Rating Republicans

Rabett Run: Republican climate cladistics

Eli Rabett saves me the bother of researching, and categories the Republican leaders who are or (or might be) in the Presidential race according to their climate change responses.

Currently, of those running, Romney and Huntsman come out in the lead, by at least not retreating on past acknowledgements that there is a problem to be addressed.

Morano approves Perry, which means we need lots more corndog photos. (See previous post.)

Flood statistics up in the air

So long, '500-year flood'? - Omaha.com

I have been saying recently that one of the largest effects of climate change - much more frequent, economically and socially disruptive, floods - may well be the first consequence of global warming that people find is convincing proof of AGW.

The above article talks about the revision of flood statistics in the US, following a lot of flooding recently.

One suspects the same thing may be said about Australia soon.

Captain a bit dull

Based on the pretty good reviews for Captain America at Rottentomatoes, I took the kids to see it today, but I think we were all a bit underwhelmed.

Sure, it looks great, but I only have middling interest in all Marvel stuff:  in fact, now that I think of it, the first and third Spiderman’s might be the only Marvel movies that I thought were very good. 

I think this movie suffered, a bit more than your average superhero special effects movie, with on screen physics that never felt dangerous.  I mean, the way the hero jumped, ran, shot and flung that shield around, he never really seemed to be in any danger; and even when his pal met his fate, it was all in such an obvious CGI background, it didn’t feel “real”either. 

The movie’s production design was all retro with quite a dash of alternative universe; in this respect, I kept thinking about Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in comparison.  I thought that earlier movie looked great, even though you knew it was all CGI background.  Maybe it was the fact that it wasn’t really trying for any realism at all that this didn’t bother me, as well as the publicity that indicated it had all been quite economically.  (A mere $70 million dollar budget, according to Wikipedia, which it failed to recover at the box office.)    I actually think the script for Sky Captain was a bit wittier than the later Captain, too. 

Anyway, I won’t be hanging out for The Avengers movies.  Ho-hum.

Corndog-gate

I noted at another blog yesterday that left wing brat-ster blog Daily Kos, which I used to check every now and again when Bush was President, but lost interest in after Obama’s election, had run a post by Kos himself making fun of photos of  Republicans eating corn dogs.   Kos also took the opportunity to specifically mention the sexuality rumour about Rick Perry, which apparently started in 2004. 

This is pretty low for someone who seemingly considers himself a serious mover and shaker on the Democrat front; if it was just a regular blogger it would just be a bit of (somewhat juvenile) mischief.  (I thought Mr Bachmann’s photo was pretty funny, but he is also the subject of rumour.)  And to be fair to Daily Kos participants, a lot of them did get stuck into Kos for this post.

Earlier at that other blog, regular bloviator CL had noted a Michelle Bachmann eating corndog photo had been run at a UK Telegraph blog – and he took that as a bit of left wing sleaze, despite the fact that I thought the Telegraph was well and truly toward the Right.

But now it gets interesting:  I see, when reading a Wall Street Journal blog that noted a mistake Perry had made, that this illustrious paper had run a Perry with corndog in mouth photo itself.

Someone in comments to that WSJ blog entry notes:

First Fox News shows Bachman throating a corndog and now the WSJ points out that Perry is a crazy dumbass. I guess that Murdoch has chosen Romney as the official Fox candidate.

So Fox News has been corndogging Republican candidates too!?

I see that the WSJ seems quite set against both Perry and Bachmann, but in the same editorial, they diss Romney too.

But it’s true, I have not yet seen a Romney with corndog in mouth photo.  Maybe he’s just careful not to eat them in view of the cameras, which would seem a good rule of thumb for any politician.

Anyway, I like the theory that this is how media tycoons signal whether or not they like a Republican candidate.  Maybe in this country, journalists from The Australian should just offer Julia Gillard a banana before her press conferences.

Things you preferred not to know

Your faeces, my furry friend, are blowin' in the wind - New Scientist

GO FOR a bracing winter stroll in a major US city and you will be inhaling more than vehicle fumes. A new study has demonstrated for the first time that during winter most of the airborne bacteria in three large Midwestern cities come from dog faeces.

