Updated: The US Intense Hurricane Drought

In preparation for an upcoming talk, I have updated the figure above to the start of the 2012 hurricane season, which will begin with a record-long stretch of no intense hurricane landfalls still continuing. (In most browsers you can click on the figure for a larger view.) The long stretch with no intense hurricane landfalls has surely shaped expectations, setting the stage for all sorts of animal spirits to be in play. Oh, to be a commodities trader this summer.

Below is a figure showing the intra-seasonal distribution of US intense hurricane landfalls. About 8% have occurred in June and July, and more than 75% in August in September.

Reducing Unemployment: Manufacturing vs. Services

The graph above answers a question I've wondered about for a bit:

By how much would the services and manufacturing sectors each have to grow employment in order to reduce the current rate of unemployment by 1%?

The answer is 1.3% growth in employment in the services sector and 12.9% in the manufacturing sector. (Data is for April, 2012, and can be found here for employment and unemployment, and here for employment in the service sand manufacturing sectors).

This graph explains that while the current uptick in manufacturing employment is worth noting and welcoming, growth in manufacturing employment is not going to be the primary long-term solution to bringing down unemployment. That said, even though manufacturing and services are distinct categories of economic accounts, they are of course inter-related within the broader economy. However, claims that special treatment for manufacturing will reduce unemployment have a high hill to climb in terms of the simple math that follows from the small portion of the economy that manufacturing employment currently comprises. Productivity gains make that hill even steeper.

And of course, do not forget that from the perspective of employment rather than economic sectors, all jobs are service jobs.

What I Learned this Week

My tiff with Joe Romm and the Center for American Progress this week taught me a few lessons and put a finer points on ones that I have already known:

• Political debate is rough business, politics ain't beanbag
• There are people and institutions whose business is to try to tear people down, to savage their reputation in order to avoid a debate on policy substance
• No appeal to reason, honor or dignity matters to such people
• They will lie to your face and to everyone else without batting an eye if they think they can get away with it
• When caught in an obvious fabrication they will pretend to make it go away and that it never happened, while doing everything possible to spread the lie far and wide

What can one do in such situations?

• Recognize that your character is being attacked because they feel that they cannot engage you on substance, an implicit argument that they see your arguments as better or unimpeachable
• Recognize that their megaphone is bigger than yours, always will be
• Recognize that because they are more influential and connected than you are, that non-combatants will generally (often silently, but sometimes overtly) side with the more powerful -- this is a fact of life and no use complaining about
• Recognize that appeals to reason, honor, dignity will be ignored or used as a means to further inflict damage on you
• Recognize that you have choices -- to drop out of debate, ignore, joke, quietly correct or return fire-with-fire

I have tried a lot of these strategies over the past years to respond to efforts at character assassination, of which I have had my fair share of;-) I don't really like any of the responses, as they all have positive and negative outcomes. But, if one can't take the heat, one should get out of the kitchen.  And if one stays in the kitchen, then that means learning to cook with gas.

This week I respond to Romm and CAP's buckets of mud with an aggressive and loud response. Sometimes bullies should be stood up to.

Was it the right response? I am not sure, but it certainly was effective. Romm's dozen or more updates and changes to his post full of lies were undignified and embarrassing, and certainly an admission of wrong-doing. CAP's outright lie to me that they stood by their reporting even as they were erasing evidence of their fabrications was laughable.

For anyone paying attention -- and I don't blame anyone for not -- this week's episode shows clearly the moral bankruptcy of the vicious element of US political discourse, which exists on both sides of political debate. One organization used a billboard campaign to associate their opponents with mass murderers -- character assassination to be sure. Another organization then used lies to try to associate me with the first organization -- more character assassination. Apparently, appreciation of irony is in short supply these days.

I do not expect to have to engage in open warfare with Romm or CAP in the future, given the degree to which they have embarrassed themselves this week. However, should they continue to try to savage my reputation and harm my career, I will not take it lightly.

For my part, I will continue to call things like I see them, and will welcome debate with (and especially with) those with whom I generally disagree with, ideologically, politically or substantively -- and that means even with vile organizations like CAP and Heartland.

As I told Joe Romm and CAP, I am in the business of sharing ideas with people who I may have many disagreements with and interaction/exchange/discussion is a virtue in my world. Disagreement and conflict are to be expected. Malicious lying and bullying is not.

