February 11, 2005

Friday Fun Thread: Animal Planet week continues

Posted by Ted

My beloved fiancee received two hermit crabs for Christmas. Due to pressures both foreign and domestic, she has not named the crabs yet, and has consistently (cruelly, some would say) rejected my suggestions.

Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us

(pictured: a very similar hermit crab)

Luckily, I have the wisdom of crowds on my side. If any commentor suggests a pair of names for two hermit crabs which are adopted by my fiancee, I’ll donate $20 to Habitat for Humanity in his or her name.

February 10, 2005

Colin's canal, again

Posted by John Quiggin

Apologies to readers for the rather odd post below, which was meant for my own blog. Since people have made comments, I’ll leave it in place, and add a few notes of explanation. The post refers to a state election campaign in Western Australia, which the incumbent Labor government was, at the outset, expected to lose. A major issue in the campaign is the water supply problems facing Perth, the capital city where the great majority of the population lives. Issues include the traditional Australian ideology of developmentalism, and the role of public-private partnerships

My piece in today’s Australian Financial Review, over the fold, brings together arguments about the Kimberley canal project, which has been debated here on the blog on my blog. As usual, I got a lot out of all the comments, whether or not this is obvious in the published article. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the debate.

Economic rationalists are often criticised, not entirely without reason, for lacking vision. Still, when confronted with a visionary project like the canal being advocated by WA Opposition leader Colin Barnett to bring water 3700km from the Kimberleys to Perth, we are reminded of that mirages are a kind of vision.

There aren’t many issues on which I agree with the Institute of Public Affairs. But I’m happy to join IPA Director Mike Nahan in suggesting that this is a project fraught with danger for WA taxpayers. It could easily join the Ord River fiasco as an illustration of what happens when developmentalist rhetoric trumps economic rationality.

Campaigning on the slogan ‘decisions not delays’, Barnett has promised to go ahead with the scheme without waiting for feasibility studies, environmental assessments or any of the other impediments of bureaucratic rationality. The evidence supporting the proposal appears to consist of some very slim documents proposed by project proponent Tenix.

Even a moment’s scrutiny of these documents indicates some obvious problems. For example, the feasibility of the project is supported by reference to the “1,065 km Californian Aqueduct’, built in the early 1900s. The Aqueduct’s own website states its length at 223 miles (less than 400 km).

But the real problems are with the economics. Barnett has promised to deliver water at $1 a kilolitre, but this can’t be done, even on the most optimistic assumptions. Taking Tenix’s claimed construction cost of $2 billion, and a very conservative EBITDA ratio of 10, the capital costs for the project would be $200 million a year. Even at the claimed maximum flow of 200 gigalitres a year, this would use up the whole $1/kl without allowing anything for pumping, maintenance, treatment or reticulation.

More plausible estimates for construction costs, including staging costs, are up to $4 billion, and a more likely estimate for total capital costs (return on capital, depreciation and amortisation) is 12.5 per cent, putting the capital costs alone at $2.50/kl. In addition, each kl of water is a tonne of matter that has to be pumped 3700km, with little help from gravity. That’s not going to be cheap. The WA Treasury has estimated the delivered costs at $6.50/kl, compared to current prices ranging from $0.41 to $1.50.

Then there’s the fact that the proposal is a BOOT scheme, with the illusory benefit of handing the project back to the public after 40 years. Of course, there is no free lunch here. The cost is built into prices, usually with a handsome profit margin built in.

It gets worse. The Tenix proposal is based on the assumption that all the water is sold to residential users, but Barnett has talked of diverting up to 80GL each year to irrigators. This will no doubt do wonders for the politics of the proposal but it will be awful for the economics. There’s no way irrigators will be able to pay any more than the pumping costs (if that). Even $1/kl is $1000 a megalitre, which would render most irrigated crops uneconomic. That means that all the capital and maintenance costs will have to be spread over, at most, 120 GL of residential use, so the costs for residential users could be as high as $10/kl. At this price, fanciful options like transporting icebergs from Antarctica start to look attractive.

But even at much lower prices, market forces would resolve the problem. A mere doubling of prices would induce a reduction in water use, and would bring forth alternative sources of supply, such as repurchase of water currently used for irrigation. Then there’s the backstop option of desalinisation, already under way on a relatively small scale.

It’s just possible that careful study could show that the kinds of problems raised above can be overcome, and that the canal option is a feasible one. But there’s no time for such a study before the election.

Unless he can present a better case than he has done so far, it seems quite likely that this proposal will cost Barnett an election he seemed to have in the bag. This episode, and Labor’s difficulties with Medicare Gold, provide a harsh lesson for Opposition parties. If you have a complex and innovative policy, it’s better to put it out for scrutiny well in advance of the election, and risk having the government steal it, than to try and defend it, perhaps unsuccessfully, in the heat of an election campaign.

February 08, 2005

Manipulating choices

Posted by Henry

Alex Tabarrok protests too much in response to John Q.’s post on the Lomborg ranking exercise.

Thus, believe it or not, the new theory of how Lomborg rigged the climate change study is that he chose someone to write the global climate change chapter who was too strong an proponent of its importance! Give me a break.

Alex may sneer, but this is exactly what at least one, and possibly two of the members of the Lomborg panel suggest, according to the Economist

Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, who voted on the final choices, thinks that presenting climate change at the bottom of the list as “bad” is misleading. He says he and the other gurus did not like Kyoto or the aggressive proposals made by Dr Cline, whom he sees as the “most alarmist of the serious climate policy experts”, but Dr Schelling says he would have ranked modest climate proposals higher on the list, because he sees climate as a real problem. Robert Mendelsohn, a conservative Yale economist who was an official “critic” of the climate paper in this process, goes further: because Dr Cline’s positions are “well out of the mainstream”, he had no choice but to reject them. He worries that “climate change was set up to fail.”

This is strong language for academics - Mendelsohn is saying that Lomborg may have tried to predetermine the outcome by ensuring that the climate change choice was unpalatable to all the panelists. Nor does this invalidate John’s previous argument that the panelists as well as the choices on offer were selected in order to conduct towards this outcome - a different group of economists might well have preferred even the more radical climate change option that was on offer. I’m not sure what the point is to Tabarrok’s surly and ungracious post. If he doesn’t believe that choices between several options can be fixed so that individuals go for the one rather than the other, he only needs to find out a little more about the gentle art of push-polling. If he’d like a slightly more rigorous discussion, I refer him to William Riker’s work on heresthetics. If he doesn’t believe that there’s some serious reason to suspect that this is what happened here, he should re-read Schelling’s and Mendelsohn’s descriptions of the process, as quoted in the Economist. There’s nothing here that’s exactly difficult to get.

February 07, 2005

Copenhagen collapse

Posted by John Quiggin

The wheels are coming off Bjorn Lomborg’s attempt to undermine the Kyoto Protocol. The Economist, which backed Lomborg’s exercise, published an interesting piece on climate change recently, noting that some members are dissenting, and ending with the observation, from Robert Mendelsohn, a critic of ambitious proposals for climate change mitigation, who worries that “climate change was set up to fail”. This was my conclusion when I reviewed the book arising from the project.

It’s a pity, because, done well, the Copenhagen project could have been a really good idea, and even as it is, a lot of valuable work was done.

