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.

Economic guesswork (please see updates too)

Here are a couple of people with some apparent credentials in the field who think that the IPCC is doing a poor job at making accurate forecasts of the economic consequences of climate change.  (They seem to think it is being too optimistic.)

Common sense suggests they are right.

But while I would not want there to be less research on the topic, I'll repeat my gripe that I find it pretty incredible that anyone thinks that economic forecasting that extends beyond about a 10 to 20 year horizon, and which is trying to take into account large uncertainties in terms of the potential for natural disasters of a scale not seen since industrialisation, has any real hope of being accurate.

The simple point is - we do not want to have to re-order the world to meet a potential for 2 to 5 degree average global temperature rise (and a global rearrangement of rainfall that would surely also be involved) if we don't really have to.   Such an increase is self evidently going to be extremely disruptive (given that the difference between an ice age and a warm interglacial may be as little as 2.6 degrees), to countries both rich and poor, and the possible compounding effect of the types of natural disaster one upon the other are really impossible to foresee.

Economics should not be allowed to overrule common sense on this issue.  There is plenty of reason to assume some unprecedented disasters in terms of humanitarian, cultural and economic life, so act to limit the potential now.

Update:  for more detail on the confusing way economic analysis is used by the IPCC, you could do worse than read this post at Real Climate, and the comments following.

Update 2:  I note from poking around The Conversation (and finding a comment by Eli Rabbett) that there is other academic support for my common sense skepticism about applying economics to climate change.     Here is the abstract from a recent paper by Rosen and Guenther, which can be read in its entirety here:

The long-term economics of mitigating climate change over the long run has played a high profile role in the most important analyses of climate change in the last decade, namely the Stern Report and the IPCC's Fourth Assessment. However, the various kinds of uncertainties that affect these economic results raise serious questions about whether or not the net costs and benefits of mitigating climate change over periods as long as 50 to 100 years can be known to such a level of accuracy that they should be reported to policymakers and the public. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the derivation of these estimates of the long-term economic costs and benefits of mitigation. It particularly focuses on the role of technological change, especially for energy efficiency technologies, in making the net economic results of mitigating climate change unknowable over the long run.

Because of these serious technical problems, policymakers should not base climate change mitigation policy on the estimated net economic impacts computed by integrated assessment models. Rather, mitigation policies must be forcefully implemented anyway given the actual physical climate change crisis, in spite of the many uncertainties involved in trying to predict the net economics of doing so.

Rarely do I find such detailed and complete vindication for a position I've espoused as a matter of common sense from people who actually know what they are talking about!

Update 3:   as noted in this article in The Conversation by a couple of Australians, the IPCC is right to note that emissions cuts are about ethics too.  From the link:

Knowing the price of everything?

Judgements about value also come into the complex debate about future economic costs and damages from climate change.

All too often, analyses focus purely on the anticipated economic damage, using lower estimates as a rationale for less action on climate change. This is a simplistic view, as it misses three crucial points.

First, as humans we care about things that are not valued in economic markets. Most Australians care far more about the Great Barrier Reef than its (nevertheless impressive) tourism revenues would suggest. Most of us also care about species going extinct, on an emotional level quite separate from the environmental and health benefits of species diversity. Ignoring these concerns means ignoring many of the values that societies hold.

Second, climate effects will vary greatly across different regions and social groups, and this is usually not reflected in simple economic cost estimates. It is often the poor who are most at risk from climate change, and will find it harder to adapt or recover. If a citizen of an Australian beach suburb loses a A$2 million house, should this be counted as 200 times worse than a Vietnamese peasant losing their A$10,000 home?

Finally, and crucially, climate change is about risks. There is a risk – perhaps small, but we do not know how small – of catastrophic impacts. Should we ignore the risk of very bad outcomes for future generations, or should we give extra weight to them?

The IPCC’s report does not provide the answers, because the IPCC is not policy prescriptive. It aims to give decision-makers the latest reliable information, and a compass to navigate their way through decisions that should be based on deeper considerations than short-term economics or electoral tactics.

Maybe another round of climate change and economics commentary due on the 'net

I see that an article appeared at Nature Climate Change on Monday with this abstract:

Integrated assessment models compare the costs of greenhouse gas mitigation with damages from climate change to evaluate the social welfare implications of climate policy proposals and inform optimal emissions reduction trajectories. However, these models have been criticized for lacking a strong empirical basis for their damage functions, which do little to alter assumptions of sustained gross domestic product (GDP) growth, even under extreme temperature scenarios^{1, 2, 3}. We implement empirical estimates of temperature effects on GDP growth rates in the DICE model through two pathways, total factor productivity growth and capital depreciation^{4, 5}. This damage specification, even under optimistic adaptation assumptions, substantially slows GDP growth in poor regions but has more modest effects in rich countries. Optimal climate policy in this model stabilizes global temperature change below 2 °C by eliminating emissions in the near future and implies a social cost of carbon several times larger than previous estimates⁶. A sensitivity analysis shows that the magnitude of climate change impacts on economic growth, the rate of adaptation, and the dynamic interaction between damages and GDP are three critical uncertainties requiring further research. In particular, optimal mitigation rates are much lower if countries become less sensitive to climate change impacts as they develop, making this a major source of uncertainty and an important subject for future research.

The only commentary I have seen about this so far is at The Atlantic   Its key point is this:

Researchers from Stanford University found that the current price of climate change is more likely six times as much, approximately $220 for every ton of carbon produced. Using a new model to calculate the number, the researchers took into account the economic damage that catastrophic climate events, like storms or crop loss, could pose to a country’s GDP over time. “If climate change affects not only a country's economic output, but also its growth, then that has a permanent effect that accumulates over time,” Frances Moore, co-author and environmental scientist, said.

 But then they go on to note that many others think that the study might be too pessimistic.

The other point made in the Atlantic is that the study emphasises how poorer countries are estimated to do worse:

Another intriguing aspect of this new model, however, is that it also incorporates the economy’s ability to adapt to damage from climate changes and acknowledges that warming temperatures will economically affect high- and low-income countries differently. "There have been many studies that suggest rich and poor countries will fare very differently when dealing with future climate change effects, and we wanted to explore that," co-author Delavane Diaz said. The researchers noted that because poor countries are on average hotter than rich countries and have less rigid infrastructure, they might suffer greater economic costs due to climate change. “If temperature affects economic growth rates, society could face much larger climate damages than previously thought” Diaz said. “This would justify more stringent mitigation policy.” 

