Dangerous games: selfishness v altruism on climate change

[Ball Lightning]

From the New Scientist Online Environmental blog.

Link

You may recall the "what's the worst that could happen" video that went around YouTube last year. US high school teacher Greg explained in a series of videos, complete with simple matrices and quirky hats, that decisions to act on climate change could all be resolved by considering the question: "what's the worst that could happen?"

His conclusion was that given error bars and confidence intervals, it's best to pay a little now to avoid huge damages later. This is the same conclusion reached, somewhat less colloquially, by Sir Nicholas Stern.

But there's a fault in both the above: they don't take into account human behaviour. Or rather, they both present the options (pay a little now or, if you don't, gamble on paying a lot later) but fail to consider whether humans will actually take the gamble. Both Greg and Stern know they would choose to pay a little upfront. But would you? And, more importantly, would governments?

A team led by Manfred Milinski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and Jochem Marotzke of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, both in Germany, analysed the behaviour of 60 university students to try to answer that question.

Six students were each given €40 and took turns putting money in a collective account. After 10 rounds, there had to be at least €120 in the pot. Providing this goal was reached, the players kept whatever money they had left-over from the origianl €40.

If, however, the €120 target was not reached, the computer "threw dice" to determine whether or not the students would be allowed to keep their leftovers. The dice were weighted so that there was a 90% chance the students would lose the remaining money, and just a 10% they would keep it.

The researchers got 10 groups of 6 students to play their game and found that half achieved the goal and half didn't.

When they loaded the dice differently so that there were just a 50% chance of losing the leftovers if the €120 target wasn't reached, just one out of 10 groups of players met the target.

I find it surprising that just half of those in the 90% games made it to the €120 target. It's not hugely encouraging. What's interesting is how the players changed their behaviour as the game progressed. Although they didn't know who they were playing, they could see if the others were playing fairly or selfishly. In the 90% games, players played less selfishly - giving as much as others - as the game progressed and neared its end.

In the 50% games, fair-sharing decreased and selfishness increased. Surprisingly perhaps, altruistic acts also increased. The researchers explain this by saying "altruists obviously tried to compensate free riding of others, but usually in vain". (How depressing.)

So the take-home message is: if it's clear that the risk is high, people will work together to reach a common goal. But if it's in the balance (ie, if there's a perceived 50-50 chance of dangerous climate change), then selfishness takes over.

The researchers make another interesting point: altruistic behaviour is likely to be diluted the larger the number of players. This implies smaller climate negotiations, such as those taking place in the G8 or in the "big emitters" meetings convened by the US are more likely to protect the common good than the all-inclusive UN process.

So... who fancies handing the world's fate over to a handful of governments?

Catherine Brahic, online environment reporter

 

[BasketCase]

The results actually shouldn't be confusing at all. When the gamble is either "get the pot up to 120 or you're 90% likely to lose all your leftover cash", there's a stronger incentive to get the pot up. When it's "get the pot up to 120 or you're 50% likely to lose all your leftover cash" the incentive to raise the pot goes down.

Selfishness is always the deciding factor. The players have the same goal at all times. Get more money for themselves. If the best way happens to be something that appears altruistic, fine and dandy. A complicating factor is that, in the real-world dice game of Global Warming, we don't know how high we need to raise the pot, and we don't know how the dice are loaded.

Your results actually explain quite neatly why the Kyoto Protocol might have failed. As you pointed out, the altruistic will try (but usually fail) to compensate for the selfish, and as the pool of "players" goes up, the odds for the altruistic players (of successfully compensating for the selfish) go down even further.

And Kyoto was a meeting of everybody.


Short version: I'm not surprised at all by these test results. Individual governments (which are simply groups of people) are acting with very straightforward self-interest.

 

[cubsfan6506]

I saw a similar experiment to show overfishing. The experiment was done on little kids. The experiment was there was a certain amount of m'ms in a cup. You could take as much as you want but as soon it goes around the m'ms double. It didn't make it around.

 

[Chairman Meow]

 

[BasketCase]

No point, Chairman--it will be decades before we see any real results--if any.

Part of the problem is that whenever something does happen that's helpful to one side (say, that period of cooling in the 50's or 70's or whenever that was) the other side calls it a fluke. There will be no way to know what is a fluke and what is actually a trend until long after the fact.

