Sweden’s Expressen newspaper is now going to publish daily CO2 levels in the atmosphere

A little-known Swedish teenager writes Sweden’s Expressen newspaper are now going to publish daily CO2 levels in the atmosphere “due to climate emergency”!! Very hopeful! Who will be the next to follow? An even less well known English greybeard replies That's gonna be pretty dull. They don't change much day-to-day. A more hopeful colonial inquires Can they take it to hundredths of ppm or something or are there detector limits or noise overwhelming signal problems? And this is a reasonable question.

So: "reporting" on day-to-day global CO2 levels is silly, because they don't change much day to day. Indeed, the annual round of There is more CO2 in the atmosphere today than any point since the evolution of humans is dull too. CO2 is increasing, at about 2.5 ppm per year, but there's a seasonal cycle of about 4 ppm, so there's a peak every year, at which point the "news" that there's a new peak is breathlessly released. And if you were to report, daily, the global average, you'd be reporting declining CO2 levels for maybe a third of the year, which is probably not what the "climate emergency" folk want to see. But can you rescue the interest by reporting the measurements to hundredths of ppm? I don't think so.

Those global measurements are of course made up of lots of little individual measurements and the pretty graph shows how those typically vary by latitude. So, it's kinda like global temperature measurements, which are also going up but which also have a seasonal cycle and spatial variation; and the accuracy of the global average is better than the accuracy of the individual measurements.

Finally, you can look at individual measurements like the Keeling ones at Mauna Loa, and you see how they vary during the day. And you notice that the daily average is very much not the average of the hourly average. If that makes you think "aha! Gotcha you lying scientists can't even do averages properly" then you need to read Dumb America; which will lead you to Eli if you want more detail and How we measure background CO2 levels on Mauna Loa for even more excruciating detail.

Refs

* EXTINCTION REBELLION THREATENS UNDEAD LANGUAGES
* How confident are you about confidence intervals? - Quiz

Rearranging deckchairs defo the right thing to be doing now

As I said to that nice Richard Betts. Context: Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment From now, house style guide recommends terms such as ‘climate crisis’ and ‘global heating’. Or you may prefer RS's take.

Update: ATTP notes something I should have mentioned," suggesting using climate science denier instead of climate sceptic". This is fair enough, for the majority of the denialists who simply are; be cautious about labelling the less committed as such.

Refs

* Peter Gabriel - FAMILY SNAPSHOT (Melt)
* The Style Guide at the End of the World - citizen joe smith
* Antitrust’s Sordid History by Donald J. Boudreaux
* ASPIRING CLIMATE REFUGEES CROWD EVEREST SUMMIT - RS

There are two sorts of people in the world...

...those who divide the people of the world up into two sorts, and those who don't. I'm one of the latter :-), Tamino it would appear is one of the former:

When it comes to man-made climate change, there are two kinds of people: those who take it seriously enough, and those who don’t. Joe Biden says he has a climate plan, but everything I hear about it (from both Joe and his opponents) leads me to believe he’s in the second group: he doesn’t take it seriously enough. Not even close. Anyone who claims we can deal with the problem but avoid a “radical transformation of the economy” is a fool...

So that leaves poor old Joe Biden, me, Donald Trump and Antony Watts in the second group, whilst the Pure of Heart stand proud in the first group. This reminds me of something I'm actually able to find, just for once: Oedipus Tex, and other Choral Calamities. And to spell out the obvious: when it comes to man-made climate change, there are many kinds of people. One group of people - distinct from Trump and Watts and Tamino - are those including me who "believe in" GW but think the GND is not just stupid but would in the unlikely event of it being imposed be actively harmful; and at best a pointless distraction.

And, no. I'm not teaching you how to think for yourself, or even offering to.

Refs

* The Guardian view on a Green New Deal: we need it now - Editorial
* Trump Calls The Majority Who Voted Against Him Enemies And Losers In New Year’s Message?
* Partisanship is no substitute for values - Rich Puchalsky

* Zombies: The Movie- lesswrong
* Why is carbon pricing in some countries more successful than in others?
* The end of the great "Peter Ridd seemed comfortable" twit storm.
* The Alan Parsons Project - Nothing Left to Lose
* Science Alone Will Not Create Prosperity - by Donald J. Boudreaux
* The Green New Deal And A Universal Basic Income - TF - I disagree with most of it :-)
* History and Character in Time of Trial - Fergus M. Bordewich - August 26th, 2017
* Shifting the Overton window - ATTP has a different way of looking at GND and ER

IMF working paper 2019: Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates

I think this is going to turn into an update to Fossil fuels subsidised by $10m a minute, says IMF? from 2015. The report (WP/19/89) itself is available from here. We read:

This paper updates estimates of fossil fuel subsidies, defined as fuel consumption times the  gap between existing and efficient prices (i.e., prices warranted by supply costs, environmental costs, and revenue considerations), for 191 countries. Globally, subsidies remained large at $4.7 trillion (6.3 percent of global GDP) in 2015 and are projected at $5.2 trillion (6.5 percent of GDP) in 2017. The largest subsidizers in 2015 were China ($1.4 trillion), United States ($649 billion), Russia ($551 billion), European Union ($289 billion), and India ($209 billion). About three quarters of global subsidies are due to domestic factors—energy pricing reform thus remains largely in countries’ own national interest—while coal and petroleum together account for 85 percent of global subsidies. Efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 percent, and increased government revenue by 3.8 percent of GDP.

So that's nice - they have told us what they mean by "subsidy". Now I look, the previous report (WP/15/105) has much the same authors but a somewhat different abstract; my quibbles from before about what should "really" count as a subsidy remain. As before the "implicit" subsidies are much larger than the "explicit" ones. Let's look at one of their pictures, to try to make this clearer.

