It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language please.
- Comment
- Reblog
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
John Quiggin 
I hope this is not deemed to breach a dicussion policy. No flames, snarks or coarse language. Depends how JQ defines a troll. But these are all issues relating to climate change which have been in the news this week, along with my own “humourous” comments 🙂
Met Office to re-examine 160 years of temperature data. (Veterinarians have been called in, as apparently a dog ate the raw data. Fortunately the cooked data is still available, although past it’s use by date.)
The UK government is trying to stop the re-examination, as the science is settled, according to Al Gore, who is paying for renovations at the House of Commons.
Phil Jones stands aside as director of CRU pending an inquiry into the leaked (sorry, stolen) emails and computer code.
Saudi Arabia thinks “there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change”. (Well they would say that, wouldn’t they).
India pledges to reduce their carbon emission intensity. (See, that’s got India, carbon, emission and reduce in the same sentence. Satisfied now, delusionists?).
@Paul Williams
Paul Williams – get out of the way.
Paul Williams:
This is to make the people still in the *first stage of denial happy.
*first stage of denial = there is no global warming
Phil Jones has stepped aside which is appropriate given the circumstances. He has shown a deficit of leadership by fostering and encouraging a culture of obstruction and secrecy.
The inquiry will aparently be chaired by Sir Muir Russell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muir_Russell
A troll by any definition. A dog ate the raw data?
The “raw data” is the property of these national meteorological offices, which is why CRU and Met have no power to release it. That the “cooked” data shows exactly the same information as the raw data will now be reconfirmed, although it won’t convince slobbering trolls and nothing else will either, which it why the UK government considers this a waste of time.
The mainstream media coverage of this scandal is the height of “he said-she said” laziness. The vacuity of the “scandal” is obvious to anyone interested in the facts. The whole thing is just an obvious premeditated fraud and a last desperate attempt at intimidation.
What culture of obstruction and secrecy? What other scientists have ever been subjected to such a concerted campaign of pure, deliberate harassment? Terje you think you can straddle the fence but instead you’ve just completely discredited yourself.
Gerard – RealClimate, which you link to as a source of “the facts”, is hardly independent in this scandal. Gavin is a player.
Terje – give up. Its the organised paid for hack delusionists and hackers who discredit real science. You can argue until you are blue in the face but you are discredited as Gerard says (and outnumbered in here badly).
You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You bat well for the wrong (lying) team Terje. You definitely dont bat for the truth.
Alice – I always bat for the truth.
Virtual tally is now available for Higgins and Bradfield.
http://vtr.aec.gov.au/
Counting is not complete but it seems like a big swing against the ALP.
-32% in Higgins.
-27% in Bradfield.
Given the swing against the ALP and the vastly smaller swing against the Liberals one wonders why the Greens have not done better. Perhaps they stink.
Non the less this does mean that the Greens will get a cash payout as a result. No doubt this is probably a gift to the Greens from the ALP (paid for by the taxpayer) as pay back for some earlier preference deal.
Terje – swings are meaningless since ALP didn’t run.
The swing to the greens in Higgins is in the order of 44%. How much bigger were you anticipating?
Terje that is simple ad hominem – address the rebuttals on their merits if you are anything more than a sad hack.
The problem is too much heat energy is not getting radiated to space. It’s melting ice instead. While the ice is melting temperature rises are going to be limited. It’s how ans esky works. The latent energy needed to melt the ice keeps things cool. Surly it’s un-Australian not to have a basic understanding of how an esky works.
What happens to the ice and the temperature inside the esky after you leave it in the sun for a few days?
Gerard – make a rebuttal and I will address it.
They have nobody to blame but themselves then.
Terje, you’ve lined up 100 per cent with the delusionists and against scientific research, demonstrating that this is a matter of tribal loyalty for you, as for 99 per cent of self-described libertarians. Fine, but don’t expect any sane person to take libertarianism seriously as a political movement any time this century.
maybe you can point out what explanations from the scientists at real climate you have found unsatisfactory.
John – We were discussing the conduct of Phil Jones. If you want to address that point then fine.
The neoclassical ideology that consumer price inflation ought to be zero, or one or two per cent is one of the most bizarre ideas around. Since it means that the economy is thrown either side of a fractional reserve collapse. Or to put it another way, it places the economy near the exact point wherein you would expect, what the Keynesians would call a liquidity trap. I don’t like the terminology. But to have the economy veering either side of a “liquidity trap” is bizare.
