I’m trying to get started on a reasonably substantial analysis of the economics of policies to mitigate climate change. I thought this would be a good time to acknowledge a couple of readers who’ve sent me useful links, and ask if anyone has any others. Of course, I’ve already got a mountain of stuff to get through.

Waratah points me to this link suggesting that California could achieve a net benefit from a program generating a substantial reduction in emissions, and SimonJM has pointed to this useful site.

Today’s Fin (subscription only) has a piece by AGW contrarian Garth Paltridge claiming that, while he was establishing the Antarctic CRC in the early 1990s, CSIRO threatened to pull out of the project if he didn’t stop saying in the media that there were doubts about the science of global warming. CSIRO’s motive, he says, was the desire to extract millions of dollars in funding from the “newly-established” Australian Greenhouse Office. Paltridge presents this as a counter to the recent Four Corners program about suppression of scientists like Graham Pearman, and it reads very effectively. The same story is reported by Andew Bolt

There is just one slight problem with the story. The Antarctic CRC was set up in 1991 with CSIRO participation. Further negotiations (given the timelags in putting together a CRC bid and getting it approved, these would have been in the mid-1990s), led to a new version of the CRC which commenced operations in 1997 (it’s not clear if CSIRO was part of this one).

The Australian Greenhouse Office wasn’t “newly established” in the early 1990s, or even in 1997: in fact it wasn’t established at all until 1998. Its formation wasn’t even announced by the Prime Minister until November 1997.

Of course, it may be that this dispute took place at some other time and in the context of some other negotiation. But if Paltridge is wrong on dates and context, maybe he has also got other things wrong, such as the content of the conversations he describes.

Update My guess is that Paltridge is referring to this Sunday program broadcast in November 1997. It’s about the time the AGO was announced, but clearly too late for the alleged threat to have been made. It’s interesting to note, by the way, how heavily the sceptics who got nearly all the running on the Sunday program rely on Christy’s satellite data, and on now-discredited hacks like Pat Michaels.

ABC Four Corners ran an interesting show last night on the anti-science interest groups who dominate the formulation and official discussion of policy on global warming in Australia. Transcript here, along with discussion from Tim Lambert and Larvatus Prodeo.

What particularly interested me was the number of scientists who had been pushed out of CSIRO, or had left of their own volition, after being tightly censored in what they could say about global warming, and the emissions reductions that would be needed to stabilise the climate (the latter point is particularly sensitive since any actual number implies a target and government policy is opposed to targets).

In particular, I was struck by the fact that global warming contrarians commonly explain the overwhelming support of climate scientists for the consensus view on anthropogenic global warming in terms of careerism. The contrarians say that if the scientists deviated from the dominant consensus, they would lose their jobs or their grant funding.

THe Four Corners report made it clear that, in Australia (as also in the US) the exact opposite is the truth. Speaking out in support of science on global warming is a very bad career move, at least for anyone employed by the government. In climate science, where the big organisations have been CSIRO and the Met Bureau, that constraint applies to most people working in the field.
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A Bush appointee at NASA, in the news for trying to censor statements about the Big Bang, and silence climate expert James Hansen, has lost his job for falsifying his resume, after being caught out by a science blogger

Great work by the blogosphere, and another data point on the close links between climate change denialism and creationism, and of course, between the Bush Administration and fraud.

I haven’t posted much lately as I’ve been busy preparing for, and, for the last few days, attending the Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural & Resource Economics Society, which ends today. This year it’s been held in Sydney, by the beach at Manly. The weather has been great and the beach tempting, but I’ve barely had time to do more than look out the window at it, as the quantity and quality of papers has been great. In particular, there has been a lot of work on salinity (irrigation-related and dryland) which I’ll be going over for some time to come.

The conference has crystallised some of my concerns about policy in this area, which I’ve referred to in the past, and will probably write more about soon. Broadly speaking, I think it’s time for governments to bite the bullet and either scale back entitlements of water for irrigation (in catchments where over-allocation is clear) or else buy them back from irrigators to be used for environmental and urban flows. At present, there is a lot of resistance to doing this, and a big focus on technical solutions.

Jennifer Marohasy has a couple of posts on dryland salinity, including a link to an excellent survey of the recent debate by John Passioura (subscription required). Marohasy’s interpretation is (as always) that the problem has been grossly exaggerated. This kind of unvarying optimism (or the alternative position that environmental disaster is invariably impending) is a fine example of the ‘stopped clock‘ approach to punditry. If you make this kind of claim on every issue, you’re going to be right about half the time.

In the case of dryland salinity, it’s easy enough to find examples of both excess pessimism and excess optimism. Among the optimistic errors noted by Passioura are the assumption of the Western Australian government 20 to 25 years ago that the salinity problem was well in hand, and that there was no problem with large scale clearing. This was covered in a book by Beresford et al which I mentioned a couple of years ago. Another form of excess optimism is the belief that there are easy solutions. These include engineering solutions like the use of the Murray as a drain for saline water (seriously proposed in the not-so-distant past as Passioura notes) and, more recently, large-scale tree planting. As I observed in the post I’ve already mentioned, it’s turned out that in many cases, the area that has to be planted is so great and the time to fix the problem so long that, in a lot of cases, it appears not be economically feasible.