I'm guessing then the "do nothing because I hate taxes and government generally" crowd will say something like "see, this means we must make poor countries rich as fast as possible so they don't suffer as much as if we keep them poor.  And that means - they should burn more fossil fuels!"

But the dog chasing its tail aspect of such an argument should be obvious, shouldn't it?  How could you ever work out with confidence that they can grow wealth to a sufficient level fast enough to make the future adaptation to climate change adequate?  (Short answer - you can't.  They want the globe to take a gamble on their mere, ideological motivated, hunches.)

The study does have the benefit of bolstering the Pope's likely position (in a coming encyclical) that climate change is a matter of crucial social justice, and that therefore Catholics should indeed take it seriously.

But back to the big picture of this entire exercise.   People who read me regularly will know that I am deeply skeptical of this whole economic forecasting on a scale out beyond (say) 20 or 30 years; especially so when the point is to try to factor in something about which the regional effects still remain rather uncertain.  (It is easier to be confident about the "big picture" than the regional one in climate change.)

It seems that at least part of this article bolsters my skepticism.  (Although they do continue to put enough faith in the whole dubious forecasting exercise to make one of their own.)

But I have another question:  can any economist type who reads this tell me if there is anything equivalent that has ever been attempted in economics?    And if so, was it successful?

Another go at the economics of climate change

Expect to hear a lot about this study just out from some Berkeley researchers.  The headline from the Washington Post:

Sweeping study claims that rising temperatures will sharply cut economic productivity 

The claim is simple, but interesting:

Culling together economic and temperature data for over 100 wealthy
and poorer countries alike over 50 years, the researchers assert that
the optimum temperature for human productivity is seems to be around 13
degrees Celsius or roughly 55 degrees Fahrenheit, as an annual average
for a particular place. Once things get a lot hotter than that, the
researchers add, economic productivity declines “strongly.”

“The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and
apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and
poor countries,” write the authors, led by Marshall Burke of Stanford’s
Department of Earth System Science, who call their study “the first
evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global
climate.” Burke published the study with Solomon Hsiang and Edward
Miguel, economists at the University of California, Berkeley.

If the findings are correct, they add, that means that unmitigated
global warming could lead to a more than 20 percent decline in incomes
around the world, compared with a world that does not feature climate
change. And this would also mean growing global inequality, since poorer
countries will be hit by worse temperature increases — simply because
“hot, poor countries will probably suffer the largest reduction in
growth.” Indeed, some already wealthier countries with cold weather,
like Canada or Sweden, will benefit greatly based on the study, moving
closer to the climatic optimum.

 But things start to sound a bit more shaky here:

Assuming this relationship between temperature and productivity is
correct, that naturally leads to deep questions about its cause. The
researchers locate them in two chief places: agriculture and people. In
relation to rising temperature, Burke says, “We see that agricultural
productivity declines, labor productivity declines, kids do worse on
tests, and we see more violence.”

Yes, not sure I'd be entirely confident of the heat and violence connection, but if we go over to the university press release on this study, there is more reason to question the accuracy of the new study:

Unmitigated climate change is likely to reduce the income of an average
person on Earth by roughly 23 percent in 2100, according to estimates
contained in research published today in the journal Nature that is co-authored by two University of California, Berkeley professors.

 So far, so disastrous.  But look:

The Nature paper focuses on effects of climate change via
temperature, and does not include impacts via other consequences of
climate change such as hurricanes or sea level rise. Detailed results
and figures for each country are available for download online.

Or, I might add, rainfall pattern changes, or ocean acidification and potential large scale changes to the food cycle there.  How the heck can you be confident of projections if you cannot be certain how many poor countries may be destined to longer droughts and/or more frequent ones, followed by larger floods?    And what about poor coastal countries where local fish is an important food source?

So, I think there are grounds to argue that this study is another example that accurate predictions of the economic consequences of global warming decades into the future are pretty much guesswork. But at least it notes that the uncertainty is no grounds for complacency, as techo-optimist libertarian types seem to think.

And it does support one thing that I reckon common sense suggests:     the poor nations will suffer disproportionately from climate change; and even if some pro-development-at-any-climate-cost proponents had their way and we had every poor country building coal burning power plants as fast as they could, they are not going to develop their way economically fast enough to outpace the damage from climate change.   They're not going to be able to aircondition their agricultural sectors, after all; nor are they all going to be manufacturing centres, or financial hubs making a living from mobile money.

Back to how bad some of the study's projections are (from the University link above):

They find climate change is likely to have global costs generally
2.5-100 times larger than predicted by current leading models. The
team’s best estimate is that climate change will reduce global economic
production by 23 percent in 2100.

“Historically, people have considered a 20 percent decline in global
Gross Domestic Product to be a black swan: a low-probability
catastrophe,” Hsiang warned. “We’re finding it’s more like the
middle-of-the-road forecast.”

Half of the simulation projections suggest larger losses. The hottest
countries in the world are hardest hit: in less optimistic scenarios,
the authors estimate that 43 percent of countries are likely to be
poorer in 2100 than today due to climate change, despite incorporating
standard projections of technological progress and other advances.

 Richard Tol is already bleating about this, I see.  Given that I consider him a discredited jerk, I'm not surprised, but it will still be interesting to read more coverage about this.

Update:  here's the abstract from Nature in full:

Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies^{1, 2}, but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries^{3, 4}. In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries is reported not to respond to temperature⁵, while poor countries respond only linearly^{5, 6}. Resolving this conflict between micro and macro observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems^{7, 8} and to anticipating the global impact of climate change^{9, 10}. Here we unify these seemingly contradictory results by accounting for non-linearity at the macro scale. We show that overall economic productivity is non-linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 °C and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries. These results provide the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global climate and establish a new empirical foundation for modelling economic loss in response to climate change^{11, 12}, with important implications. If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change. In contrast to prior estimates, expected global losses are approximately linear in global mean temperature, with median losses many times larger than leading models indicate.

