Our Word is Our Weapon

The people at the Globalization Institute seem to have got into their heads the idea that China has “the lowest protection of any developing country in the world“, and are keen to spread this wonderful fact around. Well, I’ve got bad news for them - it’s not true.

Have a look at this paper from the IMF, which has a handy table showing the ratings for a bunch of countries on five different measures of trade protection, from simple average tariffs to overall trade restrictiveness. All the data used is either newer than 2001 (China’s WTO accession year) or very close to it. On none of these scores is China the least protectionist developing country. In fact, it’s nowhere near it. Another source of trade data, table 8.4 in this big UNCTAD statistics compendium, confirms the finding.

The GI seem to have been misled by an article by Neil C. Hughes in Foreign Affairs, also published by the New York Times. He does indeed make the offending claim - where he gets it from I don’t know.

This rather undermines Cameron Carswell’s claim here that trade liberalisation was the major driver behind China’s growth and poverty reduction since the 1980s. He would do well to read this analysis by the World Bank’s experts on poverty reduction in China, Martin Ravallion and Shaohua Chen. On trade, they say:

The view that greater trade openness brings rapid gains to the poor is not borne out by our data. China’s periods of more rapid expansion in external trade were not associated with more rapid poverty reduction. Nor do we find evidence that the tariff reductions implemented since the mid-1990s (in the lead-up to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization) have had anything but a rather minor impact on poverty and inequality.

They conclude that two major internal reforms caused the biggest reductions in poverty - the de-collectivisation of agricultura started in 1978, and the decision by the government to pay a higher price through the centralised food procurement system in the mid 1990s.

[Update: I emailed the GI to tell them about the error, and they’ve quietely changed the stories, but without acknowledgement or even a word of thanks. Nice.]

I suppose Alister McFarquhar of the Adam Smith Institute hasn’t heard the news, because he seems to be making a late bid for the Flat Earth Award with this post attacking the leftist conspiracy theory which would have us all believe that the world is getting warmer and that humankind has something to do with it.

McFarquhar is sceptical about the current “Consensus Science which might excusably be mistaken for conspiracy” because, hey, wasn’t there a consensus a few decades ago that the world was about to enter a new ice age?

Although some warming at the end of the 20 Century is observed in surface samples, weather satellites and balloons recorded cooling between 1940 and the mid seventies, leading popular scientists to warn of a new and overdue Ice Age. There has been no clear trend since.

Note the apparently innocuous use of “popular scientists”. What’s that supposed to mean? People like David Bellamy, perhaps. It’s interesting that he omits to name any individuals or institutions that made this claim. Why? Because there never was any such consensus. As RealClimate point out,

The state of the science at the time (say, the mid 1970’s), based on reading the papers is, in summary: “…we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate…” (which is taken directly from NAS, 1975). In a bit more detail, people were aware of various forcing mechanisms - the ice age cycle; CO2 warming; aerosol cooling - but didn’t know which would be dominant in the near future. By the end of the 1970’s, though, it had become clear that CO2 warming would probably be dominant; that conclusion has subsequently strengthened.

Any supposedly scientific predictions of “a new and overdue Ice Age” were either taken out of context (mostly by hacks trying to rubbish the idea of global warming) were not made in peer-reviewed scientific journals in the first place.

McFarquhar continues:

Recent forecasts of rapid warming favoured by the Consensus depend on the hypothetical hockey stick which was used by the IPCC [2001] as evidence for anthropogenic global warming. It showed. a sharp recent temperature rise in the Northern hemisphere after a relatively flat trend for 1000 years. This model is now discredited. McIntyre and McKitrick [MM-2003] found the data had been manipulated. When MM recalculated temperatures with corrected data (but retaining the same methodology), they obtained quite a different temperature history, bearing no resemblance to the hockey stick (which can be fitted to random data).

Actually, it’s McIntyre and McKittrick (McIntyre works in the mining industry, while McKitrick is an economist) who have been discredited. Their paper is an attack on the 1998 paper by Mann et al, which is only one of several to have independently produced the ‘hockey stick’ shaped global average temperature trend. Here’s RealClimate (a site run by several expert climate scientists, including Mann) again:

The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, which hold that the “Hockey-Stick” shape of the MBH98 reconstruction is an artifact of the use of series with infilled data and the convention by which certain networks of proxy data were represented in a Principal Components Analysis (”PCA”), are readily seen to be false, as detailed in a response by Mann and colleagues to their [M&M] rejected Nature criticism demonstrating that (1) the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction is robust with respect to the elimination of any data that were infilled in the original analysis, (2) the main features of the Mann et al (1998) reconstruction are entirely insensitive to whether or not proxy data networks are represented by PCA, (3) the putative ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick, which argues for anomalous 15th century warmth (in contradiction to all other known reconstructions), is an artifact of the censoring by the authors of key proxy data in the original Mann et al (1998) dataset, and finally, (4) Unlike the original Mann et al (1998) reconstruction, the so-called ‘correction’ by McIntyre and McKitrick fails statistical verification exercises, rendering it statistically meaningless and unworthy of discussion in the legitimate scientific literature.

The claims of McIntyre and McKitrick have now been further discredited in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, in a paper to appear in the American Meteorological Society journal, “Journal of Climate” by Rutherford and colleagues (2004) … Rutherford et al (2004) demonstrate nearly identical results to those of MBH98, using the same proxy dataset as Mann et al (1998) but addressing the issues of infilled/missing data raised by Mcintyre and McKitrick, and using an alternative climate field reconstruction (CFR) methodology that does not represent any proxy data networks by PCA at all.

More recently, M&M’s work has been debunked by scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Alfred University.

McFarquhar goes on to claim that “Meanwhile the original data from which the hockey stick was derived cannot be extracted”. Leaving aside the fact that Mann et al’s results have been independently verified, this statement is still simply not true. RealClimate again:

the methodology used was described in detail not just in the original 1998 publication, but in an expanded description provided last year on Nature’s supplementary website. The original description was adequate for other researchers with appropriate training to closely reproduce both the algorithm and the published results. In fact, the NCAR researchers referred to above have made their code for implementing the Mann et al (1998) method publically available here. In the process, they demonstrate the impacts of the numerous fundamental errors made by McIntyre and McKitrick. With this publically available code and data, anyone can reproduce and check the reconstruction of Mann et al (1998).

So in summary, McFarquhar’s post is a tissue of anti-scientific waffle and fantasy. When he complains that “This debate has affected respected journals like Science and Nature, which are no longer willing to provide a forum for conflicting views”, what he means is that Science and Nature are no longer willing to provide a forum for the incompetent, ignorant or corrupt types who continue to peddle the “no global warming” myth. I leave it up to the reader to decide which category McFarquhar and his pals at the Adam Smith Institute fall into. I also look forward to those master debunkers Tim Worstall and Scott Burgess applying their laser-like critical faculties to this dangerous misinformation.

[PS I’ve sent a trackback link from this post to McFarquhar’s at the ASI. They’ll delete it, just as they delete any trackbacks from blogs that have the cheek to criticise them. So much for “providing a forum for conflicting views”]