Robert Reich on Civility in Politics

Sports Governance Interlude

Please visit my sports blog -- The Least Thing -- where I have a two part article (with original reporting) that tells the tragic story of Mario Goijman, and the personal consequences to one man of failures in international sport governance.

The Tragedy of Mario Goijman: Part I and Part II. 

Thanks!

Joe Romm is a Liar

FINAL UPDATE 5/10: After what must be a dozen updates and corrections, Joe Romm's post is an incoherent mess (not that that distinguishes it from his normal fare;-). I wrote to CAP pointing out obvious untruths and the results were unannounced, quiet changes to Romm's post, plus a misleading response from CAP that they "stand by" their reporting. If anyone wants to know why American political discourse is so vitriolic, just look at both Heartland and CAP, two sides of the same coin.

UPDATE: Joe Romm obviously understands that he went way over the line on this one, as he has retitled his post and added some confusing words of update. He maintains his assertion that I have some sort of "official" relationship with Heartland, writing, "How anyone could guess this isn’t official is, well, Pielke-esque." Sorry, Joe, but that is still a lie. 

Sorry to say it so bluntly, but it is true. Joe Romm has falsely claimed that I am an "official expert for Heartland." This is a lie. I have absolutely no relationship with Heartland -- never have, never will. Period.

Romm's efforts to smear by association are ironic given the lashing that Heartland just got for doing exactly the same thing. But irony has never registered high on Joe's awareness-meter. There is no lower form of "debate" than trying to sully someone's character by outright lying. And it is not the first time Joe has lied about me.

Joe Romm and the Center for American Progress should be ashamed of themselves for engaging in such tactics. Can't they engage a policy debate on its merits?  Apparently not.

Sarewitz on Bias in Science

In the current issue of Nature, Dan Sarewitz has a column about the threat posed by bias to scientific research.  (The image above is a screenshot of a paper cited by Sarewitz, which is by J. Ioannidis, 2005, "Why Most Published Research Findings are False").

Sarewitz explains the systemic findings of bias in clinical trials as follows:

Like a magnetic field that pulls iron filings into alignment, a powerful cultural belief is aligning multiple sources of scientific bias in the same direction. The belief is that progress in science means the continual production of positive findings. All involved benefit from positive results, and from the appearance of progress. Scientists are rewarded both intellectually and professionally, science administrators are empowered and the public desire for a better world is answered. The lack of incentives to report negative results, replicate experiments or recognize inconsistencies, ambiguities and uncertainties is widely appreciated — but the necessary cultural change is incredibly difficult to achieve.

Why are such findings of bias turning up in clinical trials?

A biased scientific result is no different from a useless one. Neither can be turned into a real-world application. So it is not surprising that the cracks in the edifice are showing up first in the biomedical realm, because research results are constantly put to the practical test of improving human health. Nor is it surprising, even if it is painfully ironic, that some of the most troubling research to document these problems has come from industry, precisely because industry’s profits depend on the results of basic biomedical science to help guide drug-development choices.

Is the problem of bias limited to clinical studies?

It would therefore be naive to believe that systematic error is a problem for biomedicine alone. It is likely to be prevalent in any field that seeks to predict the behaviour of complex systems — economics, ecology, environmental science, epidemiology and so on. The cracks will be there, they are just harder to spot because it is harder to test research results through direct technological applications (such as drugs) and straightforward indicators of desired outcomes (such as reduced morbidity and mortality).

Read the whole thing here.

Ignore the Gloss at Some Risk

Writing in the NYT yesterday, Jack Hitt discusses what Jerry Ravetz would call the "extended peer community" in the evaluation of knowledge claims. In the process Hitt produces a concise description of why blogging and other forms of commentary are vitally important:

These days, the comments section of any engaging article is almost as necessary a read as the piece itself — if you want to know how insider experts received the article and how those outsiders processed the news (and maybe to enjoy some nasty snark from the trolls).

Should this part of every contemporary article be curated and edited, almost like the piece itself? Should it have a name? Should it be formally linked to the original article or summarized at the top? By now, readers understand that the definitive “copy” of any article is no longer the one on paper but the online copy, precisely because it’s the version that’s been read and mauled and annotated by readers. (If a book isn’t read until it’s written in — as I was always told — then maybe an article is not published until it’s been commented upon.) Writers know this already. The print edition of any article is little more than a trophy version, the equivalent of a diploma or certificate of merit — suitable for framing, not much else.

We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published — serving as some of the very first dictionaries in Europe.

