Guest essay by Leo Goldstein
This essay attempts to address a rarely asked question: How did Silicon Valley, one of the greatest centers of wealth and brain power on Earth, embrace climate alarmism? Silicon Valley insiders are smart and successful people. By “Silicon Valley insiders,” I mean the founders, owners, venture capitalists, executives, and software professionals of the so-called tech companies located not only in the Silicon Valley, but elsewhere in the U.S.
Cognitive biases affecting understanding of the sciences
1. Silicon Valley insiders are educated and experienced in the software side of computer sciences but rarely in the kind of sciences that are directly involved with climate topics, such as physics, biology or energy engineering.
2. Software professionals tend to have a habit of not RTFM (and are proud of it). Software and Internet billionaires also might lack the time to RTFM.
3. Hardware design and manufacturing requires knowledge of physics, chemistry, and engineering. However, within the last 25 years most of the hardware manufacturing and even design that put the word “silicon” in Silicon Valley went offshore. In the last ten years, Silicon Valley has been doing very little outside software development (including firmware,) graphic design, marketing, “content,” and finances.
4. In contrast, software-centered computer sciences knowledge is very small in volume compared to the natural sciences, such as physics. One might even say that there is a 80/80/80 rule: 80% of what 80% of software engineers and architects use can be studied in 80 months. And this is the same pool of knowledge, shared by all these intelligent professionals. One cannot even remotely compare that body of knowledge to that of physics. It wouldn’t make sense to try to calculate how many months it would take to study all applied physics, or even one of its many branches (geophysics, atmospheric physics, nuclear physics, etc.) Consequently, smart minds with a software background easily fall into believing misleading “greenhouse” explanations by climate alarmists.
5. Software sciences are also everchanging. Ideas that haven’t been in circulation within the last five years just don’t matter. For example, one can be an excellent software engineer without ever hearing about the Turing machine, proposed and analyzed by Alan Turing in 1936. Can someone become an aerodynamic engineer without ever knowing Newton’s laws?
6. Developers of video games use realistic physical models and work hard to make them produce 60 frames per second. It is hard for them to believe that self-appointed “climate scientists” can cook up alarmist climate models designed to produce a physically incorrect output every 6 years.
7. Success is known to breed hubris and arrogance. Many SV insiders are extremely successful.
Cognitive biases affecting politics of the Silicon Valley businesses
8. It’s possible that some SV insiders (just as many politicians) confuse the “Internet opinion” (comments, tweets, subreddits etc.) as reflection of the US public opinion, when it’s more reflective of the leftist echo-chamber. Much of this content is written by college faculty and students, individuals with extra time on their hand and people living outside of the US. Most Silicon Valley companies are “Internet companies.” The Internet transcends international borders, so SV insiders seem to be blind to the dangers of global governance agendas, and some may even embrace them. A clear example of this is the promotion of the “United Nations Global Goals” on the Google’s U.S. front page. This is offensive to those who do not want to be subjects of the UN or any global governance. Climate alarmism has a very strong global governance component.
9. Silicon Valley is a suburb of San Francisco, a notorious Leftist stronghold, and includes Berkeley. Many SV insiders lived in this atmosphere long enough to imbibe its “values” and do not question its strong agendas, including climate alarmism. Add to this the prejudice that liberals are smarter and more educated than conservatives.
10. I suppose SV insiders find it hard to believe that the speech of climate realists could have been suppressed to such a great degree in this country. I could not believe that, too.
Possible Financial Motives
11. Silicon Valley companies do a lot of business abroad, including content business, from web search to news. Many SV companies derive more than 70% of their revenues from sales abroad. In doing so, they must obey local laws and satisfy demands of foreign governments. These demands may be political or ideological. Foreign laws and political demands seem to influence the thinking and actions of Silicon Valley companies. For example, Germany’s government demanded Facebook remove or filter out “fake news.” Immediately after, Facebook announced an initiative to do similar things (flagging “fake news”) in the U.S. Not surprisingly, all announced fact checkers are left-leaning, and some of them are notorious purveyors of fake news. Most foreign governments and political parties are either enthusiastic supporters or even instigators of climate alarmism, and might have heavily influenced SV insiders.
12. I hope none of these tech companies attempted to acquiesce demands of foreign governments or other foreign (including international) political entities regarding the content they provide in the US.
13. Of course, many tech companies are notoriously linked with the Democratic Party. This might be a consequence of the factors listed above, or it might have been a condition for success under Democratic administrations. For example, Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt was on Obama’s 2009 transition team before he went on to take a position in his science and technology advisory council.
14. Some SV insiders might be, as Richard Lindzen said, “newly minted billionaires who find the issue of ‘saving the planet’ appropriately suitable to their grandiose pretensions.”
California derived its early growth from the oil, soon becoming the national scientific leader. Now, it is comprised of little more than Hollywood, software, Jerry Brown, and collapsing infrastructure. Massachusetts, California and New York, the states that were once leaders in science, technology, and education, are now leaders in climate obscurantism.
