Developing a Theory

I'm slowly developing my own views about global climate change.

Don't anybody rush me.

One aspect of my emerging view is that markets are rational, and unbiased by any of the various factors that may bias scientists with or even without political interference. So where market rationality seems likely to be strongest, believe it over even the best credentialed experts.

Look at the earthquake in Japan, unpredicted by any scientists, but predicted by Dennis Gartman, author of a widely followed investment letter.

But in the matter of climate change, the news would come from, say, increasing flood insurance premiums.

Unfortunately, in the U.S. and in much of the rest of the world, flood insurance is a heavily socialized and political matter.

Anyway, I have discovered even since beginning work on this post that Matthew Kahn, a guest blogger at The Volokh Conspiracy, has been way ahead of me.

Back in November, Kahn wrote that for-profit insurance companies must be allowed to engage in price gouging, because price gouging is exactly what the price signalling will look like if the market for flood insurance does begin to reflect oncoming climate change and rising sea levels.

So: are there places where such price gouging is allowed by law, and where govt doesn't discourage it by in effect offering a competing subsidized product. And, if so: has that gouging become more successful, more profitable, of late? are there new entrants into those markets? This is where we should be looking, if we hope to understand the direction of climate change.

Geology as a Science

Why is it so difficult to predict earthquakes?

Ingenious scientists have been studying the matter for a long time, there is a wonderful incentive for success in this endeavor -- since many lives as well as a lot of property are threatened by the continued randomness of these planetary upheavals -- and the basic theory of plate tectonics seems to have been worked out in elaborate detail. So ... why no predictions?

Here's a column on the general point by Robert Roy Britt, managing editor of LiveScience.

But what Britt doesn't mention is the intriguing fact that geology is a science with a sample size of one. In the study of human physiology and its disorders, we can treat any human who has ever been subjected to medical study as a separate sample. From all of these samples, the relevant research community can draw important generalizations. In the study of the internal workings of the earth and what (from our puny point of view as its surface dwellers) we may call its "disorders," though, we have only the one Earth. Our knowledge of other planets is rudimentary, our knowledge of their internal workings is, I suspect, nil.

We have many observations of the earth and different earthquakes, but the multiplicity of observations doesn't make for a large sample. You can take my temperature several times, if you like. Each of those readings will be a fact about a single organism, reflecting either its equilibrium or some change in its condition over the period in which your measurements were take. There is still just the one organism.

This line of thought could lead us in any of several directions, most of them moving far beyond the quotidian difficulty in predicting earthquakes with which we began. It could lead us into metaphysics, for example, and the question of what constitutes a "thing," an "entity," even if you like a "substantial form." That is on some readings THE problem of metaphysics. But I'll leave off here for the day.