WELCOME TO TIM CURTIN'S CYBERHOME about tim | publications | contact Mr Combet’s Sun God - Comments on the Clean Energy Legislation, T R C Curtin Tim was too trusting when he made this Submission on the government’s Carbon (sic) Tax to the Commonwealth Parliament’s Joint Steering Committee, because it showed that the so-called Clean Energy Legislation is most unlikely to have any impact at all on Australia’s emissions of carbon dioxide or its climate but will have adverse economic effects. The Government-controlled Committee refused to accept the 3,930 critical Submissions, a breach of normal practice, so only the 70 mainly supportive comments have been posted. Full Story (PDF File) Much better than Yes Prime Minister!? Tim was invited by the Australian Financial Review to debate the Carbon Tax with Professor Ian Harper at The Age in Melbourne last week (22nd. July). Follow the link http://tv.afr.com/video/channel/122/160214?play=1 Land Law and Economic Development in Papua New Guinea.
Here at last is the book that David Lea and I have been working on for about 5 years or more. It is both a great read and a snip (!) at £39.99, and is available from the publishers: 1. By cheque payable to Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2. By BACS or Swift or other international money transfer means, please contact admin@c-s-p.org for details. 3. By debit or credit card: We accept VISA, Mastercard, Switch and Maestro; details may be emailed or faxed to +44 191 265 2056 or mailed to the above address; alternatively books may be purchased online at www.c-s-p.org VAT no: GB 828642212. POSTAGE Postage: Inside UK (£4.00 per item) Airmail Worldwide (£6.00 per item) Econometrics and the Science of Climate Change My paper Econometrics and the Science of Climate Change has been accepted by the Economic Society of Australia for its annual conference, which this year will be in Canberra (ANU) from 11th to 14th July. I plan to add some more graphs in Power Point for the actual presentation. Note: This paper is also available at http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/ Also there are comments on it by Jos de Laat of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, and my own response to Dr de Laat. Download paper (PDF File) Tim Curtin’s Submission to the Multi-party Committee on Climate Change I have also made a submission to the Australian Government’s Multiparty Committee on Climate Change which is designing the so-called Carbon Tax the Government plans to introduce on 1st July 2012. Submission (PDF File) The Garnaut Reviews’ Omissions of Material Facts Here are two papers with my comments on the latest Garnaut Climate Change Reviews. The first was published on 25th March 2011 at Online Opinion - http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11800 and by 26th March had attracted 27 responses, not all are flattering! This paper is a fairly short summary of the much longer and rather technical paper which reviewed Ross Garnaut’s The Science of Climate Change. This paper was published on 21st March by the Lavoisier Group and is available at their site www.lavoiser.com.au. RMAP RESEARCH SEMINAR: LET THEM NOT EAT: CO2, FOOD AND CLIMATE - Mr Tim Curtin 12.30-1.30pm Thursday 29 April 2010 - Seminar Room B, Coombs Building This seminar challenges the quasi-Malthusian assumption going back to Wigley ( CRU-UEA & CSIRO, Tellus 1993) and maintained by Sokolov et al (MIT, 2009), that there is a fixed limit to the volume of CO2 emissions that can be absorbed by land and ocean biospheres. Wigley’s assumption is central to the MAGICC models relied on by IPCC to project global climate to 2100, as it results in more than doubling the projected rate of growth of the atmospheric concentration of CO2, from the actual 0.4% (1958–2009), to 1% p.a (2000–2100). Presentation Flyer (PDF File) Full Presenation (PDF File) More scientific evidence, please Tim Curtin was pleased to find that claims he has made over the last 2 years (see links below to Tim's first Submission to the Garnaut Review and his articles in Quadrant and Energy & Environment), that there is no evidence - despite the claims by Lord Stern, the IPCC, and the Garnaut Review - for any weakening in the ability of the so-called carbon "sinks" to absorb anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, have been confirmed in a recent peer-reviewed paper (Knorr 2009). The sinks are the globe's oceans and land and sea-based plant life, which have taken up on average 57% of CO2 emissions since 1958. Stern and Garnaut used the false assumption that the sinks are or will soon be "saturated", so that in effect 100% of CO2 emissions would remain airborne for ever, resulting in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rising from 387 parts per million of the atmosphere to 887 ppm by 2100. They used the alleged resulting accelerated "global warming" to justify their draconian proposals for terminating our carbon-based economy. Tim's letter in today's (29th January 2010) Sydney Morning Herald gives more details: Full Story (PDF File) Two new papers published - 15 October 2009 Tim has just (15 October 09) had two papers published in the journal Energy and Environment. The first shows how the "prestigious" journal Nature refuses to admit the palpable errors in the 9 papers on climate change it published in its issue of 30 April 2009. The second, more substantial, paper show how important atmospheric carbon dioxide is for global food production, and that it would be a serious calamity