Just when you thought you'd heard the last about brexit

Not that any of my readers would be deluded enough to think that this is going to go away any time soon, just because Johnson wants to pretend it will.

Brexit, in some form or other, is going to start actually happening at the end of the month. I'd call it a grotesque act of self-harm but of course a lot of those who are going to suffer will be those who have opposed it at every turn. In fact it is not so much self-harm as intergenerational conflict. 

Here is the horrific split of voting preference versus age in the 2019 general election:

Now I know what you're thinking, old people have always tended to vote tory. True to a small extent, nothing like what has happened recently. Here is the longer set of results from 1992 onwards:

The blue lines do trend modestly up to the right, and red ones down but it was only since the brexit referendum that age became such a sharp dividing line, with roughly a 3:1 split of old voters voting one way and 3:1 split of young voting the other in the recent election.

What we have now is nothing short of an ideological war being waged on the young by the old. Having had all the opportunities and benefits of EU membership for most of their adult lives, they are denying this to their own children and grandchildren based on their anti-EU obsession. This isn't just an accidental consequence of not thinking about things, when specifically asked about the possibility of family members losing jobs due to brexit, a majority of brexit voting pensioners actually said they didn't care, they wanted their precious brexit anyway.

And let's not forget that there are about 2.5 million voters who have never been allowed to vote on brexit because they were under-18 at the time. Well over a million brexit voters are already dead (that's just simple demographics) and yet their views are literally held in higher esteem than real live people who are going to suffer the consequences for decades to come. Even if not a single person had changed their mind (and I'd agree not many have) then we would have had a majority for remain for the past year. That pretty much agrees with all opinion polls now for the past year and more, not to mention the election result itself where the tories (and brexit party) totalled about 45% of the vote versus the 55% from parties who wanted at least another referendum on the details if not outright opposition. Nevertheless, that's the way our system "works" and the tories have the power to do whatever they want for the foreseeable future. They, and those who voted for them, own the consequences in their entirety, especially after they've spent the past few years yelling that they know exactly what they voted for. A bit odd that they never managed to agree what that exactly was (beyond a few trivial slogans), but never mind. I'll not bother predicting because there is not yet any clear picture of what they want to achieve.

Remember the heady days of 2016 when the brexiters told us that we held all the cards and our negotiation with the EU would be the easiest trade deal in history? Now there is no more talk of sunlit uplands, brexit is at best presented as a tedious, costly and difficult task we need to try to get through before the tories can start to undo the damage caused by whoever it was that happened to be pretending to govern the country over the past decade (don't anyone tell Johnson who was in the cabinet over the past few years....). In fact it's such a good idea that the govt is banning any mention of it from February, even though the fun will barely have started at that point.

Some more brexit bonus

Assuming your primary aim is to dissuade well-qualified immigrants who will contribute to our scientific advancement and cultural and economic growth, that is. 

The first figures have emerged demonstrating that Brexit uncertainty has adversely affected UK research. They show Britain's annual share of EU research funding has fallen by nearly a third since 2015. The analysis by the Royal Society suggests scientists are choosing not to work in Britain, with a 35% drop in those coming to the UK via EU schemes.

Hooray!

Outcomes

At the start of the year I made some predictions. It's now time to see how I did.

In reverse order....

6. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere will increase (p=0.999).

Yup. I don't really need to wait for 1 Jan for that.

5. 2019 will be warmer than most years this century so far (p=0.75 - not the result of any real analysis).

As above, I know we've a few days to go but no need to wait for this one, which has been very clear for a good while now.

4. We will also submit a highly impactful paper in collaboration with many others (p=0.85).

Done, reviews back which look broadly ok, revision planned for early next year when we all have a bit of time (31 Dec is a stupid IPCC submission deadline for lots of other stuff).

3. Jules and I will finish off the rather delayed work with Thorsten and Bjorn (p=0.95).

Yes, the project is done, through the write-up continues. Actually we hope to submit a paper by 31 Dec but there will be more to do next year too.

2. I will run a time (just!) under 2:45 at Manchester marathon (p=0.6).

Nope, 2:47:15 this time. The prediction was made just a few days after I'd run a big PB in a 10k but even then I thought it was barely more likely than not, and it got less likely as the date approached. 

