Guest post by Matt Ridley
My article in Wired in August called “Apocalypse Not” (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/08/ff_apocalypsenot/) attracted a huge number of comments, many of which were constructive and interesting. It also led to critical responses at other sites. Here is my response to some of those responses. Wired asked me to respond, but then concluded that there was not space on their website to carry the response.
Philip Bump wrote an article in Grist attacking what he calls my “conceit” on climate change and calling my argument “bullshit”: http://grist.org/news/apocalypse-or-bust-how-wireds-climate-optimism-doesnt-add-up/. Leaving aside the insults, what was the substance of his criticism?
Mr Bump’s first point is that I am wrong that malaria will continue to decline because “comparing our relative recent success in combating malaria to the haphazard and poorly funded efforts from last century doesn’t provide much insight into how we’ll fare against more widespread malaria using existing tools”. He is entitled to this opinion but it flies in the face of published evidence on three counts. First, the retreat of malaria during the twentieth century was far from haphazard. As a chart published in Nature by Dr Peter Gething of Oxford University (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/images/nature09098-f1.2.jpg) shows, malaria vanished in the twentieth century from large parts of Asia, Europe and North America and became dramatically rarer in South America and South-east Asia. It also declined in Africa.
Second, the acceleration of this decline of malaria since 2000 (25% reduction in ten years) has indeed been aided by the work and funds of the Gates Foundation and others, but with new funds and new techniques it is not clear why Mr Bump thinks “it’s unlikely, though, that additional investment will continue to get the same rate of return” since he provides no evidence for this statement. Third, the “more widespread malaria” the he forecasts is largely a myth. In most of the world malaria is not limited by climate. In Africa there a few high-altitude areas – less than 3% of the continent – that might become more malaria friendly if global warming accelerates as the IPCC predicts. Surely it will continue to make sense to combat malaria itself rather than trying to fight it by combating climate change? Why should we focus on preventing that 3% increase rather than diminishing the existing 100% of malaria? As Dr Gething has written: “widespread claims that rising mean temperatures have already led to increases in worldwide malaria morbidity and mortality are largely at odds with observed decreasing global trends in both its endemicity and geographic extent” and “proposed future effects of rising temperatures on endemicity are at least one order of magnitude smaller than changes observed since about 1900 and up to two orders of magnitude smaller than those that can be achieved by the effective scale-up of key control measures.”[1]
Incidentally, the persistence of the myth that malaria would worsen in a warming world was quite unnecessary, because a world expert on the topic tried in vain to correct the myth at an early stage. Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, made the case within the IPCC that malaria’s range was shrinking and was limited by factors other than temperature, but was ignored and (in his words) “After much effort and many fruitless discussions I…resigned from the IPCC project [but] found that my name was still listed. I requested its removal, but was told it would remain because ‘I had contributed.’ It was only after strong insistence that I succeeded in having it removed.”[2]
Mr Bump’s second charge is that if I am right that the threat of increased malaria as a result of global warming was greatly exaggerated, this does not prove that other aspects of climate change are exaggerated: “Even if the malaria argument held up, it would still only represent one ancillary concern stemming from global warming!” Given the prominence of the malaria-from-warming threat in the early IPCC reports and in the media, and the long battle Dr Reiter had to get the IPCC to see sense on the issue, the issue was hardly ancillary. None the less, let me take up Mr Bump’s challenge and consider some of the other threats promised in the name of climate change. For reasons of space I chose to focus on malaria but there is a long list of threats that have been downgraded as more knowledge of climate change accumulates. My first draft included two paragraphs of other examples that were left on the cutting room floor when my article was published. I reproduce them here:
“Likewise, the prediction that global warming could turn off the Gulf Stream, an idea that featured in the film The Day After Tomorrow. The fear was taken seriously in the 1990s, with the respected Nature magazine publishing a computer-model calculation that showed “a permanent shutdown” of the Atlantic “thermohaline circulation”, which drives the Gulf Stream, within a century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to rise[3]. This, commented a senior scientist, posed a risk “that no nation bordering the North Atlantic would willingly take.”[4] Such a threat has now been abandoned as highly unlikely, one scientist commenting: “I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same [time] creates a real public relations problem for us.”[5]
“In other words, some of the subplots of climate change have already proved exaggerated.
