In a comments thread, a few weeks ago, regular commentator Observa asked

read somewhere (maybe on the Sydney water supply price hikes for heavy users)that it takes about 7,400L of water to grow a dollars worth of rice compared to a tenth of that volume for fruit and veges and hence we should import our rice. Are those sorts of consumption figures true?

Here’s a a table from an article I published in the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics a couple of years ago.

Table 1: Water required for $1 000 gross profit
Commodity Water use, in Ml
Fruit 2.0
Vegetables 4.6
Dairy products 5.0
Cotton 7.6
Rice 18.5
Pasture 27.8
Source: adapted from Hall, Poulter and Curtotti (1994)

Observa’s relativities are right and the number in the table implies 18000 litres for a dollar of profit in rice. Assuming gross profit is around half the value of total output, the number quoted also looks pretty accurate.

Before drawing policy implications, it’s worth noting that irrigating pasture is even more water-inefficient. The quoted number implies that an increase of $40/Ml in the price of water would wipe out all the gross profit from this activity.

So the first big agricultural adjustment is likely to be a shift away from the use of irrigation for pastures. One feature of the table that surprised me is that irrigation for dairy products (which presumably means pastures for dairy cows) is actually quite profitable.

My column in today’s Fin (subscription) is on Lomborg and foreign aid. Having tried out the full frontal assault in the blog and found my readers generally unconvinced, I decided to take Lomborg and his backers at face value, at least to begin with.

Lomborg argues that, rather than incur the costs of Kyoto, which he estimates at around $US 200 billion per year, the money should be spent on aid to poor countries such as improvements in health and drinking water. This is more than 1 per cent of the GDP of the developed countries as a group, compared to current aid levels ranging from 0.1 per cent of GDP for the United States to 1 per cent for Denmark, Lomborgâs home country.

If Australia adopted Lomborgâs proposal, foreign aid would need to be quadrupled at least. The cost to the budget would be somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion per year.

Itâs not surprising that the conservative commentariat has endorsed Lomborgâs opposition to Kyoto – they were against long before anyone had ever heard of Lomborg. Whatâs striking is that, without exception, they have either explicitly endorsed or tacitly accepted the second part of Lomborgâs argument, calling for a massive increase in foreign aid.

The position of the Institute of Public Affairs is particularly interesting …

Regardless of whether Lomborgâs argument is put forward in good faith, or merely as a debating point, it is worth taking seriously. There is no investment the rich countries of the world could make that would yield higher returns, even in terms of our self-interest in a less chaotic world, than $100 billion per year allocated to improved health and sanitation in the worldâs poorest countries.
Fortunately, we do not need to choose between Kyoto and aid. As Lomborg and others, both critics and supporters of Kyoto, have pointed out, implementing Kyoto through global emissions trading would amount to a massive foreign aid program as well as being an important first step towards resolving the problem of climate change.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Bjorn Lomborg’s favorite argument against Kyoto is that the money it would cost would be better spent helping poor countries. This is in keeping with his pose as a leftist greenie, reluctantly convinced of the truth of the arguments of people like Julian Simon.

So it would not be surprising to find Lomborg working for a Danish government that opposed Kyoto and spent more on foreign aid. The Rasmussen govt, for which Lomborg works, does indeed oppose Kyoto. But it has also repeatedly cut foreign aid.

Lomborg is a hypocrite and a fraud. It’s as simple as that

Update Various commentators have reacted on the apparent assumption that Lomborg is a civil servant, expressing his private views in his spare time. In fact, the Danish government created an Environmental Assessment Institute with a position as director specifically for Lomborg, whose only qualifications for such a post are the political views expressed in The Sceptical Environmentalist (he has never published a refereed article on any environmental issue). Given the frequency with which he pops up around the world, I assume that his tour to Australia is being carried out as part of his official duties.

