No One Knows What’s Going To Happen

THE best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t.

But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty. Rousseau exaggerated only slightly when he said that when things are truly important, we prefer to be wrong than to believe nothing at all.

The history of humanity is the history of impatience. Not only do we want knowledge of the future, we want it when we want it. The Book of Job condemns as prideful this desire for immediate attention. Speaking out of the whirlwind, God makes it clear that he is not a vending machine. He shows his face and reveals his plans when the time is ripe, not when the mood strikes us. We must learn to wait upon the Lord, the Bible tells us. Good luck with that, Job no doubt grumbled.

When the gods are silent, human beings take things into their own hands. In religions where the divine was thought to inscribe its messages in the natural world, specialists were taught to take auspices from the disposition of stars in the sky, from decks of cards, dice, a pile of sticks, a candle flame, a bowl of oily water, or the liver of some poor sheep. With these materials, battles could be planned, plagues predicted and bad marriages avoided.

In those places where the gods were thought to communicate verbally with humans, oracles and prophets were designated to provide answers on demand. The most highly revered oracles in the ancient Greek world were the high priestesses at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. To respond to a petitioner who had placed a question before her, the priestess would enter the inner sanctum and seat herself on a tripod erected over a crevice in the ground, out of which inebriating gases were thought to rise.

These fumes paralyzed her rational faculties and put her in a trance of receptivity that allowed the god Apollo to speak through her in cryptic remarks and riddles. These would be interpreted by a second figure, the prophet, who answered the grateful petitioner in poetry or prose. It was a very successful startup and made Delphi a wealthy town.

Prophets today are less flamboyant. Former prime ministers do not, as a rule, sniff drugs before appearing on CNN. They sit meekly in the green room sipping mineral water before being called on to announce our fate. Augurs have given up on sheep livers and replaced them with big data and statistical modeling. The wonder is that we still cry out for their help, given that the future is full of surprises.

Professional forecasters know this about the future, which is why in the small print of their reports they lay out all the assumptions that went into the forecast and the degree of statistical confidence one might have in particular estimates, given the data and research methods used. But harried journalists and public officials don’t read or comprehend the footnotes, and with the public baying for information, they understandably pass on the most striking estimates just to get through the day.

Ancient augurs and prophets were in high-risk professions. When their predictions failed to materialize, many were executed by sovereigns or pulled apart by mobs. We see a bloodless version of this reaction today in the public’s declining confidence in both the news media and the government.

Take a banal example: snowstorms and school closings. A half century ago, when meteorological forecasting was less sophisticated, parents and children would not learn that classes were canceled until the storm began and it was announced on radio and television that very morning. We lived in harmless uncertainty, which for kids was thrilling.

We live in a state of radical uncertainty. The first step is to accept it.

When snowflakes fell they even looked like manna from heaven.

Today, mayors and school superintendents, putting their faith in the meteorologists, routinely announce closings a day or more in advance. If the storm fails to arrive, though, they are sharply criticized by parents who lost a day of work or had to find day care.

And if an unforeseen storm paralyzes the city, leaving streets unsalted and children stranded at school, the reaction is far worse. More than one mayor has lost a re-election bid because of failed prophecies, victim of our collective overconfidence in human foresight.

Our addiction to economic forecasting is far more consequential. Here the footnotes really do matter but politicians and the press encourage magical thinking.

The candidate declares, My plan will create 205,000 new jobs, raise the Dow 317 points and lower the price of gasoline 15 cents. Two years later, the gloating headline reads: The President’s Unkept Promises. Stagnant growth, a bear market and war in the Middle East make re-election unlikely.

Never mind that declining global demand slowed growth, that Wall Street is a drama queen and that a freakish tanker collision set off the war. A failed presidency is declared. And so the press and the public turn to fresher faces - who of course offer the same absurdly precise predictions. Not for nothing did Gore Vidal call us the United States of Amnesia.