– The Himalayan glaciers are not melting in a hurry and even if they were, 96% of the water in the Ganges comes from rain, not melting ice[6].
– A gigantic methane belch when the Arctic ocean reaches some warm tipping point turns out to be implausible[7].
– The world’s coral reefs recover quickly and fully from bleaching episodes caused by sudden warming[8].
– Runaway warming is now widely agreed to be impossible[9].
– The United Nations was wrong in 2005 to predict (and map the whereabouts of) 50 million future environmental refugees by 2010[10]. And so on.
Maybe these sideshows were always mistakes. Or just maybe the main event is being exaggerated too.”
I look forward to Mr Bump’s response on each of these points, few of which are ancillary. I also draw his attention to the deceleration of sea level rise, in sharp contrast to predictions, a measure that is about as central to the climate change threat as you can get. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/13/sea-level-acceleration-not-so-fast-recently/
Another critique of my article appeared under Lloyd Alter’s byline here: http://www.treehugger.com/energy-policy/wired-magazine-tells-us-dont-worry-be-happy-about-climate-population-resources-pandemics.html. Mr Alter accuses me of being pie-in-the sky and head-in-the-sand and objects specifically to my conclusion about the ozone hole that “the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.”
Mr Alter claims that the long residence time of chloroflurocarbons in the atmosphere explains the failure of the ozone hole to shrink. He may be right, in which case he falls in the category I cited – “Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate” – but that hardly disproves my last statement that the ozone hole cannot yet be called a crisis that was definitely averted. Here’s a graph, from NASA (http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/meteorology/annual_data.html) , showing the stubborn persistence of the ozone hole:
Among the emails received at Wired was one from David Gasper of Dayton, Ohio, arguing “many situations are avoided because we listened to the alarmists and PREVENTED the extremes from happening.” Sure, and I acknowledged this in my piece. However, Mr Gasper gives two poor examples to support his case. The first is the Y2k computer bug. A huge amount of expensive work was indeed done to avert the breakdown of computers on 31 December 2012, but that does not in itself prove that the threats were not exaggerated.
Indeed the absolute lack of any major problems the next day, even in countries whose efforts were threadbare and patchy (such as Italy and South Korea and much of Africa), rather argues that they were exaggerated. Remember my argument is not that there was no threat of problems, but that the threat was overblown. Can anybody really think, in retrospect, that Senator Christopher J. Dodd, (D-CT), speaking at the first hearings of the Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem on June 12, 1998 was not overegging the scare when he said: “I think we’re no longer at the point of asking whether or not there will be any power disruptions, but we are now forced to ask how severe the disruptions are going to be…. If the critical industries and government agencies don’t start to pick up the pace of dealing with this problem right now, Congress and the Clinton Administration are going to have to…deal with a true national emergency.”[11]
Mr Gasper’s other example is DDT, saying that I downplay the importance of DDT and bird populations and he points out that bald eagles and other predatory birds now thrive in his part of Ohio. He’s right and hawks and falcons now thrive where I live also. In both cases the removal of DDT was, I am convinced, crucial in the recovery of raptor populations, because DDT became concentrated as it moved up the food chain till it reached levels that did harm by thinning eggshells. However, my critique of the Rachel Carson/Paul Ehrlich scare was not about this phenomenon, but about the claim that DDT, together with other chemicals, caused cancer in human beings and would result in a severe shortening of human lifespan.
The website Carbon Commentary carried a piece by Chris Goodall (http://www.carboncommentary.com/2012/08/23/2449) arguing that skin cancer was getting worse because of ozone loss, that food and metal prices were rising and that he had read a similar article in the Economist in 1997.
Mr Goodall’s piece had many errors, starting with the repeated misspelling of “Ehrlich”.
