Chris Suellentrop at Slate does a job on Hans Blix, the head of the UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection team. Unlike most of the many critics of Blix, he does concede Blix’s role in detecting the North Korean nuclear program. But as with the majority of US commentary on this issue, he fails to mention the fact that the first set of UN inspections found and destroyed Saddam’s nuclear weapons program.

This is not to say that Saddam may not have tried again, and of course he’s used chemical weapons (let’s pass over the fact that he was a ‘good guy’ at the time). But the assumption that inspections are bound to fail seems misplaced to me, especially as the Iraqis are taking a strong line in denial, rather than making some sort of ambiguous half-admission. If they haven’t destroyed (nearly) everything it shouldn’t be too hard to catch them.

Of course there could be data on a CD-ROM in Saddam’s jacket pocket, but nearly every actual weapon is detectable and the Iraqis are almost certainly behind the curve in their knowledge of advances in detection techniques over the past decade.

Don Arthur has a string of great posts, including one on whether posts should be short and sharp. I don’t think they need to be, but the problem is that it’s easier to do a short, sharp link to a short sharp post. I can’t think of anything short and sharp to say about Don’s recent thoughts, except that everyone should go and read them. The same goes for Rob Schaap.

Update As so often with this blog, the comments thread adds far more value to the debate than the original post. Read the fascinating discussion between Simon and Ken Parish, with a brief contribution from me. Then read Don Arthur and Rob Schaap. That’ll take quite a while, but I think it’s time better spent than on the opinion pages of the papers or watching the TV news.

Meanwhile my open forum (Thoughts for Thursday) is uncharacteristically quiet. There seem to be lots of new visitors to the blog since I completed my move to Queensland, so why don’t you share your thoughts on any topic you please, particularly what you like or don’t like about this blog.

Now that I’m back in sunny Queensland I need a sunshield for the windscreen of my car. So I dragged out the one I bought when I lived in the US ten years ago. On the back, along with the patent numbers etc, it bears the warning DO NOT DRIVE WITH SHIELD IN PLACE

I wonder, did someone actually do this and sue them, or do consumer products companies have staff paid to think of really dumb ways their customers could injure themselves.

Bruce Wolpe has an interesting comparison of Australian and American responses to terrorist attacks, noting that Australia is a place where the pursuit of happiness is taken seriously. I mentioned a while ago that Australia could do with our own version of the First Amendment. If we ever become a republic, it would be nice if we could manage a founding document that could bear comparison with the Declaration of Independence.

Monday messages have been very successful, but people tend to stop commenting once the post falls halfway down the page. So I’ve decided to go bi-weekly with this feature. You can post your thoughts on any topic in the comments thread for this post (civilised discussion and no coarse language).

My suggested starter – what can I do to improve this blog? Suggestions that I should get someone else to write it will not be entertained.

I’m making painstaking progress with transferring my website to UQ. Here’s the promised review of Lessig.

An interesting sidelight is that my ANU website had absolute addresses (that is, the complete URL) whereas the orthodoxy says you should have relative addresses to make transfers easy. The positive result is that having copied my homepage to the UQ site, all the links to files at ANU still work. I’m not sure if this refutes the standard argument for relative addresses, but it certainly tips the balance a bit.

A great piece from the unsilenceable Salman Rushdie. Just above it on the NYT Op-Ed page, Thomas Friedman’s piece on similar lines isn’t bad, but looks tired by comparison.

As the comments thread for a recent post made clear, the most notable single representative of the Keating era elite consensus (free-market economic reform and aggressive social progressivism) has been Paul Kelly’s Australian. Today’s editorial plaintively asserts that “Howard must revive that reform feeling”. It starts out with a standard bold generality “A secure economic future for Australia demands bold policy initiatives and a new wave of structural reforms that will help create wealth in which all Australians can share. ” But all that’s proposed is the dead duck of Telstra privatisation (a ‘bold’ proposal that’s been floating around for 15 years or so) and tax-welfare reform along the lines of the Five Economists’ plan that the government rejected three or four years ago.