Hitt uses the case of the ivory billed woodpecker to explain that authoritative knowledge claims are often subject to scrutiny from those with knowledge and expertise outside the academy. The ivory billed woodpecker was thought to have been seen in a video in 2004 -- the first sighting in more than 50 years. The sighting was subsequently written up and published in Science. It turns out that the sighting was false, it was not an ivory billed woodpecker. The paper in Science however stands uncorrected.

This has resulted in a situation where the authoritative claims are widely known to be incorrect but not recognized as such.  Hitt writes:

Already, among scientists, there is pushback, fear that incorporating critiques outside of professional peer review will open the floodgates to cranks. Not necessarily. The popular rejection last year of the discovery of a microbe that can live on arsenic was mercifully swift precisely because it was executed by online outsiders. Not acknowledging that crowd-checking and amateur commentary have created a different world poses its own dangers.

Take the case of the ivory-bill. The article in Science has never been retracted. Cornell still stands by its video. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service acted as though the ivory-bill existed, and, in 2008, it asked for $27 million to support recovery efforts. Here’s the thing: The ivory-billed woodpecker is the Schrödinger’s cat of contemporary media — dead to those who’ve looked inside Tom Nelson’s blog but alive to the professionals who can’t bear to.

Some may fear that recognizing the commentary of every article will turn every subject into an endless postmodern discussion. But actually, the opposite is true. Recognizing the gloss allows us to pause in the seemingly unending back and forth of contemporary free speech and free inquiry to say, well, for now, this much is true — the ivory-bill still hasn’t been definitively seen since World War II, climate change is happening and caused by mankind, natural selection is the best description of nature’s creative force. Et cetera.

It seems that the greatest challenge associated with blogging and other forms of "gloss" is not one of knowledge claims but of the accountability of authoritative institutions.

For instance, various claims made by the IPCC and US government as related to disasters and climate change are widely known to be false and Steve McIntyre has thoroughly documented many instances of questionable scientific practices in the so-called hockey stick literature. In both cases the relevant institutions have so far decided that it is easier to ignore the gloss than to deal with its consequences. But anyone who is paying attention can see what is going on. There is no ivory billed woodpecker.

Hitt explains that such false knowledge serves instrumental purposes, again citing the case of the ivory billed woodpecker:

The weirdest part of the ivory-bill’s resurrection is that if you look back through the past four decades, it turns out the bird has come back to life many times before. The ivory-bill seems to rise like a phoenix at times of environmental anxiety. And each time the sighting has been debunked, and then afterward some great section of wilderness has been declared protected and everyone feels better for a while.

After a 1966 disputed sighting in Texas, 84,550 acres became the Big Thicket National Preserve. When the ivory-bill was sighted/not sighted in a South Carolina swamp in 1971, the outcome was the creation of Congaree National Park. Alex Sanders, who as a member of South Carolina’s House of Representatives fought to preserve the land, told me that when people ask him where the ivory-bill is, he says, “I don’t know where he is now, but I know where he was when we needed him.”

Nice line. But you have to wonder: if we’d cinched our sense of reality with just a bit more reason instead of mythology, maybe we’d still be seeing the ivory-bill for real.

Ignoring the gloss may serve the interests of short-term expediency, but the longer-term consequences may not be so welcomed, especially within those bodies whose assertion of authority rests in knowledge claims.

FA Cup Says Expect More Hurricane Damage this Year

UPDATE: The predictive power of the FA Cup is more extensive that I have thought -- British elections. H/T Steve Cook.

In 2009 academic paper, I documented a little-known but remarkable relationship (here in PDF):

Upon seeing efforts to establish relationships between various climate variables and NATL hurricane activity one is tempted to quote John von Neumann who said of fitting relationships with various parameters, ‘with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk’ (as related in Dyson, 2004). Indeed, my own research shows a correlation of 0.33 between the total score in the UK Football Association’s (FA’s) annual Cup Championship game and the subsequent hurricane season’s damage, without even controlling for SSTs, ENSO or the Premier League tables. Years in which the FA Cup championship game has a total of three or more goals have an average of 1.8 landfalling hurricanes and USD11.7 billion in damage, whereas championships with a total of one or two goals have had an average of only 1.3 storms and USD6.7 billion in damage.

Based on this relationship and the results of today's FA Cup final, we can expect an above-average damage year for hurricanes in the United States. Scoff at this, you may ... but it as as good a predictor (if not better) than any other. Let's plan on looking back in December and see how the FA Cup Hurricane Damage Prediction actually performed.

Caveat emptor.