"Unprecedented" warming (or, how certain are you of that trend?)

Global temperatures have been rising for the last 50 years right? That is not to controversial. Look at most data that attempts to produce some average temperature for the earth over time (whatever that actually means) and there is a self evident increase. It has been warmer in recent decades that it was in earlier decades.

Ignoring potential sources of error over time (including unsatisfactory adjustments for urban heat affects, areas that haven't had sufficient measurement coverage in the past or even now, such as oceans and the poles) and just taking data as given, the increase over the last 50 years appears to be around 0.8 degrees. People get hold of this data, plot a line through it, proclaim that there is a positive trend. It is from that observational position that the hypothesis of the enhanced greenhouse effect is employed to explain the trend and then extrapolate into the future.

Think carefully about this. There are two distinct points here.

• Historical observations.
• Hypothesised causes.

The first is just acting as witness to what we can measure. The latter is an application of an hypothesis.

I make this point because, in this post, I want to deal solely with the former. What exactly does the historical data tell us with any certainty in terms of behaviour? Simply saying "it has gone up" hides a multitude of sins. What I am trying to investigate is whether the data we have witnessed is indeed extraordinary. Is it so unusual that we need to search for some, or even any, explanation or cause?

I am going to do this, like all statisticians by employing a model. I am going to start with a basic naive one the explains any monthly temperature anomaly as being zero plus or minus some random element. This random element will be described by a Gaussian (or normal) distribution, be centred around zero and have a variance of about 0.01 (which means a standard deviation of 0.1).

This would be written as Tt = N(0,0.01) ; Tt= temperature anomaly at time t.

Such a model would lead to a history of temperature anomalies over say 30 years that looks something like this:

No need for fancy statistics. There is no trend here. Just stable temperature about some constant average over time, affected by some random noise from month to month. This doesn't look anything like the actual record for global temperature anomalies, which everyone agrees seems to have risen over time. And therein lies a weakness. When people look at the actual temperature series and think "this is definitely going up", they are implicitly comparing it with the model above. Because it is clearly different, an intuitive reaction from most people is that:

"there must be something going on to push up temperatures"

And from that point a leap is made to try and find some hypothesis, possibly any hypothesis, that will "explain" the cause of the obvious positive trend. But what if this model is wrong. What if the nature of temperatures is better described by an alternative model that has different characteristics. Well, you might not be surprised to find out I think that is the case.

Let's think a little more deeply about (monthly) temperature anomalies. Our naive model above assumes that the temperature in one month is unrelated in any way to the temperature in any other month. But it is reasonable to postulate that maybe temperatures are related between months. The global temperature should reflect the transfer of energy around the world. It should operate with lags and so we might expect that the temperature anomaly witnessed in any month is in part affected by the anomaly witnessed in previous months. If it was unseasonally hot in January, then it should be more likely to be unseasonally hot in February. What this describes is an auto regressive process. We can investigate the data to see if there is any reasonable sign of such a phenomenon and to try and estimate the size of it.

So that is what I did. And a simple piece of statistics indicates that there seems to about two months months of inertia. In fact it tends to indicate our model should be more like this (the 0.65 and 0.25 drop out of the analysis:

Tt = 0.65*Tt-1 + 0.25* Tt-2 + N(0,0.01) ; Tt= temperature anomaly at time t.


So, let's now see what sort of series of temperature anomalies this type of model might be expected to produce. Here is simply one example, but note that this model will produce a much greater range of apparently different results:






















Compare this with the first chart. There appears to be a clear trend (I have drawn the linear trend). In fact there is a trend that equates to 1.4 degrees per century - or about 0.7 degrees over 50 years. This is pretty much exactly what we have witnessed from actual temperature measurements over the same sorts of periods. Compare it with an actual temperature series over a similar period (this is from the University of Alabama Huntsville):




















So what is going on? I have created this series of data using a very basic and naive model that reflects the actual measured characteristics and contains in it absolutely nothing that might cause warming. The trick of course is that this is but one potential outcome. I could generate another series and it might have a cooling trend, or no trend. But the salient point remains. Simple random data over time can generate what appears to be a material trend caused by something, when it is in fact simply an random outcome well within the range of what one might expect.

If you conducted some proper statistical tests on that series and the computed trend, you would find that the trend is not statistically significant. It would confirm what I have just said, that such an apparently significant trend - as high as that which is estimated from actual temperatures - is within the range of what might be randomly generated without any physical cause.

So, when I am asked to consider whether we are at risk of producing dangerous climate change, I have trouble getting past even the first obstacle. What does the data show us. Up until now, nothing that doesn't appear within the expected range of outcomes given the characteristics of the data involved. A trend that isn't particularly special.

Now this doesn't rule out human influence on the climate, in the form of CO2 forcing, or other localised influences (such as land use change). However, it does nothing to support the argument that we are definitely experiencing dangerous rates of warming that can only be explained by physical causes over time.

Let's check on our "Green" investments

Time for another quick check on how our HSBC (and Kate MacKenzie at the FT) recommended investment strategy is getting on.

