Utopia, you are standing in it!

In an interview with flagship daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ here), Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) Director Dr. Jochen Marotzke said predicting how many degrees of warming we need to prepare for was like reading tea leaves and that he is not worried about “climate tipping points”. 

He also spoke of the wide disagreement among climate models.

Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPIM) Director Dr. Jochen Marotzke told the FAZ he doesn’t worry about climate “tipping points”, but worries about panic. Image: MPIM. 

He told the FAZ that the worst case scenarios put out by some models were useful for the purpose of risk assessment, i.e. scenarios that are unlikely but cannot be ruled out. “In the latest generation of models, there are some models that are much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previous models in terms of their temperature increase,” he said.

Five degrees “very very…

Latest from the Beehive

Yes,  we all now know Auckland must spend another fortnight at level 3 lockdown while the rest of New Zealand continues under level-2 restrictions.

Until 11:59pm on August 26 Aucklanders are expected to stay home in a bid to stamp out what has been identified as a new strain of Covid-19.

According to the New Zealand Herald:

“Ardern said the alternative to a longer lockdown could have led to a “potential explosion in cases” and would be the worst thing for Auckland and the wider New Zealand economy.

“She also revealed some new information about the Auckland cluster – it was made up of a new strain of Covid-19, not seen in the country’s first wave.

“This means that Covid-19 has not been lying dormant in the community since the last outbreak.

“Ardern said this discovery showed Covid was not a “burning ember in our…

The ability to slide on the data visualization goggles to filter, pivot, animate, and otherwise magically parse a phenomenon is a real wonder.

This StoryMap walks through the visual analysis of 30 years of nautical piracy through various cross-sections of the calendar. While I am not a marine security expert or global economist/sociologist/explorer, I do make maps for these sorts of people. The story map presents nautical piracy in place and time, which offers up all sorts of questions. Questions I don’t know the answer to; but maps don’t necessarily have to answer questions. Maps prompt new and more specific questions.

Here are a couple extracts from the StoryMap. First, a linear look at the past three decades…

And here is a seasonal cross-section of this era…

I hope you check it out and ask questions of your own. The data is sourced from the National Geospatial Intelligence agency, and…

The assertion being of course that human-caused emissions of the trace gas carbon dioxide somehow have a specific effect on the Earth’s climate, which must be countered. But if everyone is forced into electric cars, the speed limit argument becomes obsolete. Lower speed limits also mean more vehicles on the road at any one time, trying to complete their journeys, which in turn could lead to more traffic delays, potentially undermining the whole idea. As usual they conflate pollution and climate arguments to cause confusion.
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Canadian cities from Edmonton to Montreal are lowering speed limits, primarily in an attempt to save lives, says CBC News.

But slowing down may also be an easy way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution — not just on urban roadways but also on highways (and even the high seas).

Five days ago I wrote about a campaign by two birders, operating under the name Bird Names for Birds, that had singled out a number of birds whose common names honored people who performed actions seen as odious or unsavory in modern lights. Those included John James Audubon, whose oriole may now be renamed because he did this:

 Audubon scoured the battlefield for the remains of Mexican soldiers. He decapitated several bodies and sent the heads to Samuel George Morton, a notorious practitioner of phrenology, a pseudoscience that attempted to use skull dimensions to prove the superiority of White Europeans to other races. For Audubon, this might have been just another way of practicing science — but his actions hardly align with modern values, and his scientific contributions do not excuse him from judgment.