The public square is thick today with augurs and prophets claiming to foresee the post-Covid world to come. I, myself, who find sundown something of a surprise every evening, have been pursued by foreign journalists asking what the pandemic will mean for the American presidential election, populism, the prospects of socialism, race relations, economic growth, higher education, New York City politics and more. And they seem awfully put out when I say I have no idea. You know your lines, just say them.

I understand their position. With daily life frozen, there are fewer newsworthy events to be reported on and debated. Yet columns must be written, and the 24/7 cable news machine must be fed. Only so much time can be spent on the day’s (hair-raising) news conferences or laying blame for decisions made in the past or sentimental stories on how people are coping. So journalists’ attention turns toward the future.

But the post-Covid future doesn’t exist. It will exist only after we have made it.

Religious prophecy is rational, on the assumption that the future is in the gods’ hands, not ours. Believers can be confident that what the gods say through the oracles’ mouth or inscribe in offal will come to pass, independent of our actions. But if we don’t believe in such deities, we have no reason to ask what will happen to us. We should ask only what we want to happen, and how to make it happen, given the constraints of the moment.

Apart from the actual biology of the coronavirus - which we are only beginning to understand - nothing is predestined. How many people fall ill with it depends on how they behave, how we test them, how we treat them and how lucky we are in developing a vaccine.

The result of those decisions will then limit the choices about reopening that employers, mayors, university presidents and sports club owners are facing. Their decisions will then feed back into our own decisions, including whom we choose for president this November. And the results of that election will have the largest impact on what the next four years will hold.

The pandemic has brought home just how great a responsibility we bear toward the future, and also how inadequate our knowledge is for making wise decisions and anticipating consequences. Perhaps that is why our prophets and augurs can’t keep up with the demand for foresight.

At some level, people must be thinking that the more they learn about what is predetermined, the more control they will have. This is an illusion. Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog.

A dose of humility would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living. Let us retire our prophets and augurs. And let us stop asking health specialists and public officials for confident projections they are in no position to make - and stop being disappointed when the ones we force out of them turn out to be wrong. (A shift from daily to weekly news conferences and reports would be a small step toward sobriety.)

We worsen the situation by focusing our attention on litigating the past and demanding certainty about the future. We must accept what we are, in any case, condemned to do in life: tap and step, tap and step, tap and step . . . .

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Bill McKibben Caught Lying About Wind and Solar Costs

In a Los Angeles Times editorial, climate activist Bill McKibben claims, “In the last 10 years, engineers have driven the price of sun and wind power down below coal.” This is a falsehood that climate activists frequently tell, but here is the truth.

What McKibben doesn’t disclose is that he’s only counting the price of wind and solar on days when they are operating at peak capacity, while ignoring their capital costs. Also, he is calculating the costs of operating traditional electric power plants when they are operating at less than peak efficiency, due to their need to regulate wind and solar’s ever-fluctuating power supply.

McKibben also conveniently fails to count the tremendous subsidies wind and solar power receive from the government. Indeed, without government subsidies and mandates, wind and solar power would largely be a boutique power supply for the wealthy. As Climate Realism notes, “Wind and solar power receive substantially more subsidies than conventional energy sources. Wind power by itself receives more source-specific government subsidies than all conventional energy sources combined. Solar power by itself also receives more source-specific government subsidies than all conventional energy sources combined.”

An analysis by the Institute of Energy Research, “The Levelized Cost Of Electricity From Existing Generation Resources,” reports, “Continuing to operate existing coal, natural gas, hydroelectric, and nuclear plants provides a cheaper source of electricity than replacing them with new plants or renewable sources of power like wind or solar.”

Ultimately, if wind and solar power were less expensive than coal, they would dominate world electricity production. The fact that wind and solar produce so little of the world’s electricity mix is proof positive that they are substantially more expensive than conventional energy.

You don’t need to pass laws and twist people’s arms to incentivize them to not throw away their money. On the other hand, you do need to pass laws and twist people’s arms to make them foolishly waste their money. That is what activists like Bill McKibben seek to do.