Here’s the full passage
A panel of eminent economists, among them three Nobel prize-winners, placed initiatives to tackle HIV/AIDS, malaria, sanitation and other problems confronting the world’s poor ahead of proposals to tackle global warming, which were described as “bad” investments compared with those aimed at tackling these other problems. But several participants now say that there was confusion about how they were ranking ways to spend development aid, or ranking which general global problems should be tackled.

Of course, greens howled in protest at the dismissal of climate change, and pointed to some sort of stitch-up: after all, some argued, Dr Lomborg is well known for his opposition to the Kyoto treaty. He rejects such claims, insisting that the effort was in good faith. He points out that the man selected to write the “expert paper” on climate, William Cline of the Centre for Global Development, a think-tank based in Washington, DC, has impeccable credentials; indeed, he is known as an advocate of forceful, early action to slow global warming. Dr Lomborg explains that the proposals on climate change fared poorly because they offered the lowest benefits for the costs incurred.

Now, some members of the Consensus are dissenting. Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, who voted on the final choices, thinks that presenting climate change at the bottom of the list as “bad” is misleading. He says he and the other gurus did not like Kyoto or the aggressive proposals made by Dr Cline, whom he sees as the “most alarmist of the serious climate policy experts”, but Dr Schelling says he would have ranked modest climate proposals higher on the list, because he sees climate as a real problem. Robert Mendelsohn, a conservative Yale economist who was an official “critic” of the climate paper in this process, goes further: because Dr Cline’s positions are “well out of the mainstream”, he had no choice but to reject them. He worries that “climate change was set up to fail.”

Dr Lomborg insists that that was not at all the case. Picking an enthusiast like Dr Cline also could suggest that climate was being taken seriously by the Copenhagen process. However, he accepts that more modest proposals (such as a small carbon tax or investments in research) would have ranked higher on the list. Dr Cline, for his part, acknowledges that his views (for example, on the right discount rates to use when pondering long-term policies) “have not yet been accepted by the mainstream”. He is unhappy with how climate has been portrayed by the Copenhagen process, but he still feels that the attempt to assess global problems was well intentioned and worthwhile.

January 22, 2005

Copenhagen review

Posted by John Quiggin

Friday’s Australian Financial ReView section (subscription only) runs my review of Bjorn Lomborg’s new book. CT readers won’t be surprised to find a lot of criticisms of the Copenhagen Consensus project that produced the book. But I found a fair bit to praise as well. The review, pretty lengthy, is over the fold. Comments appreciated.

On my bookshelves, I have many works that make a substantial contribution to our understanding of important issues facing the world, and quite a few exercises in political propaganda. Much rarer are books that fall into both categories. The Copenhagen Consensus, a joint initative of The Economist and Bjorn Lomborg’s Environmental Assessment Institute, has produced just such a book.

Lomborg first came to worldwide attention with The Sceptical Environmentalist, a book that claimed to refute a ‘litany’ of environmental woes. In most cases, Lomborg argued that the severity of problems had been overstated or that progress in mitigation had been ignored.

When it came to global warming, however, neither of these claims seemed plausible, and Lomborg adopted a different tack. Rather than disputing the scientific evidence of global warming, he argued that the cost of addressing the problem through the Kyoto protocol would be better spent dealing with more urgent issues, such as the provision of clean drinking water in the Third World.

There are a variety of problems with this argument, one of the most notable being that the most cost-effective approach to mitigating global warming would be a global emissions trading scheme that would require rich countries to buy emissions rights from poor countries, providing funds that could be used for initiatives of the kind Lomborg proposes. Rather contradictorily, Lomborg went on to argue that, precisely because of the large transfers from rich to poor countries they would require, emissions trading schemes would not be politically feasible.

His criticism of the environment lobby led the right-wing Danish government of Anders Rasmussen to establish the Environmental Assessment Institute and instal Lomborg as its director. Ironically, the same government made repeated cuts in Denmark’s foreign aid program.

It was against this background that, in 2003, Lomborg announced the Copenhagen Consensus project. The idea was that a group of eminent economists would look at priorities for assisting poor countries and try to rank them in terms of costs and benefits. The planned procedure was that an advocate would present a case for each of a number of possible global projects. Two ‘opponents’ would then provide a critique. The panel of eminent economists would then distil the arguments and rank the possible projects.

There was an immediate reaction to this announcement. Three of the seven members of the board of Lomborg’s insitute resigned in protest at a project which seemed unrelated to the purposes for which the institute had been established.

At the same time critics (including this reviewer) voiced suspicions of a setup. Criticism began with the composition of the panel. With four Nobel prize winners, it was certainly an eminent body. But the members weren’t notable for a focus on the problems of Third World economic development. They included experimentalist Vernon Smith, econometrician James Heckman (who later withdrew), and economic historians Robert Fogel and Douglass North.

Fogel has done important research on population and nutrition, but the other Nobel prizewinners, and most other members of the panel, were not experts in the main fields under discussion. As Jeffrey Sachs (who headed of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health) observed, the timeline was far too short for the panel to gain requisite expertise, lasting only a few months in total; the background papers circulated for a few weeks, and in the final discussions, the panel had 5 days to review 32 proposals.

The point can be sharpened by looking at some of the Nobel prizewinners who would have seemed like obvious choices for such a panel, including Kenneth Arrow, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Solow and Amartya Sen, all of whom have made extensive contributions to the debate on economic growth and development.

Comparing the two lists, the omissions are, broadly speaking, towards the left of the economics profession and those who have commented on climate change have supported policy initiatives such as Kyoto. Conversely, the members of the Copenhagen panel were generally towards the right and, to the extent that they had stated views, to be opponents of Kyoto. Indeed, Lomborg’s argument that spending to mitigate climate change would be better directed to aid projects was first put forward by Thomas Schelling, one of the Copenhagen panellists.

The same lack of balance was evident in the selection of ‘opponents’. For Robert Cline’s paper on climate change, Lomborg picked vigorous opponents of Kyoto, Robert Mendelsohn and Alan Manne, and the result was an acrimonious debate. But for most of the other issues under consideration, the differences between the parties to the discussion were matters of emphasis and nuance, to the extent that the ‘opponents‘ were eventually redescribed as providing ‘alternative perspectives’.

It is clear from reading the papers and the discussion reports that the panellists approached the task in a serious and fairminded way. But, inevitably, the narrowness of the selection meant that many important issues were prejudged or not discussed. Undoubtedly the likemindedness of the panel members assisted in the stated objective of achieving consensus. It is not clear, however, that a consensus confined to a narrow ideological subset of the economics profession is going to be of much help in achieving broad agreement on solutions to global problems.

The real problems, though, were not with the choice of panel members but with the assessment procedure, which was clearly designed to fit Lomborg’s original example of a choice between spending on climate change and on clean drinking water.

The approach adopted was to assume a budget of $50 billion, and then seek to allocate it to those projects which would yield the largest benefit for a given cost. As Jeffrey Sachs points out, this approach is fine for evaluating discrete, project-based interventions, such as improvements in drinking water quality. But with a small budget and an insistence on easily quantified costs and benefits, it is naturally biased against bolder initiatives such as broad-based improvements in health and education.

The problems are even more severe in relation to issues like civil conflict. Stability and peace aren’t alternatives to development programs, they are preconditions. Trying to rank such disparate issues makes no sense. In this and some other instances, the Copenhagen panel wisely chose not to make a ranking.

