RICE Project

Finlay Macdonald in The Snow-Readers looks at the RICE project that is examining CO2 levels in drill cores taken from the Ross Ice Shelf.

Ice contains a “memory” within its compressed crystals that we can now recover and turn into climate records. From the savage Antarctic comes a team of ice-core drillers — and arriving in New Zealand imminently is their ice, possibly the strongest evidence yet of the vulnerability of great ice sheets to global warming.

Permafrost tipping point

Julia Whitty in We're Scarily Close to the Permafrost Tipping Point has an interesting map showing the extent of the permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere. If the permafrost starts melting we could see a massive release of methane and carbon dioxide that will significantly accelerate global warming.

Howard Government wasteful according to the IMF

Peter Martin reports in Hey, big spender: Howard the king of the loose purse strings that, according to the IMF:

Australia's most needlessly wasteful spending took place under the John Howard-led Coalition government rather than under the Whitlam, Rudd or Gillard Labor governments, an international study has found.

The future on journalism and outsourced education

Robert W. McChesney has written a rather bleak article on the future of journalism in Mainstream media meltdown! Basically he says that there's not enough money to support quality online journalism.

However, it's the summary that I want to highlight:

There is probably no better evidence that journalism is a public good than the fact that none of America’s financial geniuses can figure out how to make money off it. The comparison to education is striking. When manag­ers apply market logic to schools, it fails, because education is a cooperative public service, not a business. Corporatized schools throw underachieving, hard-to-teach kids overboard, discontinue expensive programs, bombard stu­dents with endless tests, and then attack teacher salaries and unions as the main impediment to “success.” No one has ever made profits doing qual­ity education—for-profit education companies seize public funds and make their money by not teaching. In digital news, the same dynamic is producing the same results, and leads to the same conclusion.

Unfortunately there's nothing in the body of the article discussing corporatised education. Judging by the one paragraph above I think it's a topic probably worth an article in itself.

Graph of weekly ordinary time cash earnings distribution

Matt Cowgill posted the graph below to Twitter with the caption: 'One for the "$150k is a lot of money" file'. From https://twitter.com/MattCowgill/status/309089483612098560/photo/1

How "skeptics" view global warming

I think I might have posted this before:

From http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif

American conservatives have an ideas crisis

In American Conservatism’s Crisis of Ideas J. Bradford DeLong gives a brief history of conservative ideas then examines the floors with current ideas:

So what is the problem that America’s new generation of conservative critics of social insurance sees? It is not that raising poor people’s standard of living above bare subsistence produces Malthusian catastrophe, or that taxes and withdrawal of welfare benefits make people work, at the margin, for nothing.

For Eberstadt, the problem is that dependence on government is emasculating, and that too many people are dependent on government. For Brooks, it is that knowing that public programs make one’s life easier causes one to vote for non-Republican candidates. For Murray, it is that social insurance means that behaving badly does not lead to catastrophe – and we need bad behavior to lead to catastrophe in order to keep people from behaving badly.

The crucial point is that America’s conservative elites believe Brooks, Eberstadt, and Murray. To this day, Mitt Romney is convinced that he lost the presidency in 2012 because Barack Obama unfairly gave Latino-Americans subsidized health insurance; gave women free reproductive health coverage (excluding abortion); and gave other groups similar “gifts.” He could “never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

...

The problem for American conservatives is not their choice of candidates or the tone of their rhetoric. It is that their ideas are not politically sustainable.

Why you shouldn't drink too much coffee

Linette Lopez highlights 10 Things That Drinking Too Much Coffee Can Do To Your Body.

Climate change debate flowchart

A handy tool: How to Win Any Climate Change Argument.

Video showing wealth inequality in the US

This video is apparently going viral: Video on Wealth Inequality in the U.S.

Alpine glacier changes shown over 100 years

Repeat photos of Vadret da Morteratsch and Vadret Pers shows the decline in glacier size over the last 100 years.

New monetary trilemma?

The Economist looks at an interesting issue in The low rate conundrum:

LONGER-TERM interest rates have been low for quite some time now across much of the rich world, and there is little sign of an upturn any time soon. This is disconcerting. As Ben Bernanke put it in an interesting speech delivered Friday, there are two reasons to worry about low long-term rates: that they'll rise and that they won't. As rates remain low, financial market participants may be encouraged to "reach for yield", by taking dangerous risks and leveraging up. Alternatively, if rates rise sharply then there could be large financial losses in the system. As Mr Bernanke notes, the two risks are mutually reinforcing; reach-for-yield behaviour may increase exposure to losses in a rising-rate world.

...

But we should also anticipate that longer-run real growth rates may be higher given higher inflation. Why? Because we have learned that the odds of hitting the ZLB at low-inflation rates are greater than many anticipated prior to the crisis. And because we have learned that the Fed systematically under-responds to demand shortfalls when stuck at the ZLB, because it has concerns about the risks of unconventional policy. Higher inflation therefore implies fewer, shallower recessions and faster recoveries.

It is perhaps premature to declare the existence of a new monetary trilemma, that over the medium-term central banks can choose at most two of the following: low inflation, low unemployment, and financial stability.

