Here's my Top 10 items from around the Internet over the last week or so. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.
See all previous Top 10s here.
My must-read today is #2 looking at the risks around foreign borrowing by companies and banks in China.
1. The coming climate crash - This op-ed in the New York Times by former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (also a senior Republican and big time Goldman Sachs big wig) is fascinating.
Contrary to his mostly denialist Republican colleagues, Paulson has called on America to finally take climate change seriously.
He compares the 'carbon bubble' with the 'credit bubble' that built up to such an extent that it eventually caused the Global Financial Crisis.
This is where Paulson has some experience.
He was the crisis manager in charge of the US economy (along with Ben Bernanke) in those hours and days and months when the global financial system came perilously close to collapse.
He's now saying that climate change presents the same type of risk and it's time for a carbon tax.
It's an interesting new twist and will hopefully make a few Americans (and maybe even a few Australians) face up to reality.
When the credit bubble burst in 2008, the damage was devastating. Millions suffered. Many still do.
We’re making the same mistake today with climate change. We’re staring down a climate bubble that poses enormous risks to both our environment and economy. The warning signs are clear and growing more urgent as the risks go unchecked.
This is a crisis we can’t afford to ignore. I feel as if I’m watching as we fly in slow motion on a collision course toward a giant mountain. We can see the crash coming, and yet we’re sitting on our hands rather than altering course.
2. Keep an eye on China's US dollar borrowings - The broad consensus is that China is less vulnerable to a Thai or South Korean style financial crisis because its banks and companies haven't borrowed much from the rest of the world and China has over US$4 trillion worth of foreign reserves.
But Gwynn Guilford points out via Quartz that is changing rapidly and the Peoples Bank of China doesn't have nearly the same amount of control over China's capital account that it did a couple of years ago.
China’s external debt is exploding. The $38 billion in foreign-currency loans that Chinese companies had borrowed from US, European and Japanese banks in the fourth quarter of 2012 had multiplied to nine times that amount by that same quarter in 2013—to more than $349 billion, according to the most recent data from the Bank for International Settlement (BIS). Counting claims by Hong Kong banks, those debts now easily exceed $1 trillion (pdf, p.5).
This is scary-sounding stuff. Just the phrase “external debt” evokes Argentine sovereign debt default, a Thai-style currency crisis or the litany of other catastrophes that occur when emerging-market economies borrow too much abroad.
But many argue that, thanks to its $3.95 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves and its closed capital account, China needn’t worry about such problems.
Those arguments make sense. Unlike other emerging-market countries, China doesn’t need those foreign currencies to finance trade or overseas investment. It borrows because those foreign loans are an easy source of the money that China’s financial system needs to keep banks lending to each other, preventing unprofitable Chinese companies from defaulting—and thereby allowing China’s leaders to promise 7.5% GDP growth this year.
But just as China’s relationship with external debt is different from other emerging-market countries, so too are its risks.
While rising torrents of foreign borrowing keep its system liquid, they have also left China’s central bank with less control over the financial system than it had just two years ago. And that reliance on foreign borrowing makes the country much more vulnerable to a liquidity seize-up than many—including China’s leaders—realize.
3. Here comes Unionpay? - This BusinessSpectator profile of UnionPay's expansion plans in Australia is a useful primer. Unionpay is the Chinese state-owned company competing with Visa and Mastercard.
4. Youth and inequality - This OECD report out this week was a fascinating look at who have been the winners and losers out of the Global Financial Crisis.
The young lost the most. The elderly did best, particularly in New Zealand, as the OECD pointed out (in bold).
Over the four years since the onset of the crisis, young people (aged 18 to 25) suffered the most severe income losses, while elderly people (over 65) were largely shielded from the worse effects of the crisis (Figure 7).
Across the OECD countries, average household disposable income fell in real terms by around 1% per year among youth and by 0.7% among prime-age adults (i.e. those aged 26 to 65). Meanwhile, among the elderly (i.e. those aged over 65) real household disposable income increased by 0.9% per year, on average. Significant income losses among the youth took place in Greece, Iceland and Ireland, with large declines also recorded in Spain, Estonia, Portugal, Hungary and the Netherlands.
Elderly people benefitted from significant income gains in both New Zealand and the Slovak Republic (around 4% per year).