The selection of projects is another fundamental problem. Even if, say, improvements in basic health services rank poorly when compared to action against AIDS, they might rank well by comparison with military spending, or advertising, or cosmetic surgery. Lomborg dismisses these from consideration as being ‘not motivated by doing good outside the country concerned’.

But much the same point applies to proposals to mitigate climate change. Adverse impacts species extinction and loss of biodiversity are mostly of concern to people developed countries, and other impacts such as loss of coastal land affect rich and poor countries alike. Similarly the costs of mitigation will be spread across the economy, not funded from a specific government budget item that could be reallocated to foreign aid. Treating climate change as a foreign aid project fits Lomborg’s own framing of the issues, but it is not an accurate representation of the actual problem.

Not surprisingly, the Copenhagen panel concluded that implementing the Kyoto protocol was not a good a use of scarce funds. All of the doubts raised about the Copenhagen Consensus project have been confirmed by the use Lomborg has made of the results. He has said almost nothing about the positive merits of the options favored by the panel. When it emerged, in December 2004, that none of the money promised by the Bush Administration for the fight against AIDS1 had actually been spent, he was silent.

By contrast, Lomborg has repeatedly stressed the panel’s negative findings about climate change. A typical example is an article in The Australian, reprinted from The Telegraph. More than half the article was devoted to the importance of not allocating significant resources to fighting climate change. None of the priority issues identified by the panel got more than a few sentences.

In summary, the Copenhagen Consensus project was created as a political stunt. It was designed, in every detail, to produce a predetermined outcome. Having got the desired outcome, the organiser has shown little or no interest in pursuing any of the other issues raised by the project.

With all of these criticisms, it would be easy to conclude that the entire exercise was a waste of time. In fact, however, the project has made a valuable contribution. If we disregard the ranking exercise, and set the debate over Kyoto and climate change to one side, what remains is a set of well-informed papers, and thoughtful comments, dealing with some of the most serious problems facing the world, and assessing some possible responses.

The participants were nearly all economists, and this is reflected in fairly tight adherence to a standardised cost-benefit framework. The lack of alternative perspectives from natural scientists and public health specialists is a major weakness of the Copenhagen Consensus considered as a policy initiative. On the other hand, it gives the resulting publication a degree of consistency that would otherwise be hard to achieve in a single volume.

The chapters on specific initiatives to prevent disease fit most neatly with the constraints imposed by the ranking procedures. Anne Mills and Sam Shilcutt give an excellent overview of the problems of communicable diseases, focusing on the big killers, HIV/AIDS and childhood diseases, and on malaria, which not only kills millions each year but is a huge source of chronic morbidity.

In comparing fatalities with chronic illness, the standard economists approach is to measure impacts in terms of disability adjusted life years (DALYs), which may then be converted into dollar terms in various ways. However a monetary valuation is done, the invariable answer is that a life in a poor country is worth less than a life in a rich one. Rich country governments, and the voters who elect them, implicitly make this judgement every time they point tax cuts or domestic health services ahead of foreign aid. Nevertheless, it is jarring to see the same judgement made explicitly. Mills and Shilcutt address some of the difficulties, and they are taken up further in the discussion by David Evans.

The chapters on water and sanitation and on malnutrition and hunger follow a similar pattern. They provide an excellent overview of the limited progress that has been made towards providing people with their basic needs for adequate food and clean water (as an aside, the tone is considerably more sombre than the upbeat treatment of the same issues in The Sceptical Environmentalist). As discussant Peter Swedberg observes, the main cause of malnutrition and hunger is poverty. Only reductions in global poverty are likely to produce large-scale reductions in hunger, though some specific micronutrient deficiencies may be addressed . The same is largely true in relation to water supply, though again there is some scope for local initiatives.

The discussion of education is rather disappointing. In both developed and developing countries there has been vigorous debate about the impacts of increased inputs to education, and particularly reductions in class sizes, on educational outcomes. Experimental and macroeconomic studies have generally produced favorable results, while microeconometric analyses using test scores as a proxy for performance have shown little or no impact. But the debate is not joined here, since both the challenge paper author, Lant Pritchett, and the discussants, are supporters of the microeconometric approach, which suggests that there is little that can be done in this field, beyond a nod to such free-market nostrums as charter schools and vouchers. Even these limited recommendations look fragile since more recent US research, using the test score approach, has found that charter schools don’t do much better than ordinary public schools and may even do worse. If progress is going to be made on this topic, it will probably be necessary to look beyond test scores as a measure of achievement.

The remaining chapters are on topics that don’t fit well into the project-based approach of the Copenhagen Consensus, but are essential to an understanding of the problems facing the world, particularly with respect to relationships between more and less developed countries. These issues include trade, migration, international financial flows, governance and corruption and civil conflict. They cannot be addressed simply by allocating a line item in a budget, and they raise important questions of sovereignty.

Understanding these issues, and the interactions between them, is crucial to any assessment of the way forward in resolving the global problems associated with poverty and deprivation. The contributors, notably including Kym Anderson, Barry Eichengreen and Susan Rose-Ackerman, make an importatn contribution to our understanding of these issues.

In summary, this is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone concerned with the crises facing the world. But, because of the dubious process by which it was generated and the dishonest uses to which that process has been put, it ought to be sold with a warning label, something like ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’.

1 There is an error here. As reported here it is funds promised for the Millennium Declaration Account that have not been spent. Money for AIDS was promised separately and some money has been spent, though there is a lot of smoke and mirrors

December 26, 2004

Tsunami in the Indian Ocean

Posted by Chris

I’ve just been watching the news of the terrible disaster unfolding in the Indian Ocean region. Thousands upon thousands dead, and reports still coming in. One expert on the BBC just spoke about the displacement of millions of cubic kilometres of water. How powerful, unpredictable and savage nature can be. An awful day.

December 13, 2004

Copenhagen: conned again

Posted by John Quiggin

In previous posts on Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus exercise, both before and after the event, I expressed the suspicion that the whole thing was a setup, designed to push Lomborg’s favorite line that money spent on implementing the Kyoto protocol would be better allocated to foreign aid projects of various kinds. (I’ve pointed out some contradictions in Lomborg’s general argument, here).

However, I thought some good could come of the exercise, if the conclusions were taken seriously. In my last post, I observed
As attentive readers will recall, the conference concluded that fighting AIDS should be the top global priority in helping developing countries and also that climate change mitigation was a waste of money. I agree with the first of these conclusions, and more generally with the need for more spending on health poor countries, and I hope that Lomborg will put some effort into supporting it. I’ll try to keep readers posted on this.
Now Lomborg has revealed his priorities. Chris points to an article by Lomborg in the Telegraph. The supposed top priority item, initiatives to combat AIDS, gets two passing mentions. The entire article, except for a couple of paras, is devoted to the pressing need to do nothing about global warming.

It’s obvious from reading this piece that the entire lavishly funded Copenhagen exercise was a put-up job, designed to secure impressive-sounding endorsements for Lomborg’s anti-Kyoto agenda, and that the supposed concern for making good use of aid funding was a hypocritical scam. A lot of work went into relative rankings for different health policies, but I don’t expect to hear anything from Lomborg on this score. Similarly, I doubt we will ever see him campaigning for more funding for AIDS programs, as opposed to using them as a cheap anti-Kyoto debating point.

If I was one of the eminent economists who participated in the ranking exercise, or who submitted papers supporting various initiatives, I would be feeling really angry with Bjorn Lomborg right now.

