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Reply | Net Zero and Tony Blair.
at 13:05 30 Apr 2025
The Blair Institute report was written by somebody with a music undergraduate degree and a PhD in sociology. It is amateurish and full of myths. It only tackles one of the nine planetary boundaries. It is yet another attack on STEM experts. Don't get me started on the standard of work by social scientists on climate change.
Carbon capture is predominantly used for enhanced oil recovery.
Very sad to see the tree planting work of conservationists loss in the recent wildfires in Scotland. As Kevin Anderson always says, "Plant trees for tree reasons, not for climate change." |
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Reply | Trump admitting his business pals made billions over the last few days
at 19:54 14 Apr 2025
The economist stated that Neoclassical theory expects a fall in yields under these conditions. The observation was a rise in yields. The theory is bunk.
Could explain how Neoclassical models are dimensionally consistent? I could post some climate change papers by Neoclassical economists if you like and you can explain how these models work.
I noticed the nonsense you posted on climate change and the energy transition, and just to reinforce Phil's point, you simply don't understand useful energy, useful exergy or path dependence. Your post was bunk.
I am part of several discussion groups including at INET, IIPP and LML, we hold public discussions from time to time so if you think we are wrong, you are more than welcome to present your knowledge at one of these events. |
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Reply | Trump admitting his business pals made billions over the last few days
at 13:04 11 Apr 2025
Yeah, just parroting the mad ramblings of some mainstream economist on X.
I think my favourite of all time on here was a chap who compared economists to those who work in medicine. If medical professionals applied dimensional analysis the same way economists do, then we would have a lot of dead people. |
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Reply | What I can't figure out is....
at 09:56 20 Mar 2025
This is complete drivel.
"He’s already portrayed as dishonest by the media so he might as well go for it. Hmmm, climate scientists are portrayed as alarmist and mad, bad and dangerous to know, does it mean we are wrong?
I have no idea what qualifications you have or what you do, but clearly you spend little time understanding what post-Keynesian economists like Richard Murphy are even proposing. Your "not all borrowing is equal" nonsense shows you have no understanding of the post-Keynesian position and are critiquing from a place of total ignorance. Really had enough of amateurs having a casual pop at things they can't even be bother to learn about.
I love the fact you talk about projections, our projections in physics about the climate using relatively simple models have proven to be correct (these are from the 1980's), economists can't project into next week - I think it was you that posted a projection by Fitch who's projection turned out to be an order of magnitude wrong on the US economy under Biden. Would be interesting to here your thoughts on climate change, are the Neoclassical economists right? Will we see growth long into the future with only a tiny reduction in the growth rate after all the tipping points have been breached? This is all derived using the same illogical assumptions Fitch use in their projections.
The borrowing stuff is standard Neoclassical drivel taught to poor unsuspecting students, a complete fiction of banks, money and debt. Government 'borrowing' creates money on the interest paid as does its' spending and commercial banks issuing loans. Even Elon Musk has worked that much out. Government bonds are integral to the financial system and you seem to be putting this "government bad, markets good" nonsense on every post. I have been working with a group of actuaries and some people in the wider financial community on the impacts of climate change, they are very clear to me that they want their investments protected with flood defences, wildfire warning systems. It isn't going to generate much growth, but the downsides are existential for these firms. By your logic cutting NOAA is a excellent idea as it creates very little growth, your understanding of investors is derived from a textbook, not real life.
The reasoning that yields changed solely because of Rachel Reeves' spending plans is just ludicrous, as somebody with twenty plus years of working on dynamical systems you will have to come up with something better than "faith". |
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Reply | Banks were too big to fail but we're not...no QE or bailouts for us.
at 09:26 18 Mar 2025
I'm guessing you are referring to some sort of debt jubilee to reduce the amount of private debt accrued by those on lower incomes. It would certainly help, but we are in the land of Neoclassical economics, where as Reeves states, nobody thinks government debt is fine. The problem with her argument is that one of the people she talked to about economics, Mariana Mazzucato completely disagrees with her, in fact, a entire economic school of thought disagrees with her. The post-Keynesian school rejects the entire premise as the Neoclassical nonsense is based on fallacies about money, debt and banks.
