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I have a rather simple post on income tax indexation that is almost finished, but I'm leaving it for a few days until the trolldom gets bored and trundles on somewhere else.
That or we could fill the front page with articles on positivism, philosophy (espoused in the most opaque Hegel quotes available), oriental history, constitutional law etc. Fill the garden with soil fertile to the flowering of Troppodillia, but harsh to time rich and insight poor weeds.
Hi Richard,
You're saying that people who don't agree with centre leftism are trolls.
I think the only troll here is the Neo Nazi Homer Paxton.
Get rid of him.
Anyone want to tell me why O Leary is wrong?
Because if he's right there'd be no need for your beloved 45c trees and nukes sprinkled over every privately-owned hectare of Australia?
Richard
How dare you equate constitutional law with opaque Hegel quotes etc.
You lying, treasonous, deranged, parasitical moron. Oops. Sorry. Wrong thread.Very smarmy wiz.
I'm looking for low cost solutions. Why do you want to destroy GDP?
The trees are cheaper than the MRET or direct action. Nuclear is far superior to other energy sources and allows us to export carbon neutral fuel.
But really what have you got against private property?
I really hope it is not at the twilight of Troppo that the vulture of Bellona spreads its wings.
Shovels would seem like a low cost solution to horse**** surely. But is the horse**** privately owned, I wonder?
You know that Rafe is complaining at Catallaxy that he wasn't able to get a comment on Troppo this afternoon? (he posted the comment in the open thread there anyway). It's spectacularly ill conceived, but I would prefer to attack it than there.
...attack it here than there.
Friends of mine flew with RyanAir in Europe. They said that the service was f**** horse ****.
Relax, Richard. In the beginning (of Troppo, I mean) this site frequently resembled Germany after the Thirty Years War, complete with spin-off fiefdoms like Larvatus Prodeo and Christopher Sheil's shortlived but very memorable blog, forever encapsulated in my memory by the owner's frequent cries of "Go Latho! You good thing." I imagine that Chris, OTOH, is trying to forget - but it was 2004.
And who could forget the Troppo/Sophie Masson Culture Wars, the precursor to LP's founding?
Nowadays the site is rather more focussed on Nicholas Gruen's mobile phone selection conundrums - a definitively 2011 kind of thing. All things must pass, clearly. Except Homer Paxton.
You mean people don't come to this blog to find out what smart phone I buy?
What we really want to know is what Paul Krugman would think of your phone.
He hates it.
what a phoney
Thanks for the brief history at 12, it helps to explain what otherwise is sometimes a cryptic experience.
Nick and KP are clearly getting nostalgic, judging by their good work keeping some life in that last thread.
A ring in
@3,
he's failing to distinguish between climate and weather
That makes it easier, huh?
Maybe not.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/chinarsquos-power-stations-generate-lsquofuture-spikersquo-in-global-warming-2306976.html
Chinese economic growth may have caused global dimming.
Faulty first premise.
1) People can tell us what the fuck the weather will be like next Tuesday, with reasonable skill.
2) No-one claims what the fucking global temperatures will be like with absolute precision in 100 years time.
"reasonable skill, no absolute precision"
How much does this multiplicative margin of error push our carbon tax up or down?
Predicting one data point in a set with high standard deviation is a lot harder than predicting an average with known long term factors.
"." - that's not a particularly new claim, and does seem to be one of the more likely explanations for an apparent levelling off in upward temperature gradient over the last decade (a similar explanation applies to the period from ~1940-1970). Indeed, possibly one of the "cheapest" solutions to global warming is spraying the upper atmosphere with particulates. "Cheapest", that is, if your only goal is to keep a cap on temperatures for another decade or so. Needless to say, it won't help much with ocean acidification, and we have very little idea what other side-effects might stem from an experiment that results in a measurable drop in global insolation levels.
In addition to Paul Montgomery's point above, O'Leary's fundamental premise is wrong.
IPCC reports DON'T purport to predict the global temperature in 100 years time, with absolute precision or otherwise. They detail several "scenarios" each involving a different set of circumstances and human responses to global warming over time. Each scenario leads not to a specific temperature prediction but to a range of possible temperature rises in those circumstances e.g. 3-6 degrees rise. The range is necessary in part because of inherent uncertainties and in part because research has not yet reached a point where we have anything like complete knowledge about some climate feedback mechanisms and the extent to which they may amplify or dampen the warming response to increasing carbon emissions.