For those who don't remember, the hypothesis was that windmills and solar panels and other industries that will help fight climate change and herald a new era of free energy and love and peace and milk and honey for all (or some such drivel) were a fantastic investment opportunity that had been hamstrung recently by lies and intimidation from dastardly "Climate Change Deniers" [cue evil music]. But now that the the institution of climate change hysteria was getting a clean bill of health from many "independent inquiries", such speed bumps were passed and we were all set to get massively rich.

My hypothesis was slightly more prosaic. Dangerous Human Caused Climate Change is bunk of the highest order. The "alternative energy" industry in all its guises was a subsidy farming scam - fuelled by stupid and duplicitous politicians taking money from people who earned it and giving it to sleazy entrepreneurs with low morals. And now that the public subsidy well is running dry with massive public deficits, the economics of these industries (pouring taxpayers' money into industries that have no economic rationale on their own) will inevitably collapse. My hypothesis suggests investors are best to remain out of these industries (at least until you think they will have the ability to steal more taxpayers money).

The latest results are now in for May . I know this is a short period and returns are noisy, but it still looks like the FT and/or HSBC would be better off simply reprinting this blog (hell, they can have it for free) rather than continue to pay the salaries of Kate MacKenzie and whoever is pumping out their "Green" research.

Total returns on the HSBC Climate Change Index were 12.5% less than broad Global Equities. over the last 12 months and 7.2% less in the year to date (so under performance accelerated). [the red line is the Climate Change Index returns and the green one is for Global Equities]

Just how is that "climate change" investment getting on?

Remember, being told that the HSBC climate Change Index had been underperforming global equity returns because some beastly sceptics were hacking emails and other such nasty things like calling honest hard working grant farmer, I mean climate scientists horrid names?

And remember, that now we had most of those unsavoury events behind us, we could all glory and profit in the wonder that is the Green Economic Revolution(TM)? Yes? A do you remember me saying that you probably want to be a little bit more conerned about how the shareholders of such wonders as windfarms and solar panels and other economically destructive industries, companies and interest groups would manage to get the massive subsidies they need to produce any sort of return at all?

Well, it is certianly the case that the overriding investment theme this year is "we have bled taxpayers dry and will need to squeeze some more, so your stupid windfarms can live or die on their own". Well, the relative returns of the HSBC Climate Change Index this year look pretty much as you would expect under such circumstances.

Returns relative to global equities this year to 30 April -5.5%

http://www.morningstar.co.uk/UK/snapshot/snapshot.aspx?tab=0&id=F000000OC5&lang=en-GB

Get rich quick, the green way

An interesting blog here at the FT on recent comparative returns from Climate Change related stocks relative to the general market. The general thesis is that businesses that operate in climate change related areas, like wind, solar or nuclear energy companies have produced lower relative returns to investors over a period during which the market has been slightly rattled by questions over the integrity of those producing the "science". They go on to say that everything will be hunky dory once the final whitewashes, sorry, I mean independent expert inquiries report and a full and completely clean bill of health is awarded to this shower of chancers and charlatons that call themselves a scientific discipline.

Here is the supporting chart with all the relevant dates and events as exhibit A.

Well, guess what. I think this is spurious anlaysis, that HSBC are producing this"research" to convince punters to buy into their index now and Kate Mackenzie at the FT has fallen for it hook line and sinker.

Here are the salient points this HSBC report fails to mention and Ms Mackenzie fails to spot. The majority of constituents of this index are companies who will only produce a return to shareholders if they get lots of taxpayers money. That i how the wind energy industry has got to where it is today. Taken from our pockets by politicians and placed into those who own and run these companies. People like Al Gore.

And what has been happening recently in Europe? Well, there has been a collective realisation that the finances of governments across Europe are in such a parlous state that bankruptcy is a very realistic possibility for places like Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and Ireland. Money for businesses that add no economic value like wind energy or solar energy companies just isn't there and investors awakening to the fact that the "Pig at the Taxpayer Filled Trough" business model has no immediate future until we get ourselves out of hock.

This is the type of event that was occurring in January, just at the time the HSBC CC Index started to hit trouble. Kate should have spotted a report on it. This one came from her newspaper:

http://blogs.ft.com/money-supply/2010/01/06/stark-words-on-greece/

There will be no bail-out of Greece by other European Union countries, a top European Central Bank official has said. “The markets are deluding themselves when they think at a certain point the other member states will put their hands on their wallets to save Greece,” Jürgen Stark, an executive board member, told Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

Put that event on the chart above and it starts to take on a different meaning. In fact 7 January has a much better coincidence with the actual decline in relative performance than the "Himalayan Blunder" used on the chart, which clearly comes after the gap between the red and black lines closes.

Let's face it, markets really couldn't give a lambs whatsit for CRU whitewashes or an other irrelevant political shenanigans (they see through it as being completely political shenanigans).

And that is what the markets really think of this game - a pork barrel free for all. And that is why returns have been under-performing the wider equity market. And that is why would be mad to put money into these companies now.

Miracle Energy

More than one "alternative energy" subsidy scam, I mean electricity generation project has emerged from the cracks in the floorboards in Ireland in the last year. The most prominent of these has surely been Spirit of Ireland (sounds inspiring doesn't it), but there is at least one other I have seen.