This article focuses on the root causes of the climate alarmism conquest of Silicon Valley and its timeframe before 2014. Examples of recent actions by Google and Facebook simply illustrate earlier trends.
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Sign in my garage: “When all else fails, do it the way your wife told you”
Sign in the wife’s closet: “It’s either God’s will, or my husband’s fault”.
“Brain power” is one thing. Intelligence is another.
Some additional points:
15. Inside looking nature of Silicon Valley, somewhat similar to that of Hollywood.
16. Privileged (in comparison with manufacturing, energy, and other basic industries) political status of the software industry, also similar to that of Hollywood.
17. Recent influx of “content creators” with hard left views.
Software is infinitely complex compared to hardware. I agree that Silicon Valley is wrong on the issue but reason 4 is self serving nonsense.
Nah, the hardware guys are limited by what the programmers can or want to do, the design space for hardware is as large as what is real, I suppose software can extend into the unreal, but other than that.
Software can have basically an unlimited set of inter-dependencies, recursion, template meta-programming, etc. It is a symbolic thing like mathematics whereas hardware is constrained to the real world.
Yes, but the real world is really really big too. And the dynamic range too
Yes, many software projects are very complex, but they are built by a large number of individuals from a small number of building blocks using relatively small set of skills. And all these people share almost the same set of skills, which poses an additional problem – a large number of sophisticated persons with similar professional background may create its own echo-chamber, separate from the large leftist echo-chamber. BTW, I am a software engineer myself.
They’re all about opening up new technological frontiers. Placing tougher regulations on the old ones, that actually work, makes SV more competitive. It’s all about the money. People believe what they want to get what they want.
C’mon, most of these people are rich because they spend OPM (other people’s money). And they know they can get an unlimited amount of OPM from taxpayers.
Practical matters:
If it cools at the claimed rate of 40 W m-2 , then a data centre generating 100 kW (a 500 m2 room, 5400 sq ft) would require 2500 m2 (half an acre) of this radiative cooling surface, 5x larger than the roof of the centre.
And it would also require that the heat generated by the centre would be pumped (e.g. by water circulation) to just below the large surface of this film.
To affix such foil on the top of a building would require that this roof would be conducting these 40 W m-2. A rooftop made of a metal sheet may do the job, but this would be quite bad in Winter, when heat losses need to be minimized.
A better use (?) would be to cover entire glaciers in the Summer, to prevent them to melt further…
Michel,
I think your post was meant for this thread:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/02/13/a-reverse-greenhouse-effect/
These are interesting reasons but I think the article misses the most important one. As we are increasingly seeing, the ideas/products of Silicon Valley are very disruptive to established economic, political and social life and can potentially generate great hostility that can be very bad for marketing and profitability. They need an ethical/social rationale to overcome this hostility by persuading people that they are a force for good, What better way in the conditions of the last decade or two to argue that they are good for the environment, both directly – by substituting digital for physical technologies and activities – and indirectly, by using their influence to support environmental causes. And of course global problems require global solutions, which only multinationals can deliver. Hence, there is a symbiosis between global business and global green. The current opening of mainstream eyes about the arrogance and elitism of Amazon, Facebook, Google etc would probably have happened much sooner without this. The same points also explain why big oil and other corporates espoused environmental and climate causes that were apparently contrary to their interests. I write as someone who has observed this at close hand over thirty years.
So, technophiles in need of more justification for the disruption caused by the technology they’re pushing on us..
There is no such thing as climate science, only climate history, a branch of Geology. It tells us that we are at the end of a brief interglacial within an ice age and in the worst of only two CO2 crashes in earth’s history. Also that there is nothing unusual about our current climate, temperature does not follow CO2 and that plants, animals and people do better in warm periods and poorly in cold ones.
The “need for acceptance” is very much at play, here. Any who might voice an opinion contrary to that held by the majority of his peers, risks being ridiculed and ostracized.
Spent a little down time watching media predictions of the 2016 US presidential race. A very nice correlation emerges of outlets and personalities confidently predicting a Trump loss and pushing AGW alarmism. Running videos on the two topics side by side would make an interesting video.
So smug in their beliefs and yet so utterly wrong. Bet our friends in the UK had this experience after the Brexit vote.
“newly minted billionaires who find the issue of ‘saving the planet’ appropriately suitable to their grandiose pretensions.”
The noble and grandiose cause and it wont cost you anything to demand CO2 reduction.
Was it Apple or Google that tried to do something real in the green electricity, but found out it would hartly work.
The pupils of Theuth develop an undeserved reputation for wisdom.