1. Brexit won't happen (p=0.95).

On re-reading the old post, I have to admit I cannot remember the precise intention I had when I wrote this. Given the annual time frame of the remainder of the bets, and the narrative of that time being that we were certainly going to leave on the 29th March (as repeated over 100 times by May - remember her? - and the rest of them) I do believe I must have been referring to leaving during 2019. After all, I could never hope to validate a bet of infinite duration. So yes, I'm going to give myself this one.

On the other hand, I did actually think that we would probably not be stupid enough to leave at all, and clearly I misunderestimated the electorate and also the dishonesty of the Conservative Party, or perhaps as it should be known, the English National Party.

I have learnt from that misjudgment and will not be offering any predictions as to where we end up at the end of next year. Which is sort of inconvenient, as we are trying to arrange a new contract with our European friends for work which could extend into 2021. Our options would seem to include: limiting the scope of the contract to what we can confidently complete strictly within 2020, which is far from ideal, or shifting everything to Estonia (incurring additional costs and inconvenience for us, though it may be the best option in the long term). Or just take a punt and cross our fingers that it all turns out ok, despite there being as yet no hint of a sketch of a plan as to how the sales of services into the EU will be regulated or taxed past 2020. It is quite possible that we'll just shut down the (very modest) operation and put our feet up. 

I'm still waiting for the brexiters to tell me how any of this is in the country's interests. But that's a rant for another day. Perhaps it's something to do with having enough of experts.

As for scoring my predictions: the idea of a “proper scoring rule” is to provide a useful measure of performance for probabilistic prediction. A natural choice is the logarithmic scoring rule L = log(p) where p is the probability assigned to the outcome, and with all of my predictions having a binary yes/no basis I'll use base 2 for the calculation. The aim is to maximise the score (ie minimise its negativity, as the log of numbers in the range 0 to 1 is negative). A certain prediction where we assign a probability of p=1 to something that comes out right scores a maximum 0, a coin toss is -1 whether right or wrong but if you predict something to only have a p=0.1 chance and it happens, then the score is log(0.1) which in base 2 is a whopping -3.3. Assigning a probability of 0 to the event that happens is a bad idea, the score is infinitely negative...oops.

My score is therefore:
0 - 0.42 - .23 - .07 -1.32 - .07 = 2.11

or about 0.35 per bet, which is equivalent to assigning p=0.78 to the correct outcome each time (which is just the geometric mean of the probabilities I did assign). Of course some were very easy, but that's why I gave them high p estimates which means high score (but a big risk if I'd got them wrong). I could have given a higher probability to the temperature prediction if I'd bothered thinking about it a bit more carefully. The running one was the only truly difficult prediction, because I was specifically calibrating the threshold to be close to the border of what I might achieve. It might have been better presented as a distribution for my finish time, where I would have had to judge the sharpness of the pdf as well as its location (ie mean).

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Is the concept of ‘tipping point’ helpful for describing and communicating possible climate futures?

There’s a new book just out "Contemporary Climate Change Debates: A Student Primer" edited by Mike Hulme. I contributed a short essay arguing the negative side of the above question. It was originally intended to be "Will exceeding 2C of warming lock the world onto a 'Hothouse Earth' trajectory?" but no-one could be found to argue in favour of that (this was shortly after the publication of the Steffen nonsense) so we settled on something a bit more vague. Maybe I should summarise my compelling argument but don’t have time right now so you’ll have to take my word for it.

I haven’t had time to read the book but my complementary copy just arrived (hence the post) and the table of contents is quite interesting, so maybe it would make a good Christmas present for the person who is interested in climate change – or even for someone who isn’t!

