Silly Science

A new paper is out in a journal getting a reputation for silly science that predicts that climate change will lead to a massive influx of Mexicans across the border to the United States. Here is how the LA Times breathlessly opened its news story on the PNAS paper:

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

A reporter emailed me an embargoed copy last week asking for my reactions. Here is how I responded (and I pulled no punches):

To be blunt, the paper is guesswork piled on top of "what ifs" built on a foundation of tenuous assumptions. The authors seem to want to have things both ways -- they readily acknowledge the many and important limitations of their study, but then go on to assert that "it is nevertheless instructive to predict future migrant flows for Mexico using the estimates at hand to assess the possible magnitude of climate change–related emigration." It can't be both -- if the paper has many important limitations, then this means that that it is not particularly instructive. With respect to predicting immigration in 2080 (!), admitting limitations is no serious flaw.

To use this paper as a prediction of anything would be a mistake. It is a tentative sensitivity study of the effects of one variable on another, where the relationship between the two is itself questionable but more importantly, dependent upon many other far more important factors. The authors admit this when they write, "It is important to note that our projections should be interpreted in a ceteris paribus manner, as many other factors besides climate could potentially influence migration from Mexico to the United States." but then right after they assert, "Our projections are informative,nevertheless, in quantifying the potential magnitude of impacts of climate change on out-migration." It is almost as if the paper is written to be misinterpreted.

Climate change is real and worthy of our attention. Putting forward research claims that cannot be supported by the underlying analysis will not help the credibility of the climate science community. Even with the voluminous caveats in the paper, to conclude that "climate change is estimated to induce 1.4 to 6.7 million adult Mexicans (or 2% to 10% of the current population aged 15–65 y) to emigrate as a result of declines in agricultural productivity alone" is just not credible. The paper reflects a common pattern in the climate impacts literature of trying to pin negative outcomes on climate change using overly simplistic methods and ignoring those factors other than climate which have far more effect.

One of the paper's authors, Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton professor and lead author of the forthcoming IPCC report on extremes explains his motivation with the paper:

Our primary objectives were, No. 1, to give policymakers something to think about and, No. 2, to give researchers a spur to start answering some of the more complicated questions

One of the climate impacts scholars whose work was relied on in the PNAS paper was critical:

Diana Liverman, a University of Arizona climate researcher, criticized the new study for basing its forecasts in part on research that she worked on in the early 1990s that looked at crop yields in only two central Mexico sites.

In reply, Oppenheimer said the Princeton study found similar results in a second crop-yield study, and the crop reductions predicted for Mexico are typical of what has been predicted for other countries in that latitude.

Liverman said that while she believes climate change could cause widespread migration, she has seen no study documenting it. Having studied the problems of Mexican farmers for two decades, she said she has found that a bad economy, the government's withdrawal of agricultural subsidies and the North American Free Trade Agreement have caused problems far greater than climate change.

Nature also has a set of critical reactions. The LA Times article recovered from its breathless opening with a well-buried lede:

Philip Martin, an expert in agricultural economics at UC Davis, said that he hadn't read the study but that making estimates based solely on climate change was virtually impossible.

"It is just awfully hard to separate climate change from the many, many other factors that affect people's decisions whether to stay in agriculture or move," he said.

In silly science however, nothing is impossible.

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The Forest for the Trees

The blog post below by Sharon Friedman, a scientist who deals with land management issues every day, is reposted from A New Century of Forest Planning.

Creekside Ruminations on Climate Change from Bark Beetle Country

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a field trip on part of the old Routt National Forest, when I had to take a climate change conference call. Since cell phone coverage was spotty, we targeted a good spot and I was dropped off for a couple of hours and sat at creekside while on the calls.

Looking at the dead trees on the hills, it became clearer to me some of the disconnects between climate change as talked about or written about in scientific journals, and as currently lived.

