Thanks for the "so late it's useless" fact checks, Peter

Is Tony Abbott's $350 carbon claim hot air?

It's worth reading anyway.  (And watching the video on "can the GST be increased without the States consent".  Short answer:  yes.)

Trying to cheer myself up

Local intelligence

I cannot explain how, but entirely by accident, in the course of work this morning, I learnt which street, and pretty much which house, in Brisbane barking mad billionaire wannabe politician Clive Palmer lives, and it's only a suburb or so away from me.

Should I drive by his house on election night?  Is he having a party I can gatecrash?  Does he have a child easily kidnapped?  (A joke, a joke, Federal Police!  Mind you, he does remind me a bit of the mad furniture shop owner in Raising Arizona, who was willing to forgive on the return of the babies.  [Still a joke!  Seriously!])

Quite a surprise anyway.

Update:  I see by Googling that the street he lives in has been noted in the Courier Mail more than once.  My intelligence was less of a coup than I realised.  

Jericho on costings

Policy costings about more than the final figures - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

A good explanation from Greg Jericho here of the games being played with "costings".

We need to know the final number, and it's great to know that it is accurate, but we still need to know how they arrived at that number.

The problem is many editors and news directors have focussed on the number and not the assumptions and parameters that determined the result. The ALP also fell for this old way of thinking when last week they announced that the Liberal Party had a $10 billion black hole.

In reality what the ALP had demonstrated was not that there was a black hole, but that if you used the assumptions and parameters previously announced by the Liberal Party the savings amounted to only $21 billion as opposed to the Liberals' announced $31 billion.

Both numbers are right. But we have no idea why they are different, because we have no idea how the Liberal Party arrived at its final number.

To use the running analogy, at best we know the vague distance they ran, but little else.

The ALP over-egged their case, but when the Treasury and the PBO released statements pointing out that the costings released by the ALP were not the actual costings of the Liberal Party policies, the media for the most part took that as meaning the ALP's $21 billion figure was wrong.

The Treasury and PBO had said no such thing. They had merely announced that the costings depend on assumptions and parameters. Do we know the assumptions or parameters of the Liberal Party's policies?

Nope.

His explanation of the difference the Parliamentary Budget Office has made is important too, but I won't reproduce that here.

The quiet economists

I have been rather annoyed with the general silence of economists on the issue of the Coalition approach to climate change in the lead up to the election.

As far as I can tell, there is virtually no economist who thinks "direct action" is a better longer term plan for achieving its stated goal than pricing carbon. The evidence is strongly suggestive that the carbon pricing is having an effect already on reducing electricity consumption.   The Coalition's Greg Hunt used to champion carbon pricing, until he was told he had to come up and sell with an alternative simply so that Abbott could have a different from policy from Labor.  Government seeded clean energy financing has been underway in other countries - I have not heard any economist talk about whether that has been considered successful or not.

As I have argued recently, there is plenty of room to be skeptical of long term economic modelling of the effects of climate change; but shorter scale economics modelling of how to be push society in a cleaner energy direction can be expected to make sense.

So why are the great majority of  economists who support carbon pricing sitting on their hands on the topic during the election? 

Still don't like him

Tony Abbott, and his daughters, were on Kitchen Confidential tonight. 

I'm thoroughly sick of the PR use of his daughters throughout this campaign.  Transparent as a tactic, I hope this is the last we see of such persistent manipulative use of children in politics.

As for Abbott himself:   sad to say, but his psychological make up only came out of the interview as being shallower than expected.  He's quite open about not being able to be open any more, confirming my oft stated assessment that he was more likeable as a somewhat contrarian Minister, than as the  the um-ing and ah-ing,  self censoring, constipated looking Leader that he is now.  [And that awkward "hah.hah.hah' laugh - maybe it's natural, but sounds very self aware to me.]

Left the seminary because a mate of his from Uni was getting to travel overseas and sign up really big contracts?   I thought souls were meant to be more important than money, but there you go.  (Actually, isn't it said that he did not fit into what he considered virtually a "gay" seminary culture, but I suppose it is too much to expect him to be too open about that on national TV.)  He made  mention of feeling his education (making a specific mention of his Rhodes scholarship) was being wasted.  Actually, he has had a career in which his economics qualifications have made little contribution, and his colleagues have said he has no natural interest in the topic.  Turns out it was wasted after all... 