He attempted to combat my assertion that melanoma is not increasing with the following remark: “increasing skin cancer incidence has been linked to rising UV-B radiation for several decades.” He gave no source. (My article has over 75 source links at my website: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx.) Is Mr Goodall unaware that most skin cancer is not melanoma? That the increase in other skin cancers is caused, most medical scientists think, by an increase in holidays in low latitudes, not a reduction in ozone in high latitudes?
There were plenty more in the way of egregious mistakes in the piece that would never have got past the fact-checkers at Wired. His price graphs took no account of inflation! Minerals and cancers were cherry picked. For the true picture on commodities prices and the Simon-Ehrlich bet, see this chart:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_otfwl2zc6Qc/S4AmqnxCqXI/AAAAAAAAM1A/eYRQcCkYlcc/s1600-h/commodities.jpg
and Mark Perry’s conclusion about it:
“If Simon’s position was that natural resources and commodities become generally more abundant over long periods time, reflected in falling real prices, I think he was more right than lucky, as the graph above demonstrates.
Stated differently, if Simon was really betting that inflation-adjusted prices of a basket of commodity prices have a significantly negative slope over long periods of time, and Ehrlich was betting that the slope of that line was significantly positive, I think Simon wins the bet.”
As for food prices, see http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/08/peak-oil-climate-change-and-the-threat-to-food-security/#more-48870
How anybody from the climate-alarm camp can argue that the recent spike in food prices might be evidence of running out of food, when we turned 40% (!!) of US grain into motor fuel last year to satisfy green campaigners, baffles me.
And the similarity of some parts of the Wired article to some parts of the Economist article in 1997 is because I wrote them both.
Finally, there was an anonymous article on a blog called Skeptical Science, which purported to correct my claims about the possibility of a “lukewarm” climate outcome that would be less damaging than some of the measures being taken to combat climate change such as biofuels. The article focused on two points, first that Greenland’s ice loss, while currently less than 1% per century as I claimed, is in fact accelerating. However, recent revisions to the data show that the true rate of ice loss is even lower, less than 0.5% per century (http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n9/full/ngeo938.html) and even this comes from far too short a period to be called a trend. (It is interesting how quick some climate alarmists are to dismiss the standstill in global temperatures of the last 15 years as “too short” while accepting nine years of Greenland satellite data as a trend!)
In fact the latest work, by Kurt Kjaer of the University of Copenhagen (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6094/569.abstract?sid=822b555a-638b-4a49-a021-3dab84f17457), using aerial photographs to extend the history of Greenland’s ice cap backwards in time “challenges predictions about the future response of the Greenland Ice Sheet to increasing global temperatures” by concluding that the spurts of ice loss from Greenland in 1985-1993 and in 2005-2010 were short-lived events rather than indicative of a general trend.
Skeptical Science’s other criticism was that the evidence supports a strong positive water-vapour feedback amplification of carbon-dioxide induced warming. I am glad to have confirmation that this feedback is necessary to turn CO2-induced warming into a major danger, as I argued, but I disagree that the current evidence overwhelmingly supports this. There are studies that find evidence for net positive feedbacks and studies that do not. Here’s one very recent one (http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2011GL050226.shtml) that makes “relatively low projections of 21st-century warming”. And here is a recent critique of high-sensitivity studies (http://judithcurry.com/2012/06/25/questioning-the-forest-et-al-2006-sensitivity-study/). My point, remember, is not that climate change will definitely be benign, but that the possibility that it will be real but not a catastrophe is far from small and yet is usually ignored. It is surely premature to rule out the possibility of such a lukewarm future and Skeptical Science produces very threadbare evidence to support such a dogmatic conclusion.
For those who are interested in the sources I used for my original article, I have reprinted it with many live links at www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/apocalypse-not.aspx.
