Catallaxy Files

Phil Jones in a BBC interview.

B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming

Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.

It would have been nice for him to have told us the exact significance level but he says ‘yes’ to the question no statistically-significant global warming since 1995. No cooling either.

C – Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?

No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant.

Again it would have been nice if he would say what the significance level was. It looks like a plateau – but that is not warming. To my mind this is a significant admission. In a July 5, 2005 email Jones had indicated

The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.

Jones still adheres to the AGW hypothesis, but now it seems because there is no other explanation.

H – If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can’t explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing – see my answer to your question D.

So AGW is the default assumption – yet I would have thought it is a proposition to be tested not simply assumed. Jones also abandons the hockey stick.

There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the NH and SH) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm that today, then current warmth would be unprecedented.

Marc Sheppard at the American Thinker discusses that admission in much more detail.
(HT: Tim Blair)

There was an interesting exchange in the Senate last week.

BARNABY JOYCE: Is it a fair statement that if we keep borrowing money and our debt keeps getting larger, that we will be putting upward pressure on interest rates?

KEN HENRY: Ah, well no disrespect Senator but that is a gross oversimplification of economic understanding of these matters and to illustrate you will recall that, um, during the early years of this decade as debt was being repaid, interest rates were steadily climbing.

So I think we should be um, we should be careful not to rush into simplistic relationships between levels of debt and interest rates.

Well yes. There are always ceteris paribus assumptions at work when economists debate issues. But I think Ken Henry’s answer was inappropriate. The correct answer to this question is, ‘Everything else being equal, yes’. Then speculate of why we don’t have to worry just yet – not that I’m suggesting that there might not be a debt problem.

Does Henry support this statement or is it too simplistic?

A high stock of government debt imposes costs on a country and its government. It leads to crowding out of private investment via higher real interest rates, imposes a continuing servicing burden on the government, and reduces its fiscal flexibility in dealing with unexpected adverse shocks. If government debt gets high enough, it can call into question the government’s ability or willingness to service the debt. However, a strategy of reducing debt as quickly as possible without regard to the broader economic environment is likely to do more harm than good. With fragile recoveries in their own economies and high debt levels, the governments of the advanced countries are currently confronting a difficult trade-off. On the one hand, government debt as a share of GDP cannot be permitted to continue to rise indefinitely; on the other hand, too rapid fiscal consolidation could endanger the recovery.

David Gruen said these words on December 8 last year. Now he made it clear that he wasn’t referring to Australia – fair enough, he doesn’t think debt levels are too high – but that is exactly the relationship Joyce was asking about.

Henry performed very poorly in the Senate committee. It is one thing to think that Australian government debt isn’t a problem, but he should at least be able to say what the numbers are. In addition to federal debt, the state governments also have a lot of debt, including large unfunded superannuation liabilities. That debt has been under the radar for a long time. This the man who has just done an analysis of the whole taxation system. Are we to believe that he has looked at state revenue powers without thinking about state liabilities and spending?

JULIAN MCGAUREN: We’re talking about the debt of the country here. If you’re not prepared for debt questions, why bother turning up?

Why indeed?

There is an excellent expose of carbon trading and offsets (particularly offsets under the United Nation’s Clean Development Mechanism) by Mark Schapiro in the Review section of the Financial Review of Friday 12 February 2010 (no link sorry).

I liked this:

In fact, the problems with turning carbon into a commodity begin at the very moment of conception. A one-ton carbon credit is not precisely reproducable like an ounce of gold or 20 tons of pork bellies; each credit emerges from entirely different conditions and components, whether the planting of eucalyptus trees, the capture of methane from pigs, the substitution of wind power for coal. Each represents a promise of potentially varying longevity and effectiveness, to say nothing of trustworthiness. Each involves rewarding a promise that may not be kept and whose keeping cannot even be measured reliably. On paper, cap-and-trade is seductively elegant; but in practice, making good on its promises would require an enforcement structure that is hardly less onerous than the obvious (if painful) solution to climate change that cap-and-trade was designed to avoid: that is, a carbon tax.

… carbon exists as a commodity only through the decisions of politicians and bureaucrats, who determine both the demand, by setting emissions limits, and supply, by establishing criteria for offsets.

During the debate over the Government’s stimulus program, many commentators, including the then Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, said that tax cuts would be superior to increased government spending.

The Government eschewed such advice, insisting instead on one of the largest stimulus programs in the world (as a percentage of GDP).

Now the fruits of that are becoming apparent with the many examples of wasted taxpayers’ money, most recently with the insulation program.

Is this not further evidence that individuals are better at sensibly spending their own money than Government? Instead the Rudd Government thought it knew better on how to spend our money. This of course is an ideological issue – a government expanding the nanny state and intruding ever more into our daily lives. And using the global financial crisis as an excuse to expand the size and scope of government.

Malcolm Turnbull has been proven right: tax cuts would have been a far superior means of providing an economic stimulus.