The 3 degrees of warming commonly cited for IPCC "predictions" is not a prediction at all but the midpoint of the ranges of the most moderate/likely scenarios in IPCC reports.
So if they "don't" predict mean temps, anyone hazard how much their variance will put the carbon price up or down?
Now if people claim the temperature will be something as a forecast, can we retort that's just a scenario?
Do we actually know if mitigation will help ocean acidification? How much mitigation will we need and at what cost? Do we know if there are any unknown impacts if we mitigate? Why does the precautionary principle only apply to emissions and cheap mitigation, never expensive mitigation?
One moment here people are claiming that a specific forecast at a point in time is somewhat facetious, but now the dangers of global warming now include a set of unknown unknowns, particularly if we mitigate.
Why is it facetious to ask for a forecast rather than a range of scenarios but it is *not facetious* to give some shadowy, nondescript "risk factors" when we undertake a form of mitigation not supported by some who want deep cuts to GDP (i.e deep Greens)?
My final totally serious and non facetious question is if a carbon tax is some form of insurance - then you want to insure against the level of loss which becomes unacceptable.
Where does that lie in a 3-6 degree scenario and how much would it cost, and how much would it cost across a range of mitigation methods, such as the Government's total set of State and Federal policies, i.e the Clean Energy Future comprising the Carbon Tax/ETS and MRET etc?
Nicholas, you've acquired a taste for doomed threads lately! :-)
Yes, we're hoping to secure Lord Monkton's services for the Troppo brand, which is essentially an eyeballs play.
Let me see if I understand what you're saying, Dot. As I read you it's something along these lines: If IPCC had made a specific prediction/forecast then you would agree with O'Leary that this is horseshit because it's impossible. But because they don't do this and instead provide scenarios with temperature ranges (for precisely the reasons you and O'Leary were previously suggesting - the extent of current human ability to predict with precision over such a long time period given the complex range of known and unknown factors)), you nevertheless demand that they must give a specific forecast or be dismissed as "facetious".
As these two positions are logically contradictory, I can only presume your real position is either:
(a) carbon emissions do not warm the atmosphere at all contrary to all scientific evidence (the Graeme Bird position - the greenhouse effect is a myth); or
(b) the ostrich with head in the sand approach - we can't know whether or to what extent it's a problem and I don't want to know anyway, so I'll just advance whatever argument that pops into my head in an endeavour to confuse and obfuscate the issue.
Good faith discussion anyone?
"but now the dangers of global warming now include a set of unknown unknowns, particularly if we mitigate. "
If by mitigate we're talking about reducing CO2 emissions, then the only 'unknown unknowns' are the ones that will always be present and we can do nothing to avoid. If you include geoengineering solutions, that obviously increases the potential for unintended consequences, but at least should significantly reduce the likely consequences of simply letting temperatures rise unchecked. Almost certainly the worst 'unknown unknowns' are going to come from BAU (it maybe 'usual' to us 21st century humans, but extremly far from usual from a planetary perspective).
Your exactly right, Ken. Well done.
I've just always assumed that the uncertainty as to how climatic change will pan out regionally, and then globally, is too uncertain to be confident of any economic forecasting decades ahead. However, when the uncertainty goes to matters such as the ability to globally raise enough food for the world to feed itself, the potential displacement of large populations due to persistent drought, an uncertain ecological future for the oceans, and the abilities of the great coastal cities of the world to prevent inundation by meters of water, it's foolish to assume that the uncertainty is going to work out on the optimistic side.
I would have thought that the bunching up of strange weather of the last year or so is an indication that this is a sound judgement.
I thought a comment on Geoff's musings is worth it.
Chris Shiel's back pages blog was undoubtedly the best blog that has ever been around.
although unquestionably biased of course comments were incisive, humorous and you simply had to read it every day.
It goes hand in hand with the 2004 election.
This was when Galaxy made it debut. It was also before Mumbles, Possum and The pollbludger. Polls simply released their results and the their sample.
It was great fun working out the margin of error and seeing if anything had change in a statistical way.
