Miranda Devine’s latest piece on Kyoto (sent to me by Jack Strocchi) adds a couple of new (or newish) talking points to the debate. The first is the claim that New Zealand faces a “cost blowout” of $1 billion as a result of the treaty. As far as I can tell, this is a beat-up. The government had calculated that under existing policies, New Zealand would meet its Kyoto commitments with a bit left over that could be traded on international carbon emission credits markets. Now it looks as if they won’t, which means either changing the policies, buying credits or repudiating the commitments. Its hard to see how the availability of the second option makes NZ any worse off.

What’s more interesting is that Devine attacks not merely the carbon emissions market established under Kyoto, but the whole idea of emissions trading. This is fairly surprising since the whole thrust of environmental policy under the Howard and Keating governments, including the current government’s negotiating position on Kyoto, has been to encourage the used of market-based instruments, of which emissions trading systems are an archetypal example. Although problems can emerge with naive application of this kind of policy, it’s generally the right direction in which to go. The development of tradeable water rights in the Murray-Darling system and elsewhere is a prominent example of both the benefits and some potential pitfalls.
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The still-developing disaster of Hurricane Katrina has some obvious parallels with the Kobe earthquake ten years ago. Both were predictable (and widely predicted) events. The damage from Kobe took years to fix, and it’s already obvious that the same will be true of Katrina.

Equally significantly, weaknesses in the state response to Kobe had big psychological impacts in Japan. The earthquake came at a time when the Japanese economy was recovering from the bursting of a huge property bubble, but when triumphalist rhetoric about the strengths of the Japanese state, and the inevitable dominance of Japanese ways of doing business, was stronger even than during the 1980s. The failure of the initial government response to the disaster and the mismanagement and pork-barrelling that characterised the reconstruction effort went a long way towards reducing confidence.
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Via Jennifer Marohasy, I found a report on three articles in Science Express that put the closing seal on the most significant issue in the debate about the reality of human-caused climate change: the disagreement between climate models and data from satellites and radiosonde balloons. Now as Real Climate observes “the discrepancy has been mostly resolved – in favour of the models.”

There aren’t many scientifically literate sceptics (that is, people open to being persuaded by evidence, but not yet convinced) left on the global warming issue, and this evidence, along with the continued warming being observed at all levels, should convince most of those who remain. There’s a bit more history over the fold.
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The widely circulated claim that the antimalarial use of DDT has been banned, costing millions of lives, seems finally to have been refuted (score one for the self-correcting blogosphere!). For those who haven’t followed this one, here’s one of my contributions, with links.

The last line of treat for this argument is the claim that there is a “de facto” ban on antimalarial use of DDT (agricultural use is banned, and a good thing too, since this builds up resistance). Tim Lambert nails this one, assisted in a lengthy comments thread by Ian Gould, a regular commenter on this site also.

There is a sense, though, in which all antimalarial strategies are subject to a de facto ban: there simply isn’t enough money to implement them. The Roll Back Malaria partnership has a comprehensive program to halve the burden of malaria by 2010, which could be implemented for a fraction of the cost of the Iraq War (or, to be evenhanded with the examples, the EU Common Agricultural Policy), but it’s almost certainly not going to happen.

That’s about the best I can say for the agreement on climate change announced today. It appears to offer nothing beyond an acknowledgement that the problem exists.

This supposedly represents the response of the US, China, India, Australia, Japan and North South Korea to the problem of climate change, but if so, the Americans don’t seem to have noticed. There’s a brief item in the NYT, but it doesn’t even appear in the International section of their website. Going directly to the White House website, there’s nothing on the front page, but digging a bit deeper produces an innocuous item headed President’s Statement on U.S. Joining New Asia-Pacific Partnership which I’ve reproduced over the fold.

If this is the Bush Administration’s answer to Kyoto, they’re keeping pretty quiet about it.
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A research challenge for my readers. The task is to nominate scientists who

(i) have undertaken serious research on climate change
(ii) doubt that human activity is contributing to global warming
(iii) are disinterested, with no financial or political axe to grind

I’m reasonably flexible on (i) and (ii). That is, I’ll count anyone who has published relevant research in a reputable journal or who has done research on the topic and holds a job in a university science department or similar institution. Similarly on (ii) it’s sufficient that the person express doubt as to whether the evidence supports the anthropogenic view: they need not claim that it has been disproved.

On the other hand, as far as (iii) goes, I’m applying a stringent criterion. I’m excluding anyone who has taken money from lobby groups with a political position on climate change policy, is a member of any such group, or has publicly expressed a political position on the Kyoto protocol.

I claim that I can nominate hundreds of scientists who satisfy (i) and (iii), as described, and whose work supports the anthropogenic hypothesis. I suggest that the number of scientists satisfying (i) and (iii), as defined above, but who doubt the anthropogenic hypothesis, is in single digits. My current estimate is one, but perhaps readers will be able to double or triple that estimate, or perhaps reduce it to zero.

Update I obviously need to clarify the point on government funding. I’m not excluding scientists who have received research funding from public research bodies, even where those bodies are funded by anti-Kyoto governments, such as those of Australia and the US. This is making the task of finding disinterested sceptics easier, not harder, a fact which several commenters have apparently failed to observe.

Australians have long been captivated by the idea of turning coastal rivers back, to irrigate the dry inland. The most famous advocate of such a scheme was John Bradfield, designer of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Such schemes have always foundered on the ugly physical fact that water is heavy. Any significant amount of uphill pumping is prohibitively costly, so schemes of this kind require lots of expensive tunnelling, and can only get access to water from the upper slopes of the Great Dividing Range.

As coastal populations have grown, we’ve seen increasing interest in the reverse option, of taking inland water to the coast. Adelaide is already buying water back from irrigators on the Murray. Current Victorian policy prohibits Melbourne from doing the same, but it’s hard to see this ban being sustained as water restrictions are tightened, and the technical difficulties are not great.

Today’s Australian has a proposal from Dennis O’Neill of the Australian Council for Infrastructure Development to take water from the Tantangara Dam on the Snowy to Sydney, via Googong dam near Canberra. This sounds a lot more expensive than the options for Melbourne and Adelaide, though not in the same league as Colin’s canal. And at least the scheme works with gravity rather than against it. I’ll look forward to seeing a more detailed proposal.

All of this will certainly make for interesting times for irrigators on the Murray-Darling, the main focus of my research and modelling. On the one hand, those who are able to sell water rights stand to do very well. On the other hand, those wanting to buy will be competing with the swimming pools and gardens of the big cities (the uses currently subject to the tightest restrictions).