The pic tries to compare existing and efficient prices across the world for coal. One obvious puzzle is that the retail price (yellow circles) is near constant. Coal is globally trafficked, but that degree of constancy seems weird. GW is accounted for (red) at $40 per tonne. And for coal, the rest is local pollution. Some of this makes sense - presumably the Ukrainians burn bad coal badly in densely populated areas; ditto Thailand, China, Russia. The very low values for Mexico, Tanzania and Ethiopia are harder to understand. World-averaged, their calculations are that about 2/3 of coal "subsidies" are local pollution, and 1/3 GW.

Maybe looking at petrol will make things clearer. We see now what we already knew, that retail prices vary wildly. But we see something else that we probably didn't realise, that part of the implicit subsidy for petrol is "accidents". Another quite large one is congestion. Leading to the apparently bizarre conclusion that a country could potentially reduce it's fossil fuel subsidies by building more roads. Wait, what?

In a very few (basket) cases retail cost is less than supply cost, and these are the usual suspects: Saudi Arabia, Iran. These are unquestionably subsidies. Glboally, about 2/5 of petrol "subsidy" is local pollution; 2/5 other local factors; and the rest a mix.

So there you have it. This is of course not an IMF official document merely a working paper, but that won't stop people saying The IMF — no enemy of business — estimates that globally fossil fuels, which poison our future, are being subsidized $5.2 TRILLION annually...

Incidentally, I have no objection at all to their defining a quantity that is "the  gap between existing and efficient prices (i.e., prices warranted by supply costs, environmental costs, and revenue considerations)". That seems like a useful quantity; I'm just doubtful that the bare word "subsidy" is a useful shorthand for that quantity.

Refs

* Why is carbon pricing in some countries more successful than in others? by Franziska Funke and Linus Mattauch
* The Hidden Subsidy of Fossil Fuels - A new report says that the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion in just one year. But that calculation is less tidy than it seems -  by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic.
* Walmart Bullied by Government, or Was It? by Pierre Lemieux
* What Can A Research-Minded Metal Detectorist Do In Sweden? Aardvarchaeology – by Dr. Martin Rundkvist

UK Parliament declares climate change emergency?

UK Parliament declares climate change emergency, Aunty tells me. The only hint the Beeb gives that they think this is all posturing is subtle: they don't bother tell you what was in the motion, or bother link to it. The Graun, who are perhaps less aware, say The motion called for the declaration of a climate emergency and urgent remedial action such as a green industrial revolution as well as changes to transport, agriculture and other areas; but again, can't be arsed to link to the motion itself. But I care deeply - well, it is unfair to mock it without reading it - and so found:

That this House declares an environment and climate emergency following the finding of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change that to avoid a more than 1.5°C rise in global warming, global emissions would need to fall by around 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero by around 2050; recognises the devastating impact that volatile and extreme weather will have on UK food production, water availability, public health and through flooding and wildfire damage; notes that the UK is currently missing almost all of its biodiversity targets, with an alarming trend in species decline, and that cuts of 50 per cent to the funding of Natural England are counterproductive to tackling those problems; calls on the Government to increase the ambition of the UK’s climate change targets under the Climate Change Act 2008 to achieve net zero emissions before 2050, to increase support for and set ambitious, short-term targets for the roll-out of renewable and low carbon energy and transport, and to move swiftly to capture economic opportunities and green jobs in the low carbon economy while managing risks for workers and communities currently reliant on carbon intensive sectors; and further calls on the Government to lay before the House within the next six months urgent proposals to restore the UK’s natural environment and to deliver a circular, zero waste economy.

Meh. Dull and wrong-headed. No mention of a carbon tax, but this is command-and-control Corbyn, so that's hardly surprising. Note the while managing risks for workers and communities currently reliant on carbon intensive sectors which is the kind of special pleading that should be firmly squashed.

As if to prove that the pols are uselss for anything but squabbling, amendment b adds some irrelevant hobby-horsing about Brexit, and another pile of useless words. Amendment a is just dull.

Still, on the plus side, this satisfies the first demand of the Extinction Rebellion folks, so they can be well satisfied with their excellent progress. Or does "Tell the truth: Government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change" mean they want the govt do do something? Maybe they aren't so happy after all. FWIW, I would say that on "tell the truth" they have nothing to complain about: the govt - as pretty well all Western govts - is straight down the IPCC line, perhaps even ahead of it; just read their gumpf.

Refs

* Idea: To The Reader of these Sonnets by Michael Drayton - TF
* Bowties considered inappropriate? Update! AOC insults Rossiter!
* Would you like to read something more positive? Try We can't save the planet with half measures. We need to go all the way by Varshini "who he?" Prakash in the Graun
* Warren Buffett’s Case for Capitalism
* Sorry, Emma Thompson, but you’ll never be perfect enough to save the planet - by Zoe Williams. Grauniad luvvie who cares deeply but wants to continue to fly defends other luvvie ditto.
* An Economy Is Neither a Family Nor a Firm; It Is a Catallaxy

Melting permafrost in Arctic will have $70tn climate impact?

Or so claims the Graun. Being totally shit journos they don't even include a link to the paper that is their source, but the answer is Climate policy implications of nonlinear decline of Arctic land permafrost and other cryosphere elements by Dmitry Yumashev et al., Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 1900 (2019). They also don't link to the press release, where we discover that Carbon released into the atmosphere by the increasing loss of Arctic permafrost, combined with higher solar absorption by the Earth’s surface due to the melting of sea ice and land snow, will accelerate climate change – and have a multi-trillion dollar impact on the world economy. A new paper in Nature Communications reveals a combination of these factors has the potential to increase the long-term economic impact of climate change by just under $70 trillion, under mitigation levels consistent with current national pledges to cut carbon emissions (5% of the estimated total cost of climate change for this scenario). Nothing here is terribly surprising, except the $70T. In particular, the roundabout +5% makes it a fairly small effect well within the error margins of other parts: CO2 emissions, ECS, discount rate assumed, whatever.

