Annotated Index to my Publications and Papers
My writings are grouped under the topic headings on the left. New items live here on the home page until I get around to filing them. Peer-reviewed articles are denoted **. Invited and edited articles or chapters are denoted *.
NEW ITEMS (as of April 18, 2013)
RESPONSE TO CRITICS: Various responses to my Fraser Institute Report on energy policy have come out, including ones from the wind industry and the Ontario Environment Commissioner. I was sent a series of questions about these rebuttals by a journalist, and my replies are here.
ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE ONTARIO GREEN ENERGY ACT: I have released a report through the Fraser Institute examining the economic effects of the Ontario Green Energy Act, and pointing out that it costs far more than an alternative strategy that would have yielded the same environmental benefit. The report is available here and the statistical analysis logfiles are here.
- I was on the teevee on April 13 in the morning
- And the radio
- I was on the teevee on April 13 in the morning
- And the radio
REVIEW OF THE GREENWICH WIND FARM ECONOMIC ANALYSIS: Some residents of the Eastern shores of Lake Superior asked if I would look at a report by a consulting firm called Crupi Consulting Group, which was prepared for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and is disseminated on the MNR website (you won't learn the URL from me). The report seems to have greatly impressed a lot of staff members in the Ontario government and may lay the groundwork for even more atrocious ruination of the priceless North Superior shoreline through erection of yet more wind farms. The report is deeply flawed as a basis for understanding the net economic consequences of such developments. Indeed it is so ridiculous I can't believe the MNR staff disseminates it, let alone has put the Ontario government logo on it. Here is my letter to the group of residents explaining some of the flaws in the report. And this is what they are fighting to preserve:
Econometric Applications in Climatology: Conference Registration is now open. This is going to be one for the history books.
STATISTICAL EVALUATION OF IPCC EMISSION FORECASTS: I have a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Forecasting, coauthored with Mark Strazicich and Junsoo Lee, which looks at the probabilities of different IPCC emission forecasts. We examined the SRES forecasts which were used for the 3rd and 4th Assessment Reports. The paper was accepted last year but we are still waiting for the final published version to appear. The IPCC has traditionally referred to these scenarios as mere "projections" and treated each as equally probable. We looked at them probabilistically and found the top half of the distribution less likely than the bottom half, and in particular the top quarter are very difficult to justify. Our paper is here.
WIND LETTER UPDATE (March 13): I have been contacted by many people across the province, who have asked permission to use my OEB letter to assist their own submissions to planning authorities in cases where it is equally applicable (basically everywhere wind turbines are proposed). I hereby give permission, and to facilitate its usage I have rewritten it into a generic form. I hope that anyone who ought to read it is given many, many opportunities to do so in the days ahead, by people who are facing the consequences of this horrific blight. (The photo is the actual view from a home in what was once one of the most beautiful places to live in Ontario -- now described by the resident as "a hideous place to live now".)
Letter to the Ontario Energy Board: I am regularly contacted by members of the public who live in rural areas of Ontario under threat from the invasion of massive industrial-scale wind turbine installations. I am highly sympathetic to the plight of rural folks as they contemplate lost property values, increased stress and nuisance, destruction of scenery, and community divisions under this policy-induced menace. Making matters worse, the economics for the province as a whole are disastrous and the environmental benefits are mythical. From every angle the Ontario Green Energy Act looks like a calamity, except to the rent-seekers who are profiting from the Feed-in-Tariff program at the expense of their neighbours and fellow citizens. In response to a request from a courageous community group trying to prevent the ruin of their township, I wrote a letter to the Ontario Energy Board to apprise the panelists of some of the realities of the situation, as they decide whether or not to approve a proposed wind energy project. The OEB is constrained only to look at two aspects of such projects when they make their decision. My letter points out that if they actually follow the instructions they have been given, they will realize that wind energy projects are not in the public interest.
