Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside


"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman





The Goodies


good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders




Try a lucky dip:


"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."

" " we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."





Strange

Bedfellows


John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger



Blogger's Cut


Best slices from the watermelon



Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Who you gonna call?

You know how young children make bargains in their minds - "If I don't miss this bus I will do my homework for a month", that sort of thing? It's a bit like whistling as you pass the graveyard to keep the ghosts away. Or clapping hands to keep the elephants away ("Does it work?" "Well, you don't see any elephants do you?").

Penny Wong reminded me of all of that last week. There were nation-wide protests about the lack of meaningful action on climate change. Afterwards Ms Wong said people's expectations were unrealistic - "What many of these people are calling for simply can't be done. It can't be done while supporting jobs," she said. About the same time it was revealed that Australia was demanding that CO2 emissions from bushfires not be included in calculating Australia's total, because we had so many (and will be having more and more as the continent dries out). You can hear Penny clapping, whistling, and making bargains with invisible beings can't you? She seems to think that good intentions ("Like the people who are at these rallies, this Government does want to take action on climate change") will make that nasty global warming go away. That she can make bargains, that the CO2 already in the atmosphere will totally understand if the politics of coal companies, the CFMEU, and Barnaby Joyce make it impossible to reduce our emissions. There are no bargains Penny, and clapping hands won't make the elephant in the room go away. The world (yes, Penny, the world does include Australia) has to actually reduce emissions (including bushfires and everything else), quickly, and no amount of whistling and bargain making changes that grim reality. Ms Wong has failed.

Harsh? Yes, but we expected better of Kevin "we will let the science decide" Rudd and his team of the best and the brightest. Penny Wong has that aura of brightest girl in class [Steve Fielding on the other hand is the class clown and doesn't know anything but has learnt to stick his hand up and say stupid things ("Now class, what do astronomers tell us the moon is made of?" "Please miss, please miss, green cheese miss") just to get the class laughing - loves being the centre of attention] but she has been given the most important job in government and she has failed to do her homework, failed to hand it in, and Australia is going to miss the bus in Copenhagen.

And Greg Hunt - doing much better than Penny Wong (and won't she be cross when she reads that). But he reminds me of the star eighteen year old recruit to a football team doing really badly, full of has-beens and never-wases. You can enjoy his flashes of brilliance in a Reserve's game, but you know that the team as a whole is never going to achieve anything. And you are quite certain that he won't get a start in the first team, and if he did he will never be allowed to play his natural style.

As American scientists, detailing the disastrous changes (bigger graveyards among them) that are coming to America this century (many of which are coming to a southern continent near you too), said "These are not opinions to be debated, these are facts to be acted upon". Penny Wong clearly doesn't understand this - the whistling has to stop, and the action has to start, ghosts or no ghosts.

21 June 2009
Category Climate change
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Maggot

Some years ago there was a political figure who was devoutly religious. The leader of his particular religion had recently reaffirmed the church's stance on contraceptives. And so this man was heard endlessly defending the leader, and the wisdom, of his decision, even when faced with questions about the rising world population, increasing poverty, and the social effects of forcing poor families to have 10 or more children. In interviews he could be heard proclaiming the rightness of the ban, even though you knew, he not being a fool, that he knew he was talking nonsense. You also knew that if the next day a new leader had proclaimed that in the light of world problems the church now supported the use of condoms, our hero would have instantly changed his answers to questions to reflect the new reality, black would become white. So 1984.

Reminds me of that group of climate change deniers who are not in the pay of energy companies and who just deny for the love of the cause. Believe in ultra free market capitalism; or human dominion over the world; or the drowning of governments in bathtubs; or the importance of extracting every last mineral from the Earth's crust; or some religious text that has a god looking after the world; or the imperative of removing all other living organisms and modelling the surface of the planet purely for human use; or even just the National Party, and you can't accept the reality of climate change. Can't accept that greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen, one of those stubborn facts that keep getting in the way of ideology. You have what in Victorian times they called a "maggot" (an obsession) in the brain. You will argue that black is white, red is blue. The smallest downward movement in a fluctuating graph has you howling at the sun. You grab the smallest facts, no matter how incongruous they are (one of the New Zealand glaciers is growing. Growing! Mars is getting warmer. Warmer!), unable, totally, to see the forest for the trees.

It is the classic mistake of starting with a belief, and fitting the facts around it. The kind of mistake that sees a toasted cheese sandwich that "looks like Jesus" sold on ebay. The kind of mistake that thinks a banana was "intelligently designed" to fit in the hand. And the facts are examined in a sheep race in which a drafting gate directs good facts to the right, bad facts to the left. A massive decrease in old Arctic ice one year is not global warming, a slight increase in new ice the next year is evidence of global cooling: Hurricane Katrina is not the result of global warming, a cold day in Melbourne is evidence the climate is cooling; a very hot year is the result of El Nino, a cooler year is nothing to do with La Nina. And so on. Put together enough of this selective view of the planet and you get a best selling book and endless promotion by that arch denier Mr Murdoch.

