Harry Clarke

I regret that Malcolm Turnbull was replaced by Tony Abbott as Liberal Party leader. To me it is the replacement of a decent hard-thinking politician by a populist clown who stands for nothing of consequence. Turnbull has stated he will cross the floor to vote for the Government’s CPRS. It is hard to see he could do much else given his stated views and, indeed, those of the Liberal Party itself, going into the 2007 elections.  In doing so Turnbull provided a more cogent analysis of the reasons for supporting a CPRS than Rudd ever could.

Here is a transcript of Turnbull’s speech - perhaps his best.

Moves by others in the Liberal Party to support Turnbull either in the House of Representatives or- much less likely - the Senate might suggest a rebuild of one of Australia’s important political parties.  Currently it is a party of clowns.

Update: Samuel J probably the worst of the right-wing ignorami at Catallaxy gets it horribly wrong by suggesting that an individual nation cannot implement a CPRS so that Turnbull is a traitor to liberalism and small government! What a bad joke!

The Sunday Age today presents a proposed ‘transport revolution’ for Melbourne prepared by Monash University’s Professor Graham Currie – a ‘transport expert’.  The plan recognizes that expanding road supply is not a major sensible option in the face of Melbourne’s ballooning congestion problems and instead argues for creating a ‘road hierarchy’ that gives pedestrians, cars, motorists and public transport priority access to roads at different times of the day to improve travel times.  To reduce congestion Professor Currie proposes to limit the building of new roads, create the above-mentioned priorities, reducing the speed limits allowed to cars in shopping strip areas during the day and giving more priority to public transport by, among other things, removing on street parking. Continue reading Daft proposals for Melbourne’s transport woes

I am attending an OECD meeting on ‘Implementing Congestion Pricing’. There are some excellent papers here – the one by K-K.  Chin on the Singapore experience was particularly good but presentations on the Stockholm, Oslo and proposed Dutch schemes also useful. Generally, the International Transport Forum website is useful for transport planners.

A few of my well-worn prejudices have been shocked by the imperatives of practicality. Lots of design compromise and my love affair with telematics * is experiencing a rocky patch. The world will watch the Dutch attempts to regulate national traffic flows by satellite with interest. I’ll write up a more complete report once my opportunities to appreciate French cuisine cease.

* Need to be hard-nosed about pricing technologies.  Plenty of mature options and the most economic should be chosen – not necessarily the most sexy.

I am in Paris staying at (what is to me) an expensive hotel with rooms that would leave the proverbial door-mouse feeling cramped. Taking a break from blogging. Continue reading Paris

A fascinating piece on chess computers versus people by Gary Kasparov in The  New York Review of Books.  With the defeat of humans by compiuters – Kasparov claims that these days Grand Masters would be challenged by many $50 programs – chess is now a new game. Broader issues of strategy matter more than tactics and there is the possibility of tandem people+machine competiting among themselves.  Chess as a game of full information is under attack from games with randomness where bluffing and psychology play a role – the current poker boom is an instance – but even here computers are making inroads.  Kasparov is a thoughtful, unaffected guy and positions himself well – as the first of the Grand Masters to lose to a computer – to understand the broader implications of this development.

I sent this to The Age a few days ago but they neither published it nor responded to its submission. Continue reading Silly remarks on climate change by John Carroll

Another retrieved post – thanks Christina. Continue reading Glaciers

Again a retrieved post – thanks Christina. Continue reading Car speed & death

“Data collected by the Bureau of Meteorology indicate that Australia’s annual mean temperature for 2009 was 0.90°C above the 1961-90 average, making it the nation’s second warmest year since high-quality records began in 1910. High temperatures were especially notable in the southeast during the second half of the year, with Australia, Victoria, South Australia and NSW all recording their warmest July-December periods on record.” The Annual Australian Climate Statement 2009  from which this figure and these quotes are taken is worth reading.

“2009 ends Australia’s warmest decade on record, with a decadal mean temperature anomaly of +0.48°C (above the 1961-90 average). In Australia, each decade since the 1940s has been warmer than the preceding decade. In contrast, decadal temperature variations during the first few decades of Australia’s climate record do not display any specific trend. This suggests an apparent shift in Australia’s climate from one characterised by natural variability to one increasingly characterised by a trend to warmer temperatures.”