5. Boomerang kids - This New York Magazine piece on kids who come home to live is an interesting sign'of'the times piece from the United States.
One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.
The common explanation for the shift is that people born in the late 1980s and early 1990s came of age amid several unfortunate and overlapping economic trends. Those who graduated college as the housing market and financial system were imploding faced the highest debt burden of any graduating class in history.
6. Political polarisation and inequality - Rajashri Chakrabarti and Matt Mazewski write about their research linking income inequality to political polarisation in this piece in Liberty Street Economics.
The chart below includes a measure of polarisation (the red line) and the income share of the 1%.
In this post, we present evidence that political polarization—or the trend toward more ideologically distinct and internally homogeneous parties—is not a recent development in the United States, although it has reached unprecedented levels in the last several years. We also show that polarization is strongly correlated with the extent of income inequality, but only weakly associated with the rate of economic growth.
Another possible channel by which polarization might drive inequality involves financial regulation. Asymmetric polarization associated with a shift of the political center of gravity to the right can lead to lighter regulation of finance, which in turn may lead to rising incomes for individuals in the upper tail of the income distribution.
The subject of income inequality has gotten a great deal of attention in the media over the past several months, and polarization and gridlock have been features of the American political landscape for years. We can confirm that polarization has increased over the past thirty-five to forty years, and that it has done so in an asymmetric way, with Republicans moving further from the center than Democrats. And while we find that polarization is only weakly associated with growth, we find a robust association between a widening ideological gap and income inequality.
7. Regulation, technology and inequality - Dean Baker muses here at CEPR about the unfairness of Uber and Lyft essentially using their regulatory freedoms to make money at the expense of the regulated.
It's a good challenge to the overwhelming sympathy for the likes of Uber and Airbnb.
It is worth considering this issue in light of the larger issue of the growing inequality we have seen over the last three decades. Uber, like Amazon, has allowed a small number of people to become extremely rich by evading regulations and/or taxes that apply to their middle class competitors. Amazon and other Internet-based retailers have used their tax advantage to put tens of thousands brick and mortar stores out of business.
This is a pretty simple story. In a country where rules are enforced or not enforced to benefit the rich and screw the middle class, you will have increasing inequality and a middle class that is seeing few of the benefits of economic growth.
10. Totally a parody video about Frozen. My daughter is right into it. It's the memories I dread...
51 Comments
This Hank Paulson stuff is gold. “Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures.”
These would be the same experts who predicted:
Snow would be a “very rare and exciting event”. “Children are not going to know what snow is” vs. mid summer ice bergs still on Lakes Superior. If the same chap had predicted mid summer ice bergs on Lake Superior he would have been laughed out of town - but because it was global warming prediction porn it was printed worldwide without question from "experts".
Himalayan glaciers melted by 2035.
10 million climate refugees by 2010 prediction vs. actual zero.
The need for Oz to blow $15 billion on now mothballed desal. plants for droughts that never came etc. etc.
The track records of the financial experts, who couldn’t see a GFC coming or beat an index fund, are remarkably similar. Climate scientists have tried to model the future and failed. The runaway global warming hypothesis didn't work out. If all only that billion a day gravy train had been spent on cancer research or clean water.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing…
Excellent - there is an example of straw man arguing.
First, make a statement to reframe the debate - 'he's right wing'. Doesn't need to be true or have any evidence. But moves off the issue nicely.
Second, put words in their mouth they didn't say. Infer their preferred option is to pray. Again to be a true straw man they should not have actually said anything of the sort.
What you missed is step three where you proceed to demolish their stupid reliance on prayer as unscientific and/or ridiculous.
Without arguing about the way the desal plants were expanded since the initial planning and the economics of that, I know a couple of Queensland farmers who would have a very robust reply if you told them that the worst drought in history they have been in earlier this year was imaginary.
I can see why you would not want to argue about the desal economics.
But please check out the drought and heatwave trends. We're all doomed! Screw the thrid worlds kids without access to fresh water - lets build desal plants for farmers who roll the dice with drought when they buy the farm.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/weather-climate/hig…
http://www.nature.com/articles/sdata20141/figures/5
The only thing imaginary is impending climate doom.
I really, really do not understand how these are evidence about whatever claims you were making about Australian droughts.