But $70T is a surprisingly large number to me, in view of stuff like 500,000,000,000 is a small number. This turns out to be The NPV of the total economic effect of climate change, denoted as C_NPV, consists of mitigation costs, adaptation costs and climate-related economic impacts aggregated until 2300 and discounted using equity weighting and a pure time preference rate. So, OK, it's total not annual, OK, that probably makes sense. But then it becomes unexciting.

Refs

* Climate change could kill over 500,000 people per year by 2030?
* GDP impartially consider'd
* 4th National Climate Assessment report: Labour
* You Have No Right to Your Culture by Bryan Caplan
* Inequality is decreasing between countries—but climate change is slowing progress - NatGeo
* Dalmia's Almost Great Idea on Sanctuary Cities by David Henderson
* Live and Let Live by Pierre Lemieux (Hayek: The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on concrete common aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made; PL: The more politics expands beyond this basic level, the less agreement there can be and the more confrontation there must be. In other words, the more politics there is, the less manageable it become)
* Rejoinder to Moller on Immigration by Bryan Caplan

Carbontaxwatch: Edenhofer, tax, trading, obligations, gilets, FFF

Another note in the long Carbon Tax wars. This is Otmar "director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research" Edenhofer in conversation with Sarah Zerback. Since it is in foreign, I have ripped off helpfully included the Google translation below, so I know what I'm responding to.

So it's nice to see "even 20 euros brings something". In true perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good style, some people argue for implausibly high levels of carbon price, which is just going to get it thrown out. I think there's a lot to be said for just having an explicit carbon tax, getting people used to it, and worrying about increasing it later¹. I don't see him explicitly pointing this out, though. Notice though that the interviewer is pretty keen on getting details of the price and returns to the subject. The other nice part is that he's noticed the Skolstrejk för klimatet² vs the "Gilets Jaunes" tension and observes - correctly -  that the Sfk stuff is an opportunity: because it is, perhaps, and indication visible to pols that the public is finally willing to make some hard choices.

Less good is his equivocation about carbon tax vs trading systems. He's probably a bit stuck because he isn't allowed to say that the ETS is stupid. But he goes further than that, suggesting the possibility of introduc[ing] a separate emissions trading system for these three sectors, transport, agriculture and heat, to which my response would be FFS not another bloody boondoggle, haven't you learnt anything in all these years? He also wurbles about sector-specific targets at national level, which is also stupid.

Quasi-interesting is the role of "European obligations": We are in a completely different debate. We have European obligations, and all Member States of the European Union have these obligations. Those who fail to comply with these obligations must buy certificates from other countries, and not voluntarily, but this is simply a sanction imposed by the European level on each Member State. He doesn't talk about how binding those obligations might be, if things get tough.

Notes

1. Of course those opposed to a carbon tax are fully aware of this cunning plan, and will tell people that it is just the thin end of the wedge, but there's no point in making their job easy.

2. He - or the Googly translate - uses "Fridays for Future" but I'm guessing it is much the same.

The text

New debate on CO2 tax"Even 20 euros bring something"

The climate researcher Otmar Edenhofer supports the initiative of Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze to raise a CO2 price on gasoline, diesel, heating oil or natural gas. Unlike in the 1990s, he believes that a CO2 tax is enforceable this time. One reason for this: European legal obligations.

Otmar Edenhofer in conversation with Sarah Zerback

Sarah Zerback: I now greet Otmar Edenhofer, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, on the telephone. Good day, Mr. Edenhofer!

Otmar Edenhofer: Hello!

Zerback: You've been pleading for a carbon tax for a long time now. Did the "Fridays for Future" demos only have to come, so that new momentum comes into an old idea?

Edenhofer: Yes. This movement was extremely significant, because a few months ago, when you said CO2 price, then one has been countered by the policy, we want to prevent the yellow vests in Germany. Now there is a new movement that says we want carbon pricing. It does not necessarily have to be a tax, it can also raise CO2 prices differently, but that is indeed giving new impetus to the political debate, which is urgently needed.

Zerback: And above all, there is debate about how expensive the whole thing should be now. What's your suggestion, how expensive, if it was a tax, how expensive should that be?

Edenhofer: First of all, you have to see that we have tasks in two areas. One is the electricity sector and the industrial sector, which is under European emissions trading, and there Christoph Schmidt and I have suggested that there is a minimum price, which now starts at 20 and is expected to grow to 35 euros by 2030.

Now there is a second area, and in this second area - which is poorly understood - we have European obligations, and if we fail to meet these European legal obligations in the agricultural, heating and transport sectors we may have to pay high penalties to the other states Afford. Now begins the dispute, how can the government this price signal, which after 2021 will be yes in Europe, how can this be translated now at the national level.

In the climate protection law one says yes, that should then make the individual ministries. That does not seem to me to be such a good idea, because the Transport Minister has many options to avoid. He can make meaningful spending cuts in his budget.

What matters now is that citizens - motorists who invest in new heat pumps, even in the agricultural sector - should have the incentive to save CO2 and other greenhouse gases. There are basically two ways you could do that. So you could charge a carbon price, a carbon tax for these sectors - that would be an option. But the other possibility would be to introduce a separate emissions trading system for these three sectors, transport, agriculture and heat, and then ensure that the quantity targets that we have been imposed by the European level are actually met. That's what the argument is about.

Order of magnitude for CO2 price still has to be calculated

Zerback: Thank you, that you have in the complexity above all else again aufgedröselt. Let's go into the details again. The President of the Bundestag Wolfgang Schäuble, who says that no matter whether tax or certificates are more expensive, this goes in the same direction. Let's talk about the altitude again. So you say 20 euros now. We have just heard it in the report again. There are others who say that we need at least 50 euros, otherwise it will not help at all.

Edenhofer:First of all, if 20 euros does not bring anything, that's not true. Of course, bring 20 euros already something. We see this in the empirical investigations that this also already reduces the emissions. The key question is, will emissions go down as it is compatible with European obligations, and we do not know exactly how high the price has to be, and therefore it would be reasonable to think about an emissions trading scheme, because then there can control the amount. Then you can set a minimum price that is on this scale. You start at 20, grow up to 35, maybe 50 Euro. Where exactly the orders of magnitude are, we are still in the process of calculating that. If the price rises too much,

Essentially, it will be a question of defining such a price corridor, and this price corridor, where it is now, we are in the process of calculating that and giving more precise information. I'm not going to comment on that right now because we're just doing the research.