We made fun of people like Fran Kelly or Tim Blair's blog who couldn't tell the difference. ( Chris eventually told Blair's blog that they could visit back pages to determine to find out the margin of error and thus how important the poll was.
I have to admit Back Pages took a Don's party turn when it eventually occurred to most howard would win as I said her would a week out.
ah those were the days
I also remember Minchin on channel 2 and Ray on Channel 9 saying the election would be very close. Indeed both parties polling were almost identical to the Morgan poll.
In amazing turn they had an 'Ergas; memory loss in about three hours time when it wasn't a close result. suddenly Latho had gone from convincingly winning the campaign ( so what ) to the complete opposite.
O'Leary is hardly a disinterested observer. The prospect of rising fuel costs due to anti-climate change measures is of great concern to any airline, particularly an ultra-cheap, if-you-don't-like-our-f*****g-service-you-can-go-and get-f****d airline like Ryanair.
Close but way off Ken. My view is that AGW is real and not worth worrying about but even so if you justify mitigation in terms of "insurance" (actually a long dated, out of the money put) there are far more cost effective policies that can totally mitigate at a negligible cost and should be done simply as a matter of course as a general microeconomic reform/supply side policy. I also genuinely believe the pro mitigation folk have an implicit agenda of wanting to shut down energy production (or they are too stupid to understand the engineering problems). The pro mitigation folk don't realise how truly wasteful and damaging Gillard's ETS really is. They won't even discuss it in terms of average costs. They won't even cough up the answers. They are engaging in time inconsistency of their decision making.
How about some answers? Why are you guys afraid to answer questions? Why so defensive?
Steve praises Ken then ignores my question:
...if a carbon tax is some form of insurance – then you want to insure against the level of loss which becomes unacceptable.
Where does that lie in a 3-6 degree scenario and how much would it cost, and how much would it cost across a range of mitigation methods, such as the Government’s total set of State and Federal policies, i.e the Clean Energy Future comprising the Carbon Tax/ETS and MRET etc?
Mark Latham will hit John Howard like a Mack Truck!
I should add a postscript.
Whilst Chris's politics and economics were too leftwing he was fun to engage whether it was as a fan of the beautiful game to say the Wallabies needed grunt in the forwards ( something that he failed to see) or attempting to tell him Clapton was a good guitarist but slow that's why Alvin Lee blew him off the stage at the Isle of Man.
He lost his sense of humor at LP though.
when Evilpundit made a quite funny remark Chris took umbrage and banned him.
I started a campaign to change that and changed my moniker to bring back EP at LP.
Chris didn't like that or the moniker and said if I continued with both I wouldn't be able to comment . This he did as I continued my campaign.
It was very brief given the torrent of dissent to that ruling. I was soon back at LP urging them to allow Evilpundit to comment there again.
However Chris wouldn't budge. A shame a great shame
Airlines are the one industry where algae/seaweed based fuels ala aviation biofuel may be cheap and convenient. It may even be a chance to vertically integrate and better manage risk. Market forces, not diktat may push this through.
Some major energy and airline players are already heavily invested in R&D in this field.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/13/algae-solve-pentagon-fuel-problem
So they reckon they can get 84 USD/bbl but can get it down to 42 USD/bbl.
But DARPA is diktat, so it must be bad.
Wiz,
Do you really want to argue that the Government should be doing our R&D?
Note that private firms are doing similar research, like Air New Zealand, JAL, GE, Honeywell, Boeing etc.
Well that's just a f****ing awesome quote Nick. O'Leary should get together with Geoff f****ing Lemon, they'd have a f****ing brilliant time together.
Doesn't understand the important difference between predicting the precise outcome of a single roll of a die (not possible), and predicting the statistical pattern of outcomes of a large number of rolls of a die (very possible).
(Assuming a fair die, of course.)
In a word, iteration.
Nicholas, no doubt that, for his opponents, Monkton has a very useful disease. He's self-selecting for the obviously a loony jibes.
The fact that the IPCC gives scenarios is also a potential clue about the quality of the predictions. I see regular claims that the evidence for warming is increasing, but that is not the same as the evidence for the predictions. Even Monkton (and perhaps Bird) thinks that warming has happened. The real argument is about the feedbacks and other predictions. Recently we've seen a climb down on the more and worse storms, a scientist saying that sea levels are not rising anything like as predicted, a new report about satelite evidence for the release of heat into space and I read in Judith Curry's blog about the evidence for substantially higher sea levels 2000 years ago. Sheesh, you could get the idea that this stuff isn't so certain as is made out.