What are they about? I'm glad you asked. You see they make FREE ELECTRICITY, by "harnessing the natural wind resources of Ireland" or somesuch nonsense. In the world of sensiblespeak they use wind turbines to pump water into reservoirs which then generate hydroelectricity. OK, it is a batch of windmills connected to a big battery.

Sounds great. If you don't dig too deeply. Let's do that.

Our starting point is that wind generation of electricity is a complete waste of time. No matter how many windmills you have, you can never have the type of certainty of generation that a modern society requires. Today, we will never accept "sorry you need to be cut off for a while because there is no wind". Nor should we.

Simply put, windmills provide electricity when the wind blows, not when people need it. It is only by random chance that those two conditions occur at the same time. And even a 90% concurrence is 10% too low.

So we need an alternative for when the wind isn't blowing, noting that sometimes there is next to no wind across the entire island of Ireland. In which case we need alternative methods of generation available at all times for immediate supply of electricity. Of course, that begs the question; why have the windmills at all then?

Quite.

So windmill buffs come up with a weeze. Why not store the electricity generated when the wind blows so it can then be provided only when people need it. A big battery, like a hydroelectric reservoir where we pump the water uphill to be released downhill when electricity is needed.

Sounds lovely, until you try to mount this baby and ride it full tilt down the wrong side of the motorway of the real world.

It turns out that the reliability of wind in Ireland (the windiest place in Europe supposedly) is such that even with massive storage capacity such a combined generation and storage system is still likely to run short of electricity. Don't believe me? I got into a discussion about this hair brained scheme some time ago. I like to check things out for myself so I modelled such a system using data for actual electricity generation yields from the Irish wind network combined with different theoretical stored capacity. This is what I found using data at the time (note, this is from last year, but I didn't cherrypick the time period, I simply took the current month).

The chart below shows how much potential electricity would be stored in such a system with different level of storage capacity; from a pretty hefty 100 Gigawatthours up to a massive 500 Gigawatthours. Just note that 500 Gigawatthours is about enough electricity to keep all of Ireland running for about 10 days. It is alot.

Next I assumed that the reservoirs were full to the brim at the start.

Next I simply calculate how much electricity would remain available to meet demand from households and industry if it was attached to a flock of windfarms with a theoretical 5 Gigawatt output (i.e. if running at optimal generating speed they would generate 5*24=120 Gigawatthours of electricity in one day, at 50% they would generate 60 Gigawatt hours)

We then compare how much such electricity was being generated and how much electricity was being demand across Ireland over the period and can track how much storage would remain over time (it being used to meet demand when the wind wasn't blowing sufficiently strongly).

This was the result:

Even ,with a massive 500 Gigawatthours of storage at the start of June last year, Ireland would have been blacked out by the middle of the month. We would have needed an alternative backup generation system available to meet 100% of the country's needs on top of this very expensive hair brained scheme. So, why bother with the hair brained scheme?

Some people might try and quibble by pointing out that I have simulated how this system would operate meeting the electricity needs of the entire country, when the proposal is only ever to meet a proportion of it.

Well, leave aside the fact that some of these proposals claim we could use this for all our electricity needs, all you need to realise is that this analysis shows that the system could not be relied upon to meet any arbitrary amount of electricity demand on its own. It would need 100% backup.

So again. Why bother with this, when the backup works on its own?

Yet another vignette showing climate scientists at play.

What a lovely bunch they are. After reading his work and his communications with others, one can but admire a man like Roger Pielke Snr. He is someone who has been contributing to the science of climate in the way that Darwin intended. On merit rather than on the extent and influence of his academic coterie. Even as a layman observer of the climate science community, his looks like a lonely position.

In a recent blog piece Roger retraces a distasteful (but increasingly familiar) looking episode of climate science in action. In that post by Roger is one email that made my jaw hit the ground. I reproduce it in part below with the bits that caused my mandibular dislocation:

Subject: Chapter 6: an alternative? [email not for the faint hearted?]
Resent-From: CCSPTempTrendAuthors.NCDC@noaa.gov
Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 13:22:32 +0100
From: Thorne, Peter

To: CCSPTempTrendAuthors.NCDC@noaa.gov

Dear all,

Health warning: This mail does not hold its punches as the youngest member of this panel I suppose that I have the most to lose through Chapter 6 in its current form in terms of future research career. I also suspect that I am the most likely to run around making a pain in the proverbial of myself. My apologies for that! I’ve tried over the past few weeks to help others in the Chapter 6 redrafting, but I really think that the structure we had just will not work. Therefore I took the liberty of spending 3 hours this morning developing an alternative, which I attach. I will caveat that David has looked at this, but the rationale and most of the text is my responsibility, not his (in other words the buck stops here).

[SNIP]

What does this say to you? I know that it is not in context, blah blah blah. But let's just cut to the chase. A young and (by all indications) ambitious researcher felt that a scientific report might not be good for his career advancement and so personally redrafted it as a replacement for the combined work of the team.

