Lords of Climate Change

John Quiggin87 Comments

I see in this piece by Alan Wood that the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs inquiry into “The Economics of Climate Change” (which strongly questioned the science of climate change) is still getting a run in denialist circles.

I haven’t bothered posting on this before, because the main outcome of the inquiry was the establishment of the Stern Review which issued its first discussion paper back in April, stating (from the Executive Summary)

Climate change is a serious and urgent issue… There is now an overwhelming body of scientific evidence that human activity is increasing the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and causing warming.

There’s more like this, giving an excellent summary of the mainstream scientific position.

So the House of Lords exercise was something of an own goal for the denialists. But how did a supposedly serious inquiry come up with with such nonsense in the first place?
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Room at the top

John Quiggin18 Comments

One of the beliefs that is (or at least used to be) influential in discussions about the War on Drugs is that, if only the Mr Big(s) at the top of the distribution chain could be caught, the problem of illegal drugs could be controlled. The Melbourne gangland wars provide an ideal test of this idea. The leading gangsters did a better job eliminating each other than any police force has ever managed and most of the survivors are in jail or on the run. So, at least for a while, drug crime ought to be under control if Mr Bigs count for anything.

According to this story in The Age, the opposite is true. The void created by the war is rapidly being filled. Takeaway quote

Police say the profits from drug trafficking mean little-known criminals can became major influences in months.

In most cases, gangsters like those involved in the gangland wars don’t facilitate the illegal drug trade, they tax it.

Adventures in social network analysis

John Quiggin34 Comments

The latest round in the Republican War on Science is a report prepared for US Representative Joe Barton aimed at discrediting the ‘hockey stick’ analysis of global temperatures first undertaken by Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, and subsequently supported by many other studies. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, this peripheral issue in the analysis of climate change has attracted disproportionate attention from denialists, most notably Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre. One result was that the US National Academy of Sciences recently reviewed the work, reaching conclusions broadly supportive of MBH.

The report for Barton was prepared by three statisticians, Edward Wegman, David Scott and Yasmin Said , and its only novel contribution is a social network analysis, which is meant to show that the various independent studies aren’t really independent and that peer review has broken down, since the same group of interlinked academics is reviewing each others’ papers.

Kieran Healy and Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber are experts on this stuff, and I’ll be interested to see what they have to say. But in the meantime, I have a couple of observations (feel free to correct errors in my interpretation).
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Room-mates

John Quiggin14 Comments

In my dialect of English, shared living arrangements (normally non-familial) can be described by three terms.
A housemate (or flatmate) is someone who shares your house (normally not your room, but this is open)
A roommate is someone who shares your room (normally not your bed)
A bedmate is self-explanatory.

In US English, “roommate” seems to cover all three, but US English speakers seem able to infer which is intended from the context. Can anyone help me with a usage guide?
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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin3 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

Mumbai terror attacks

John Quiggin22 Comments

Yet another terror attack, with 200 killed. All such crimes, whether committed by terrorist gangs or national governments, should be condemned without reservation. The idea that causes such as national independence, religion or political ideology justify the murder of ordinary people going about their daily business is utterly pernicious, as is the view that similar killings (whether directly intended or inevitable ‘collateral damage’) are justified in retaliation for such crimes.

Request for help

John Quiggin16 Comments

I know there’s a word for this, but I’m still holding out against it. I’m hoping someone will be able to help me with a computing problem.

My approach to security is to keep three copies of my Documents folder (about 20GB) synchronized twice daily (often about 500Mb of changed files). One copy is on the home computer, one at work, and the third is on my 40Gb iPod. My problem is that the iPod is filling up, and it doesn’t look as if Apple has any plans to bring out a substantially larger one with Firewire, as I had hoped. One possibility is to find one of the 60Gb models, but it struck me that if Apple can fit a Firewire drive into a lightweight package and make it play music as well, someone must have produced a FireWire equivalent of the ubiquitous USB memory stick. I don’t need something that big, but I’d like something that can be powered from the Firewire drive rather than external power and is small enough to fit into a shirt pocket, with capacity, say 80Gb. Oh, and a frickin’ laser beam attached to the front panel. Is that too much to ask?

Other suggestions gratefully received. My feeling is that synchronizing over USB or an Internet connection is going to be too slow, but maybe there are some clever strategies for increasing efficiency here.

Thanks in advance

PPPs in decline ?

John Quiggin22 Comments

There’s been quite a bit happening in relation to Public Private Partnerships, most of it suggesting a diminished role for this kind of financing. Queensland has issued new guidelines, partly in response to criticism of the fact that there has so far been only one major PPP project approved (and that only just scraped in). The criticism is understandable: a lot of people in the financial sector are missing out on really big money every time the government decides to go with simple low-cost bond financing. It’s striking though, that the only state with no reason to reduce measured debt levels (Queensland has positive net financial worth) is also the one that has found hardly any PPP offers meeting the value for money criterion. It seems pretty clear that at least some evaluation processes in NSW and elsewhere have been corrupted by the determination of the parties to do a deal regardless of the economics. The recent NSW Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee report on PPPs doesn’t say this, but it certainly raises plenty of concerns about opaque processes.

Meanwhile, in the UK, it seems to be two steps forward and one step back. The nonsensical idea of an all-in-one contract for schools, in which construction is bundled with provision of “soft services” like procurement and HR is mercifully being abandoned, but new forms of PFI/PPP, such as Building Schools for the Future are emerging. The pernicious features of these “innovations” will no doubt become apparent in time, but for the moment, the Blairites are still keen.

Back in the box

John Quiggin19 Comments

Unless Costello has another move planned, it looks like we can all turn back to the sports pages. Costello’s called Howard a liar, Howard has returned the compliment in spades (without actually repeating his earlier denials) and now it’s back to business as usual.

The only real interest in all this will be for the history books. Unlike the tangles of Children Overboard and AWB, where plausible deniability has reigned supreme, this is as straightforward a demonstration of the mendacity of Australian politics in the Howard Years as could be imagined.