While taking a break here, I’ve put up a couple of posts over at RSMG, and there’s an interesting piece from Nanni over the long-running fight to stop leading academic publisher Elsevier from running arms fairs.
I’ve posted on why I’m glad my frequent flyer status has been downgraded, and a newly-published critique of the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for reducing CO2 emissions.
An interesting report from The Times (hat tips to Rog and Richard Tol).
Following the broadcast of The Great Global Warming Swindle, Dr Armand Leroi, who had been planning to work with Durkin on a documentary, sent him an email expressing concern about the programme and saying “To put this bluntly: the data that you showed in your programme were . . . wrong in several different ways.” He copied the email to scientific author Simon Singh. Durkin responded to Leroi saying “You’re a big daft c*ck.â€? A further email from Singh, urging Durkin to engage in serious debate, received the response “Go and f*ck yourself”. Leroi subsequently stated that he was withdrawing his co-operation with Durkin.
This was the day that Frank Devine chose to begin his column in the Oz, which has enthusiastically plugged Durkin’s work, “Climate change predictors really need to acquire a few social graces.”
Reader Taust contributed to the Great Shave Appeal, asking in return for 250 words in praise of adaptation to global warming. This isn’t as hard as it might seem since a large part of my research work is focused on exactly this issue. The only problem is that I find I have to write more than 250 words. Anyway, here is the promised post.
The responses to global climate change have been characterized as ‘mitigate, adapt, or suffer’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6302019.stm Weber 2007). Whatever level of mitigation takes place for the world as a whole, and whatever our contribution, global warming is bound to continue for decades to come, probably at rates faster than we have observed so far. So, for any given level of mitigation, the choice comes down to ‘adapt or suffer’.
Apparently Channel Four in the UK has put out a program which, with admirable honesty entitles itself The Great Global Warming Swindle, and offers the same tired set of swindlers we’ve heard for fifteen years or more, although their site breathlessly proclaims
But just as the environmental lobby think they’ve got our attention, a group of naysayers have emerged to slay the whole premise of global warming.
Particularly amusing for those of us who follow these things is the linkup between the US right, represented by Fred Singer, Patrick Michaels and others, and the Revolutionary Communist Party/LM crew at Spiked who put the whole thing together.* George Marshall (no relation to the George C Marshall Institute, which in turn bears no relation to George C Marshall, the soldier and statesman whose name it shamelessly ripped off) details names, track records of and (an incomplete list of) cash payments received by the participants.
*For those who like to keep track of the links between various forms of delusionism, this is the same group that denied ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
While Australia has punched a little below its weight in terms of the number of climate change delusionists we have produced, we’re at world’s best practice as far as loopiness as concerned. Our leading delusionist group is the Lavoisier Institute which has, among other things
* Used the work of (now-deceased) astrologer Theodor Landscheidtas the basis for criticism of the IPCC
* Compared the Kyoto Protocol to the attempted Japanese invasion of Australia in 1942(1)
The Lavoiser team got together at Parliament House in Canberra to launch a book by rightwing eminence grise Ray Evans called “Nine Facts about Climate Change”.
As I’ve said before, I don’t plan to bother refuting this stuff any more, but taavi does garbage pickup. I particularly liked the perpetual motion machine in Fact 2.
1. Of course, the official rightwing line now claims that the invasion threat was itself a myth cooked up by notorious appeaser John Curtin.
Last night I went to hear Warwick McKibbin at the Brisbane Institute talking about climate change. It was a good presentation and Warwick made an effective analogy between the McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan for climate change which uses fixed prices in the short run and fixed quantities in the long run, and the bond market, where central banks set short-term interest rates but allow long-term rates to be set by the market.
One thing I hadn’t realised, though, is that the plan doesn’t allow for international trade in emissions permits, even in the long run. McKibbin sees this as an advantage, since there’s less of a reduction in sovereignty, but I see it as a big problem for two reasons. First, there’s an obvious efficiency loss in not allowing countries with low-cost offsets to trade with high-cost countries. Second, the biggest source of credits so far is China, the country that is going to need the most persuading to join an international agreement (contrary to Warwick, I’m confident the US will ratify Kyoto, perhaps extracting some concessions on timing and targets, as soon as Bush goes out, and that Australia will do so then, if not earlier). The possibility of gaining credits, combined with the threat of border taxes on exports from non-ratifying countries will be needed to overcome the obvious free-rider problems.
It doesn’t seem to me that the restriction to national markets is crucial, at least to the long-term part of the plan. A modified version that incorporated some form of international trade would be more appealing.
With Al Gore winning the Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth and the CBC news “The Denial Machine” airing on Four Corners last night, it must be getting hard to hold on to the delusions that have been propagated so vigorously throughout the parallel universe created by Fox News and similar bodies. While it’s no news to anyone who reads blogs on the topic, the revelation that the “skepticism” propagated by our local delusionists was produced by recycled hacks for the tobacco industry, such as Fred Singer and Fred Seitz (I was mildly disappointed that Steve Milloy didn’t get a run) must have shaken a few more people awake.
“Happy Feet”, an Australian animated feature about penguins that has been attacked by the Fox News delusion machine because it refers to overfishing, also scored a gong. No doubt, Neil Cavuto would have preferred an award to the Astroturf exercise on penguins produced by DCI. It’s delusion all the way down with these guys.
* The problem of terminology has always been difficult. It’s obviously unreasonable to use terms like “skeptic” or “contrarian” to describe people who produce or swallow transparently fraudulent propaganda like that of Singer and Seitz because it happens to suit their preconceived ideological views or financial interest. On the other hand, there have been vigorous objections to “denialist”. So, I’m switching to “delusionists”, a term which covers:
(i) people who manufacture delusions for a living like those mentioned already and their local counterparts
(ii) people who prefer to accept ideologically convenient delusions rather than face the truth
(iii) people who have genuinely been deluded by this propaganda (not many of these left in Australia now).
Felix Salmon gnashes his teeth at yet another incorrect report on discounting and the Stern review, by David Leonhardt in the New York Times.
Using his discount rate and other assumptions, a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now is roughly as valuable as 7 cents spent reducing emissions today. (In fact, it’s less than that, because Stern adds another discount rate, called delta, on top of eta.)
Leonhardt says that “spending a dollar on carbon reduction today to avoid a dollar’s worth of economic damage in 2107 doesn’t make sense” – but this is a straw man, since Stern never comes close to saying that we should do such a thing. Leonhardt also spends a lot of time on the academic qualifications of Stern’s opponents, but neglects to mention that Stern himself, a former chief economist of the World Bank, is actually a real expert on discount rates, and understands them much better than most economists do.
Salmon is right, both about the Leonhardt piece and, unfortunately, about the limited understanding of discounting issues on the part of economists in general.
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Things have been pretty frantic at the Risk and Sustainable Management Group (my research team at UQ, focusing on the Murray-Darling and related issues) as we raced to prepare five papers for the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society meeting in Queenstown NZ last week. There’s lots of news about this at the RSMG blog.
We’ve also had a complete redesign of our website, which is now located here. We’ll be updating Working Papers and adding lots of publications in the near future.
I plan to write more about water and climate at this blog in future. Discussion much encouraged.
Blogospheric opinion has divided on predictable lines over the Queensland Land and Resources Tribunal’s rejection of objections to a new coal mine by environmental groups who wanted offsets for the carbon emissions of the mine. Brickbats have come from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Lambert and Robert Merkel, while Jennifer Marohasy and Andrew Bolt have cheered the Tribunal and its presiding member, President Koppenol.
But this looks awfully like an own goal for the denialists to me.
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John Quiggin 