Just as background, this was a CCSP report. CCSP stand for Climate Change Science Program. They provide the scientific basis for the US, a bit like the IPCC role at an international level. So this was a biggish deal and should have had an objective and inclusive approach to the broad base of scientific views, including those represented by (NB not held by) Roger Pielke. Could it really be true that some young buck thought such an approach might stimey his scaling of the greasy pole of success and so, with or without the support of others, arranged to hijack proceedings? Hard to believe and yet hard to rationalise otherwise the self stated conflict of interest and resulting actions detailed in that email.

And it is the Climate Change preachers who constantly parrot on about how sceptics are compromised.

"proving" Dangerous Anthropogenic Cimate Change

I entangled myself in "discussion" with Richard Tol over on irisheconomy.ie. I say discussion, but Richard seems quick to jump to use of epithets.

The issue I (quite politely) took Richard up on was a statement he made about the efficacy of the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Climate Change. Note I have remove the "Dangerous", because I don't believe that the issue had been extended to that (additionally hoary) question.

Richard's contention was that because, using the DACC hypothesis, we could mathematically model past temperature changes we had all the "proof" we need.

Here is where I introduce some terminology and two important concepts:

NECESSARY condition:
This is something that must be true (i.e. is necessary) in order to support a particular hypothesis. As in test of the statement "Serena Williams won the Ladies Singles title at Wimbledon in 1999". If I wanted to test the truth of that statement, I could start with a necessary test - is Serena Williams a woman? Answer: yes (cut the giggling up the back there Thompson!). What does that information prove? It proves that Serena William could have won the Ladies Singles title. Another NECESSARY condition would be was she entered that year? But again, this only proves that she could have won, not did.

So what do we need to move from a helpful could to more useful did. For that we need a SUFFICIENT condition. If this condition holds then that is all we need to prove the claim. So, did Serena Williams collect the All England Club Ladies Singles trophy in 1999? If she did, then we can say she did win.

So what use are NECESSARY and SUFFICIENT conditions? In mathematics, statistics or everyday logic a NECESSARY condition is something you can use to falsify an hypothesis. You can rule things out. A very useful tool and vital in science. A SUFFICIENT condition is used to move an hypothesis in the territory of a theory - not only can we not rule it out as an explanation, but we must rule it in. Exclusively.

Back to Richard and the hypothesis of DACC. Richard presented a claim that modelling past climate is SUFFICIENT to test the hypothesis. The problem is that this is only a NECESSARY condition. I have posted on this blog before about modelling hypotheses and the long and short is that only by making correct predictions (correctly modelling future and otherwise unknowable events) with our model can we meet NECESSARY conditions.

Don't believe me? Here is someone who isn't an "anonymous lizard" who agrees with me.

So there you have it and it deserves repeating, and repeating and repeating. DACC will not be "proven" until they start accurately modelling future climatic outcomes. And the track record on that isn't good to date.

I'm just wild about Harrrryyy....

One of the hacked/leaked/lost files from the Climate Research Unit is one called HARRY_READ_ME.txt

It opens with this line:

READ ME for Harry's work on the CRU TS2.1/3.0 datasets, 2006-2009!

Note the exclamation mark (!).

Even for non programmers like me it provides some mild chuckle moments as you scan down the code and comments as the programmer codes their building exasperation into posterity via comment lines, like this:

As a glutton for punishment I then looked at the tmin/tmax db format. Looks like two extra fields (i6,i7) with mvcs of 999999 and 8888888 respectively. However *sigh* inspection reveals the following two possibilities:

It makes you wonder who Harry is, as I came to pity him so. Maybe this is him?

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/#Research%20Staff

A note on scepticism

In the Blogosphere of climate debate a major earthquake has hit. Supposed data and email communication has been allegedly obtained by fair means or foul from the Climate Research Unit (attached to to University of East Anglia). The material was brought to the interwebbie via this blog:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/

Now, of course, given the nature of the contents, which variously paint a picture of a distinct cabal of "insiders" looking to promote their own research and conclusions of that research by any means at their disposal, this has been dynamite.

I am not going to comment on the contents, but rather about the blog response to date and what this rapidly evolving story says about scepticism in general and scepticism as it specifically relates to the hypothesis of Dangerous Anthropogenic Climate Change.

One of the pitfalls of human behaviour is "confirmation bias". It happens everywhere, especially in financial markets. It is the natural human tendency to put more weight on new information that supports your own views or prior conclusions.

This is one of my personal criticisms of the many proponents of the DCC hypothesis. Even some nominally well credentialled academics in the field appear to do it, hence creating an environment where these proponents and the resulting media and lobby organisations exaggerate their case.

This new information (the validity of which we can not yet establish and may never will), offers the potential for confirmation bias to reveal itself in those who have to date been sceptical of the main claims of the DCC lobby (including the IPCC). The email communications in particular appear to confirm what most sceptics have suspected and appeared to be indirectly implied by the belligerent behaviour of many notable academics in the field and the incestuous relationships between key academics, and government and policy organisations (including the UN's IPCC).

As someone who (possibly mistakenly) prides himself on being a genuine sceptic in the best sense, I have to try and recognise in myself that same instinctive reaction that "this proves exactly what I thought" and restrain it. Instead, the issues are; what more do I need to know before I can properly assimilate this new "information" into my thinking?

