I’m planning on putting the following argument in a piece on the proposed Free Trade Agreement with the United States. Can anyone confirm or refute my understanding of the implications of the FTA?

Under the Bush Administration the United States has, to an ever-increasing extent, rejected the whole idea of multilateralism on the basis that it fails to recognise the special position of the United States. In place of multilateral negotiations in which the United States is, at most, first among equals, the Administration has pursued bilateral agreements on a wide range of issues. The most notable case is that of the International Criminal Court, where the United States has pursued bilateral agreeements exempting Americans from prosecution.

Inevitably these agreements involve an element of ?pattern bargaining?. The United States proposes the same set of terms to each of its negotiating partners, generally on a ?take it or leave it? basis. While adjustments may be made in particular cases, the end result is inevitably that the terms of such agreements are those set by the more powerful party.

The most important multilateral agreement to be boycotted by the United States is the Kyoto protocol on climate change. It is noteworthy that the most prominent advocate of the FTA, Alan Oxley of AUSTA, is also a leading critic of Kyoto, and bases his arguments against Australian participation primarily on the argumentthat Australian industries will lose competitiveness against non-signatory countries such as the United States.

It is easy to foresee the possibility of the Kyoto agreement coming into conflict with an FTA. For example, an effective emission credit trading system will require some form of taxation of carbon dioxide emissions embodied in imports from nonsignatory countries. Applied by Australia to imports from the United States, this would, on the face of it, conflict with the requirements of the FTA.

I trawled through my hard drive, trying to find something I wrote last year about the IPCC and Ian Castles’ criticism of it. However, Keneth Miles (link malfunctioning for reasons I can’t figure out, use the one in the blogroll) has made most of the points I was going to, and has lots more, including the disappointing news that Castles has joined the Lavoisier Group, an organisation based on the idea that, if we all close our eyes and wish hard enough, the whole problem of global warming will magically disappear.

Keneth Miles has been posting quite a bit on the Castles critique of the IPCC economic projections used in estimates of global warming. I started a long piece six months ago, but have been too busy to do all I wanted. So, in the best blogging spirit, I’ve decided to post what I have and let the debate go on.

For those who don’t want to read a complex and lengthy post, my conclusion is

No-one can predict with certainty, but the IPCC estimates don’t seem noticeably different from those used in other long-range forecasts. It seems unlikely that they are biased towards overestimation of likely growth in emissions.

Read More »

Preface on reposting policy I and others have been discussing concerns about the ephemerality of blogging. Given that blogs are a searchable database, there’s no real reason why people should look only at the current pages. But in my experience, comment threads tend to die off after a few days. However, Aaron Oakley has just put in a comment on a post from December 2002, and this gives me a chance to announce my new policy. If anyone comments on a post that has been archived (more than 10 days) I will do my best to repost it and thereby reopen the debate.

Preface to the repost Now here’s the reposted piece. I think the article quoted in the paper refutes Aaron in advance, but just to be clear I’ll restate my point. I agree with Aaron that urban heat islands are real even in small towns (in fact, I’m glad to see Aaron endorsing the reality of human-induced climate change). I also agree that estimates of climate change need to be checked using only rural stations. But, as the cited article says this has already been done, and it makes no significant difference to estimates of global warming. Note that Aaron himself recommended this article.

Reposted article begins
Bizarre Science points to this study confirming the IPCC contention that Urban Heat Islands, while a real phenomenon, are not important in assessing estimates of the rate of global warming C.J.G. (Jon) Morris of the School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne, reports

Whilst climatologists now think that the warming in the temperature record from some small urban areas is partly the result of the UHI, this is not evidence that Australia’s climate has remained unchanged rather than warmed over the past 100 years. Average minimum temperatures from many stations over most of Australia have shown an increase of between 0.1 deg C and 0.3 deg C per decade since 1951. Whilst some temperature records from small towns do not represent the large scale climate, it is unlikely to have any major impact upon our estimates of temperature warming over Australia. This is because there are numerious other weather stations located in remote areas such as lighthouses and regions far removed from urban areas that still indicate a warming temperature trend.

Thanks for this useful link!