If we can get debts down way low the best situation to be in is where prices are always falling yet total sales revenue, including sales of intermediate goods, are always growing. Its this sweet point that you want to be in and you never want to leave. We are prevented from getting there not by downward stickiness in wages but by debt levels. Well actually by both. But it is the debt levels that are not considered. The neoclassicals loving debt like nothing else, and also having a fetish about lower wages or so it would seem.
The time period between world war II and the 1970’s gave us the impression that real wages could be pushed up by powerful unions and laws that favoured the bargaining position of wage earners. But in the wider sweep of history real wages increase in the context of falling prices and virtually never under any other conditions. Getting to that point is not nearly as easy as neoclassical models would assume. They think its all about accepting lower nominal incomes. But the spectre of debt is where it is at.
The best person to read to understand this is David Hackett Fischer with his book “The Great Wave”. I was able to cross reference his material with fractional reserve expansions and collapses.
The best time periods were after there had been these “money famines” which could last twenty years. No union movement back then. No minimum wage legislation. The two good time periods when real wages were always rising, and prices were always falling were
1. The “Equilibrium” of the Renaissance 1400-1470
2.The “Equilibrium” of the Enlightenment 1660-1730
His phrase “equilibrium” is misleading since these were times of falling prices. Its not to be thought that the neoclassical prescription of low consumer price inflation would work itself out unto the good times after 20 years. A hundred years later that prescription would still be dysfunctional. It would still leave us in boom bust conditions with sales volumes soaring and then crashing all the time. Why people can be so pigheaded about this I don’t know. But as terrible as currency debasement is we see the situation wherein Australia had an easier time of things being a bit more flexible than the New Zealanders in monetary policy. And the New Zealanders no doubt just a bit too close to that monetary crunch vortex.
The inflationary times which lead to falling real wages, international war and domestic violence were pretty much as close to the neoclassical prescription as you can get.
1. The medieval price revolution 1180-1350
average inflation about .5%
2. The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century. And the crisis of the 17th. About 1470-1660
3. The Price Revolution of the 18th century: About 1720-1820
The latter two ghastly periods only had average consumer price inflation of maybe 1% or so. These were time periods of the expansion of fractional reserve although Fischer doesn’t realise it.
So neoclassical orthodoxy is just not equipped to get us to a happy place where real wages are rising all the time and resources are allocated to wealth creation. They don’t know what they are doing. And they are not inclined to learn.
The deranged Right has latched onto this climategate scandal like another one, equally genuine.
Sarah Palin interviewed a couple of days ago:
GOP front-runner for 2012.
Gerard – the article you linked to does not address the issue of Phil Jones fostering and encouraging a culture of obstruction and secrecy which is what I made reference to.
It does however attempt to explain this phrase:-
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
This comment is from a 1999 email sent by Phil Jones to several people including Michael Mann (ie Mike).
The expaination Gavin (or whoever wrote the RealClimate article you cite) offers is very disappointing. It seeks to explain the issue in terms of peoples understanding of the word trick. In so far as it goes I have no real problem with the notion that people could use the word trick in quite positive ways. And it is fair enough to point this out because many media outlets did latch onto the word “trick”. However Gavin seems to deliberately miss the real point.
The issue isn’t with Phil Jones choice of words but in the nature of the actual trick. It entails an analysis of tree ring data that throws away the tree ring data post 1960 (where it shows a temperature decline) and replaces it with thermometer data (which shows a temperature increase). A number of people have criticised this splicing approach in the past. For instance Michael Mann said in 2004 on RealClimate:-
The fact that Phil Jones uses a data manipulation technique he learnt from Michael Mann, which Michael Mann says publicly that nobody ever uses is a travesty. Especially given the criticism this technique has come in for when exposed previously.
Just to labour this point. The shallow media response to “hide the decline” has been to create the impression that the temperature since 1960 has actually cooled. This is clearly rubbish. We know the temperature has risen because that is what the termometer data tells us (as well as satellite data later on). Phil Jones was clearly not hiding a decline in actual temperature. However what he was doing with his fudge was publishing a temperature reconstruction supposedly based on proxy data which shows a high correlation with recent temperature trends. In short the doctored reconstruction will look more credible. And this means we will trust what it has to say about past temperature.
“Hide the decline” is a travesty but not for the reason the talking heads imply.
Gerard – In case you were wondering I am not going to defend what Sarah Palin has to say about anything. She should stick to shooting moose.
@TerjeP (say tay-a)
“The fact that Phil Jones uses a data manipulation technique he learnt from Michael Mann”
So you were there in these tutorials when Michael Mann was ‘instructing Phil Jones on data manipulation techniques’. From across the Atlantic?
Terje, Get real man. Some of the white hats turned out to be human under the onslaught from the forces of darkness and took defensive measures against the philistines.