He re-confirmed his upset at Gillard's misogyny speech, yet once again, he gives not the slightest indication that he recognizes his own provocative echoing of "died of shame", or years of not-so-subtle references to Gillard's childless status.   He accepts that he sees more "shades of grey" now than when he was a university conservative hard man.  Yet his political message over the last three years has been built around exaggeration and confrontation.

The funny thing about him is that he appears to be an introspective man, yet the explanations that he come up with about himself seem to fall well short of reality.

I hope he loses the election due to his policies, and the interview confirms that there is no particular  character reason for the public to regret such loss.

Who's that successful and visionary business leader again?

I had to remind myself about Roger Corbett, who is getting a lot of attention for having criticised Rudd and Labor (and praising Tony Abbott) on Lateline last night.

Oh that's right: he would be the Chairman of Fairfax who in 2004, as Eric Beecher told us last year, was confident the company would be the media "envy of the world":

After listening to my prognosis that the company faced a potential collapse of its traditional business model — I sketched out what I described as a “catastrophe scenario” under which The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age would lose much of their classified advertising in coming years — the Fairfax board studiously ignored my plea to implement overlapping strategies as “insurance” against that possibility.

One director, in particular, became quite agitated about what I was saying. “I don’t ever want anyone coming into this boardroom again,” he told his colleagues as he held up a copy of one of Fairfax’s hefty Saturday papers, “and telling us that people will buy houses or cars, or look for jobs, without this”. He then dropped the lump of newsprint onto the boardroom table with a thud.

That board member was Roger Corbett, now the chairman of Fairfax. He spent 40 years as a retailer, never worked in media or journalism, holds a handful of shares in Fairfax, and was paid $412,000 last year by the company. On the day he was appointed Fairfax chairman in 2009, Corbett presented a glowing picture of the way his company was handling its task. “The decisions taken in the last few years by management and the board have, I believe, put Fairfax in a position which is envied by media companies around the world,” he said.

 Gina Rinehart.doesn't like him either.  How easily I forget these things.  I wonder how she feels about him today after last night's performance?

Update:  the fact that Corbett worries about the ABC "crowds out" Fairfax, and thinks Workplace laws are holding up the economy, does make him more likely a Coalition sympathiser.  At least he does acknowledge a need for greater tax revenue, though.   But my real annoyance with him is the inappropriateness of expressing his highly partisan views as member of the Reserve Bank Board in a crucial part of the election campaign cycle.

Update 2:  so, he's actually a member of the Liberal Party, but it wasn't mentioned last night?  And the story ran this morning without that being mentioned?  Great job, media.

Update 3:  Actually, it occurs to me that it was also an obvious failing on Kevin Rudd's (or his team's) part too.  When asked about it yesterday morning, the first thing Rudd should have said "well he's a member of the Liberal Party, what do you expect him to say about me?"
 

Hopping to church in Luxembourg

Here's a charming story from the BBC about a centuries old hopping parade in Luxembourg.  Watch the video too.

Speculative physics in Nature

Theoretical physics: The origins of space and time : Nature News

Haven't had time to read this yet, but looks interesting...

A fair summary from John Quiggin

John Quiggin's take on the Coalition and Tony Abbott in this election campaign is pretty accurate, I think:

The case put forward by the LNP is based entirely on lies and myths. These include the claims that
* Labor has mismanaged the economy and piled up unnecessary debt and deficits
* Australian families are ‘doing it tough’ because of a soaring cost of living
* The carbon tax/price is a ‘wrecking ball’, destroying economic activity
* The arrival of refugees represents a ‘national emergency’
None of these claims stands up to even momentary scrutiny. 

Then there’s Abbott himself. After 20 years in politics, I can’t point to any substantial accomplishments on his part, or even any coherent political philosophy. For example, I’m not as critical of his parental leave scheme as some, but it’s totally inconsistent with his general political line, a fact that his supporters in business have been keen to point out. On climate change, he’s held every position possible and is now promising, in effect, to do nothing. His refusal to reveal policy costings until the second-last day of the campaign debases an already appalling process. He treated budget surplus as a holy grail until it became inconvenient, and has now become carefully vague on the topic.