Judging from the numerous comments on my post, readers were unanimously opposed to this renaming. (It appears…

Lately, social media has been flooded with people sharing studies about various aspects of COVID. This is potentially great. I’m all for people being more engaged with science. Unfortunately, many people lack a good foundation for understanding science, and a common point of confusion is the meaning of “statistically significant.” I’ve written about this at length several times before (e.g., here and here), so for this post, I’m just trying to give a brief overview to hopefully clear up some confusion. In short, “statistically significant” means that there is a low probability that a result as great or greater than the observed result could arise by chance. Statistical tests are designed to show you how likely it is that the sample in a study is representative of the entire population from which the sample was taken. I’ll elaborate on what that means below (don’t worry, I’m not going to…

I’ve been remiss in following—or even learning about—Noam Chomsky. I’m not much into linguistics, and, truth be told, I couldn’t even recount his big contributions there beyond the concept of Universal Grammar, or how well they’ve stood up over time. I have read several of his political pieces, so I’m aware of his severe criticism of the American government and its actions overseas, and not just under Trump. But in the past few years I haven’t read a word he’s written.

Chomsky is now 91, and when I saw him at a meeting in Puebla, Mexico a few years back, he was frail and needed help walking. But that’s to be expected at his age, and, according to the interview with Anand Giridharadas in The Ink (click on screenshot below), Chomsky is as sharp as ever. According to Wikipedia, he’s now a part-time professor of linguistics at the University…

Last week, I gave a presentation on the Laffer Curve to a seminar organized by the New Economic School in the nation of Georgia.

A major goal was to help students understand that you can’t figure out how changes in tax rates affect tax revenues without also figuring out how changes in tax rates affect taxable income.

As you might expect, I showed the students a visual depiction of the Laffer Curve, explaining that the government won’t collect any revenue if the tax rate is zero (the left point of the horizontal axis), but also pointing out that the government won’t collect any revenue if tax rates are 100 percent (the right point on the horizontal axis).

The curve between those two points shows how much tax is collected at various tax rates.

The upward-sloping part of the curve shows the “region of increasing revenue” (i.e., where higher tax rates…

Green dreamland
Only five ‘grand’ challenges? Better be quick — we keep hearing there’s supposed to be a climate emergency on. Yes, throw out existing successful energy solutions when there’s nothing of equivalence to replace them with. Then wonder what to do next, while muttering about climate change. Great plan! Or maybe not.
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Solar and wind power are an important part of solving the problem of climate change, but these renewable technologies on their own probably will never provide the energy for many industrial processes, like making steel, reports TechXplore.

Approximately 90 percent of the world’s energy use involves generation or manipulation of heat, including the cooling of buildings and food.

Maintaining modern economies and improving life in developing economies while mitigating climate change will require five major advances in how we convert, store and transmit thermal energy, according to a new paper in Nature Energy…

Back in the last “lockdown” I linked to various pieces of work by other economists attempting to make sense of, evaluate etc, choices the government was making.   There was Ian Harrison’s work challenging some of the modelling estimates the Prime Minister liked to wave around and some aspects of the “Level 4” restrictions.  There was an early attempt at a cost-benefit analysis by Bryce Wilkinson of the New Zealand Initiative, and another exercise looking at a similar question in a different way by John Gibson at Waikato University.  There was another exercise that I never wrote about, but reported and linked to here, by Martin Lally, a consultant economist and former Victoria University academic.

What was striking, even at the time, was that there was no sign that the government had commissioned from officials, or officials had undertaken anyway, any sort of serious cost-benefit analysis of the sorts of…

While the revolutionary government frantically raised fresh troops and reorganised its armies, a Prussian-Austrian army under Charles Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick assembled at Coblenz on the Rhine. In July, the invasion began, with Brunswick’s army easily taking the fortresses of Longwy and Verdun.

The duke then issued a proclamation called the Brunswick Manifesto, on July 25, 1792. It was written by Louis XVI’s émigré cousin, Louis-Charles the Prince de Condé, declaring the intent of the Austrians and Prussians to restore the king to his full powers and to treat any person or town who opposed them as rebels to be condemned to death by martial law.

King Louis XVI of France and Navarre

Contrary to its intended purpose of strengthening Louis XVI’s position against the revolutionaries, the Brunswick Manifesto had the opposite effect of greatly undermining his already highly tenuous position. It was taken by many to be the…