Catallaxy Files

In May of 2008 a series of emails were exchanged by the Team. First from Tim Osborne to Caspar Ammann.

Our university has received a request, under the UK Freedom of Information law, from someone called David Holland for emails or other documents that you may have sent to us that discuss any matters related to the IPCC assessment process. We are not sure what our university’s response will be, nor have we even checked whether you sent us emails that relate to the IPCC assessment or
that we retained any that you may have sent.

Okay, that seems fair enough, Ammann replies

Oh MAN! will this crap ever end??

Well, I will have to properly answer in a couple days when I get a chance digging through emails. I don’t recall from the top of my head any specifics about IPCC.
I’m also sorry that you guys have to go through this BS. You all did an outstanding job and the IPCC report certainly reflects that science and literature in an accurate and balanced way.

That last bit needs some repeating and emphasis.

the IPCC report certainly reflects that science and literature in an accurate and balanced way

Yes, well. There you have it; ‘accurate and balanced’. But then the cover up starts. An email from Phil Jones.

Although requests (1) and (2) are for the IPCC, so irrelevant to UEA, Keith (or you Dave) could say that for (1) Keith didn’t get any additional comments in the drafts other than those supplied by IPCC. On (2) Keith should say that he didn’t get any papers through the IPCC process.either. I was doing a different chapter from Keith and I didn’t get any. What we did get were papers sent to us directly – so not through IPCC, asking us to refer to them in the IPCC chapters. If only Holland knew how the process really worked!! Every faculty member in ENV and all the post docs and most PhDs do, but seemingly not Holland.
So the answers to both (1) and (2) should be directed to IPCC, but Keith should say that he didn’t get anything extra that wasn’t in the IPCC comments. As for (3) Tim has asked Caspar, but Caspar is one of the worse responders to emails known. I doubt either he emailed Keith or Keith emailed him related to IPCC. I think this will be quite easy to respond to once Keith is back. From looking at these questions and the Climate Audit web site, this all relates to two papers in the journal Climatic Change. I know how Keith and Tim got access to these papers and it was nothing to do with IPCC.

So everyone ‘could’ or ‘should’ say this or that. No suggestion that they simply tell the truth.

These emails are now in the public domain. As Ammann indicated

If I would consider my texts to potentially get wider dissemination then I would probably have written them in a different style.

Watts up with that? is reporting an email press release from a Graham Smith Deputy Commissioner in the UKs Information Commissioners Office that is potentially explosive. (I can’t find a copy on the ICO website, so I can’t be sure of its veracity).

Norfolk Police are investigating how private emails have become public.
The Information Commissioner’s Office is assisting the police investigation with advice on data protection and freedom of information.

The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information. Mr Holland’s FOI requests were submitted in 2007/8, but it has only recently come to light that they were not dealt with in accordance with the Act.

The legislation requires action within six months of the offence taking place, so by the time the action taken came to light the opportunity to consider a prosecution was long gone. The ICO is gathering evidence from this and other time-barred cases to support the case for a change in the law. It is important to note that the ICO enforces the law as it stands – we do not make it.

These comments are quite extraordinary, if confirmed to have originated in the ICO. While the period the bring a prosecution has passed (a huge loophole in the UK FOI legislation) there can be little doubt that in Smith’s opinion a violation of the UK FOI legislation has occurred. I also think it is quite incredible that a public official would express such a strong opinion before the police inquiry is concluded.
Update I: The Times Online is now reporting the story and, via Bolt, so too is the Norwich Evening Times.
Update II: John O’Sullivan at Climategate is suggesting that Phil Jones can still be prosecuted for fraud under the UK Fraud Act (2006). While many of the actions appear to have occurred before 2006, I understand that the legislation simply formalises the common law position.

Rudd concedes his economic policies will increase interest rates.

“Australia was the only advanced economy in 2009 not to go into recession,” he said.

“That’s come off the back of strong action by ourselves through our national stimulus strategy, school modernisation plan and through the banks, to bring down interest rates as radically and quickly as they did.

“But obviously there’s going to be upward adjustment.”

No mention of a generation of economic reform that is more likely to have insulated the economy. But when you’re busy reregulating the economy you hardly want draw attention to little things like that.

Interest rates are going up next week. Inflation remains high. Before the last election Rudd and Swan had heaps to say about inflation, so let’s have a look at the inflation record over the past few years. I have graphed the variable the RBA looks at – the average of the Weighted Median and Trimmed Mean measures of inflation.

Doesn’t look good. The RBA measure hasn’t once fallen into the 2 – 3 percent band that they target in the last two years (despite the greatest economic crisis since the great depression).
Update: Stephen Long on ABC PM has just said that the preferred RBA inflation measure is the lowest it has been in three years – that is incorrect. It is the lowest since September 2007.