1. People are already dealing with climate change every day as part of their work.
People are felling hazard trees, doing WUI fuels treatments, looking for biomass opportunities, etc. Climate change is just another change agent that affects our work.

2. We may never know how much of what we observe is due to climate change (take bark beetles; 100% climate change? 75% climate change plus the age of trees 25% ?). But we still have to deal with the changes, regardless of their source. So it probably doesn’t make sense to have a separate pot of funds for climate change adaptation or resilience- otherwise we might spend out time in tedious disagreements about whose problem is more climate-induced.

3. We will be dealing with these issues collaboratively, locally (for the most part) using an all lands approach, and involving regulators and communities early and often.

We can’t or shouldn’t get to the point where the community and the FS is in one place, but the regulators have a different worldview.

4. Climate change will include opportunities as well as hazards and difficulties.

For example, at the Steamboat Ski Area, we visited a site where dead trees provided an opportunity for a children’s outdoor ski opportunity..

5. It could be argued that the complex structure of direction in the Forest Service does not make us as flexible and adaptive as we need to be. Changes due to climate change and other factors can occur more quickly, and in different spatial/temporal configurations, than the current structure can respond to.

For example, the ranger district or forest is the right scale for many decisions. But not for bark beetles. Should it be dealt with by the current three forests? An interior west scale group? What would be the governance of such a group?
We have the incident command model for fires.. but if something is large, but not a month by month kind of emergency, do we have an organizational structure to deal with it?

6. Safety of our employees and the public need to come first.
I don’t know at the end of the day how many climate change issues will have real safety hazards such as bark beetle and other sources of dead trees. The urgency requires new ways of working together in a timely way. Environmental groups, industry groups, local communities, regulators- we all need to be able to speed up from our bureaucratic and legal natural rate of speed to an emergency rate of speed.

7. If ecosystems are too complex to predict (“more complex than we think, more complex than we can think”), let’s use scenarios and not specific predictions, and pick “no-regrets” strategies. I wonder sometimes if we are overthinking and overanalyzing climate changes and I think we should consider the opportunity costs of what we could to to “protect reconnect and restore” in the Trout Unlimited strategy versus “assess, predict and model.” Note that while common sense and decision theory under uncertainty have always argued for “no regrets” strategies, now at least some water scientists agree.

I would ask us to think about that climate change may be a stressor to our organizational and social systems as well as the environment. It requires us to work together faster, and better than we have in the past. I often wonder if climate science funding were divided half to social scientists, what would the “best available science” look like?

I’d be curious about others’ ruminations on these topics…

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Unit Conversion - A Million Votes

Advocates for action on climate change are fond of arguing that costs of a few percent of GDP are really quite small in absolute terms (see image above from EDF). Here is one way to think about a 1% reduction in GDP in political terms.

Political scientist Ray Fair calculates that in historical presidential elections, every 1% decrease in GDP results in a 0.7% decrease in vote share for the incumbent party(See Table 2 in this PDF). In 2008, more than 130 million people voted in the US presidential election. In very round numbers, a 1% change in GDP has historically led to a swing of 1 million votes.

Are 1 million votes a small amount or a large amount? For selfish reasons alone, policymakers are going to be reluctant to impose any brakes on GDP, no matter how small those effects are argued to be. Climate policy will not succeed until the benefits are far more tangible and on the short term.

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Tennessee Titans sue USC and Lane Kiffin for Inducement of Breach of Contract and Tortious Interference

Marcia Smith of the Orange County Register has the story on the lawsuit and interviews me and Lewis & Clark Law School professor Tung Yin about it.

The gist of the lawsuit: the Titans allege that USC and its new coach, Lane Kiffin, "maliciously" lured away running backs coach Kennedy Pola to become the Trojans' offensive coordinator.

The alleged malicious part is that Pola's contract with the Titans required written permission from both the Titans team president and its general counsel for him to take another job. He didn't get the permission, and the Titans claim USC and Kiffin knew about the permission requirement. Now the Titans don't have a running backs coach with a week to go before training cap.