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An Inconvenient Truth: Gore Proven Spectacularly Wrong on Snows of Kilimanjaro

In his 2006 book, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore asserted there would be no more snows on Mt. Kilimanjaro by the year 2016. To the contrary, Mt. Kilimanjaro, located just 205 miles from the equator in Tanzania, continues to host huge, year-round glaciers and snowfall on a regular basis. In fact, today’s eight-day weather forecast for Mt. Kilimanjaro, provided by weather.com via Google, shows a forecast of snow every day for the foreseeable future.

On page 45 of his 2006 book, Gore writes, “Another friend, Dr. Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University, is the world’s leading expert on mountain glaciers. Here he is at the top of Kilimanjaro in 2000 with the pitiful last remnants of one of its great glaciers. He predicts that within 10 years there will be no more ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro.’”

However, the website www.just-kilimanjaro.com reports the snow-capped mountain peak continues to exist “with permanent glaciers covering its entire tip.”

The website www.deeperafrica.com reports similar year-round snow. “Ice and snow can be found year-round on the mountain’s upper reaches. There are massive glaciers, ice fields, and towering walls of ice that blaze in the equatorial sun,” the website reports.

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Al Gore Falsely Claims Fossil Fuels Raise Coronavirus Death Rate

Al Gore falsely attempted to blame fossil fuels for raising the coronavirus death rate during a February 27 MSNBC interview. In reality, economic prosperity brought by the use of abundant, affordable fossil fuels results in lower death rates from viruses and epidemics. Also, viruses like influenza and COVID-19 thrive in cold climate conditions and are inhibited by warmer temperatures.

“This climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic are linked in some ways,” Gore said on MSNBC, as reported by The Hill. “The preconditions that raise the death rate from COVID-19, a great many of them, are accentuated, made worse by the fossil fuel pollution.”

Scientists have long known that cold temperatures are a key factor in the annual death toll for influenza, which kills an average of approximately 36,000 Americans per year.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) documents that flu season ramps up when the weather turns cold, and then peters out when warm temperatures return. According to CDC, “influenza activity often begins to increase in October. Most of the time flu activity peaks between December and February, although activity can last as late as May.”

According to Harvard University researchers, “In the southern hemisphere, however, where winter comes during our summer months, the flu season falls between June and September. In other words, wherever there is winter, there is flu. In fact, even its name, “influenza” may be a reference to its original Italian name, influenza di freddo, meaning “influence of the cold”.

“[A]t least in regions that have a winter season, the influenza virus survives longer in cold, dry air, so it has a greater chance of infecting another person,” the Harvard researchers added.

Scientists are still learning about COVID-19, but preliminary evidence indicates warmer temperatures have either minor or significant impacts reducing the spread and harm of coronavirus. Warmer temperatures certainly do not make COVID-19 worse.

According to a publication released by Harvard Medical School, a recent study by the National Academies of Sciences “found that in laboratory settings, higher temperatures and higher levels of humidity decreased survival of the COVID-19 coronavirus.” The scientists are currently attempting to determine whether this will also be the case in natural environments outside the laboratory.

In fact, cold temperatures kill many more people – for a variety of reasons – than warm or hot temperatures.

In an article published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W. R. Keatinge and G. C. Donaldson noted, “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”

More recently in a study published in the Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths, and found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700% more people than warm or hot weather.

In his MSNBC interview, Gore doubled down on his reckless assertions. He attempted to link fossil fuels to high asthma rates, which he claimed are made worse by the coronavirus. However, even as air pollution in the United States has consistently and sharply declined since the 1970s, asthma rates have increased substantially. This contradicts the assertion that air pollution causes asthma.

As explained by researcher Joel Schwartz in his paper, “Facts Not Fear on Air Pollution,” the incidence of asthma rose 75 percent from 1980 to 1996, and nearly doubled for children. However, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documents that air pollution has declined 74 percent since the 1970’s, over the same time period that asthma worsened.

In the end, climate change is neither causing nor exacerbating any identifiable illness or disease, be it COVID-19 or anything else. To the extent a modestly warming planet may impact COVID-19, the impact is almost certainly to reduce the spread of the disease and save many human lives.

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