The first and primary requirement is the provenance and accuracy of any of this information I would use. If there is an email communication that clearly shows some form of academic bias, collusion or worse fraud, I need to be convinced first and foremost that it is genuine before I consider what it might mean.

I believe everyone else should do the same or further damage the case of true scepticism even more than I believe proponents of the DCC hypothesis have already done to date.

A bottled water frenzy

The Grauniad appears to have saved the day again by quickly alerting us hoi polloi to the imminent danger/disaster/apocalypse into which we were plummetting. This final warning on the complete depletion of Adelaide's water supply seems to have done the trick:

http://geckkosworld.blogspot.com/2009/09/rip-quality-journalism.html

You will recall that last month Adelaide had but one week's supply of water left before emergency bottled supplies would need to be shipped in. It seems that the local population has been extra busy, by pouring the emergency bottled supplies directly into the drinking water reservoirs, which have increased from 90% of capacity to 93% capacity.

Apocalypse averted. Keep up the good work guys.

What I hate about climate "debate"

In a word. Strawmen. Making up a statement or claim by an opponent so you can knock it down. One which is a popular target for "debunking" is a strawman that a climate scientist (specialising in oceanography) and contributor to the IPCC, Mojib Latif, was now forecasting a decade or two of falling average global temperatures. The usual suspects and others are no all abuzz pointing out how Mojib Latif has not made any such predictions.

Let's get one thing straight first. There appears to be different reporting of Latif's comments in the media and across the interwebby. Some indeed suggesting that he made a "prediction" of cooling. I am happy enough that he did not make a prediction, but made a hypothetical along the lines; "if there was a cooling, and I don't think that is impossible".

A journalist called George Will is a particular target of this manufactured argument. He is thoroughly disliked by a large proportion of the Dangerous Climate Change lobby because he takes an opposing view. How distasteful. But regardless of whether Mojib was making prediction of or not, this was never the issue. Look at what George will wrote. Verbatim:

The Times says "a short-term trend gives ammunition to skeptics of climate change." Actually, what makes skeptics skeptical is the accumulating evidence that theories predicting catastrophe from man-made climate change are impervious to evidence. The theories are unfalsifiable, at least in the "short run." And the "short run" is defined as however many decades must pass until the evidence begins to fit the hypotheses.

George Will

Cooling Down the Cassandras

This isn't written in ancient sanskrit. It is pretty plain English. The point is not what anyone is or is not forecasing - including Mojib Latif - but the apparent impossibility that any data might falisfy the DCC hypothesis. It clearly says what skeptics have difficulty with is the way nothing (even a hypothetical two decades of cooling) would still not falsify a theory of global warming.

That is what skeptics are getting increasingly frustrated with. The proponents of the DCC hypothesis would advance their standing in the eyes of skeptics immeasurably if they began drawing some clear lines in the sand, which if they are truly scientists they should do. Does Latif imply that no amount of cooling would falisify the DCC hypothesis? His quote doesn't say that wouldn't be they case, he just leaves it at "cooling would not falsify".

My question for any such climate scientists would be; what outcomes or data are you looking for that would falsify parts of the DCC hypothesis?

An answer of "none", leaves me in no doubt that we aren't talking science. And that is the answer skeptics are getting at the moment.

RIP quality journalism

The Gruaniad is a newspaper that seems to pride itself on notoriously poor standards of fact finding and editorship, but I have just been bowled over by a superlative piece of garbage that went up on their web site this week. No surprise that it appears in their "environment" section and no further surprise that it is yet another lame piece of climate change alarmism.

Have a look at the article and then do as much fact checking that you can in, say, nine tenths of a second.

Adelaide latest victim of global water shortages

Australia's fifth-largest city could be reliant on bottled water as early as next week as overuse and drought stretch the Murray river to its limit

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/adelaide-water-drought

Pretty self explanatory really, but also seriously alarming. Adelaide (the fifth largest city in Australia) must surely be in a state of emergency given such an imminent event. Can you imagine the logistics involved in the supply of a city with bottled water, the restrictions one would need to place on any water use at all in order to prevent all manner of disasters and even death?

Google must be running hot with links to local press warning the populace of the danger they face and the things they need to do....





Oh.

9 potential news articles. Only one referring to this disaster, from the Gruaniad itself.

No bother, this means nothing. The Gruaniad journalists are quick off the mark. They get the scoops weeks before other inferior news hounds. A quick look at primary sources will reveal the astonishing speed with which these paragons of the news media have pounced on cold hard verifiable FACTS:



























Oh.

Adelaide reservoirs 90% full. Maybe they are filling the bottles at the reservoirs for distribution to this thirsty city.

Never mind, the South Australian Water authority are consummate professionals. They will be on the case and will be ensuring that water is being used for the most essential purposes only. Sure enough, they have put everyone on LEVEL 3 ENHANCED WATER RESTRICTIONS!!! This is definitely serious.

Dripper systems and hand-held hoses fitted with a trigger nozzle can be used for a maximum of 3 hours a week

What? Don't these dolts realise that there will be NO WATER NEXT WEEK? And they are still letting people waste it on their gardens!?! They are rushing headlong into this disaster.

I await the upcoming Gruaniad reports of this unfolding crisis in the coming days with great anticipation.