 

[Tee Kay]

So... who fancies handing the world's fate over to a handful of governments?

Well, we don't really have a choice do we?

 

[warpus]

Capitalism drives our civilization.

Selfishness & greed drive capitalism.

Of course it's going to be difficult to fight global warming.

 

[BasketCase]

Until the planet's population goes down, which will cause our emissions to go down, until global warming stops being a problem. That's assuming human emissions are causing it to begin with, of course.

 

[Fugitive Sisyphus]

Not putting money in the pot when you have a 50% chance of keeping your money anyways makes mathematical sense.

If there are 6 people, each with €40, then each person needs to contribute €20 for it to be fair way to have a €120 pot(6 * 20). This means, assuming that everyone cooperates, that you are expected to get €20. If you don't contribute any money at all, your expected return is 50% of €40 which is also €20. So, on average, you don't lose anything by not contributing. There is also a chance that you lose money even if you do contribute(because others don't) and there is a chance that you are guaranteed to keep all your money if you don't contribute(because other's make up for it). So you 'should' be selfish in this situation.

Now all of this has very little to do with global warming.

 

[Ball Lightning]

Now all of this has very little to do with global warming.

I agree.

We need to look at the science, and what it really tells us.

1: CO2 levels are corresponding to Temperature levels.

2: CO2 levels have been increasing since 1800's and since then have been surging to the highest level in 1,000,000 years which also goes against the normal pattern of CO2 and temperature in the last 600,000 years.

3: Coal plants do emit CO2 But Electricity generation is only half the problem, there are many ways humans have put CO2 into the atmosphere.

4: The Temperature is increasing, the artic is melting, ice shelfs in antartica is melting, Greenland is coming green, Australia weather is going crazy. And many other bizzare events or un-normal trends have been appearing ever since CO2 has gone up.

5: CO2 levels in the past 8,000 years have stopped falling at the time agriculture began, and since 1800 it has been increasing faster and faster, and suddenly at the time that industralism began CO2 shot up to its highest level, explain that in natural terms.

6: CO2 increase causes Global Warming is physics, prove that it isn't.

 

[BasketCase]

Now all of this has very little to do with global warming.

On the contrary, global warming is just one great big well-disguised "pass around the bucket" game.

Assuming CO2 is actually the cause of the problem (gee, there goes BasketCase with that caveat again), we need to fill the "pot" with, say, fourteen dollars' worth of CO2 reductions. We pass the pot around, nations contribute however much they like. At the end of the round, if there's 14 dollars in the pot, the problem goes away. If not, we get incinerated/baked/drowned/mildly inconvenienced.

The Earth doesn't care where that 14 dollars comes from. So we've got the same situation as with the schoolchildren and the pot full of M&M's. The kids as a group would have gotten 3 times as many M&M's if they'd taken fewer and allowed the pot to go all the way around. But the individual kids were greedy and took too many.

The nations of the Earth all want to keep their money for themselves. The most common tactic being various attempts to guilt the United States into providing all 14 dollars. Not gonna happen.


Game theory. That's all it is. How do you get enough in the pot to solve the problem, while keeping as much money as possible for yourself?

 

[Shadowlord]

(Interestingly, this thread has already been indexed by google)

Here are some interesting climate change simulation games:
http://www.globalwarminginteractive.com/index.htm (This was made for multiple people, so notice the three jobs in the top-left which you can switch between when playing alone, and how different actions have different colored boxes around them. They can only be modified by the job which is the same color)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/climate_challenge/

The second one has more detail in your choices, although the economic model seems to be pretty bizarre - every time I do it, I get 0-10% on economy, and you can't see how the economy is doing until the game ends.

The first one starts you in 1960 in Brazil (it supposedly has two countries so far, but maybe you need more players - probably 4+), and lets you control various budgets with sliders and set tax rates for individuals, businesses, on CO2, and protect forests. It gives you more detailed information on how your CO2 output is doing, what percentage of your energy comes from CO2-belching sources, what amount of fossil fuel you still have, how much unemployment you have, your GDP, population, etc.