But while the deniers deny away and pat each other on the back and beat back the evil hordes of greenies who are determined to destroy civilisation as we know it and the whole planet as well, the inexorable rise of CO2 continues, spewed out by the power stations and factories that have just been given a free ride into the future by Martin Ferguson and Kevin Rudd. And the CO2 eats away at the ability of this planet to maintain its environment, working away like a worm in an apple, unseen and unheard, but when you pick up the still healthy looking apple you discover it is hollow.

An obsession can have the same effect in a brain. Now, if only one or two of the shock jocks, the bishops of the climate change denial church, would tell their followers that global warming is real and serious and needs urgent government action to solve it, those followers would turn around and start instantly demanding action on climate change. White would become black.

22 May 2009
Category Climate change
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Tree change

Among the reasons, some honourable, some less so, for the failure of the whole population to be out on the streets, pitchforks in hands, demanding action to halt global warming as quickly as possible, is a feeling , perhaps, that things are not changing. Remember the phony war? Well, no, most of you probably don't. It was the period in 1939 and early 1940 when Germany had invaded Poland and then not much else seemed to happen. Air raid sirens sounded in London on the day war was declared, but it was just a false alarm. No bombs came out of the sky, no German paratroopers landed in sleepy villages, no German spies came ashore from submarines. Life went on pretty much as normal for a while, and the ordinary person in the street might have thought it was a big fuss about nothing. And then of course, all hell broke loose.

Something of the same feeling here. Oh we might have declared war on global warming in a very low key way, but for the ordinary citizen of Yass, or Gundaroo, life goes on much as normal. And, more importantly, everything looks normal. And it looks normal mainly because of the trees. When we drive to work, or the shops, or school, or on holiday, our impression of the landscape contains basically two parts - trees and grass. We know the grass changes from season to season, year to year, will exchange experiences with our neighbours on how the lawn is going, or how green is your valley. So brown grass, yellow grass, even no grass, doesn't send danger signals, just an indication that we are in for a tough summer, or a tough year, or a tough decade. Just another drought. Because the trees are still there - the old Candlebark in the front paddock, the line of pines on the west fence of the home paddock, the poplars along the road, the she oaks down by the river. All still there, just as they were when you were a child, or even when your grandfather was young.

And the trees - their kinds, and size, and abundance - give the landscape its identity (and used to much more strongly before so many were cleared). We know we are in a forest, or a woodland, or the far outback, or the desert, by the trees we see flashing past our car windows.

Unchanging trees in an unchanging land. And while we see them, our impression will be that global warming is just something the city people go on about, or those greenies. The trees are still there, and trees, with their roots deep down into the soil, can ride out bad seasons, can average out wet years and dry years, cold years and hot years, always have done. Where the grass responds almost instantly to a hot day, or wind, or a downpour, or frost, the trees don't. And we know this instinctively. As long as the trees remain there is nothing much to worry about.

Except there is, because the trees are starting to change. Stringybarks seem to have been the first in trouble around here. Big old trees left behind when all around were cleared, perhaps dating back further to the first white settlers or even longer. Dying back in their crowns. Well, that had happened before, and then back came the trees with new growth. Only this time many of them didn't. Whole big trees completely dead, a few dry leaves left briefly in what was once the canopy.

And we thought, well, it's only stringybarks, perhaps they have shallow roots. And then suddenly, it seemed, very old pine trees in windbreaks were dying. Trees planted by the first settlers to protect homesteads from the westerly winds were turning brown. Then almost overnight it seemed, windbreaks were punctuated with dead trees which began to break and splinter and blow right over. And more and more going. Next will come the leaves of Candlebarks, blowing in the wind.

So the landscape is beginning to change. Will gradually more resemble western New South Wales, with few, and small, trees, than the southern tablelands of a 100 years ago.

And gradually we will start to notice. The phony war will be over. The landscape is changing. Sound the sirens.

3 April 2009
Category Climate change
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GWC

I see the Global Financial Crisis is now popularly known by the initials GFC. A little strange (was the 1929 Wall Street Crash called WSC?) but I guess both the acronym and the longer title (itself a shorthand description, though much better than the "meltdown" that was used initially) have the advantage of precisely focusing attention on the set of problems that have emerged as a result of decades of neoconservative meddling with western economies. When the G20 leaders sit down around the big polished table, agenda item one would only need to have "GFC" for everyone to look serious and get out their copies of Keynes, national check books, and the "Guide to regulating a modern economy for dummies" in paperback. Nothing like the phrase "Global Financial Crisis" for concentrating the mind.

I see President Obama is calling together some of his new G20 friends for a chat about climate change later. Could I suggest to him not to use the soothing, no need to panic, nothing happening here folks, Luntz-inspired phrase "Climate Change" on the agenda. A term that will have leaders muttering about emissions trading, and nuclear power, and clean coal, and all the other nonsense that the energy company magical misdirection has come up with, and thinking ahead to an excellent White House lunch. Instead, President Obama, go for something short and snappy. Something like, oh, I don't know, the "Global Warming Crisis" or GWC.

