Bad laws make lawbreakers

Miranda Devine had a rant this week about cyclists:
But hostilities were fed by the lies told by the Government and the RTA, which gave cyclists unreasonable expectations and ideas above their station. The former roads minister Carl Scully, a vegetarian cyclist, threw $250 million at the lobby, further fuelling expectations which were dashed by subsequent [...]

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Extreme distributions

John Connor, CEO of the Climate Institute, made a speech today talking about bushfires. I’ve been pondering one of his key points for the last two weeks, ever since the bushfires.
Climate change is not just about warmer weather, it is about wilder weather.
One of the lessons I learned early on as an actuary is that [...]

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Wildfire

Wildfire scarcely seems an adequate term for what happened over the weekend in Victoria.  To give a sense of the intensity, many cars are unidentifiable, because the numbers on the engine blocks have melted. This article compares the temperature in the worst of the fires to the Dresden firestorms.
John Quiggin has done his usual wonderful [...]

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Educated sceptics

Mr Penguin alerted me to this interested article in Wired. As you would expect, in the US, Republicans are more likely to be sceptical about global warming than Democrats.  Environmentalism has always been found more on the left than the right, and Republicans have more to lose from action that makes energy more expensive.
But college-educated [...]

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Price signals vs coercion

Sydney’s water crisis is over, for the moment. Our dams are now 65.5% full - up from 33.9% on the 8th February 2007. That will last us around two to three years without any more rain, at the current rate, which feels like a reasonable cushion. Not coincidentally, Sydney’s water consumption went from an average of 1,800 or so [...]

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Cycle Lanes

In a front page story in the SMH today, the NRMA (NSW’s peak motorist lobby group) accused the government of wasting money on cycle lanes.
“The Iemma Government is building a cycleway alongside choked Epping Road, despite as few as 25 cyclists using that corridor each day. At $7.6 million for the Epping Road cycleway, the [...]

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Actuaries as ostriches

The Institute of Actuaries of Australia does a quick (36 seconds is the promise) survey of its members once a month, reported in its imaginatively titled magazine Actuary Australia. Of the 345 respondents (self selected, but a good proportion of all the actuaries in Australia) 35% don’t believe that global warming is happening at all.
I [...]

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Celebrity

Tonight, I got the chance to see Al Gore speak live. He was spruiking his investment company, Generation _, which is being launched (via a platform) to retail investors in Australia. I’m not usually seduced by celebrity, but this felt like an opportunity you don’t get every day.
I read on the smoking gun that this [...]

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The Last Gasp

Michael Duffy had a column in the Sydney Morning Herald today with some (I hope) last gasp global warming denial. Before I got into blogging, I suspect I would have read it as making some valid points. Unfortunately, for Michael Duffy, I had already read the comprehensive demolition from the realclimate blog, and the analysis [...]

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Walkability

Via Elizabeth, at Half Changed World, I found this index of walkability of where you live. It works on google maps, which unfortunately isn’t populated for my local part of Sydney, so I don’t know where my house comes out on the scale. To see how the scale works, here’s where I once lived in London, [...]

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