Update While I’m at it, I also appreciate this post, in which BS reader Reader George Bogg points out that, given the number of points in Alan McCallum’s scatterplot, the trend he finds is almost certainly statistically significant (thereby resolving the main remaining point of dispute). However, Bogg misses the point that this is a panel data set, consisting of observations from many different stations over time. An analysis taking this into account would yield a much stronger correlation. Of course, as Bogg points out the fact that the world is getting hotter doesn’t prove anything about the causes. But at least agreement on the facts is a start.

Gary Sauer-Thompson has an excellent post on the news that the minimal flow through the mouth of the Murray is about to stop altogether. Clearly the only sustainable response is a reduction in the amount used for irrigation. Sharing this around is going to be difficult, especially when some users are still trying to increase the amount they take.

A couple of months ago, I made the observation that

there is now almost no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans. The other social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) are even more suspect than economics. The natural sciences are all implicated in support for evolution against creationism, and for their conclusions about global warming, CFCs and other environmental threats. Even the physicists have mostly been sceptical about Star Wars and its offspring. And of course the humanities are beyond the pale.

I didn’t extend this claim at the time to the Australian right, but looking at the most recent Quadrant, perhaps I should have. Quadrant has been the biggest backer of historical polemicist Keith Windschuttle (whose fabrications have just been exposed yet again) and a keen promoter of global warming ‘skepticism’.

But when writing the above, I assumed that creationism would not find any support on the Australian mainstream right. I was wrong. The April 2003 Quadrant has a piece by Jenny Teichmann attacking Darwinism and claiming that support for Darwinism arises from the fact that it promotes atheism. The piece is short (less than two pages) but very confused – not surprisingly given that it draws on Windschuttle’s massively confused mentor David Stove, also an opponent of evolution.

One article doesn’t define an editorial stance, and perhaps the next issue of Quadrant will contain a vigorous defence of evolutionary theory. But running a piece like Teichmann’s is yet another indication of the declining intellectual standards of what was once a major journal.

While I’m on this general topic, the same post noted that, having been caught in a piece of glaring dishonesty, the National Review Online covered it up by amending its Web Site without acknowledgement. This seems to be standard practice on the US right. Cato’s change of name from ‘Project on Social Security Privatisation’ to ‘Project on Social Security choice’ was similarly unheralded. And, more recently, Tim Lambert has caught the Independence Institute and the Heartland Institute amending or suppressing articles by John Lott of the American Enterprise Institute where he has been exposed making false claims about defensive gun use.

These people have read their Orwell of course, and seem to think of Websites as being like the memory hole, where the past can be erased. They don’t, however, seem to be aware of Google archives, let alone the Wayback Machine.

Of course, Orwell was talking about Stalinist rewriting of history. And, until recently, anti-scientific irrationalism was more common on the political left than on the right. But those days are gone, and it’s now advocates of truth and rationality on the political right who have to blush for the company they keep.

Update Professor Bunyip (permalinks not working) weighs in as assistant counsel for the defence in the Windschuttle case. As always with Windschuttle, the evidence of participants in the conflict who denied doing anything wrong is preferred to eyewitness evidence against them. By Windschuttle’s account, the fabrication of Aboriginal history is not the product of recent leftwing historians but a conspiracy stretching back to the beginnings of European settlement.

As I pointed out in an earlier piece on junk science, facts are inconvenient things. If you do science or history honestly, you will always come across facts that don’t suit your preconceptions, and will need to acknowledge this openly. Plenty of leftwingers have failed this test in the past. But Windschuttle fails it to an extent unparalleled outside the rigidly disciplined ranks of Marxism-Leninism from which he (and, I think, Bunyip) came.

Does this all matter? Well, yes. This is not an argument over old bones but part of an organised campaign to assure white Australians that if the Aboriginal population is suffering now, it is their own fault. In essence, the line is that, until they sort out their own problems (drink, violence etc), we (whites, that is) have no need to worry and no wrongs to atone for. This is even more false and dangerous than the mirror-image claim that, since problems like drink and violence are the result of oppression, Aboriginal communities cannot be expected to do anything about them.

I noted a couple of days ago that the economic argument on Kyoto has largely been won. The BCA shift to a neutral position reflects the fact that the economic costs of Kyoto will be small. Warwick McKibbin <a href="http://www.msgpl.com.au/msgpl/download/ep10.pdf”>continues to argue (PDF file) that his alternative provides a better way of dealing with uncertainty about implementation costs, and he makes some good points. In my view, Warwick’s arguments are more applicable to the design of a substantial post-Kyoto initiative than to the first steps involved in Kyoto itself.

