Tag Archives: climate

New IPCC economic models

An arti­cle from Forbes Mag­a­zine on the IPCC’s lat­est “socio-economic mod­el­ling” of emis­sion and growth sce­nar­ios has attracted a lot of atten­tion because it claims the IPCC now shows that… The high­est eco­nomic growth model leads to the low­est level of emis­sions con­sid­ered. Less eco­nomic growth leads to higher emis­sions. Extract from Forbes But the authors …

August 12, 2011 – 7:52 am | By pwg | Posted in Public policy | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Alarm or deny

How can it be that the same data on tem­per­a­ture trends and sea-levels sup­ports such rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent agen­das? Because the data, from time to time, does not strongly deter­mine any way of look­ing at the world. This obser­va­tion is as cogent today as it was when it first appeared; per­haps more so. The total­ity of our so-called …

June 29, 2011 – 3:52 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

That’s exactly what “partisan” means

He reads, but can he speak Eng­lish? “There are prob­a­bly peo­ple now think­ing I’m par­ti­san for say­ing the sci­ence is in on cli­mate change. Well, I don’t think that’s par­ti­san. I think I can read Eng­lish. And I think the evi­dence is over­whelm­ing. I don’t think I will be par­ti­san. I don’t think you’re par­ti­san …

June 21, 2011 – 7:42 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

One thousand ppm might be better

The Aus­tralian gov­ern­ment is bent on enact­ing a carbon-emissions tax that has no respon­si­ble jus­ti­fi­ca­tion other than recently re-hashed advice designed to jus­tify an emis­sions tax. Lit­tle won­der, then, that polling shows vot­ers are strongly opposed to the tax, despite wide­spread their appar­ent con­vic­tion that the cli­mate is warm­ing and their accep­tance that warm­ing is …

May 30, 2011 – 2:47 pm | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

An eminent economist

“After a dis­tin­guished career that has seen sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to pub­lic pol­icy for­mu­la­tion through more than three decades, Gar­naut finds him­self, at 64, more piv­otal than ever. As he grap­ples with his respon­si­bil­ity it is worth observ­ing he lacks one qual­ity also miss­ing in every other econ­o­mist: infal­li­bil­ity” Extract from “A bril­liant career, but cer­tainly …

April 2, 2011 – 8:42 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Climate debate and climate policy

Bat­tles between ortho­doxy and non-conformity are never won or lost. Only a naïve empiri­cist, or a reli­gion­ist who con­fi­dently expects all to be made clear at the final trump—when the prizes are handed out, truth is con­soled and error con­sumed by shame—could sup­pose oth­er­wise. There will be no “killer blow” to either the alarmist or …

March 23, 2011 – 9:02 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged | Comments (0)

A salty climate “bonbon”

Wor­ried by Ross Garnaut’s claim in his revised review that sea lev­els are ris­ing faster than even the U.N. pre­dicted: “Ris­ing sea lev­els will con­tinue to increase the fre­quency and inten­sity of coastal flood­ing events dur­ing the 21st cen­tury. Obser­va­tions indi­cate that there­has been a sig­nif­i­cant increase in the fre­quency of extreme high sea lev­els …

March 17, 2011 – 8:34 am | By pwg | Posted in Resources | Tagged , , | Comments (0)