December 12, 2004

Taxing carbon to help the poor

Posted by Chris

Further to my post on Lomborg below, here’s an idea. Maybe it isn’t new, but I’d still be grateful for critical comment. Lomborg says that it would be better to direct our resources to helping the world’s poor, rather than trying to implement Kyoto. Well, one thing first-world governments could do would be to introduce taxes on carbon emissions (many already have these) and to hypothecate those taxes (or some fixed proportion of them) to foreign-development aid.1

1 I take it that those who think that foreign aid is always a waste of money or counterproductive would not, themselves, put the Lomborg argument in good faith (whatever their opinions on CO2 and global warming). No need for them to comment below then.

Global warming and foreign aid

Posted by Chris

Bjorn Lomborg has a column in today’s Sunday Telegraph arguing that it would be much better to spend money on helping the world’s poor than on Kyoto-style measures to cut carbon emissions. It is an interesting way of putting things, especially since, as he points out, the world’s poor are likely to be the principal victims of climate change. Thank goodness, then, that those governments most sceptical about Kyoto are also among the most generous with their foreign-aid budgets (scroll down for table). And shame on those Kyoto-enthusiasts who are, comparatively, so mean with their foreign-aid contributions (and who also tie what little aid they do give to compliance with their foreign-policy objectives).

October 18, 2004

Global warming bombshell?

Posted by John Holbo

UPDATE: Apparently it’s a dud. In fact, John Quiggin defused it last month. Well, that’s a bit silly not to read my very own weblog. (I knew it was a bit suspicious, what with it being good news and all. What a world, what a world.)

I’ll tuck what now looks to be nonsense under the fold, for the curious. Comments are quite interesting below. And Tim Lambert has an interesting post up in response to the general question. Turns out this is a newer model than Quiggin discussed before.


This seems interesting and potentially quite important. But I know nothing about this stuff. That’s what comment boxes are for. Excerpt:

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on?

I reemphasize my lack of a hockey stick to grind. Really, I’m dead ignorant. (When Michael Bérubé does his hockeyblogging thing my eyes glaze over. And I never really was much good at math.) I would be pleased if it turns out the world isn’t boiling as soon as we feared, because I like things the way they are. (Link via Kikuchiyo.)

[UPDATE: Bérubé doesn’t blog about global warming. Just hockey. Don’t want to actually send anyone looking for stuff that’s not there. Just a joke.]

September 12, 2004

The price of growth in China

Posted by Chris

The New York TImes has a horrific report on the extent of pollution in China and on the people who are bearing the costs of growth:

Less than a mile downstream from the waste outlet, Wang Haiqing watched his seven goats chew on weeds. Mr. Wang lived on the other side of the stream, in Wangguo, and said several neighbors had contracted cancer or other intestinal ailments. He said his goats vomited if they drank from the blackened water.

To reach clean drinking water, he said villagers must dig wells 130 feet deep. Most cannot afford to do so.

“It’s been so polluted by the MSG factory,” said Mr. Wang, 60. “It tastes metallic even after you boil it and skim the stuff off it. But it’s the only water we have to drink and to use for cooking.”

August 26, 2004

Sistani rules, OK ?

Posted by John Quiggin

As the pointless bloodbath in Najaf drags on, Ayatollah Sistani has finally returned from hospital treatment in London, and looks likely to be the only person to come out of this disaster with any credit1. His march on Najaf will, it seems likely, allow Sadr and the American-Allawi forces to reach the kind of face-saving compromise that has been the only possible outcome all along, apart from the disastrous option of an assault on the shrine and the martyrdom of Sadr.

Update #1 27/8 I’ve come across a useful piece by a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority, Larry Diamond, linked, with some interesting comments by Gary Farber Gives an account of the Coalition’s dealings with Sadr and other militias (minor snipe: Diamond uses “prevaricating” when he means “vacillating” to describe this).

Update #2 27/8 Like most people not actually on the scene who seek to be well-informed about Iraq, I’m indebted to Juan Cole for his informed comment and information on the situation. He’s just put up a post assessing the winners and losers from the Najaf situation which matches, almost point for point, what I posted yesterday. Of course, it carries a lot more weight coming from him than from me.

Of the other parties, the biggest losers have been the unfortunate people of Najaf. Dozens have been killed, hundreds wounded and thousands left homeless. From all the reports, they (correctly) place part of the blame of the blame for this on Sadr but even more on the American forces. There have also been hundreds more casualties in other towns where the fighting has spread. All of this because someone in the US command decided that this would be a good time to eliminate Sadr and his militia.

The other big losers are the Coalition forces and everyone (including most readers of this blog) represented, willingly or not, by those forces. The Shi’ite world has been outraged by the fighting, and large parts of Southern Iraq are now in the same ‘no-go zone’ state that already characterized the Sunni section of the country. If we avoid a Shiite version of Al-Qaeda, it will be by the good graces of people like Sadr, who continues to denounce terrorism as un-Islamic (while being happy to engage in common-or-garden political thuggery).

Meanwhile, Coalition forces are still boasting about the hundreds of Sadrists they have killed. Perhaps they haven’t noticed that the people they have killed (mostly unemployed young men who have gained nothing from the invasion) all have brothers and cousins, bound in honour to avenge them, not to mention friends eager to share in their glory.

The Allawi government has also lost a lot of ground. Domestically, the alternating bravado and backdowns of the past few week have eroded what support it began with. Meanwhile, its habit of dealing with journalists by rounding them up at gunpoint has guaranteed a hostile press. A straw in the wind is the refusal of the British Labour Party conference to countenance a visit by Allawi, pushed hard by Blair.

Moqtada Sadr has also lost ground on balance, and will lose more if Sistani is seen to be the successful peacemaker. Still he defied the Americans for weeks on end, and looks likely to live to tell the tale. Among his core constituency this will count as a win.

It’s increasingly obvious that the Coalition should have held interim elections at the earliest opportunity using ration books for an electoral roll. Almost certainly, Sistani’s supporters would have won. If the elections planned for January 2005 go ahead, the same outcome will probably be achieved, with a delay of more than a year, and a loss of thousands of lives.

A Sistani-dominated government would be Islamist, but not in the Khomeini theocratic mould. It wouldn’t be liberal in any sense, but it’s by far the best option that has any chance of coming to pass at this point. The alternatives include an authoritarian regimes headed by Allawi, Sadr or someone similar, or a descent into outright chaos.

1 There have been some suggestions that Sistani’s health was fine, and that the trip to London was based on inside information, and a desire to be away from Najaf when the balloon went up. If correct, these suggestions given Sistani fewer points for moral credit, but even more for political judgement than my analysis, based on the assumption that his health problems were genuine.

August 25, 2004

McKitrick mucks it up

Posted by John Quiggin

Late last year, the debate over climate change was stirred up when an environmental economist, Ross McKitrick and a mining executive, Steven McIntyre, published a piece claiming to refute climatological research crucial to the claim that the last few decades have seen unparalleled global warming (the ‘hockey-stick’ paper of Mann, Bradley and Hughes). According to McKitrick and McIntyre, the work of Mann et al was riddled with errors, The paper was loudly publicised by the American Enterprise Institute (home of John Lott) and, as you would expect, Flack Central Station. Mann et al produced an immediate rebuttal, and despite many promises of a rejoinder, McKitrick and McIntyre have never responded on the substantive issues1.

