DON AITKIN

Apr 29 2017

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The Social Cost of Carbon

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Environment, History, Language, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 51 Comments

I was going to write about Earth Hour once more, and for the last time, when I realised that it seemed to have passed its use-by date, for it seemed to have been almost unnoticed. There was no sign of it in Hobart, where I was on the hallowed night, and I couldn’t find out much about its effects in Canberra, where I have been for past Earth Hours. Earth Day passed too, without much fuss. So I have gone on to a subject I have been playing with for some years now, which is caught up in the phrase, ‘the Social…

Apr 22 2017

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The March for Science

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Climate Change, Education, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 119 Comments

I am writing this essay on the day of the March, which will happen in Washington DC and apparently 500 other cities, including several in Australia, where the March is happening as I write. What is it about? There is apparently a ‘war on science’, though who is conducting it is not clear. From its US website you can get this mission statement. The March for Science champions robustly funded and publicly communicated science as a pillar of human freedom and prosperity. We unite as a diverse, nonpartisan group to call for science that upholds the common good and for political leaders…

Apr 15 2017

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Gary Banks nails it

By Don Aitkin | Climate Change, Economy, Education, Environment, Media, Politics, Society | 59 Comments

For years now I have puzzled at the whole mess of our energy policy. People keep telling us that soon (or now) solar-panelled electricity, or wind, or something, will be cheaper than coal, so we should be transferring, at once. Such oracles never tell us about the hidden subsidies that would make this really true, if it were apparently true. I’ve given up responding. It is plain to me that wind and solar cannot power an electricity grid without abundant base-level fossil-fuel energy. Well, along comes Gary Banks to tell it as it is. For those who don’t know of…

Apr 08 2017

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Ending ‘the violence of prostitution’

By Don Aitkin | Health, History, Media, Politics, Society | 19 Comments

A young woman (I’ve seen her photo) called Andrea Tokaji had a piece in one of our local newspapers, which I read quickly and then read more slowly and carefully. She is ‘a PhD candidate on gender-based violence’ and the Founding Director of Fighting for Justice Foundation. It’s an interesting website, and is largely about bringing and end to ‘human trafficking’, which includes sexual slavery, forced marriage, organ removal and forced labour. The International Labour Organization puts the current numbers at about 21 million, about two thirds in forced labour and a quarter in sexual exploitation of one kind or another. In…

Apr 02 2017

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April Off-Topic Thread

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Climate Change, Environment, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 105 Comments

Gary C says: April 2, 2017 at 8:48 pm (Edit) Don Two articles from 2016 supporting models: “Comparing models to the satellite datasets” : http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/05/comparing-models -to-the-satellite-datasets/ “Models” : Models Reply Don Aitkin says: April 2, 2017 at 9:23 pm (Edit) Gary, you get the honour of having the first comment in the new Off-Topic Thread. I’ll comment there.

Apr 01 2017

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What is it that worries me about what the BoM and CSIRO tell us about climate change?

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Climate Change, Environment, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 262 Comments

Commenter Chris asked me, in a comment at my last essay, what are your concerns over BoM reporting or data use? I had intended to write about something else, but it seemed sensible to deal with this issue at once. I have written about the Bureau before (here, for example, and here), but to this direct question there is a straightforward reply. I’ll deal first with the more general issue of BoM (Bureau of Meteorology) reporting, and note first that it is directly linked, as anyone who reads the website will see, with CSIRO’s biennnial reports on the State of Climate. So my response to Chris covers both…

Mar 25 2017

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Mathematics, my father and me

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Education, History, Politics, Society | 47 Comments

(Robyn Williams, of the ABC’s Science program, read my piece in Quadrant about how my own world-view came to be formed, and asked could I do an Ockham’s razor broadcast about my father, mathematics and me. This is the outcome. It was broadcast on Sunday March 12th and interested readers can download the audio here.) If you grew up in New South Wales in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, there’s a good chance that you studied maths with the help of the textbooks written by two high school teachers, A. G. Aitkin and B. N. Farlow. I knew the…

Mar 18 2017

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Books that have been important to me #4 Barbara and Allan Pease: Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Books, Education, Health, History, Humour, Media, Society | 160 Comments

In 1998, my wife and I were driving through northern New South Wales, and had the radio on. Margaret Throsby introduced her guest, Allan Pease, told us the name of his new book, and said something like, ‘Now I want to take issue with you at once about the title. I can read a map as well as any man!’ ‘How do you do it?’ he asked. ‘Well, I point it in the direction we are travelling and it’s straightforward.’ ‘That’s exactly the point of the title,’ he responded. ‘Most men can read a map however it is pointed, but most…

Mar 12 2017

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A final thought on 2016 Australian warming

By Don Aitkin | ABC, Climate Change, Environment, History, Media, Politics, Religion, Research | 232 Comments

In an earlier essay this year, I used the useful maps prepared by Professor Ole Humlum of www.climate4you to ponder about how hot it actually was in Australia last year. I did so because of claims that the year was the hottest ever, as it was said to be for the world. When I wrote the piece I did not have access to the summary for the whole year, but I now have it, and it is displayed below. These data are from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which is part of NASA, and they show the relative change between…

Mar 04 2017

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Standing up against Nannies

By Don Aitkin | Education, Humour, Media, Politics, Society | 113 Comments

I’ve written a few times (here, for example) about ‘the nanny State’, and the way in which well-meaning people want to protect ourselves from ourselves by making illegal things that we like to do. Of course, virtually all domestic law is about protecting us from us, but every now and then I want to cry ‘Enough!’ And I do so in this essay, which is about the efforts of a Green MLA in Canberra to protect us, or more specifically, her grand-daughter, from the wicked writing on Wicked camper vans. If you haven’t come across a Wicked camper van, then here…