Somebody on here posted a link to an article that contained the opinions of several post-Keynesian economists and one poster on here didn't even understand the context of the article and gave the stock Neoclassical answers. People need re-educating about how money, debt and banks actually work and that will take a generation to see any progress. The Neoclassical school has also produced the most illiterate nonsense on climate change I have every read, if you support the nonsense coming out of this school then in my eyes you are supporting straight up climate change denial.
The fallacies of government doesn't have any money of its own; it needs to borrow from us or tax us for money; the idea that banks lend out deposits; the notion that government borrowing crowds out private investment; the nonsense that markets dictate what we can do, will continue to drive these conversations for years to come and the trend of rising inequality, climate and ecological breakdown, crumbling infrastructure, an increasingly vulnerable financial sector and resultant economic crashes will push people further to the right.
I'd never heard of Gary Stevenson until a few people mentioned him on here, having watched a couple of his videos he seems to fall for a few of the Neoclassical fallacies, if you married some of his ideas with the post-Keynesian perspective it could help. The Left in general seem wedded to a wealth tax, but in practical terms this would take years to happen and the spending needs to happen now, not only to address the myriad problems building up in society, but also because projects take time to realise any gains and the government needs gains for the electorate. Labour needed to massively front-load their spending, in reality we have got very little. |
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Reply | Migrant "crime crisis"
at 19:41 12 Mar 2025
The coat of arms is similar to Oriel College, Oxford but none the wiser on who has authored this map. I agree it is curious as I volunteer at a food bank and people often talk about empty social housing units. One chap from Mauritius (been here decades) said his sheltered housing block had twelve units out of seventy empty (some have been empty for over a year).
I completely agree with you regarding the tactics around these debates. At the Global Systems Institute we had a public discussion around climate change and invited people from across the political spectrum (JSO/XR to Reform/Tory/Labour). These debates usually start with people coming out swinging, however, the use of interdisciplinary skilled facilitators can make a real difference to how people engage. TWTD is definitely not the place for these types of debates as all the acrimonious stuff takes over. The actual evidence provided is thin to say the least. |
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Reply | Global sea ice at an all-time minimum
at 12:36 6 Mar 2025
Excellent Stuff.
The Hansen group have put forward their argument on aerosols among other things in this recent paper.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#d1e1468
Hansen et al. describe an Amoc shutdown as "a point of no return"
If you contrast that with economists who find surface albedo feedbacks and Amoc shutdown would have a positive impact on the global economy. This was a meta-analysis of all the 'research' done by climate economists.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103081118?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=
"AMOC slowdown benefits Europe, while parts of central Asia see increased climate damages."
"Tipping points reduce global consumption per capita by around 1% upon 3C warming and by around 1.4% upon 6C warming, based on a second-order polynomial fit of the data. In some runs, damages exceed 4%.
Refereed by other economists, they don't want climate scientists to referee their work, can't imagine why, this nonsense gets pick up by people in finance and included in their models. All tipping points at 6C of warming causes 1.4% reduction in consumption from what it would have been in the absence of climate change calculated using a smooth function. Total madness.
If people want to learn about tipping points then the Global Tipping Points report is the scientists' evaluation.
https://global-tipping-points.org/resources-gtp/ |
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Reply | Hooray for capitalism!
at 18:15 26 Feb 2025
Props to you for mentioning Kate Raworth, I think her module at Oxford is the only one economics students look forward to taking, she is one of those people that makes learning fun, and is the only one that will teach them anything useful.
I think Lowhouse is a lost cause at this point. I've tried several different ways to explain biophysical limits, but this is a world away from the stylised economic system that is taught on economics courses.
Just reading down the thread you get the sense that people haven't quite got the idea of climate and ecological breakdown, the scale of it, the impacts, what is going to be physically possible. It seems to me people assume you can just select a system: communism, socialism, capitalism, whatever and it will just do its thing.
As you point out, systems with lots of hockey stick graphs tend to be inherently unstable and prone to collapse. A system with 'exponential' traits can simply not survive such a change. The people tasked with understanding capitalism have no idea how it works and can barely describe what it is, that level of ignorance is not a great starting place for a stable world. The idea that capitalism will carry on unabated in our changing environment with a few tweaks is delusional nonsense. As Kevin Anderson (Climate Scientist at Manchester) says, "There are no non-radical futures" Bit of a mentor for us younger "commie climate hoax pushing lefty loons" is Kevin.