Here is an excerpt from Smith's story:

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"It's a funny lawsuit that could have been avoided if Kiffin had made the customary courtesy call before talking to Pola," said Lewis & Clark Law School professor Tung Yin. "The harm that they (the Titans) are also alleging also probably wouldn't have been an issue if the hiring happened two or three months ago and not left the Titans without a running backs coach a couple days before camp opens."

This is the latest controversy for Kiffin, who left his University of Tennessee head coach job and a trail of secondary NCAA violations and rubbed-the-wrong-way peers after the 2009 season to become the USC coach. Titans coach Jeff Fisher, a USC alumnus who hired Pola in February, expressed dissatisfaction with Kiffin's methods that neglected the terms of Pola contract, which ran at least through Feb. 14, 2011.

"There is a tradition of coaches changing teams for promotions, even when their employment contracts contain language that technically limits their ability to change teams,..." said Vermont Law School professor Michael McCann. "The Titans have to be careful here. If the Titans develop a reputation for not letting assistant coaches take on other jobs, it may hurt their chances for hiring top assistant coaches."

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To read the rest of Smith's column, click here. To read the complaint, click here.

I have 5 other points:

1) I think it would be interesting to find out how common the alleged clause requiring Pola to obtain written permission is in the contracts of Titans' assistant coaches and, if it is common, whether the team has enforced it with other departing coaches. Or, if its unique to Pola's contract, why did the team insist on having it with him?

2) Although the facts of this case are different, there was the recent case in New York involving James Madison University engaging in tortious interference by hiring away basketball coach Matt Brady from Marist College without obtaining the proper permission from Marist. Marist won the case. While that case is in a different jurisdiction, does not concern a position promotion (as Pola, now an offensive coordinator as opposed to mere running backs coach, is getting with USC), and probably involves different contractual language, perhaps the Titans nonetheless feel emboldened by the outcome of that case.

3) I assume Pola isn't being sued himself for breach of contract because the Titans do not believe it is financially worth it, or because they still like him as a person, or because they do not want to develop a reputation for suing departing employees who leave the team for a promotion.

4) While this lawsuit is unlikely to prevail, the Titans are sending a message that other teams probably agree with: don't poach coaches right before the start of training camp.

5) If this dispute were between the Titans and another NFL team, rather than with a college team, we wouldn't see a lawsuit -- we'd see Commissioner Goodell resolve it, internally (like when Commissioner Tagliabue resolved the dispute between the Jets and Patriots when the latter hired Bill Belichick away -- the Jets got a first round pick, the Patriots got what turned out to be one of the best coaches of all time).

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Midnight Ice Cream and Comic Relief

I was talking with a coach a while back about family life during the season ... He said in the past he unfortunately pretty much forgot about his wife and kids once 2-a-days started but last season he tried something. He decided that he would do something special for his wife on Tuesday, his daughter on Wednesday and son on Thursday.

They loved it. His wife liked red wine - so "Wine with Wife on Tuesdays". His daughter - ice cream. Many times he would get home insanely late on Wednesdays ... so he would wake her up and they would have "Midnight Ice Cream". His son was going through a checkers fad .... "Checkers with Chad.

It was the best season of his life. His kids would go to bed a little earlier on "their" night knowing that Dad would come and wake them up to spend time with them. He was tired but he wouldn't trade it for the world now.

For some comic relief, here is a rap for all Dads - "Dad Life". Thanks, Bob Dwyer!

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HEROES-Julian Assange

Julian Assange is the founder and chief editor of WikiLeaks, a website that angers governments and corporations by publishing leaked documents, videos, and other info from whistleblowers and insiders. Assange does this at great personal cost since many governments would like to "talk" to Mr. Assange about his activities. Needless to say, Julian keeps a low profile and no fixed address. He is almost certainly on someone's hit list.