Further update 5/10 Stentor Danielson has a good discussion of the issues raised by Lomborg’s actions, and concludes, that Lomborg doesn’t care too much about the foreign aid cuts because

really thinks that reducing spending on global warming is a good thing in and of itself (only a suspicion because I haven’t read his manifesto, The Skeptical Environmentalist)

I have read it, and I agree.

Bjorn Lomborg pushes his usual anti-Kyoto line in the Oz

will be extremely expensive and will have only a negligible effect. The global cost will be large: the estimates from all macro-economic models show a cost of $US150 billion ($224 billion) to $US350 billion every year. At the same time, the effect on extreme weather will be marginal: the climate models show that Kyoto will merely postpone the temperature rise by six years from 2100 to 2106. Most global warming problems will occur in the Third World, yet these countries have many other, more serious, problems with which to contend. For the cost of Kyoto, in 2010, we could permanently solve the biggest problem in the world ö we could permanently provide clean drinking water and sanitation for every person in the world. Should we not deal with the most pressing problems for real people first?

What Lomborg doesn’t say here is that these scary estimates refer only to the case when Kyoto is implemented without emissions trading. With emissions trading, the net cost to the world would be much smaller, but Lomborg says this is politically infeasible because it would require big transfers from rich to poor countries.

In other words, we can’t implement Kyoto efficiently because we would have to give lots of money to poor countries and that’s politically impossible. But, as an alternative to implementing inefficiently we should give lots of money to poor countries.

I’ve pointed out this contradiction ad nauseam, but consistency is not a major issue for Lomborg or for his right-wing employers (the nastiest government in recent Danish history) and promoters.

This report, saying that a return of 1500 Gigalitres to the Murray is needed to achieve moderate improvements in ecological conditions is pretty much what was expected. As I argued here, such a reduction in water use is feasible, but expensive and politically tricky. Given the way the process has been set up 1500 GL is likely to be an upper bound for the return of water to the Murray, at least for the next 10 years, the period for which NSW licenses will be allocated.

In the comments thread for my post on Lomborg, I’ve been presented yet again with the widely-reproduced quotation in which Stephen Schneider is supposed to have advocated scientific dishonesty in the interests of environmentalism. In fact, the history of this quote proves exactly the opposite of the point intended by those who use it.

The original quote, was in an interview by Discover Magazine in 1989, where Schneider discussed the problems of dealing with the media. (I’ve looked in vain for the full interview, so I’ll make my usual appeal for help on this).
The relevant paragraph is

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

The first public use of this quote against Simon was by the late Julian Simon (of whom Lomborg is a big fan). Here’s the version he printed, in the APS News, March 1996

Scientist should consider stretching the truth to get some broad base support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention about any doubts we might have… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. (emphasis added)

The section in bold is a complete fabrication and the remainder of the quote has been distorted by omission of key sentences, notably the final one. Schneider demanded and received the right to print a correction.

One might think that having been caught out in this fashion, Simon and his friends would either avoid using this quote or be careful to get it right. Not a bit of it. Both Simon and his numerous followers have continued to use distorted versions of this quote. (I should note that Lomborg used a short version but was careful enough to give the full quote in a footnote). Here for example is John Daly

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

Note that critical sentences have been omitted or run together with no indication of what has been done.

What’s really interesting about this episode is that Schneider’s opponents are committing exactly the offence of which they accuse him. They are convinced he is a dangerous scaremonger who needs to be exposed in the interest of “making the world a better place”. Unfortunately, their best piece of evidence has a lot of “ifs, ands and buts”. So rather than “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but”, they extract the “simplified dramatic statements” and serve them up to “capture the public imagination”. Indeed, “each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest”, and for not of all us does it mean being both.

UpdateAs regards my own reaction to Schneider’s views, I’ll restate what I said the first time I discussed this. “Iâm not a huge fan of Schneider – I find him overly prone to alarmism, and even in the corrected version I think this comes through. But that doesnât justify reproducing quotations from obviously hostile sources without the simple precaution of a Google check.”