In my world the Armed Forces were presented with an analysis of what an shutdown of the Atlantic Sub-Polar Gyre would mean for Britain, actuaries realising just how bad climate change will be for their industry/humanity and we had Ben Franta (Climate Litigation Lab Oxford) give a talk today about how states are now filing lawsuits against fossil fuel interests as capitalism literally eats itself. |
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Reply | Labour isn't working ?
at 11:51 20 Feb 2025
There are two things here; firstly, you are right about Neoclassical economists being consistently wrong about inflation. The reason behind this is because the assumptions in their models are wrong and don't remotely reflect the real world. This makes them beyond useful and they should be discarded. The Bank of England currently has Ben Bernanke (the guy who completely missed the 2008 GFC) conducting a review of its inflation forecasting methodology and it won't improve as a result.
Secondly, as George Box said, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful" and if we use the correct techniques such as we have done with climate models (we have accurately predicted the near linear change in temperature/CO2 concentrations to this point). A colleague of mine who works at the London Mathematical Laboratory wrote a book about the problem of modelling. It is called Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson and goes into the problems associated with complexity and nonlinear systems. |
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Reply | Different goverment, same moronic decisions?
at 22:37 8 Feb 2025
There is rightly lots of effort put into sea defences to protect from SLR and more intense storm surges as well as work on riverine flooding, but the thing that can be very hard to forecast is pluvial flooding which as we saw with the cut-off lows in Europe that can result in mass loss of life.
Paul Davies and Hayley Fowler both confirmed recently at a seminar just how close we have been to a Parliamentary Enquiry type event and the atmosphere is only getting more conducive to these types of hazards. |
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Reply | See Lego is offensive now. (n/t)
at 22:24 8 Feb 2025
You clearly don't know this otherwise you would have referenced it, but Patrick West (the climate change denier at The Spectator) has plagiarised your thoughts and written the exact same thing. The construction of the argument is identical.
I can understand why you wouldn't want to reference The Spectator given it's strong anti-science position on climate change, but it seems a bizarre coincidence that this crank has written the same as you. Do you get a free set of crayons with The Spectator these days?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/lego-isnt-homophobic/
Since you have suddenly become a natural sciences scholar, here is a piece by Toby Young on climate change that you might find similar to your own thinking. Why do people who take a profoundly anti-science position keep referencing science?
*It's total drivel in case anyone was wondering.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ive-found-the-cure-for-climate-anxiety/ |
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Reply | Who is going to be the Left Wing Hero?
at 10:27 6 Feb 2025
I'm guessing the old autocorrect has done its thing there, but you're right Stephanie Kelton, Michael Hudson and Richard Murphy put forward a coherent argument for a better understanding of banks, debt and money. Interestingly Hudson is a Neoclassical economist by training and has switched over to post-Keynesian viewpoint as Hicks did (one of the founder of New Keynesian theory). Michael Kumhof, another Neoclassical economist, who has used the post-Keynesian viewpoint on endogenous money and ported it into DSGE models (not SFC models unfortunately) for the Bank of England.
When I first started to learn about economics about a decade ago I quickly realised what a mess the field was in. It is deeply misogynistic, you only have to see the treatment people like Kelton, Kate Raworth, Isabella Weber and Mariana Mazzucato receive. It is the only field I know of where student groups are calling for a rethinking of the approach. We don't have a rethinking physics group, but I have been part of rethinking economics discussion groups. It is also a field in which people claim expertise when they have none. We get them on here, they have no PhD or ever published in a top journal, but claim all sorts of causality which turns out to be complete nonsense. They don't even bother to reference the people who's ideas they've misrepresented.