A look at economic optimism

New Scientist reports this:

Is it too good to be true? Top economists this week lay out an audacious argument for transforming the world's economy into a low-carbon one. Even if you forget climate change, they say, it is worth doing on its own. That's because a low-carbon economy is an efficient economy that will deliver faster economic growth, better lives and a greener environment. Forget the costs, feel the benefits.

The report is published today, a week before world leaders gather at the United Nations in New York City for the UN Climate Summit 2014, which will discuss how to share out the cost of fighting climate change. But its optimistic message is that there is no cost to share. Nations should be cutting their carbon emissions out of self-interest.

The study – authored by the World Resources Institute, a think tank in Washington DC, the Stockholm Environment Institute and others – is published by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, an independent body chaired by Felipe Calderón, former president of Mexico, and Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. (The Stern Report in 2006 first opened up a global debate about the economics of tackling climate change). A copy of the latest report, Better Growth, Better Climate: The New Climate Economy Report, is available here.

"We can combine economic growth and climate responsibility," Stern said at a pre-publication press briefing. "The key is fostering the right investment, making it profitable to the private sector."

 They also link to another (pretty wildly) optimistic sounding report:

"You can go green and continue to prosper and develop," said Ed Davey, the UK secretary for energy and climate, yesterday. And the evidence is on his side. Economists say that, despite the expense, drastic cuts in the UK's carbon dioxide emissions will boost the country's economy.

The finding should encourage action to reduce CO₂ levels, which reached a new high in 2013, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. The growth from 2012 was the biggest jump since 1984, and may be partly down to plants and other organisms taking in less CO₂.

If climate change isn't incentive enough to cut emissions, try this: if the UK cut its carbon emissions by 60 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030, as it has promised, its GDP would be 1.1 per cent bigger than if it stuck with fossil fuels, says a study by consultants at Cambridge Econometrics.

About half the gain would come from cheap running costs for fuel-efficient cars, with 190,000 new green jobs and higher wages also helping. The average household would be £565 a year better off.

Maybe it's just me, but I do feel that even things like China deciding to be pickier about what coal it burns, and the Abbott government discovering that the Australian public actually loves renewable energy does make it seem that what Greenies have been saying for a long time may turn out right - the world is going to go cleaner and it's stupid to not take steps to encourage that in Australia too.

Ten Stupid Things

I have been writing this on and off for a week.

I spend a lot of time criticising the Right now, because it used to be the side displaying common sense and not letting ideology trump results. Then along came climate change denialism, the re-invention of voodoo economics in the States, and the rest is history. So, in fairness, let's start today's list -

On the Left hand

1. Chaotic Leader Wants Second Chance.

So, political leaders are supposed to always be completely open about leadership spills are they? I can't believe such a fuss is being made over the precise extent to which Julia Gillard was involved in the leadership challenge to Kevin Rudd. The sensible attitude to this is "politicians will always be economical with the truth about leadership challenges - and it doesn't matter." Those on the Left who think this is important want their head read.

It's kind of absurd, isn't it, that internal leadership talk should be out and about as Gillard makes an early-in-the-year win on the health insurance rebate: a matter of real significance to the budget bottom line and one that can readily be sold as a matter of Labor principle.

2. Academics for Chaotic Leadership. Chief amongst those needing phrenology are Leftist academics who think Rudd must be re-instated. John Quiggin and Robert Manne both seem to see intellectual and leadership qualities in Kevin Rudd that the politicians who have worked with him can't. In fact, Kevin Rudd and his supporters in Parliament cannot do anything other than continue to hurt the government, and in my view replacing Gillard with anyone at the moment will show a Labor Party that is completely consumed by internal personality politics, just as the Liberal Party was in the tedious 1980's fight between Andrew Peacock and John Howard.

3. Another project where chaotic leader ignored advice. So Kevin Rudd was warned he was spending money on clean coal in a wasteful way. I have been writing posts on the dubious idea for years now; you can search the blog if you want to.

4. Why not send a cheque and let them sort it out? I bought a TV digital set top box for $38 the other day: people are right to wonder how it can cost the government an average of $700 to get them installed for pensioners. For a government that wants to appear economically cautious, this looks silly. It's not much money in the big picture, but it will be taken as confirmation that Labor just can't handle money wisely.

5. Search for a Climate Change Star. Why did the government re-instate Tim Flannery as a climate commissioner? Look, I think he is unfairly (and dishonestly) quoted out of context as a matter of routine now by the Right wing commentariate, but this has become impossible to be undone. Those who trust him and those who don't are in firm camps and neither is ever likely to move: he's damaged goods to the AGW cause. And more importantly, why can't they find an more articulate climate scientist with plenty of experience in the field who can take on the role?

Now for the Right

1. Pope Santorum: "One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is: the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea."

Can anyone outside of the United States believe that Rick Santorum is a serious player for Republican Presidential candidate? That his, not just "worn on his sleeve", but "yes I will talk about it and tell people how they are living their lives wrong" brand of Catholic sexual ethics has a hope in hell of doing anything other than galvanise socially liberal Democrats and sensible Independents against him?

As one cute headline put it: Is Santorum running for president or pope?

It's not a matter of whether you agree with him - as it happens, probably quite a lot of people (even with a not so conservative background) think that too many people take sex and relationships too casually these days. But "the dangers of contraception"?? Catholic priests gave up talking about that from the pulpit, or hearing anyone confess it as a sin, since about 1970.

Rick, Rick: Social conservatism is not inconsistent with responsible use of contraception. Look at your Mormon competitors: big families (by today's standards), conservative values (ask a gay Mormon) and no fretting by their religion that couples can't use contraception responsibly.

But more importantly: politicians can do what they can to bolster family life via various policies, but it's been many a decade since anyone expects them to deliver talks on sexual morality, and in particular contraception. Lead by example, by all means: oh wait a minute, the Mormons seem to be doing that better than new Catholics (but old Christians) like Newt Gingrich.

But that's the problem isn't it: this is really all about American evangelicals who can't stomach voting for a Mormon.

2. Call it "bad judgement" or "just dumb"?

In listening to climate change "skeptics", particularly loudmouth, aggressive, know-it-all ones it from a blog like Catallaxy, or those who comment at Andrew Bolt, there is a continual temptation to react by just thinking "they are so dumb, this is unbelievable."

But that can't really be the explanation. I mean, they hold down jobs, make money, etc. They count amongst their fold a disproportionate number of geologists and engineers, which suggests a personality connection of sorts.

