Carbon price thoughts

What more can be said about the Gillard government finally passing its carbon price legislation? Typically, the right wing blogs are in a frenzy about the death of democracy, the coming glorious electoral defeat of leftism for all eternity, etc. (Have a look at this joke of a post at Catallaxy, where the resident obsessive about Say's Law quotes James Delingpole as some sort of authority.) I assume Alan Jones' radio show was absolutely chock full of this sort of guff today, and will continue in the same vein for the next couple of days at least. 

But once legislation like this is passed, it's hard to imagine any media figure being able to keep it as hot an issue for the next 12 months.

I have previously expressed here great doubts about an ETS being better than a carbon tax, but basically, it seems that credible and moderate economists (that is, those who are not wholly dedicated to right wing, anti-tax, as-small-a-government-as-possible ideology) think otherwise, and I'm willing to go with their judgement. I do get the impression that lessons have been learnt from the problems with the European ETS. Let's hope that's right.

How it will all pan out is still highly uncertain. As papers have already been noting today, Abbott's pledge to revoke it actually leaves some businesses in a bit of a limbo as to what to do over the next year or two. I suspect that most will have to assume that the tax will survive, and some will start to call on Abbott not to revoke it before the next election.

And honestly, if Abbott is to be taken at face value (in reality, most people who are strongly opposed to a carbon price hope that Abbott is lying about his intention to reach the same CO2 target) he is not going to find an economist around who is going to say that his means of achieving a similar reduction is going to be better than the ETS. Tony Windsor is on Lateline tonight making this point as I type.

The worst scenario is that the world economy tanks badly in the next 8 months, and the scheme commences operation at a time of great economic pessimism. Abbott's pledge would presumably then remain popular, and a double dissolution threat to ensure it is achieved may seem like a good bet.

I hope it doesn't come to that. There will never be an obviously "good" time to introduce such a scheme, but it would be bad luck indeed if this turned out to be the very worst time to introduce it.  

Finally, although you can be cynical and say that Gillard made a rod for Labor's own back by being wishy washy on an ETS after its initial failure under Rudd, I think Annabel Crabb is right to note that what she has been forced by circumstances to achieve still shows off her skills and practicality:

In bringing the Parliament to this point, Julia Gillard is picking up the can that has been kicked down the road by John Howard, Kevin Rudd and, in his own way, Malcolm Turnbull. It's maimed all of them, this diabolical issue, but Julia Gillard is still standing, and has today pulled off a legislative feat that - under the circumstances - deserves recognition even among the non-enthusiasts.

Bringing regional independents together with the Greens, to reach agreement on a fiendishly difficult economic reform like this one? Convincing the Greens to exempt petrol from the scheme?

Prevailing upon Bob Brown - hardly an International Man of Steelmaking, ordinarily - to rescue $300 million in assistance to steelmakers after Tony Abbott refused to vote for it?

All of these outcomes looked fairly unlikely as the New Paradigm was lowered nervously into place, and yet they have come to pass. Where her predecessor ached to be popular, this prime minister has made unpopularity into something of a personal art form.

In light of this, I find those on the Left who want to see Gillard replaced by Rudd, like John Quiggin, to be exercising perversely strange logic. This is actually an achievement by Gillard, and she should be given the opportunity to reap any benefits from finally being seen to take action. Success on the mining tax should also be seen as an achievement by the Labor base, and that is another thing Rudd didn't achieve.

Replacing Gillard anytime soon makes no sense, and I have much greater confidence in her achieving results than I had in Kevin Rudd.

The population at large is still easily conned by the boyish, earnest facade of Rudd, but that does not mean he is actually capable of good leadership.

Well, this is how I choose to interpret the situation....

but I could be misconstruing things... : )

PS: photo is from Sourcewatch, credited to Bob Burton. Someone should let me know if there is a copyright issue.

The Fake Crisis continues

I see that The Australian (and Denis Shanahan in particular) are in full blown "campaign" mode to see Julia Gillard replaced as Prime Minister.  This has been obvious for some time, but some headlines from last week, and this morning in particular, just confirm it:

Coalition storms ALP strongholds: Newspoll
Labor leader has lost public's faith
Leaky boats could sink Julia Gillard 

It's obviously important to Shanahan that a 3% increase to Labor in Newspoll not be interpreted as a clear sign that Labor has bottomed out, so he writes as follows:

A three-point rise in the Newspoll primary vote for the ALP has avoided the unthinkable for the Gillard government of going to 25 per cent or below to have less support than the combined vote for the Greens and various odds and sods, but the broader view of this survey of public opinion about Labor - as well as the personal standing of Julia Gillard - is devastating. The electorate has not only stopped listening to Labor but rejected it on every front.