This would be par for the course, except that McKitrick somehow managed to attract the attention of Aussie computer scientist Tim Lambert, famous for his demolition of Lott’s shonky research, which purported to show that guns reduce crime. The result: McKitrick’s work is even shoddier than Lott’s.

Lambert has mainly focused not on the McKitrick and McIntyre paper but on a subsequent piece by McKitrick and Pat Michaels, which contains a regression purporting to show that it is GDP growth that causes (measured) climate change. McKitrick and Michaels take this as support for the generally-discredited ‘urban heat islands’ hypothesis, that measured warming is an artifact produced by weather stations in or near big cities.

In previous rounds of the debate, Lambert has shown that McKitrick messed up an analysis of the number of weather stations, showed he knew almost nothing about climate, flunked basic thermodynamics, couldn’t handle missing values correctly and invented his own temperature scale.

But Tim’s latest discovery really takes the cake. It’s well-known that the rate of warming varies with latitude, but McKitrick and Michaels find no such effect for their variable, which is the cosine of absolute latitude. Lambert checked and, amazingly enough, found that the data set used by McKitrick and Michaels had latitude in degrees, but the cosine function in the SHAZAM econometric package, they used expected input in radians (which is what any mathematically literate person would expect). If you apply this function to angles measured in degrees you get nonsense.

Once Lambert did the correct analysis, latitude was highly significant and the economic variables became much less important. The results reported by McKitrick and Michaels can be explained by an obvious confounding effect. Rich countries tend to be at high latitudes, and so GDP acts as a proxy for latitude.

Although Tim is almost invariably right in such matters, it was hard to believe that such a gross error could go undetected - it would show up immediately if you looked at descriptive stats on the variables, for example. So I checked myself. The descriptive statistics in the McKitrick and Michaels paper (available here) include the latitude, which is clearly in degrees, but not the cosine variable. The SHAZAM documentation, here, indicates that input to the sine function is in radians ( McKitrick and Michaels derive cosine using a transformation of this).

Bear in mind that McKitrick’s main claim to fame is his assertion to have done a painstakingly careful check of the work of others and to have found numerous errors. Looking at Lambert’s demolition of this paper, I’m reminded of what Julian Sanchez had to say about Lott - if he told you the time was 12 o’clock, you’d check your watch before you believed him2.

And Michaels was a reputable climate scientist before he sold out to the fossil fuel lobby. It looks as though, as long as he says what his employers want to hear, they don’t feel the need for quality control.

1 There was a secondary dispute about the provision and labelling of data, as a result of which Mann et al published a very short corrigendum in Nature, noting that they had incorrectly described some parts of the data set, but that this had no implications for the results.

2 Interestingly, Sanchez, like Michaels, has worked at the Cato Institute, which shows that it’s not safe to make generalizations about institutions based on a few, or even a lott, of bad apples. Even TCS publishes some work by reputable people, to add cachet to its real output of lobby-fodder.

August 11, 2004

Vandalism

Posted by Chris

From Mark Lynas’s new blog on climate change (hat-tip Harry’s Place ) comes this story of the medieval village of Heuersdorf , in eastern Germany, which is threatened by strip-mining for lignite. God knows why anyone should mine dirty, horrible, acid-rain producing brown coal anyway, let alone demolish medieval churches to do so. This story needs wider circulation.

August 08, 2004

Prozac Nation

Posted by Chris

It seems that Prozac is being prescribed so widely in the UK that there’s a buildup in our drinking water:

Traces of the antidepressant Prozac can be found in the nation’s drinking water, it has been revealed.

An Environment Agency report suggests so many people are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and groundwater.

See also The Observer.

June 23, 2004

Mosquitos

Posted by Kieran

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times today about Elizabeth Willott’s work on mosquitos and the environmental ethics of wetland restoration. Elizabeth’s in the Entomology department at Arizona. Her other half is the philosopher Dave Schmidtz, and when Arizona were recruiting Laurie and me, we stayed with them. It was the middle of December. The first morning we were there, we picked a grapefruit from one of the trees in their yard and ate it for breakfast. This effective recruitment strategy is not often used by universities on the east coast, for some reason.

June 06, 2004

A question on the cost of nuclear power

Posted by John Quiggin

If you take the problem of climate change at all seriously, it’s obviously necessary to consider what, if any, role nuclear (fission) energy should play in a response. I discussed this on my blog not long ago and concluded that “it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.” However, on the basis of my rather limited survey of the evidence, I suggested that, as a source of electricity, nuclear energy is about twice as expensive as coal or gas. If so, conservation is the first choice, and we should only move to alternative sources of electricity when the easy conservation options are exhausted.

By contrast, Mark Kleiman says that “Nukes, if run right, are fully competitive with coal, and a hell of a lot cleaner”, Brad DeLong says “He’s 100% completely correct”, and Matt Yglesias takes a similar view.

Kleiman cites the example of France, which I don’t find entirely convincing, since the French have always given substantial subsidies to nuclear energy. He argues that the US made a mess of nuclear energy for regulatory reasons, but doesn’t say anything about the British experience, which didn’t have the same problems and was still an economic disaster. I’ve looked briefly at Canada’s CANDU program, where experience appears to be mixed at best.

Can anyone point me to a reliable source of comparative information on this? Is there general agreement, or a partisan divide between pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear advocates ? I’d also be interested in comments on the general question raised in my opening sentence.

June 04, 2004

Copenhagen Interpretation

Posted by John Quiggin

How would you rank the following priorities for making the planet a better place?

  • A major improvement in health in poor countries, saving millions of lives each year
  • Substantial progress in reducing the rate of climate change, preventing large-scale species extinctions and other environmental damage
  • New and improved advertisements for consumer goods

You don’t have to be Bjorn Lomborg to agree that, given the choice, improvements in health should get top priority. And you don’t have to be Vance Packard to think that the benefits of advertising, if they are positive at all, are trivial in relation to the first two choices.

In fact, however, countries in the developed world currently allocate about 1 per cent of its income to the advertising industry (this excludes the cost of the TV programs and so on financed out of advertising revenue), far more than to either development aid or climate change. The US, for example, spends about 0.1 per cent of GDP in development aid, and almost nothing on programs to mitigate climate change. If we were all prepared to watch the same old ads, instead of getting new ones every year, we would have enough money to finance either the proposals of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health or a climate change mitigation program substantially more ambitious than the Kyoto protocol.

The fact that we don’t raises a couple of issues. First, our priorities are seriously screwed. We should all be making more noise, more of the time, about the need to increase development aid, as well as personally giving more than we do to aid organisations. I don’t claim to be much better than anyone else in this respect, though I do try from time to time.

Second, comparisons of this kind are clearly tricky. Even if we all agree that too much is spent on advertising, there is no easy way, in a market or even mixed economy, of stopping firms spending money to promote their products, let alone of redirecting any savings to socially desirable ends. Similarly, and contrary to Lomborg’s implicit premise, there’s no easy way of making a trade-off in which we decide to do nothing about climate change and instead to spend the money on improving the health of the poor.

Third, given that high-priority needs are going unmet, it’s hard to reason properly about social costs and benefits. The Copenhagen Consensus exercise illustrates this. It’s quite reasonable to say that, given the choice, clean drinking water for the world’s poor should rank ahead of mitigating climate change. But is this the appropriate comparison? If Kyoto goes ahead, it won’t be financed out of aid budgets. In fact, to the extent that emissions trading is involved, poor countries will actually benefit. So the appropriate comparison is between mitigating climate change and maintaining higher levels of consumption (including the advertising that is part of that consumption) in the rich countries.