I also read he associated pages you linked to following the links (so I actually read the articles) and I am really not sure they support whatever point you were trying to make, and I can follow what they were doing in there analysis. as they point out in figure two, they are using a multivariant model that represents both percipitation and soil aridity have increased over time (there is more moisture in the air and less on the ground). Thier combined score is the drought index. You might want to talk to someone who actually understands food production about the long term effects of less moisture in the soil and more in the air. They also note that last time the world had a major El Niño event, 20% of the world's land was in exceptional drought. You might dismiss that, but that is actually a pretty serious event.
DH if the big fat droughts came in as predicted the desal plants would be working full noise rather than being moth balled $15 billion economic embarrassments. Taxpayers suck the big one and Flannery and Gillard retire to their beachfront properties.
Good for you for reading the links. Interesting how there were a lot more heat waves in the 1930's before SUV's were invented don't you think? If CO2 was a such a big driver would be not be seeing lots of droughts since 2000 when 25% of post industrial CO2 was emitted?
If you understood about food production you would know plants are essentially CO2 starved. A crop of corn will halve the field atmospheric CO2 concentration by lunchtime. I wish I knew that
Yeah El Nino, the last great hope for doomsters. It's happened before and will happen again. A primary production risk. If termperature increases were greater now than 1910-1940 or 1975 to 1998 there may be cause for concern. But the reality is temperature increase is not out of the ordinary only increasing at 1/5 of the rate predicted.
um, as I understand it everyone on both sides of Australian politics still thinks building the correct sized desal plants would have been a good idea, it is just the government doubled the size once they were underway for four times the costs.
The drought in Queensland this year was the worst in history. I do not understand why you think the bungled implementation of building desal plants meant that the drought didn't happen. I assure you it was really real and it hurt people. In fact I think the Australian Govenrment pledged near $320 million on drought relief on this one, when the costs of building the desal plants at the size recomended by experts would have been about $500 million.
And for the heatwaves in the US, again I don't see the relevance to Aussie droughts, but a heat wave is an unbroken run of warm weather. All the standard climate models indicate that warmth adds energy to the system. that is what warmth is. And more energy in the system makes more unstable system, and fewer long runs of the same is consistent with instability. That is one explanation, of the top of my head, for all the other graphs connected to the same data from the same page showing more unusually hot days and fewer unusually cold days. I haven't actually looked to see what the baseline for warmth is, the above explanation assumes that it is constant (I didn't check) if it is continuos warm days against a rolling average temperature, it is even easier to explain.
I think you'll find a heat wave is an unbroken run of extremely hot weather not "warm weather". The sort of hot weather that leads to dust bowls and people writing the Grapes of Wrath. Imagine how bad the drought would have been if they had to drive to California in their SUV's back then.
There have been droughts in Aussie before and there will be again. Like the Federation drought 1895-1903 which killed off 40 million sheep and crippled Australia.
http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/climate/levelthree/c20thc/drought1.htm
And as for "more energy in the sytem". It has been hotter in the past and the planet didn't spin out of control. Holocene climatic optimum 5,00 years ago and all that. Have you not heard the "more energy" is missing? ie Kevin Trenberth famous inhouse email "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t." They think it might be hiding the deep oceans or something but the need more funding.
Here you confuse weather with climate, and a lot else, and as usual lacking in honesty to boot.
What climate change predicts is more extremes in weather. More hot, more drought and more wet and all these more severe as individual events, with the occasional cold extreme thrown in. It doesnt say it will happen tomoorw, but statistically it is more and more likely, hence the de-sal plants are insurance (however badly implimented) and likely to be needed in the future and more frequently.
But then you dont care about an honest debate do you. Bad news for you, like the tobacco industry deniers climate change deniers are going the same way, greatly diminishing in numbers and becoming a kooky, fringe non-event.
regards
Warmest May on record.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/06/23/3451944/warmest-may-on-reco…
Don't worry though, it's that One World Government crowd.
“”Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies. —Scott Westerfeld :)FYI: Contrary to our pollies constant refrain that small countires should not take the lead on CO2, Costa Rica, with about our population, genuinely much above our 51% pure, is scheduled to be carbon neutral by 2020. It can be done.
They are agricultural (coffee the main crop) and have manufacturing plants from Intel, Galaxo, etc. Would have emigrated there instead but for the snakes and crocs.