[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v465/n7296/full/nature09098.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reiter
[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/sci120197.htm
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/sci120197.htm
[6] http://www.mtnforum.org/sites/default/files/pub/1294.pdf and http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/himalayan-glaciers-not-melting
[7] http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/more-views-on-global-warmin-and-arctic-methane/?src=tp
[8] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423100817.htm and http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2010/09/13/coral-bleaching/
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_greenhouse_effect#cite_note-10
[10] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,757713,00.html
[11] http://www.co-intelligence.org/y2k_quotes.html
Dr Burns said: November 21, 2012 at 12:21 pm “I wouldn’t be bothered about Grist. Who in their right minds would believe this “bullshit” .”
The trouble is that is the only source of “climate science” that the UK Guardian reads;-) , and BBC editorial staff only read the Guardian 😉
[1] http://tinyurl.com/gristInGuardian
[2] http://tinyurl.com/28gate
Matt, if you please, may I repost your article to the site I make my arguments at? (deviantart.com)
Here’s a list of 35 notable skeptical scientist, from Wikipedia , no less–which means the actual list is two or three times longer. Just send those people the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists'_views_on_climate_change
davidmhoffer says:
November 21, 2012 at 5:04 pm
david,
The folks making the decisions were not choosing between their children and the raptors. They were choosing between the raptors and Other people’s children; and those Other people were the wrong color and poor besides.
So why didn’t we decide to cut off DDT in industrialized countries and leave the others alone? I don’t know. Or, why didn’t we decide to limit the use of DDT to inside homes, where there are not a lot of raptors? The consumption of DDT could have been cut by 90% or more. Would have been more effective to boot.
BTW, the notion DDT thinned eggshells was based on poor fieldwork.
When DDT was in use, bird counts went up. This was based on surveys conducted by Audubon society types. DDT killed bird lice, carriers of bird disease, leading to healthier birds.
Claims of DDT leading to breast cancer were thoroughly debunked. Not really emphasized as Rachel Carson believed it did and Rachel had been canonized as the chief saint of the environmental movement.
davidmhoffer says:
November 21, 2012 at 5:04 pm
I agree. However if we had continued using DDT the fleas would be as thick as.. well, fleas on a dog by now. Prince Philip, David Attenborough and Paul Erlich would be
mostmore displeased because mankind is a virus and they must be allowed to cull the numbers of fleas so that the(ir) dogs may prosper.Given that the world’s largest malaria outbreak was in Siberia, not known for its tropical heat, puts the dampers on the claim that malaria is temperature driven. Malaria is easily reduced by removing areas of stagnant water near houses which removes breeding places of the mosquito. This simple action in the southern states of the US reduced the malaria problem. DDT did the rest.
DDT is not in itself a problem only its over use. Due to its low price it was literally sprayed everywhere but it did drastically reduce mosquito populations. Africa has seen an increase since the use of DDT was banned and the replacements too costly to use.
The claims about rising temperatures with rising atmospheric CO2 volumes has been shown to be false given today’s 15 years of zero temperature rise with an 8% rise in CO2. Ice core data also demonstrates the failure of CO2 to drive temperature but rather the reverse. These claims persist because of total belief in the GHE which does not in fact exist. Doubters please see the web site http://www.climatecfsophistry.com which is written by an astrophysicist Joseph E Postma MSc.. This site explains the errors of the GHE model, like 24 hour sunshine, why the model is wrong and proposes a new realistic model which demonstrates the lack of the need of any GHE to give the atmospheric heat we enjoy. It also explains the GHE violations of the laws of thermodynamics.
I commend this site to Matt Ridley.
Dr Burns says:
November 21, 2012 at 12:21 pm
I wouldn’t be bothered about Grist. Who in their right minds would believe this “bullshit” :
http://grist.org/series/skeptics/
____________________________________
At least GRIST did not practice censorship. From the comments I skimmed only those who can not reason were still Warmists.
When you read skeptic comments and understand that Green ‘Activists’ are often PAID activists you can understand why Peter Gleick et al leap to the conclusion that skeptics have to be well orchestrated and PAID. The Seabrook nuclear power plant activist got $10/hr according to the WantAds in the Boston Globe in the 1980’s and not much has changed since then link.