MY IPCC REVIEW: In 2012 I was a reviewer for the First and Second Order Drafts of the forthcoming IPCC Report (AR5). The expert review process is now closed, even though the report is still undergoing several rewrites. None of the changes introduced at this point will be seen by expert reviewers. Government reviewers will have access to the text at one point, but very few of them bother to submit comments, and the IPCC rules permit Lead Authors to ignore them anyway. In past assessments this post-review rewrite has been the point at which some of the worst mischief has been done to the text: I wrote a report for the UK-based Global Warming Policy Foundation about this in 2011. Things may be a bit different this time around since the IPCC draft has been leaked. This will make it harder for the IPCC Lead Authors to introduce major changes, or delete stuff previously inserted in response to review comments, because there are many more eyes now on the text. Another change is that, in the past, the IPCC did not release review comments, at least until Steve McIntyre got on their case. But even if they plan to release the review comments for the AR5 eventually, they will wait until a long time after the Summary for Policy Makers has been published, at which point it will be too late for people to see what the process looked like. So in order to increase the transparency and openness of the IPCC process, I have compiled my submitted comments on the Second Draft into a single PDF file which anyone who wants can read, and I hope other reviewers will likewise release their review comments. My undertaking to the IPCC was to keep the draft text confidential, but I didn't promise to keep my own comments confidential. The first couple of comments refer to a Figure that has already been widely distributed.
ENVIRONMENT AND INEQUALITY: I made an invited presentation to the CIGI conference "False Dichotomies" (Nov 16-17 2012) in a session on the theme of Environment and Inequality. My argument was that there is a kind of Environmental Kuznets Curve connecting social equity and the stringency of environmental policy. In heavily polluted economies, increased stringency and enforcement of regulation generates a mix of benefits and costs that benefit overall equity. But in modern, high income economies with low pollution levels, like Canada and the US, environmental policy overkill is becoming a means by which wealthy urban households derive warm glow benefits while passing the costs disproportionately onto low-income and rural households. My presentation slides are here. The entire session can be viewed online here. Peter Victor speaks first and then I come on at about the 14:00 mark.
THE DISMAL THEOREM: I have released a Discussion Paper entitled "Cheering Up the Dismal Theorem" which critiques the basis of the Weitzman (2009) argument that people should, in principle, be willing to spend an arbitrarily large amount of current income to prevent a catastrophic loss of consumption due to the risk of a large future climate change event. It turns out there are lots of Discussion Papers floating around criticizing various aspects of the Dismal Theorem, so many so that journals are already considering the topic somewhat done to death even though the critiques are mostly not yet published. Mine differs from the others in that I don't try to argue that the basic structure of the argument needs to be tweaked. Instead I am arguing that Weitzman's main result depends on an approximation term that can be replaced with its exact counterpart, and if this is done the results no longer go through.
ENCOMPASSING TESTS OF SOCIOECONOMIC SIGNALS IN CLIMATE DATA: I have a new Discussion Paper on the subject of surface temperature data quality. It occurs to me that the current debate is interminable because people are arguing from different premises and incommensurable data sets. To bring these disputes closer to actual resolution requires building some larger data sets that encompass apparently conflicting results, such that one can be shown to arise only as a restricted case of a model whose general form supports the other, where the restrictions can be tested. I present two examples, one testing Parker's idea that the failure to observe a difference in trends between windy and calm conditions proves there's no socioeconomic contamination of large-scale trends, and another testing a BEST-style sample split as a means of measuring land surface disruption effects on temperature trends. Data/Code archive is here.
ENCOMPASSING TESTS OF SOCIOECONOMIC SIGNALS IN CLIMATE DATA: I have a new Discussion Paper on the subject of surface temperature data quality. It occurs to me that the current debate is interminable because people are arguing from different premises and incommensurable data sets. To bring these disputes closer to actual resolution requires building some larger data sets that encompass apparently conflicting results, such that one can be shown to arise only as a restricted case of a model whose general form supports the other, where the restrictions can be tested. I present two examples, one testing Parker's idea that the failure to observe a difference in trends between windy and calm conditions proves there's no socioeconomic contamination of large-scale trends, and another testing a BEST-style sample split as a means of measuring land surface disruption effects on temperature trends. Data/Code archive is here.