Tax is actually a way to use market forces, something the right wing should understand. If you increase the price of something you use less of it. It also makes other alternatives more viable. So you change from cheap coal to wind power. What is so wrong with that?
You have probably downsized your car to something more economical over the years. Thats market forces influenced by price.
i find it interesting when it comes to the climate change debate that people form opinions without examining the facts. Australia is having the warmest winter on record yet people still deny it.
Climate change deniers are usually to the right politically and dare I say it are religious as well. I have yet to understand why. Insurance companies are taking it seriously as they have to pay out as the damage occurs. So governments and the corporate world are acting, but the populous needs convincing as they fry. Make no mistake people will make big bucks by acting soon to take climate change into account.
What is so wrong with that?
Good question.
What is the moral basis on which one group of people dictate the terms that another group of people will live.
It is one thing to identify that a tool to motivate or change peoples behaviour exists. It is quite another to use that tool to dictate your morality on others.
At the very least you have to be careful on this slipperly slope, history is repleat with examples of this kind of thinking going very wrong. Even now there is a woman in the Sudan who is being told what she will believe by her 'government'. There are good reasons western tradition removed religion from government - and I suggest this propensity for humans to tell each other how they will live was a big part of it.
The moral basis on which one group of people dictate terms to another is based on the general principle that people should not be allowed to act in ways which harm other people's persons or property, ie the same moral basis as the one which allows societies to impose and enforce laws preventing murder and theft. Even the staunchest of libertarians would subscribe to that.
An economist would describe the case of climate change as an externality - harm caused by an action which is not taken into account in the price paid/earned for that action - which is in turn a type of market failure which can (but does not necessarily) justify a Government intervention. Much of the debate here is about whether there is any such harm, which is not an economic or a moral question but a scientific one.
Quite agree with the general principle, without it we have either archarcy or 'might makes right'.
If I examine the moral case so far it goes something like this;
Is the climate is changing? - no question.
Is the change beyond the scope of historic changes? - not enough evidence to say conclusively but maybe.
Is man the major cause of change? - not enough evidence to say conclusively but maybe.
Do we know exactly how the planetary climate system works (important if predictions are strong enough to base policy on)? - no we don't, even our best models aren't yet backward facing accurate let alone forward predicting accurate.
On top of this are the economic problems lke externality, which in context take us beyond each national government taxation (i.e. NZ taxes all it wants but it doesn't change China's pollution problem).
So the moral argument is wholly insufficient at this time to support national taxation as a way of "saving the planet". To leave the moral debate out is to jump the gun and allow moral dictation on an insufficient basis (like alarmist conjecture).
Unless you obtain wide social contract for large scale moral any dictations it ends badly with societal breakdowns.
Do you think the moral argument justifies doing nothing?
Put it this way. If it's genuinely uncertain, then we cannot know whether it is a mistake to do something, or not to do something.
Suppose we do nothing, and we're mistaken in that - it turns out that climate change is real, and reducing fossil fuel use would have helped to avert it. What would be the harm in that?
Supposing we do something (a well-designed emissions trading scheme is probably the most economically efficient thing we can do, but a well-designed tax isn't that far behind), and we're mistaken in that - it turns out that it wouldn't have made any difference whether we acted or not. What would be the harm in that?
Which is the greater harm? Which mistake do you think our grandchildren will be more ready to forgive us for?
The greater harm is diverting precious research dollars and investment away from things like actual problems like clean water, sanitation and electricty supply in thr third world, cancer research etc. We have air pollution laws already. Bringing in CO2 trading laws just increases energy costs for the poor. Looks at the spike in eldery cold related deaths in the UK due to a greenie driven energy policy.
Check out the divergence in electricty prioces in Europe and the US. Is it morally right to hike energy prices based on computer models that predicted warming 5x higher than observations? With the benefit of hindsight we can see that warming 1910-1940 was no different to 1975-1998. Where is the justification from diverting resources from actual problems like clean water and vaccinations to computer model predicted doom?
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21579149-germanys-energiew…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
"Simulations conducted in advance of the 2013–14 assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the warming should have continued at an average rate of 0.21 °C per decade from 1998 to 2012. Instead, the observed warming during that period was just 0.04 °C per decade, as measured by the UK Met Office in Exeter and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK."
