmental. A truly thankful and grateful person can say that these challenges we are now facing are really part of the consequences of that success – it’s like winning the lottery and being told a small chunk of it will have to be apportioned to cleaning up some mess after the party.

To reiterate an essential point above – I need to tell that with the right kind of analysis of just what the human collective is and has been, it really is the case that as a species we couldn’t have done this very much better than we have, if you think of it through the correct I, Pencil-type of lens (see this blog post). In fact, perhaps the biggest thing we should have done better is scaled nuclear power earlier, but ironically that is something to which most environmentalists have been opposed.

No, we’ve done just about as well as we can in this great collective effort over the past 200 years, and it’s only because we have progressed to the stage that we can tackle climate change through a continuous process of technological development that we know how to pass through this next stage of challenges. That is, a more appreciative, humble way to think of it is our transitioning from the energy that built civilisation to the energy that will sustain it. It’s a story of billions of people doing the best they could with the tools and resources they had to collaborate, and usher in the next phase of our agrarian-industrial-technological evolution.

Remember, as I’ve blogged about before, the progress we are making (and going to keep making even more rapidly) will not just dwarf today’s environmental problems, it will make future generations look back with embarrassment at how this generation was so myopic about the ratio of progression to risk, and benefit to cost.  

No, events like the Dunwich Heath fire are awful to watch – I feel it too, as Dunwich has a special place in my heart. But our story of human complexity, ingenuity, and the next chapter of human responsibility should engender gratitude and optimism, not belligerence and alarmism, as we realise that harnessing fossil fuels and the rise of cheap, abundant energy has been one of the most consequential positive material shifts in human history - and almost all of modern life’s accomplishments - longer lives, mass prosperity, global food security, scientific progress, and the liberation of billions from poverty - sits on top of it.

Schoolboy Climate Errors

 

One of the reasons I’ve written a whole book dedicated to the physics and economics of climate change is because the mainstream scientific and political interpretations are so misjudged, I can’t actually believe they see the light of day, much less become the mainstream narrative swallowed up wholesale by large swathes of the population. And here I really don’t just mean “Alas, they’ve got a few things wrong”, I mean “Heck, this is one of the most absurd failures of analytical reasoning ever wrought on a developed society, and one of the costliest ideological mistakes in recent history!” (see my blog post here for more on this)

The basic errors being made in the climate change alarmism are so elementary that I'm in a constant state of surprise that they are taken seriously enough to make it into mainstream discussion. Note, I don’t mean on the matter of whether there will be problems to solve - I mean the schoolboy-like heuristics being applied to how the whole situation is evaluated. Take the most blatant of all errors: literally the vast majority of the projections of future climate issues I’ve seen are implicitly assuming no technological, scientific, economic, or general standards-of-living progress during the period being measured. It is so absurd, it’s hard to describe it as anything other than recklessly negligent.

Once we see the naïve analytical failure in the assumption that human systems will simply remain static in the face of changing conditions, it becomes plainer to see the folly in the tendency to treat worst-case scenarios as if they were the most likely outcomes. This is a classic misunderstanding of risk modelling, which I blogged about here: extreme projections exist to bracket the outer limits of possibility, not to define the central forecast - which is a bad enough error if you are factoring in dynamic human change within the timeframe, but positively ridiculous if you are treating the timeframe as static. Presenting tail-risk outcomes as standard expectations in a mistakenly static model creates such a distorted sense of perspective that it has vanishingly little to do with the actual distribution of probabilities. It’s the kind of mistake you’d expect from a child who hasn’t yet learned that he won’t always have the problem of relying on stabilisers to ride his bike, or the issue of not being able to reach items on adult-size shelves.   

These are the principal reasons behind the negligent attempts to smuggle moral or ideological conclusions under the pretext of scientific claims. And here I’m only talking about some of the least bad attempts to frame this - I haven’t even sunk to the level of the average political folly coming from the mouths of mainstream politicians like the Green Party and Ed Miliband.

When it comes to the climate, there is no such thing as ‘the’ scientific community (see my blogs here and here) – the institution has become so fraught with crony capitalism, political meddling and institutional malfeasance that many of its exponents (though not all) no longer distinguish clearly between empirical findings, value judgments, and policy preferences - they simply blend them into a single, confused, ideological narrative, as though the data itself mandates the particular political agenda they are being paid or coerced into supporting.

This conflation of facts and prescriptions is such a basic category error that it’s one that even any first-year student of critical reasoning should spot a mile off. The fact that it has become the rule and not the exception is a shocking indictment of our times - especially as the same thing has happened with fiscal and monetary policy, labour markets, housing policy, price theory, basic biology of the sexes, and education policy.

The Next Ten Years Are Going to Be Ridiculous

Scientific and technological progress is accelerating so quickly that I regularly reassure my readers that the coming decades will bring unprecedented scientific, technological and economic progression on a scale so prodigious that they won’t be able to believe it. The trouble is, given that most people who most urgently need to hear this don’t read my blog - on account that statistically most people in the world don’t read my blog - the message of encouragement isn’t getting out there fast enough.

According to research I’ve read, current trends even in just AI show capacity growing more than 25× per year, vastly outpacing human research growth. Even if these rates slowed by a factor of 100, the combined cognitive labour of humans and AIs would still expand far faster than anything in history, potentially delivering hundreds of years of innovation within a single decade. Rapid gains in computational capacity, algorithmic efficiency, model scaling, and inference costs all contribute to the next phase of what I call the progression explosion, which will trigger a corresponding unprecedented surge in technological development, robotics, and industrial output.

There may, of course, be fresh things to contend with, with such acceleration - like misaligned AI, power concentration, entrenched authoritarianism (which is, alas, already happening), and other challenges posed by advanced digital minds. But they will probably be a spit in the ocean compared with the huge potential benefits - especially extreme abundance, medical breakthroughs, and rapid scientific and material progress.

And as I’ve blogged about before, these advances will create unprecedented possibilities for solving long-standing “future problems” like climate change. If AI-driven research acceleration really does condense centuries of innovation into years, then technologies we are still working on - ultra-efficient batteries, carbon-negative industrial processes, fusion breakthroughs, and advanced materials for energy storage - will arrive with prodigious application far sooner than most people imagine. Rapid scientific iteration, combined with autonomous experimentation, would allow AI systems to explore billions of design possibilities for catalysts, solar materials, carbon-capture membranes, and so forth, before you can say “Greta Thunberg hates cheeseburgers served at BP Garages”.

