The Texas School Board wants to add Hayek to the high school economics curriculum. This seems to have caused something of a fuss. Justin Wolfers has argued at the Freakonomics site that Hayek is unworthy. This on the basis of a citation search through JSTOR.

But searching for “Friedrich von Hayek” only yielded 398 articles; adding “((“Friedrich von Hayek”) OR (“Friedrich Hayek”))” raised his total to 1242 mentions; also allowing “FH Hayek” raised his count to 1561.

Oh dear. Friedrich Hayek’s middle initial was A. not H. Okay. Mistakes happen. Jacob Levy then tries to replicate the Wolfers exercise. Afterall this isn’t climate science – replicability is an important aspect of what economists do.

Next step, to get a ceiling estimate:
full-text search on Hayek . 12088 results. Browsing through these yields very few false positives– so now I’m suspicious. Read more »

Bass is the electorate in the north-east of Tasmania, based on Launceston and including the Tamar valley to the north, the rural north-east, and Flinders Island. The middle class suburbs of Launceston are the largest strong Liberal area in the state; if Tasmania had single-member electorates like the rest of the country, this might have been the only place the Liberals recently would have won any seats.

Downtown Launceston

This year, however, they’d be winning seats all over the place. Labor is on the nose, and that’s clearly in evidence in the north. Liberal (and Greens) posters, for example, all feature the name of the party prominently, but Labor posters just have a small and inconspicuous Labor logo down at the bottom. Read more »

I don’t think there has been an issue quite like climate change in Australia in my lifetime. It is no longer a scientific debate, it is no longer a political debate – it has become a religion, a loyalty test and a focal point for inter tribal warfare.

The science has receded into the background in most of the fights. Most of the fighting is done by non scientists (with some exceptions) who have only a rough understanding of the science.

The politics hardly matter any more. Nothing Australia does will have any effect on global CO2 and, anyway, it seems highly likely that thee will be no international agreement of any substance.

Nevertheless, the fight is getting rougher and more malicious. Character assassination, offensive names, allegations of connections with creationism, tobacco denialism and other foolish or evil beliefs. It seems to me that more of the malice is coming from the believers but that might be just my biased impression. Read more »

George Monbiot is lamenting the war on science.

The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science.

This idea of a war on science is very popular with the left. But I don’t see it. Rather I see politicised debate with some using science as a weapon and scientists as human shields. But I suspect that Monbiot isn’t helping his cause much by these comments. Read more »

Today the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO released a six page document purporting to provide more evidence that climate change is to inflict damage on Australia.

The first four pages show some trends from 1960 to 2009. The fifth page shows trends in global CO2 concentrations (over different periods).

The final page shows a giant leap in logic (or rather, absence of logic) by asserting:

Australia will be hotter in coming decades;

much of Australia will be drier in coming decades;

it is very likely that human activities have caused most of the global warming observed since 1950; and

climate change is real.

I need make only three points. First, past trends are not evidence of the future. Second, correlation is not necessarily causation. And finally, the data just shows that the climate fluctuated between 1960 and 2009. That doesn’t prove that “climate change is real” for all periods. Read more »