UPDATE 14 OCTOBER:
I received this disturbing e-mail today [I do hope this poor soul survives]:

Still waiting on the bottled water to arrive. Can't hold out much
longer. So... thirsty...

When myth meets economics

Economists get a bad rap a lot of the time. And, on occasions it is well merited. But more often than is commonly imagined fault lies in alarming widespread and firmly held beliefs that support damaging policies by government.

Trade is a goldmine of examples. Take the experience of the Great Depression. One feature of the this tragic period in modern history was a descent into protectionism and an unwillingness to trade (i.e. import) goods and services from other countries. The graphic below is modestly famous, appearing in an Economist article on the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, that was arguably the catalyst to a general retreat into economic isolation around the world. Some think it ugly, or contrived, but I find the chart illustrates the annual contraction in the volume of trade. Each circle encompasses an amount of trade which gets smaller and smaller. Hawley-Smoot brought into effect more than 800 different tariff increases. Naturally, other countries followed suit. The result was less trade.

While supporters of these tariffs might try to maintain that the affect was as intended (keeping out foreign imports in favour of domestic production), they might baulk slightly when one explains that the chart below shows the decline in total world exports; most anti trade proponents tend to be of a mercantilist flavour and believe, no insist, that imports are bad while exports are good. Everyone was exporting less. This is of course a trick, every import is in fact an export, but the point is valid. There are no exports without imports. A type of Yang and Yin if you like.

What you don't see when you look at this chart is the loss in income and welfare around the world as we stopped trading with another.






















That is an interesting trip down memory lane, but what relevance is it for today. Well there is more than one point to make.

• Firstly, economists fight a never ending battle against the enemies of trade. Strangely, over time, this continues to be the overwhelming proportion of the population.
• Secondly, trade protectionism is a classic knee-jerk response that comes at time of recession. It is intuitive, but badly flawed, to believe that you can "save jobs" by buying locally produced goods or services only or preferably.
• Third, we are facing a rising specific threat at the moment. This is partly related to the point in the economic cycle in which we find ourselves, with unemployment high and rising nearly everywhere. But we also have to deal with Climate Change catastrophists who are lobbying and legislating for taxes on anything with a carbon-based energy component in it. Unfortunately, that is everything, because the use of energy has been the bed rock of our improving welfare ever since man lit his first fire and dramatically reduced mortality from hypothermia, nocturnal predictors and bacterial infection from eating raw meat. And given our present technology there is no cost comparable alternative.

One of the darrrrlings of the Climate Change Catastrophe industry is the Waxman-Markey Bill in the US which has plans to place an explicit or implicit tax on fossil fuel use. This would increase the cost of energy as a way of reducing its use. However, such a law introduced in the US would simply mean that production would move overseas. So the Bill has provision for tariffs to be applied to imports of goods from other countries. Bad news.

It doesn't end there, Nicolas Sarkozy is a fervent admirer of such an idea (what, an anti trade Frenchman???) as it could also help square the political circle for the EU thinking of doing something similar.

And people lap it up, keeping out those nasty imports.

I live in dread.

The next religious war

It is embarrassing to admit that this bloke is Australian. The stereotypical national character (perhaps self delusional) is of a skeptical, bordering cynical, nature. A person most likely to take a pause, look through the bullshit and call a spade a bloody spade; most usually to end in the appraisal of most situations with an assessment of "no worries".

I hope that strength of character isn't dead, because the country has bred the Flannery, a pale imitation of an Australian. A panicky scare monger who now foresees war, yes war, if countries don't toe his preferred line. That preferred line is a halt in the generation of income, goods and services as a way of stopping the production of a natural trace gas that is the very base of the food chain on this planet.

The only reason a war could come of this is over attitudes like Flannery's themselves. A self-fulfilling war arising out of demands by one group of people that everyone else adheres strictly to a set of punative and inequitable ideological principles and rules. Yes, we have been there before. This is just the threat of another religious war.

A note to Mr Flannery. I believe nothing good ever came from wilful subjugation. I will not bow to your destructive religious crusade and I doubt I am alone.

Reap what you sow

Oxfam are now worried about the possible implications of diverting scarce resources from one problem to another.

Maybe they should have thought a little harder about their own actions when they started to spend their limited budget on political lobbying:




The reason I won't give to Oxfam. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and this mob are finding they might end up doing more harm than good.

Climate change madness

In the mad rush to avert that non-problem that is dangerous (man-made) climate change, we are told we need to pass laws, regulate and spend lots of taxpayers' money (glibbly taken by voracious government) to force the production of "renewable" energy sources. Stuff like wind, solar etc.

Of course the problem is the technology just isn't commercially viable yet. We would either have to pay a lot lot more for the power we use for transport, light and heat etc (especially nuclear, solar). or we would simply layer a another sum of capacity on top of fossil fuel (especially wind) because it won't be dependable enough to meet demand on it own.

If you dispute this, look at that paragon of sustainable energy, Denmark. After pouring a massive amount of taxpayers money into subsidised wind turbine production it finds it has to draw on foreign electricity production and charge the highest prices for electricity in Europe.