Seems about right

I watched every Coen brothers movie. - By David Haglund - Slate Magazine

I used to be keen on seeing Coen Brothers movies, but lost interest after Fargo, which despite being a big critical success, indicated to me that people were seeing more in their oeuvre than was actually there.

This article sort of backs that up; I think.

I should still see the True Grit remake. Is it on DVD yet?

Stupid uses for reproductive technology

The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy - NYTimes.com

A inappropriate sense of entitlement to consumer goods has been the subject of much discussion since the English riots, but it's rare that anyone puts that label on the stories of reproductive technology.

But look at the main story that starts the above article: a 45 year year old pregnant woman who apparently went through 6 years of fertility treatment, including with donor eggs, who then chooses to abort one of the twins which she has conceived. And here's the kicker - she's already a mother:

The idea of managing two infants at this point in her life terrified her. She and her husband already had grade-school-age children, and she took pride in being a good mother. She felt that twins would soak up everything she had to give, leaving nothing for her older children.

I have complained about cosmetic surgery as being the most inappropriate and wasteful use of medical resources around, but at least the patient is just mucking around with their own bodies; not creating a fetus to then decide whether to keep or not.

And look at the case at the end of the article:

A. and her partner had been together 15 years when they decided to get serious about having children. Because both women were 45, they tried to double their already slim chances by both being inseminated. They each tried it three times; nothing took. At their doctor’s suggestion, they chose an egg donor in her mid-20s. Both women went through I.V.F., each with two embryos transferred. Both women got pregnant, but A. quickly miscarried. Her partner (who did not want to be identified, even by an initial) gave birth to a healthy boy, whom they adore. A. did another round of I.V.F. with frozen embryos, hoping to provide their son with a sibling. It didn’t work. So when their boy was nearly a year old, both women underwent I.V.F. again. Given A.’s fertility history, the doctor predicted she had just a 5 percent chance of getting pregnant.

On their son’s first birthday, both women found out they were pregnant, both with twins. Four in all. “In our wildest expectations, we never imagined being in this situation,” A. said. “We both went through I.V.F. before, and we came out with one baby. We did it exactly the same way as last time, so we never expected this.”

And yes, you guessed it, one of them "reduced" the pregnancy to one, and the other woman lost her pregnancy totally.

Call me crazy if you want, but what I'm seeing here is a fundamental problem of over-enlarged sense of entitlement to babies at any age, and even worse, regardless of the fact that a relationship already has a child (or children) to look after.

This is a true slippery slope that reproductive technology has led to, and for anyone who is even a bit uncomfortable about abortion, the selective abortion that is happening in these cases should just be seen as completely unacceptable, in large part because the pregnancies were unwarranted in the first place.

High hopes

I've explained this before: MI4 is directed by Brad Bird, who, based on his animation, I expect can do action well. The trailer looks pretty good, although let's hope the movie is not hyper-edited:

Mercury and autism

Pink disease: autism risk (Science Alert)

A genetic sensitivity to mercury appears to be strongly related to increased risk of grandchildren having autism.

Pink disease was a form of mercury poisoning prevalent in the first half of the 20th century. Affecting 1 in 500 young children with a hyper-sensitivity to mercury, it caused a range of severe symptoms including loss of speech, loss of interest in usual activities, hypersensitivity to light, pain and, in up to 20 per cent of cases, death. When mercury was identified as the culprit and removed as an ingredient in teething powders in the 1950s, the disease was essentially wiped out...

For the current study the Swinburne researchers surveyed over 500 Australian survivors of Pink Disease, asking them about the health of their descendents. This allowed them to collect detailed data about the survivors, as well as their 1100 children and 1360 grandchildren.

"We asked the pink disease survivors to report any health conditions that their children or grandchildren had been diagnosed with," Austin said. "The survey included questions about Down syndrome, fragile X syndrome, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), epilepsy and autism."

The prevalence rate of most disorders was comparable to general population figures, however, the rate for autism was extremely high.

"Staggeringly, we found that one in 25 grandchildren of pink disease survivors aged 6-12 had been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. This compares to the current Australian prevalence rate for that age group of one in 160.

I presume this is going to feed into the issue of mercury in vaccines again, as the author suggests:

....those with a suspected family history of pink disease to minimise their exposure to mercury. This is particularly important for young children and women who are pregnant or breastfeeding.