"We are in a completely different debate"

Zerback: Yes, the question is really whether national measures bring anything. I'm wondering if you might feel personally reminded of the '90s. Since there was ever the push to tax CO2, as a tax on it to introduce. That is because then failed because it needs unanimity in the EU. So you still see this danger?

Edenhofer: No, I do not see that at all. We are in a completely different debate. We have European obligations, and all Member States of the European Union have these obligations. Those who fail to comply with these obligations must buy certificates from other countries, and not voluntarily, but this is simply a sanction imposed by the European level on each Member State.

It's not about the question of whether we want to formulate our own goals now. From my point of view, one can discuss the national sector targets cheaply, one can make it more flexible where I would be, but there is no way around European law obligations. This has nothing to do with whether there are any majority principles in the European Union, whether a tax is enforceable. We have these national commitments, and any proposal that is to be taken seriously must show that we can actually comply with this European law obligation with this proposal.

Sector-specific savings targets conceivable at national level

Zerback: Nevertheless, the CDU was so far always against it. Now there are voices that join the proposal of the Federal Environment Minister yes. Do you share the worries of Svenja Schulze, that perhaps there is a calculus to avoid other savings targets?

Edenhofer: I think that if you want to introduce a CO2 price that is so low that the savings targets can not be achieved at the European level, that is a suggestion that makes no sense. This is an obvious calculation, and this calculation will quickly hit the wall, because these proposals do not continue. It is only the suggestions that ultimately lead us to say that, after 2021, we are actually actually achieving the emission reduction targets in agriculture, the transport sector and the heating market.

The only dispute we can make is whether we need sector-specific targets at national level in addition to these European goals. I think we would be well advised to allow great flexibility at national level here.

Statements by our interlocutors reflect their own views. Deutschlandfunk does not embrace the statements of its interlocutors in interviews and discussions.

ECS is 5 oC?

So, it would appear, CMIP6 first results show¹. This appears a touch implausible to me, and is waay out of line with previous results from CMIP5, as the figure shows, and in comparison with for example ATTP's nice Bayesian analysis of no great vintage, or the long-established consensus for 3 oC. Which models are where can be found in the twitter thread of from here, if you're interested. I await with bated breath James's and RealClimate's analysis, so that I know what to think.

Refs

* Climate sensitivity is 5.3C? - JA from 2016
* If you want some arguments against 5 oC, you could read La Curry; I don't particularly recommend it though, which is why I haven't.
* So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.

Notes

1. I don't see a mean or anything, I've just eyeballed it, the mode is clearly the [5, 5.5) bucket but the mean is perhaps around 4.5.


I feel I shouldn't be totally ignoring Anthony Watts joining Heartland, so here's an image (see-also weasels ripped my flesh):

L'affaire Peter Ridd, part 2

So the puzzle posed in part 1 is resolved: it turns out that Peter Ridd is a a Good Colonial whose academic freedom has been trampled on². The Graun has the story. Unsurprisingly the Forces of Darkness are happy¹. The Graun doesn't go into the full gory quotes from the man in a wig, contenting themselves with the university has ‘played the man and not the ball’; but there's more, much much more (including the immeadiately following Incredibly, the University has not understood the whole concept of intellectual freedom which for some inexplicable reason the Graun doesn't consider noteworthy). Let's begin with the main message:

The Court rules that the 17 findings made by the University, the two speech directions, the five confidentiality directions, the no satire direction, the censure and the final censure given by the University and the termination of employment of Professor Ridd by the University were all unlawful. 

No bones thrown to the university at all. And there are some good words on intellectual freedom:

the mission of these institutions must undoubtedly be the search for knowledge which leads to a quest for truth. In reality, intellectual freedom is the cornerstone of this core mission of all institutions of higher learning. This is so because it allows ideas to conflict with each other; to battle and test each other. It is within this “battle” that the strengths and weaknesses of ideas are found out. In this process, there comes “learning”. And with learning comes discovery. At its core, intellectual freedom mandates that academics should express their opinions openly and honestly, while inviting scrutiny and debate about those ideas. Unless opinions are expressed in this way, the growth and expression of ideas will be stifled and new realms of thinking will cease to be explored. That will lead to intellectual and social stagnation and a uniformity of thought which is an anathema to the concept of higher learning and social progress.  Intellectual freedom allows academics to challenge the status quo and encourage critical analysis.

Later on we discover that The hypocrisy [of the university] is breathtaking. And During the course of the trial, I repeatedly asked Counsel for the University to tell me what the conflict of interest actually was. Try as he might, Counsel was unable to do so. Yet he would not concede that this finding was not justified. So in some ways this is a great victory over the faceless bureaucrats. Let's hope some of them are sacked for this.

Notes

1. And selling it as a huge victory for climate skeptics everywhere, which of course it isn't; indeed it has little to do with climate directly, though it is connected to impacts.

2. I think this is essentially the correct verdict. I still don't quite care for the company he keeps, but that's a different matter.

Refs

* Paris in October

The Great Miscalculator

There's a niceish article The Great Miscalculator by Arnold Kling, mostly about markets. But I think:

When a firm's costs are dominated by overhead, price discrimination becomes an attractive strategy, even a necessity. The airline will try to attract price-sensitive customers with a low price while charging a higher price to those customers who are more committed to flying at a particular time rather than searching for a bargain... This also complicates the problem of treating ordinary market failures. For example, suppose that the government wishes to use a tax on airline fuel as a tool to get passengers to internalize the pollution cost of flying. If the airline allocates this additional cost to price-insensitive passengers and leaves its discounts for price-sensitive passengers in place, then the total air miles flown may remain approximately unchanged in response to the tax

is wrong. Because he has done the usual confusion of two different things. The thing that doesn't happen - in this particular scenario - is the that total air miles flown [remains] approximately unchanged. And indeed, many or most people would regard that as a failure of the policy. But that wasn't what he started with: that was use a tax on airline fuel as a tool to get passengers to internalize the pollution cost of flying. That has happened. However - because of the somewhat artificial construction of the example - although the price has been internalised the amount of goods consumed doesn't change, because the customers are assumed to be price-insensitive. But that's kinda OK: the point of the tax is to make people pay the full cost of their choices. If, knowing the full cost, they still choose to buy, then they've chosen rationally.

