Month: April 2005

Duffy on global warming

John Quiggin108 Comments

Via Immanuel Rant, I found this piece by Michael Duffy in Saturday’s SMH, pushing global warming denialism. Immanuel points out that Duffy has been more than a little economical with the truth, saying

Duffy is correct to warn us not to overlook agendas and political interests and how they affect science. The trouble is that Duffy’s “cold, hard look� forgets the mote in his own eye. Kellow and William Kininmonth (also mentioned) are members of The Lavoisier Group. The group was created by Ray Evans of Western Mining and is an astroturf operation.

The article is full of similar examples. Sceptic Bob Carter is described as “an environmental scientist at James Cook University”. At least when I knew him there, he was a geologist working (not surprisingly) with the mining industry, and his current affilation is still with the School of Earth Sciences Nothing wrong with that, as Duffy himself says, but, why the misrepresentation.?

Then there’s the reference to a conference held by

The Friedrich Naumann Foundation, a liberal think-tank,

which

held a climate seminar in Germany in February and conducted a poll of the 500 climate researchers who attended. A quarter doubted that the modest warming of the past 150 years is due to human activity.

For most Australian readers, the term “liberal’ without capitalisation might imply a moderate progressive, perhaps an Australian Democrat. Duffy doesn’t bother to inform us that the Foundation is liberal in the classical sense. It stands for

he reduction of state interventionism, the advocacy of decentralization and  privatization, the cutting of existing state regulations and of bureaucratic red tape in our daily lives.

In other words, it’s an ideological clone of the CIS, IPA or Cato. It appears to have close ties with the last of these, a well-known promoter of junk science on this and other topics. Duffy could have been honest with his readers and called it a “free-market thinktank”, but that would have alerted them to possible bias. I managed to find a report on the meeting here, but it’s in German and I can’t really follow it. It doesn’t appear to me that those in attendance were climate scientists, though some of the speakers were.

It seems to be just about impossible to attack the consensus view on global warming without resorting to dishonest misrepresentation. Duffy is no exception to this pattern.

Update Tim Lambert has more.

And, given his past form, I’m not surprised to learn that Duffy is an exponent of rightwing postmodernism.

As you’d expect from someone hired as the “right-wing Philip Adams’, Duffy poses as a critic of postmodernism, as in this Counterpoint episode where he links it to Leninism, eugenics and contempt for ordinary people, and defends science as a source of truth.

But, when science says something Duffy doesn’t like, for example on global warming, he’s happy to embrace the “social construction of reality” thesis, as propounded by political scientist and Lavoisier Institute member Aynsley Kellow.

Further update It turns out (see the comments thread) that the respondents to the survey described by Duffy were not, as he says, climate scientists attending a conference in 2005, but members of meteorological societies who responded to a survey sent out in 1996! It’s scarcely surprising that a lot of respondents took the view, at that time, that anthropogenic climate change was not proven. IIRC, the IPCC took the same view. I’ll put this one down to sloppiness rather than deliberate deception, but it’s illustrative of the point that Duffy is not engaged in a serious search for truth here.

Yet further update 20/4 A lengthy search suggests that the claimed result does not refer to the 1996 survey, but to another survey undertaken by the same researcher in 2003. The results are apparently here but I can’t get them to work on any of my browsers.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin8 Comments

“The Strange Death of Liberal England” (George Dangerfield). A classic I’ve meant to read for years, but only just got to has a strikingly apposite quote in relation to the Tory party’s incitement to army mutiny in relation to any order to enforce Irish Home Rule on the Ulster Unionists. Dangerfield has this great line

The Tory philosophy, up to the beginning of the war, might be summed up in this way: Be Conservative about good things, and Radical about bad things. This philosophy, so far as can be seen, has only one flaw: it was always the Tories who decided what was good and what was bad.

So while donning the mantle of conservatism in defence of the House of Lords, the Tories were prepared to tear up the constitution to defeat Home Rule. The same line seems applicable to the Bush Administration today.

“In Defense of Globalization” (Jagdish Bhagwati) Bhagwati is a smart guy, but he hasn’t yet learned that, on the internets nothing is as it seems. On the lookout for a good anecdote about globalization he finds one that seems too good to be true

In fact, while the rich-country while the rich-country claim to be providing “countervailing power” against the far richer corporationsin their midst, it is ironic that some of the the truly small NGOs in the rich countries themselves have voiced their fears over “unequal” competition from the far bigger and richer NGOs. A hilarious example is provided by a report in mid-2001 of “calls today for multinational pro-anarchy pressure groups to be investigated for monopolistic practices after the NW3 branch of the Radical Left Movement for Socialist Revolution Socialist Revolution was disbanded due to lack of interest.” The report goes on to say that the group’s spokesperson, Nigel Wilkinson, “believes that global anarchy movements such as the ones responsible for the G7 riots in Seattle are to blame for forcing out smaller, independent operations like his…. These large American anti-capitalist movements have effectively taken over the militant scene in this country.” As if this were not amusing enough, the report goes on to say: …”Wilkinson has seen his group’s membership dwindle by almost 70 percent over the last two years, from a peak of three members to one himself

Turning to the reference we find the source is Urban Reflex currently running the headline

Audience Stunned As Pop Star Appears On Stage Fully Clothed

Bhagwati may have been taken in on this one, but in other respects his book is sharp and well-argued. Some more comments before too long, I hope.

