On the scope for cutting public spending

Currently, the major political parties in Britain seem to agree that some cuts in public spending are required in order to help bring the soaring, post credit-crunch, budget deficit under control. However they are reluctant to indicate exactly what they will cut and are also reluctant to imply that any major cuts will be made this year (let alone this side of the election which must be held by the summer). The most you tend to get is the mention of a few specific items adding up to at most a few billion (a small percentage of total spending).

This reluctance is understandable. For much of the time since 1997, if a party (usually the Tories) talked about spending cuts, especially if they start attaching figures to the desired levels of cut,  their opponents (usually the government or the Labour party) will ask how many doctors, nurses, teachers, policemen, schools or hospitals will be scrapped, or claiming it will lead to some scary number of them being scrapped, as if any significant cuts in public spending must necessarily hit frontline public services. The political tactic is to suggest to voters that any cuts must entail fewer schools, hospitals, doctors, teachers, etc, and thus those proposing cuts will endanger the services voters care about.

John Redwood, writing in the Telegraph, suggests that actually there may be more scope for cuts that don’t impact public services than debates on this issue usually acknowledge:

The good news is cutting public spending is technically easy when you look at just how much needless and wasteful spending there is.

Anyone saying you can cut without sacking a single nurse, doctor, teacher or uniformed person is usually ridiculed, but it is true.

Out of the 6 million state employees, only around 1 million are these essential front line workers.

Over the last few years public sector efficiency has failed to rise, whilst private sector efficiency regularly rises by 2.5% a year or more.

It is possible to do more for less in the public sector, by applying some of the disciplines of the well run office, shop or factory.

Further support for suggesting there is scope for cutting public spending without touching frontline services can be found in a graph on page 12 of the 2009 Pre-Budget Report. It lists the £676 billion worth of projected public spending for 2009/2010 broken down into the following categories:

• Social protection £190 billion.
• Personal social services £29 billion.
• Health £119 billion.
• Transport £23 billion.
• Education £88 billion.
• Defence £38 billion.
• Industry, agriculture and employment £21 billion.
• Housing and environment £30 billion.
• Public order and safety £36 billion.
• Debt interest £30 billion.
• Other £72 billion.

I.e. there is £72 billion worth, over 10% of the total, being spent in addition to the budgets for education, health, industry, the environment, transport, public order and safety, social protection, personal social services, defence, housing and even the payment of  debt interest.

How much of this spending is necessary? Could we not make cuts here without harming front line services? This depends on what the £72 billion is being spent on. The notes in the chart explain: “Other expenditure includes general public services (including international services); recreation, culture, and religion; public service pensions; plus spending yet to be allocated and some accounting adjustments.”

I wonder how much of spending on recreation, culture and religion is really necessary?

What “general public services” are left after you factor the public services covered in the other major categories of spending?

Climate Research Unit broke freedom of information rules

The Times Online reports:

The university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails broke the law by refusing to hand over its raw data for public scrutiny.

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now
seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

This does not surprise me. Some of the emails demonstrated an appalling attitude to the Freedom of Information Act (let alone the transparency regarding methods and data that scientists should display) and some even hinted at or proposed actions that would be in violation of that Act.

Have world poverty and inequality fallen since the 1970s?

This article suggests so:

Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006 (Figure 1).

Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.

And later:

We can compute not only the world poverty rates and the poverty rates of any country or region, but also other statistics related to the distribution of income. For instance, we can compute the world gini coefficient, a measure of world inequality, for every year between 1970 and 2006. We show that world inequality measured by the gini fell from 67.6 to 61.2 (Figure 3), and similar declines in inequality can be shown for other inequality statistics, such as the mean logarithmic deviation, the Theil Index, and the Atkinson family of inequality indices.

Finally, for many theoretical concepts of welfare (e.g. Atkinson’s expected utility for the society, or Sen’s real national income) it is possible to find an inequality index described above such that the welfare concept can be represented as GDP multiplied by one minus the inequality index. Since we can compute these inequality indices, we can show that because world inequality fell, welfare measured for the world as a whole grew even faster than world GDP did, and more than doubled over the period 1970-2006.

Trafigura gags the BBC

Richard Wilson writes:

Late last week the BBC chose to delete from its website a damning Newsnight investigation into the Trafigura scandal, following legal threats from the company and its controversial lawyers, Carter-Ruck.

Previously, other media outlets including the Times and the Independent, had withdrawn stories about the case, amid concerns that the UK press is choosing to engage in self-censorship, rather than risk a confrontation with such a powerful company in the UK’s archaic and one-sided libel courts.