On a completely different note, he tries to point out that chance - contingency - is important. And it probably is. But he over-eggs it:

The evolution of business practices and industry structure can seem inevitable in hindsight. But this is misleading. The personal-computer industry is famous for the role of start-ups, including Apple, Microsoft, and Dell. But with slightly different business decisions, it could instead have been the province of Xerox and IBM.

We don't know if this is true or not. We can certainly see, now, that IBM could have been placed to make decisions that would have squelched Micro$oft. But was it actually placed to make those decisions? Quite probably not, even if you jiggle the starting conditions somewhat. Even with contingency, some structural constraints persist.

Refs

* Book review: the Raven Tower
* Brexit: Governing Ourselves by Pierre Lemieux

Can Law Save Us From Climate Change?

No. Because it isn't against the law. However calltothebar.org would have it otherwise, writing:

On April 18, 2019, a group of leading lawyers and law professors will convene in person at locations across the United States to discuss the problem of climate change and the role of lawyers in advancing solutions. The locations will all be linked by live video/audio feeds. This is the third year in a row for this national conference on this important subject. This year’s conference will feature leading experts addressing the most important aspects of the climate crisis from a legal perspective. The conference will also address ways in which lawyers can work to make a difference on this subject of grave concern to our well-being and future.

Much of their petition is sane: recognition of GW-as-science¹ and calling for carbon pricing. Their arguments for why lawyers-in-particular should be involved are weak, but never mind, they're a bunch of lawyers and can be expected to think that they're important. The bit that I'm less happy with is

Protecting society from harm is the most fundamental purpose of law and government. Faced with clear evidence of impending harm, we as citizens and lawyers have a duty to speak out on the need for effective government action to protect humans now alive and those to be born. We have no right to knowingly continue to inflict severe damage to the planetary ecosystem that sustains all life. To the contrary, we have a duty to protect it.

Why would anyone object to that motherhood-and-apple-pie type stuff? Because as usual, as ever, as always when people talk about this stuff there's the dangerous sliding of words. GW does indeed risk harm to society. But then again, burning fossil fuels provides good to society. That's why people do it, after all. How do you balance the harm and the good? Ah, now we're back to the real problem.

And the problem of balancing harm and good isn't obviously one that is well suited to the all-or-nothing of a courtroom. Lawyers can be rather one-sided. To quote a well-known Alsup:

The benefits of fossil fuels are worldwide. The problem deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case. While it remains true that our federal courts have authority to fashion common law remedies for claims based on global warming, courts must also respect and defer to the other co-equal branches of government when the problem at hand clearly deserves a solution best addressed by those branches. The Court will stay its hand in favor of solutions by the legislative and executive branches.

Notes

1. And they get credit for using videoconferencing, too.

Refs

* Economics, Law and Ethics
* Skolstrejk för klimatet
* The Climate Wars Can Get Rough At Times
* Global warming and common law

* And stuff like The destruction of the Earth is a crime. It should be prosecuted by George Monbiot doesn't work

Top oil firms spending millions lobbying to block climate change policies?

The largest five stock market listed oil and gas companies spend nearly $200m (£153m) a year lobbying to delay, control or block policies to tackle climate change, according to a new report, the Graun breathlessly tells us. Can it be true? Exxon is pegged at $40+M, and yet Exxon total lobbying spend per year is around $11M, according to OpenSecrets. How do we reconcile these numbers?

I think that The five publicly listed oil majors – ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP and Total – now spend about $195m a year on branding campaigns suggesting they support action against climate change doesn't help. That's not the same spending as above. However, any just accounting would have to count it towards the "good" side, since it's essentially a positive message re GW. Naturally, the report doesn't count it as such.

To find out more we're going to have to download the bloody report, which creepily requires you to register, these people are friends of the surveillance state. And then, worse, we're going to have to read it. And you know what? It's some kind of shit-for-brains cut-n-paste protected thing too, the scum. Well, don't expect too many quotes then.

Page 10 tells us Exxon's climate lobbying is ~$41M per year, again making no effort to reconcile that to the total $11M figure. But they may be counting social media and advertising as "lobbying". Lots of the report is the traditional I-don't-like-oil-companies stuff; by which I mean the authors struggle - or rather, don't struggle - to stay on topic, and wander off.

So by the time we get to the end of the conclusions, no details of the composition of the numbers have emerged. We need to go into the depths of the Appendix, it seems. But no, that doesn't help either. The appendix has no real data, just a methodology. So it's impossible to tell quite where they've gone wrong, or what they've made up.

[Late addition: pic from the Economist, Lobbying in Donald Trump’s Washington.]

Refs

* Banks Funneled $1.9 Trillion Into Fossil Fuels Since Paris Agreement - endorsed by the sainted Greta no less.
* Paasche Says Progress by Bryan Caplan
* There are some more numbers at https://climateinvestigations.org/trade-association-pr-spending/

Skolstrejk för klimatet

Trigger warning: negativity. If you want to think happy thoughts, go elsewhere.

People say things like "Yesterday, I went to witness the local #ClimateStrike. I found the energy and enthusiasm of these young people very encouraging.  It gives me hope for the future". And that's charming. It's always lovely to talk to nice positive people, rather than unlovely old curmudgeons. And yet the absence of any real idea is becoming glaringly obvious.