Assange is a rare individual. He has courage. He believes in what he calls "scientific journalism." He puts the documents out there and lets you make up your own mind. But he is also an activist. People criticize him for this because they expect him to take a neutral stance on all things journalistic. I think this is impossible. But unlike other journalistic outfits, Assange does publish his source material.

Julian has a unique background. According to Wikipedia, he is Australian, has been in various schools in his youth, is an autodidact, and got into trouble in his younger days for hacking. Assange is an ethical hacker, and those skills are what enable him to run WikiLeaks.

I admire Assange for being antiwar and having the courage to expose to the world what governments do. This makes him a hero in my book, and you get the feeling that he will inevitably be a martyr for his cause. I can only hope that he can find some refuge in Iceland and keep doing what he is doing. The world needs more people like Julian Assange.

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Chronicle of Higher Education Article on Sonny Vaccaro and O'Bannon v. NCAA

Libby Sander has an extensive and thoughtful article on Sonny Vaccaro and O'Bannon v. NCAA in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is titled The Gospel According to Sonny: Sonny Vaccaro helped commercialize college sports. Now he wants athletes to get their due. She interviewed many persons for this story, including me and Duke Law Professor Paul Haagen. Here are some excerpts:

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Three years have passed since Mr. Vaccaro ended his decades-long career as a marketing executive with Nike, Adidas, and Reebok, for which he oversaw large-scale events for elite teenage players ... Now, in a new period of his long involvement with the game, Mr. Vaccaro, who is 70, has embarked on a personal quest of sorts. If he succeeds, he could fundamentally change college sports. He could also change his legacy.

* * *

One of [Vaccaro's] most consistent complaints is that the NCAA's rules governing athletes, especially that limit scholarships to one year and require athletes to sit out a year after transferring, treat players like commodities to be traded at convenience. He recently produced a list of more than 300 Division 1 basketball players who, by late June, had already transferred to other institutions--presumably in part because of recruiting promises left unfilled--where they will lose a year of eligibility.

* * *
. . . Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, a group of 14,000 current and former Division I athletes that advocates for many of the same issues as Mr. Vaccaro, says the aggresive rhetoric (of Vaccaro) strikes exactly the right tone. The NCAA "doesn't respond to people asking nicely," he says. "It responses to force: lawsuits, new laws, public criticism through the media. I think he's doing exactly what he needs to do if he's going to inspire change.

"Look at who he's talking to. He's talking to the future lawyers. He knows where the power lies."

[Note from McCann: Vaccaro has spoken at a number of law schools and other academic institutions in the last couple of years, including Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and Boston College Law School -- check out our coverage on Sports Law Blog]

* * *
. . . Mr. O'Bannon's case in particular has brought more attention to a waiver that athletes sign when accepting a scholarship, which authorizes the NCAA to use their names and pictures to promote NCAA events, giving up all future rights in the association's licensing of those "images and likenesses."

Michael McCann, a professor at Vermont Law School who focuses on sports law and has written about the O'Bannon case, says Mr. Vaccaro's willingness to push the issue of whether athletes should receive compensation, even retroactively, forces people inside and outside intercollegiate athletics to confront a concept many feel is threatening.

"People love college sports. To suddenly change it to where college players are paid would change the way we look at college sports," Mr. McCann says.

To Mr. Vaccaro, however, the quandary is almost purely one of labor and compensation—with the wrong people benefiting from a distorted market.

"He really is trying to get at the questions of what's the appropriate interaction of education, athletic competition, and kids—particularly kids who come from fairly tough backgrounds," says Mr. Haagen, the law professor at Duke. "I think Sonny had this kind of intuitive sense that a lot of the amateurism talk was not correct. ... What he really understands is the beginnings of an effort to try to get dollars to people who are producing value."

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To read the rest (subscription only), click here. It's a must read if you have a subscription.

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