Author: Mark J. Heinicke

Americans Serious about Climate Change? Tell Me Another Whopper

[WARNING: many readers may find the following a downer—but if you care about facts, you must be willing to look at all kinds of Inconvenient Truths.] 

U.S. public on climate change: a crisis in name only

The September 20th Global Climate Strike has been inspiring—for those seriously concerned about global warming and climate change.

It’s less inspiring to read of how not-serious most of the American public is. A week before the Climate Strike, the release of a Washington Post/Kaiser Family Foundation poll headlined “Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis” appeared to portend a sea change (pun partially intended) in attitudes toward climate change.

Read on for what underlies appearances.

The takeaway from the poll is that the public says, big problem—let somebody else take care of it. Consider that 38% describe climate change as “a crisis,” and another 38% describe it as “a major problem but not a crisis.” However, to combat climate change only 37% say major sacrifices will be required, 48% say minor sacrifices, 14% “not requiring much sacrifice,” with 1% having no opinion.

Next we read that “nearly half of adults say they would be willing to pay a $2 monthly tax on electricity to help combat climate change.” If that sounds promising,  the report says just 27% would pay $10 extra a month. Meaning that at best 27/38 (71%) is the fraction of those saying the threat is “a crisis” would also pay $10 extra a month. $120 a year. Hmmm . . .  33¢/day = a bit more than 1/6th the price of a “tall” cup of Starbucks coffee.  Now that’s what I call a major sacrifice!

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Iran: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Time to pity Donald Trump

Looming over the verbal skirmishes  concerning Iran’s recent attack on the Saudi oil facilities and Mike Pompeo’s calling the attack “an act of war” is the fundamental problem that Donald Trump has created: putting himself between a rock and a hard place. There’s no wriggling out of it without either losing face or getting into a hot war with Iran, which would incur the involvement of Russia and the Chinese—too hot for Donald Trump to handle.

At this point, the end result appears to have been a loss of face—not that Donald Trump would ever admit it. The Treasury Department is to clamp down further on Iran’s financial system—somewhat short of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric. This will wreak further havoc on Iran’s economy, but if the Iranian government asks its people to make big sacrifices to oppose the U.S., they will be ready to starve rather than knuckle under.

We saw a similar Trumpian backpedaling from explosive rhetoric back in July of 2018 as Trump, personally aggrieved by standard Iranian bluster,  thundered back at Hassan Rouhani with threats of annihilation.

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Teleprompted Trump: Who’s He Kidding?

“American Carnage” – White Supremacist Style

In his inaugural address in 2017, Donald Trump railed against “American Carnage”—meaning principally street crime, considered a greater threat to our republic than Russian election interference, the crushing of the middle and lower classes by an ever-ascendant plutocracy, and the slow-rolling catastrophe of global warming.

Now that we have seen literal carnage in the bloodbath in El Paso—merely the most recent and conspicuous manifestation of white supremacist violence exacerbated by Donald Trump’s words themselves—we were also to hear, on August 5th, President Trump mechanically droning a teleprompted message condemning racial hatred and bigotry, and even white supremacy.

Hah!  Who believes that? Certainly not his core followers—it was the telltale tone similar to that of a juvenile delinquent forced to say morally proper things that told them he didn’t really mean it in his heart of hearts. Certainly not his myrmidon Stephen Miller, who in fact wants to go so far as to bar immigration by anyone with the wrong skin color.

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It’s Now or Never: Delay on Impeachment Weakens Democrats

Time’s running out for impeachment

The argument against impeaching Donald Trump gets stronger every day.  Check out liberal pundit Nathan Robinson giving pro-impeachment liberals a scolding in the pages  of The Guardian. Robinson is wrong that impeachment of Trump is a bad idea. But he’s right that counting on Mueller’s congressional testimony to turn public opinion in favor of impeachment was foolish.  Polls still find support for impeachment below 40 percent among the general population, although above 60 percent among Democrats.  Mueller’s testimony didn’t change many minds on either side of the partisan divide, and the center has seemed not to care very much before, during, and after.