As I won’t be able to make Lomborg’s IPA address, I’ll repost, with marginal changes, an earlier piece setting out my views on him.The only thing that’s changed in the interim is that Lomborg has dropped his earlier pretence of being a leftwinger and repentant greenie, which was, as it were, his unique selling point (thanks to Dave Ricardo for this neat way of putting it). Anyway, here’s my piece.

This will, I promise, be the last thing I post in relation to Lomborg and Kyoto for some time. I want to explain a bit about the development of my ideas and why I’m so strongly pro-Kyoto and anti-Lomborg. I didn’t as ‘Robert Musil’ suggests, reach this position in some kind of green-liberal cocoon. Anyone who knows the ANU economics department, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) or Townsville, to name a few of my influences, will find this idea laughable.

Rather, I am an environmentalist for the boringly straightforward reason that I love natural environments and want to see them preserved. My favorite environments, reflecting the places I’ve lived most, are the Australian Alps and the Great Barrier Reef. If we get the kind of global warming that seems likely under ‘business as usual’, both will be destroyed or at least radically transformed.

In this context, I think it’s important to take some modest actions now so as to prepare for the need for more substantial reductions in CO2 emissions once the scientific doubts are resolved. If, as is possible but in my view unlikely, it turns out that the problem has been greatly over-estimated, and we have incurred some small economic losses (less than 3 months economic growth) needlessly, it will in my view have been a worthwhile insurance premium. In this context, Kyoto is far from ideal, but it’s the only game in town. The US Administration has given up pretending it has an alternative – it’s talking about adapting to climate change. This is fine for agriculture in the developed world and maybe even in the developing world, but it’s not an option for the Alps or the Reef. So, I’m 100 per cent for Kyoto.

On most other issues, I am, to coin a phrase, a ‘sceptical environmentalist’. That is, I accept the need to take substantial action to control pollution, make agriculture sustainable and so on. But I’ve never believed in the kind of doomsday scenarios postulated in the 1970s by the Club of Rome.

I’m also sceptical in the sense that I try to evaluate each issue on its merits, and to reach my own conclusions, rather than accepting or rejecting environmentalist claims holus-bolus. For example, I’m happy to eat GM food, provided it is properly labelled so I can make my own choices. Similarly, while I doubt that nuclear power is ever going to prove an economically viable energy source, even in the presence of high carbon taxes, I have no problem with mining and exporting uranium, subject to the usual environmental safeguards needed for mining operations in general.

With this background, I began with a very positive attitude towards Lomborg. He seemed to be taking a sensibly optimistic attitude towards environmental problems, pointing to our successes in fixing up pollution problems, the ozone layer and so on, rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios. Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems – whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing. In particular,he came up with an obviously self-contradictory case for doing nothing about global warming, and gave a clearly biased summary of the economic literature on this topic, which I know very well.

After that, I looked at his story about being an environmentalist reluctantly convinced of the truth according to Julian Simon. As I observed a while ago, I first heard this kind of story in Sunday School, and I’ve heard it many times since. It’s almost invariably bogus, and Lomborg is no exception. You don’t need to look far to find errors in Simon’s work as bad as any of those of the Club of Rome, but Lomborg apparently missed them. Going on, I realised that Lomborg’s professed concern for the third world was nothing more than a debating trick – otherwise he wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss emissions trading with poor countries as politically infeasible.

There’s nothing I hate more than being conned. Lomborg tried to con me, and, for a while, he succeeded. That’s why I’m far more hostile to him than to a forthright opponent of environmentalism like Simon.

Poor old Paddy McGuinness, still living somewhere in the twilight years of the Syndey Push, can’t seem to shake the addiction to the politics of victimhood that characterises so much of the Australian (and even more the American) right. In his recent column in praise of Keith Windschuttle and Bjorn Lomborg, he asserted “

Lomborg will not be speaking at any university campus, since these have become hotbeds of political intolerance where unpopular views are shouted down and the speakers often physically attacked

He doesn’t seem to have noticed that Windschuttle (whose quasi-racist views that the Tasmanian Aborigines were responsible for their own extinction by virtue of their degraded morals are far more offensive than anything Lomborg has to say) has repeatedly appeared on University campuses in debates that have been extensively reported in the blogosphere.