The problem I see for the Left is that ecological, post-Keynesian (MMT) and complexity economics are hard to grasp. Claiming the government has no money, is useless and inefficient and therefore needs to be kept to a minimum is easy to sell. Trying to get people to see government as something positive and a force for change is difficult. An example at the moment is flood defences, at a conference last year a person from the Civil Service, who are experts in their own right, talked about Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) and how there is a loop of pilots but never any progress to policy. The government has just announced a paltry increase on flood defences of a couple of hundred million over and above the existing budget, a scheme I visited last year at Southsea costs £180m, so a drop in the ocean of what is really needed given the years of neglect from the previous Tory governments. Government seems to care more about what McKinsey and Blackrock think rather than actual experts. [Post edited 6 Feb 10:34]
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Reply | No mixed messages here then.....
at 08:25 23 Jan 2025
This plays into the abundance agenda put forward by the democrats in the US. The agenda is that we can have a mix of fossil fuels and renewables into the future and technology will mop up the overshoot. As far as I can tell Tim Walz seems to be a prominent figure in this unscientific policy agenda. If senior members of the cabinet think economic growth comes before planetary health then I'm afraid physics will win out to the detriment of us all.
Staggering only 48% of democrats believe we should phase out fossil fuels. Presumably tech bros have convinced Americans that their technologies will save the day.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2023/06/28/what-americans-think-about-an-ene |
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Reply | Paying more for less.
at 09:20 22 Jan 2025
Crazy isn't it. I looked at the wild swings from inflation to deflation in the 19th century and still marvel at how economists use stochastic equilibrium models when you look at the possible states of a economic system ( generally far from equilibrium).
To add to your point, the UK has it's own currency and can always meet those servicing requirements. Nobody has any clue as to what constitutes too much debt, however, we do have money for new runways but not flood defences. I can't wait to see the logic for this latest insanity. |
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Reply | Anyone feeling glum or despondant...
at 13:43 20 Jan 2025
Roberto Forzoni, a performance psychologist, gave a talk at one of our coaching meetings about his time at West Ham and that incredible survival in 2006/7. They had 20 points by mid-March and ended up with 41. He talked about mental resilience and setting achievable goals as a team and as individuals.
In Kieran McKenna we have a coach/manager who stays very balanced and clearly has great belief in the players, his staff and himself. I genuinely believe, despite the rawness of yesterday, that we can get on a run with the talent in this team. We have to stay humble and have those "honest conversations" when it goes wrong, but always take the positives - Jack Clarke breaking the lines, clever free kick routine, excellent delivery from Johnson on corners, Delap hit the target when presented with the chances, as others have said, we stayed true to our identity even when we were 6-nil down.
This is a very exciting team and we have the coaches to get the very best out of them, I'm certainly not throwing the towel in and unlike Luton last year, I think we will get stronger in the final third of the season. |
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Reply | This is the reality of Trump's pick to lead health in the US
at 23:00 18 Jan 2025
Bill Gates had a nice dinner with Trump and was "impressed" with him. Apparently Bill works in global health and there was me thinking he was a climate scientist. It would certainly confirm just how close the ideology of the right and the centrists have become. It will be interesting to see how far the centrists will go to defend their heroes such as Gates and Musk (Tesla and SpaceX very popular with the aspirational centrist).
Gates and RFK in the White House would be some look and the anti-science drivel coming out of Gates on climate change (we (the rich) can adapt to 3C of warming) and Kennedy's nonsense on vaccines/treatments will undoubtedly be replicated elsewhere in the world. Expect a big attack on science over the coming months. |
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Reply | Suicide.
at 09:17 17 Jan 2025
Really? I thought the economist types had some vibes about deficits and debt and we need a decade to 'fix' the economy. What's that another 400GtCO2 or so added and I'm not getting my flood defences until then so all the concerns we had at the Hydrological Society conference last year will have to be put on hold until the real 'experts' stop having vibes.
There is the chance that Gates, Musk, Bezos etc. can use their collective physics degrees to deliver fusion, geoengineering (we went through that at the Global Systems Institute - absolute disaster on so many levels), zero-point energy, asteroid mining, DAC - you name it according to some we have little to fear from climate and ecological breakdown.
A couple of strong influencers on my thinking have been Carl Sagan and James (Jim) Lovelock, I was lucky enough to meet Jim before he died and he didn't hold out much hope. Sagan pretty much foretold that we (the scientists) would be pushed into the background by fantasists (the economists and tech bros), he was right. |
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