"This can be done by observing the recommendations of Food Standards Australia regarding seafood consumption, opting for non-amalgam dental fillings and requesting preservative-free vaccines from your doctor," he said.

I thought the mercury/vaccine/autism thing was all sorted out. Now it seems less clear.

Sounds complicated...

Hybrid solar system makes rooftop hydrogen

This system uses roof top solar panels (of the heating variety, not PV) in a set up designed to make hydrogen that is then fed into a fuel cell for electricity.

Gotta love the internet

Hey, I posted a question at Real Climate's open thread this morning, and Gavin Schmidt has already answered me.

Very neat, the way anyone can engage with scientists like this.

Horrible history noted

I've been meaning to mention that my son has been a keen reader of the Horrible Histories series of books over the last year or two, and is now very happy to watch the TV series being shown on ABC2.

The TV show is pretty good, even for adults. It's got high production values, and most sketches are at least amusing, if not laugh out loud.

I see the books have been going for much longer than I expected, and have attracted some controversy in England on occasion.

All in all, it's a good product to see out there, even if I would hate to see it result in a surplus of unemployed wannabe historians in their 20's, roaming the streets, begging passers by for any tidbit of local historical interest.

Line drawn

Call me old fashioned, but I find nothing to celebrate about baby creation for relationships which are inherently, by a fundamental and intrinsic fact of biology, inconceivable. (Ha, a pun.)

Here's my simple rule: if you love someone and want a relationship with them, take the biological consequences with it. This applies just as much to heterosexuals as homosexuals, in that they should be ready for the possibility of a baby no matter how well they try and use contraception, and from the other side, they should also accept the possibility that their relationship may turn out to be incapable of producing children.

Yes, this all sounds harsh and unreasonable to everyone under the age of 35, and I speak as relatively late age husband who still managed to have a couple of kids. I'm not a doctor who has to deal with depressed woman crying all day because she can't have a baby naturally.

Sorry, but this is just how things were a mere 40 years ago, and reproductive technology interferes with a fundamental aspect of biology and creates something entirely different from medical technology which merely preserves and improves an already existing life. So don't try to tell me that, if I was consistent, I should be against vaccines, or heart valve operations, or whatever. It's different: I am drawing a line which I consider entirely justifiable. It is not an essential function of any life that it has to have reproduced.

I also have the Pope onside, even though I have to work on his attitude to contraception in at least one respect: neither the rhythm method nor a condom used by a husband and wife can turn sex from moral to immoral. His line drawing needs adjusting too.

Is he sure?

London riots: police debate how far they should go to regain control | UK news | The Guardian

The biggest outbreak of rioting to hit Britain in living memory has led to debates within the police service about how far forces should go to regain control of the streets. Pictures of police officers standing and watching as youths smashed and looted shops have puzzled the public.

But Steven Kavanagh, the Metropolitan police deputy assistant commissioner, denied those images were a sign of the force being soft on rioters: "The Met is not namby pamby," he told the Guardian.

He added: "The face of policing has changed, 25-30 years ago it would have been a different response, we'd have gone to baton rounds and water cannon straight away. Now we are more measured."

Yes, and it's working a treat isn't it?

One thing I have been thinking about as a result of this is why Australia has never (as far as I can recall) ever had similar widespread rioting and looting from our (for want of a better term) underclass.

Also, on some of the video from England, I have noticed that streets full of shopfronts with full metal shutters down at night. As far as I know, there are few Australia city shopping streets that look like that, in fact the only similar "lock down" looking street I can recall seeing was Wilcannia, where (at least when I went through there in the late 1980's) the motel tells you to go no where near the centre of town at night, as it will be left to the local aborigines. But maybe there are parts of Sydney or Melbourne that look like that at night, and I have missed them.

And you always have to careful about the impressions you can get from TV, and I have heard residents interviewed who have said that many of the suburbs being looted are really quite pleasant and (relatively) up market.

Anyway, it's all a very curious phenomena, including the question as to how easily stupid Twitter and its ilk makes it for looting to be coordinated.

McKibben formula

Economist Warwick McKibben talks about the various solutions he sees for the economic problems of Europe, the USA and Australia.

I do not know his general reputation, even though I have heard of him before. His recommendations appear to me to not spring from a set ideological view.

