Copenhagen Con ?

John Quiggin7 Comments

I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist . The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.

There are however, two big difficulties.
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Time to give up the day job ?

John Quiggin3 Comments

I’ve been meaning for a while to post on some of the claims made by Ross McKitrick . Since McKitrick is, like me, an environmental economist, I feel some responsibility to rebut his arguments, but I’ve been put off by the thought of untangling the mess he has made of the global warming issue, most notably in his attack, written jointly with retired mining executive Stephen McIntyre, on the Mann et al study of the history of global temperatures.

Fortunately, Tim Lambert is on the job. As his demolition of pro-gun academic fraud John Lott showed, Tim has exactly the required qualities for a task like this. He’s careful, painstaking, scrupulously honest and (unlike me) hardly ever loses his temper even when faced with the most arrant nonsense. He’s started off with a truly devastating blow, nailing McKitrick (and co-author Christopher Essex) as the source of the absurd claim, now required belief in many anti-global warming circles) that there is no such thing as an average temperature (see also here.

The work of Lambert and others has made it pretty certain that Lott will never again hold an academic job, though that doesn’t stop the American Economic Institutions. McKitrick reports that he has started taking bagpiping lessons, and this sounds like a good career move to me.

Global warming and nuclear power

John Quiggin12 Comments

While we’re on the subject of climate change, I ran across a statement made by James Lovelock, described as a “celebrated Green guru[1]”, that “only nuclear power can now halt global warming”. The core point is

He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their last report in 2001.

On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable energy, such as wind, wave and solar power – the favoured solution of the Green movement – to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power stations whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere to warm.

I agree with Lovelock’s analysis up to a point, but there is a big problem that he has overlooked.
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Putin and Kyoto

John Quiggin1 Comment

The announcement by Vladimir Putin that Russia will move rapidly to ratify the Kyoto treaty, thereby bringing it into force, is encouraging news, though scarcely conclusive. Putin has gone back and forth on this several times before, and it’s not immediately clear what has prompted the latest announcement.

What is obvious is that it’s bad news for Bush and Howard. Putin can scarcely have been unaware of the impact on Bush, and has presumably made the judgement that he’s on the way out, and this judgement may in fact have been one of Putin’s motives for switching sides. Howard, of course, is merely collateral damage.

One good thing about the long delay is that it’s given those who want to do something other than Kyoto plenty of time to put up or shut up. In effect, they’ve done the latter. Both Bush and Howard have gone for business as usual, while alternatives to Kyoto like the McKibbin-Wilcoxen Proposal have gone nowhere. It’s Kyoto or nothing, and I certainly hope it will be Kyoto.

What I'm reading and doing

John Quiggin7 Comments

I’ve spent most of the weekend at our annual karate training camp. As a result, I’m both stiff and bruised, but still, a good time was had by all. The camp was at Tallebudgera, one of the most pleasant places on the Gold Coast. We stayed at the Recreation Centre there, which has been extensively, and expensively, upgraded since last year. The 1950s bunkrooms are gone. The new ones are much brighter and airier, and include their own bathrooms as well as what appeared to be Internet ports, though I didn’t have any capacity to check on this. The other main essential has been dealt with, as the centre now has a cafe. The high point of the weekend, after some rugged training on the beach was to walk past a tree full of rainbow lorikeets – I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many so close.

Although most of the non-training time was spent sleeping, I managed to get a bit of reading done, finishing Gil Merom’s book on democracies and small wars (on which more soon), Tiffin and Gittins How Australia Compares and Stephen Bell’s The Money Mandarins

, certain to be the standard work on the Reserve Bank for years to come.

What I'm reading and doing

John Quiggin7 Comments

I’ve spent most of the weekend at our annual karate training camp. As a result, I’m both stiff and bruised, but still, a good time was had by all. The camp was at Tallebudgera, one of the most pleasant places on the Gold Coast. We stayed at the Recreation Centre there, which has been extensively, and expensively, upgraded since last year. The 1950s bunkrooms are gone. The new ones are much brighter and airier, and include their own bathrooms as well as what appeared to be Internet ports, though I didn’t have any capacity to check on this. The other main essential has been dealt with, as the centre now has a cafe. The high point of the weekend, after some rugged training on the beach was to walk past a tree full of rainbow lorikeets – I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many so close.

Although most of the non-training time was spent sleeping, I managed to get a bit of reading done, finishing Gil Merom’s book on democracies and small wars (on which more soon), Tiffin and Gittins How Australia Compares and Stephen Bell’s The Money Mandarins

, certain to be the standard work on the Reserve Bank for years to come.

Fertility and partnering

John Quiggin43 Comments

There’s been a bit of discussion of fertility issues in comments threads. Rather than present a view of my own, which I’m still refining, I’ll point readers to a paper by coming out of the Monash Uni Centre for Population and Urban Research, and commissioned by the Australian Family Association[1]. Here’s the blurb. As I read it, the central theme is a causal chain from economic reform to less secure employment for men with low education to low rates of partnering to lower fertility. The paper gives some good evidence on the later links in the chain, while assuming the earler ones. I don’t have a problem with this, since I think it’s clear that there has been a general increase in economic insecurity, though it rises and falls over the economic cycle.

I’m less concerned than the authors, and some commentators on this blog, about declining aggregate fertility levels. But I think the study makes a strong case that economic insecurity is producing a society in which central life goals like having a family are out of reach for (or at least not attained by) an increasing proportion of the population.

fn1. The AFA is a socially conservative lobby group, which is very concerned about things like cloning and the “gay agenda”. As with all such groups, it’s necessary to apply an appropriate level of scepticism. But in my reading of the Monash study, I haven’t noticed any obvious signs that the research has been slanted to fit a particular agenda.

Responsibility, part2

John Quiggin1 Comment

In an earlier post , I suggested it was startling to find that the Daily Mirror has more stringent standards of personal responsibility than the Blair government in relation to the dissemination of falsehoods about the war in Iraq Looking at parallel cases in the US[1], Jack Shafer at Slate is surprised but in the opposite way, saying that until NYT editor Bill Keller publishes an apology for the bogus WMD reports published by Judith Miller

we’ll be occupying a bizarro world in which the secretary of state is more accountable than the New York Times.

Pardon my naive idealism, but isn’t the government in a democratic society supposed to more accountable than any newspaper. Still, it does seem rather alternate-universe that the Daily Mirror should be the only actor in this whole drama to uphold traditional standards of responsibility.
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