What say we take your views about nuclear power and subject you to the sort of intense pressure these guys were under from the black hats. For years! Would you be so lilly white. Hell no! You would be ducking and diving, trying to avoid the plague of mosquitos that is the denialosphere. And trying to do what you could to deny these vampires oxygen. Or blood. So Phil Jones may have bent some procedural rules, maybe. So What. All’s Fair in Love & War. And this ain’t Love.
Richelieu said “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”. this “hanging offense”, the grand conspiratorial needle that you’ve turfed up in the haystack of hacked personal correspondence between working scientists, basically involves replacing incorrect data with correct data in the construction of a model. There’s no “scandal”, unless you’re saying that information was deliberately falsified, and there’s no significance for scientific consensus on the balance of evidence for AGW. however there is always room for improvement in science and we anxiously await more rigourous computational modeling coming from the holier-than-thou R and MATLAB experts of Wingnut Blogosphere University.
As usual the YouTube user potholer54 has done a great job on the sage of the e-mails stolen from the climate research unit, here.
That should have been saga.
JQ said;
“but don’t expect any sane person to take libertarianism seriously as a political movement any time this century.”
Put the above statement down as an endorsement for libertarianism, considering JQ’s record on predicting ‘future outcomes’ is not one of his strong points.
Consensus and collusion by emails is a “matter of tribal loyalty” for those whose dodgy theories can’t successfully predict future outcomes. Thankfully the senate can tell the difference between consensus and science, unlike the bloggers around here.
Constructing proxies to match up partial but overlapping series – each with different biases – is part of the climatological art. I myself have used the word trick in the sense of a neat piece of art. Phil Jones did this with one small data series, independently of other reconsructions, and sent his workings to others. It was not published, but used to support other reasoning (which was published, and fully explained). So where’s the problem?
From my own experience with FOI I do not see any impropriety in e-mail exchanges. Nor in anything else (although a few comments would have been phrased differently if intended for wider publication – but who has not privately made robust remarks about idiocy?). The MSM are lazy, and most of the comment likewise a lazy version of “no smoke without fire” – something a moment’s reflection would show to be untrue.
Just the usual pack of witless hysterics, abetted by journos seeking thrills. Is there some reasonable way to quarantine these people from a discussion on the future of the human race?
Sorry, I meant tribe of bloggers around here.
Actually that video is not to dissimilar to what Terje has said, but it definitely highlights the knee-jerk reaction that some people have had. And has been pointed out before, science is a fluid field of study. The anomaly in the tree ring data just shows us how little we know.
@Peter T
“Is there some reasonable way to quarantine these people from a discussion on the future of the human race?”
Possibly you are forgetting that Phil Jones is employed by the British and American taxpayers. His colleagues also. The papers produced, the body of work, is underpinning government policy, with profound implications for the economic well-being of those same taxpayers. Policy is being formulated by other taxpayer employees, the politicians.
Employers have every right to check the work of their employees, and dismiss them if they aren’t performing satisfactorily.
@gerard
“Sarah Palin …GOP front-runner for 2012.”
Here’s hoping. With the Mad Monk as PM and the Moose Hunter as President, the meltdown on blogs like this one would be enough to raise global temperatures off the scale.
December 5th, 2009 at 20:18 | #14
Reply | Quote
What happens to the ice and the temperature inside the esky after you leave it in the sun for a few days?
Esky warming!
And that is my point; every one is going on about the temperature while the ice is melting; the real fun starts when it is all melted.
Libs facing line-ball contest in Higgins by-election.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/liberals-face-line-ball-contest-in-higgins-by-election/story-e6frgczf-1225807154484
Libs easily win Bradfield and Higgins.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/libs-to-win-bradfield-and-higgins/story-e6frg6n6-1225807308719
Surely Rudd will call a double dissolution while the Libs are in such disarray?
@Paul Williams
Well thats interesting news Paul Walter. In two long standing bluer than blue liberal seats (Higgins was Costello’s and Bradfield was Brendan Nelsons) with no ALP candidate that ran there was a 24.6% swing to the greens in Higgins and a 14% swing to the greens in Bradfield and you hard right fruit loops think climate change policies dont matter.??
Perhaps Malcolm should consider freeing the sane in the party from the clutches of the insane.
Like it or not I don’t think the Higgins or Bradfield results can be categorised as bad for the Liberals – they held both seats with small swings. Clearly, many Labor voters were not prepared to vote Greens. IMO that is a bad result for the ETS.
If this result was a referendum on climate change, 60% of voters in Higgins and Bradfield don’t care about it. Hopenhagen will be CopenOut on these numbers.