One would venture to hypothesize from this that Warmists are either paid or naive followers and this is why Peter Gleick went looking for “evidence” of Big Oil involvement and a well paid army of ‘Deniers’ at Heartland. After all his company has a Shell Oil VP listed and BP, Shell and other energy sector companies have been shoveling cash at CAGW since the CRU was founded. The Bishop Hill blog has an interesting article A study in groupthink dealing with the Peter Gleick Fakegate.
The Warmists just can not credit an actual grassroots group of concerned independent, unpaid intelligent and articulate citizens. This says much about their Ivory Tower contempt for the ‘uneducated’ masses. I guess as professors and politicians they spend so much time with rump-kissers they can not conceive of a different class of people. People who are honest and independent thinkers.
This take off on the old joke: There’s A Pony In Here Somewhere: Cartoon Fun Edition seems quite appropriate.
Matt Skaggs says: @ur momisugly November 21, 2012 at 12:47 pm
“Hopefully folks who are actually trying to understand the world around them won’t be beguiled by the Julian Simon nonsense. No rational person seriously believes that….
…more people plus less resources equals cheaper resources over the truly long term…”
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Dan in Nevada says: @ur momisugly November 21, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Matt, you, and many others including Ehrlich, don’t seem to grasp the economic principles that apply in the real world…
This is not hard to understand; I think most 5 year olds could grasp this. Why is it that presumably intelligent adults continue to buy into the “Population Bomb” crap?
________________________________________
Well said Dan, I always liked the The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894 as an example. Some how it just seems so appropriate.
If we follow Matt’s thinking we should be fretting about ‘The Great Chert Nodule Crisis”
Outtheback says: @ur momisugly November 21, 2012 at 7:41 pm
In regards to the comment about food price hikes due to corn being used to fuel cars….
_______________________________
There is more to the 2008 Food Crisis than biofuel. The real culprit was the 2000 Commodity Futures Act that deregulated derivatives trading.
WIKI
Actual law
This law signed by Clinton had far reaching effects on the US and world economy.
Important Banking Legislation from Library of the FDIC: is a list of bank laws and a short blurb so you can SEE how Congress/Clinton set the USA up for a depression by repealing the Great Depression era banking laws passed to PREVENT another Great Depression.
How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis
How the AIG Bailout Could be Driving More Foreclosures:
The Financial Meltdown
Road to Ruin
Just like with everything else the MSM simplifies and diverts attention from the actual causes or only tells part of the story. Thank goodness we now have the internet and can research ‘the rest of the story’
Mr Alter claims that the long residence time of chloroflurocarbons in the atmosphere explains the failure of the ozone hole to shrink.”
==============
The ozone hole is a result of the “polar vortex”. It is caused by cold air sinking, coupled with the rotation of the earth, sweeping the ozone from the poles towards the equator. It is larger over the south pole because the south pole is colder.
We see this effect on other planets and moons with atmosphere’s. This is largely ignored because human nature is to take credit / place blame for the works of nature. As far back as we can look in human activity, people have always blamed their neighbors for bad weather. CO2 is simply the modern equivalent of the “evil eye”. Al Gore is the latest incarnation of the ‘Witchfinder General’.
Witchfinder General (1968)
… who tours the land offering his services as a persecutor of witches. Aided by his sadistic accomplice (the IPCC), he travels from city to city and wrenches confessions from “witches” in order to line his pockets and gain sexual favors.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063285/plotsummary
For those of you who have never read Matt’s great book The Rational Optimist it really is a fantastic read.
I am less optimistic than Matt as I think the research makes it quite clear that AGW is primarily an excuse for government officials and their cronies globally to take control of the economy. In somewhat of the same manner as the 15th century China Matt describes and for similar reasons.
Likewise I think the UN’s Education for All limited to basic skills and new collectivist values being pushed all over the world is at it core an attempt to break the Division of Labor and control unauthorized disruptive technology that might threaten favorite Business Cronies.
