The problem with environmental alarmists
I consider myself to be an environmentally minded person. Protecting the environment is the only area in which I personally feel that capitalism needs an infusion of governmental regulation. Individuals making decisions out of their own self interests yields great results in numerous facets of life, but safeguarding the environment requires that decisions are made in the best interest of all people, collectively.
That being said, I find the logic and tactics used by environmentalists to be dubious. One fallacious argument is made in the first sentence of this article that proudly predicts a “global collapse” of fish species.
If fishing around the world continues at its present pace, more and more species will vanish, marine ecosystems will unravel and there will be “global collapse” of all species currently fished, possibly as soon as midcentury, fisheries experts and ecologists are predicting.
The key phrase is “if [it] continues at its present pace.” This ignores the fact that individuals, governments, and wildlife itself are adaptive in both predictable and unpredictable ways. The authors of the study are clearly more interested in purveying a provocative headline than making realistic predictions about the status of marine animal populations.
As the numbers of a commercially viable marine animal dwindle the cost to seek out and capture said animal will increase. The higher acquisition cost will necessitate higher prices, which will diminish demand. Eventually the demand will fall below a critical level and virtually all efforts to capture the creature will cease as they will no longer be cost effective. The population will rebound.
Governments – possibly spurred on by people such as the authors of this study – may move to shift the supply or demand curve through regulation. Higher taxes applied to the purchase of seafood or restrictions on harvest size will cause the price to increase. See previous paragraph for eventual result.
Most striking is that environmental propagandists ignore one of the core tenants of the living world: life adapts. After the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980 many scientists wrung their hands at the ecological disaster. They were all surprised to see how quickly and completely the area rejuvenated itself. Some animals, including snapper, are able to change gender in order to cope with unsustainable ratios of male to female. The theory of evolution (which shouldn’t be called a theory, but that is another story) is the ultimate law of unknown consequences. When faced with a daunting set of circumstances some plants and animals go the way of the dodo and others react in unpredictable ways to preserve themselves. The point is that you can’t make a ceteris paribus extrapolation that far in the future with any reasonable expectation of accuracy.
My biggest pet peeve is when I see some study predict global temperatures decades in advance. My snarky rationale is that even the most seasoned meteorologist can’t seem to consistently predict temperature and precipitation just a few days in advance. But only slightly more seriously, I’ll compare climatological predictions to the trajectory prediction of a guided missile. Before a missile is launched virtually everything is known. Initial mass properties can be measured with a high degree of accuracy. The thrust generated by the engine is generally very well characterized. Environmental conditions can be measured just before launch. The azimuth and elevation of the missile can also be set with precision. Very advanced and complex codes exist that can model the position and attitude of the missile throughout flight. Yet devices must be included in the missile to correct for unknowns and the unexpected during flight in order to keep the missile directed at the intended target. And still these weapons “miss” their targets by some amount and their accuracy has to be quantified by defining a theoretical circle that the missile will likely land in a certain percentage of the time.
Contrast the predicted and actual flight of a missile, where virtually everything is known ahead of time, with climatological predictions where only the initial conditions are known. Think about the butterfly effect. Unlike the flight of a missile, there are no known variables after the start of the simulation. The bottom line is that computational climate models decrease in accuracy at an increasing rate with the passage of simulation time. Who knows how long they can be considered accurate? What is the stated (and verified) degree of uncertainty as a function of time?
We must protect our environment for generations to come, but we can need to make policy decisions without a bevy of Chicken Little’s running around (think Al Gore) proclaiming doom and gloom.
Update: It seems I’m not the only one with reservations about the marine population extrapolation.
“They are flagging a really serious problem, but I don’t buy that extrapolation,” said Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University.