Yet, in a sign that Andrew Bolt has been taking all his cues from Catallaxy lately, his post on McKibben's story starts with "Keynesian economics is a bust."

Andrew is set to become as certain on economics as he is on climate change; in both cases, by listening to only one ideologically blinkered side of a complicated field.

Coffee the Australian way

As my son has a project this term to do with the Australian gold rush, we've been looking together at paintings and illustrations of the era on the internet. (He's doing a diorama, and as much as it is supposed to be his project, I actually would love to get in and build the little shops and tents myself.)

One of things I noticed was that several paintings and drawings of era indicate that coffee was popular in the gold fields, with shops and tents advertising it prominently. This surprised me, since, as a child, tea seemed to well and truly dominate household drinking habits, at least until the 1970's. (Maybe coffee was bigger in the more European influenced cities of Melbourne and Sydney; I'm talking Brisbane experience here, and not even near Italian influenced New Farm.)

As it turns out, the coffee shops of gold rush settlements were often not what they seemed:

....despite the government’s attempt to enforce prohibition on the goldfields, liquor was never in short supply. Willian Howitt’s description of the vestiges of its consumption at Ballarat reinforce Clacy’s view: ‘... bottles broken and whole lie about in such quantities, that it is wonderful how horses go anywhere on the field without getting lamed.’

Transport costs and the need to conceal the alcohol meant the illegal supply was restricted to spirits. Sly-grog sellers found ingenious ways to advertise and dispense their goods. ‘Coffee shops’ or ‘coffee tents’, and less often ‘lemonade sellers’, were common euphemisms for sly grog shops. The prohibition was on the sale of alcohol so, to get around the law, a general storekeeper might make a ‘present’ of a tipple and charge extra for another item on the bill. A couple of ‘hugely fat’ female grog-sellers were well remembered for their enterprising ways – they strapped tin containers to their waists (underneath their clothes) and dispensed brandy from tubes poking out the side of their skirts.

Well, that explains the enthusiasm for the "coffee" outlets.

The grog sold could have quite a kick:

The liquor supplied by sly-grog sellers on the diggings was commonly adulterated. In 1853, a government inquiry found that the ‘brandy’ sold on the fields was half cheap spirit and half additives. Water was commonly used to dilute alcohol, but tobacco was often used as a base to give the grog extra kick. Pharmaceutical spirits, opium and even cayenne pepper were also reported additives.

That reminds me of the My Coffee episode of Scrubs, when the janitor (taking a job as a barista) invents a new drink:

“The two most addictive substances on earth are caffeine and nicotine... Behold... Smoke-accino!”

On coffee in Australian history generally, I didn't know this:

....coffee has been grown in Australia since 1832 when a small planting was established at Kangaroo Point in Brisbane.

By the 1880’s, coffee was grown in northern New South Wales and along the Queensland coast as far north as Cooktown. The most extensive area under plantation was then, as now, concentrated in Tropical North Queensland.

By 1900, 50-60 farmers in the Cairns region were collectively producing 40% of our young nation's coffee supply. Many early pioneers won international recognition in Europe for the Australian bean. Unfortunately by 1926 the industry slipped into decline and until the 1980's only small plantings had survived.

Isn't it funny how things go in and out of fashion...

For that unique Gazan holiday experience

Gaza's first five-star hotel provides luxury and hope amid the blockades | World news | The Guardian

There's a photo at the link: it looks a lot like the Sheraton at Noosa if you ask me.

But this Gazan luxury hotel has its issues:

....if you turn your eyes away from the setting sun you will see a Hamas military training camp next door which was recently bombed by the Israeli military.

And as for taking a dip in the pool - not so fast:

But the pool, which could be a big draw, remains off-limits until the management can figure out a way to avoid transgressing conservative Gaza's social mores. Men and women are forbidden from swimming together and even if the hotel has segregated days, it has yet to find a way ofscreening female swimmers from public view.

One thing I find surprising is that the people of Gaza don't know how good a duck can taste, apparently:

....when the hotel's manager, Rafel Carpinell, wanted to put duck on the menu he discovered that Gazans found the concept of eating the birds incomprehensible.

I look forward to reading the reviews on Tripadvisor soon.