It has to be more a case of reasonably intelligent people displaying bad judgement when the psychological conditions are right. There are many examples of this from history - I guess we shouldn't be surprised that it is happening again.

And yet, as noted in a previous post, how can you show a graphs like these to people:



and yet get a response of "haw, haw, you're convincing no one; give it up, you've lost"? I mean, it sure sounds like dumb.

John Quiggin, even though I think he is wrong on Kevin Rudd, takes a very tough line when he writes bluntly in a recent post:

There is no such thing as an honest climate sceptic. Those who reject mainstream science are either conscious frauds or gullible believers.....While many low-information “sceptics” have simply been misled by reading the wrong material on the Internet, or trusting the wrong sources, the great majority of active opponents of climate science are complicit in their own deception, preferring to believe obvious lies because it suits their cultural and political prejudices.

Is he overstating the case there when he uses "conscious frauds", particularly when you look at what passes for commentary on climate change by economists at Catallaxy?

I'll be polite and say I'm sitting on the fence - I can't work out how they got to the position they are in. But certainly, I think they sound dumb as a matter of routine in the (often snide and dismissive) way they talk about climate change science.

I also can't avoid the feeling that when any economist, being a profession that is supposed to be used to assessing statistics and information of all types, starts being a polemicist for AGW and climate change denial, the credibility of policy views on just about anything else they write about also deserves to suffer.

3. Right wing and US racism

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has been reading comments to stories at Fox News, and it is truly astonishing the racism that is on display there, until Fox disappears them if they get too ugly. Have a look at these:

Fox News Commenters Respond to Whitney Houston’s Death With Deluge of Hatred and Racism

Reactions to ‘Fox News Commenters Spew Racism at Whitney Houston’

Update: Fox News Makes Racist Comment Thread Disappear

Fox Nation Commenters Spew Hatred and Racism at First Lady Michelle Obama

Has this been an issue for comment on any of the popular right wing commentary blogs in the US, such as Hot Air, PJ Media or Instapundit? Not as far as I can see from Googling around. It's just ignored. The Right has developed a blind spot to the ugliness on their own side. They do this with the ugly attacks on climate scientists too.

But they will still take the time to note books criticising multiculturalism, though.

4. We love nuclear power...we just don't want to help it.

Right wing people instinctively like nuclear power. Not because of low emissions, since a large slab of the Right doesn't believe in global warming, but just because it's shiny, new and modern sounding, and used to appear in a lot of science fiction that the libertarian wing of the Right used to read as a teenager.

So they like it, but then they don't care about when it arrives. In a country like Australia, where coal is always going to be dirt cheap without carbon pricing, do they want carbon pricing to make nuclear at least competitive? No, of course not.

This exchange between me and the climate change denialist Rafe took place over the weekend:

Me: Which leads me to a fundamental Catallaxy and Coalition bit of nonsense: you are (mostly) dead keen on nuclear, but totally against a carbon price that would actually make implementing it competitive.

Rafe:

Great idea Steve, intervene to make an existing service more expensive to help an alternative to get up.

R&D will take care of the greater cost of nuclear power, if it is allowed to proceed instead of being brought to a halt as occurred in the US (under Carter?).

Of course, Rafe would have absolutely no idea as to how long the R&D will take and whether it truly has any prospect of ever making it as competitive as coal for Australia. But the free market takes care of everything, doesn't it?

If pressed further, Rafe and other free market types will no doubt complain about excessive regulation of nuclear power being the reason it doesn't evolve faster, and in doing so like to pretend that it isn't inherently dangerous. So we get them and the likes of Andrew Bolt acting as if nuclear accidents are not a big deal. "80,000 people displaced indefinitely from their homes? What's it matter - no one was killed!"

Given what we currently can see as potential sources of energy, and the length of time involved in replacing existing power sources, there is not much chance of the free market dealing with climate change without some involvement of government to skew things towards faster adoption of clean energy. Because the libertarian right hates the government doing anything, they are useless on climate change, and would rather devote their time to dismissing the idea that anything need be done at all.

Their legacy in 30 years time will, I expect, be looked back on with bitterness.

5. Blair's Law on the Right. I'm still on Tim Blair's blog roll, and I see the occasional visitor still drops in here via that. Not sure how much longer that will last, though, when I note here how Andrew Bolt's blog, Blair's blog and Catallaxy are increasingly inter-related and referring each other to stories, and it all makes a pretty convincing case of Blair's Law ("the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force") applying just as much to the Right as to the Left.

Does Tim Blair, for example, ever bother reading the comments threads at Catallaxy, where CL (who seems to be in daily contact with him) writes nutty, extremely conservative Catholic stuff about Obama, one recent example starting like this:

Not enough attention is paid to the ‘why’ of Obama’s Hitlerian attack on Christianity, specificially in relation to contraception.

It's all because Obama and the Democrats and "homosexualists" have a "passionate hatred and fear of human sexuality and fecundity," according to the 1950's style Catholic conservative CL, which seems a bit odd to me because most conservatives feel the Left's fondness for non-interference in sex lives indicates they are generally pretty keen on sex.

But the Right is increasingly willing to overlook nonsense in its fellow travellers. The number of people who call out CL on Catallaxy, even when he stupidly starts using slurs like "whore" for female politicians he disagrees with, can be counted on one hand; a hand that's lost a couple of fingers in an industrial accident, even.

Start having a good hard look at yourself, right wing commentariate. You might not like what you see.

Yet more Lomborg

Rabbet Run features a post about Lomborg's dubious method that (apparently) helps ensure that climate change drops in priority when he's doing his "let's decide what problem should be dealt with first" exercises.   The argument dates back to 2009, though, and it's surprising that it isn't more widely known than it seems to be.

The post also features this nice graphic that's been a recent hit on the twittersphere, and it sure doesn't hurt to promulgate it further:

Meanwhile, at The Conversation, there's an interesting post up with the title Bjorn Lomborg’s consensus approach is blind to inequality. 

The argument is that the cost-benefit analysis that is Lomborg's shtick now does not have adequate   regard to intergenerational inequality. The explanation of discounting is dealt with pleasing clarity:

The picture is complicated even more when considering issues where the benefits are deferred – such as taking action on climate change.