 

A Good Use Of Energy

There’s a lot of confusion in green thinking about how energy use really works - both from greens who don’t adequately grasp the relationship between efficiency and energy saving, and, to be fair, from those at the opposite end who assume that making things more efficient automatically means we’ll use less energy. Thank God there are Blogs like mine to set things straight. 😃

You can think of capitalism's progression-explosion a bit like this, through the lens of the Jevons paradox. We build a steam-powered factory which costs £10 per item made. At £10 an item, we can sell 100 a day, because few customers can afford it. Then we build an electricity plant, and that only costs £1 per item made. At £1 per item, we can now sell 10,000 items per day, because most people can afford it. That's ten times more spend on a hundred times more energy, and a hundred times more consumers of that energy.

But in reality, it’s not as simple as “a hundred times more energy,” because the new technology also makes each item cheaper precisely by using less energy per unit. If production rises a hundredfold while each item uses a tenth as much energy, total energy use still rises about tenfold. In other words, efficiency lowers the energy per item, but growth in production and consumption more than makes up for it. 

But in fact, it’s even more efficient than that, because we said we have ten times more total spending, and roughly ten times more total energy use - because even though each item uses less energy, we’re making vastly more of them - but the “a hundred times more energy” is an understatement, because but in my example, each item became cheaper precisely because it uses less energy per item. In other words, depending on how the technology and demand interact, total energy use might increase tenfold, a hundredfold, or somewhere in between - but it almost never falls. Efficiency doesn’t necessarily reduce total energy use; but it can enable the economy to expand and consume even more, and both consumers and producers are richer, and more is being produced for less effort. When goods and services become cheaper, we generally buy more of them. When production gets more efficient, we produce more. And the energy use increase from the economy getting bigger typically outpaces the energy use reduction from things becoming more efficient.

But there's even more to the story, because per unit of production, energy becomes more efficient (less energy per item). This is why we need to separate efficiency from total energy use. Per person, or per unit of economic output, modern, advanced economies are usually far more efficient than their predecessors (see the Environmental Kuznets Curve, which also factors in positive trade-offs regarding pollution vs. income benefits, and shows how, at higher income levels, pollution declines, as societies can afford cleaner technologies, smarter regulation and more efficient service-based economies.) - we get more GDP per unit of energy than older economies did, especially with the additional structural shifts (to services, outsourcing manufacturing) alongside those efficiency gains.

Energy intensity has been falling for decades in advanced economies, which shows that growth is almost always greener or more energy efficient. Yet at the same time, total global energy use keeps rising, because efficiency makes goods cheaper and accessible to more people, expanding both production and consumption.

This is one of the many matters the environmentalists don't address - though in most cases they don't currently even think in ways that show them this needs addressing. In other words, it's not just that they don't get this; they don't usually know there is anything here that needs getting (ditto the other green blind spots I have blogged about in the past). It's the complex trade-off between the efficiencies above, of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, and the fact that efficiency doesn’t shrink our total energy appetite - it just allows us to fuel a larger, more energy-intensive economy, where growth is not just about using less energy per item; it’s about the huge advancements of more activity overall, where the trade-off is more absolute energy use, but in most cases for the betterment and improved material living standards of the human species.

The Psychology Of Engaging With Political Liars

I remember watching a documentary on the Manson family, and I recall some of the family members recounting their turning point for rejecting Charles Manson’s influence - “It was when we could see he was lying”, they said. It’s usually easy to see when people are lying – to themselves and to others - but it becomes even more evident when you observe how people respond to questions. Because of how highly complex the world is, and because political incentives are predominantly overly simplistic and self-serving (at least in part), virtually all politicians who support bad policies do so by continually lying - to themselves, and therefore, to others. You can't lie to yourself without lying to others, and you can’t lie to others without lying to yourself. Even if you lie to others, knowing full well you’re lying, you’re still lying to yourself because deception still reflects a deeper level of self-deceit and the suppression of your own potential truthful qualities.

Lying to yourself is like weaving a web of deceit that ensnares everyone around you; when you distort your own narrative, you inevitably distort the narratives of those you interact with. In politics, it’s rather like a dance; as you convince yourself of a fabricated reality, you project that illusion onto others, forcing them to step along with you in your masquerade. Equally, in lying to others, you can’t escape the entanglement of that web of falsehood within yourself, tugging at your conscience and negatively shaping your self-perception. Ultimately, this web of lies creates knotty entanglements that trap us in our own illusions.

To see this most clearly, you only have to look at extreme people believing in extremely absurd things. For example, it's almost impossible to have an intelligent debate with a climate extremist/alarmist, as virtually every journalist and TV presenter is finding out. They don't want to listen to reason. When someone doesn't want to listen to reason, hitting them with reason and good arguments does little good - it just washes right over them. The best thing to do is to draw out some good in exposing their incompetence by asking them questions that they won't be able to answer - not because they are trick questions (they aren't) - but because their response requires reasoning and a grasp of multitudinous levels of complexity that they simply do not have the artillery to engage with.

There's a good reason why exposing their incompetence is a better strategy than debating with them back and forth. Even if you defeat them in a back and forth exchange, there will still be many people reading or watching who will remain convinced (and deceived) by their arguments, because some who are skilled in political rhetoric may still sound confident, assured and sometimes even partly-researched in a few key areas of the subject. But remember, it's what they don't say and what they don't understand that makes up most of their shortcomings - and it's easier and more fruitful to expose what they don't say and what they don't understand by asking them questions and observing them demonstrate that they don't understand things very well at all.

Do it to politicians if you get the chance; do it to influential figures in the world of climate hysteria; do it to young earth creationists; do it to social justice extremists – just ask questions, and ask further questions in response to their answers, and so on, and see how easily they tie themselves further in knots. Because it’s a near-ineluctable law of human psychology and morality - if you’re trying to defend things you know deep down are untrue, or that you know you haven’t figured out sufficiently, it’s virtually impossible to keep responding to challenging questions and not eventually choke on your own web of deception.

If you don't let them change the subject, and keep asking questions that demonstrate how out of their depth they are (you can do it courteously) so they feel less good internally, humbled and inwardly less assured of their position, then you have a better chance of stopping them influencing others, and the slimmest chance that you'll plant a subconscious seed that may bear fruit and help them grow out of it in maturity. It's better to help them trip themselves up with their legs in a tangle than it is attempting to trip them up with your own leg. You need them to distrust their own legs, not be annoyed at yours.

On Whether There Really Is A 'Climate Crisis'

 

The term ‘Climate crisis’ is uttered at will these days, and the danger is that young people brought up in this normalised Overton Window period won’t even question it. Let’s try to explore what we are dealing with here. The concept of a "crisis" is not straightforward, and different people interpret it in different ways depending on their perspective, values, and epistemic standards. Some friends of mine think there is a climate crisis, and they would take it to mean that we are reaching a catastrophic threshold; a tipping point where irreversible and extreme damage is inevitable, such as runaway global warming, mass species extinction, or the collapse of major ecosystems. Some other friends of mine think climate change is already causing widespread harm and demand immediate large-scale action to prevent worsening consequences. Others I know concede that there are urgent climate problems that need solving, but would only call it a moderate crisis. Perhaps you could call these interpretations of a crisis red hot, hot and warm (pun intended). 

