Willis is about as wrong as usual

Willis wants us to know that carbon taxes, being regressive, are "cruel." So very, very cruel. This he will prove with data, because he is a Serious Person and not at all a shambolic dishonest embarrassment to the human species.

Immediately, however, we run into the problem that the numbers provided are not remotely plausible. All the numbers look far too high, but the figure on the bottom for thos making less than $20,000 a year is the standout. While poor Americans often spend more of their incomes on basic necessities like energy, the idea that they spend 40% of their income on energy is, frankly, utterly ludicrous.

To get here he cites a number of sources, fucking up in unknown ways to get answers that are wildly wrong:

Someone challenged me on this claim about energy taxes the other day, and I realized I believed it without ever checking it … bad Willis, no cookies. So of course, having had that thought I had to take a look.
The Energy Information Agency (EIA) collects data on this, with the exception of gasoline usage. I got the most recent data, for 2009. (Excel workbook). Gasoline usage figures are here from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Finally, income averages by tiers are available here from the Census Bureau.

While he laments the loss of his cookie, I would actually offer him two small cookies here. One, he is making an effort to check his intuitions against data. Two, the places he is going for data contain good reliable information: the EIA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau.

At that point Willis' cookie supply dries up, because he has mangled the data to get a grossly wrong answer. People who make less than $20,000 per year spend an average of $1,571 dollars a year on energy (slight more if you include gas). So Willis is asking us to accept that the average income of this group is $3,900 a year, and after spend almost half that on energy they are paying for housing, food, and clothes with $200 a month.

The sources Willis cites do not provide numbers for the average income of a household in a given income bracket. Possibly he was using the means as averages, although that would not explain his numbers by itself. The Social Security administration does provide averages, fortunately:

 If you plug those numbers in you get an average income, for those making less than $20,000 per year, of $8,124. That would make the energy costs in this bracket 19% (plus a couple percent for gas), which is quite high compared to expert estimates the very poor spend about 10% of their incomes on energy, but which is less than half the number Willis somehow obtained.

I don't spend as much time chasing the nonsense on WUWT as I used to, because so much of it is repetitive and deadly boring. It's also because those that want to be informed have a much clearer understanding of the workings of ideological alternative realities than was the case when I started this blog in 2010. For reasons I would never chose, the country and the world are much more familiar with the working of denialism than they were then.

This one caught my eye because Willis is trying to be good. He's looking up good sources. He's trying to test his intuitions against the facts.

He fails because he is still operating out of a denier mindset in which he expects to find something all the experts have missed. A simple google search should have altered him that the people who study energy poverty professionally put the cost of energy in the US to the poor at, at worst, 10-20%. He should then have tried hard to figure out where his calculations went wrong.

Willis has never learned how to manage a data set, which is to say, he's never learned the art of doing a little math as you go, checking the numbers against common sense, and circling back to recheck when the answers starting coming out weird. This is basic, habitual skepticism, and the scientists I know do it so adroitly it becomes invisible and almost unconscious, a reflex. Willis clearly doesn't know that he doesn't know how to do this. Despite gestures at an appropriate method of inquiry, the cruel cold talons of Dunning-Kruger still hold him firmly in its grasp.

Idiot comment of the day: Salby follies

Note the tone of faux-authority:

philc | August 5, 2011 at 11:10 pm | Reply

What you are missing is the ~190 GtC/yr that cycles through the oceans and land mass, with an uncertainty of about 40 GtC. The mechanisms of that cycling are largely unknown and unstudied. We don’t even have enough data to analyze whether or not there might be oscillations in that cycle. Given all the known cycles in the climate(PDO, AMO, ENSO, etc) forgive me if I think that a 1-2% change in the global carbon cycle over a period of 50-100 years is probably more than likely.

"Unknown and unstudied," gosh. Sounds like scientists have really been laying down on the job. But just to confirm what our expert has told us, let's check Google Scholar and see if the carbon cycle is really "unstudied."

“Carbon cycle” pulls up 138,000 results on Google Scholar. “Carbon sink” — 21,100. “Soil respiration” — 32,600 articles. "Biological pump" -- 5,090. And so on. And on.



"Philc" is not just causally wrong, he exemplifies the psuedoskeptical tactic of presenting himself as knowledgeable about matters of which he is totally ignorant. "We don’t even have enough data to analyze whether or not there might be oscillations in that cycle." You would think from the way he writes that he is just on the verge of sitting down to do the analysis himself, and straighten the matter out once and for all. Yet this clown thinks the carbon cycle is "unstudied."