It might be useful to point to some developments in the scientific debate, with the warning that, like most bloggers, I’m not an expert on most of the relevant issues.

The most impressive evidence against the global warming hypothesis (GWH) has been the satellite data, which originally showed a strong cooling trend, directly contrary to the evidence of surface-level warming. The inconsistency was partially resolved when Matthias Schabel and Frank Wentz pointed out that the measurements, taken by a team led by John Christy at the University of Alabama, had failed to account properly for the gradual decay of satellite orbits. When this adjustment was made, the satellite data showed a weak upward trend. There’s been a bit of back and forth adjustment since then, but now Schabel and Wentz have struck again with a statistical analysis (PDF file that brings the satellite data much closer to the ground-level, though there is still a gap between the trends. This research is still unpublished, and no doubt there will be more debate, but it looks as though the contradiction between the data sets has been reduced to a minor anomaly, which will be resolved in due course. As Schabel and Wentz note in their abstract, this is bad news for critics of the standard modelling of water vapor feedbacks, who have relied heavily on the satellite data.

A second area of contention has concerned events at the poles. I tend not to put too much weight on this because I’ve formed the impression that polar climates are inherently highly variable, poorly understood and subject to severe measurement problems. This impression has been reinforced by what I’ve seen over the last year or so, which seems to have something for everybody. On the one hand, the spectacular break up of an ice-shelf recently gave rise to this report suggests that sea-level rise may proceed more rapidly than was previously thought. On the other hand, large parts of Antarctica appear to be cooling, not warming, which is not what the GW models predict.

Although it often seems as if these issues will never be resolved, at least one hypothesis should be subject to a conclusive test in the next few years. A number of sceptics have argued that the high global temperatures of recent years are due to the combination of variable solar activity and the El Nino cycle. No-one disputes the importance of El Nino, but the solar cycle idea is rejected by most climatologists.

Sceptic John Daly points out that the peak of solar activity has passed, which he says should imply declining global temperatures over the next few years. Obviously it would be good for all of us if he was right – on the standard version of the GWH, serious environmental damage seems inevitable even if we implement then extend Kyoto.

If, as I expect, we see a continuation of the warming trend, an acceptance by Daly and others that their hypothesis had been refuted might help to mobilise serious action.

Unfortunately, there is always the intermediate possibility of data that is not conclusive either way. Murphy’s Law suggests that this is what we’ll get.

The Business Council of Australia has dropped its previous opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, moving to a neutral position.. The other main business body, the Australian Industries Group is reconsidering its position. This reflects the fact, which I’ve pointed out quite a few times, that the economic costs of implementing Kyoto are quite small. A few industries, like the heavily-subsidised aluminium industry, lose substantially but the effect on the rest of the economy is neutral or beneficial.

In fact, most modelling (even that commissioned by the government) shows that if the Kyoto protocol comes into effect, Australia is better off joining than staying out. We will lose some coal exports, but that will happen whether we ratify or not. I discussed this at length here, noting:

Some time ago, the government commissioned Warwick McKibbin, who’s a leading critic of Kyoto, to model the effects. The results he found are pretty striking. Whether Australia ratifies or not, there’ll be a negative impact on the coal industry because other countries will import less. But given that other countries have ratified, McKibbin finds that, at least until 2010, Australia is better off ratifying Kyoto and implementing emission-reduction measures than staying out. The gain is reversed by 2020, but the current agreement calls for new targets to be agreed and implemented by 2012, encompassing more countries. The other striking feature is how small the numbers are -the benefit of staying out in 2020 is 0.2 per cent of GDP or about $1 billion per year. Although I disagree with Warwick’s policy position on Kyoto, I compliment him for keeping his independence as a modeller. The government clearly didn’t like his results one bit.

To clarify, Warwick has an alternative version of Kyoto which he has pushed pretty vigorously but so far without gaining the support of the main ‘rejectionist’ governments, those of Australia and the US.

Update Ken Parish has an interesting take on developments in hydrogen fuel cell technology. Also Jon Stanford has a piece in today’s AFR (subscription required).