Joe Romm supports arguments suggesting that climate change has worsened the current drought.  The arguments are based on Bertrand Timbell and provide a position I have not previously endorsed.  Data from the last few years suggest the long-term rainfall decline in south-eastern Australia is not due to ENSO.  Declines in autumn and more recently spring rainfall the culprit.

Another retrieved post – thanks Christina. Continue reading 2010 the hottest year?

Another hacked post recovered – it is a bit dated and was posted a couple of weeks ago. Thanks Christina.  

Google was apparently subject to a cyber attack by people living in China - the inference was that these people were agents of the Chinese Government.

The attack was  directed at Chinese human rights activists and at eliciting information about their private email accounts.  Google has responded dramatically by abolishing agreed on screening measures in China that filtered out material the Chinese authorities do not wish to have circulated.  Since Chinese Government support is required for Google to continue operating in China it may be that Google and its search engine may no longer continue operating in China – a threat that Google has made explicit.  This threat if acted on would be very costly to Google which would lose a huge market to other browsers but is embarrassing to the Chinese Government and costly to China given the extensive use of Google in China. Can modern technology defeat the strongest political machine on the planet?

Another recovered post.  China Daily reports the incident briefly in a 4-line report that states Google will discuss with the Chinese Government whether it can operate “within Chinese law’.  In a curious twist the largest internet search engine in China, Baidu, which should move well beyond its current market share of around 64% of the Chinese market, was today itself  hacked by a group linked to Iran! 

I’ll follow up on this – much more to come of all this for sure. China so far is standing firm portraying the issue as one of law.  The western media I have followed equivocates between suggesting Google is acting morally and courageously with suggesting that business life in China is becoming increasingly tough so that Google probably isn’t foregoing much in the way of profits by exiting.

Another retrieved post-hacking post. A letter published in AFR on January 16. Continue reading Industry views on road user charges

Another retrieved post after the nasty hacking attack. Continue reading Consumerism & the global environment

Another retrieved post from hacking attack:

I mentioned in an earlier post that the animated film Unchained Goddess unambiguously forecast anthropogenic climate change in 1958.  I’d only seen a clip and couldn’t find the complete film in local video stores so bought a copy from Amazon.  It is an outstanding, partly animated, documentary film by Frank Capra (he produced one of the greatest films of all times, It’s a Wonderful Life with Donna Reed and Frank Stewart).  I haven’t enjoyed a documentary film more for years. Obviously designed for school kids it is a fascinating introduction to weather and climate that would entertain and inform any age group.  The science is a little dated but includes a fascinating still of John von Neumann who, amongst his many talents, developed the early use of computers in meteorology*.  The film closes with some prescient words “man may be unwittingly altering the world’s climate” by releasing pollutants. Then unambiguously the prospect of melting icecaps and rising sea levels is discussed.  Fascinating stuff.

With the film came Hemo The Magnificent which is a biology film that discusses the human body’s blood plumbing system.  Again by Capra, the film again includes animation and some amazing photography.  Truly superb. 

My son watched both films with me and he was as enchanted by the presentation as I was.

Also available is Our Mr. Sun and Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays which I will try to get. 

These films were commission by AT&T (Bell Telephone) during the 1950s to develop school and general community interest in science.  If I had been exposed to this approach to science in the 1960s I might not have become an economist! I can’t find any record of use of these films in Australian schools.

* Von Neumann of course invented game theory and made pioneering contributions to the multi-sectoral analysis of growth. His interest in meteorological prediction led him to propose manipulating the environment by spreading colorants on the polar ice caps in order to enhance absorption of solar radiation (by reducing the albedo), thereby raising global temperatures. It is also interesting to note that two of the most prominent economists initially worked in meteorology. Quote: “That might be a bit of a stretch, but meteorology and economics have a lot more in common then you might think. Both the youngest and oldest winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics were meteorologists before they were professional economists. Kenneth Arrow, the youngest to win, was a weather forecaster during his military service in World War II. Similarly, Leonid Hurwicz, one of this year’s winners, taught meteorology at the University of Chicago between 1942 and 1944 before entering the field of economics. At 90 years of age, he is the oldest person awarded a Nobel Prize in any field.”