Another piece of bad news is that, whereas early studies focused almost exclusively on agriculture, dryland salinity can cause substantial economic losses through damage to roads, buildings and so on. On the other hand, remote sensing has suggested that the area affected by dryland salinity is less than first thought, and that trends are more variable. And the alarming estimate of 17 million hectares derived from the National Salinity Audit refers to the area that might (in the absence of policy change) have high water tables and therefore be at risk of dryland salinity, not the area that is likely to be actually affected.

If you want an easily accessible view of the problem (a little out of date now, but still very good), I recommend David Pannell’s 2001 AARES Presidential Address Dryland Salinity: Inevitable, Inequitable, Intractable? .

Update 8/2/06In response to a challenge to nominate an environmental issue where urgent action is needed, Jennifer Marohasy says

“In a recent blog post (a version of the same published as an article for The Land newspaper) I suggest something needs to be done about overgrazing in the Macquarie Marshes, This links back to the even more dramatic
Cattle Killing the Macquarie Marshes?.”

Despite the question mark, Marohasy is pretty confident the answer is “Yes’. Her evidence? “An aerial photo showing the line of demarcation between an overgrazed private property and ungrazed nature reserve. As she says, “the impact of grazing here is obvious and dramatic.”

But there are many, many similarly dramatic photos of environmental damage in the Murray-Darling. In these cases Marohasy rightly says that dramatic photos may be misleading and need to be backed up by scientific research (when the scientific research is produced she rejects it, but that’s by the way). [I will try to get some more info on this, and report what research has in fact been done].

How is that Marohasy is so quick, in this case, to label farmers as environmental vandals, and to call for urgent action, when she normally disputes conclusions based on decades of research?

A reading of the posts makes the answer pretty clear. The Macquarie Marsh graziers are in conflict with the irrigators she represents. Follow the money.

The New Republic has a piece by Paul Thacker pointing out that Fox News science columnist Steven Milloy is a shill for, among other corporations, Philip Morris and ExxonMobil. It’s behind a paywall but that scarcely matters, because the relevant facts have been on the public record for years. As usual, Tim Lambert has the most detailed coverage, but a search of this blog or Crooked Timber will produce plenty more, and most of the info has been in Milloy’s Wikipedia entry for some time. In this context, the claim by Fox News, reported by TNR, that they were unaware of Milloy’s corporate payoffs speaks volumes for their capacity as a news organisation. I guess when you can just make it up, you don’t need to use Google.

What seems to be happening here, as with the Abramoff scandal is that facts that have been in plain view for ages can now be fitted into a media narrative – Republican sleaze in general and pundits for hire in particular. Whereas evidence of these kinds of links has been ignored or brushed aside in the past, they can now be seen as part of a systematic pattern of corruption.

If this narrative keeps running it’s going to make life a lot more difficult for the network of rightwing thinktanks and lobby groups that have proliferated in the US over the past two decades or so. Apart from the fact that most of them have at least one individual shill or fraud already exposed (AEI with Lott, Hudson with Fumento, Cato with Bandow and Milloy, TCS from top to bottom[1]) it’s going to become increasingly obvious that these guys have done little more than some unauthorised moonlighting. The organisations are engaged in the same kind of shilling, but on a larger scale. It’s hard to see how they can retain any credibility, or how any reputable person can continue work for any of them, unless all of the shills are sacked, and the organisations become a lot more open about their funding.

In this context, it’s heartening to note that Milloy has quietly departed from Cato where he was an adjunct scholar until the end of 2005. I don’t suppose this post had anything to do with it, but having called for Cato to sack him, I’m glad they’ve parted company. How long will it take Fox News to do something similar?

fn1. Except for Tim Worstall, who seems unaffected by the general atmosphere there.

If you want to hear my thoughts on biodiversity in the context of a moderately-lubricated pub discussion, you can hear it on Radio National today at 1305 (1605 in WA).

There’s no longer any serious debate among climate scientists about either the reality of global warming or about the fact that its substantially caused by human activity, but, as 500+ comments on my previous post on this topic show, neither the judgement of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, nor the evidence that led them to that judgement, has had much effect on the denialists[1].

And the Australian media are doing a terrible job in covering the issue. I’ve seen at least half a dozen pieces this year claiming that the whole issue is a fraud cooked up by left-wing greenies, and January isn’t over yet.

The latest is from Peter Walsh in the Oz. Walsh is still banging on about the satellite data, and the Medieval Warm Period, suggesting that his reading, if any, in the last few years has been confined to publications emanating from the right-wing parallel universe. But that hasn’t stopped the Australian from running him, and a string of others.

If an issue like genetically modified food, or the dangers of mobile phones was treated in this way, with alarmist cranks being given hectares of column space, most of those who sympathise with Walsh would be outraged and rightly so.

Walsh does make one valid point however, saying. “If your case is immaculate, why feed lies into it?” To which, I can only respond, “If the cap fits …”

fn1. At this point, the term “sceptic” is no longer remotely applicable. Only dogmatic commitment to a long-held position (or an ideological or financial motive for distorting the evidence) can explain continued rejection of the evidence.