The BBC is a dominant player within the UK media, and its independence – supposedly guaranteed by the millions it receives from licence-payers each year – is vital both to its public service function and its global reputation.

Freedom of speech means very little without an effective and independent media – if it’s true that the BBC’s independence can so easily be compromised by legal threats, then this sets a very dangerous precedent for the future.

The mainstream UK media has so far assiduously avoided reporting on the BBC’s climbdown. Yet it’s an issue that raises serious questions about the state of press freedom in Britain, at a time of unprecedented attacks on the media.

To help subvert this latest attempt to muzzle the press, please embed this video on your blog, and link to this PDF of the original story.

On the Russian IEA’s analysis of temperatures

I reported earlier on the Russian claims that the CRU had cherry picked the data from Russian weather stations. Deltoid points out that the analysis concerned actually confirms the recent warming from 1950 onwards:

The red and blue curves agree very well in the period after 1950, thus confirming the CRU temperatures. Well done, IEA!

The red and blue curves do diverge in the 19th century, but the one that provides more support for anthropogenic global warming is the blue hockey stick. The red curve shows warming in the 19th century before there were significant CO2 emissions, so it weakens the case that global warming is man-made. If CRU (not HAdley as claimed in the Russian news story) have “tampered” with the data, it would seem that they must have been trying to make a case against AGW.

The IEA analysis is, in any case, misguided. CRU has not released all the station data they use, so the red curve is not the CRU temperature trend for Russia at all. If you want that, all you have to do is download the gridded data and average all the grid cells in Russia. You have to wonder why the IEA did not do this.

Climategate recent stories

I just want to round up a few recent stories regarding “climategate”, as I’ve not had time to do the more in-depth work I’m planning yet.

Firstly, RealClimate look at the integrity of the CRU data set, with an analysis comparing raw data with the adjusted quality controlled data:

The key points: both Set A and Set B indicate warming with trends that are statistically identical between the CRU data and the raw data (>99% confidence); the histograms show that CRU quality control has, as expected, narrowed the variance (both extreme positive and negative values removed).

Thus if their analysis is sound, it would seem that the warming trend was present in the raw data, and the adjustments did not introduce it. Note that in contrast to Willis Eschenbach, Real Climate take a random sample of the whole data set rather than focus on a few stations.

Meanwhile, apparently the US Department of Energy has issued a “litigation hold” notice to CRU employees asking them to preserve documents, suggesting that some form of legal action might be being prepared for.

Also, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis claims that the CRU have cherry picked the warmest stations in the HADCRUT data set (which is joint work of the Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the CRU). The article is a bit confused blaming the Hadley Centre rather than the CRU (who provided the land-based data in the HADCRUT data set) however. I’m not sure whether Real Climate’s analysis of the CRU data linked to above would account for cherry picking of the weather stations. It depends on whether the full raw data was in the data set with the adjusted data affected by the cherry picking or both.

Finally, Megan McCardle speculates that climate scientists may have been calibrating against each other, this would be more subtle than conspiring to fake the data, and they might not even realise they were doing it. The only way one can address these concerns is to analyse the raw and adjusted datasets, and any code and methods used for adjustment for signs of bias.

Some “climategate” code: proof of deception?

Samizdata recently featured this quote of the day. They’ve quoted from some computer code (in a language called IDL) which is alleged to prove that the CRU have been cooking their data. The reason people have latched onto this is that the code defines an array of adjustments to apply to a series of temperatures. These adjustments boost recent temperatures by upto 1.95 degrees whilst leaving earlier temperatures untouched or slightly reduced, hence the suspicion emanating from climate change sceptics. (NB: The values in the array range from -0.3 to +2.6 but are then multiplied by 0.75. Multiplying 2.6 by 0.75 gives 1.95.)

The story however is a bit more complicated than it first seems. For example, Robert Greiner, posting on the Cube Antics blog, notes that more than one copy of the code exists in the archive and only one of the copies has the adjustments commented out. (I should point out Greiner still thinks the code points to possible fraud.) It is also rather odd for someone to deliberately put a comment in the code like “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” if they’re trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes. Furthermore Tim Lambert, a computer scientist working in Australia, points out that even if you comment the adjustments back in to the version of the code where they’re commented out, it would have plotted two graphs, one with and one without the adjustments with each version labelled as such, and thus would have been open about what is going on. He further found a related published paper where the graph was plotted without the adjusted version of the data.