Assessing the cost-benefit issues here isn’t easy, and I doubt that the members of the Copenhagen panel have managed, in the course of five days looking at a whole range of issues, to come up with better answers than those that have been found so far. There’s no easy way of putting a monetary value on species extinctions, the loss of coral reefs and so on, and there are also tricky conceptual issues about discounting. I can only say that I would happily accept an income cut of 1 per cent if even half of the damage projected by the IPCC could be avoided (some warming is, of course, inevitable).

It would, of course, be reasonable for Lomborg, and others who’ve participated in the Copenhagen Consensus exercise to say that climate change is a second-order issue and that it is far more important to devote attention to AIDS and other health issues. Lomborg could start at home if he wanted to. Denmark has been one of the few countries in the world that gives 1 per cent of its income in development aid. But the same government that appointed Lomborg to run its Environmental Assessment Institute has also cut foreign aid repeatedly. Lomborg is a figure with a world profile who could certainly bring some pressure to bear to have this decision reversed. If I does so, I’ll be the first to cheer him on.

June 03, 2004

Copenhagen Consensus

Posted by John Quiggin
The results of the Copenhagen Consensus are out, and as predicted, that is, with climate change at the bottom of the list. I’ll give a more detailed response later on, but I thought I’d respond to this point in the Economist
The bottom of the list, however, aroused more in the way of hostile comment. Rated “bad”, meaning that costs were thought to exceed benefits, were all three of the schemes put before the panel for mitigating climate change, including the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. (The panel rated only one other policy bad: guest-worker programmes to promote immigration, which were frowned upon because they make it harder for migrants to assimilate.) This gave rise to suspicion in some quarters that the whole exercise had been rigged. Mr Lomborg is well-known, and widely reviled, for his opposition to Kyoto. These suspicions are in fact unfounded, as your correspondent (who sat in on the otherwise private discussions) can confirm. A less biddable group would be difficult to imagine.
On the contrary, as I suggested at the outset, a panel that included, say, Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen would have been considerably less biddable1, as well as being better qualified to look at the issues in question.

The panel did avoid some of the criticisms made here and elsewhere by excluding from the ranking issues like financial stability, civil conflicts and (with one trivial exception) governance. They compensated by subdividing the three health-related issues (diseases, malnutrition and sanitation) in the list into ten. (The other items ranked were trade liberalisation which, not surprisingly, they all liked, and migration which got mixed grades).

But the result, in a sense, only makes the process more transparent. The great majority of the approved items are now health initiatives. So, the outcome may be summarised as saying that health care in developing countries is more important than addressing climate change, which is, of course, the strongly stated view of the organiser, (The panel also agreed with Lomborg that the costs of doing anything about climate change exceed the benefits.) I’ll respond to the substantive findings in a later post, and when I’ve had time to look at any publication arising from the process.

However, the exercise could still be worthwhile. If Lomborg and the other panel members take the results to mean that they should personally campaign for action on the high-priority issues they mention, they could certainly do a lot of good. I’ll wait with interest to see if this happens.

1 To be boringly clear, I’m not suggesting that the panel was “biddable” in the sense of taking orders from Lomborg. Rather they were selected to be a likeminded group which would come up with the desired consensus.

May 25, 2004

A Green Thought in a Green Shade

Posted by Henry

I’m in Europe at the moment for research, and staying with friends in Brussels while I do academic interviews with political types. The place I’m in has a nice big back garden (property is relatively cheap here) which is periodically invaded by flocks of wild green parrots that have gone native. It’s delightful - a splash of the exotic in a notoriously unexotic city. Apparently though, many of the locals are unimpressed - the parrots build big, ugly communal nests resembling poorly built rafts that are a bit of an eyesore in winter, when the leaves drop off the trees. How the parrots themselves make it through the winter, I don’t know. According to the National Geographic, Brussels isn’t the only city in temperate climes to support a wild parrot population; there are thriving flocks in London, San Francisco and elsewhere.

May 24, 2004

Copenhagen Con ?

Posted by John Quiggin

I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.

There are however, two big difficulties.

The first is that the underlying idea is much trickier than it sounds at first sight. Suppose, for example, you come to the conclusion that malnutrition is a bigger problem than disease. That presumably doesn’t mean that you should cut health budgets to zero and spend all the money on food. Presumably, the implication is that, at the margin, it would be a good idea to redirect resources from general health to nutrition. But such a conclusion is inevitably going to be specific to particular countries, or even particular regions. How can a general conclusion be drawn?

The problem is even worse when you come to look at things like “conflicts” and “governance and corruption”. In what sense can you prioritise and rank improving governance and corruption or reducing conflict relative to malnutrition and disease. It ought to be obvious that these are not alternative expenditure items in a budget. Rather the effectiveness of anything you might want to do to reduce malnutrition and disease will be drastically undermined by the prevalence of conflict and corruption. Conversely, poverty and deprivation are natural sources of conflict and corruption. I don’t assert that this is an insoluble vicious circle, but I don’t think it’s amenable to being solved in a six-month, part-time exercise by ten people, no matter how brilliant.

The second big problem is the joker in the pack, climate change. Lomborg is well-known for making the argument that money spent on mitigating climate change would be better allocated to improving sanitation and providing clean drinking water, which just happens to be another of the ten challenges. (I’ve criticised Lomborg’s argument here). So there’s a natural suspicion that the whole exercise is designed to provide support for Lomborg’s position and that the idea of ranking development challenges in general is a cynical cover.

There are a couple of ways we could check on this. First, we could wait and see what the panel comes up with. If they reject the whole idea of ranking on the grounds I’ve set out above, I’ll be impressed and surprised. If climate change is ranked highly, or even if it ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack, and is not much discussed in the final analysis, I’ll admit that my concerns were baseless. To see the whole thing as a setup, two conditions would need to be met:

  • climate change would need to be at or near the bottom of the rankings
  • this finding would need to receive a lot of attention in the reporting of the results

It’s the second point that’s crucial in my view. Having seen a lot of top 10 lists in my time, the big interest is usually in the top two or three places and in arguments about whether the right winners were chosen. The also-rans rarely get much attention. So it would be surprising, in a legitimate exercise of this kind, if attention was focused on the bottom places.

For those who are too impatient to apply these checks, you could look at what Lomborg himself has to say. He certainly doesn’t seem to be in much doubt about the outcome.

May 07, 2004

Are high oil prices here to stay ?

Posted by John Quiggin

Paul Krugman has a piece on oil. This is as good a time as any to put up a long post I’ve been working on about oil and whether it’s finally going to run short, points on which I broadly agree with Krugman.

Will the oil run out ?

Oil is the paradigm example of an exhaustible resource (there’s a charming, but apparently false, belief that oil comes from decayed dinosaurs) Whenever the price of oil rises sharply then, it is natural to ask whether this is a mere market fluctuation or an indication of the impending exhaustion of the resource.

A couple of points of clarification are necessary before we come on to the main issues. First, the price of oil is typically quoted in $US/barrel, for some specific grade of oil such as West Texas light sweet crude. This need not be an accurate indicator of the cost of oil in general, because of variations in the purchasing power of the US dollar and because the relative prices of different types of oil fluctuate. The current upsurge in prices is due in part to the devaluation of the dollar against other major currencies and also in part to a particular shortage of the light grades of oil most suitable for producing petrol.