Introduction: Why and how to debate climate change
Mike Hulme
1. Is climate change the most important challenge of our times?
Sarah Cornell and Aarti Gupta
PART I: What do we need to know?
2. Is the concept of 'tipping point' helpful for describing and communicating possible climate futures?
Michel Crucifix and James Annan
3. Should individual extreme weather events be attributed to human agency?
Friederike E.L. Otto and Greg Lusk
4. Does climate change drive violence, conflict and human migration?
David D. Zhang and Qing Pei; Christiane Fröhlich and Tobias Ide
5. Can the social cost of carbon be calculated?
Reyer Gerlagh and Roweno Heijmans; Kozo Torasan Mayumi
PART II: What should we do?
6. Are carbon markets the best way to address climate change?
Misato Sato and Timothy Laing; Mike Hulme
7. Should future investments in energy technology be limited exclusively to renewables?
Jennie C. Stephens and Gregory Nemet
8. Is it necessary to research solar climate engineering as a possible backstop technology?
Jane C.S. Long and Rose Cairns
PART III: On what grounds should we base our actions?
9. Is emphasising consensus in climate science helpful for policymaking?
John Cook and Warren Pearce
10. Do rich people rather than rich countries bear the greatest responsibility for climate change?
Paul G. Harris and Kenneth Shockley
11. Is climate change a human rights violation?
Catriona McKinnon and Marie-Catherine Petersmann
PART IV: Who should be the agents of change?
12. Does successful emissions reduction lie in the hands of non-state rather than state actors?
Liliana B. Andronova and Kim Coetzee
13. Is legal adjudication essential for enforcing ambitious climate change policies?
Eloise Scotford; Marjan Peeters and Ellen Vos
14. Does the 'Chinese model' of environmental governance demonstrate to the world how to govern the climate?
Tianbao Qin and Meng Zhang; Lei Liu and Pu Wang
15. Are social media making constructive climate policymaking harder?
Mike S. Schäfer and Peter North

no comment

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Mina olen Eesti e-resident! 🇪🇪

I believe the title of the post proclaims me to be an Estonian e-resident. jules likewise. This marks the culmination of a very straightforward on-line process which was remarkably painless right up to the moment that we had to attend the Estonian Embassy in London to pick up our identity cards in person, at which point we had to brave Britain’s creaking rail network.

The point of establishing e-residency is to be able to set up a business there, which will enable Blue Skies Research to remain seamlessly in the EU in the event of the UK ever managing to leave. Not that the latter looks very likely, but in order to collaborate on any long-term project based on EU funding we need to be able to prove that there’s a plan in place to cover the theoretical possibility. This must be one of these “Brexit bonus” things that the tories have been promising us for the past few years. Though “bonus” would usually imply some sort of gain rather than added costs and bureaucracy, not to mention the losses in corporation tax which will henceforth be paid in Estonia rather than the UK. Even for our part-time hobby business, that is likely to be several thousands, perhaps up to ten thousand pounds, per year lost to the UK indefinitely into the future. Our combined share of EU membership fees is probably under a hundred quid per year. Even the bare cost of health insurance for when we visit our colleagues there will cost more than that when we lose the EHIC. But we will apparently get blue passports and we may eventually get a new 50p piece too when they have worked out the design. Apparently they had almost finalised that a while back, but hadn't worked out what to do about the border. Boom tish. Of course they still haven't, so Bonson is just lying through his teeth every time he opens his mouth, and the same old tory voters will just lap it up cos he's such a cheeky chappy with those clever latin bons mots.

We did managed to arrange another couple of things during the two-day trip, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. And it was cheaper than expected too, due to three of the four train trips being significantly delayed to such an extent we can reclaim half of the travel costs.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Marty Weitzman: Dismally Wrong.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum and all that, but I realise I only wrote this down in a very abbreviated and perhaps unclear form many years ago, in fact prior to publication of the paper it concerns. I was sad to hear of his untimely death and especially by suicide when he surely had much to offer. But like all innovative researchers, he made mistakes too, and his Dismal Theorem was surely one of them. Since it’s been repeatedly brought up again recently, I thought I should explain why it’s wrong, or perhaps to be more precise, why it isn’t applicable or relevant to climate science in the way he presented it.

His basic claim in this famous paper was that a “fat tail” (which can be rigorously defined) on a pdf of climate sensitivity is inevitable, and leads to the possibility of catastrophic outcomes dominating any rational economic analysis. The error in his reasoning is, I believe, rather simple once you’ve seen it, but the number of people sufficiently well-versed in statistics, climate science and economics (and sufficiently well-motivated to carefully examine the basis of his claim) is approximately zero so as far as I’m aware no-one else ever spotted the problem, or at least I haven’t seen it mentioned elsewhere.

The basic paradigm that underpins his analysis is that if we try to estimate the parameters of a distribution by taking random draws from it, then our estimate of the distribution is going to naturally take the form of a t-distribution which is fat-tailed. And importantly, this remains true even when we know the distribution to be Gaussian (thin-tailed), but we don’t know the width and can only estimate it from the data. The presentation of this paradigm is hidden beyond several pages of verbiage and economics which you have to read through first, but it’s clear enough on page 7 onwards (starting with “The point of departure here”).