Knowing the nature of the British public, I might even go so far as to say that the majority of people in the UK think there is a climate crisis. But for a nation, this is problematic politically and economically because these conditions are complex, multi-faceted, and difficult to conceptualise in a single framework like ‘crisis’. Most of the population as individuals do not fully understand all the interconnected elements of climate science, economics, and geopolitics that would justifiably define what a crisis is, yet there is widespread consensus that there is a crisis.

The trouble is, when you look at the majority of reported crises in socio-political history, we tend to only be able to recognise them as crises retrospectively, once their consequences became clear. As Hegel famously said, “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk”. The difficulty, then, of claiming we are in a climate crisis before it has happened, where our margin of error increases with every year of future projection, means that if the conditions for a crisis can be claimed to be consensual but not individually understood, it’s harder to epistemologically justify the claim that the crisis is real, especially if you understand that there are a lot of bad and corrupt agents in society in whose interests it is to peddle the narrative that there is a climate crisis. It is highly likely that almost all the individual agents pushing the climate crisis agenda hardest could not explain to you with reason, evidence and logic why there is a crisis. And yet they exist in society as influencers who can push it to the point where most people will believe there is one.

What would ordinarily be matters of empirical fact, economic reasoning, scientific evaluation, and right and wrong are now so routinely politicised and monetised - where most have a tribal stance to defend, or a political or financial incentive - that it’s now prohibitively difficult to track reliable appropriate expertise and rigid interpretive frameworks for large and complex matters like this.

If we think of the value of knowledge as the total benefit it provides to human understanding and decision-making, then wrongly declaring a crisis of this magnitude is one of the costliest errors that can be wrought on society – and is already proving to be one of the most financially costly errors we’ve ever made as a species.

In terms of wholesale epistemic prudence and utility – that is, what we know, and what we know we know - the only responsible conclusion to reach at this point is, in my estimation, roughly as follows. Fossil fuels have been the principal driver of our climb out of poverty, into a decent standard of living in the past 150 years. We are undergoing more technological advances than any individual can keep up with, and solving problems at a rate that far exceeds the climate issues about which the fundies are hysterical. The ideological error the eco-hysterics make is similar to the Malthusian one - it is stuck in arithmetical ratios and not geometrical ratios. Energy is not a zero-sum game. Prematurely limiting the use of fossil fuels while demonising the very energy sources that have transformed the human population is not only short-sighted and ungrateful, it's a toxic message to send to our young. 

The eco-vandals are not 'prophets'; they are the entitled, uninformed narcissists of society who have no sense of perspective, very little gratitude for humanity's past struggles and current achievements – and they are too uninformed to understand that progression is mostly combinatorial, as various technologies and ideas build on one another to create exponential benefits.

I have written a book on this subject, where I have spent a long time carefully researching everything from both sides - whereupon I concluded that there is not a climate crisis, and there is every reason to believe that collective human ingenuity and increased personal responsibility are tools that make solving climate problems well within our grasp. If only more people had reached more carefully thought out conclusions, and been much more circumspect in their reactionary decision-making and short-sighted profligate spending, the current climate debacle wouldn’t look quite so grim, and be quite so costly to members of the public.

Alas, I believe the pervasiveness of the ‘climate crisis’ consensus is primarily driven by two things: 

1) People are very gullible

2) There are a lot of bad agents in society willing to exploit widespread gullibility

Net Zero: Created By Madness For Madness

 

You know by now what I think of Net Zero – it has been “one of the most widespread Dunning-Kruger ‘Mount stupid’ delusions ever wrought on modern societies” - and it’s good to see that Kemi Badenoch wants to do away with it – and probably deserves to win the next election on that alone. 

She is right to call out its adverse effects on living standards, and the ridiculous financial burden of Net Zero policies on UK citizens, particularly in the energy sector. The UK’s artificially hasty push towards renewable sources, coupled with a failure to develop domestic fossil fuel resources, has resulted in some of the highest energy prices globally, and it is rightly making British folk mad with indignation. Because of politicians’ short-sighted economics and preening attempts at virtue-signalling, UK citizens are saddled with rising household inflation and escalating industrial production costs, leading to accelerated deindustrialisation, and bigger consumer struggles to make ends meet. The UK deserves better.

That the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves refers to climate policy as the "economic opportunity of the century," merely keeps reaffirming the same mistakes and the same painful realisations that most politicians do not understand basic economics (see my Green/Environmentalism side bar for much more on this). One of the main things they don’t get is that jobs are a cost, not a benefit – in other words, labour is an input, not an output. If something requires more labour to produce, it means fewer resources are available for other productive uses. Moreover, if government mandates force businesses and households to invest in expensive, less efficient green technologies, and pay more for their goods as consumers, this diverts resources away from other sectors of the economy, which are classic misallocation and inefficiency errors in economics. A true economic opportunity reduces costs and increases productivity, and Net Zero policies do precisely the opposite.

Knowledge of price theory brings the basic understanding that prices reflect scarcity and consumer preferences. If renewable energy was as efficient and cost-effective as politicians claim, it would outcompete fossil fuels without such radical government intervention. In reality, subsidies, mandates, and regulations artificially distort prices, creating hidden costs that mostly go under the public's radar. Higher energy prices raise production costs across all industries, leading to reduced competitiveness and real income losses for consumers. And government-driven investment in green industries often crowds out private sector investment in more productive activities, leading to a lower return on capital. And, to rub salt in the wounds, the precipitous transition to Net Zero increases costs for businesses, who then pass these onto consumers, which further erodes purchasing power.

If Rachel Reeves really did want to pursue the true "economic opportunity of the century", she would pursue policies that lower costs, improve efficiency, and allow freer markets to converge upon the best solutions without so much government misallocations. Instead of Net Zero mandates, a market-driven approach - where innovations emerge based on actual consumer demand and price signals - would be far more beneficial. Instead, politicians are merely shifting costs and distorting markets.

I know some will allude to precautionary mindfulness around market failure, and state-based initiatives to jumpstart technological innovation, but these pale in comparison to the superior efficiency, adaptability, and wealth creation of market-based approaches. The counterarguments are the exception not the rule. Market failures are rare and trivial in comparison to government failures, which are frequent and more destructive. Real economic opportunity and, in fact, greener societies, come from increasing efficiency and productivity, not artificially inflating employment in sectors that only exist due to subsidies, regulations and political posturing.