In fact, the way I read the poll, Labor is still preferred outright on IR and education, arguably has more people favouring their position on climate change if you make the assumption that the substantial number for "someone else" are mostly Greens, and is even pegging on health.    
 
People are saying the Coalition handles asylum seekers better, which as I have noted before, is at complete odds with other polls indicating that they are no so keen on offshore processing.   You just have to assume that people are completely (to put it generously) confused on this issue.  No, forget it:  people are stupid on this issue. And let's be clear here:  this extends to those on the Left too, who (as shown on Q&A last night) pretty much completely ignore the issue that a completely open and welcoming processing regime would be practically guaranteed to involve hundreds more deaths at sea on leaky boats.

On this issue, I note that the local UNHRC rep has again said that he thinks the Malaysia solution is better for people than being locked in detention centres in Australia:

ASYLUM seekers would receive better protections in Malaysia under the Gillard government's proposed transfer deal than being held in indefinite mandatory detention in Australia, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office has said.

Australia ''would fall well short'' of the human rights criteria demanded of Malaysia under the deal signed in July, the UNHCR's regional representative, Richard Towle, has told a parliamentary inquiry....

''In the context of the Malaysian arrangements, the assurances of legal stay and community-based reception for all transferees can be seen as a more positive protection environment that protracted - and in some cases indefinite - detention that many face here in Australia, provided the assurances are carefully monitored,'' Mr Towle wrote.

The High Court struck down the refugee swap partly because Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention. But Mr Towle said many signatories did not meet the ''the fundamental protection safeguards that were expected of Malaysia under the arrangements''.

The UNHCR has also dismissed a ''misperception'' that asylum seekers could be caned, saying the document to be issued proving their legal status would have been ''a significant safeguard''.
Mr Towle said the Malaysian government also planned to extend legal work rights to all refugees, not just those sent from Australia. This would allow refugees to access insurance and health schemes.

The Malaysians have an incentive to see that the Australian sent asylum seekers are not mistreated:  they get to give us lots more Burmese asylum seekers.  This idea, based as it is on Departmental advice given by the same public servants who advised the Coalition, should be tried.

Back to the Newspoll:  the Coalition leads Labor by a large, large margin on the economy, but here it is clear that the public is buying into the idea that there is some sort of crisis going on about how Labor has handled it.

The reality is that, although the Coalition under Turnbull might have spent a bit less money on the GFC spending, there is no credible economist around who is regularly condemning Labor's response. Internationally, it is difficult to find anything other than praise for how Australia handled it.

The worst thing about all of this is that some Labor supporting figures like John Quiggin have given up on Gillard at a time when she is just getting some major reforms through Parliament.  It has always been absurd to suggest that she should be replaced at this time. 

Meanwhile, Bruce Hawker has suggested today how Labor can improve.  I have always found him boring on TV, but he is right in this column.  It was a serious mistake for Gillard to appear with Bob Brown as if he was a virtual deputy leader.   Hawker suggests distancing herself from Brown, and coming up with simple, distinctive Labor policies, like universal dental care.  He's right.

Quite a surprise

Prenatal testing could spare babies from toxoplasmosis complications

A study from Stanford finds strong reason for routine testing of toxoplasmosis in the US:

Their research found much higher rates of serious brain and eye disease among U.S. infants with congenital toxoplasmosis than among similar infants in Europe, where the prenatal testing is routine....
Eighty-four percent of the North American infants studied had serious complications of the parasitic infection, including calcium deposits in the brain, water on the brain and eye disease that caused visual impairment or blindness. By contrast, few European infants had these problems – for instance, about 17 percent of French infants with the infection develop complications.

“It was a shock,” said Jose Montoya, MD, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of Medicine in Infectious Diseases at Stanford. “We were dismayed to see so many little ones with severe eye disease, hydrocephalus and brain calcifications.”

The reason for the different outcomes between affect US and European babies:

...effective medications exist to prevent mother-to-child transmission of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite – and babies who receive these drugs in utero have much lower rates of complications than the infants in Montoya’s study, whose mothers did not get the prophylactic meds.

The test is cheap too. I wonder if it is done in Australia?

As I like to say to my children when they're feeling down..

‘Humans are just modified fish’ (Science Alert)

Not a good place to be sick

South Pole Worker Stranded After Stroke - NYTimes.com

Oceans heating, but how deep?