No plan, let alone a plan B

I should establish that GT has no plan, since this is important to my argument. She says

People keep asking me ”what is the solution to the climate crisis.” And how do we ”fix this problem”. They expect me to know the answer. That is beyond absurd as there are no ”solutions” within our current systems. No one ”knows” exactly what to do. That’s the whole point. We can’t just lower or heighten some taxes or invest in some ”green” funds and go on like before... We are just passing on the words of the science. Our only demand is that you start listening to it. And then start acting. So please stop asking your children for the answers to your own mess.

I think that serves; she advertises it as a reply to those who keep on lying, spreading hate and knowingly leave out facts but perhaps I can forgive her in time.

We are just passing on the words of the science

Another of those things that people say, but which aren't true. People trumpet Greta Thunberg has done her science homework, but this is to miss the point: as the Alsup trial proved, the science isn't in question, to first order¹. Almost everyone - even the Evil Bjorn Lomborg - claims to be just following the science. But actually the (physical) science doesn't really tell you what to do. To decide what to do - well, one version of it - you have to make some semi-arbitrary assumptions, like limit warming to 2 oC or 1.5 oC - in order to make the problem space tractable, and then use the science to turn that into concentrations, and then turn that into emissions, but even then you're still left with lots of policy choices over those emissions. You could for example waste everyone's time propounding drivel like the GND. Or you could throw out the stupid limit and impose carbon taxes instead and hope that solar photovoltaic saves us.

No plan, but...

Actually, it isn't quite true that she doesn't have a plan. There are hints of ill-formed and very bad plans struggling to get out: "We need a new economics", "We need a whole new way of thinking. The political system that you have created is all about competition. You cheat when you can because all that matters is to win. To get power. That must come to an end. We must stop competing with each other". Which is std.fairyland: why can't people just get on and be nice to each other?

Panic, Captain Mainwaring

GT would like us to panic. This is a regrettable turn of phrase, and not one that can be shrugged off as an accident, since it was from a speech at Davos. But panic is not a sensible response to anything, just about by definition. Panic is what you want from other people when you know that calm rational analysis will not achieve the result that you have decided you want through calm rational analysis. At least, I trust that GT is not simply spouting all these words in a state of panic.

Denial Is Not a Policy

ClimateLiabilityNews tells me Striking Students Demand Climate Action: ‘Denial Is Not a Policy’. But, they're wrong. Denial actually is a well-formed and actionable policy - just not one that anyone sane would want the world to follow. In this it differs from GT who, as noted above, has no real plan.

Does any of this matter?

Yes, because if all the happy well-intentioned enthusiasm catches on, their are plenty of the old guard waiting in the wings to steer things their way. For example The climate strikers should inspire us all to act at the next UN summit by António Guterres: Without ambitious action, the Paris agreement is meaningless. Oh, FFS. OK, so that particular old guard is largely harmless, if allowed to splurge large quantities of cash and CO2 on summits. But others maybe less so, and it all distracts from trying to forge some agreement with those who don't want an entirely new economics based on kittens.

Update: nothing useful can happen until people are willing to make hard choices, and for that, an aroused public is necessary

This was CIPs comment. I largely agree with it - with the above caveats about enthusiasm and panic. But I don't see evidence of an increasing willingness to make hard choices². I see a slew of articles piggybacking on GT to call for Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism, but that's just opportunism, not thought, nor choice.

Update: Greta Thunberg's full speech to MPs 2019/04/23

Read the full text of the speech Greta Thunberg gave to MPs at the Houses of Parliament offers the Graun. There are problems with the speech, you won't be surprised to discover:

* But we’re only repeating the message of the united climate science - well, no, not really. In terms of the physical climatology, when you talk about that at all, you veer off to the high side. And when you start to talk about what to do, you're off on the politics, not the science.
* The future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. This is bollox. All too common bollox, very seductive bollox, but bollox all the same. It presents us with the alluring idea that all we have to do is to "fix" just a few people or corporations and all will be well; that the rest of us have no guilt. And so, it is wrong.
* Around the year 2030, 10 years 252 days and 10 hours away from now, we will be in a position where we set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control, that will most likely lead to the end of our civilisation as we know it. This appears to be (a) the we-only-have-12-years fallacy; and (b) that 12 years is a knife-edge tipping point.

And so on. There's still no plan.

Notes

1. And very funny it was to see all the high-powered Scientists turn up to prove the science with Powerpoint, only to discover that the Evil Oil Companies had forseen that and neatly parried with "yeah, we accept all that".

2. Do please use the comments to provide examples.

Refs

* New technologies, not Paris climate agreement, will do the job?
* Carbon budgets and carbon taxes
* Guerrilla Education at Princeton: Letter from a Dad by Bryan Caplan
* Increasing The Minimum Wage Increases Crime, Obviously Enough by Tim Worstall
* Later: 3 ways to combat climate change according to young activists. But again, there's nothing resembling a plan. They are 1) learn about climate change; understand govt's role; make pols listen. Which are all splendid, but.

Governance is hard

Getting a good government is hard. This is becoming increasingly obvious in the world, perhaps for two interconnected reasons: people are less likely to make govts job easier by accepting that "The Governing Class" will get on with it as best they can; and the interconnected world is just harder to govern.

In a society in which the power at the top is fixed, or defined by someone else, getting the government of the layers that flow down from that to be tolerably correct is not too hard. Such as a colonial administration¹. Or an English county. Or a theocracy? But when the entire structure needs to be self-supporting, the problem becomes much harder. Preventing too much drift, whilst also avoiding ossification is difficult. Cue my analysis of the USAnian constitution, in another post.

So when CIP comments that Brexit allows us Yanks to imagine that we might not be the stupidest democracy in the world I can but agree. Both Brexit and Trump are many things, but arguably manifestations of the public's separation from The Ruling Class and their increasing distrust of it. But this separation and distrust is also largely correct: TRC are not competent to their job². Unsurprisingly: the chief qualification of a pol is the ability to get elected, which has little correlation with their ability to be competent in office; Darwinism applies in many areas, we should not fall victim to the error of believing in Intelligent Design.