For good or ill, the free-market reform agenda is essentially played out. The big action in the future will be in health and education, areas where there is no serious proposal for a fully market-oriented solution and where a range of partial market-oriented reforms have repeatedly failed to deliver the goods.

And while I think Howard’s success in changing the terms of debate on social issues has been greatly overstated, it’s clear that top-down elitism of the kind exemplified by Keating is, and will remain, on the nose with the Australian public with respect to both social and economic issues.

Janet Albrechtsen attacks as un-American those Australians who would like to work European hours like the 35 per week that was until recently, within 10 per cent of the Australian full-time norm. Her boilerplate about European sclerosis and poor employment growth sounds as if it has been recycled from 1999, when the dynamic US economy was creating jobs at a steady clip and we were promised a never-ending boom.

But there is something new in this sentence “It [the union movement] champions a collectively dumb group-think vision that reflects an unease over the natural layering that emerges from disparities in talent.” The repetitive abuse of ‘collectively dumb group-think vision’ alerts us that something special is on the way, and we are not disappointed. Growing inequality has now become ‘natural layering’. Good one, Janet!

By the way, this is my first post from my new office at the University of Queensland. Normal service should be restored soon.

In the long comments thread below, Ken Parish makes the point that the observed rate of global warming over the past few decades has been about 0.2 degrees C per decade, and that the IPCC and others (including some Ken has cited with approval) suggest that about half of this is due to human activity, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases. The rest reflects factors such as the cyclical fluctuations that led to warming in the first part of the 20th century and cooling in mid-century. (There are both higher and lower estimates of the share due to global warming, but half seems reasonable, especially when we compare the recent rapid warming to the more gradual warming and cooling observed in the past).

The simplest way to interpret these numbers is to suppose that there are no lags, sinks or feedbacks, so that current emissions feed directly and immediately into increases in global concentrations of greenhouse gases and then, also directly, into higher temperatures. On this basis, a continuation of the late 20th century rate of emissions would imply a temperature increase of 1 degree C, which seems unlikely to cause major disasters.

But of course, under business as usual, emissions will not remain stable. If no mitigation policies are adopted, it seems likely that emissions will at least double over the next 50 years suggesting warming of at least 2 degrees C.

Now lets think about lags, sinks and feedbacks. To the extent that lags and sinks are important, and that sinks are gradually filled, the final impact of CO2 emissions will be greater than the initial impact. Thus, if emissions stabilise at a high level, temperatures will keep rising. This again supports a higher estimate of damage. It’s hard to estimate, but I’d suggest that this supports a baseline business as usual estimate of around 2.5 degrees C.

Feedbacks can go in either direction. The IPCC argues that positive feedbacks will dominate, critics such as Richard Lindzen disagree. I find the arguments too complex to resolve, so lets call it an even-money bet that feedbacks will either enhance GW by 50 per cent or reduce it by 50 per cent. On this basis, it’s about equally likely that the impact will be 1.25 degrees C (not too bad) or 3.75 degrees C, enough to wipe out a wide range of vulnerable ecosystems. (This is spurious precision, but the range of possible outcomes is what matters)

The basic question is whether to start preparing for the bad scenario now (Kyoto) or to wait for more information. If we start preparing and it turns out that things are not as bad as we thought, we incur a cost (about 0.5 per cent of world income on most estimates) for no benefit. On the other hand, if the news is bad, we will be well placed to take the action needed to prevent a disastrous rate of warming.

If we kill Kyoto (negotiated over nearly the whole of the 1990s), wait ten years and then start negotiating an alternative when we get bad news, we will have lost 15-20 years at least, and possibly more. The cost of achieving any given level of atmospheric concentrations will be greatly higher, and the amount of unavoidable damage much greater.