There is clearly a need for the government to communicate with the electorate that:
– a bunch of stolen emails are not a counter-argument; there is a climate problem
– increased CO2 is the only plausible explanation for that problem
– we may not be the biggest contributor but we are one of the worst; the people we trade with will not do anything if people like us don’t
– we will need to invest in replacement technologies (not the clean coal lie) and that will cost money. It will also create jobs so there is not a big unemployment or debt problem
– we need more than just a tech fix; people need to think about their lifestyles
– unless government can prove carbon offsets will not just be cooked up in third world tax havens then sold to keep brown coal power plants running, we may be better of with a straight carbon tax to fund repalcement technologies.
I have become skeptical of the ETS as a solution to climate change. (I am not a climate change skeptic). It may work well in theory but in practice seems unable to be implemented. Like Hansen, I think its time for plan B.
@Alice
Paul Walter above should read Paul Williams. Shocking mistake.
@Socrates
Socrates says
“Clearly, many Labor voters were not prepared to vote Greens. IMO that is a bad result for the ETS.”
I dont know how you could possibly get that picture Socrates. In a deep blue seat (Higgins)
“Greens contender Dr Clive Hamilton had 35.3 per cent of the primary vote, a swing of about 24.6 per cent, owing mostly to the absence of a Labor candidate.” Labour quite often doesnt run a candidate in these seats. For the greens to collect 35.3% of the primary vote is a vote for climate change policies in my opinion. Or its a vote of disgust with recent Federal liberal antics.
@Socrates
You say “Like it or not I don’t think the Higgins or Bradfield results can be categorised as bad for the Liberals – they held both seats with small swings”
You neglected to mention the swings were against. Not much in Higgins but still against the LP 3% against in Bradfield. If they were marginal seats 3% would be a substantial swing against.
But the Libs can choose to ignore what the electorate is saying. They do it regularly these days. Fed lib acts like NSW labor. Both now unpopular and hijacked by the hard right.
re #39,
A bit like the conversation alleged overheard at staff headquarters, Berlin, 1945, re Russian Front:
“Anymore of these “victories” the Fuhrer keeps talks of, and they’ll be marching down Potsdamer Platz before we can blink” .
Whoops, no history prior to nineteen fifty, or I’m Godwinned…sorry!
Alice, re #37 am humbled that you should identity me with less a personage than Paul Williams.
Thanks…
Truly.
@paul walter
Thats why it was such a shocking mistake Paul……!!!!! LOL. No I dont identify you with Paul Williams except by inversion…. I just hadnt had my coffee yet.
@paul walter
LOL Paul (thats Walter…!)I say we name the Higgins and Bradfield results the “Potzdamer” victories in honour of the denialists and their new Fuhrer!. Potty?…indeed.
Ha, ha, good one Alice.
Just watching them trying to spin the byelections on Insider and some unbeleivable pfaff from Joyce.
Annabel Crabb was having a good laugh relating Abbott’s holidays back in his younger days, as to the tiresome inevitable wowser question about whether he’d ever smoked pot.
Wisely not trying to obscure it, he related that he’d tried a reefer in the US, but spluttered it all out.
But he reckoned in India somewhere, they gave him the house specialty, hash yoghurt.
He says he was “off with the fairies” for the next twelve hours, which indicates he must have had a good dollop, not that I’d know about these things.
I see a result in the Bradfield by-election that shows how relevant the pro-nuclear power views of TerjeP are. Goronwy Price (Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy) has 609 votes (about 1 per cent of the total) with 69.2 per cent counted. This is far fewer than Marianne Leishman (Australia Sex Party) with 2087 votes (3.4 per cent). Even Bill Koutalianos, an Independent but who is the candidate for the yet to be registered Climate Sceptics Party has polled 1122 (1.8 per cent). Thus the combined support for climate sceptics and nuclear power advocate candidates in Bradfield could not match the Australia Sex Party.
@paul walter
Paul…..ahhh that explains it…I can only imagine what they would do to hash yoghurt eating tourists in India. “Reefer” indeed. Abbott would know it hasnt been called a reefer since before Cheech and Chong.
@JohnL
Thats it for me with Terje and his pro nuke arguments. Ive been talking to a minor!
Oddly, at Pymble PS, Koutoulianos’s leaflets were being distributed by a self-professed member of the ACT Greens, who justified it on the basis that he was her brother-in-law.
@Alice
In Cheech and Chong they didn’t do Abbott in India size reefers; the comparable film for Abbott’s effort is Withnail and I in which he makes a monster spliff called the “Camberwell Carrot”. Now that’s more like it!
Remember kids, don’t try this at home ;-Q