Gotta beat taswegian, gotta beat taswegian...and be the first of possible 500 comments heading this way.

Beautiful Graham.

Fungo I'm flattered that you keenly await my comments. You might notice I never have anything to say about religion, child photography or indigenous issues.

Back to LB vs GW. The link is unsustainable demand for fossil fuels which creates a correlation.
1st process; FF --> GW
2nd process; FF -->gasolene price hikes -->mortgage defaults-->LB
This view is widely held in the US if you look at energy blogs. Basically people who couldn't really afford a mortage drove to their low paid jobs in gas guzzlers. When their weekly fuel budget went up 50% they defaulted. Mortgage linked financial derivatives imploded. So yes there is a connection between sub-prime and climate change.

First, I think, we need a concise explanation to origins and effect of 'subprime'...cnn surprisingly produced a good one...

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/01/29/economic.crisis.explainer/index.html

the key/initiating pathway was creation of 'mortgage-backed securities'...led to banks aggressively seeking housing loan clients...increasingly digging into 'high-risk' buyers from 1990's whom in past used to be refused...then selling on whole mortgage/buyer/repayment onto faniemay/freddie mac and gang...whom sold it to investors whom made lot of 'lazy-money'...but whole thing required a ever increasing house value...when that stopped...crash...

of course article fails to mention other certain essential ingredients like creation of 'life-debt-workers' whom required almost a whole life of time of hard work to pay off...essentially a working-slave...and what the hell the goverments were doing when this sector growth/size eclipsing other financial sectors...and on...yeah wealth production by manipulation of market, than wealth by producing consumer needed manufacturing...supported at highest levels of government bureaucracy...and now no media is identifying these rouge organized operators...

and this article is trying to link two dissimilar areas, financial-climate...and each with complex materially relevant factors...but understanding of basics will help is my hope...for illuminating discussions...

sam
Ps~bottom line-no market is going to be sustainable unless the 'workers' are able/create a balanced meaningful life...and which judged by each individual themselves...so any economy that recognizes this higher need and creates flexible work opportunities...with lower 'worker debt load'...is going to grow slower but sustain it long term...and exclude get-rich-quick rouge operators affecting economy too mucy...

The models used by the climate fanatics are now thought to be as useless as the financial models referred to by Graham.

I think the funniest thing I read in relation to the climate models was, a scientist was explaining how his climate model works and how many variables had been included in his climate model and how it predit doom and gloom. He was speaking for about 5 minutes when someone interupted him.

Does your model accurately predict past temparature?

There was a long silence .... then he said " we are working on that one"

It was one of the funniest thing I read ever

At the risk of re-opening old issues may I mention 'Sensitive dependence on initial conditions' (chaos theory). Modelling is useless for the economy and the climate because both are chaotic systems.
If you are going to lend money to a person who cannot afford to repay it there is going to be a problem. If we pump carbon into the atmosphere there is going to be a problem. That is all the modelling that can be done. In both cases the extent of the problem is unknowable so it all comes back to a subjective assessment of risk.