RealClimate: Global warming and ocean heat content

This Real Climate post, and the comments and discussion following, are important.  The issue is heat going into the oceans, and whether once it gets there, it is possibly a problem again in the future.

There has been a skeptic argument around that if upper ocean heat is getting "buried" in the deep ocean (a fact which itself is very hard to measure, apparently) then the heat does not represent any future "threat" to surface temperatures again.  Yet Trenberth had made a statement that any heat going down "has not disappeared and so it cannot be ignored. It must have consequences.” 

Gavin Schmidt seems to indicate that, whatever Trenberth had in mind (and, curiously, he doesn't seem to know exactly what it was,) heating of the deep ocean has never been considered a threat to surface temperature.

Roger Pielke Snr turns up in the thread too, and Schmidt dismisses most of he claims about Ocean Heat Content.  In particular, he says the ARGO system simply can't measure ocean heat moving from the top layer of the ocean to the deep ocean, whereas a skeptic meme (started by Pielke, I think) is that the "missing heat" can't be going into the deep ocean because ARGO hasn't seen it passing through the top 700 m.

This really does appear to be a very complicated topic, and it is surprising to see that this may be a case where climate scientists have contributed to a skeptic meme via their own looseness of language.

Domestic notes from the weekend

*  Yesterday morning started off with a bang, and being woken up by a loud clap of thunder at 6 am is not that common for Brisbane.  The storms seemed to hang around then for about 3 hours, and it was very dark with many close lightning strikes in my area during that time.   The weather bureau predicted a stormy summer for Brisbane, and maybe this is a sign they were right, as indeed they were this time last year when they warned the Government that conditions were right for big floods.    

*   The mother possum hasn't been seen for a few days now.  In fact, her spot under the balcony on Friday morning seemed to be occupied by two smaller possums (as far as we could tell - we could only see one head but what appeared to be two rear ends.)   What do possums do - play a game of musical nests each night, and just stay at the one nearest them when the sun comes up?

*  Had a go at making limoncello this afternoon.  It now has to sit in the cupboard for a month before being strained and ready to taste.   I'm just hoping I sterilised the bottle enough - the last time I tried to do something with lemons (preserved lemons) they went mould pretty quickly in the jar.  I hope the alcohol in limoncello helps prevent that.  The recipe being followed is this one.   I'm using vodka as the base, which is a form of alcohol which I could never see the point of drinking.  I figure that even if one's intention is simply to get drunk, surely it's more interesting doing it with something with flavour.   In any event, I was aware that fancy schmancy vodkas of all varieties were trendy for a while, particularly in the US, I think, given that I had seen a Mythbusters segment in which they were seeing if they could really tell the difference between high end brands.  And indeed I was surprised to see today just how many brands are on the shelf in Australia too, most of which are only interesting for the nifty bottle designs.  It's funny, but in two different bottle shops, the cheapest brands were actually made in France.  When did they become a producer of cheap vodka?  I also see now that many flavoured vodkas are sold, which is fair enough, I guess.  Better than drinking plain old vodka.

*  Speaking of lemons, it's spring and the lemon and lime tree are having their annual outbreak of stinkbugs.  These bugs (the flat bodied bronze orange bug) appear to be extremely common on Australian citrus, and as this article notes, they do have a very vile smell when disturbed.   They  die pretty easily with any pyrethrum garden spray, but the big problem is reaching the one sitting up near the top of the lemon tree.  (By the way, while Googling around on the topic, I came this page:  Stink Bug Field Guide for Brisbane.   We do seem to have many, many stinking bugs in this region - something to be proud of, I guess...)

*  OK, this has nothing in particular to do with my weekend, apart from the fact that I just read it.  The Taiwanese have an indigenous population?  I didn't know that, although I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because I had heard about the Ainu, being the Japanese equivalent.  Funnily enough, if you watch the video at this link, you'll see a spokesman for the Ainu who looks a little bit like a younger version of Geoff Clark.

*  I found out today that the McFeast is still on the menu at McDonald's as a "birthday special", but I remain concerned how much longer this will be the case.

*  I guess I didn't mind the last Dr Who episode of this season, but as the final episode in this season's big story arc of how the Doctor avoids his (apparent) death at the start of the season, it did come up with a trick that seems just a little too "easy", if you ask me.  Again, I see the Guardian (gosh they discuss this show a lot) has a long article about whether everyone is completely happy with the direction it has taken under Steven Moffat.  It's good to see that I not alone in preferring the better stand alone stories to the overblown (and increasingly silly in their way)  story arcs that Moffat seems most interested in. 