Paul Krugman is very upset.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Well, yes. The issue here is Obama’s proposed spending freeze.

President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.

The WSJ is unimpressed.

Mr. Obama’s touted spending freeze for some domestic agencies is the politics of gesture. It would apply to only 17% of the budget, and these programs have already had a 22% increase in their annual appropriations in the past two years, and another 25% increase including stimulus.

To get some idea of the extent of the problem, see this chart from Greg Mankiw.

In that graph we can see the ‘Bush spendathon’ – he actually spent within the average over 1970 – 2009 but revenues declined in his first term before making a recovery in his second term. Obama has spent well beyond the average and plans to continue doing so. So even when (if?) US tax revenue recovers the US will still be running a huge deficit.

So whether or not Obama will succeed in cutting spending, at least he and his administration have recognised the problem. Last word to the WSJ.

The tragedy is that Mr. Obama’s fiscal conversion is coming a year too late, assuming it is now real. If the President and his party really are serious, they can do more than promise a spending freeze after 2012. They can stop spending more now: Drop the health-care bill, cancel the unspent stimulus spending from last year, kill the $150 billion new stimulus that has already passed the House, and bar all repaid bailout cash from being re-spent. Everything else is marketing.

It seems Tony Abbott has caused something of a kafuffle by advising his daughters not to engage in premarital sex. All the luvvies are out in force carrying on about how outrageous this is.* Mind you I’m sure many fathers of teenage daughters give exactly that same advice and failing that say ‘please be careful’. Of course, others might argue that Abbott is a hypocrite; afterall he speaks of his own behaviour as a young man in his recent book Battlelines. That’s life; its unfair and there do seem to be different standards for males and females. As in many of these differences the biological division of labour plays a large role.

Eric Crampton points to an interesting NBER paper (ungated version here). From the conclusion

Engaging in a premarital conjugal relationship in yesteryear was a perilous activity for a young woman. The odds of becoming pregnant were high, given the primitive state of contraception. The economic consequences of an out-of-wedlock birth were dire for a young woman. Being born in or out of wedlock could be the difference between life or death for a child. Just like today young adults would have weighed the cost and benefit of engaging in premarital sex. The cost would have been lower for women stuck at the bottom of the social economic scale, so they would have been more inclined to participate. To tip the scale against premarital sex, parents, churches, etc. socialized children to possess a set of sexual mores aimed at stigmatizing sex. Parents at the lower end of the social economic scale would have less incentive to engage in such practice. With the passage of time contraception become more efficient and the costs of premarital sex consequently declined. This changed the cost and benefit calculation for young adults so that they would be more likely to participate in sexual activity. It also reduced the need for socialization by parents, or the church and state, which would also spur promiscuity. This is an example of culture following technological progress.

I understand the time series argument, but the cross-section income argument is counter-intuitive. If we believe that the costs of raising children out of wedlock are higher for females than for males then those costs must be proportionality higher for females in lower socio-economic groups than for higher socio-economic groups. Sure the costs of socialising children are high but I don’t see why they would vary by parental income. Yet that is implied by the data.

So, for instance, in the bottom decile 70% of girls between the ages of 15 and 19 have experienced it, versus 47% in the top one. Similarly, 68% of adolescent girls whose family income lies in the upper quartile would feel “very upset” if they got pregnant, versus 46% of those whose family income is in the lower quartile.

I haven’t read through the model carefully so there might be an explanation for this in the paper, but nothing jumped out at me while skimming through it. It does seem, however, that both parents and societal institutions used to socialise children. If parents with a lower socioeconomic status economised on socialisation, then societal institutions such as the church would have substituted for this at some margin. One of the results in the paper suggests that as the costs of illegitimacy have fallen for religious institutions so they have engaged in less socialisation.

* Most notably Julia Gillard who has no children.
Update: The Age does some fact checking on the story and reckons its a beat-up.

In an interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly, one designed to present himself favourably to the voting public ahead of an election year, this is what Abbott had to say on the subject of pre-marital sex. ”It happens.”

”I think I would say to my daughters if they were to ask me this question … it is the greatest gift that you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving and don’t give it to someone lightly, that’s what I would say.”

Leaving aside the Opposition Leader’s hackneyed ”gift” metaphor – an idea possibly lifted from a Mills and Boon romance novel where the hero’s name is Rock or Brutus – what is Abbott saying?

He’s saying don’t bang the first randy, pimple-faced adolescent you smooch at the school disco just because he insists he loves you. He’s saying think about it.

Isn’t this what many parents would advise their growing kids?