if the Copenhagen Conference succeeds in getting global CO2 emissions down to the proposed 40 per cent of the 2000 level, since that is less than half the current annual new uptake of emissions by the world's oceanic and terrestrial biospheres, via photosynthesis to phytoplankton (the feedstock for the krill that whales just love) and all our own food crops and vegetables. The outcome will be severe food shortages for every living creature from dolphins and whales to the teeming millions of Africa and Asia. We Australians are rich enough to avoid starvation come what may, but we should care about the less well-off worldwide who will suffer grievously if food prices rise as my paper suggests they will after Copenhagen. Climate Change and Food Production (PDF File) Nature's New Theory of Climate Change (PDF File) Foolish views on education finance are stuck in 1848 "It is a pleasure to see that the ALP, whose Hawke-Keating government introduced the iniquitous HECS system back in 1990, has at last seen that participation in higher education by the lower income groups has not increased since then, by allocating new funding in this week's budget to promote increases in such participation. By chance my letter in London's Financial Times advising against proposals to extend HECS in the UK, was published on 8th May. Here it is. The best both the Australian and British governments could do is abolish HECS altogether, and leave it to the income tax system to collect from the higher incomes that most graduates earn relative to most non-graduates." Land in Melanesia - 16 March 2009 Tim Curtin was one of three panelists for one of the RMAP-RSPAS "Argument" series at ANU. Summaries of all three presentations are at http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/land-melanesia/ Here is Tim Curtin's Summary; Complete version of Quadrant article "The Contradictions of the Garnaut Report" Here is the complete version of Tim Curtin's article "The Contradictions of the Garnaut Report" in Quadrant, Jan-Feb 2009, with footnotes and references. I took the opportunity to make a few corrections of mostly minor errors pointed out to me by various readers of the Quadrant paper including E. Adler, P. Lewis, and K. Macoun, to whom my thanks. All remaining errors are mine. This version has been available since January 2009 at Quadrant Online and at www.lavoisier.com.au. Download here (PDF File) Is Land in Melanesia being Mobilised? 4pm 16 March 2009, Hedley Bull Centre (APCD)
Argument Summaries — Comments welcomed
The contradictions of the Garnaut Report The Report makes many dire projections for the future, including the claim that without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, chiefly carbon dioxide, there will by 2100 be major declines in gross domestic product (GDP) across the globe … The Report offers no evidence for such effects having already become apparent despite the warming temperatures experienced globally and in Australia since 1976. On the contrary, that whole period has seen the fastest economic growth ever recorded across almost the whole globe, and Australia is no exception. Carbon dioxide is NOT a Pollutant
Download here (Powerpoint File) "The next recession we have to have" - Tim's 4th Submission to the Garnaut Review. Download here (PDF File) Garnaut, the Greens, and the browning of Australia and the World Download here (PDF File) Climate Change Mitigation - and mass starvation by 2050? Presentation to the Emeritus Faculty, Australian National University, 20 February 2008 (Power Point File) Tim Curtin's contribution to the Conference of the African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific at the ANU on 31st January 2008, "The Economic History of Land Tenure in Zimbabwe". Download here (PDF File) Tim Curtin's Submission to the Garnaut Review Here is a slightly updated version of my Submission. Download here (PDF File) An Overdue Letter to President Bush from Albert Einstein Download here (PDF File) Old Growth Eucalypts are not Rembrandts - and Papua New Guineans are not to be treated as if they were old growth eucalypts Download here (PDF File) The Great 'Illegal' Logging Swindle Download here (PDF File) (Newsletter of the Commonwealth Forestry Association, London, UK available at www.cfa-inetrnational.org ) The Da Vinci Code of Climate
Change Economics OR What are the real benefits of avoiding predicted climate change, and what are the costs? Lavoisier Group Workshop: Rehabilitating carbon dioxide. Melbourne, 30th June 2007 Download here (PDF File) Economics of Climate Change Nicholas Stern's Immaculate Conception (PDF File) Jeremy Berkhoff - Stern on Climate Change (PDF File) Tim Curtin - Response (PDF File) Alan Kirman (PDF FIle) FT Letter - Business as Usual (PDF FIle) Economics of Forestry in Australia and Papua New Guinea Sustainable and legal logging (PDF File) Bringing down the axe in illegal logging (PDF File) The Greenpeace attack on
Forestry Development in Papua New Guinea Full Story (PDF File)
Tim Curtin, Emeritus Faculty, Australian National University, Nicholas Stern's Immaculate