Having duped unskeptical skeptics, he move to his big finish:

Given all the known cycles in the climate(PDO, AMO, ENSO, etc) forgive me if I think that a 1-2% change in the global carbon cycle over a period of 50-100 years is probably more than likely.

He doesn't claim to have made an argument for this -- good thing, since he can't -- but instead very directly invokes the "authority" he asserts with his faux-expertise: "forgive me if I think." No thank you. We're all out of forgiveness for dishonest and obnoxious morons today.

Idiot comment of the day: homegrown edition

We must be coming up in the world. We have a local winner. I'm so proud:

Anonymous said...

Any real proof that there's any 'real' danger in warming?

Been warming a long time save for a couple of tiny ice cold times that some GW "scientists" tried to DENY, since the last big ice age, still have some ice year round, so to me still have some warming to go. That's how it works, like a pendulum from thousands to millions of years long.

Carbon? Pfft, treat it as a offending or toxic 'pollutant' ? Plants eat this stuff!... whatever but it's not a forcing factor on the climate systems - it's just too puny.

Oh and hate to break the news to you - your golden CO2 egg is easily proven to be ponzi scam as more and more people are able to explain rationally why it's not science, not true and not credible.

Warming is a good thing, I wish we were, instead we are a bit cooler and we're noticing.

Here in Can, already have short summers, we notice, we note the extra harsh winter of late in our extra expensive hydro/heating bills and I personally - hate the cold. Cold kills life more than heat.

Nothing grows on ice, life however sparce exists in deserts.

Anyone not questioning this is being lazy intellectually.
You have to question this or somewhere along the way you were taught not to think logically.

Sad that so many won't have the needed discussions about this 'settled' science approach to begin with.

Settled science on tiny bits and pieces that are just being discovered - considering the subject - earth sciences?

Says who?

You're going to let some group of scientists led by experts like Al Gore - no matter who else they are - say they "know all" there is to "know" about our whole climate systems and can predict the weather outcome in the far future?

What happened to real science?

So what are the fallacies here, and what are the rhetorical strategies used to conceal them?

First, you have a denier who is either bluffing or believes they are scientifically literate -- and is thus a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning conclude, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others" (p. 1127).

CO2 of course, is not "puny" in its effects, the poster has no idea "how it works" but invokes vague "cycles" which they do not understand enough to know that "cycles" are not a explanation for anything, let alone the very un-cyclic response of the climate to anthropogenic interventions.

We have the old denier canard that "CO2 is plant food" and therefore, magically, you can never have too much CO2; CO2 can never cause you a problem. Skeptical Science's takedown is here.

Al Gore, that hoary old bogeyman, is in there too: "You're going to let some group of scientists led by experts like Al Gore - no matter who else they are . . ."

Gore, of course, never claimed to be an expert, and is not "leading" scientists. He did manage to do very successfully, to the tune of $50 million in ticket sales, what many non-scientists have tried to do from the "skeptic" side: he explained the issues in lay terms, persuaded others to share his concerns, and presented a political plan of action. For this, the "skeptics" will never forgive him. Anyone associated with Gore in any way, we are asked to conclude, must be bad and untrustworthy. Which argument might have someone like Anders Behring Breivik nodding along, but is hardly convincing otherwise.

"[They] say they "know all" there is to "know" about our whole climate systems [sic] . . ."

Sometimes I really wish "skeptics" would get in the habit of citing their sources. Who said that? Nobody. We know enough to make some hard choices, we know a lot, in fact, but there's a lot more to know. We will never know everything. We don't know everything about heart disease, or strokes, or cancer, but we know enough to say "You probably shouldn't put that tobacco or its smoke in your mouth or your lungs."

The poster goes to say . . . well, maybe someone can explain to to me:

Here in Can, already have short summers, we notice, we note the extra harsh winter of late in our extra expensive hydro/heating bills and I personally - hate the cold. Cold kills life more than heat.

Nothing grows on ice, life however sparce exists in deserts.

Anyone not questioning this is being lazy intellectually.

Apparently the poster has confused science with alchemy (a common problem in people who know nothing about science yet are persuaded they know far more than all those fancy scientists with their la-dee-da "high school diplomas") and seems to be claiming a mystical connection between heat and life, and cold and darkness and death. Hence, we should welcome global warming. It's climate science according to The Silmarillion.

I, for one, would not want to be thought "lazy intellectually," and I hope the poster and like-minded "skeptics" will return often to entertain us with their wit and insight.