Cost-benefit calculations typically deal with this by using “discount rates”. Typically, humans are not good at deferred gratification; we would much rather have $100 today than next year, so discount rates place a lower value on returns the further they are in the future.

This approach is contentious, particularly in environmental economics, where the benefits of our investments accrue to future generations rather than ourselves. Do we have the ethical right to discount the value of the lives and livelihoods of future generations against our own shorter-term financial benefit?

In climate economics, the time horizons are so long that even a relatively low discount rate can generate apparently absurd conclusions. More generally, any discount rate can be interpreted as a preference for intergenerational inequality: it systematically values the welfare of future generations at a lower level than our own.

 But someone in comments disputes the take on "utility" in the article, saying this:

Your explanation of utility is not quite right and quite unfair to poor old Jeremy Bentham. Given diminishing marginal utility of income, a concept devised by Bentham, an investment that generates a smaller financial return but accrues to a poor person rather than a rich person could easily be considered superior in terms of utility. It seems to me your criticism of Lomborg is precisely that he doesn't assess investments in term of utility.

Regardless of that, another comment in the thread perhaps make a more general point that sounds about right:

I started working in the cost-benefit area in the 70s, directly applying the Tom Peters, Deming, et al methodologies. In those days the benefits in particular specifically included non-financial outcomes but this aspect seems to have been lost in today's economic rationalist approach.

Even this article says that in a CBA "You work out the economic cost of a particular investment (or policy) and estimate its economic benefits".

Admittedly it then points out the omission of inequality but there are many other omissions in the same line that we cannot quantify (basic health, environmental health, future opportunities of particular strategies such as pure research and education in the arts, etc.)

This is also the most glaring omission in Lomborg's approach, as he trivialises the science and ignores the intangibles. Even his claim of economic projections beyond say a couple of years have to be regarded with a pinch of salt.

Economics is only one discipline. We need more than that for human progress.

Floods and economics considered

The recent monsoonal rainfall event in North Queensland has certainly been devastating to the cattle industry:

The latest estimate is that 500,000 cattle have perished in the floods. That is a death toll of biblical proportions.

At a value of $1000 a head, that’s $500 million worth of livestock gone.

But this is about more than the dollars.

Many of these cattle have been kept alive by desperate farmers who have battled seven years of drought — drought that continues despite one dump of rain. They have spent thousands of dollars on fodder they can no longer remember once growing themselves.

The toll on those farmers is enormous. Unthinkable even.

Agforce chief executive Michael Guerin rightly described it as a “massive humanitarian crisis”.
“The loss of hundreds of thousands of cattle after five, six, seven years of drought is a debilitating blow, not just to individual farmers, but to rural communities,” said Mr Guerin, whose organisation is the state farming association.

Looking to the future, the CSIRO openly admits that it is very difficult to be sure of the long term rainfall effects of climate change in Australia.   I thought they generally expected North Australia to get wetter, but Southern Australia to dry out, but the Climate Change in Australia website says this about the Monsoonal North:

Providing confident rainfall projections for the Monsoonal North cluster is difficult because global climate models offer diverse results, and models have shortcomings in resolving some tropical processes. Natural climate variability is projected to remain the major driver of rainfall changes in the next few decades.

By late in the century, rainfall projections have low confidence. Potential summer rainfall changes are approximately -15 to +10 per cent under an intermediate emission scenario (RCP4.5) and approximately -25 to +20 per cent under a high scenario (RCP8.5). Per cent changes are much larger in winter in some models, but these changes are less reliable because average winter rainfall is very low.

Impact assessment in this region should consider the risk of both a drier and wetter climate.

They do, however, expect extreme rainfall events to increase:

Despite uncertainty in future projections of total rainfall for the Monsoonal North cluster, an understanding of the physical processes that cause extreme rainfall, coupled with modelled projections, indicate with high confidence a future increase in the intensity of extreme rainfall events. However, the magnitude of the increases cannot be confidently projected.

Drought will continue to be a feature of the regional climate variability, but projected changes are uncertain.

In terms of risk, let me muse this:   the problem is surely with the frequency with which extremes occur - if a flood of this kind that formerly happened only once in (say) 100 - 300 years starts to occur 2 to 3 times within a lifetime (say, every 20 - 30 years), you can readily imagine that certain agricultural enterprises will just abandon that form of land use due to the "wipeouts" coming at such a rate that it becomes too much of a risk, even if you can get some good years out of it in the intervening years.

This is why I am completely sceptical of economic predictions of the effect of climate change:  even if you make guesses on whether certain regions become generally wetter or drier (and therefore more or less potentially agriculturally productive), the confounding factor is in the details of the frequency of wet or dry disasters within the big picture.  

There's no way of confidently predicting that at the moment, so how can you deal with it in economic models?

Economics and climate change, again

Andy Revkin recently linked to this post talking about how can you make the best judgements about dealing with climate change when there is still a lot of uncertainty about the exact extent of the problem, particularly at the small regional level.

I thought it pretty much confirmed what I had been thinking recently about the dubious use of economics to try to forecast the effects many decades into the future:

The politicians and other leaders who make (or influence) such decisions do not like deep uncertainty. They do not like it, Sam I Am. They want something specific to plan for. Expert recommendations. Metrics, targets, and “deliverables.” Otherwise there’s no way to determine the most efficient use of resources, how to minimize costs and maximize benefits, which course is optimal. So they ask analysts for cost-benefit analysis (CBA).

CBA is useful in some circumstances, particularly where there are bounded time spans and known risks. But remember, there’s a difference between risk (statistically quantifiable) and uncertainty (not). It is the difference, if you will, between Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns” and his “unknown unknowns.”

As time horizons and uncertainty increase, CBA becomes less and less useful, more and more “a knob-twiddling exercise in optimizing outcomes,” as economist Martin Weitzman put it. Differences in social/political/ethical assumptions, like discount rates, start determining model outcomes. “Results from the CBA,” says the World Bank, are “extremely dependent on parameters on which there is no scientific agreement (e.g., the impact of climate change on hurricanes) or no consensus (e.g., the discount rate).” It’s still possible to construct models and get answers, but the danger becomes higher and higher of getting the wrong answer, i.e., optimizing for the wrong thing.

The answer, says David Roberts, (and he is quoting the approach that is argued in a World Bank white paper) is to go "robust":

Now, whenever I criticize cost-benefit analysis, someone will ask, Well, what’s the alternative? What else can you do but weigh costs and benefits? How else would you make decisions?