In making the case against impeachment, Robinson trots out the  tiresome argument that “the Democratic obsession with the Mueller investigation was symptomatic of a party that has lost touch with the real concerns of working people.” Again, Robinson is both wrong and right.  Wrong that the party has lost touch with the real concerns of working people.  (He knows better—he’s just venting.) But he’s correct that the hype of the Mueller report—primarily on the Left—has given the appearance of a party that has lost touch. That’s not the fault of the Democratic Party, it’s the fault of the media that thrive on whipping up emotions. Their best bet for ratings has been to run juicy Trump-outrage stories to get the liberal tribe thirsting for blood.

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The Victimization of Carbon Dioxide: William Happer’s Crusade to Rescue a Molecule’s Good Name

Claim: climate “alarmism” is a hoax, carbon dioxide is good—and the victim of a conspiracy

The climate change denier on President Trump’s Security Council who possesses the most conspicuously solid scientific credentials is one William Happer, who received a PhD in physics at Princeton in 1964, and attained high standing in the physics community for his work on optics and atomic physics—not, however, climate. His contrarian stance on climate change has some fellow physicists scratching their heads, muttering “who got to this guy?”

In fairness, one should note that Happer does not exactly dispute the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide. What he disputes is that Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) and the resultant climate change will be as severe as “alarmists” claim . . .  and to the slight extent that CO2 does modify climate, it’s a good thing.  And that good thing, in his view, is under malicious assault. He is prone to such provocative catchphrases as “the demonization of CO2,” “we are in a CO2 famine,” and “if plants could vote, they’d vote for coal.”

Yes! Plants would vote for coal! Or not. Plants were thriving in the Carboniferous Period, which is when they were also dying en masse, piling up in peat which was eventually compressed into what we call fossil fuels today: coal, petroleum, and natural gas. It was also a time of heavy competition between plant species in what we might call the Survival of the Vegetative Fittest—so that for any individual plant or species, the Carboniferous might not have looked quite like Paradise on Earth. It might have seemed, to some light-starved, struggling seedling on the forest floor enshrouded in the gloom shed by a dense canopy of enormous trees, more like a dungeon.

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Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part III: Yes.

“Human intelligence is underrated”

Longtime readers of this blog who may have tired of my ruminations about AI imposing absolute reign over humanity should be overjoyed to hear that I am dropping the apocalyptic Artificial Intelligence thread for the foreseeable future.

That’s because this article in New Scientist has put my fears (mostly) to rest, with one of the pioneers of Deep Learning,  Yoshua Bengio,  saying,  “[the machines] don’t even have the intelligence of a 6-month-old.” He is even quoted as saying “AIs are really dumb”—essentially answering my very question. Thanks Yoshua!

Bengio expresses himself in deceptively simple language, but that’s an exercise in humility, because . . .

Bengio is a recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of computing,” which gives his opinions great authority.  He’s one of the originators of “deep learning,” that combines advanced hardware with state-of-the-art software enabling machines to train themselves to solve problems.  Bengios’s high standing is enough to persuade me not to worry to excess until a contradictory view by an equally qualified AI expert comes out.   Most of those sounding alarms about AI Apocalypse are not computer scientists, no matter how smart they are. Elon Musk, for example, discovered that robots in his Tesla factory were making stupid mistakes, and concluded, “human intelligence is underrated.”

Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part III: Yes.”

Make-Believe on Climate: the Secretary of State Speaks

Startling climate insight – “There’s always changes that take place”

Today (June 9, 2019 as I write), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brushed off concerns about climate change with a string of banal commonplaces that reflected either his own state of ignorance, or more likely a cynical reliance on the ignorance of the public.  For detail, see https://myfox8.com/2019/06/09/pompeo-downplays-climate-change-suggests-people-move-to-different-places/

Pompeo trotted out the well-worn platitude that “the climate’s been changing a long time. There’s always changes that take place.” This expresses the fallback position of defenders of the fossil-fuel burning status quo, by conceding climate change is indeed taking place, but say it is a consequence of “natural cycles.”  This position bolsters the status quo in two ways, by implying (1) it’s not so bad, we’ve been through this before; and (2) human activity has little or nothing to do with it.