The Dirty Cost of Cleaner Energy

In a perfectly competitive market, the price is typically set equal to marginal cost. This is the cost to the producer of producing one more unit of the good. When price equals marginal cost, economic efficiency is maximised. Consumer surplus is the difference between what consumers are willing to pay and what they actually pay. Producer surplus is the difference between what producers receive for a good and their cost of producing it. At a price equal to marginal cost, the sum of consumer and producer surplus is maximised, and the total gains from trade (economic surplus) are at their peak.

Any price above marginal cost reduces the consumer’s benefit from the transaction by more than it increases the producer’s benefit. This is because of how surplus is distributed between consumers and producers in a market. When the price is set above marginal cost, the producer is charging more than what it costs to produce the additional unit, which means consumer surplus decreases (consumers pay a higher price and fewer units are sold, reducing total surplus). When this happens, consumers derive less benefit from the transaction because they are paying a price higher than what would have been necessary to cover the production cost of the good. This extra price they pay above the marginal cost reduces their surplus. When the price of a toaster is set above marginal cost, such as £15 instead of £10, consumers experience a reduction in consumer surplus by paying more per unit, and the market experiences a deadweight loss because fewer toasters are sold than would be at the efficient price, resulting in a net loss of total surplus, and a misallocation of resources that could have otherwise increased economic utility.

Producers benefit from the higher price, as they receive more revenue per unit than the marginal cost. However, the gain for producers is typically smaller than the loss faced by consumers, because the producer's surplus increases by the price difference (£15 - £10 in our example) for each unit sold, but the number of units sold will likely decrease because consumers will buy less at the higher price. The producer’s surplus increases only on the remaining units sold (but the quantity sold likely decreases). This reduction in quantity sold reduces the potential for additional producer surplus that could have been earned if the price was lower (that is, closer to marginal cost). The portion of the total surplus (consumer plus producer) that disappears due to the higher price is called a deadweight loss.

The higher price discourages consumption, as fewer consumers are willing to pay the inflated price. Those consumers who would have bought the good at a price closer to the marginal cost do not get to purchase it, resulting in a loss of both consumer and producer surplus. The producer does not gain enough from the higher price to compensate for this loss, since fewer units are sold overall. Consumers lose more than producers gain because the reduction in consumer surplus (from paying the higher price and from fewer units being purchased) is greater than the increase in producer surplus from the higher price. Deadweight loss results from transactions that no longer occur due to the higher price, representing inefficiency, and amounting to a net loss to society.

What we’ve seen so far is that the economy as a whole would be better off if the price is equal to marginal cost, ensuring maximum benefit from trade for both consumers and producers. It should be clear at this point that when governments implement climate policies that artificially increase energy costs (e.g., through carbon taxes, cap-and-trade systems, or regulations that mandate the use of more expensive, cleaner energy sources), these policies create many economic inefficiencies similar to the ones caused by pricing above marginal cost. We can see why by applying the same economic reasoning as above. By introducing measures that increase the price of energy above its market-determined marginal cost, consumers end up paying more for energy than they would have in a free market. This leads to a reduction in consumer surplus because consumers have to pay a higher price for the same quantity of energy, reducing the benefit they derive from each unit of energy they consume. When energy costs rise, lower-income households and businesses with tight budgets may reduce their energy consumption or cut back on other spending to compensate, and some smaller businesses (and ultimately consumers) may be priced out of the market altogether.

Just as before with toasters, suppose the marginal cost of energy from fossil fuels is £50 per megawatt-hour, but due to carbon taxes or regulations requiring renewable energy usage, the price consumers pay rises to £70. This £20 price increase represents a loss of consumer surplus, as they are forced to pay more than the true cost of production. While most consumers and small businesses lose, producers of renewable energy benefit in what has become a rigged crony capitalist system, where more expensive cleaner technologies gain because the higher price of energy artificially incentivises their production methods, even though their marginal costs are typically higher than fossil fuels, and less efficient for the UK economy. 

These producers receive producer surplus because they are able to charge higher prices that reflect the environmental cost embedded in climate policies – but, alas, the net benefit for these producers is almost always not larger than the consumer losses, because the increase in energy prices causes a deadweight loss, similar to what happens when prices are set above marginal cost. Consumers purchase less energy due to the higher price, leading to a reduction in energy consumption that exceeds the socially optimal level if we ignore environmental externalities. As well as inflated prices harming business and consumers, some energy needs will remain unmet, or consumers may resort to less efficient alternatives (such as cutting down on important activities that rely on energy, like heating or transportation), reducing overall welfare. This deadweight loss represents a loss in total economic efficiency: the difference between the energy that would have been consumed at a price closer to marginal cost and what is actually consumed at the artificially higher price due to policy interventions.

They get away with this assault on our economy by peddling the lie that these artificially higher prices are necessary to internalise externalities by reflecting the cost of fossil fuel-based energy production, including its environmental harm. But this is one of the greatest sleight of hand tricks ever played by politicians on the electorate. This disgraceful crony capitalist arrangement results in a redistribution of wealth from consumers to producers (particularly clean energy producers) and the government (through taxes), while at the same time putting the UK industry at a disadvantage from other more competitive nations. 

It is disgraceful that politicians have the power to artificially increase energy costs energy and make production more expensive for businesses, leading to reduced output, job losses, and higher prices for goods and services, which get passed on disproportionately to the poorest people in society. Climate policies are pushed hardest by socialists, when they are actually (as is so often the case with socialism) worst of all for the poor. The reality is - as is surely plain for all to see in these awful economic times - energy prices have increased above marginal cost far too quickly, aimlessly and recklessly, and far too precipitously for alternative energy technologies to become competitive in price and efficiency, causing energy prices to rise significantly above the true marginal cost of clean energy production, and creating larger inefficiencies and more severe deadweight loss than necessary.

 

Science & Climate Change - Closing Thought: Myopic Fears, Transformative Solutions

 

These climate discussions we've been discussing this week are about a complex set of considerations involving assessing trade-offs, allocation of resources, forecasting, and so on – and one thing we know for sure from history is that present day analyses that fail to factor in this complex suite of considerations are always woefully sub-standard in their analysis, leaving their protagonists ill-equipped to make prudent decisions and sensible forecasting.