Compare Ireland - hardly a low cost electricity model. We pay more than twice as much as Americans and three times as much as Australians and Canadians. Consumers price is around 15 cents per kilowatt.

with Denmark, with its mass of windfarms consumers pay 24 cents per kilowatt.

I don't want to pay that. Irish electricity is too expensive as it is. But if individuals don't stand up to this madness that has captured the political agenda globally, that is what you face for no practical gain.

The Western world's Great Leap Forward

Students of history will likely be knowledgeable about the Great Leap Forward. This was the great centrally directed plan of Mao Zedong's "government" [read despotic autocracy] to transform the structure of the Chinese economy from one that predominantly produced, consumed and was employed in agricultural industry on a small or individual enterprise basis into one in which consumption, employment and output was more oriented towards heavy industry and employing mass production techniques.

The plan was to simply direct everyone, collective organisations (the Communist equivalent of western companies) and individuals to produce steel predominantly, but also other industrial processes

So how did it pan out? For those of you who don't know, not too well. To say the least. Tens of millions starved to death, the population went into decline. There was homelessness and all round severe deprivation. Not for Mao or his cronies of course, but everyone else.

Fast forward 50 years and the liberal Western world, who always knew such government intervention in economies was stupid to say the least (aren't we clever), seem to have decided that a Great Leap Forward is required for ourselves. I should be more specific about this. It is the environmental lobby and their political partners in crime who have decided that is our required medicine.

Climate change and jobs top priority
House to vote on cap and trade bill

Are just two examples, but pretty much all of Europe and the wider Western world is in on the fun.

Make no mistake, this is our Great Leap Forward. Governments and lobby groups who are convinced that we need and can affect a change in the nature of our economies and improve our welfare. They will follow the same Chinese game plan with some modern liberal economic twists and:

• Autocratically direct what may or may not be produced. For example, we must produce electricity from anything but coal, we must not use cars, we must use CFL light bulbs etc.
• Direct us to consume certain things. Examples as above via direct means, but also indirectly by taxing us and spending the money for us on all manner of "green" initiatives through government budgets.
• The additional twist is that we use markets to help determine prices and so governments will attempt to use that mechanism to further advance the policy via carbon taxes, emissions permit trading etc. The objective being to make "bad" things more expensive so that we consume, produce and draw employment into "good" things.

Of course the results will be the same. The larger the change governments try to affect the more ruinous the affects on our economic welfare will be. And we are not just talking about falling wages and salaries. We are looking at reduced total income across the economy available for the things we like to provide for ourselves centrally, like good education systems, good health systems and decent welfare systems among other things. We will be able to afford less of all this stuff because we will not be as well off.

So go ahead and support your local Green/Left lobby group or NGO. But read a little about the Great Leap Forward. Better still, talk to a Chinese person, ideally someone alive in the 1950s, if you are able. You might find out why China appear less willing to follow the Western lead on this and appear far more economically liberal than us. I suppose they've been there, done that and have the T-shirt.

What is it with climate panic?

One of the things that continues to baffle me is the natural propensity, nay the apparent all consuming desire, of climate alarmists to embrace with a passion the worst prognoses for our world. Do they get some sort of extreme buzz from the type of personal panic they appear to impose on themselves?

My confusion is compounded when I read the measured and ridiculously reasonable writings of someone like Richard Lindzen. Here is an article from him that all should read:

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/07/resisting-climate-hysteria

When economists go bad

Paul Krugman used to be an economist I enjoyed reading. He was sensible, logical and most importantly even handed with hypotheses and data. He made well founded arguments that didn't rely on fallacies of authority and he treated all data with the caution and respect it requires.

But something has happened. Something has changed. Paul seems different. A bad case of Nobelitis? Or maybe, just maybe, Paul sees a political future for himself rather than an academic one.

This is only the most recent comment from Paul on the issue of Dangerous Climate Change. In it he displays none of the reason that I enjoyed in the past. He is instead a shrill voice waving papers, citing some extraordinary claims (without providing details of the supporting data) and most importantly making a political case rather than an economic one. Read it for yourself and make your own judgement, but I would provide one illuminating sentence:

I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against
the planet.

Yep. Treason.

And what could prove this is such a disaster in the making?

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Facts apparently. Something a Nobel Economics prize winner should be pretty hot on and was until recently. But in this case it is worse than even pessimists expected and occurring at a terrifying rate, but he doesn't even identify what these data are or where they can be found.

What data is being analysed suggests that climate change, as measured by everyone's favourite metric of mean global temperature anomalies, is occurring more slowly than thought. Look here for a fact-based appraisal of temperatures to date compared with the "scenarios" produced in 1997 and 2001 by the IPCC, which had become increasingly alarming. It indeed appears that the more pessimistic the "experts" - like those modellers at MIT Paul mentions - become, the more benign the outcomes appear to be. Actual changes in temperature are falling well below those expected. Paul would serve himself well to familiarise himself with such analysis, which I would be inclined to call genuine science.

Such failure isn't surprising, because in other areas the reality of climate is falling short of the predictions of the doomsayers. Claims that tropical cyclones (hurricanes) were increasing in number and intensity - which was all the rage around the time of Katrina - are now scarce because there has been very subdued activity.