How could you solve this problem? In a way, it ought to be self-solving: when the public becomes disenchanted and elects unsuitable people, those pols not elected, and those on the selection committees, and those voting in primaries, ought to learn from this and choose more suitable candidates. Alas, the feedback loops often don't work. Sometimes they are even unstable: if you're not elected, it is easy to decide this was because you weren't radical enough, and you move in the wrong direction. See-also rational ignorance. I don't see the Dems learning anything from 2016; and I don't see the UK or EU pols having learnt anything useful from Brexit.

I have come increasingly to believe that the direction to move in - this isn't a Final Solution, so I don't need to define it too carefully, it is more a direction to travel - is to have govt do less. They are, manifestly, not competent; so they should do less⁴. This though goes against the direction we've been moving for centuries; and directly opposes the Progressive View which invariably involves Govt Must Act. It is supported by only a small minority; even those parties that might nominally support it - Repubs in the USofA and Cons in the UK - don't actually support it.

Different views of competition

There are two sorts of competition: good competition, which acts as a spur to innovation and responsiveness, and results in a better world. And bad competition, in which two sides grind themselves down into the dust in a ding-dong battle to beat the other side. War is bad competition, unless you can win it quickly and cleanly. Civil war - a la Syria - is particularly bad. Market competition is generally good³. Political competition where it offers voters a choice of policies is good. But when it polarises into two parties fighting it out and turns into deadlock, it is bad. Is it a co-incidence that our two exemplars of bad governance - Trump and Brexit - come from systems with first-past-the-post electoral systems? [Note: this is not a suggestion that the best thing to do is to focus on the electoral system.]

Other things that are not the real problem

mt twote: The biggest public question in my opinion is not climate change. It is not global security. It... is bullshit immunity whose failure is at the root of all those other risks. I attempted to suggest that he meant governance, but he denied it, asserting that [BSI] has rapidly decayed of late. I don't believe that; I never trust the age-of-gold "it has rapidly decayed of late" stuff. That opinion is heavily influenced by Popper; for that see my Why don’t people pay attention to the future of their own world?

Notes

1. Cue howls of outrage. Yeah, I know it wasn't all roses or even close. Don't get too hung up on the details or my lack of history. I've read Heart of Darkness.

2. In all likelihood, they never were. But the increasing complexity of the world makes the job harder, and the increasing transparency of the world makes the failure more obvious. Meanwhile, the selection process for pols becomes ever more ruthlessly focussed on electability, which selects out competence.

3. Progressives will leap in with the other sort of bad competition - fake competition - where evil companies or pols gang up behind the scenes and agree to pretend to compete but actually collude, thereby ripping off the public. But this isn't actually competition, so doesn't need to go into my taxonomy.

4. For an example of people pushing this idea, the market reduces or eliminates the need for collective or political choices to be made concerning composition, organization, extent, and distribution of valued product.

Refs

* The left has no theory of the behavior of the government?
* Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious; from George Orwell's review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi, January 1939.
* Factcheck: Is 3-5C of Arctic warming now ‘locked in’? - carbonbrief

Brexit schmexit

We appear to be reaching the End Times, so I feel the need for another post. I was hoping that nice Dr Annan would spare me the trouble but he's too busy twitting agit-prop³.

So: last week was dramatic and exciting, and slightly confusing, so I hope I've got the story straight.

On Tuesday, May's stupid deal was voted down yet again¹.

On Wednesday, MPs rejected leaving with no deal².

On Thursday, they voted to delay Brexit.

This - with some minor quibbles, see the notes - forms a creditably logical sequence, and is an advert for representative government over referenda, since it would have been impossible to do this via a referendum.

In an ideal world - in which we clearly do not live - da govt would now go to Brussels, ask for an extension, be told they can only have a nice long one of several years, and say oh-all-right-then. Several years is long enough for passions to deflate, May to be replaced by someone competent, and indeed any number of dei-ex-machina to swoop in and save us.

In the non-ideal world, May appears to want to put her rubbish deal to MPs again next week⁴, presumably in the hope that now they see that if they vote that down the only alternative is a long extension - which many would rightly fear would turn into no-Brexit - they will hold their noses and vote for her rubbish deal. However, I think that is unlikely to work. Many MPs live in fear of their constituencies, or in fear of the more vocal parts thereof - and arguably, so they damn well should - but those said constituencies are unlikely to rip them too badly for voting down May's deal, since everyone knows it is rubbish.

That passed, the other obvious problem is negotiating the extension. Here it would be easy between two parties of good faith, but it isn't obvious that either party will act in same. May could just as easily sabotage her own negotiation in order to end up with no deal, and I find it impossible to read her motives - I cannot understand how she behaves as she does, so I cannot predict her behaviour. JA's favourite response is to say that her plan is to survive and wait and see what turns up, which argues for her not turning down whatever the EU offer.

So, my not-very-confident - because it is the outcome I'm hoping for, and I've been disappointed so often by this process - prediction is for May to ask the EU for an extension, and them to give her a long one.

Notes

1. By a large margin - 149 votes - but less than the first time; though I haven't seen anyone trying to spin that into a victory.

2. This is one of the more confusing bits, if you care about the detail, which I am by no means sure you should, since I doubt the detail is important in this case. There were two votes. The first, narrowly won by four votes, was to reject no deal under any circumstances. The second - arguably unconstitutional, since it was a subset of the previously decided matter - was to not leave with no deal on the 29th, and was won by forty-three. [Update: see comments by PS and CR. It looks like I misinterpreted it (to be fair to me, the Beeb who I was skim-reading didn't report it clearly): the first vote was to amend the motion which the second then voted on.]

3. Update: James speaks.

4. Arguably unconstitutional, again as per point 2 but more correctly; and now appears to have been so determined by the Speaker. Tee hee.

Update

Parliament has spoken. This is what it said:


Meanwhile, TM has offered to fuck off, but only if her deal is passed, which is fuckwitted of her.