Conception It was good to see David Henderson's comment in the April 2006 Newsletter (Economics, climate change, and governments) but I feel that both he and his eight co-authors in their submission to the Stern Review have been too kind to Nicholas Stern's keynote paper "What is the economics of climate change?" For the most extraordinary feature of that paper was not just its blind acceptance of the Kyoto consensus but also its disregard for all previous work on the economics of climate change. The only economists cited by Stern are those he probably cut his teeth on as an undergraduate, Pigou and Coase, but while they still have much to teach us (and Stern) there have been more recent contributions. Full Story (PDF File) Expert: Bank robs PNG of more logging revenue A RESPECTED Australian economist has argued that World Bank intervention in PNG’s logging industry has stifled exports that could be worth K13 billion compared with only K416 million in 2003. Economist Tim Curtin compared Papua New Guinea with Sweden and suggested that PNG’s logging exports could be worth K13 billion or nearly double the country’s total exports in 2003. Full story (HTML) ‘Old’ forestry
law best bet for forest exploitation PAPUA New Guinea would need to amend the Forestry Act 1991 and revert largely to previous legislation if the government wants to exploit the full potential of forestry resources, an Australian economist suggests. Mr Tim Curtin said “the Forestry Act was largely a response to what in retrospect seems the half-baked Barnett Report, with its exhaustive exposure of alleged ‘depredations’ through the claimed transfer pricing of foreign logging companies”. Full story (HTML) Economics of Land
Titling in Papua New Guinea The paper appraises some of the arguments and counter-arguments in the Hughes-Fingleton debate on whether or not customary land tenure is conducive to raising living standards in Papua New Guinea. The paper shows that both the extent and the productivity of customary individual usufruct tile in PNG have been greatly exaggerated, and collates recent empirical evidence on relative productivity of customary and alternative titling modes in Zambia and Zimbabwe showing superior outcomes of documented individual land title. Implications for equity and legal/administrative issues conclude the paper. Full story (PDF File) | Full story (Powerpoint File) Letter on HIV/Aids
Your World Aids Day supplement failed to mention that 'male circumcision' is by far the best path to prevention of the spread of Aids. The feature's map showing the African epicentres of the disease proved the validity of my contention, since none of the countries highlighted is in north Africa, with its majority Muslim population which routinely practises male circumcision. Your map did show Nigeria as a severely affected country, but singled out Lagos in the south, with its non-Islamic majority. A similar map of the former Soviet Union would also show Aids is concentrated in the non-Islamic north rather than in the southern republics. Forestry and economic
development in Papua New Guinea This paper suggests that Papua New Guinea's national income would grow much more rapidly if its largest natural resource, its forests, were developed to their full potential subject to both sustainability and reasonable conservation of biodiversity. Data will be provided showing that plantation forestry could deliver exports worth more than the country’s total mineral exports in 2003 from an area of only a seventh of the total under forests. Suggestions for necessary legal and institutional changes for this to occur conclude the paper. Kyoto and All That I am bound to say I was very disappointed by your article in today's Australian Financial Review, devoid as it is of even one correct factual statement whilst replete with unfounded innuendo and defamatory statements against all who disagree with the Kyoto mantras. A Contrarian View on Aid Effectiveness It is only to be expected that a seminar attended mostly by those with a direct interest in continuation of economic aid to developing countries would be more concerned with how to deliver aid efficiently than with whether it should be provided at all. Yet there is some evidence that the developing countries that have done best are those that have not relied on aid so much as on their own efforts. Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore are cases in point, whereas despite the huge volume of aid provided to a country like Tanzania its real income per head is less now than it was when the British awarded independence in 1963, and Papua New Guinea has little more to show for all the aid it has received. However this Note will not go so far as to rule out any value of aid, but will rather emphasise preference first for project over programme aid, where the latter consists only of transfers of funds unrelated to specific projects, and second, for project aid that is based more on wealth creation than on poverty reduction. Here are some more of Tim's recent papers: How Poor is Papua New Guinea? How Rich could it be? (Powerpoint File) How Poor is Papua New Guinea? How Rich could it be? (PDF File) Rethinking the model - Campus Review vol.14 no.26, July 7th, 2004 What's fair? university graduates pay their way with a tax double whammy - Campus Review, vol.14, no.24, June 23, 2004 Equitable financing of higher education: taxes versus fees - Emeritus Faculty, Australian National University, June 17th, 2004 A new model for financing higher education (Powerpoint File) Financing of higher education - letter published in Newsletter of Royal Economic Society, July 2003 Land registration in Papua New Guinea: competing perspectives Past papers include: All taxes are graduate taxes - The Round Table, 356 (2000), 479-491. Economic
and Health Efficiency of Education Funding Policy - (with E.A.S.
Nelson), Social Science and Medicine 48 (1999), 1599-1611. (PDF
File - 536 KB) |
|