A more recent study published in Nature (February 2014) proposed the likely mechanism for the pause:
"Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake. The extra uptake has come about through increased subduction in the Pacific shallow overturning cells, enhancing heat convergence in the equatorial thermocline. At the same time, the accelerated trade winds have increased equatorial upwelling in the central and eastern Pacific, lowering sea surface temperature there, which drives further cooling in other regions. The net effect of these anomalous winds is a cooling in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1–0.2 °C, which can account for much of the hiatus in surface warming observed since 2001. This hiatus could persist for much of the present decade if the trade wind trends continue, however rapid warming is expected to resume once the anomalous wind trends abate."
It will be interesting to see what happens in the coming decades. Don't worry profile, no one is going to do anything meanful about climate change unless a major catastrophe strikes, at which point it'll probably be too late to do anything meaningful anyway. You can relax, your fossil fuel stocks are safe.
Ah yes I'd read that but was being tardy in going to find it to refute Profile's out fo date cherry picking, thanks.
The interesting thing also is that I read that hurricanes form around warm surface water and when that gets dispersed the cooler water underneath dappens the hurricane. If of course the warm water is both hotter and goes deeper the hurricanes are going to be more frequent and bigger as they have access to more energy.
both US and OZ I think live in that hurricane zone so Abbot and teh US CONgress get to see the effects of climate change directly.
Oh boy.
regards
Pluto there are lots of theories as to why the warming has only increased 1/5 of that predicted. Nature, January, 2014 had a whole host of them. But they remain just theories. Keven Trenberth "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t."
Warming will likely acclerate again but will it be any faster than 1910-1940 or '75-98 warming trends? Since 98 all we have observed is ho hum interglacial warming so why all the hand wringing?
Bringing in CO2 trading laws does not only increase energy costs for the poor. It may also help to avert a far greater disaster than some people having to re-prioritise their spending and/or put on an extra jumper in the winter.
Hving said which, I would certainly agree that energy prices in Europe are unnecessarily high. That is because they have adopted unnecessarily expensive and inefficient aproaches to seeking to reduce carbon emissions, prescribing and subsidising the use of certain technologies rather than allowing the most efficient technologies to emerge through competitive market processes, as would happen in a well-designed carbon trading scheme.
Thanks for the lack of empty mocking:
Do you think the moral argument justifies doing nothing?
Can I try for a logic statement in reply;
IF the moral basis is not to allow actions that harm others;
AND the consequence of an action is uncertain as to the allocation of harm;
THERFORE there can be no moral basis to block the action.
We may make other criteria the basis for action but morality alone does not stand as a justification (either way). We may make emotional pleas as to the level of "uncertain" but that doesn't actually further the science of knowing or move the moral foundation.
What would be the harm in that?
This argument is dependant on the cost isn't it. Both the direct costs (on whomever they fall) plus the opportunity loss of the money involved. Only if we put those costs aside or count them as nought does the harm become nothing. Like so many government policies, pregnant with good intentions, I suggest the many children are usually named 'unexpected' and 'none could have foreseen'.
Without a detailed analysis of the opportunity loss it is impossible to make a judgement as to who might forgive whom and for what.
IF the moral basis is not to allow actions that harm others
AND the consequences of a action is uncertain as to the allocation of harm
THEREFORE there can be no moral basis not to block the action.
Why is this logic any worse than yours? The uncertainty means that you risk harm whether you block the action or don't block the action. The harm isn't nothing in either case; the question is which is the greater.
Hm. Back to the logic classes for me.
I read it as the uncertainty means the pre-requisite "that others were harmed" is not filled because the fact of harm is not established.
Certainly if the extent of harm cannot be established then I don't see any easy way to use quantitative measures such as greater with any meaning.
I mean it's a bit wonkyto just say the risk is total extinction therefore the harm must be greater. Because risk is a two stage measure - impact x probability - and although impact is high probability hasn't been established.
Another reply, sorry.
This is not to say I would not support *any* level of action (in a democratic going along with the majority kind of way), but I am very much driven by knowing rather than gambling - and am fully aware that is just me and many would be happy to gamble at this time (with this level of knowledge).
Also, I am not sure how much I buy into it, but an argument can be made that resources to respond are limited and to hold them back until the best informed moment to make maximum impact is a sensible way of 'keeping your powder dry'. I would say about equally valid as the 'what harm in acting' argument.