Funny you should ask! Turns out the World Bank white paper everyone’s* talking about has a great deal to say on that very subject. It describes various alternative decisionmaking procedures and gets into the weeds of some case studies. And if that doesn’t sate your nerd thirst, have no fear, the literature on climate change and uncertainty is extensive. Go nuts.

For the rest of you, though, I just want to focus on the top-line idea. It is this: Shift the focus from optimality to robustness. Rolls right off the tongue, no?

The optimal decision is the one that achieves the best cost-benefit ratio in a given set of conditions. A robust decision can be expected to hold up, and perform reasonably well, under a wide variety of possible conditions. To make the optimal decision, you must be able to quantify risks. When there is uncertainty rather than risk — “multiple possible future worlds without known relative probabilities” — one is better off with robust decisions.

The optimal decision aims for efficiency; the robust decision aims for resilience. A resilient solution may not be — probably won’t be — the one best suited for whatever circumstances do end up coming to pass. But it is, from the present-day perspective, the one most broadly suited to the widest array of possible futures.

An optimal solution is cost-effective, if you get it right (obviously). But strategies aiming for optimality are brittle. If you optimize for one thing and run into another, you risk degradation or collapse (or, like Ho Chi Minh City, just wasting a buttload of money). Robust decisions and investments often cost more in the short- to mid-term; the extra money is effectively spent as insurance against unforeseen outcomes. A robust solution retains its integrity in a wide array of circumstances.

When it comes to climate change, most economic models are premised on CBA — the search for efficiency. The World Bankers suggest an alternative, based on robustness, and yes, it involves yet another acronym: CIDA, or Climate Informed Decision Analysis, also known as “decision scaling.”

This sounds quite sensible to me.

Economic guesswork

'Discounting' The Future Cost Of Climate Change - Science News

Given that the economics of climate change are hot in the news again, I thought this explanation of discount rates was pretty good.

But still, my general attitude to all this is that it seems an absurd idea that economic modelling of the effects of climate change out to a century or so is anything other than pure guesswork.

The obvious reason is because of the uncertainties within climate science, even allowing that is basically right in its current estimate of likely global temperature increases. As the disruptive weather of the last 18 months is showing, it's not just heat waves to worry about, but floods, droughts, and possibly even unusually snowy winters at lower levels of the Northern Hemisphere. Everyone agrees that predicting regional effects is much less certain than the big picture, but this means we don't really know which population centres of particular economic importance are likely to be hit hard, and which get off relatively easily.

One of the largest consequences which I would have thought could be most important economically - sea level rise - is still very uncertain. If rate of sea level rise increases and it becomes clear that it will be at the top of the worst scenario forecasts, and thereby cause abandonment of major land areas and parts of some cities, how do you factor that into your economic forecasts now?

I guess this economic modelling is worth the exercise (and only attempted at all) as a way of trying to politically justify a certain level of current economic pain to offset future problems; but really, I find it hard to believe it can really be taken seriously as prediction if the actual effects of climate change are so difficult to predict.

It seems to me that using economics to work out the least costly method of getting to lower emissions is another matter, as that's comparing something that is relatively "here and now" and has aims which are in a more realistic time scale.

But the key point is, I think, average citizens wanting to see action on climate change should just be interested in serious movement to lower emissions done in a way that does not cripple the economy. Serious leadership on technological innovation that seems to be needed to achieve this will need to come as well.

Economic failure and climate change

As an antidote to Tony Abbott talking about claimed long term economic benefits of removing carbon pricing to justify its removal, I would suggest people read this post by Michael Tobis and the comments that follow, particularly as to how they relate to economic modelling and climate change.

Tobis has been banging on about this for some time, but it seems to me that not many people pay attention.

I find him quite convincing.   Just as I would not expect an economist working in 1913 to have a good set of predictions about the global economy in 2000, even if there was no great intervening issue like climate change, I just do not see how it is plausible to trust modelling that is trying to anticipate economic costs of a 100 year change to climate that will have greatly varying local effects around the globe.

Now, its true:  environmentalists use modelling to justify carbon pricing.   So how fair is it to criticise the likes of Abbott when he uses economic arguments against carbon pricing?

It is fair, for a couple of reasons:   climate change will have much longer term effects than a mere century.  Some of those effects that are very plausible/ likely in the longer term are simply obviously disastrous - work out what 2 or 3 m of sea level rise around your favourite global cities is going to do to them, for a start.  But on the shorter scale as well, changes to the hydrological cycle are likely to have some very serious effects, and soon, and common sense suggests that they are not readily capable of effective adaptation.  The effect will also hit the poorer countries hardest.  Have you noticed the flooding in India and China this year?  You can only build so many useful dams in a country, even if it is rich.   Is there anywhere in Western Queensland you can build a decent drought fighting dam that won't evaporate at a furious rate?

[And even if the unlikely assumption that climate sensitivity is only 1.5 degree for a doubling of CO2, you still have the concern about what ocean acidification is going to do to the food chain in the oceans, with recent work indicating that krill in Antarctica may collapse, and a very uncertain future for pteropods as well.  There is no good way to really guess the knock on consequences of the failure of very large elements of ocean food chain like that, I reckon, although scientists are trying.]

Criticisms of economic modelling to show that other economic modelling is flawed therefore misses this whole point. It misses the common sense of the situation.

So ridiculous exercises by small government/libertarian poster boy Topher, for example, are not just a waste of time; they are a dangerous waste of time.   At least Greenies who use economics poorly to get to the right political response anyway can't be accused of that.

Malcolm Turnbull continues to disappoint, even as an ex PM

I had something of a hope that Malcolm Turnbull would use his exit from politics to try to blow up the Liberals by stating the obvious:   there is no working with those in the party who deny climate change.   The party needs to split, as there is within it too large a rump of Right wing, American style "conservatives" who are more obsessed with trying to win back an already lost culture war, and it poisons their judgement against good and necessary policy on climate, economics, and even humanitarian issues.  (The first two because evidence is ignored in favour of conspiracy and ideology; the latter because fighting a culture war means being obsessed with strength and never admitting you have gone too far - hence punishing wannabe refugees can continue forever as far as they are concerned.)