The simple point that I have to make is to observe that this paradigm is not relevant to how we generate estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity. We are not trying to estimate parameters of “the distribution of climate sensitivity”, in fact to even talk of such a thing would be to commit a category error. Climate sensitivity is an unknown parameter, it does not have a distribution. Furthermore, we do not generate an uncertainty estimate by comparing a handful of different observationally-based point estimates and building a distribution around them. (Amusingly, if we were to do this, we would actually end up with a much lower uncertainty than usually stated at the 1-sigma level, though in this case it could indeed end up being fat-tailed in the Weitzman sense.) Instead, we have independent uncertainty estimates attached to each observational analysis, which are based on analysis of how the observations are made and processed in each specific case. There is no fundamental reason why these uncertainty estimates should necessarily be either  fat- or thin-tailed, they just are what they are and in many cases the uncertainties we attach to them are a matter of judgment rather than detailed mathematical analysis. It is easy to create artificial toy scenarios (where we can control all structural errors and other “black swans”) where the correct posterior pdf arising from the analysis can be of either form.

Hence, or otherwise, things are not necessarily quite as dismal as they may have seemed.

God's own marathon

I'd like to post about brexit but there's been absolutely nothing of note going on recently - truly it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So instead of that, another race report.

Every year the British Masters Athletics Federation organises a Masters Marathon Championship event, usually as part of one of the autumn city marathons ("Masters" = veterans). This year it was in York, or more precisely the Yorkshire Marathon. England Athletics also organised an England vs Celtic Nations Masters Marathon match at the same event. It's all a bit of meaningless fun really but what with it being reasonably local and with nothing much else on, I decided to give it a go this year. I could have qualified for the England team (through being in the top 4 in my age category in Mancs) but offered my services to Scotland instead. 

Training was a bit desultory, I wasn't going to spend hot summer days trudging around on long runs so just squeezed in an abbreviated plan in the 12 weeks leading up to the event. It was never going to be a PB for me, and a half marathon in September where I barely broke 1:25 (about 3 mins slower than my best) confirmed this. Never mind, I had a smart Scotland (veteran) vest to wear!

Had been hoping to see a bit of York over the race weekend, as we had barely visited before, but the location of our Airbnb to the north, combined with the need to visit the start village on the Saturday afternoon to pick up a race bib, meant we didn't really have time or energy for much else. But we managed to find a decent pizza in the impressive old assembly rooms which was stuffed full with a bunch of mostly skinny oldish people eating unusually large dinners early on a Saturday evening. I don't think the staff knew what was going on. It wasn't quite as good a pizza as in Manchester or Leeds, actually, but seemed adequate for the purposes.

The airbnb was a bit further than I'd have liked to be from the start, but we had plenty of time to wander there in the morning mostly down a quiet cycle route. Loads of people were already stuffed into the starting pens - I've never understood why people want to spend so long standing around like that - and I hopped over the fence with about 10 mins to go and found myself among lots of England veteran vests. In what was an interesting novelty to me, the vets were all wearing race bibs with their age categories on their backs - this is what I'd had to pick up the day before - so we could tell who we were supposed to be competing against. This is a really good idea as usually when an old baldie hoves into view mid-race I have little idea whether they are a direct competitor or not and therefore whether I should try to beat them.

The race was fairly uneventful really - I wasn't that sure of my fitness so didn't risk going too hard. Unfortunately that meant that I got dropped just off the back of what would have been a useful group around the 2nd woman and ran most of the race solo which didn't help in what had become a steady breeze. Temperature was comfortable enough, we only had one very light spot of rain along with a bit of sun that never got too hot. For some reason there were a couple of pipe bands, subsequent web searching suggests they were probably local to York as I can't imagine why any would have come down from Scotland.

Went through halfway in just under 1:25, almost exactly the same as my recent half marathon, but slowed slightly for the second half as my lack of motivation and training started to tell. Nothing drastic though, and I finished in 2:52:52, nominally my worst proper marathon since 2016 (not counting the very mountainous Bentham race) but not really that bad considering. With the wind and lots of gentle undulations it didn't feel like quite as fast a course as Manchester, though runbritainrankings seems to think it was just as quick or even quicker. But that may have been biased by the number of vets peaking specifically for this event. Anyway it was a decent event and well organised apart from the minor annoyance of having to pick up the back bib in person rather than having it posted out as with the standard race number.