Second, oil will never simply ‘run out’. As the supply of any commodity declines, prices increase and, for relatively low-value uses, the costs exceed the benefits. Where they are available, low-cost substitutes become more attractive. Before the 1973 increase in prices, oil was commonly used as fuel in electricity generation and home heating. Following the increase in prices, most oil-fired power stations were converted to gas or coal. Where natural gas was readily available, the same was true of home heating. The relevant question then, is not whether oil will run out, but whether it will become so scarce as to be uneconomic in its main uses, the most important of which is as fuel for motor vehicles.

Jevons and Hubbert

Critics of predictions of resource exhaustion have plenty of history on their side. In the 19th century, the eminent economist W.S. Jevons predicted the imminent exhaustion of reserves of coal. He was wrong, as were a series of subsequent prophets of resource exhaustion, most notably Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome in the 1970s. Time after time, scarcity has been met by new discoveries and by improvements in resource technologies that have made it economic to extract resources from sources that were once considered valueless. In the case of oil, the estimate of ‘proven’ reserves in 1973 was 577 billion barrels. The Club of Rome pointed out that given projections of growing use, reserves would be exhausted by the 1990s. The economic slowdown from the 1970s onwards meant that the actual rate of growth was slower. Nevertheless, between 1973 and 1996, total usage was around 500 billion barrels. Yet at the end of the period, estimated reserves had actually grown to over 1000 billion barrels.

This is a pattern that has been repeated for many other commodities, and should give pause to any advocate of the exhaustion hypothesis. Nearly all the additional reserves came from upward revisions of estimates of reserves in existing fields. (This is seen by optimists as reflecting technological gains, allowing more secondary extraction, and by pessimists as reflecting a shift from conservatism to (excessive?) optimism in estimation procedures).

Believers in the exhaustion of oil reserves have some history on their side too. Their key exhibit is the Hubbert curve which is supposed to show that oil output from a field should peak about 25 years after discovery. If you buy this story, oil output should have passed its peak a year to two ago. The big success for the Hubbert curve was Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of the peak in US oil output around 1970.

The current period of high prices and short supply gives some support to advocates of the Hubbert Curve. The really striking events however, have been those relating to reserves. For the first time, downward revisions to estimated reserves have become commonplace. The Shell company has been the most notably affected so far, being forced to announce a series of downward revisions in estimated reserves, apparently because of problems with Nigerian fields. But there have also been suggestions of similar problems many other oil-producing countries, either because reserves have been overstated for political reasons, or because fields have been mismanaged.

Of course, some fields are still expanding. For example, new leases are being issued for deep water prospects in the Gulf of Mexico. But the very fact that such marginal prospects are being explored is an indicator that oil companies expect high prices to persist.

On balance, I think that current high prices are likely to persist and to rise over time.

What does it matter?

Oil looms large in many geopolitical discussions. While claims that the Iraq war was ‘all about oil’ are unduly conspiratorial, it seems clear that, if it were not for the presence of oil, the Middle East would not be a central focus of US foreign policy. The 1973 OPEC ‘oil shock’ (an embargo imposed in protest against US support for Israel, followed by a quadrupling of prices) was widely blamed for the stagflationary recession of the 1970s, and was seen as indicating the strategic vulnerability of the West to attacks on its supply of oil.

Most of this is and was an illusion. In reality, the oil shock was a consequence rather than a cause of the collapse of the postwar economic order based on the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. A central element of that system, the convertibility of the $US into gold at the fixed price of $3835/oz had been rendered unsustainable by inflation, and had been abandoned in the early 1970s, beginning with the Smithsonian agreement of 1971. Increases in the price of other commodities, including oil, were an inevitable consequence. The price of wool, for example, had doubled before anyone outside the oil industry heard of OPEC.

Similar points apply to the supposed vulnerability of the West to the cutting off of oil supplies. An embargo similar to that imposed by OPEC in 1973 might necessitate some form of rationing, but this is scarcely the ‘moral equivalent of war’. It makes no sense to maintain military preparations for a possibility that could be dealt with by reducing consumption.

Still the fact that such things make no sense doesn’t mean they won’t happen. Permanently high gasoline prices will be a big psychological shock for US consumers and could produce some irrational responses, such as a desire to invade Middle Eastern countries.

December 29, 2003

Uncertain science

Posted by Chris

Iain Murray has a column on global warming in the Washington Times . As is typical of the genre, the column employs very different epistemic standards when assessing the claims of scientists about climate change than it does when invoking the projections of enviro-sceptics about the economic consequences of Kyoto. Be that as it may, I thought the following sentence worthy of at least an honourable mention in any “It could have been in The Onion ” competition:

Moreover, the alleged increase in extreme weather events may simply be due to better reporting, as more people move to areas susceptible to such events.

October 07, 2003

Evidence (and global warming)

Posted by Chris

Suppose there are two possible states of the world, S1 and S2, and we don’t know which of the two states the world is in. An event E occurs which is consistent with the world being in either S1 or S2, but is more likely in S1 than it is in S2. We should surely say that, given E, the world is more likely to be in S1 than in S2, and that to that extent E (though consistent with both possible states) is evidence for the world’s being in S1.

Such evidence isn’t, of course, conclusive. After all, by hypothesis, E is consistent with both possible states. But evidence doesn’t need to be conclusive evidence to count as evidence.

That sensible view of what evidence is doesn’t appear to be shared by new enviroblogger Professor Philip Stott , whom I welcome to the blogosphere in the traditional way - by arguing with him.

Stott writes:

I have just been contemplating two recent polls on ‘global warming’. They are fascinating and unexpectedly consistent, though quite different questions. First, my ever-vigilent younger daughter has just let me have the position of a current poll on Discovery Europe (choose UK option):

Does global warming concern you?
No: 48%
A little: 12%
Very much: 39%
[As at this posting]

Secondly, here are the results of a poll held by The Scientific Alliance (see my Links):

Do you believe that this summer’s exceptionally hot temperatures were evidence of climate change?
Yes: 40%
No: 48%
May be: 12%

These are surprisingly mature results - public opinion might be changing.

I take it (by implication) that Stott believes that the 48 per cent who rejected the view that the exceptionally hot temperatures were evidence of climate change were giving the right answer. But surely they weren’t. No-one but a fool would think that Europe’s hot summer was conclusive evidence for climate change. But , as noted above, evidence can be evidence without being conclusive. Indeed it can be evidence even if it just raises our confidence in a proposition by a tiny degree. Europe’s summer should have made believers in climate change a bit more confident in their beliefs and should have made sceptics a bit less sceptical. Typically, that’s what evidence does.

September 19, 2003

Contingent valuation

Posted by Chris

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the second of a series of conferences with the title “Priority in Practice” which seek to bring political philosophers in contact with more gritty policy questions. It was good fun, there were some good papers and I learnt a fair bit. One of the interesting papers was by John O’Neill from Lancaster who discussed the controversial question of “contingent valuation”, which is a method by which researchers engaged in cost-benefit analysis attempt to establish a shadow value for some (usually environmental) good for which there is no genuine market price, by asking people what they’d be prepared to pay for it (or alternatively, and eliciting a very different set of answers, what they’d need to compensate them for its loss).