But Malcolm on his Q&A session last night gave no hint of understanding his party that way.  Sure, he makes a good point that the electoral evidence from 3 former safe Liberal seats (now with independents) is that people are wanting Liberals to be centrist, small "l" liberals; but he just does not still seem to appreciate that the conservative wing who dumped him will continue to make it impossible to market the party as the one that he wants it to be.

"Broad church" fails when it tries to accommodate those who won't even acknowledge that a key and urgent issue such as climate change, with its broad impact on energy and economics policy, really exists.

Even Andrew Bolt seems to understand this better than Malcolm, since he has muttered about a split recently. 

So, bring on an election, and let the Liberals have their crisis in Opposition where they can do less harm.

Long memory

Wow, Tim Blair has a long memory.  I see that he has linked to a post here from 2006 in which I did something I haven't done for a very long time - defend Mark Steyn.

For some, this will no doubt raise the question of how much my political colours have changed since I started the blog.   It has certainly long irked Catallaxy commenters that I maintain "conservative" in the title of this place, despite my support of the Gillard government, disdain for Tea Party and "conservative" politics of America, dismay at the election of Trump, and full support of climate change action (ideally, by a carbon price - but I remain skeptical of emissions trading schemes).

Now I have been through this exercise before, but it doesn't hurt to re-state it:

People should remember that  I was completely unimpressed by Kevin Rudd from the start, and was calling out his apparent personality issues long before their true extent became clear;  I have never resiled from basic support of the Howard government; I still think much of the criticism of George W Bush was overblown even though the Iraqi intervention turned out to be something of a disaster; I would much prefer that gay relationships were recognised as civil unions rather than marriage; I'm pretty skeptical of the way many now think of transexualism, too;  I'm leery of IVF and certainly against the mooted "brave new world" of things such as three parent babies; I think much of pro-decriminalisation of drugs argument is ill founded and continually oversimplifies the issue, and I would be perfectly happy if we could maintain the one legal drug of alcohol, with appropriate constraints;  I've been as dismayed as anyone about the rise of ISIS and the ongoing fallout the world is suffering from an internal Islamic dispute stemming back more than 1,000 years.   I've posted quite a few times about the seemingly peculiar susceptibility of Islamic societies to conspiracy and rumour; although since the rise of the importance of fake news to the Trump voter, clearly I can now be called out as being a bit unfair in singling out the Islamic societies in that regard.

Here's the thing:  it's the American Right (and its Australian followers) that has moved since the start of this blog from a position of "reasonable" conservatism to one of unreasonable, ideologically based positions that are no longer pragmatic, but in fact aggressively dismissive of evidence.

The prime bell-ringer of this change is global warming, of course, where Mark Steyn and his ilk have basically been conned by a mere handful of contrarian scientists and a much larger body of amateur self-aggrandising wannabe scientists and propagandists (Monckton, Watts, Inhofe, etc).   It's the climate change denialists who have moved from mere skepticism about the exaggeration of some forecasts of the imminent effects of climate change  into the world of dishonest or disingenuous cherry picking of graphs and quotes, and conspiracy belief about how science works, and thus unwisely decided to double down rather than admit they were wrong.  Steyn in particular fully deserves to be sued for defamation by Mann, who I hope succeeds in his action.   Andrew Bolt is similarly impervious to evidence.

The same thing can be said of economics, too:   the American Right can't get over belief in Laffernomics, despite recent and older examples of its failure.   In a sense, though, their gullibility on this is more explicable than it is on climate change - as I noted recently, there is so much going on in societies that economics presents a wealth of opportunity to come up with multiple explanations for current economic success or failure.  I don't think that climate change science allows even half way plausible alternatives.

And then there is the issue of Islam.  It is a serious problem, of course, whenever a group of immigrants seek to bring illiberal attitudes, violence or crime into a society that is prepared to given them a home.   But the likes of Steyn have, I think, lost historical perspective on the matter, and are now prone to exaggeration on the risk of terrorism.   Furthermore, it seems to me that anyone on the Right who supported the Iraq invasion has some gall if they try to shift the blame for the humanitarian crises we see subsequently from the Islamic Middle East onto a Left which never supported the de-stabilising effort in the first place.

I think Andrew Bolt is particularly offensive with his "who let them in?" dog whistles whenever there is migrant crime in Australia.   There is no doubt humanitarian immigration is something worthy; there is also no doubt that sometimes it comes with  gang related problems, for a time.  And there is also no doubt there is no magic detector for working out which migrant families may harbour future gang members.

Other examples of the ways in which the American Right has come to dismay me:  the barely disguised racism underpining much of the Right wing populist attack on Obama, and their non common-sensical approach to gun control which would consider Ronald Reagan to be a Lefty on the issue.

So there you have it - it's so called American Right wing conservatism which has walked away from the reasonable, under the influence of  a variety of self serving interests;  not me.   And Mark Steyn is a prime example of someone who has followed this sad path.   

Update:  the blips on my hit map alert me to the fact that Mark Steyn has picked up on Tim Blair's post, and in doing so has linked to my old post too (and referred to this blog by name.)   Obviously, Mark is not a regular reader here...and nor will many of his referrals if they look around the modern incarnation of the blog!

As I suspected...

Climate challenge underestimated? : Nature News

This looks like a really important story on the economics of climate change. My suspicion has long been that the optimistic talk of countries being able to achieve huge changes in CO2 emissions with lots of "green" technologies and without too much economic pain was bunkum, and this report indicates my hunch may be right:

Climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr, climatologist Tom Wigley, and economist Christopher Green lay out in a commentary article published in Nature ¹ today why they think that the emission scenarios the IPCC produced nearly a decade ago, which are still widely used, are overly optimistic. They note that most of the IPCC’s 'business as usual' emission scenarios assume a certain amount of 'spontaneous' technological change. The size of this assumed change is unrealistic, they argue, and deceives policy-makers and the public about the crucial role policy must have in encouraging the development of technologies to prevent dangerous climate change.

Such a large chunk of the needed energy-efficiency improvements is built in to these 'business as usual' scenarios that the degree of change requiring special effort seems artificially small, they argue. According to the authors' own calculations, IPCC scenarios make it seem as if the technical challenge of stabilizing greenhouse-gas emissions at around 500 parts per million — a concentration which scientists think will prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 2 °C — is a quarter of its true size.