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.

The future of taxes

Why taxes would rise under Abbott

Ross Gittens does some useful number crunching about why the tax take has to increase somewhat if either side wins the election.

Should Labor or the Coalition wear the most blame for not being up front about this?   This gets confusing.  Labor has run a scare campaign on Abbott and the GST.  Abbott & Hockey deny emphatically that it is at risk.  But then, Abbott and Hockey have run, of course, a 5 year scare campaign on the deficit and their ability to get back to surplus faster than Labor.  Yet they do not face up to the fundamentals.

I think the best outcome may be that either Abbott or Rudd gets replaced in the next term, and the new leader gets realistic on this.

Folks are dumb where I come from....

Rudd fails to rally voters in his home state

Well, how harsh should I be?  It's not as if I supported a return of Kevin Rudd, and I have puzzled many, many times over why he was ever popular in Queensland.   The State is not exactly renowned for supporting urban quasi-intellectuals.   Did they think his "folkiness" was genuine?

Anyhow, after first encouraging Labor's party machine that Kevin was going to do well in Queensland, people polled here have decided they don't like him much after all.

What's more, they are apparently looking at voting in fairly significant numbers for Clive Palmer's nutty rich man act, and he seems to have taken over the "Eccentric Politician We'll Vote For Because We Don't Like Politicians" role from Bob Katter.

If they collectively have 15% of the vote, their preferences are going to be pretty important, and the article claims that more of those voters claim they will preference Labor.  Especially those voting for Clive Palmer.

This is all very peculiar.  But the State that continued voting for Joh endlessly has always been a bit of a political mystery.

Barry's depressed, with justification

Barry Jones: the 2013 election and the death of rationality

The article is taken from a lecture, and so wanders a bit, but his end take on Joe Hockey seems particularly accurate:

I have watched, with some pain, election telecasts being given by the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, somebody who I have always had some regard for, balanced, recognisably human, and not a fanatic, with touches of self-mockery.

He could have taken a more subtle, nuanced approach in his pitch, saying, perhaps, “while it is true that Australia has had some outstanding successes, such as the AAA rating and 21 unbroken years of growth, nevertheless there are some worrying indications that…”, and go on from there.

Instead, he plays the catastrophist card, that the past six years had left the Australian economy as a smoking ruin, and the rest of the world is looking to see when Australia will turn the lights back on. Catastrophic? Disaster? Tsunami? The clear suggestion is that practically every nation, with the possible exception of Somalia, is performing better economically than Australia.

Does Joe Hockey really believe what he is saying? I hope not.

Uncertainty Queen's failure

Well, there you go.  Tamino has a good post about that "ENSO masks global warming paper" paper, and points out that Judith Curry has mis-read it spectacularly.  

I predicted that she would soon be shot down, remember.

The biggest mistake Julia Gillard made

...was in not promoting hard the argument that a fixed price for carbon permits for an introductory period is not a carbon tax.  

Listening to Rudd agree with journalists that this was a mistake only confirms this.  He gets no traction from saying that - people who have been brainwashed into thinking its the worst thing ever done by a government are not interested in his half baked apology for it.  

Labor would doubtlessly have been better off by arguing it is not a tax, and not a broken promise.

Let them eat oysters

To Live, the Oyster Must Die 

I had read before that oysters used to be the food of the poor in England, but I didn't realise it was quite to this extent:

As the population of London boomed, doubling again and again from the 16th century onwards, these little nuggets of protein became an irresistible way for the fishermen of anywhere within reach of the capital to make a living....
 
The oyster boom expanded as industrialisation accelerated, with oysters fuelling industrial Britain’s industrious workers. Modern machinery made them easier to catch, store and transport, and oysters became the signature food of Victorian Britain.

“The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir; here’s a oyster stall to every half dozen houses. The streets lined with ‘em. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation,” remarks Sam Weller in Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers.

That was published in 1836, and Londoners were only just getting going. In 1864, they consumed 700 million oysters. That’s five oysters a week, every week, for each man, woman and child in the city.