Refs

* The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity
* Dec 2012: JA: The failure of brexit; me: Brexit, again.
* How much has Brexit uncertainty slowed growth? by Scott Sumner; EconLib

Godwin's law

Godwin's law, strictly speaking, is merely an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". But I use it in a more restrictive sense: a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that, when a Hitler comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever made the comparison loses whatever debate is in progress. This is to counter laziness. It is the same concept as unparliametary language. It is perfectly possible to insult people in parliament: you just can't do it by calling people fuckwits; you have to be more inventive. Comparisons to Hitler spring too readily into people's mouths and fingers. If you can't think of another example that illustrates whatever point Hitler was your exemplar for, you probably don't have a point. And if you can think of another example, you should use that instead.

Refs

* DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence -  Demis Hassabis founded...

Climate Litigation Watch?

Life is dull after Lents. Ah well, I can but look forward to Mays and the future. In the meantime, I run across Climate Litigation Watch, not to be confused with Climate Liability News. You won't be astonished to discover they are opposing sides, though I think both pretend to be neutral.

Who are these people? Let's try to find out, and compare. For CLW, of course, we look at the "about" page, and discover Climate Litigation Watch is a project of the 501(c)3 legal non-profit, Government Accountability and Oversight, dedicated to providing a complete, accurate and objective record of litigation related to climate change. There's more text but no more information about the identity of the perpetrators. CLN themselves had a go, writing Christopher Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at Competitive Enterprise Institute, is a leading figure behind the nonprofit funding this site, Government Accountability & Oversight. (That group takes on the acronym GAO, potentially confusing people with the federal government’s nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.) Which is probably fair enough; there's no tracing other than their being part of the not-the-GAO. I notice, also that the only twits in their sidebar are by Chris Horner or themselves.

But enough of the evil-doers hiding in darkness. What of the Light Side? Well... they say Climate Liability News is a project funded by donations to Climate Communications & Law, a new 501(c)3 nonprofit. Climate Communications & Law but continue on to tell us who the CCL Board are:

* Kert Davies—Executive Director of the Climate Investigations Center. Davies is a well-known researcher, media spokesperson and climate activist who has been conducting corporate accountability research and campaigns for more than 20 years.
* Alyssa Johl—An attorney, Johl is a veteran international environmental and human rights campaigner, and former Senior Attorney with the Climate and Energy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law.
* Richard Wiles—Director of the Center for Climate Integrity at the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. Prior to that, Wiles was Senior Vice President at Climate Central and co-founder and Executive Director of Environmental Working Group.

So I think that's a pass. Score one to the Good Guys¹.

Notes

1. Although, as it happens, whilst I disagree with CLW on the reality of Global Warming - on that, they're a bunch of wackos - I happen to agree rather more with their stance on suing, as you already knew.

Refs

* Shark Tank Take Two- Pop Culture Myths that Need Undoing - by Garreth Bloor: ABC’s Shark Tank is popular culture’s take on entrepreneurship
* Decisions are hard enough to take; to change them is even harder - TF - Auden, Pound, Huey Long
* Adam Smith, Loneliness, and the Limits of Mainstream Economics - Russ Roberts
* The Spirit Level Delusion by  Alex Tabarrok
* Ode to the Medieval Poets - W. H. Auden
* The Principal Costs of Minimum-Wage Legislation
* The Killer Had An Ideology

Minor note re IPCC 1990 fig 7.1(c)

Listening to the usual idiots bleating about adjustments to the temperature record, I was struck by a comment in the Jones et al. paper which contains the definitive tracking of where 7.1(c) came from. That quote is:

...the source can be isolated to a series used by H.H. Lamb, representative of central England, last published (as figure 30 on p. 84) by Lamb (1982)... The ‘Central England’ curve also appeared in Lamb (1965: figure 3 and 1977: figure 13.4), on both occasions shown as an ‘annual’ curve together with the extreme seasons: winter (December to February) and high summer (July and August). The IPCC diagram comes from the 1982 publication as the vertical resolution of the annual plot is greater. The data behind the 1977 version are given in table app. V.3 in Lamb (1977), but these are essentially the same as previously given in Lamb (1965)... The 1982 version dispenses with the three possible curves evident in Lamb (1965, 1977) and instead uses a version which accounts for the ‘probable under-reporting of mild winters in Medieval times’ and increased summer temperatures to meet ‘certain botanical considerations’. Lamb (1965) discusses the latter point at length and raised summer temperatures in his Mediaeval reconstructions to take account of the documentary evidence of vineyards in southern and eastern England. The amount of extra warmth added during 1100–1350 was 0.3–0.4°C, or about 30% of the range in the black curve in Figure 7. At no place in any of the Lamb publications is there any discussion of an explicit calibration against instrumental data, just Lamb’s qualitative judgement and interpretation of what he refers to as the ‘evidence’. Variants of the curves also appear in other Lamb publications (see, eg, Lamb, 1969).

So the point - in case you missed it - is that Lamb happily and with no real explanation other than personal taste adjusted his data. And - but you knew this already of course - not one of the "skeptics" either knows or cares.

Refs

* More use and abuse of IPCC 1990 fig 7.1(c).
* Adoration of the Lamb.

Lents 2019

Another fine Lents, this one happily not truncated by inclement weather. Stars of the show were Caius who went head on their first day, according to Pembroke regatta, where they we two lengths faster than Maggie or Downing over about a km; and indeed they caught Maggie around the Plough. For the women, Newnham were convincingly faster than Downing and then Jesus. Elsewhere there was lots of excitement, including me flinging my GoPro into the river 30 seconds after taking this on Saturday, and a cold wet time I had recovering it.



Rather than point you - and my future self - at the individual days, there's an entire playlist to go through. As a bonus, I've included a few other people's vidz in the list. If you want to watch any, they're all dead thrilling, but Saturday's M2 has a particularly exciting finish.

Refs

* 2017
* 2016
* How to get ze legs down.
* Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology by  Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang & James A. Evans; via Dominic Cummings.