Troe if only you could witness the continuing meltdown of liberalism on the BBC – continual spasms of anti- Trump hysteria grasping at any straw to berate Trump closely followed by continuous denigration of the deplorables who voted Brexit. Actually they really believe the narrative that it was sad old gits like me who have read more than than the green book of political right on correctness who are responsible for their serial defeats. They also have no understanding of how many people of All ages no longer believe their narrative and see the utter failure of the EU to do anything except screw the Greeks and Italians and impoverish most of the rest. I am astonished by some of the disdain I hear expresseed by educated, reasonable, people for the uninformed bigoted rubbish we now hear from BBC presenters and inadequate journalists.
Politics! The EU seems as mini-UN to me, does it not?
Leo,
I would postulate an additional reason: Silicon Valley software developers are not really engineers in the traditional sense. Many of the software developers and coders aren’t trained in the rigorous foundation of mathematics and logic, they are taking advantage of standing on the shoulders of those computer scientists who came before them. Instead of requiring deep knowledge of advanced mathematics to create the software programs, they now rely on code libraries and templates to provide a head start on new software writing. A lot of the candidates I’ve encountered in the past 15 years are alarmingly dependent on copying samples of code, rather than designing an algorithm and then building it into a functional software module. The lack of mathematical background, even the basic interest in mathematics, could explain how such intelligent people can fall prey to doctored data models posing as precise climate simulation. There is precious little inquisitiveness that would drive any one of them to spend time delving into the details that WUWT publish every day to illuminate the extent of the deception.
Right. But the influential ones are exceptionally smart and capable of understanding hard sciences (unlike Al Gore.) I mean people like Gordon Moore of Intel, Vinod Khosla, or Google founders. Just a couple out of hundreds of such people could have exposed climate alarmism as a fraud.
Right. But the influential ones are exceptionally smart and capable of understanding hard sciences (unlike Al Gore.) I mean people like Gordon Moore of Intel, Vinod Khosla, or Google founders. Just a couple out of hundreds of such people could have exposed climate alarmism.
There are also thousands mathematicians and statisticians working for them.
Hey Leo, I’m not sure if you live around here or grew up around here. I did. I can simplify all this. Going way back, to mid last century, the Bay Area especially the Western parts of it have been very, very Green. I’m talking about politics and general environmental policy wise. During my childhood the massive Green Belt we now have got started. Not only did that include State, County and National parkland. A number of Open Space Districts also came into being via various local election votes. Growing up, we had all things Green drilled into us. Not only that, but it seems me and all my friends were absolute cycling nuts. I was peddling up to Skyline even before I had a Driver’s License. There is just a certain zeitgeist around here that fosters everything Green. Back when I was teenager I started reading Callenbach. My Parents were members of Friends of the Earth. The Sierra Club was too conservative for them. I was a dedicated Friend of Earth First! in college. I obviously moderated a bit as I aged. The point I am making about all this is the tech companies are products of this environment. It’s pretty simple.
Protecting environment is good. Earth First is just a radical group with an environment as a banner issue. But why smart and scientifically inclined computer sciences majors embraced obscurantism and climatist pseudo-science was a thorny riddle for me.
I lived in Southern California for many years, and in Silicon Valley for some time.
Here’s an interesting article that may have part of the answer: http://niemanstoryboard.org/stories/annotation-tuesday-ron-rosenbaum-and-the-secrets-of-the-little-blue-box/
My take on why Silicon Valley elitists are so All-in on the Climate Hustle.
They are like Peacocks strutting their feathers : called Virtue Signaling, to get the cute liberal econutter females that run around Berkeley-SF-SanJose in bed.
7. Success is known to breed hubris and arrogance. Many SV insiders are extremely[…]successful.” Ha!
So how shall we wake them up and realize, “You know, maybe the globalist program in my head is a buggy piece of garbage causing the target society to run many hundreds of unknown and unwanted programs in the background…”
Through their wallets.
I have a simpler answer: The education system and its effects on our culture.
The SJW took over the education system long ago. They have taught their students the insidious shaming techniques used shut out opposition to several strongly held beliefs, one of which is climate alarmism.
It’s no surprise that highly educated Silicon Valley has bought into the climate alarmist belief system. You get ostracized if you do not. You lose access to jobs, venture capital, and your social group. The shaming mechanism is extremely powerful.
Peter
That’s right, too. And it is a topic in itself.
One simple point that does not seem to have been touched upon here:
I suppose SV people are supposed to be smart people, just like academics. Now, because they are supposed to be “smart”, that makes them more afraid to be “dumb” than other people. Which of course also makes them more vulnerable to the “all scientist agree” propaganda style, the argument from “authority”.
Many members of the so-called elites know little or nothing about global warming theory, judging by the many silly statements I have seen during the last 20+ years. Instead, they are just repeating a few talking points they picked up somewhere from the PR machines. Which seems to confirm my suspicion.
The final point made me think instantly of Bill Gates.
Straw men, slippery slopes, fallacies galore. Clearly Leo does not understand what Silicon Valley engineers do. As such, this essay is a part of the science communications problem, not a part of the solution.