The best I've done in the first one is by, in 1960, increasing science funding to 50, development incentives/subsidies to 50, the CO2 tax to 40 (the maximum), and acres to protect to 100 (leaving the other taxes at the normal setting). This causes an economic depression with high unemployment (over a decade or two), vastly slowing CO2 output while technology converts to clean sources. Once they're developed, clean sources rapidly replace fossil fuel sources and the economy recovers rapidly.

I ended up with a global average temperature of 71.42 (the 1960 value is 57) in 2060, and a global CO2 level of 137.58% of the 1960 level.

Of course we can't - in the real world - go back in time and enact radical carbon taxes in 1960 and pour massive funds into clean energy science and development. So we're in quite a bit more trouble. So I tried to simulate our current situation.

If we change *nothing* from the default settings in that simulation until 2010, we end up with a global average temperature of 70.86 and a global CO2 level of 190.55% in 2010. Worse still, just before reaching 2010 we burned through the last of our fossil fuels (and can only import tiny amounts, apparently)! If, at this point, we enact the same policies I tried in 1960 before... It's too late. Our economy is almost completely dead, so we aren't getting enough resources into science or development to research or build enough clean energy to restore the economy. By 2050 only 89% of our energy comes from non CO2 sources, though the vast majority of the rest of the power sources don't actually work due to lack of fuel. Unemployment is at 94%. The global average temperature is 79.4, and the global CO2 level is 168.55% of the 1960 value. By 2060 the temperature has increased to 79.6 and the CO2 level has dropped to 166.59% of the 1960 level. (Presumably the CO2 level is dropping because of lack of fossil fuels)

Edit: In the real world, our global CO2 level is around 120% of the 1960 level right now (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png ), so the simulation is flawed, presumably, or there were non-CO2-tax things that brazil's government did that drastically reduced CO2 output IRL, or something.

 

[cubsfan6506]

On the contrary, global warming is just one great big well-disguised "pass around the bucket" game.

Assuming CO2 is actually the cause of the problem (gee, there goes BasketCase with that caveat again), we need to fill the "pot" with, say, fourteen dollars' worth of CO2 reductions. We pass the pot around, nations contribute however much they like. At the end of the round, if there's 14 dollars in the pot, the problem goes away. If not, we get incinerated/baked/drowned/mildly inconvenienced.

The Earth doesn't care where that 14 dollars comes from. So we've got the same situation as with the schoolchildren and the pot full of M&M's. The kids as a group would have gotten 3 times as many M&M's if they'd taken fewer and allowed the pot to go all the way around. But the individual kids were greedy and took too many.

The nations of the Earth all want to keep their money for themselves. The most common tactic being various attempts to guilt the United States into providing all 14 dollars. Not gonna happen.


Game theory. That's all it is. How do you get enough in the pot to solve the problem, while keeping as much money as possible for yourself?

Not really a fair comarison. The nited states currently have the most money.

 

[BasketCase]

So what? We want to keep it. Unless you're willing to invade or nuke the U.S., there's nothing you can do to change the way we play the game.

And so, just like the kids who took too many M&M's, we're not gonna play nice. We have the same goal everybody else does: to keep as much money as possible.

 

[zxcvbnm]

The nations of the Earth all want to keep their money for themselves. The most common tactic being various attempts to guilt the United States into providing all 14 dollars. Not gonna happen.

No. We are trying to make the US pay their share of that 14 dollars. Not all, but something as currently mr. Bush isn't paying anything, unlike we Europeans.

 

[BasketCase]

And therein lies the game: do you bank on getting the U.S. to pony up, or do you fork over the money yourselves to save the whole planet......?

 

[zxcvbnm]

And therein lies the game: do you bank on getting the U.S. to pony up, or do you fork over the money yourselves to save the whole planet......?

We can give all that $14 but we'll come and get your share of it, later if not now, you can be sure of it...

 

[BasketCase]

Nope. Not happening. Unless Europe is willing to threaten a war--which they're currently not.

All part of the aforementioned game. Each player tries to guess whether the others are bluffing. Right now Europe can't bluff--big disadvantage.

 

[carmen510]

Global Warming is not something we can wholly stop now, its process is almost finished, plus scientists have said that the CO2 released before will still be in the air.

So what we really need to do now is to plant more rainforests (Deciduous trees actually release heat along with oxygen) and reduce carbon emissions.