More directly to the point, his claim that Lomborg won’t be speaking on Australian campuses is false, a fact which was certainly known to Lomborg’s sponors, the Institute of Public Affairs, which obviously supplied McGuinness with his information. Lomborg will be speaking at the University of Queensland on October 1 (unfortunately, I’ll be in Canberra, at the Conference of Economists). When challenged on this blatant falsehood by Paul Norton of Griffith, the SMH provided the following response

Dr Jennifer Marohasy who provided some of the information about Lomburg to Paddy had the following experience when arranging for him to speak. PAddy did not have this most recent information when he wrote the article. An extract of Dr Marohasy’s email is included here.

When I (Jennifer Marohasy) first broached the idea of him (Lomburg) speaking in Brisbane at the University of Queensland campus my contacts in the Life Sciences Faculty were unhelpful and uninterested – and concerned that such a lecture would be controversial and divisive! Thus we were to hold the lecture at Custom’s House, a University property, but in the city.

However, given the nature of Bjorn Lomborg’s work and the relevance of it to those studying ecology etcetera I ended up going back to the Life Science’s Faculty accusing one of my old PhD supervisors along the lines of your article – and it was throw back at me that I now work for a right wing organisation, politically motivated etcetera etcetera. However, in the end the University did agree to host the lecture and on campus.

The quibble about the Customs House is nonsense. This is the University’s standard venue for speakers of general interest – in the year I’ve been here I’ve attended half a dozen university events there, and spoken at a couple of them. Marohasy knew when she briefed McGuinness that Lomborg could speak at UQ if he wanted to. As Norton points, out in an email, Griffith University wasn’t even asked, although it has regularly hosted speakers whose views could be presumed to be unpopular.

Reading McGuinness’ piece as a whole, the striking feature is the implicit assumption that while it’s OK for Paddy and his friends to dish out the vitriol, it’s blatant victimisation when they get a serve of their own medicine.

Whether or not the Kyoto Protocol comes into force depends on whether or not the Russian Duman ratifies it. But trying to work out what is going on seems like an exercise in old-style Kremlinology. One Minister they’re all set. Another says it’s months away. It’s not clear whether this is standard interdepartmental argy-bargy (the first minister is environment, the second is economy), angling for some last-minute sweeteners from the EU or something else altogether. Are there still Kremlin-watchers in business and if so can they explain what is going on?

Reader Robert Parson, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, has kindly supplied a scanned PDF file of the hard-to-obtain Baliunas paper “Ozone and Global Warming: Are the Problems Real?”, which I’ve posted here (2.6MB download). It’s a fascinating illustration of the contrarian technique at work. In particular, it’s noteworthy that Baliunas uses almost exactly the same kinds of arguments on the two issues and, if anything, her case on CFC and ozone seems stronger. Of course, CFC regulation was a live political issue at the time, whereas action on global warming, such as Kyoto, was a relatively distant prospect.

A highlight is Baliunas’ confident assertion that “the ozone hole cannot occur in the Arctic” – a claim that stood up for about three years.

Only a few weeks after Baliunas testified before Congress that the science on all this was unsettled, the Chemistry Nobel was awarded to Paul Crutzen, Sherwood Rowland, and Mario Molina for their work on stratospheric ozone. Rowland and Molina were explicitly cited for proposing the CFC-ozone depletion theory. This killed Republican attempts (by the aptly named Reps DeLay and Doolittle) to stop the phaseout of CFCs, and Baliunas has been very quiet on the ozone issue ever since.

I’ve appended a more detailed version of the story kindly supplied by Robert Parson.

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