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?
Manifestation
I’ll be on ABC Radio National Australia Talks Back tonight, starting about 6:10, debating time limits for unemployment benefits with Peter Saunders (the CIS one).
Monday Message Board
It’s time again for your comments on any topic – civilised discussion and no coarse language please.
What I'm reading
Parliament of Whores by PJ O’Rourke. There can be few contemporary writers with more epigones than O’Rourke. Just about every newspaper has one these days (for a while, the AFR had two), and the blogosphere is full of variants on the same riff.
O’Rourke himself was a lot funnier in his National Lampoon days, satirising the Left, not exactly from within, but at least from close-up, than he is as a fully paid-up Republican party animal. Still he can always raise a laugh, which is more than can be said for most of his imitators.
The gamut from A to B
According to a piece by the Letters Editor of the NYT
We are eager to print all points of view ÷ liberal, conservative and anything in between
Junk science on ozone
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.
Middle East Mess
The Israeli Cabinet has decided to exile Yassir Arafat, who, they say, “is an absolute obstacle to the whole process of peace and compromise”. It’s hard to disagree with this. But if that’s the criterion, why isn’t Sharon going into exile as well?
A lesson in statistics
Ken Parish supply the expected quibbles for my post on global warming. He illustrates some important statistical fallacies in the process. To support my case that the weather has got no cooler relative to the “the climatic extremes of 1998-2002”, I linked to the NOAA/National Climatic Data Center which showed that during the period since Daly’s post “January-July 2003, the global average land and ocean surface temperature was 0.54¡C (0.97¡F) above the long term mean, third warmest “.
Ken’s response is to go back to the underlying data and perform comparisons between Jan-July 2003 and the corresponding period in 2002, as well as month by month comparisons between 2002 and 2003 . Since the data set consists of deviations from long-term averages, it has no seasonal pattern, and there is, therefore, no justification for this procedure, or for focusing on 2002 when my post referred to the period 1998-2002 (the warmest five-year period on record,). It does, however, mean that the base period for his comparisons includes three of the four warmest months (in deviation terms) in the entire data set, all of which were in early 2002 (you can see them in the graph below). This is a prime example of ‘cherrypicking’.
Ken’s next move is to compare the individual months of June and July 2003 with the corresponding months in 2002, finding them to be cooler by 0.09 and 0.05 degrees respectively, and says “Thus the weather has got cooler since last year, albeit only slightly so far. ” In drawing this conclusion, he ignores the problem of statistical signifiance, which is acute when making pairwise comparisons for periods as a short as a single month. It’s easy to check that, even if you suppose that the data is an average of 1000 independent observations (far too many, given that short-term weather patterns at adjacent points are highly correlated) and that the standard deviation of monthly average temperatures at a given point is 1 degree, the difference found by Ken is statistically, as well as climatically insignificant.
All this might lead you to conclude that you can prove anything with statistics. But in fact, this is one case where you don’t need elaborate statistical analysis. The graph below (taken from NOAA) makes it clear that there is a warming trend that swamps the short-run cycles associated with sunspots and El Nino events.
To end on a positive note, I broadly agree with Ken’s assessment that
If the global average temperature falls back to well below the long-term average by 2006 that would suggest Daly may be correct. On the other hand, if it continues to fall but remains above the long-term average, that will clearly demonstrate the imprint of man-made global warming.
To be more specific, I predict that the average global temperature for 2006, as measured by NOAA, will be above the average for 1971-2000 (the baseline in the chart above) and I promise a retraction if this prediction is not correct.
Thought for Thursday
My Fin column today, the two-year anniversary of the S11 atrocity, looks at Bush’s request for $87 billion more for Iraq (it also includes a pittance for Afghanistan). Like most commentators, I conclude that while the request marks a welcome return to reality after months of dodging the issue, the money is little more than a downpayment on the costs that will be incurred. In fact, after deducting military expenditure, what’s left will barely be enough to pay running costs for the Occupation government. A short excerpt …
The 2003 Budget released by the Coalition Provision Authority in July called for the expenditure of $ 6 billion in the second half of 2003 alone.
Then there is the Oil-for-Food program which is due to expire on 21 November. Under this program, Iraq was allowed to export oil to the value of about $10 billion per year, which was used initially to buy food, medicine and from 1998, a wide range of essential imports. … Maintaining the imports funded under the Oil-For-Food program and the current expenditure levels of the 2003 Budget will require about $20 billion in 2004, less perhaps $5 billion in net proceeds from oil exports. This would swallow all the money allocated in the Bush request, leaving nothing for large-scale reconstruction, let alone the now-forgotten Afghans.
If Bush had followed through the Afghanistan war with a serious peacekeeping and reconstruction effort, that country could be well on the way to a relatively prosperous democracy by now, going a long way to discredit its previous Taliban rulers and their Al Qaeda accomplices. Instead, the Taliban are on the rise again, and no doubt Al Qaeda is not far behind them.
Middle managers
My comments on Bad Company: The Cult of the CEO by Gideon Haigh have just been published in Quarterly Essay along with a response by Haigh. He argues that a focus on managerialism as an expression of the interests of the managerial class/caste as a whole is out of date because there’s now a cleavage interests between top managers and ‘middle managers’.
This got me thinking that although the phrase ‘middle managers’ is used a lot, I don’t know what it really means. In the large organisations I’ve worked in, people could be classified into three main groups. There are the people who actually do the work, the managers who tell people what to do and a group in-between, consisting of skilled and experienced workers who supervise others.
Sometimes the dividing lines are fairly sharp and sometimes not, but there’s usually a pretty clear line separating the managers proper from everybody else. In the public service, for example, the dividing line is generally provided by the boundary between the Senior Executive Service and what used to be called the Third Division.
What isn’t clear to me is whether the term ‘middle managers’ applies to the intermediate group I’ve described or (as Haigh implies) to managers other than CEOs and those in their immediate circle.
In debating things like managerialism, the two interpretations have radically different implications. I would certainly agree that the last decade has been a pretty miserable one for people in my worker-supervisor category. On the other hand, as David Gordon pointed out in Fat and Mean the idea that the corporate sector moved to slimmed-down management and flat organizations in the 1990s is a myth. Gordon was writing in 1996, but the dotcom boom was characterized by even more proliferation of management to the point where some firms had more vice-presidents than programmers.
John Quiggin 