Global warming, part 2

Most of the talk about global warming comes from politicians, not from scientists who actually know something about the subject. (Perhaps they’re afraid that people will learn that the real cause of global warming is “hot air”.) Apparently those scientists who do know something can be actively locked out by the politicians. See the article Bitten by the IPCC by Lawrence Solomon, which appeared in yesterday’s National Post.

Too much knowledge can be a bad thing

This isn’t a rant, but an account of something amusing that just happened to me.

While my computer was busy preparing a backup I was playing the game Text Twist (Palm OS version), where you are given 6 letters (e.g. USECED) and have to find words of 3 or more letters that can be formed from those 6 letters (e.g. USE, SEE, CEDE, CEDES, etc.). The more words you find, the more points you get. The critical thing is to find at least one 6-letter word (there’s guaranteed to be one), or you are tossed out of the game. (In the case of USECED, there are two such words, DEUCES and SEDUCE. But usually there’s only one word.) For assistance you can click “Twist”, which randomly reorders the letters.

This round I was presented with the letters EINSUX. It didn’t take me long to find UNIXES, a familiar name from my computer background, but not a valid word in Text Twist’s dictionary. Then I found USENIX; same problem. I couldn’t find anything other than those two before the clock ran out on me, and I wonder whether they blinded me from finding the valid word that was there. Which was UNISEX.

Billing vs. marketing vs. me

I was just about to pay my Rogers Cable TV bill when I noticed something amiss: the Digital Terminal and Digital Services fees added up to $7.48 (they were $4.49 and $2.99 respectively), but my “VIP Discount” was only $6.98. This bothered me because in the past my VIP Discount exactly cancelled out those two fees.

I called Rogers customer service, who did a pretty good job with my call: the first-tier agent gave me enough information to convince me that my total was correct and only the breakdown was wrong, but because I still was unhappy she passed me on to someone in the “management office” who explained the whole story. Apparently Marketing had decided to raise the digital terminal rental by 50 cents for everyone, so that non-VIP customers would pay $4.49 instead of $3.99 while VIP customers would pay 50 cents instead of zero.

I objected that the bill explicitly stated that my VIP Cable package included a free digital terminal: “Your VIP Cable package includes ... first digital terminal (from $4.49), Digital Services Fee, ...”. Guess what: it does, if you look at it just the right way. This price change was made at the same time as another price increase, that of VIP Cable. VIP Cable programming went up by $2.50 and digital terminal by $0.50, for a total increase of $3. (If I didn’t have a digital terminal I’d save 50 cents a month. Plus tax.) But if you look at it another way, the increase was $3, which includes a 50-cent credit toward the higher digital terminal fee. Multiple answers with no official contradictions: these people should start a religion.

If you haven’t followed all this, that’s ok: the point is that the total is correct but the breakdown is misleading. (What they really need is to tell their billing system that there are now two VIP Cable programming products, one analog and one digital, with slightly different prices. But perhaps their billing system can’t handle it.) I suggested to the “management office” person that he pass this complaint on so that clarifying the bill could be looked into. He obviously didn't want to so I badgered him and he said that he would run it by his management, but I’m not holding my breath. He knows, as I know, that hardly anybody actually reads their bills and insists on understanding them. But as I pointed out to him, most people who think something may be wrong won’t call Rogers; they’ll just hate Rogers, unfairly in this case.

Global warming

The Earth’s certainly been warmer than usual lately, enough so that I believe all the worry about consequences to be entirely justified. But it’s not at all clear to me that the global warming is caused by human activities. Yes, there are such things as greenhouse gases and we’ve been generating them, but there are lots of forces that affect climate, and I’m concerned that we’re just picking one to the exclusion of all others.

We humans unfortunately like to do that kind of thing, because it lets us believe that we can control things more than we actually can. For instance, when Ronald Reagan ran for U.S. president, he seized on the doctrine of supply-side economics because it would allow him to cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and increase spending — simultaneously. It didn’t work. The economic forces quoted by supply-siders do exist, but so do others.

If we want to put the brakes on global warming it is crucial that we understand what’s causing it. If we assume that the problem is greenhouse gases and we’re wrong, we may expend enormous efforts to reduce greenhouse gases only to have global warming gallop on unchecked — while we avoid dealing with the consequences because we believe we’re solving the problem at the source.

Some people have remarked that it’s not just the Earth that’s experiencing global warming, that other planets in our solar system that have atmospheres are experiencing the same thing. If that’s accurate, then global warming is almost certainly caused by conditions external to the Earth. For one person’s writing on this, with links to various sources, see this. I can’t vouch for any of it, but then nobody should vouch for the simplistic assumption that global warming is being caused by human-generated greenhouse gases. Climate is a very complex thing, just like economics, but certain people, like politicians (not just the publicly elected ones, but also those who maneuver their way into heading up non-governmental organizations), find it convenient to pretend that they have all the answers. Reaganomics didn’t work, and now one of the loudest voices in the greenhouse-gases-are-evil establishment is someone else who’s had a run at the U.S. presidency, Al Gore. Mr. Gore likes to act as though he’s a scientist, but he’s no more a scientist than Mr. Reagan was an economist, and he falsely claims that all the scientists agree on what’s behind global warming.