Matt-Everytime I read the OECD’s push of Competency for All and no more with Equity in Credential Attainment. I want to shout “But remember Tasmania!”
Keep up the good work in this global attack on unapproved knowledge and the subjugation of reality to totalizing theories.
Ulf T says:
November 21, 2012 at 12:19 pm
Awesome oxymoron: good COBOL programmers. ;->
Matt Skaggs says: @ur momisugly November 21, 2012 at 12:47 pm
“Hopefully folks who are actually trying to understand the world around them won’t be beguiled by the Julian Simon nonsense. No rational person seriously believes that….
…more people plus less resources equals cheaper resources over the truly long term…”
========
About the only thing that doesn’t get cheaper over time is land, because you can’t make more of it. Pretty much everything else gets cheaper because of human ingenuity. Working against this price decrease is politics, which seeks to monopolize control of resources and thus increase profits for those in control.
If you are selling goods at the market you have an interest in making sure your license is exclusive, that no one else is allowed to sell the same products as you are selling. Thus, you are eager to contribute to the politician that grants the licenses. This corruption is the inherent problem as it creates inefficiencies that are paid for by the poor to benefit the rich.
IN 1898, DELEGATES FROM ACROSS THE GLOBE gathered in New York City for the world’s first international urban planning conference…
The situation seemed dire. In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan’s third-story windows. A public health and sanitation crisis of almost unimaginable dimensions loomed.
…Stumped by the crisis, the urban planning conference declared its work fruitless and broke up in three days instead of the scheduled ten.
========
Apparently common sense was more common in the past
http://www.uctc.net/access/30/Access%2030%20-%2002%20-%20Horse%20Power.pdf
And they’re still on about the Gulf Stream today.
How to survive climate change ad rising sea levels:
“However, enough ice water in the sea could possibly reverse the Gulf Stream and Britain, being relatively far north, could enter a new ice age……Therefore, moving to Lake Titicaca, which straddles the mountainous border between Peru and Bolivia, might be a good bet.”
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/mayan-apocalypse-2012-how-to-survive-the-end-of-the-world-142657517.html
PS: They also have how to survive a zombie plague, courtesy of Bristol City Council, UK, and the CDC:
“The English local authority suggests arming yourself with a stun gun, handcuffs and a protection suits to both defeat and avoid the plague of the living dead.”
“According to CDC plans, they “would conduct an investigation much like any other disease outbreak” if ‘zombies did start roaming the streets’…..CDC director Dr Ali Khan notes: “If you are generally well equipped to deal with a zombie apocalypse you will be prepared for a hurricane, pandemic, earthquake, or terrorist attack.”
Ah, the good old Y2K. Let me lay out the basic points made to my by a long time electrical engineer friend who designed telcomm systems for Nortel.
– A computer does not quit working when a number goes from 99 to 00. The computer will work just as reliably using 00 as it did using 99. 00 is just as real a number as 99 to the computer and it will work just as flawlessly.
– A computer doesn’t care if it is January 1st, 2000 or January 1st, 1900. Both are perfectly acceptable dates to computers and they will continue to work.
– Further more, since the computers were only using a year code of 2 numbers, they see no difference between 1900 and 2000. Nothing crashes.
– you could test this yourself, set your old computers clock to a minute before midnight 1999 and let it run through Y2K…….I did it and it worked just fine, even did it on an old 8088 to prove the point.
– almost every new system installed was given the software/firmware ability to communicate with older systems without issues.
The first thing companies did was test their equipment and it worked. But they didn’t tell anyone so people would spend money on upgrades. Nothing that wasn’t upgraded crashed and that includes whole countries. To claim it was a near miss, saved by the alarmists requires monumental ignorance of what really happened.
John Marshall says: @ur momisugly November 22, 2012 at 2:45 am
…. Doubters please see the web site http://www.climatecfsophistry.com which is written by an astrophysicist Joseph E Postma MSc..