On the finishing straight I managed to find my pre-arranged flags and crossed the line waving them to a suitably mixed reception.

According to the results I was the 7th overall M50, but 5th in the BMAF championships (which you had to specifically enter separately) and the 1st member of the Celtic Nations team. Though these results don't seem to have been officially announced yet. I don't get a haggis as a prize or anything like that. Just an unfeasibly large garish pink t-shirt which has been donated to jules for her own sartorial experimentation.

My latest brexit prediction

Thought I'd better make a prediction before tomorrow's verdict: the Supreme Court will rule the matter justiciable, it will furthermore conclude that Johnson lied to the Queen, but it will not demand a specific solution such as reopening parliament or declaring that the prorogation was null and void. This option was not even discussed on the "Talking Politics" podcast I listened to over the weekend, and since they've reliably got everything else wrong about brexit for the past three years, it's a slam dunk.

No, honestly, though I do think it's a plausible outcome I wouldn't attach a very high probability to being right on this. The story of brexit has been one of unpredictable twists and turns, even if the final outcome is amply summed up in this pie chart:

And here's some more twitter fun:

They lied to you pic.twitter.com/LN5eunkjIc

— Brexit Bin 🇪🇺 🇬🇧 #FBPE #RevokeRemain (@BrexitBin) September 21, 2019

Probably takes a click to make the gifs/videos play. [Oh, the second one doesn't seem to work. That's a shame. Well, it was just a long list of brexiters pretending everything was going to be great a couple of years ago, and now pretending that they never claimed it was going to be great. Just the usual lying liars lying.]

Oh how I long for the days when a PM syphoning off 100k of public money to one of their mistresses qualified as a proper scandal. These days it barely rates a mention on the BBC, and only then after people have baited them for a day over why they haven't covered it.

Meanwhile the Labour party conference has managed to create an outcome that is even worse than anyone imagined possible, not merely sitting on the implausible brexit unicorn fence but choosing to do so through a show-of-hands vote that many think was called the wrong way or at least too close to call without a proper count. What a shambles.

At least the LibDems have got there finally. I can snark at how long it took them to get there but they are still well ahead of the other two parties.

Bracing for brexit

So, the Govt has decided to splash £100m of our money on telling us to do what it has signally failed to do for the last 3 years - get ready for brexit. Of course the main aim of this marketing campaign is really to soften up the population for the supposed inevitability of brexit at the end of October, and hoodwink them into thinking that if it "happens" then that would be the end of the matter, rather than the start of decades of negotiation, argument and recrimination over the subsequent arrangements.

I had a look at the govt site, and for a small and simple company such as BlueSkiesResearch, there are pages and pages of vague verbiage that mostly miss the point and nothing that explains whether or not we would be able to travel to the rest of the EU to work there as we did in Hamburg and Stockholm over the last few years. Probably the best strategy will be to just lie and pretend it's a holiday. Of course there's no guidance for that either but we can be fairly confident that this would be sorted out in time for our next trip (probably the EGU meeting in Vienna if any Austrian immigration officials are reading).

More consequentially, I've also applied for - and received - Estonian e-residency (jules has also applied, but a bit later so hers has not come through yet). This will enable us to establish a business over there within the EU and hopefully allow easy participation in such things as Horizon2020 and its successor funding programmes. I know the govt had promised to support existing grants but the point is to be able to apply in the future.

Of course an inevitable consequence of this - on top of the time and money wasted, which will amount to a few hundred pounds by the time it's done and dusted - is that our company will be paying corporation tax in Estonia rather than the UK. Just one more bit of pointless self-harm by the idealogues.

I've still got to go to London to pick up the id card, that's more time and money down the drain. Perhaps after visiting the Estonian Embassy I'll take a stroll along Downing Street and chuck a few petrol bombs at No 10. Only joking, I'll probably take a milkshake.

Of course the most likely outcome - as I have said consistently for over three years now - is that we actually remain in the EU after all, when this colossally stupid act of self-humiliation collapses under its own dishonesty and idiocy. In the meantime, the damage mounts up and whatever happens now, the harm will take decades to recover from.