Again...

That's: dodopathy.blogspot.com

Nasty utilitarians

Moral philosophy: Goodness has nothing to do with it | The Economist

Here's a short article about the apparent personality traits of the small-ish number of people who (in a thought experiment) think strongly enough of utilitarianism to kill someone innocent to save the lives of others.

Perhaps not surprisingly, they don't appear to be very nice:

They found a strong link between utilitarian answers to moral dilemmas (push the fat guy off the bridge) and personalities that were psychopathic, Machiavellian or tended to view life as meaningless. Utilitarians, this suggests, may add to the sum of human happiness, but they are not very happy people themselves.

Always had my doubts about them!

Possible explanations

Gas 'n' Air - Technology Review

Wow, that was quick. The link above has quite a few papers from arXiv talking about how the faster than light neutrino experiment may be flawed, and/or possible explanations as to what is going on if the result is real.

Strange experiment

Single dose of hallucinogen may create lasting personality change

I'm not entirely sure why anyone would want to take a shot at magic mushrooms if you knew ahead of time about this:

A single high dose of the hallucinogen psilocybin, the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms," was enough to bring about a measureable personality change lasting at least a year in nearly 60 percent of the 51 participants in a new study, according to the Johns Hopkins researchers who conducted it.

Lasting change was found in the part of the personality known as openness, which includes traits related to imagination, aesthetics, feelings, abstract ideas and general broad-mindedness. Changes in these traits, measured on a widely used and scientifically validated personality inventory, were larger in magnitude than changes typically observed in healthy adults over decades of life experiences, the scientists say. Researchers in the field say that after the age of 30, personality doesn't usually change significantly.

"Normally, if anything, openness tends to decrease as people get older," says study leader Roland R. Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

All of the participants were already "spiritual", however, and the fact that they were agreeing to an experiment with a hallucinogen indicates something about their "openness" already, surely. The article also notes:

As a word of caution, Griffiths also notes that some of the study participants reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their daylong psilocybin sessions, although none reported any lingering harmful effects. He cautions, however, that if hallucinogens are used in less well supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors.

Count me out, thanks.

The Right gets a recruit

Angry Anderson has joined the National Party and is looking at running for a Federal seat.

This post from his blog: The New World Order of the New Free World gives some idea of the scattergun mind of someone who the Nationals (and Abbott) seem to think would be a good candidate:

Do we really believe that this push for a Tax on Carbon pollution is about anything but raising more revenue for the government and the United Nations in league with the international banks using the “New World Order” as a blueprint for the Globalisation of the New Free World?

Are we so naive that we have ignored those warnings written about, not so long ago, by the likes of Toffler and his ilk about how these unseen people will have to come up with more and more ways to separate us from our hard earned cash?

I, for one, do not believe in this transparent lie of global warming, global warming created by us the population. Talking of population, why isn’t anyone talking about that as an issue related to this matter – the world is overpopulated but is anyone talking about reducing or slowing the population growth as a measure to slow this so called warming? No they aren’t!...

David Suzuki once said that to be a productive citizen of the world we should think globally and act locally. This is what we need to do now, to even begin to address issues that do now affect us and will affect us for years to come. The World was created by the perfect hand and prolific forests were always integral to the quality of life on this planet; I am suspicious of the attempt to take our focus away from such obvious problems as rampant logging of old growth forest and replacing them with new less understood but seemingly “hipper” subject matter....

I get suspicious. Who is pushing so hard? Gee, it’s big business cleverly or not so cleverly disguised as “do gooders”. This has been pointed out in emails that have been circulating in recent times worth investigating. Wouldn’t be the first time the international banking cartels have duped and enlisted the young and outraged to do their dirty work whilst preying on the fears of the older working population threatening them with their mortgage and livelihood, keeping us distracted with issues, like trying to educate our kids and keeping a roof over our heads, while they plot and scheme to fleece yet more of our money away from us.

The Right of politics in Australia and the USA , with few exceptions, is truly in an embarrassing state at the moment.

An Australian birthday

I had missed this last week - the neighbour's out of tune birthday trumpet serenade that Prime Minister Julia Gillard received on the national news.  (It's the first part of the video after the newsreader's intro):


This strikes me as a very distinctly Australian thing to happen - a sign of our egalitarianism that includes not taking the office of Prime Minister too seriously, and a politician who is definitely not "up herself". 