Here’s what else we know. We do know that virtually every time we’ve tried to solve problems without foresight for how we are growing in knowledge and enhancing our capabilities we make errors. For example, in the late 19th century, Manhattan faced a serious "horse problem." Horses were the primary means of transportation, pulling carriages, wagons, and streetcars, and their population created significant issues, like massive amounts of manure, filthy, smelly streets, a disposal of dead horses problem, and the spread of diseases due to the unsanitary conditions. What those concerned didn't foresee was the advent of a transformative technology: the automobile. By the early 20th century, motor vehicles began to replace horses, effectively solving the horse problem in a relatively short period. By the 1920s, cars had become the dominant mode of transportation, and horses were largely relegated to recreational or ceremonial roles.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted that overpopulation would lead to mass starvation and societal collapse, due to insufficient food supply – being myopic about advances in agricultural technologies, including high-yield crops, synthetic fertilisers, and modern irrigation – and how they dramatically increased food production, and ensured sufficient food for growing populations in many parts of the world. And we all know about Malthus’s similarly miscalculated prophecies of doom in the late 18th century, inaccurately predicting that population growth would outpace food production, leading to global famine and societal collapse.

There are so many more examples of this kind. People have thought there was a potential wood crisis without understanding the transition to coal (and later coal and electricity). People have feared urban darkness by failing to see the transition from oil lamps or candles to gas and electric lighting. People have been concerned about a potential telecommunications saturation with increasing population, with not enough insight into how a digital telecommunications revolution made communication scalable on a global level. Early computer scientists worried that the memory storage and processing power of early computers could never scale to meet the needs of more complex tasks – overlooking the invention of transistors, followed by integrated circuits and modern semiconductor technology, that enabled exponential growth in computing power.

These examples, and countless more, reflect exactly what is inadequate about extreme environmentalism, which continues to spread unremittingly like an unhealthy social contagion. It’s not that we need speculative faith that the trajectory of technological and scientific innovation will just eliminate all problems that once seemed insurmountable. But the balance of analysis and reaction is way too far on the myopic side of failing to account for the transformative power of present breakthroughs and of potential of future breakthroughs – largely because the whole thing has been politicised and manipulated to pay scant regard to them. These truths don’t serve politicians’ interests well, they don’t make splashy headlines for the media, they don’t enable the narcissism of virtue-signalling, and they are thinly spread so they are harder to apprehend for people whose considerations and agendas lack sufficient balance, perspective, wisdom and historical knowledge.

Science & Climate Change Part III: Understanding the Limits of Climate Models in Risk Assessment

Following on from part 1 and part 2 in this series, let’s conclude by exploring climate models and risk assessment. On the physical nature of climate change, some scientists argue that climate modelling should be trusted because it is specific and can point to physical laws that are currently observable and constant. Alas, this is only partially true - but even if it were wholly true, that still does not justify such confidence that the world’s extreme and hugely costly reactions to climate change are sensible, balanced and well-conceived. Just because a model relies on physical laws doesn't mean it has far-reaching predictability. The specific weather on any given day relies on physical laws, but it does not have far reaching predictability. The predictions are relatively short-term; in issues surrounding the perturbations of the environment, short-term predictions are not very reliable antecedents for long-term outcomes. Climate change science suffers from the same problem. Trying to rely on long-term predictions by extrapolating current patterns would be a bit like a man from another planet visiting earth for the first time in January and measuring the temperature in Trafalgar Square every day from January 1st through to August the 1st (increasing over the months from freezing up to 28°), and hypothesising that by December the temperature in Trafalgar Square will be 40°. But I don’t suggest that illustration just in terms of future problems – it’s current and future problems plus current and future solutions. Once you factor in responsive and pre-emptive human innovation into the equation, the model is not as unyielding as most environmentalists assume by their narrow projections.

Furthermore, focusing solely on the situation from a purely physical perspective is not helping the so-called climate scientists' cause. No one disputes that the underlying physics behind any purported climate changes gives us empirical objects of study - and few deny that changes will occur, and there will be problems to solve. But the climate change considerations must give more emphasis to how humans will respond to those changes. The environmentalists’ fear of the rate of temperature change - and that its impact on ecosystems, societies, and economies can outpace the ability of ecosystems and human systems to adapt – is highly likely completely backwards. Because what we are dealing with is slow, gradual change in temperature, and a rapid rate of change and adaptability from human ingenuity and natural scientific and technological advancement. Most environmentalists fear x is fast and y is slow, when the reality is almost certainly that x is slow and y is fast.

Yes, it is almost certainly true that climate change is in some parts anthropogenic, but most of what we’ve done industrially and technologically has been to the huge benefit of the human race, not least in the way in which the industrial revolution and consequent progression-explosion of the past 200 years has increased standards of living, life expectancy, prosperity, well-being, knowledge, and the many other qualities that benefit the human race. Don’t forget that our global emissions in the past century have been part of the very same scientific and industrial advancements that have facilitated this extraordinary human progression. To criticise our innovations as being environmentally detrimental is a bit like criticising a vegetable patch for ruining perfectly good soil, or criticising medicine for ruining perfectly good plants.

Professor Richard Tol (do Google his work - there's plenty of it) has perhaps done the most of anyone I've researched to show that when you factor in the economic, the ecological, the humanitarian and the financial considerations, there is an overall positive effect in climate change. He arrived at this conclusion after undertaking 14 different studies of the effects of future climate trends. One of professor Tol's key findings is that climate change would be beneficial up to 2.2˚C of warming from 2009 (when his paper was written). Some say those temperatures may not be reached until the end of the century, some say even longer. The IPCC predicts we will reach that temperature increase by 2080. This means that, far from being a so-called ‘climate emergency’, even at worst case scenario, global warming could continue to be of net benefit for another 60 years. And even if it is the case that global warming will only benefit us for another 60 years (assuming current conditions) then the people who will have to deal with it in 2080 will be about nine times as rich as we are today (assuming economic growth continues on its present trajectory), and more scientifically and technologically advanced than we can possibly imagine. While I'm encouraged by Richard Tol's research, I actually think he slightly underestimates the mood for optimism by making an understated assumption himself. He talks of global warming possibly being a problem by the time the planet undergoes 2.2˚C of warming (in 2080) without paying enough regard to just how much better equipped we'll be in 60 years from now to tackle perceived problems in 2009 (or even today).

This has always been a strange solecism from climate change alarmists too: Look at how the world has gone from 1924 to 2024. Nobody sane thinks that the world's population hasn't benefiting immensely from industrial progression and technological advancements alongside a changing climate during the past 100 years. Given that we are richer and more advanced in this day than in 1924, it’s absurd that so many people are unconvinced that the world's population won't benefit immensely from industrial progression and technological advancements alongside a changing climate in the next 100 years. Moreover, given that we in 2024 have most of the advancements to have been able to solve the majority of economic problems people in 1924 faced, we should be more confident of having similar capacities 60-100 years henceforward, given that we are starting from an even stronger place, and that we have far more people on the planet to help solve the problems that might arise. We seem drastically unfair on ourselves when it comes to forecasting our ability to work together to solve complex problems.