And of course the worst sin of all for an economist, in particular one I regarded so highly until recently, is the blind support for complex modelled forecasts - something I talk about here. I know that will cause him such immense embarassment among his peers at some point in the not to distant future.

Question about the Dangerous Climate Change hypothesis #1

A couple of points before we start (my bog, my rules):

We are talking about the Dangerous Climate Change Hypothesis, which I define as meaning:

An hypothesis that human carbon emissions are the predominant cause of a dangerous shift in climate to a higher energy state, resulting in, among other things, higher average global temperatures.

There, I have made it easy by highlighting the key points and they are not open to dispute. They are axiomatic on this blog.

Also, some rule of engagement.

If by some extravagant exhibition of the laws of probability someone actual a) finds this blog, b) stays long enough to read this blog, c) reads this or another post on this topic, d) even considers it worthwhile responding, they should not accuse me of "not understanding the science". Although only a humble economist by training, I have surprised many people by the way I have mastered the dark art of reading. Moreover, there are areas in the field of econometrics and statistics and in particular the nature and behaviour of large jointly determined and highly endogenous models of natural systems I am well qualified to understand some extremely important issues.

Grand so. Buckle the seat belt and off we go.

This entre to the minefield of climate science will start on familiar ground for me - forecasting. I know the IPCC and climate modellers hate using that word (and I know why they hate it), but any extrapolation of a time series into a period that extends beyond the availability of data is a forecast. Yes, they may be conditional on certain assumed states of the world, but they are still forecasts.

And forecasts are important and this is why. Testing the ability of any model to predict future outcomes is the only real test of its efficacy. Every time someone tells you how well climate models track past temperature trends or variations as "proof" of the robustness of the hypothesis, call bullshit on them. For a surprisingly large number of reasons this is simply not true and any trained statistician or econometrician will verify that fact.

So when I want to prove to myself (unfortunately I rarely take peoples' word for anything) that the Dangerous Climate Change (DCC) hypothesis might be true, I look to the ultimate test of our understanding of climate processes - forecasts. And this, surprisingly, is very hard to do. I say surprisingly, because for something that could tell us so much about the state of our knowledge on such an important issue, very few people involved in climate research bother to do it. Instead they seem to spend their $BILLIONS (yes it is that much) increasing the complexity of their models and churning out more and more forecasts of different types, simply leaving the older work behind like yesterday's newspapers.

So let do some of this work for them. First let's be realistic about the challenge here and some valid points that climate modellers would raise.

• Climate change is about decadal trends. A year or two means nothing, you really need to look at maybe 20 or even 30 years to begin to get enough information to draw any sort of conclusions.
• Given, as I point out earlier, we will be dealing with "conditional" forecasts, we need to consider the role of underlying assumptions (poor forecasts due to erroneous assumptions can still indicate that the underlying understanding of the process is sound).
• We are dealing with "stochastic" processes. That means random. In statistics you need to be simply close enough, not exactly correct to 2 decimal places.

That will do for now. Note I will deal with these points qualitatively where I see the need. I don't think this is the place for number crunching confidence intervals and the like (because I say so OK!?!).

Boy, that turned into a longer preamble than planned, so let's get down to brass tacks. Firstly we need to find a forecast we can have a look at. It needs to have some hard numbers in it and it has to be long enough in the tooth for us to have had time (ideally decades) to collect data to test it. Given that the field of DCC is very youthful in scientific terms, we aren't spoiled for choice here, but there is one excellent candidate. In 1988 James Hansen, considered by some as the Godfather of DCC produced a famous paper and in it he produced some forecasts. Here is the chart contained in that paper showing these forecasts:

This chart nicely summarises the data we are interested in. There are four lines. The first runs to 1988 and is temperature anomaly data available at the time of publication. The other three are conditional forecasts. The different "conditions" are assumptions about how much more CO2 (and other greenhouse gases - "GHGs") humans will pump into the air. The only important point to know about these three forecasts is that none of them assumed that there would be less GHG pumped into the atmosphere than actually occur ed from 1988 to present.

Now we simply take some temperature data and carefully overlay to see ho good these forecasts were:

OUCH! Actual global temperature over the 20 years since the forecast was made have risen far less than forecast. And don't fool yourself. Hansen himself described the lowest forecast (the best outcome for mankind) as being based on an assumption that "drastic cuts" would be made to GHG emissions. Don't come here arguing that the world has made "drastic cuts" to GHGs.

Now some will complain that I am being an evil, oil industry funded, creationist supporting, conspiracy nutter, right wing neocon sceptic about all this. They would say that I should be using Hansen's own data for global temperature (yes, for those uninitiated in the concept of science as it is practiced in climate circles, the most vocal, qualified campaigner manages his own measure for the existence of this DCC - the GISS surface temperature series). But I am nothing if not fair, so lets repeat with Hansen approved temperature measures:

Double OUCH! Hansen manages to keep those temps up compared with satellite derived measures (the UAH in the previous chart), but still the trend over 20 years is well below what Hansen himself forecast it would be had we made "drastic cuts" to our emissions.

Well, all I can say is thank crikey we weren't so stupid to have done that.