Peter,
If you can find anywhere where I said that I was confident the science is right, I'd be very surprised. But the existence of a reasonably robust scientific consensus that the world is likely to experience dangerous warming is enough for me. I mean why is the uncertainty of the science supposed to be some reason not to manage the risk by scaling back - to the tune of 0.1% per annum for a decade or so on economic growth?
no evidence of warming? of course there is.
Pedro you will never know until you leave delusionalist corner
Homer and Nichols, it's luck you're not sailfish. Otherwise you'd be looking down over some fat guy's bar with pride of place between the bullfight poster and dogs playing pool. :-) I thought deliberate threads of doom were for a laugh!
The funniest thing about Back Pages was Chris's elevated levels of performance enhancing dudgeon when someone had the audacity to accuse him of bias.
KB Keynes at #35: "It was also before Mumbles, Possum and The pollbludger."
I don't know about the others but Mumble was going well before the 2004 election.
Pollbludger kicked off in January 2004 according to the blurb on his Crikey blog. Possum is a relative newcomer though AFAIK. There was also at that time a political scientist (I think) named Bryan Palmer who ran a blog called ozpolitics which also ran a lot of psephology stuff. There was lots of pretty good psephology blogging in the first part of the 2000s, contrary to Homer's recollection.
Pedro - "a scientist saying that sea levels are not rising anything like as predicted" is kinda meaningless. In any well-established field of science you can usually find at least a decent handful saying that some phenomenon is not behaving as the best available theories we have predict. Further, it's not hard to name at least a few scientists that believe the IPCC predictions are far too modest because they don't take into effect the possibility of rapid ice sheet disintegration, which can't be modelled accurately with current technology. And what "climb down on the more and worse storms" are you referring to? The only significant finding I recall was from a few years ago when a noticed trend of hurricanes in North America increasing in intensity was questioned due to insufficient historical data. But the fact is scientific theories are refined all the time. What matters is that we have far more than enough certainty to justify taking action to forestall the worst possible outcomes.
Mike,
Mumbles certainly had a website (and of course it was top class) then however I was making the point these days an opinion poll comes out and if you read all three you know anything you need to know about the poll.
It wasn't so back in 2004. As I said I was actually calculating the MOE on each poll as it was released.
Ken I hope you realise your assumption about what I was saying was wrong.
I wasn't really talking about that.
Tony, you just didn't like it because of no cricket.
( Tony's blog on cricket could well be the best around)
Life for the AGW agnostic is not an easy one cf warmistas and deniers but you do enjoy more laughs. While you can enjoy a laugh at Ryanair, you can also enjoy a similar laugh at the Fryanair mob like John Quiggin and Co who scoff at DSGE computer modelling of whole economies that can't predict a GFC or the price of stocks next week. Not exactly breaking news to Austrian economics afficianados but then in the next breath they'll swear we can all rely on those global climate computer models and that settles it folks. Yep, just pick your side and life was meant to be easy. If an opponent is proven wrong on A,B,or C, then you don't have to address their X,Y, or Z even if the facts are there unchallenged. Easy for the Climatology Club to write off a denier like Spencer's latest research because 'the science is settled' but Scafeta and Loehle's latest is a bit more perplexing for we poor agnostics. Are they really warmistas with that refined CO2 signal or simply deniers challenging the settled science?