Domestic report

Here’s what’s been going on at home:

*  In cute news:   the possum that lives under the balcony (well, most days anyway -  it would appear that brushtail possums like to keep alternative abodes going) has a baby.   My wife spotted this first, while handing the mother a piece of fruit.  The possum leaned down from its perch and a pink furless body was able to be seen in the forward facing pouch.  I saw it myself yesterday, when feeding it watermelon and kiwifruit.   It will be some months before the baby is furry and adorably cute, like this one, and I hope we get to see more of it.  Here's a recent photo of our possum eating:


She is much less shy than before, but I hope she never learns to knock on the front door.

*  Yesterday involved a bit of ambling driving around Brisbane, and on a whim, seeing we were at Hamilton already, I took a drive out to Pinkenba.

I grew up on the north side of Brisbane, and a trip out past the old airport to the strange combination of oil refinery, sewerage plant, houses and riverside shacks known as Pinkenba was always a novelty.   I am happy to report that a trip to this strange part of town is still interesting.   In fact, I am amazed as to how much of the old riverside land out beyond “Pinkenba Village” has been converted to light industrial.  During the weekday, at least, it looks as if it would be a much more lively place than it used to be in the 60’s and 70’s.  

There are more houses there than I remembered:  some of them not too bad looking for the area.   The small primary school, which looks very much like the old Nudgee Beach primary school also on the northside, appears to have closed late last year.

But the local hotel “The Pink” still exists, and from its website, looks a lot better on the inside than from the outside.  (A prominent sign for the scheduled “Hot Girls” shows mark it out as place catering for young male workers who go to the expanded industrial estate, I guess.)    While we drove past it, I suddenly remembered that I had brought something unusual from the bottle shop there once when I was young and used to visit unusual pubs occasionally for something to do.  I think it was there that I bought a bottle of Gekkeikan sake – the only brand you could ever get in Australia decades ago.    I didn’t care for the taste, but it represented a sort of foreshadowing of a turn my life would take.  Certainly, I enjoy sake a lot now…

The other reason to visit Pinkenba is because from the road you can get very close to one of the cavernous Qantas maintenance hangers, and watch planes being towed in if you’re lucky.   In fact, it might be Qantas workers, for all I know, who frequent the Hot Girls shows at the Pink; but I certainly hope it is only after work and they have their work on their minds while they check the fuselage of a 767.

*   Went kite flying today.   Brisbane is not the best place for kite flying, at least if you are not near the coast, as I just don’t think it is that breezy a place.  [Well, unless you are dealing with a summer storm, in which case it can be very breezy indeed, but only in short bursts.]  But today was a good day for my daughter to get out a birthday present she got last year from a friend.  It was from Aldi, which was a bad sign, and indeed it needed work with a pair of scissors usually reserved for eyebrows and nose hair to get rods into pockets which otherwise did not exist.  But despite all of this, it flew quite well.

I find getting a kite airborne and keeping there for more than 10 minutes at a time is an unusually satisfying experience.  I’m not sure about my daughter: I was reluctant to hand it over to her at all.  (I’m joking, but as it turned out, she did relinquish it to me often.)

Like taking kids fishing, having a go at kite flying with them is something that just has to be tried  at least once.   That reminds me, we need to go fishing again to see if they can catch something next time.  The first attempt only resulted in my wife getting something.   My manly abilities to provide food from the wild for my family are still in question.

An alternative outlet

Introducing Dodopathy.

May be gone a while ....

I really need to concentrate more on work at the moment. I probably won't post again until next weekend - possibly longer. Wish me luck with resisting the urge to post, and my attempt at ignoring the internet generally. (But I will be back.)

The Doctor is back

After complaining about Dr Who recently, I just wanted to note that the last two episodes, which were "stand alone" stories, were really quite good.

It confirms my earlier observation that the big story arcs are the worst aspect of the show now. It seems that I am not alone in these thoughts.

An interesting idea

Gravitational Waves Can Explain Dark Energy And Axis of Evil, Says Cosmologist - Technology Review

I've had a look at the paper, which is not written for the lay person, of course, but I remain a little uncertain as to whether he is claimed that this gravitational wave idea could explain away the apparent acceleration of the universe entirely, or only partially.

Thinking about teenagers

Teenage Brains - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine

Mind Hacks liked the above article in National Geographic a lot, as it gives a fresh perspective on why teenagers take risks, other than the overly simplistic "brain's not fully developed yet" meme.