One of the posts lost in the recent hack attack concerned Lord Monkton’s visit to Australia.  Conservatives around Australia (Albrechtsen and even Barnaby Joyce)* are seeking to distance themselves from this silly toff.  I liked the following summary of the great Lord Monkton from DeSmogBlog.  The mad Lord Monkton repeats the usual delusionist nonsense at a press conference.  Quadrant  - but apparently not the IPA at least at their website – are advertising his intended lecture tour.  I get an amusing citation at the Quadrant site. Quote – The reference is to a debate I had with Des Moore:

Professor Harry Clarke: “The fact that the gang from Quadrant turned up was unsurprising as it was advertised at their website.”

The lunatic right are certainly good at one thing – at lying and in distorting the simple truths about climate change.  Professor Andy Pitman states “Climate scientists are losing the fight with the sceptics. The sceptics are so well funded, so well organised. They have nothing else to do. They don’t have day jobs so they can put all their efforts into misinforming and miscommunicating climate science to the general public, whereas the climate scientists have day jobs and [managing publicity] actually isn’t one of them. All of the efforts you do in an IPCC report is done out of hours, voluntarily, for no funding and no pay, whereas the sceptics are being funded to put out full-scale misinformation campaigns and are doing a damn good job, I think. They are doing a superb job at misinforming and miscommunicating the general public, state and federal governments.”

The Oz trip is costing $100,000. He will be accompanied by our home-grown spokesperson for climate change idiocy, Ian Plimer.

*Though not, apparently, arch lune Nick Minchin.

Posts from January 6-25 have vanished after a hacking attack last night.  I am seeking to beef up security and would appreciate advice.

Update: Things are still not working quite right now. Posts disappear as do comments.  It was a frantic morning as I sought to restore things – eventually a phone call did it. I was rushing and irritated as I was due to play golf at Kingston Links at 11am.  Despite the hacker aggravations I played probably the best golf round I had in more than 20 years shooting 77 off the stick. Stoked!

The extreme political right are showing their hatred for the movie (that I reviewed recently) Avatar presumably because of its pro-environmental and anti-military themes.  It is hard for me to appreciate the viewpoint of those who see something positive in environmental destruction and in killing people  but that seems to be where these kooks end up.

There are in fact a number of early movies that take up environmental issues and even specific climate change themes.

I recently viewed once again the film Soylent Green a science fiction classic that takes up environmental themes and provides early (around 1973) glimpses of the possible implications of climate change with explicit mention here of the greenhouse effect.  But I  really want to see Frank Capra’s Unchained Goddess which, in 1958,  very directly examined the specific anthropogenic warming hypothesis – a clip is here.  I’ll try to chase this up in my local video store and report back.

The Pew Climate Centre have shown that over the last year or so a decreased proportion of US citizens believe climate change is a serious public policy issue and a reduced number believe there is solid evidence that anthropogenic warming is occurring.   Climate change delusionists might be credited with inducing these changed opinions but the role of the media is also important.   Continue reading Global warming & the issue-attention cycle

I have admiration for Tiger Woods the sportsman and really couldn’t care less if his sexual drives lead him to have partners other than his wife.  But something is lost in my admiration for the guy because of a stench of hypocrisy. Woods’  configured public image as the ‘perfect family guy’ turns out to be just that –  public relations.  He is not the straight-up-and-down great athlete always totally in control that his media managers suggest is the case.  A hero is diminished. Perhaps it was naive of me to take the public messages about Woods at all seriously anyway.

Frank Rich in the NYT compares the disclosures about Woods with those concerning the failed corporation Enron.   That doesn’t seem to be an apt comparison since the activities of Enron at core were fraudulant and Woods is a great sportsperson.  I hope he sorts out his personal life soon and resumes his golfing career.  But there is hysteresis here that implies ongoing damage – can Woods be taken at his word again? His loss of credibility is csaid to have reduced stock market values of companies whose products he sponsored by US$12b and, ever keen to capitalise on the misfortunes of others, Hollywood is planning a movie on the Woods affairs.

It is the start of a new decade and the occasion to review a simple fact. The decade to 2010 was in terms of global mean surface temperatures the hottest in recorded history – that is, over about 160 years. It was 0.2 degrees C hotter than the 1990s which were, in turn, the previous hottest decade in recorded history.  No warming did not stop in 1998!  Joe Romm sets out the details.  Barring a lot of supervolcanic activity Romm predicts that the 2010 decade will again be one of record average heat.

So it is Happy New Year but a qualified one.  It is the decade where the world must deal decisively with climate change. Enough denialist lies, fence sitting and prevaricating politics. The evidence on climate change is overwhelming and the option of doing nothing and simply waiting is radical stupidity.