The climate change alarmists' assumption is that because climate change is an emergency, we should be risk-averse, and risk-aversion here means spending more money and resources on tackling climate change in the here and now. But this is faulty reasoning, because risk-aversion should primarily focus on the world’s biggest risks - and the biggest risk of all is not that future (richer) generations will be born into a warmer climate, it is that present (poorer) people are going to be born in a poverty-stricken state where they can’t afford access to cheap, necessary, dependable energy. The way to be rationally risk-averse is to help poorer people become more prosperous - not adopt short-sighted climate change policies that make energy unaffordable for those that need it most.

Here I refer you to a passage about risk in my previous series on climate change risk:

“Risk is assessing the potential costs with known probability. Uncertainty, on the other hand, is not knowing the probability, which means an inability to calculate a risk. If I have to draw a Jack, Queen or King card from a 52 card deck to win £1,000,000 or else die, that is a ‘risk’ because I can calculate the probability (12 in 52). On the other hand, if I have to draw a Jack, Queen or King card from an unspecified pile of cards, and I don't know how many are missing from the pack, then I have ‘uncertainty’. I cannot calculate the probability of drawing a picture card because I don't know if any picture cards have been removed.

Let me make it even clearer with an illustration. Suppose there is a pile of 99 cards - all of which are either a Jack, a Queen or a King, and all three cards are represented. You know that 33 of the cards are Jacks, but you don't know the ratio of Queens and Kings in the remaining 66 cards. You can choose from two scenarios:

Scenario 1: You win £1,000,000 if you draw a Jack, and nothing if you draw a Queen or King. 

Scenario 2: You win £1,000,000 if you draw a Queen, and nothing if you draw a Jack or King.

Which scenario would you prefer? Due to scarcity of information there really is no way to know which scenario is preferable because you don't know the ratio of Queens and Kings - you only know there are 33 Jacks. If you choose Scenario 1 you know you have a 1 in 3 chance of £1,000,000. If you choose Scenario 2 you don't know what chance you have because you don't know how many of the remaining 66 cards are Queens - there could be as few as 1 or as many as 65. Scenario 1 offers you a risk; Scenario 2 offers you uncertainty.

The climate change assessments are generally more like Scenario 2 than Scenario 1 - they involve uncertainties where drastically little is understood about the probability. It was important to mention that before we got under way with the series. In the next part I will look at how mindful we should be of future generations, and what we owe them.”

Rising tides sinking some boats?
Let’s now focus one of the other main messages of the environmentalists - that even small increases in temperature in the next 100 years are going to be disastrous for people living in coastal areas (this amounts to about 650 million people according to a BBC report in 2019). Alas, this prophecy of doom is a presumption they never attempt to justify. Whatever science tells us about the changing climate, the future is far too complex for anyone to know the magnitude of the effect of those changes, how future humans will be equipped to deal with them, and who will be better and worse off. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either mistaken or lying (or perhaps a bit of both).

Suppose the world gets a little warmer in the next 100 years, as predicted. Through today’s lens of analysis, it’s expected to have a net negative effect on places like Ethiopia, Uganda, Bangladesh and Ecuador. But no one talks about the net positive effect it could have in regions of Russia, Mongolia, Norway and Canada, where inhabitants are subjected to harsh winters. But even that’s too simplistic, because you then have the unenviable task of considering what future Norway or future Bangladesh will be like compared to now, and undertake a separate measurement of forecasted temperature increase alongside perceived impact at any given time. This is not a method of analysis that we can undertake right now – and this is something that seems to be almost entirely missing from the climate discussions.

Not only is a forecasted temperature increase alongside perceived impact at any given time very complex, it’s almost certain to be short-sighted and hasty. China in 1965 would be very poorly-equipped to deal with a metre of rising tide compared with the China of now or future China, who could pay for it with loose change. Just as in every decade that has passed recently, global warming has produced both negative externalities and positive externalities, and future global temperatures are too hard to predict in terms of whether or not longer growing seasons and milder winters produce a net cost on the world.

All that said, let’s be generous to the environmentalists and declare that their spectre is wholly accurate (against what my own reasoning says) - that increases in temperature in the next 100 years are going to be disastrous for people living in coastal regions. What might they still be overlooking? Currently we live in a world in which about 71% of our world’s surface area is ocean, where it could rise by half a percent if the ice caps melt very much in the next few decades. Humans have done pretty well in the past few hundred years adapting their industry in a world in which 71% of our world is ocean – so it shouldn’t be so hard to believe that people in the future with more money, greater knowledge and better technology will find it within their grasp to adapt to a world in which 71.5% of the world’s surface is ocean.

Not convinced? Ok, let’s take a worst case scenario - that all of the 650 million people living in coastal regions are going to be negatively affected by rising sea levels in the next hundred years. A few key facts: firstly, almost all of those 650 million people won’t be alive in 100 years, and during that time they and future descendants will have had the capacity to move inland or make the necessary infrastructural changes in response to the very gradual increase in sea levels. During slow, gradual changes, the next 100 years is a long time to make adjustments, especially in a future in which everyone is richer than now and more technologically astute. Remember, environmentalists fear x is fast and y is slow, when the reality is almost certainly that x is slow and y is fast.

We are not sure how many of the 650 million people (and more factoring in population increase and migration to cites) will be affected by rising sea levels, but here's what we do know. If moving inland or making the necessary infrastructural changes would be costly, not moving inland and not making the necessary infrastructural changes will be a lot costlier. It's one thing to discuss the costs of moving inland and making the necessary infrastructural changes and weigh up those against all the benefits and the future capabilities of dealing such things - but it's quite another thing to warn about staying in coastal areas and getting washed away, because that's just not going to happen.

If some relatively short-term extreme changes are the price that future unborns have to pay for living in such a prosperous world (and it's still a big IF), then it is certain that those future unborns will pay those costs, and almost certainly a lot more easily than we can pay them. If rising oceans and dealing with the consequences are not the price that future unborns have to pay, either because we are burning almost no fossil fuels in the future (which is highly likely to be the case) or because climate alarmists have got their predictions wrong, or because future humans have technology that easily helps them adapt to the gradual changes (which is almost certainly going to be the case), then the alarmism has been absurdly wasteful and largely unnecessary, because global market innovation is already doing about as much as it can, and will continue to do so.

The environmentalists frequently seem to be confused by a base rate fallacy regarding what they are doing. Even if we ignore the fact that this level of uncertainty is not an obvious call to action (and we shouldn’t ignore that, but we will for simplicity’s sake), and the fact that these reactionaries have no real clue of the appropriate measure of range of possible outcomes against range of possible actions, they are utterly confused by the concept of ‘doing’. They peddle the narrative along the lines of ‘What we should be doing’ when really they mean ‘What we should be doing now’. And I’m not saying that everything we are doing is reactionary – we are making some terrific progress on a whole range of innovations to help make us greener – but doing reactionary things now for projected future scenarios is hasty and presumptuous because time is inevitably going to reduce the cost of dealing with the problems (because we’ll be richer, and with better technology, and have more information and understanding).

