Climate science and Hansen misrepresented – aerosols disguise real global warming

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[Published on The Drum 20 May]

Recently climate sceptics Anthony Cox and David Stockwell published an opinion piece on the ABC’s The Drum claiming climate scientist James Hansen had “admitted” climate models have been wrong, and that human-caused global warming was therefore in doubt.  The article contains basic misrepresentations of Hansen and of the substance and implications of a draft paper by Hansen.

The Hansen paper does not weaken the case that humans are the main cause of global warming.  On the contrary, it suggests we have unwittingly and temporarily shielded ourselves from the full effects of our activities.

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Surrogates of Empire

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It has long been obvious, to anyone who would look, that US foreign policy is not about democracy and freedom, it is about power.  The conjunction of the Middle Eastern uprisings and Wikileaks’ release of US diplomatic cables has laid bare the fact and means of US “influence” over its de facto empire.  That influence is exercised through loyal “subordinate elites” who are, in the words of Alfred W. McCoy and Brett Reilly, “a motley collection of autocrats, aristocrats, and uniformed thugs”.

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How to crash an economy – some monetary parables

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[Another sample from The Nature of the Beast, from Chapter 11:  Economic Fire.  Another downloadable instalment will be available after Easter.]

Almost every institution involved in the financial system is, in the jargon, highly leveraged.  This is as true of old-fashioned banks with fractional reserves and mainstream banks with capital adequacy requirements as it is of shadow banks.  What does “highly leveraged” mean?  It means that you are betting a small amount on a large return.  If the return is positive, you make a handsome profit.  However if the return is negative you lose not only your stake but potentially everything you own.

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More on Growth Spruiking

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[Another of my letters to the Editor, challenging the confusion between growth and well being. Published 19 April.  Again I’ll post any responses.]

The front-page report “ACT economy trumps states” (Canberra Times, 18 April) highlights the biased spruiking that commonly passes for economic reporting.

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Calculating Reptiles

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[Another instalment of The Nature of the Beast has been posted, Chapters 5-8.  Here is a sample from Chapter 6.]

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher said during an interview

“… they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people … But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”36

This was the origin of an infamous quotation: “There is no such thing as society”.  Continue reading →

Fundamental Flaws in Economic Thinking and Practice

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[After a 6-month break I have returned to working on The Nature of the Beast. A new version of Chapters 1-4 is available for download and comment – use the links at the top. More will follow soon. To whet your appetite, here is a sample, from the Introduction.]

The Global Financial Crisis, also known as the Great Recession, is the biggest economic malfunction since the Great Depression. You might think that those in charge when it happened, and those who designed the economic system within which it occurred, would have been chastened and purged, to be replaced by those who saw the crash coming and those who warned that the design of the economic system was prone to such failures.

However few of those responsible have been purged, and few seem to have felt chastened. Rather, they claim that no-one could have seen the crash coming. If that were true, what exactly has the economics profession been doing for the past eighty years? Everyone knows there was a Great Depression. Would it not be a top priority to figure out how it happened, so we might see the next one coming, or better still avoid the conditions that would trigger a depression? One might think so, but that is not how the great bulk of the profession has spent the past eighty years.

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Lesser Known Economic Miracles

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Two lesser-known economic good news stories provide a revealing perspective on the mainstream economic paradigm, and on Australia’s current state.

The first economic miracle is Mauritius, brought to our notice by Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian.  Mauritius gained independence from Britain in 1968, and with few natural resources in its Indian-Ocean archipelago its economic prospects were rated as pretty dismal.  Bucking the usual prescriptions of economists (sell your soul and your land to overseas investors and tourists), and despite per capita income of less than $400, Mauritius decided to invest in its one major asset – its people.

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Slow Growth

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[The following was published as a Letter to the Editor in the Canberra Times, 19th March.  It has generated a bit of comment, so I thought I’d post it here too.]

[Update 24 March:  I will add relevant Letters to Ed to the Comments here as they appear in the paper.]

Canberrans will be worse off if Canberra grows rapidly, as the growth boosters want.  Much of the amenity we enjoy will be lost to crowding, congestion and outdated infrastructure.  Much of the amenity we had has already been lost.  Civic is already lost, transformed from people-friendly plazas to glass boxes with managed artificial environments.

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Sick Labor

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has at last begun the effort to explain her carbon price policy, but all agree she has a lot of ground to regain after scoring yet another spectacular own goal for Labor, this time by announcing a price on carbon without having any clear policy on compensating households.  This while facing a Leader of the Opposition who will say and do anything for a populist scare campaign, his biggest bogey of all being “a great big new tax”.  It is not so hard to think of how to present the issue to the public, as a journalist and a blogger demonstrate.  Why can’t Labor?

Labor has form, as former PM Kevin Rudd also scored a spectacular own goal last year by walking away from the greatest moral challenge of our time, global warming.  Then there were the running sagas of home insulation, green loans and so on, which could and should have been explained, fixed and continued but which became such a political liability they too were abandoned.  Labor has displayed staggering ineptitude.

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