The same was true elsewhere in Britain, with predictable results. Oyster fishing began to collapse in Scottish waters in the 1870s, and had all but ceased there by 1920. In the 19th century, fishermen discovered a 200 by 70 mile oyster bed on the seabed between England and Germany, and had cleaned it out within decades. 

And we have still not learned from our mistakes. In the 1970s, fishermen found oysters in the Solent, the channel between the Isle of Wight and the South Coast, giving hope that the industry could be reborn sustainably, but we ate them all instead.

Of course...

Tony Abbott willing to break emissions pledge over funding hole

Malcolm Turnbull on, I think, The Drum last week, called Abbott an "intelligent skeptic" on climate change.

No: Abbott is not smart enough to take sensible policies to reduce CO2 seriously.  He is the triumph of political opportunism and shallowness over making a genuine attempt to deal with an important issue in a sensible way.

Turnbull should be appalled at this, but there is a possibility, I suppose, that he could still be leader if Abbott implodes.  His keeping quiet might therefore be good in the long run.  At least, I hope so.

Update:   I had forgotten how outspoken Turnbull used to be on this issue.  From 2009:

....the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change. They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion "climate change is crap" or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, its cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world.

Now politics is about conviction and a commitment to carry out those convictions. The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is "crap" and you don't need to do anything about it. Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing. After all, as Nick Minchin observed, in his view the majority of the Party Room do not believe in human caused global warming at all. I disagree with that assessment, but many people in the community will be excused for thinking the leadership ballot proved him right.

Remember Nick Minchin's defense of the Howard Government's ETS was that the Government was panicked by the polls and therefore didn't really mean it.

Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it.

His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with "Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but....."

Yes, that's the pathetic political calibre of the  man about to be PM, apparently.

Politics and singing noted

It seems that Rudd got good reviews for his campaign launch speech, but with Newspoll doing another leap, this time in the wrong direction, no one can envisage the possibility that Labor will win.

But I did think the Abbott attack ads I saw while watching X Factor last night with my daughter were pretty good.  Even on a very soft interview on Insiders yesterday, Abbott still hesitates and ums and ahs like there is no tomorrow whenever a journalist asks an even mildly difficult question.   This makes for pretty good ads, for Labor.

Speaking of X Factor:  it's a very good show for parents to watch with pre-teen daughters, I reckon.  It leads to easy conversation about the inappropriate dress, make up and song choice of teenage contestants, and the silliness of raunchy choreography.   This year is better than last year:  there are far fewer tattoos on display in the judging panel, and on stage, and there are fewer contestants about whom I cannot comprehend why they are still there.

I have only seen a bit of The Voice - I thought it was pretty awful in comparison.  The X Factor has more likeable judges (it's not even clear this year that they have one in the role of "contrary and hard to please" judge), and (I think) less of an intrusive concentration on the personal lives of the contestants.  Now if only the show could fire the person who applies eye make on all of the females with a trowel, it would be perfect. 

This year, the star is no doubt Dami Im, whose amazingly powerful voice seems so incongruous coming out of a modestly proportioned Asian body.  And she's just married, Christian (I think - she has made brief reference to singing in Church), almost certainly free of tattoos, and appears a very genuinely nice person with a very happy husband. What's not to like?

My wife said she has seen on TV that she has had lots of publicity in Korea now too, due to her performances here.    Barring a nervous breakdown, or a vocal cord catastrophe, they may as well hand her the recording contract now and finish the show early.   But the producers probably have an entire store room full of short female skirts, and eye make up in 44 gallon drums, that has to be used up, so it won't happen.

Physics of interest

I wonder how many readers are actually interested in my posts pointing towards odd physics papers that I usually don't fully understand myself.  Who knows, but here's some examples of recent physics stories I liked for their novelty:

*  Great title here: Can the Higgs Boson Save Us From the Menace of the Boltzmann Brains?

I can't be the only person who thinks of the Futurama episodes with giant floating brains whenever I hear "Boltzmann Brains", can I?