In the recent past, Pompeo has shown his enthusiasm for the commercial advantages of climate change by celebrating reductions in polar sea ice that may open “new passageways and opportunities for trade,” likening an ice-free Arctic Ocean to “21st Century Suez and Panama Canals.” In other words, climate change was a Good Thing. Now—hedging his bets due to military and intelligence communities warnings about disruptions, and a shift in public opinion—he pronounces climate change a security threat to be addressed “in ways that are fundamentally consistent with our values set here in the United States.” Since Pompeo has been the recipient of $375,000 in campaign contributions from Koch Industries in his Congressional career (see profile in Business Insider) , we can be pretty sure the “values” he is talking about are not geared to cutting carbon emissions.

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185 Democratic Wafflers Waiting for What?

Yesterday I saw that 50 House Democrats have called for either the impeachment of Donald Trump or an “impeachment inquiry.” The latter is to impeachment what a match is to a fuse—you light it only if you are aiming for an explosion—but the softer term lends the process a tone of propriety.

Which leaves another 185 Democrats waiting to see from what direction the strongest wind will blow. Most of them are in thrall to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who continues to put politics ahead of principle when it comes to calling evildoers such as the U.S. President and his henchmen to account.  (I had my Elizabeth Warren-inspired say on the politics-vs-principle issue in my two-weeks-old post,  The Impeachment Dilemma.)

A welcome breath of fresh air was stirred by Robert Mueller’s long-awaited public statement to the effect that Donald Trump had committed a crime but there was nothing he—Mueller—could do about it because of the absurd (he couldn’t say “absurd” but you know he thought it) Department of Justice policy against indicting a sitting President. Therefore, he implied in the driest but most cutting possible language, it was up to another branch of government (i.e., the legislature) to go get the S.O.B.

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Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part II: the Common Sense Factor

Common sense and competence

In Part I of this series, we saw examples of how machines, putatively endowed with “Artificial Intelligence,” commit laughably stupid mistakes doing grade-school arithmetic. See Dumb machines Part I

You’d think that if machines can make such stupid blunders in a domain where they are alleged to have superhuman powers—a simple task compared with, say, getting your kid to school when the bus has broken down and your car is in the shop—then they could never be expected to achieve a level of competence across many domains sufficient for world domination.

Possibly machines are not capable of the “common sense” that is vital to real, complicated life, where we range across many domains, often nearly simultaneously.

A trivial example from Part I: the machine correctly calculates 68 when asked for the product of “17 x 4.”   But it calculates  “17 x 4” as 69.   Stupid, right? A human looks at the discrepancy and says aha! It’s the missing period that threw it off. Getting the correct answer would require knowing something about punctuation. The period is not a mathematical object, it’s a grammatical object.  Getting the difference requires bridging from math to grammar—another common sense activity we do without consciously missing a beat.

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Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part I: the Duh! Factor

Existential Angst: Nuclear War, Donald Trump, or Artificial Intelligence?

Apart from worldwide nuclear war (unlikely), or Donald Trump grabbing dictatorial powers (not quite as unlikely), my greatest worry is the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over the world—or at least enough of it to doom humanity as we know it.*

Likely? Experts have views as divergent as the sides that disputed whether the notorious DRESS was black and blue or white and gold.  More seriously, people way smarter than me (and perhaps you) have made predictions ranging from AI threatens the elimination of humankind, to AI is the greatest tool for the betterment of humankind that has ever existed. 

(The remainder of this post addresses machine intelligence, which is really a sub-category of AI—but since most people assume  AI equivalent to machine intelligence, I use the terms interchangeably unless specified otherwise.)

Ultimately AI may be a greater threat than Climate Change.** I know Green New Dealers don’t want to hear it, but consider: there have been drastic changes in climate in the geological record—and life, including humans, adapted. Recent Ice Ages are notable examples.  (This is NOT to defend inaction on Climate Change! Especially because the changes we are imposing on the planet, unlike most previous climate shifts, are so devastatingly swift.)

Super-AI, on the other hand, will be utterly unprecedented, and its advent, unlike Climate Change, could come swiftly and with little warning—especially if we continue to pooh-pooh it as an illusory bogeyman.

Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part I: the Duh! Factor”