That fact that uncertainty will decrease over time, and our knowledge, resources and richness will increase over time is an argument that, relative to our abilities, the problem will get smaller not larger, and our ability to manage it will get better not worse. If you don’t believe me, and still think we need immediate action otherwise it’ll be too late, you only need remember that this has been said for every decade for at least the past five decades, and with every passing decade we have gained in understanding, reduced our uncertainty, made humanity better off, reduced poverty, increased global trade and prosperity, become greener, and enhanced our technology - and this in spite of the extreme environmentalists, not because of them.

So many people are getting taken in by the doomsday eco-fundamentalism, on the pretext that ‘we have a climate emergency’ (or worse 'the end is nigh') is a consensual view among climate scientists. Climate scientists are experts at understanding the climate (the clue's in their job title) and the problems we are facing, but they are not economists, so they are unlikely to present the full menu of considerations. Climate scientists can tell us about the relationship between our activities and global warming, and they can tell us about how different levels of carbon emissions in the near future are likely to impact on climate change (to a degree, pun intended). But the climate change situation is not simply a matter for the physical sciences, it's largely a matter for economics.

Science is the systematic study of the physical environment within nature. Economics is the science of allocating resources efficiently amidst competing preferences. Science tries to tell us which challenges a region of the Middle East might have to face if the planet is n degrees warmer in 20 years' time. Economics tries to consider the future resources and technology available to change human behaviour in the region. Science tells us what might happen to our ocean levels. Economics tries to consider how our coastal regions will adapt to those changes. Politicised climate science focuses largely on the costs of climate change, and is wilfully myopic when it comes to trade-offs. Economics focuses on the costs and benefits of climate change, and on the complex trade-offs that have been made over the past 150 years of humanity's great material enrichment and unprecedented rise in living standards.

Climate scientists speak of future problems with scant regard for how innovative, collaborative future humans will be economically, technically and scientifically equipped to solve those problems. Isolated, reactionary appeals to the expert climate science consensus are anaemic appeals, because climate science consensus on its own is too a narrow perspective that neglects to include many of the most relevant tenets of the analysis. Let's have more gratitude and more humility - and we can work together to solve these problems with more balance, and less extremism. Imbalanced extremism almost never acts as a force for good, or as a vehicle for efficient problem-solving. 

Science & Climate Change Part II: There Is No Single Scientific Method

 

In the previous blog post, I introduced a poser to show an easy way to establish basic scientific principles. Here, I want to say that despite there being good and bad ways to make inferences, the idea of there being a single ‘scientific method’ is problematic, as the complexity of scientific inquiry cannot be encapsulated by one method or definition. That is to say, the idea that any human mental processes can encapsulate a singular method for science is a faulty one.

Last time, we applied modus ponens (affirming the antecedent) and modus tollens (denying the consequent) to explain why Team B’s method is more reliable and why modus tollens can be effective in some cases. Now, consider the affirming the consequent method:

If P, then Q.
Q.
Therefore, P.

While this logical form is a fallacy, science sometimes uses it to form hypotheses - yet it's precarious without corroboration. For example:

If a carbon atom has 4 valence electrons, then it can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time.
A carbon atom can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time.
Therefore, a carbon atom has 4 valence electrons.

While it is a fact that a carbon atom can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time because has 4 valence electrons, this kind of hypothesis would not qualify as a scientific theory were it stated as a one-off isolated hypothesis. To see why, let’s use a comparable example:

If it is midnight, then my watch will say it's midnight.
My watch says it's midnight.
Therefore, it must be midnight.

In isolation, this kind of fallacy of thinking would be exactly true of science too – one claim by one scientist is inadequate to the task of a reliable inference; we need corroboration from repeated sources, because if stated in isolation there may well be something (as yet unknown) that falsifies the proposition that “a carbon atom can bond with up to four other atoms at the same time because has 4 valence electrons”, just as seeing my watch has stopped gives me reason to doubt whether it really is midnight. 

But equally, suppose my watch says it’s midnight, and also my neighbour’s watch says it’s midnight – I have a much better reason to think it’s midnight, as two watches in 2 houses side-by-side stopping at midnight is less likely. The more verification I get when I look at other people’s watches and see they say midnight, the stronger the corroboration, and the stronger the justification for my belief.

That is what science is all about. Science uses arguments at the singular level, but they become stronger with further corroboration. We infer to the best possible explanation, where a theory best explains the facts in front of us. Of course, if scientific theories are inferences to the best explanation, then the best explanations will also have good predictive success rates too. But context must be established in order for this to happen. For example, the earth is both spherical and flat when seen from the right context. When I place a spirit level on my concrete driveway, I see it as flat, but if I view the earth from space then it is spherical. It would be a fallacy to measure my driveway as flat and infer that the whole earth is also flat. 

The strength of science is found in inferences based on repeated corroboration, but there is no single scientific method from which we obtain this. While we often use the term 'scientific method' for ease (by which we mean testable, repeatable, verifiable, and predictable), it is difficult to justifiably claim science to be amenable to some kind of singular ‘scientific method’. It does little good to simply say that the value of science is in an observation being testable, repeatable, verifiable and predictable, because science is only one particular lens of reality, which by itself has no singular ‘method’. 

Even if we ignore for a moment the fact that science is limited to only a scientific lens of reality, there are many philosophical questions attached to the process of an observation being testable, repeatable, verifiable and predictable. How does one confirm that one’s observations are sufficiently free from psychological bias to be balanced? How does one decide what is testable? At what level does repetition confirm the validation of an observation? How can prediction be informative without a philosophical framework to police our concepts? What links our methods of experiment with the complexity of data? How do we account for the fact that different levels of reality are attached to different levels of physical behaviour in nature? How does the overarching narrative of our interpretation of reality align with the lenses of reality to which science is amenable?

It’s not that these questions can’t be answered; it’s that there is no singular ‘method’ by which they are all answered, as humans have such a complex nexus of perceptions and conceptions, and require many lenses of interpretation with which to understand the world.