In any event, the paper notes that one of the simplest present explanations for the universe carries with it a serious "Boltzmann Brain" issue, and asks whether there is a way around it.   The answer seems to be:  maybe.   Here's co-author Sean Carroll giving an easier to read explanation of the paper.   I should have read that first.

*  The Economist, of all places, notes a paper that argues that dark energy, causing an acceleration in the expansion of the universe, does not exist at all.  Instead, the universe is just getting heavier:

In Dr Wetterich’s picture of the cosmos the redshift others attribute to expansion is, rather, the result of the universe putting on weight. If atoms weighed less in the past, he reasons, the light they emitted then would, in keeping with the laws of quantum mechanics, have been less energetic than the light they emit now. Since less energetic light has a longer wavelength, astronomers looking at it today would perceive it to be redshifted.

At first blush this sounds nuts. The idea that mass is constant is drilled into every budding high-school physicist. Abandoning it would hurt. But in exchange, Dr Wetterich’s proposal deals neatly with a big niggle in the Big Bang theory, namely coping with the point of infinite density at the beginning, called a singularity, which orthodox theories cannot explain.

Dr Wetterich’s model does not—yet—explain the shifts in the shapes of galactic clusters that the Dark Energy Camera, SuMIRe and ACTPol are seeking to clarify. But perhaps, one day, it could. Dr Wetterich is a well-respected physicist and his maths are not obviously wrong. Moreover, his theory does allow for a short period of rapid expansion, known as inflation, whose traces have already been seen in the CMB. Dr Wetterich, however, thinks this inflation did not happen just after the beginning of the universe (the consensus view), for he believes the universe had no beginning. Instead, a small static universe which had always existed turned into a large static one that always will exist—getting heavier and heavier as it does so. There was thus no singularity.

Probably, this theory is wrong. As Cliff Burgess of Perimeter Institute, a Canadian theoretical-physics centre, puts it, “The dark energy business very easily degenerates into something like a crowd of people who are each claiming to be Napoleon while asserting that all the other pretenders are clearly nutty.”

 I like to think that God has given us a direct clue to this, by ensuring that from middle age, a mass increase takes place in nearly all human bodies for no obvious reason.   So goes the universe too, possibly.

*   Someone from CERN complains that the LHC has not come up with any significant surprises for the Standard Model of physics, which is very annoying for physicists.  Here's the abstract:

The first three years of the LHC experiments at CERN have ended with "the nightmare scenario": all tests, confirm the Standard Model of Particles so well that theorists must search for new physics without any experimental guidance. The supersymmetric theories, a privileged candidate for new physics are nearly excluded. As a potential escape from the crisis, we propose thinking about a series of astonishing relations suggesting fundamental interconnections between the quantum world and the large scale Universe. It seems reasonable that, for instance, the equation relating a quark-antiquark pair with the fundamental physical constants and cosmological parameters must be a sign of new physics. One of the intriguing possibilities is interpreting our relations as a signature of the quantum vacuum containing the virtual gravitational dipoles.

 As with many papers on arXiv, you should read the introduction, which paints a comprehensible summary of the problem before venturing into scores of equations and terminology which are hard to follow.

*  Someone (I have no idea who)  from Hungary seems to think he has found a way that you can get Einstein's results without Einstein-ian physics.  The paper has a charming title:  A simple minded question: Do we live in the four-dimensional spacetime? and starts in a very modest fashion: 

The author of the present paper is not sure that the following ideas are worth for publication or they are more similar to a somewhat lunatic conception.

 I don't really follow the argument at all, but have only looked at the paper quickly.  Still, if this is ground breaking new physics, you read it here first.

*  If you are interested in the "fine tuning of the universe" issue, Catalyst on the ABC had a pretty good 30 minute summary last week, which features some short interviews from some of the big names in physics.   There are the more extended interviews with them here, I think, although I haven't watched them yet.

I saw from the show that Paul Davies, who moved from Adelaide University to Arizonia State University (he seems to showing greater affinity for "dry and remote" as he ages) finds a sort of backwards causation causation appealing, although I don't really understand the mechanism he thinks might work.  As Frank Tipler's similar idea, that the future God causes the past, seems to have sunk under the experimental finding of the mass of the Higgs boson, I should look up what Davies is saying on the topic.