Labour productivity increasing

In Why cutting wages is a fool’s way to boost the economy Malcolm Farr notes that recent declines in productivity are entirely capital driven, employee productivity has actually been increasing.

The history of the issue is this: From 1993-94, labour productivity rose consistently in what Mr Parham called “very, very strong output per hour worked’‘. Meanwhile, capital productivity was flat, meaning machinery, buildings and mines were less efficient.

There has been a big change in the past 10 years. Capital productivity has tanked, said Mr Parham, dropping 20 per cent since 2003-04.

“And it’s capital productivity that has been the drag on Australia’s overall productivity performance. Because you can see multi-factor productivity, which is often the key indicator of efficiency, has done nothing. If anything it has gone backwards,’’ he said.

And what did labour productivity do while capital efficiency tanked? In recent years it has risen 3.3 per cent a year. Over the same period capital productivity has fallen by 3.4 per cent a year.

The not very rational voter

The Gordon's Thoughts blogs has an interesting post: Voting against one’s rational interests. The blog argues that:

People make decisions and behave emotionally and justify their decisions and behaviour rationally!

The blog later makes the point the following point:

Framing and communication matter! It’s all well and good to cite long policy lists of achievement and what the data says in regards to how certain policies are working but if you aren’t dealing with people on an interpersonal level and there is no process of illustration or persuasion mechanism to get people to buy what you’re saying, it all falls on deaf ears.

I found it informative.

It's not a tax, you can't buy and sell a tax

In this memorable quote from Rob Oakeshott says:

Source https://twitter.com/TaodeHaas/status/307386638953222145/photo/1

CSIROh! shown to a toxic mix of conspiracy theories and antisemitism

In Toxic legacies: Malcolm Roberts, his CSIROh! report and the anti-Semitic roots of the “international bankers” conspiracy theory The Watching the Deniers blog systematically tears apart the Malcolm Roberts written CSIROh!. Malcolm Roberts is project manager for the Galileo Movement - an organisation that denies the existence of human induced global warming.

According to parts of the climate sceptic movement, the world is not as it seems.
The CSIRO is a tool of international bankers, who over the past century have also orchestrated every major financial boom and bust since 1913. The United Nations was created at the urging of international bankers, who are using it as a vehicle to usher in a New World Order.

The Rockefeller and Rothschild families have been working behind the scenes for centuries manipulating events. These same banking families instigated both the First and Second World War in order to profit from the chaos. Every Australian Prime Minister of the post-War period – except John Howard – was a Fabian-socialist-Manchurian candidate.

Or so claims Malcolm Roberts, project manager for the Alan Jones sponsored Galileo Movement .

...

Background: the perceived antisemitism of Roberts conspiracy theories

For those readers not familiar with Roberts, he is the project manager for the climate sceptic group the Galileo Movement. The mission of the Galileo Movement is to see the “carbon tax” repealed and to cast doubt on the science of climate change.

Last year in an interview with Sydney Morning Journalist Ben Cubby Roberts claimed a cabal of international bankers were behind the climate change “scam”. This revelation ultimately lead to conservative columnist Andrew Bolt repudiating both Roberts and the Galileo Movement due to the implied whiff of antisemitism of his claims.

Since then Roberts has clearly been smarting, and in CSIROh! he attempts to set the record straight and vindicate his claims.

However, CSIROh! is not an ordinary report. In it Roberts creates an alternative history of the world, in which the Rockefeller’s and Rothschild’s have been working behind the scenes to wreck and profit from financial chaos, incite major wars and build the foundations of a tyrannical world government.
Basically the blog shows that CSIROh! is built upon a web of absurd, and often contradictory, conspiracy theories and anti-semetism.

Trade deficits forever

Matthew Yglesias makes the point that America Can (And Will!) Run a Trade Deficit Forever as Australia has successfully done.

The free market is not a god to be worshipped

In The Sequester's Market Utopians Adam Gopnik argues that the free market is not a god to be worshipped but a tool to be used when it works. He argues that some services (e.g. health, opera, the US Postal Service) are not best left to the markets. He makes this great point:

Society is about running at a loss, because profit and loss are, above all, human terms to be given a human measure. Societies run at a loss so that their citizens can live at a profit, in productive comfort.

The NBN vs the Coalition's proposal

In The vast differences between the NBN and the Coalition's alternative Nick Ross has written a detailed comparison of the Government's NBN and the Coalition's proposal:

The Coalition's broadband policy slogan states that they will "Complete the current NBN cheaper and faster." This simply isn't true.

Ross goes on to justify this statement in great detail. Whilst Ross comes across as a little on the strident side (and I'm not sure the suggested savings in health costs would ever eventuate) I think his argument is essentially correct.

5 false political assumptions

In 5 False Assumptions Political Pundits Make All the Time Molly Ball analyses work published by political scientist Morris Fiorina. The five false assumptions are:

1. The electorate is not "polarizing." It's "sorting."
2. Candidates change more than voters do.
3. Independents aren't partisans.
4. "Division" is easy to overstate.
5. Campaign ads really, really, really don't make much difference.

This is an American article and the rules reflect the US political system. However some of it holds true for Australia. Worth a read.