The problems considered

I freely admit I only have a broad brush knowledge of economics. Like most people, I read and listen to a range of commentators and try to work the ones who seem to make most sense. I also watch in amazement at how economic crises arrive, if not entirely unexpectedly when you look across all economic commentary, but certainly with a timing that seems to be well beyond the abilities of accurate forecasting. (Of course, some economists get some predictions right just by always predicting the next crisis is just around the corner.)

I have a hunch that the problem with economics is twofold: to a large extent it's based on human psychology (and even more unpredictably, human group psychology); but also I suspect that international financial systems have become so complicated that it has become extremely difficult for anyone to understand it in sufficient entirety to make accurate forecasts.

But what has become clear at the moment is that some economists have become well and truly caught up in a sort of culture war.

On the one hand, the Tea Partiers and small government libertarians in the US have decided that the key idea is the need for urgent reduction of debt. This ties in with wanting small government generally, which they argue also means low taxes, even while government debt is still high. They also both share a disbelief in climate change, frequently claiming it is merely the wolf of socialism and redistribution of wealth in sheep's clothing.

On the other hand, you have the proponents of Keynesian economics, arguing that stimulus is what is needed to help prevent a bad situation becoming worse. Although Tea Partiers and right wing pundits of all types now paint Keynesian economics as a Leftist sacrilege against good sense, the basic idea of Keynesian economics seems to have been accepted as making sense by many economists who you would not identify as being of the Left.

The culture war in the States clearly has Krugman on the one side, and the right wing noise machine on the other. (I'm not sure who to cite as a prominent economist who always supports what the Tea Partiers and Republicans say - their main support seems to come mainly from the likes of journalistic commentators in the Wall Street Journal and whole bunch of bloggers.)

In Australia, we get a whole lot of huffing and puffing about it from the "centre right" website Catallaxy, with Sinclair Davidson and especially Steve Kates citing every day the mantra "reduce debt, lower taxes". Of course, they totally oppose a carbon tax and a minerals tax, mainly (I suspect) because those phrases contain the word "tax".

Steve Kates seems so obsessive about Keynesian economics as the root of all evil that he has just written a whole book about it, and promptly promoted it on the Catallaxy website.

Sinclair Davidson is a member of the IPA, which not only runs campaigns against the carbon tax as a tax, it promotes actual disbelief in AGW science by hosting and publishing material by geologist sceptic Bob Carter. If you ask me, the IPA starts with its ideological hostility to taxes first, then works backwards to find any justification for no carbon pricing, including hosting a scientific maverick like Carter, despite his clear failure to make an actual dint the mainstream of climate science. They also hosted Vacla Klaus' recent talking tour of Australia, where his attack on carbon pricing was based on it being too much like communism.

Given that non-economist Rafe Champion takes every opportunity to promote anti-AGW articles from pure propagandists like Jonova, and spends all his time analysing AGW science as if it were entirely a result of Leftish propaganda; and Judith Sloan makes her disdain for the topic clear as well, it appears that not believing that climate change is real (or if real, not serious) is the essential requirement for anyone given posting rights on the Catallaxy.

This conflating of issues across economics and science seems to me to be a worrying phenomena. As the Europeans have shown, antagonism to climate change science does not have to be a prerequisite to conservatism in politics. Yet it is virtually a cornerstone of right wing small government philosophy in both America and Australia, even when the Coalition's policy is actually for direct government intervention, as opposed to the Labor trying to set up a more market orientated approach of an ETS.

Climate change skeptics spend all their time criticising alleged over-confidence of climate change scientists, and of course they have occasional PR wins when someone (often non scientists like Gore or Flannery) can be quoted with a careless exaggeration from years ago.

But when it comes to economics, Steve Kates in particular is like the epitome of over-confidence in one rock solid formula for economic truth, and it seems rather ludicrous to me that he and his co-bloggers should spend much of their time criticising climate change scientists for being stuck on one idea.

It seems to be common sense to me that the middle ground in economics is almost certainly right - a Keynesian type response is appropriate for some situations, but it can't always work and you obviously have to take into account the prospect of crippling your nation with too much debt for too little return. Same with taxes: sometimes lowering them will work with the economy generally, sometimes it won't. Refusing to increase taxes even moderately on the very richest (such as is happening in the States at the moment) makes little sense psychologically, even if it contributes to the bottom line minimally without reducing spending. Small government ideology can even be its own worst enemy to effective reductions in spending. I have noticed recently, for example, commentary emphasising how the key spending problem in the States is on health, and yet you get Australians in threads at Catallaxy, despite our egalitarian, high quality and yet cheaper health care system, siding with Tea Party opposition to substantial reform of the American system on pure ideological grounds of dislike of government involvement in anything.