Richard Tol, an energy and environmental economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, also says that the IPCC has underestimated the cost of technology, and notes that the cost of mitigating against climate change increases as time goes on. If Pielke and colleagues are correct, the cost of controlling global warming could go up by a factor of 16, argues Tol.

I trust Professor Garnaut is reading this with interest.

Judith not good at analogies (when it suits her)

Whenever The Australian or AFR run articles by the likes of Judith Sloan or Alan Moran on climate change economics, they should (but don't) put a large rider in bold "READERS SHOULD KNOW:  THIS ECONOMIST DOES NOT BELIEVE CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL OR NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED IN ANY MANNER AT ALL.".  Because, of course, if your analysis is springing from  that fundamental belief, there is no reason to trust its objectivity at all.

So I see today that Sloan's column in The Australian on the modelled costs of Labor's climate plan is able to be accessed.  

To be honest, much of her account of the uncertainties is pretty well aligned  with what I heard on Radio National this morning - she could have put more effort into poohing-poohing Labor's policy than she did.   Is this a sign of a crack in her noggin that is letting in light that action is going to happen and she had better start sounding like she hasn't always been a flat earth climate change denier when talking about policy responses?

But my main reason for posting about this:  she claims to be completely puzzled by Bill Shorten's "fat person eating 10 big macs" analogy.  It's not perfect, but the point is clear enough:  the fat person [Australia] can't just continue with the easy and fast fix for hunger [energy needs] by eating fast food all the time [building coal power stations], because we all know that in the long run it will hurt/kill them [climate change effects].   They  have to put the effort in to get a better diet [clean energy and reducing all emissions] even if a good meal costs more than a Big Mac [that's where the analogy starts to go off road - although if the only choice were restaurants, it might work.]

She's just being deliberately obtuse in saying she doesn't understand it.

Adam Creighton re-confirms his foolishness

Look, as I have said before, I have never held Creighton in high regard; but with today's column in The Australian:  Coronavirus: Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts, he re-confirms  himself as the most ignorant fool.

He decided early on to go with one take on the COVID-19 problem and he is sticking to it, obviously in such a way that no evidence is going to change his mind.

Most of the column is devoted to the COVID pandemic, but when it gets to climate change, he only quotes this:

Climate modelling was struggling even before the pandemic, given the planet has warmed about half as much as forecast by the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in back 1990.

“Almost the entire alarm about global warming is based on model predictions. If you just look at the last 30 to 40 years of data, nothing spectacular has happened, there’s no sign temperature increase is accelerating,” says Benny Peiser, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.

This claim has been debunked years ago - Creighton reads only what he wants to on the topic, obviously.  As for quoting Benny Peiser - his qualifications:

Peiser studied political science, English, and sports science. 

Yeah, the man to trust.   

The rule of thumb should apply - if anyone is running with "climate change is no problem" line after all this time, they are not to be trusted on any topic, even one they are supposedly an expert on, such as economics.   It's a solid marker for foolishness, not knowing how to tell a genuine expert from a charlatan, and an inability to admit to past error.   

Some good (and bad) climate change commentary

*  And Then There's Physics has a crack at the "we can't stay under 2C now" pessimism, and I generally agree with him.  (See the comments too, where he says it seems to be a case of climate scientists not being able to "win" either way.)

* Lenore Taylor has an excellent explanation of how Australian policy got to where it is today.   The details of this are hard to keep in memory, so it's really good to see such a clear account.

*  And now for the bad:  the very bad.  Adam Creighton writes with so many errors in his take on climate change, it's hard to know where to begin.  Take this paragraph:

But even more problematic, the link between carbon dioxide and global average temperatures is highly uncertain. Sure, it is probably positive, but the degree of the relationship is vague, as sober analysts of the climate change debate will readily point out. Moreover, splicing the effect out from temperature changes that would have happened anyway is next to impossible.

"Sober analysis" - ha!

This paragraph in particular shows his complete ignorance on the topic:

The other problem with these models is they assume the impact of global warming is unambiguously bad. It might not be. For example, the 44,000 more than expected people who died in the British winter last year — in part because of the cold — might have had a different view.

Absolute unadulterated rubbish, and proof he simply does not read the IPCC reports or any other material - where the cross over between any net benefits to net harm has been a matter of hotly contested dipute.  (Lukewarmer Richard Tol's error prone work being very significant on this.)

But how surprising is it really, that a small government, anti tax, libertarian inclined economics writer knows stuff all about climate change. 

But the basic problem with his argument is the common (and discredited one) - that uncertainty is our friend.   It isn't, Adam.  Read. 

Krugman on "Marxism!"

Crazy Climate Economics - NYTimes.com

Was I sounding too Right wing in the last post?  Time for a corrective, then.

An excellent column yesterday by Paul Krugman on the craziness of the ideological rhetorical (much of) the American Right has adopted in the last decade.   A taste:

Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing
Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”

Ha!  Didn't Atlas Shrugged indicate that a certain author who had a fetish about individualism thought trains were OK?  (Actually, at Slate, they looked at this question in detail a few years ago.  Libertarians apparently still like trains - as long as they are privately owned trains.)

Krugman predicts that the Right's reaction to Obama using the EPA to address CO2 (because they won't let him use market based methods) will again be to claim "Marxism":

You can already get a taste of what’s coming in the dissenting opinions from a recent Supreme Court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority of the justices agreed that the E.P.A. has the right to regulate smog from coal-fired power plants, which drifts across state lines. But
Justice Scalia didn’t just dissent; he suggested that the E.P.A.’s proposed rule — which would tie the size of required smog reductions to cost — reflected the Marxist concept of “from each
according to his ability.” Taking cost into consideration is Marxist? Who knew?

As he goes on to argue, very reasonably:

Why is this crazy? Normally, conservatives extol the magic of markets and the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to reflect environmental issues — such as a cap on carbon emissions — those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with change.

Now, the rules the E.P.A. is likely to impose won’t give the private sector as much flexibility as it would have had in dealing with an economywide carbon cap or emissions tax. But Republicans have only themselves to blame: Their scorched-earth opposition to any kind of climate policy has left executive action by the White House as the only route forward.

The Right in the US has (in large part) become an intellectual embarrassment, and we are all waiting for the recovery.