As well as these, I very much enjoyed“Singularity Sky” (Charles Stross), and I’ve been alternatively entertained and appalled by the TV version of <“Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Oxford World’s Classics)” (Thomas Hughes, Andrew Sanders) Actually that combination also sums up my response to last nights Swans-Lions game.

Multinationals and CADs

John Quiggin7 Comments

As current account deficits in the US and other English speaking countries continue to balloon, there’s a big demand for talking points in support of a “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” position. A favourite contender is the idea that the US trade and current account deficits are overstated because about half of all US imports come from overseas subsidiaries of US multinationals. For those who’d like to get straight to the bottom line, this fact makes no difference to the current account deficit or its sustainability.

For those who enjoy somewhat eye-glazing arguments about economic statistics, read on.
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Declining enrolments

John Quiggin14 Comments

I was struck by this Guardian story headlined US university enrolment ‘in decline’. We are seeing static or declining new domestic enrolments here in Australia, and it seems the same is true in Canada also. But I was unsure about the US and the Guardian story was lacking detail.

It is old news that the number of US students in areas like engineering and computer science has been falling for decades, and, since Bush came into office (and particularly since 9/11/01) foreign student numbers are also falling. But I had the impression that this was more than offset by increased numbers in law, business and other fields.

Checking at the National Centre for Educational Statistics yields a mixed picture. The total of undergraduate students is rising, but so is the population. Although participation has risen since 1970, participation rates for most age groups have been stable since about 1990 (There’s a graph over the fold), while rates in Europe have risen greatly.

What is going on here?
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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin14 Comments

In keeping with my general hopes of a return to normality, this (lately somewhat irregular)) regular feature is back. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.

Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

Having it both ways

John Quiggin28 Comments

The Gunns case, in which the world’s largest woodchip exporter is suing critics it accuses of ‘corporate vilification‘ is a typical instance of companies wanting to have it both ways. On the one hand, advocates of the corporation deny that corporations can have any moral or ethical obligations, other than to their shareholders. On the other hand, they want all the protections available to a natural person, including protection from defamation[1]. An individual who acted the way a company is supposed to act in the standard theory would be a sociopath, incapable of being defamed because of the absence of any justified reputation.

In this case, of course, we have the equally important issue of defamation laws being used to suppress free speech on political issues. I doubt that Gunns will prevail, but they don’t have to – a corporation with deep pockets will always win at this kind of game, unless the courts come down hard. I hope that they not only lose but are forced to pay a full accounting of the costs they’ve imposed.

fn2. On the third hand, to mangle the metaphor, the officers and shareholders expect to be protected from any sort of liability for their corporate actions, relying on the sanctity of the ‘corporate veil’. I had a go at this topic here

We have a president (updated)

John Quiggin23 Comments

After months of delay and dispute, the BBC reports that the Iraqi Parliament has finally mustered the two-thirds majority needed to nominate a president and two vice-presidents. These positions are largely ceremonial, but the deal presumably implies an agreement to select a Prime Minister, after which an interim government can finally take office, with the task of drawing up a permanent constitution. Some good news is that the Allawi group has been kept to the marginal position its weak electoral support implies.

There are still plenty of big problems ahead – the delays reflect fundamental divisions between Kurds and Shias about the future of Iraq and, except for some token appointments, the Sunnis have been excluded altogether. And the insurgency continues with little letup, having no doubt found many recruits among the refugees from Fallujah, almost completely destroyed in the November campaign there. Still, it seems reasonable to hope that a reasonably democratic, and only moderately Islamist government will eventually emerge.

Assuming this happens, was the invasion worth it? Definitely not, in my view.
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Another big trade deficit

John Quiggin12 Comments

The trade deficit for February came in at $2.8 billion, which suggests an annualised trade deficit of about 3 per cent of GDP, and a current account deficit of maybe 7 per cent of GDP. All the export growth was in the rural sector (mostly coal I guess, though I haven’t checked yet.

There are two broad explanations of this. One is that foreignrs see huge investment opportunities that will enable us to expand exports greatly some time in the future. Given the stagnation of manufacturing exports and the fact that there’s no particular reason to think that we are getting drastically better in service areas like tourism, the only plausible growth area is yet more coal.

The alternative is that we’re relying on hot money that can be pulled out quite rapidly when sentiment about the English-speaking countries sours. At that point, we’ll need to turn the trade deficit into a surplus, pronto. As those who’ve experienced such adjustments can attest, this is likely to be a painful process.

I favour the second explanation, but we’ve maintained these deficits for a decade or more, with the obvious blowout confined to the past few years. So we’ll just have to wait and see.