Junk science double fail
<p>Two bits of science news appeared on my radar today with not much in common except that they&#8217;re both exceedingly bad news for the political class.  That more or less guarantees that they&#8217;ll get poor or nonexistent coverage in the mainstream media and is a good enough reason for me to write about them.</p>
<p>First, the British Meteorological Service and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia are now admitting that <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html">global warming stopped in 1997</a> &#8211; there&#8217;s been no net rise in the Earth&#8217;s temperature in 15 years.  And no, this isn&#8217;t an illusion produced by the 1997 El Nino peak &#8211;  if you look at the chart accompanying the article you&#8217;ll see that GAT has dropped to pre-el-Nino levels.</p>
<p>The source makes this a particularly difficult pill for AGW alarmists to swallow &#8211; for of course, the CRU is the home of the infamous &#8220;team&#8221; whose work has been at the center of the panic.  If they&#8217;re wrong now, what warrant do we have that they weren&#8217;t equally wrong then?</p>
<p>And, actually, it gets worse.  Solar observations suggest we may be headed for an insolation minimum ever deeper than the one in 2008 that wiped out the entire 20th-century GAT rise &#8211; in fact, some NASA meteorologists are muttering darkly about a near-term recap of the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age!</p>
<p>This of course, is bad news for the political class because AGW panic was so useful for raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy.  The general public has been increasingly skeptical of late, but popular reaction so far has been nothing compared to what will be unleashed if it turns out the real climate problem of the next two decades is how to keep our crops from freezing.</p>
<p>Our other news today is of a study apparently showing that <a href="http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2012/01/iq-matters-understanding-your-world-so.html">the heritability of IQ increases with age</a>.</p>
<p>IQ, and its heritability, has been a major irritant to would-be social engineers. Because &#8211; no matter how much propaganda they sponsor to the effect that IQ is meaningless, or multifactoral, or the tests are culturally biased &#8211; IQ assessments done in the traditional way aimed at approximating Spearman&#8217;s g keep turning out to be about the single most valuable statistical measure for predicting not just academic performance but all kinds of other interesting things like lifetime earnings and propensity to criminality.</p>
<p>This new result is another turn of the screw. Because now it turns out that while you can raise childrens&#8217; measured IQ with all the usual nostrums (better family circumstances, intensive schooling, etc) the effects of such interventions vanish in the adults that the children become.  A particularly strong finding is that while adoptive children tend towards the IQ distribution of their foster families, the adults they become revert to <em>the IQ distribution of their biological families.</em></p>
<p>This matters because poverty is correlated with and often caused by low intelligence. This is even more true today than it used to be, because we have a whole meritocratic apparatus aimed at scooping up poor-but-bright kids and tracking them into good schools and good jobs so they don&#8217;t <em>stay</em> poor. (And, as cynical as I sound in the rest of this post, be in no doubt that I think this meritocratic apparatus is a good thing and among the proudest achievements of our civilization.)</p>
<p>But: Our political class is heavily invested in the ideology that all the factors driving poverty are environmental.  Because that means we can social-engineer our way to an egalitarian utopia by methods which &#8211; surprise! justify raising taxes and increasing central control of the economy. It&#8217;s bad news for them that adult IQ is genetically heritable and intractable to the sorts of interventions that employ thousands upon thousands of bureaucrats and busybodies.</p>
<p>To be fair, neither the prospect of a cooling earth nor the intractability of IQ are good news for the rest of us either.  It would be nicer, in many ways, if we really lived in the political class&#8217;s fantasy world &#8211; the place where all our troubles are self-created, there&#8217;s always someone to blame, and always a political fix.</p>
<p>But at least, since we <em>don&#8217;t</em> live in that fantasy world, we can tell the political class to stuff its coercive utopianism up its own ass and demand our liberty back.</p>