So what is going on?

Libel reform campaign petition

The Libel Reform Campaign has launched a petition. England’s libel laws are quite draconian and I urge anyone concerned with freedom of speech to sign this.

Do the leaked emails show that Phil Jones and others corrupted the peer review process?

One of the allegations made against the CRU’s Phil Jones and others mentioned in the emails such as Michael Mann, is that they corrupted the peer review process. Below I consider several of the emails mentioned in this context:

• Jones said that he and a colleague would keep two papers out of the IPCC report even if it meant redefining the peer review process. The first point to note on this is that both papers were cited and discussed in Chapter 3 of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report, on page 244. Jones and his colleague are the 2 coordinating authors out of a group of 12 for this chapter, yet it seems they didn’t keep the two papers out in the end. Of course if they attempted to redefine the peer review process on the IPCC report the fact that they failed does not exonerate them. However, the evidence that they did is a most probably flippant comment in an email. Even if Jones and his colleague were trying to keep these papers out of the IPCC report, if they were doing so on the grounds the papers were of such poor quality they should never have been published in the first place, then they were doing what they should be doing, namely exerting quality control over what material goes into an important scientific report.  Without further evidence, I consider this part of the charge therefore to be unproven and evidence for it weak.
• In another case, an email discussion involving Tom Wigley and Michael Mann (cc’d to Jones and others) has Wigley musing about trying to get Jamie Saiers, an editor at Geophysical Review Letters (GRL), ousted. A later email from Michael Mann talks about a leak at GRL being plugged. As Bishop Hill notes, Saiers is no longer an editor at GRL. However it’s not clear that Saiers left due to the efforts of Wigley or Mann. Saiers stepped down as editor of GRL in 2006 (according to the CV available at his webpage at Yale) over a year after Wigley’s email and some months after Michael Mann’s comment about the GRL leak being plugged. Moreover Saiers himself says his standing down as editor had nothing to do with attempts by anyone to get him sacked. There is however some question as to why the editor in chief took over handling the paper concerned from Saiers. At this point, it seems to me that we simply don’t know why he did so. The emails suggest a possible line enquiry but that’s all. It’s quite possible it had nothing to do with Wigley, and that Wigley’s suggestion was never acted on by Wigley himself or by those to whom he suggested it. The evidence here is contradictory and circumstantial.
• In another email exchange, Michael Mann and Phil Jones discuss their concerns about the journal Climate Research and a paper by Soon & Bulianas. They both regard the work accept by Climate Research as being of low quality that wouldn’t pass muster in other peer-reviewed journals and Mann suggests ignoring Climate Research, whilst Jones indicates he will write to the to tell them he’ll have nothing to do with them until they get rid of “this troublesome editor”, namely Hans von Storch. Now, it turns out that there was a storm over the Soon & Buliunas paper that led to several of Climate Research’s editors, including von Storch, resigning.  However von Storch’s account of his resignation makes it clear that he thought the publication of Soon & Baliunas was an error, that the paper was severely methodologically flawed and that the peer-review process had broken down in the case of that paper. Clare Goodess’s account of the resignations is also worth a look. From what I’ve read of this affair it seems clear to me that von Storch and others resigned because of a dispute amongst the editorial board of Climate Research, over a paper that was widely regarded as methodologically flawed (as evidenced by numerous complaints, the fact some editors came to this view themselves and a rebuttal of the paper), and a peer review process that seems to have broken down at the journal concerned. Phil Jones et al’s role in this was simply to be part of the cacophany of complaint over the paper and to have contributed to the rebuttal of the paper. Criticising and/or boycotting a journal over allowing poor quality work to be published is hardly dishonest or unscientific.

None of the three emails above come close to proving the peer-review process had been corrupted by Phil Jones, Michael Mann et al and they seem to me to be the emails most supportive of this allegation that I’ve seen.

However I am aware that many regard the leaked code as exposing fraud and also that there are some issues about “hiding the decline” that my earlier post about “Mike’s Nature trick” did not address. I will turn to these topics next.

Video on the leaked CRU emails.

[Hat Tip: Unity posting at Liberal Conspiracy]

This video makes some good points about the leaked/stolen emails:

I’ve yet to see anything in the emails that proves fraud, and I’m inclined to think people are rushing to judgement. I intend to post more on this point, but investigating takes time.

I should add that there is also the code to be taken into account, and I grant the video above does not address the leaked code. I intend to address it myself in due course.