Naturally, people often react with fury or distaste to the suggestion that they assign a monetary value to something like the preservation of an ecosystem. They think that just isn’t an appropriate question and that it involves a transgression of the boundaries between different spheres of justice or value. John had a nice quote to show that researchers have been asking just this sort of question (and getting similar tetchy responses) for rather a long time:

Darius, after he had got the kingdom, called into his presence certain Greeks who were at hand, and asked- “What he should pay them to eat the bodies of their fathers when they died?” To which they answered, that there was no sum that would tempt them to do such a thing. He then sent for certain Indians, of the race called Callatians, men who eat their fathers, and asked them, while the Greeks stood by, and knew by the help of an interpreter all that was said - “What he should give them to burn the bodies of their fathers at their decease?” The Indians exclaimed aloud, and bade him forbear such language. (Herodotus, Histories , III).

September 08, 2003

Confusing the public about global warming

Posted by Chris

One can’t be a blogger for long before being reminded of the sad truth that people tend to believe information that is congenial to their interests and disbelieve that which isn’t. The blogosphere, and the internet more generally, provides people with a ready made source of prejudice-confirming information. There’s a ready-made market then for sites like TechCentralStation that have the convenient look of authoritative sources but are actually largely written by bloggers of a libertarian and/or conservative cast of mind to provide easy, prejudice-congenial op-ed-like material.

I spent some time looking at TCS’s global warming pages at the weekend. These are largely devoted to debunking the view held by the majority of expert opinion that CO2 emissions have contributed substantially to global warming. It would, after all, be pretty convenient if conventional opinion turned out to be mistaken: I haven’t done a survey but I’d be willing to wager that an average member of TCS’s core demographic emits rather more carbon than typical human beings do.

Still, asking “cui bono?” falls short of being an argument. And I’m not a scientist anyway, just a concerned member of the public. I try to make up my mind on the issue by reading the papers and magazines, watching the TV, and so on (like pretty much everyone else). Mostly, I think that the conventional view is probably right, but sometimes I can be shaken into thinking that maybe no-one has good reason to think any particular thing on this subject.

When I’ve been thus shaken into a state of epistemic indifference, I also, naturally, become less supportive of pollution-limiting initiatives. Even if the anti-greens haven’t won the argument at that point, they’ve achieved a good part of their purpose as lobbyists.

One TCS column that caught my eye was one Here Comes the Sun by Lorne Gunter a Canadian newspaper columnist. The supporting text to the link to Gunter’s article reads “Global warming is caused by the SUN, not SUVs.” In the body of the piece Gunter refers to research by a Canadian geologist (Jan Veizer) and an Israeli astrophysicist (Nir Shaviv). Now I’m neither an astrophysicist nor a geologist, but that sure sounds impressive. Here’s Gunter’s take on their conclusion:

far from being a manmade disaster, the warming we have experienced to date is entirely natural [emphasis added].

Good blogger that I am, my first move in investigating further was to feed “Shaviv” and “Veizer” into Google. 314 hits, but rather a lot of them (21 in all) were to material by Gunter - often the same syndicated article. A further 8 hits were to Gunter’s TCS colleague Kenneth Silber. Gunter’s pieces, published by organizations like fathersforlife.org are often accompanied by headlines like this:

Cosmic ray flux zaps pro-Kyoto types: New study puts paid to overheated theories on climate change

But one thing Google did enable me to do was to find Nir Shaviv’s own summary of his research. What is Shaviv’s own view?

Some of the global warming is still because of us humans (probably about 1/3 to 1/2 of the warming).

Now a half to a third is quite a lot, especially when we are talking about a phenomenon that may have significant threshold effects. If I’m up to my neck in water and you raise the level by a further foot, it is no good telling me that your so raising it only added 10%! But this finding, by the very global warming iconoclast he’s drawing on, doesn’t get a mention in Gunter’s piece. The closest he gets to acknowledging it is to say “Shaviv worries anthropogenic CO2 may have some fractional effect.” 1/2 is a pretty big fraction. Presumably drawing attention to what the scientist actually says would detract from the purpose of the article: to provide comfort to SUV owners and energy interests.

July 25, 2003

Orwell on food technology and modernity

Posted by Chris

I posted a pointed to to a moderately pro-GM report the other day. But in the comments section I got pretty revolted by the suggestion that one day we might synthesize all our food. As I said there, I want my potatoes from the earth and my apples from a tree. I don’t think there’s anything especially “green” about feeling this and I’m somewhat embarassed, as someone who is supposed to live by good arguments, by how hard I find it to get beyond the raw data of feeling, intuition and emotion when I try to think about what is of value.

The best I can do, is, I think to notice how much of that is of value in human life has to do with an engagement with the natural world and a recognition of the uniqueness and (sorry about this word) the ‘otherness’ of the world beyond the human. I’m not just thinking about raw untamed nature here (Lear on the heath) but also about the way in which an artist has to work with the natural properties of pigments, a gardener has to work with plants and their distinctive characteristics, and a cook has to work with ingredients. Architects too have to work with materials, with stone, wood and so on.

Contrast this with an attitude that sees the non-human world as merely an instrument for or an obstacle to the realization of human designs and intentions. On this view what is out there has no intrinsic value that we ought to respond to and respect. (And perhaps when we think that it does, we are just engaged in a projection of our concerns onto the world.)

As I’ve suggested, I’m not really sure how to think in this area (is this ethics, aesthetics or what?). And I’m alive to the danger that I’m running together a whole range of different issues that ought, properly, to be distinguished from one another. While worrying about all this, Orwell came into my head. I’m thinking partly of the Orwell of The Road to Wigan Pier who is revolted at technology-freak socialists of his day and who observes that the tendency of of modern development is to turn us all into brains on the end of wires. But a famous passage from Coming Up for Air also came to mind: the one where Bowling bites into a sausage:

The frankfurter had a rubber skin, of course, and my temporary teeth weren’t much of a fit. I had to do a kind of sawing movement before I could get my teeth through the skin. And then suddenly—pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was FISH! A sausage, a thing calling itself a frankfurter, filled with fish! I got up and walked straight out without touching my coffee. God knows what that might have tasted of.

Outside the newsboy shoved the Standard into my face and yelled, ‘Legs! ‘Orrible revelations! All the winners! Legs! Legs!’ I was still rolling the stuff round my tongue, wondering where I could spit it out. I remembered a bit I’d read in the paper somewhere about these food-factories in Germany where everything’s made out of something else. Ersatz, they call it. I remembered reading that THEY were making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different. It gave me the feeling that I’d bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of. That’s the way we’re going nowadays. Everything slick and streamlined, everything made out of something else. Celluloid, rubber, chromium-steel everywhere, arc-lamps blazing all night, glass roofs over your head, radios all playing the same tune, no vegetation left, everything cemented over, mock-turtles grazing under the neutral fruit-trees. But when you come down to brass tacks and get your teeth into something solid, a sausage for instance, that’s what you get. Rotten fish in a rubber skin. Bombs of filth bursting inside your mouth.

The attitudes Orwell’s character is repelled by are now found less on the left and more in parts of the right (especially the libertarian right). TechCentralStation is a good place to observe them. But this clearly isn’t a left-right thing. Nor is it straightforwardly a matter of modernism versus anti-modernism. I also want to be alive to and to respond to the excitement and fluidity of the modern world - driven, in parts by markets and technological developement. Nevertheless, Orwell (together here with Rousseau, and Wordsworth, and …) is onto something important, I just wish I could better articulate exactly what it is.