The problem is, the ideologues on display at Catallaxy, as well as Republicans in the States, show no interest in trying to make objective assessment on climate science, and view it all through their "small government, lower tax, we hate Keynesians" ideological glasses. I wouldn't mind if they kept their little ideological school to themselves, but they spend a fair amount of their time as evangelists too, and in the US and Australia such evangelism seemingly has had some success on public opinion as to whether it is worth making any response to climate change at all.

They could contribute to useful discussion as to best policy options to move to reducing carbon, but instead they prefer to devote their time to insisting or insinuating there is not a real problem at all, and spreading negativity on an ETS in toto. I can't say that legitimate criticism of how a policy might fail is useless - I have a long standing scepticism of ETS' myself - but it is hard to get a clear idea of how valid some criticisms are when you know that they are all issuing from a largely ideologically driven hostility to accepting the very problem being addressed.

Anyway, that is how I see it: a bunch of non-scientifically interested economic ideologues interpreting a field of science through their cultural glasses and devoting a lot of time to criticising policy on it by claiming that all of the politicians and scientists involved are a bunch of political ideologues who have fooled themselves on both the science and policy.

Their position is not credible for the reasons I have outlined. To the extent that they run interference for their being no political response at all to reduce the use of carbon fuels, they are acting against the long term interests of humanity collectively.

The best that one who is sympathetic to their economics can argue is that they are trying to preserve a strong economy which will have better resources to adapt to climate change which is inevitable due to Chinese and Indian growth in carbon fuels regardless of what the West does.

The reason I do not find this compelling is because I find the uncertainty in the precise effects of climate change, something skeptics argue as a reason for doing nothing, is actually a more compelling argument for reducing CO2, because it may well that effective adaptation is simply not possible for many of the consequences of climate change. In the Australian context, for example, there is not a lot of adaptation to be done about severe flooding of the type that Queensland just went through: there is no other dam that can be built on the Brisbane River, and the floods were so widespread across the southern half of the State there was no relevance of talking about damming having any significant effect. The same applies for the flooding in Victoria, I expect.

Make formerly 1 in a 100 year floods happen, say, every 10 to 20 years, and the economic cost is surely very large, and the only adaptation possible is, I suppose, abandoning large swathes of Brisbane.

The same for droughts of the type currently happening in the USA. Make them more frequent, and I just don't know that there is any possibility of adapting to them at all.

Instead, you take the scientists' advice that limiting CO2 levels should limit to a lower range the possible climate changes.

My attitude to the problem of China and India is twofold: global climate change effects appear to be well on the way anyway, given the world's climate of the last year or so, and so recognition of the problem is not likely to be an issue. (In fact, it would appear that at least in China there is no serious government skepticism on the science, perhaps because "small government" is not an ideology that appeals to them!) Recognition of the equity issue, in terms of the telling these countries that they can't follow the Western route to increased prosperity, is going to be important, as will be all assistance possible to finding effective technological solutions to clean energy. Both of these are hindered by any large part of the West (being the USA and Australia) refusing to start any action towards carbon pricing, which should assist market moves to clean energy.

The bulk of non-ideologically bound economic commentary on the matter is that carbon pricing does not have to kill economies; I don't see why I should accept the ideologues against Keynesian economics are correct in their assessment to the contrary.

Of course, an international recession has its own problems for carbon pricing, and for all I know there may be a legitimate argument for delaying its start it in the worst affected countries. I suspect, however, that even in recession, it is not going to be a killer for recovery. Any reader who knows better can opine below. What I do think is that the longer the delay for any reason, the worse are the prospects of getting China and India to treat it as urgently as we should want them to.

There: that's the position of this non-economist, non-scientist, but compulsive blogger.

Quiet change

Uncovering your hidden ninja | The Japan Times Online

I thought this was quite a charming story from Amy Chavez about how Japanese psychology seems to work with respect to change. It certainly would indicate that the entrepreneurial spirit has to work a little differently there.