I am also aware to inflict wide society financial pain for the wider good requires wide society buy-in. So, in my opinion, to misrepresent the extent of what is known is very dangerous. Look at the silly things Al Gore said would happen within ten years. He (and his kind) cried "wolf" and every time they did it / do it the moral authority is eroded by the lie they made.
If you loose the people on the way, or are not all seen to be in the boat together (some don't contribute to the pain) the social contract is easily broken.
1. I have to disagree that people taking opinion without evidence is somehow limited only to climate debate. As far as I see that is pretty normal and thinking is harder than it looks.
2. There two problems with using a warm Ozzie winter as evidence of global warming:
(a) alone the sample is so small as to be statistically irrelevant
(b) you are attributing all weather change to global warming, which is factually incorrect
Climate change deniers are usually to the right politically and dare I say it are religious as well
It is ironic to point out people establish opinion without evidence and two sentences say something as unsupportable as that. Do you have any proof of such a claim, and if not how are you different from those you acuse?
I personally object to the use of the word 'denier'; which, placed in a cultural context, means a group of people who said the holocaust never happened. To equate the questioning of scientific inuiries with such a group is the lowest type of gutter trash argument that should only be used by people who cannot think.
1. Yes and frankly after seeing what you have written I can happily put you in that category
2a looks a straw man, see 1.
b) No climate scientist would
climate change deniers, well extreme right wing and religious fundies do as a rule indeed deny AGW.
"denier" well when the weight of science and math supports climate change then denier is actually not a bad label for deniers IMHO. It is certianly not skeptic.
Def:
denier
(one who denies)
I cannot off hand find any other (polite) english word that suits .
Maybe this will help seems you are in great company with 1/2 of Congress,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC3CHeKfkDo
regards
Anyone growing a.o. wheat and apples in Greenland?
They were 1000 years ago, right up to about 1260. Ever wondered why it is called Greenland? Medieval Warm Period, look it up it may surprise you. Plenty of information on the net and an integral part of Scandinavian history, or was until the climate police stepped in.
Then it got too cold.
But that was all natural of course.
It is different now because some say so and desperately want everyone else to believe it.
1000 years odd before that in the Roman Wam Period, Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants, glaciers would still be blocking the way if he was to try it now on that track.
Then it got cold again.
1000 years before that they call it the Minoan Warm Period. then it got cold again.
Seems to come back every 1000 odd years, (1100 actually and lasts for about 300 to 400)
It has all happened before and will happen again.
Relax people. There are a number of scientists now screaming AGW who were yelling Ice Age Coming in the late 60's. Nothing we are seeing now has not been seen before. It is just that the "record" is in most cases less then 60 years, depending what you look at. Not a very long record at all in the scheme of things and certainly not for the climate.
However, finding reliable additional energy sources will be needed in time to come.
I haven't heard of too many Southern Baptist Republicans promoting climate change. Or many Republicans at all for that matter. Correct me if I am wrong.
I am a fan of back of the envelope calculations for a first look at something. So yes, the planet has had warmer cycles, but is it reasonable to assume that 6 billion people chopping down forests, burning fossel fuels, polluting water etc have had no effect on the environment?
Common sense would say there must be some effect.
Been skiing in the North Island this winter have we?
I would challenge the word 'theory' with regard to co2 causing warming. It is a fact that it does. There are many scientific papers to confirm this. Only deniers relate everything back to 'theory' when these things are proven.
The general public has little understanding of 'peer' reviewed research. This means that a research paper have been reviewed by their peers. Also experts in their field. Yet these papers get rubbished by deniers by non peer reviewed opinions without basis in fact. Both seem to get the same level of publicity, when they are not the same. One has credibility by experts, the other not. Journalists do not care about the difference either and would sooner ask the man in the street. Both get equal coverage on the 6o'clock news.
It's a hard row to hoe that this entertainment system we call 'media' should provide balanced coverage of anything. One day vitamins can save your life and the next they have no effect or will kill you.
As for peer review, none of the greatest scientists in history (or any of their discoveries or work) was peer review. As judged by Biography online:
http://www.biographyonline.net/scientists/top-10-scientists.html
I haven't seen any proof that the peer review system makes scientific research more likely to be correct.
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