Which leads me to some random thoughts(comes with the territory most likely?) as to what makes an agnostic? Perhaps you have to be a market man to be agnostic because agnosticism is inextricably linked with not only an assessment of the evolution of the science but also the history of the policy prescriptions. Probably the two are inextricably linked. It would seem so because the moment you question the policy prescriptions the warmistas immediately conflate that with climate science denial. You only have to own a solar feed-in system to recognise the obvious. Caught another glaring example the other morning as an ABC reporter was interviewing an engineer, replete with fluoro jacket and helmet alonside the solar thermal hybrid installation alongside Liddell power station. A 2000W coal job and the tech was explaining how the millions of dollars of taxpayer tracking mirrors, etc was producing 0.1% of that power. Now you could see the intrepid Aunty man's jaw drop and he couldn't help himself asking the obvious to which the tech trying to keep a straight face explained how it had all been a 'useful exercise' as he put it. Thereupon followed more questioning on bang for buck on reshiftables and what about wind? To which the tech really struggling to control his smirking explained that to replace Liddell alone with wind turbines, 500m apart as required, would see windmills stretching from Brissy to Melb. End of video and strangely enough I couldn't find it on Aunty's website thereafter. An awful lot of windmill headaches and strange medical symptoms for those not receiving rent for that lot thought I.
As I said agnostics have more laughs but I note we do arouse more ire among warmistas than do straight out deniers. I was reminded of that when some visiting Yank warmist on The Drum went off like a firecracker at one of the guests who happened to drop he was agnostic on the whole deal. More so than with one of the panel who was an outright skeptic. I guess she figured he was beneath contempt but an AGNOSTIC!!!! That really threw her into a tizz.
Anyway agnosticism might not be quite as simple as I've outlined and the observa is the archetypal agnostic, writ large. Take Barry Brook who is a true believer and yet he knows as I do reshiftables are a complete crock and yet he runs the gauntlet of being the heretic with the Greenies. I certainly have more skepticism about the settled science than he does, but I can respect the views of someone who sees the bleeding obvious and he might know more about the science than I do. Similarly with John Della Bosca now joining Morris Iemma with their critique of Gillard's carbon tax madness. These guys are strong believers in the IPCC stuff and yet they're not stupid when it comes to policy.
That's where I believe Rudd, for all his faults the ALP sacked him for, was right after Copenhagen, despite the political capital he expended there for his warmist beliefs. As for Abbott, I'm not sure whether he's more of a skeptic on the science than me, but nevertheless his direct action policy will founder in the long run if all it does is stick up more windmills and solar panels. Still if that's what the mugs want to believe in for the time being I guess it's the lesser of two evils. If Federal Labor couldn't cap and trade the MDB with wall to wall Labor in the States and given the caution of cap and trade's authors about going too big with all its jurisdictional problems, what choice do they or Tone have? Me, I'm sticking with the science aint settled, I'm with Lomborg generally but it's the constitution of our marketplace that's the overarching problem. We can change that and show the world how environmentalism is really done.
Oh yeah I almost forgot another thing that probably makes an agnostic. It's the Groupthink thing and you see it in Big Biz as well as Big Gummint. I was reminded of it with that interview with the Greek Economist (Lateline Business as I recall)where he was ridiculing the EU for its Greek bailout stance and exactly the same thing Marc Hartwich ran into here-
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/EU-debt-crisis-Greece-eurozone-meeting-currency-eu-pd20110719-JVVJE?OpenDocument&src=srch
That classic line about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Has a lot of poignancy for me for climate change policy to date, whatever the science.
Essentially if you are to break free of the Groupthink mould then you have to wipe the slate clean, work out where it is you went wrong, what it is you really want to achieve, what really works and how to get where you want to go. Rawls original position but not quite since we start from here and we have a lot of experience up our sleeves already. Think like an agnostic.
LOL
Exactly. Why can't we be agnostic and go with an idea as a working theory if the evidence is strong enough. Since when did you have to commit to a theory?
Sure I'm a libertarian but I'm that way based on outcomes amongst other things.
"Is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) a valid scientific theory? Is it well supported by the empirical data or is it mostly an artifact of computer modeling? I don’t have answers to these questions. I stand, rather, on the side of those who favor rigorous scientific inquiry, transparency, and openness. I am not a climate scientist, but neither do I cede the whole matter of answering such questions to the designated experts. Good science doesn’t limit itself to the views of narrow-cast specialists. Valid observations, corrective criticism, competing hypotheses, and rigorous testing can and often do arise from other sources.
It surprises me, however, that proponents of AGW, or what might be called the climate orthodoxy section of AGW theory, often respond to criticism and dissent with a kind of fury. Far from welcoming discussion, they seek to suppress it. In doing so they jeopardize both their own authority and the prestige of the scientific community."
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/climate-thuggery/29919
Yup! And then there's their policy prescriptions to discuss.