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The web site is http://climateofsophistry.com/ (You used a c instead of an o in of)
ferd berple says:
November 22, 2012 at 7:41 am
….If you are selling goods at the market you have an interest in making sure your license is exclusive, that no one else is allowed to sell the same products as you are selling. Thus, you are eager to contribute to the politician that grants the licenses. This corruption is the inherent problem as it creates inefficiencies that are paid for by the poor to benefit the rich.
______________________________
Very nice summing up of the problem in todays politics. With permission I am going to steal it.
ferd berple says:
November 22, 2012 at 7:41 am
“…Pretty much everything else gets cheaper because of human ingenuity. Working against this price decrease is politics, which seeks to monopolize control of resources and thus increase profits for those in control…”
Spot on, Ferd. I would only add that in addition to the collusion between government and favored business associates (in less PC times, this was called by its proper name, “fascism”; the polite term today is “crony capitalism”), there are also those apparently sincere efforts by government to reduce the costs of things perceived to be important to their constituents. Things like medical care, housing, college tuition…
Gail Combs says:
November 22, 2012 at 6:55 am
Do you really believe that paper trading caused the food prices to rise?
Had the requirement not been created through government decree, land that was used for growing other crops was now converted to corn production, a ready market with better returns then the original crop.
The increased demand for corn could not have been satisfied with the production at the time. Had there been no conversion to corn the production of those staple crops would have remained as they were and in theory these prices would have remained stable. However then virtually all corn produced would have gone to the highest bidder and with the government stipulation and related subsidies of so much corn ethanol in fuel guess who would have won that bidding war. This would then have resulted in these other staple crops becoming a viable alternative for corn in food production which would have resulted in price increases for these also with the increase in demand for these. Normal market forces at play.
As it happened these other staples went up in price as the production declined in favor of corn production. Basically the same mechanism as above.
Sure, speculation can add to the future price of a commodity but no one will try to drive up the price of a commodity if the outlook is going to be one of oversupply. Goldman and cronies are in it to make money and they don’t bet on losers. (or rather they try and avoid betting on losers). Where do you think that money they invest is coming from? It will dry up in a flash if they report losses.
Futures are not securities and what the government was doing was making sure that banks could not list them as such in order to keep their security to liability ratio in line with central bank policies.
Did that cause discomfort for some, absolutely, but they should not have used them as such in the first place.
The distinction is market entrepreneurs who prosper by providing something people want so they voluntarily part with their money vs political entrepreneurs who put that time, money, and energy into rent seeking from government politicians and bureaucrats. Grant me this stream of revenue or erect this barrier to competitors or keep anyone from coming up with a superior product.
AGW is designed to create a return to a Mercantile, Dirigiste economy where it’s hard to prosper unless you are a political entrepreneur. This also ties in all over the world with the Regionalism push also coming out of the UN and Agenda 21. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/protected-producers-vs-paying-consumerstaxpayerswho-will-prevail-on-education-and-the-economy/ is a story I wrote on this Global Education/Neo-Mercantile based on Green Energy/ Regionalism integrated worldwide push after listening to a speech last month by Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institute.
By the way Regionalism is also going by the name Metropolitanism now to highlight the desired push to stop urban sprawl and corral us back to wards cities and away from private vehicles. Because that’s working so well in Portland, Oregon we are now supposed to globalize it. Talk about not learning our lessons.
Tsk Tsk says:
November 21, 2012 at 6:51 pm
“Simple. They equate people with bacteria, i.e. stupid life that invariably grows to consume all available resource and then crashes.”
LOL – google David Suzuki and test tube bacteria (what else would you expect from a fruit fly)
Robin said @ur momisugly November 22, 2012 at 7:32 am
I’m with you on the excellence of Matt’s The rational Optimist, but then I have been a Matt Ridley fan ever since I read The Red Queen in 1993.
Not only do I “remember Tasmania”, I live there. I have no idea what remembering Tasmania has to do with the rest of your comment. Searching your blog on “tasmania” generates a “not found” response.
PG. There are quite a few .pdf files on Tasmania on the OECD website.
DaveE.