Having built the foundations in parts 1 and 2, we are now ready for a meatier part 3, which is up next: Science & Climate Change Part III: Understanding the Limits of Climate Models in Risk Assessment

Science & Climate Change Part I: How To Do Science

 

In my book The Science & Economics of Climate Change: How the Mechanisms and Physics of the World Really Work, I have a bulky section on what many think of as “the science of climate change”. When you hear environmentalists – from the serious scientists, to the raving climate alarmists – you’ll often hear them say "The science is clear on this" or "We have to listen to what the science is telling us and act urgently". And when they say those words, they are signalling to you that they haven’t got a thorough grip on the matter, because no one who understood the complex, multivariate analyses required for a subject like climate change would ever use the term THE science.

How to do science
Regarding the methods associated with science, let me start with a poser. You've been tasked with hiring a team for a science project as yet unknown to you. You have 2 teams of eight from which to choose (call them Team A and Team B), and you know only one thing about the teams. Here's what you know.

Both teams worked independently on the same project; it was an investigation into seventy deaths that occurred in a factory on one day last September. Everyone in the building was found dead on the floor one day, and both teams knew that the factory had recently started to use a new chemical X, but they weren't sure for how long. Team A and Team B were given 35 of the dead bodies each and access to the entire factory, and were tasked with finding the cause of 70 deaths. Here's what they did differently:

Team A gathered evidence A, B, C, D, E and F and sat down together in a room discussing all the possibilities. After some deliberation, they hypothesised that methyl isocyanate had escaped into the factory's atmosphere and caused the deaths. After this, they did a postmortem on the 35 bodies to see if the cause of death matched their hypothesis. The 35 bodies they tested all had methyl isocyanate poisoning.

Team B did the post mortems first, found the cause of death as methyl isocyanate poisoning, and then gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F to see if the evidence matched their post mortem conclusion. It did. The evidence suggested that methyl isocyanate had escaped into the factory's atmosphere and caused the deaths.

That's all you know about the teams; you have a project coming up, and you need to hire Team A or Team B. Which do you choose to hire?

Conclusion..............

To see which team is a better candidate for your hiring, we need to consider how science works at a general level - and for that, we should start with two kinds of inference; modus ponens and modus tollens. For those unfamiliar with the terms, modus ponens means 'method of affirming', and modus tollens means 'method of denying'. They are rules of inference, where if the premises are true, we can reach a logical conclusion and make inferences about how the world is. We say an argument is a valid argument when it is not possible for the conclusion to be false if the premises are true.

With modus ponens, if we know that P is true, and we know that P implies Q, we can infer that Q is true. So for example:

If today is Tuesday, then tomorrow will be Wednesday

Today is Tuesday

Therefore tomorrow will be Wednesday

With modus tollens, if we know P implies Q, and we know that Q is false, we can infer that P is not true. So for example:

If today is Tuesday, then tomorrow will be Wednesday

Tomorrow will not be Wednesday

Therefore today is not Tuesday

In the first case, we are affirming the antecedent, and in the second case, we are denying the antecedent. That is to say, with modus ponens we are affirming that today is Tuesday, meaning tomorrow is Wednesday. With modus tollens we are denying that tomorrow will be Wednesday, meaning today is not Tuesday 

Now, if all argument forms were as valid as that, and if all premises were as unambiguous as that, then there would be no fallacies committed. But it isn't the case, because some argument forms are faulty, and some premises are ambiguous. Consider this common type of error:

If I have flu, then I'll have a runny nose.

I have a runny nose

Therefore I have flu

This is an unreliable argument, because my runny nose may be caused by something else (like hay fever) that is not flu. Or consider this:

If it is midnight, then my watch will say it's midnight

My watch says it's midnight

Therefore it must be midnight

Here we get into difficulties again, because just because my watch says it's midnight doesn't mean it is midnight. My watch might have stopped at midnight, and it may actually be 1am. We can also see a logical fallacy when we consider an inference in the negative sense:

If the street is wet, then it is raining.

It is not raining

Therefore the street is not wet.

Clearly, this is also unreliable, because even though it is not raining it does not prove that the street will not be wet. It could be that the street is wet due to a burst pipe, or snowfall, or by being washed by the council. 

So let's look at the above example with our two science teams. We can see that team A used the modus tollens method whereas team B used the modus ponens approach. Here's a reminder:

TEAM A: Team A gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F and sat down together in a room to discuss all the possibilities. After this, they did a post mortem on the 35 bodies to see if the cause of death matched their hypothesis.

TEAM B: Team B did the post mortems first, found the cause of death as methyl isocyanate poisoning, and then gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F to see if the evidence matched their post mortem conclusion.

Personally, I would hire Team B, because the modus ponens method is a better method for confirming a hypothesis in science (modus tollens is better for falsification). Team A made themselves candidates for the modus tollens fallacy by gathering evidence A,B,C,D,E and F and hypothesising that methyl isocyanate had escaped into the factory's atmosphere. Here they made an educated hypotheses and turned out to be right, but their method may not have accounted for the other possible conclusions that could be reached from evidence A,B,C,D,E and F.

Team B's modus ponens approach means they began with the 'method of affirming', by doing the post-mortems first and finding the cause of death to be methyl isocyanate poisoning. They then gathered evidence A,B,C,D,E and F to see if it matched their post mortem conclusion, which I think is a better way to make inferences. This approach builds a solid foundation by grounding hypotheses in observable evidence. On the other hand, Team A’s approach, where they formed a hypothesis before examining the bodies, had the potential to run into problems if the post-mortem results contradicted their hypothesis. While this approach can work if the evidence supports the initial hypothesis, it is prone to confirmation bias and could lead to ignoring contradictory evidence. Given the foregoing, Team B's approach demonstrates a more reliable method of scientific inquiry, and they are the Team I’d advise hiring.

There are cases when the modus tollens approach gets you to the right answer more quickly. If the hypothesis is that methyl isocyanate escaped into the factory atmosphere and caused the deaths of the 70 people, they could use modus tollens to frame the logic as follows:

P1: If methyl isocyanate escaped into the factory atmosphere, then all the victims' post-mortems should show evidence of methyl isocyanate poisoning.

P2: The post-mortems do not show evidence of methyl isocyanate poisoning.

Conclusion: Therefore, methyl isocyanate did not escape into the factory atmosphere, and it is not the primary cause of the deaths.

This would open the team up to other lines of enquiry.

In conclusion, modus ponens and modus tollens are essential tools in science, each suited to different stages of investigation. Team B's modus ponens approach is ideal for confirming hypotheses based on solid evidence, reducing the risk of confirmation bias. Meanwhile, Team A's modus tollens approach is useful for quickly eliminating incorrect hypotheses.

For the factory investigation, where reliable confirmation of facts is key, Team B’s method is preferable. In seeing that their approach builds more efficient conclusions on observable data, making them the better choice for future scientific inquiries that require careful validation, we have shared in a good insight about some of the basics of science.

Stay tuned for part 2: Science & Climate Change Part II: There Is No Single Scientific Method