It’s semi-official. Global warming is taking a back seat to the economy. The Lowy Institute has just released the results of their 2008 pollwhich finds, amongst other things:

Australians see protecting their jobs and strengthening the economy as more important foreign policy goals than tackling climate change according to the 2008 Lowy Institute Poll, to be released tomorrow.
The Poll’s findings also indicate that we regard climaterelated challenges as the most critical threats to Australia and a slim majority (51%) of Australians are not confident in the government’s ability to deal with global warming.
The Poll also reveals that Australians want action on climate change but not if it hits hard on the hip pocket.
Asked how much extra each month they would be willing to pay on their electricity bill to help solve climate change, 53% of Australians were only prepared to pay $10 per month or less. 19% were prepared to pay $21 or more.
Last year, ‘tackling climate change’ tied for first place with ‘protecting the jobs of Australian workers’ as the most important foreign policy goal (75% of Australians said these were ‘very important’ goals).
This year ‘tackling climate change’ dropped from first to equal fifth place (from 75% saying it was ‘very important’ to 66%).

The poll mirrors election results in the UK where policies to counter climate change have cost governments votes.
While voters are worried about climate change, policies which apply any sort of a tax or impost to counter it are seen as being unrelated to dealing with the problem, and just another way for the government to put their hands in voters’ pockets.
Food for thought for Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. Howard’s climate change policy might not have been politically wrong, just poorly timed.
They’re releasing the complete poll results at 11:00 a.m. and hopefully I will be able to put a link up then.

Is there a link between the demise of Lehman Brothers and global warming? Jennifer Marohasy certainly seems to think so, but she doesn’t say why. There is a spate of theories from her commenters.
I think that there is a link, but it’s not specific to Lehman Brothers, but rather systemic, and it has to do with computers and modelling.
When I first started in finance in 1983 I was issued with a Hewlett Packard HP12C calculator. This nifty little beast, which I still own, was programable, although we mostly used only the 5 or so buttons needed to work out lease rates. But this was before personal computers, so for most investors and developers cashflows were still laboriously produced using pencil and paper. Changing one variable meant rubbing out a lot of spreadsheet, so you made sure your assumptions were very robust.
Personal computers changed all of that. A few years later I was programming Lotus 123 spreadsheets to automatically predict development profits in which I could tweak the assumptions ad nauseum. I wasn’t the only one, and pretty shortly no valuation was complete without a discounted cashflow, with sensitivity analysis.
At the same time, as a result of the 1987 sharemarket crash, New York stockbroking firms were going one step further and hiring physics PhD graduates to construct computer programs to predict the direction and magnitude of stockmarket prices. These graduates shamelessly took their millions, even though they should have been aware that the task was the philosopher’s stone of sharemarket investment.
In the real estate investment and development industry computer models never really took over. Valuation practice meant that valuers had to check their calculations by using at least two, and preferably three methods for comparison. Cost of construction and direct market comparisons didn’t negate computerised discounted cashflow models, but they did mean banks wouldn’t lend to you on the digital blue-sky valuations. The models might be right, but few lenders were prepared to risk their shirts on them.
I know I soon realised that if it didn’t work on the back of an envelope, then making it work with a computer program was very dangerous.
The same thing can’t be said for equity and credit markets, where asset pricing models for risk have taken over at the large ticket end of things. Which brings us to the sub-prime mess.
Even though a cursory explanation of how the mortgage packages were structured sounds daft, the models said that they were fine. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) is the technical term for this. And the models were so complex, and the products they were used to produce so opaque, that no-one really knew the full risks of what they were “investing” in.
And at the bottom of the pile, making all of this possible with abstract computerised models, were undoubtedly a lot of physics and maths graduates.
Which is pretty much where we are with climate change. There are some “back of the envelope” models of what happens with increases in CO2, like this one. Or slightly more complex ones like this (thanks to Jennifer for both the links). Neither requires a computer, just a pencil and a sheet of paper, plus some advanced maths. While both predict temperature rises, there is nothing too scary about them.
To get the scary temperature rises requires GCM (general circulation models) which run on computers and are programmed with positive feedbacks. Like the models under-pinning sub-prime mortgage securitisation, you have to be a specialist to get a good handle on them, so most decision makers just trust the programmers, because, as they have PhDs in physics and maths, they must have sound judgement, musn’t they, just like those graduates programming the assets risk allocation models? Whoops.
Which is where Lehman Brothers legitimately comes into the argument. It didn’t go broke because it ran a program promoting carbon trading. They went broke because they, and many others, relied on smart people to construct models which ultimately didn’t reflect the real world. Undoubtedly many inside Lehman Brothers and the other Wall Street firms knew that they didn’t, but there was a conspiracy of silence. No-one wanted to risk this year’s bonus or next year’s promotion by pointing out that the only thing transparent about these opaque models were the emperor’s clothes!
So it is with global warming. Other methods of evaluating the risks, like reviewing the historical record, suggest that nothing that is happening at the moment that can’t be accommodated, but the models say otherwise, and the weight of money and ambition has gone behind the models. As a result, we in the West are caught up in an environmental bubble economy where everyone is spruiking cimate change.
Which is where Lehman Brothers comes in again. While these phenomena can persist long past their natural life, in the end, they burst. It’s costing perhaps a trillion dollars to clean-up the subprime modelling mess in the US. How much will it cost to clean-up the AGW modelling mess in the world?

Shelley once claimed that poets were the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind” a proposition with which my fellow English graduate Nathan Rees might agree. As someone who retired from writing poetry after producing a very modest published output, it’s an idea to which I’m not unsympathetic.
Belief in the manifest rightness of your particular profession running the world runs deep. Plato hated poets, but he liked the idea of the philosopher king. We know that lawyers, teachers and union officials are more likely than members of other professions (or should that be occupations) to be elected to parliament and in response various other professionals have veered towards suggesting affirmative action for other professions – like theirs. Indeed, I remember a member of a north-side Brisbane branch of the Queensland Liberal Party who was an engineer and believed that all of our problems arose from the fact that the world wasn’t run by engineers.
The calls in today’s press by three scientists for the government to ignore Ross Garnaut’s latest encyclical and act more urgently on CO2 abatement brought Shelley to mind.
There are a number of conspiracy theories to explain why a large number of scientists have become apostles of global warming hysteria. Here’s another one. Could it be that this is their opportunity to give their profession a chance to run the world? Are scientists now the unacknowledged legislators of mankind?

Apparently the energy crisis is shifting Americans’ attitudes to global warming – they’re less worried. Hard to tell from the NBC report exactly what this means, although I gather 58 percent of them are still worried about the direction in which the environment is heading.
Judging from the picture on the right, maybe they never were that serious. I’ve never seen a stretch Hummer before and would hate to think what its carbon footprint would be, but going on its wheel base, it must be considerable! This one was parked briefly outside the Hyatt Regency at Waikiki where the Civic Video Pipeline conference was held.