And keep saying it in your introductory speech. The GWC this. The GWC that. Make them understand that they all face being hung in the morning if they don't act urgently, right now in fact, on the GWC. Get them focused, thinking renewable energy, 80% reduction, technology transfer, energy conservation, biodiversity protection, adaptation help for poor countries, 350ppm; serious goals and solutions for a crisis. Get them sweating, making notes, huddling in corners in small groups, taking off jackets, working out deals and programs, eating limp sandwiches as they work, making phone calls, having estimates prepared by harried aides, bursting into applause at the end of the day.

You want to save the world economies? Deal with the GFC. You want to save the world? Deal with the GWC.

Plenty of urgency on climate change at TWB (The Watermelon Blog).

1 April 2009
Category Climate change
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Wham Bam Climate Spam

As I float like a bee around the internet, here a sip of nectar, there a load of pollen, I seem to acquire, like unwanted hive mites, a swarm of spam emails.

You know the kind of thing. A sender's name consisting of a jumble of computer-generated random letters; a subject line consisting of a random assortment of computer-generated words, forming, with some imagination, a plausible message that will entice you to open the email. And when you do - Bam! You have inadvertently sent all your money to Citibank, or started a war in the Middle East, or destroyed the whole planet. After the first few you spot the tell tale signs of sender and subject and consign them to your trash. And you wonder, once more, what pleasure the creators of such computer programs get from knowing that here I sit, a world away, wasting some of the benefits of my first cup of morning coffee, deleting their garbage.

But these spotty teenage nerds in their basements are not just targeting the inboxes of email users. Among the places where the bee sucks (and so suck I) are climate change sites, as I try to keep track of the rapidly deteriorating state of the planet and the ever gloomier forecasts for its future. And, among the ordinary, genuine posts from those who share my concerns, my thirst for information, my attempts to comprehend, my desire to help in some way, any way, I find yet again the tell tale signs of computer-generated spam.

Easy to spot really. The user names are always anagrams of "Ronald Reagan" or "Ayn Rand" or "Greenie Killer". The posts themselves are sentences randomly formed from a set of words including Arctic ice, Al Gore, Mars, 1970s, Junk Science, Medieval warm period, Chicago, cold, snow, China, Urban, Sun spots, world government, saturation, 1998. The real giveaway of course is that on every thread you will see well-meaning people try to provide answers to these apparent questions or assertions (question and exclamation marks are randomly assigned by the computer), only to be ignored. When "Nay Nard" has been told, yet again, that world temperatures are still rising in spite of it being a cold day in Chicago, "Nagear" will bounce into another thread asserting, with a little chuckle, that snow in Chicago is proof that all the junk science from the IPCC is wrong.

All climate change threads need a Trash facility where this computer-generated spam could be dumped before settling down to read the material from actual human beings. Need to be careful with it though, a click in the wrong place and you can find yourself caught up in one of those mindless computer exchanges that were all the rage in the 1970s. You know "Are you happy?" "What is it that makes you think I am happy, Dave?" You could spend all day responding to a computer which was "answering" you by simply taking what you typed in and moving the words around to form another question.

And while the spotty basement nerd, chuckling, is keeping you occupied, the whole world outside the basement is being irreversibly damaged ("So, you think the world is being irreversibly damaged, Dave?" "Yes I do" "Why do you say 'Yes I do', Dave?"). So, jolly good fun, Dlanor, but the grown-ups have work to do now, time your mother turned off your computer and you went to school to get an education - physics, biology, chemistry, mathematics, geology, all that stuff. Debating computers was fun for a while, but from now on I am just going to dump all your output into the trash can. "Are you sure you want to delete the trash, Dave?". "Yes." How does it go again? "Float like a butterfly, sting like ...". Wham, Bam, no more spam.



No spam on the Watermelon Blog, but I have been known to sting like a bee.

21 March 2009
Category Climate change
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Hot tin roof

When I was a young fellow, many moons, and suns, ago, growing up in Perth, there was a rule at school that if the temperature exceeded 105 degrees fahrenheit (40 centigrade) we would be sent home. We thought, as cynical young people, that the figure had been carefully chosen to ensure that we would never be sent home. We would read forecasts carefully, check out the previous day's temperature in the morning newspaper, and, lo and behold, it never reached the magic number. We would sweat out our days at school, no air conditioning of course, not even a fan, the only relief provided by high windows, opened by reaching up a long stick with a hook on to turn a screw device. Hot, hot, hot, but we never got sent home in my time. Perth was a hot city, famous for it, and there were many days at home around 37, 38. 39, 40, where we ate ice blocks, went swimming, lay on the floor in a passage to try to get some air movement; and many days at school where we ran under sprinklers, squirted each other at the taps, or just flopped out in the shade of trees. But never hotter than 40, although we read, with horror, stories from Marble Bar, hottest town in Australia, where temperatures did reach 112, 113 (45 centigrade) but that seemed as far away and exotic as Timbuctoo.

And now? Temperatures everywhere in southern Australia (even Tasmania now) regularly hit 40 and more. Indeed 40 is barely remarked upon other than with some comment about going to the beach. And cities like Perth Melbourne and Adelaide have started experiencing temperatures well above 40, even, last week, 45.7 in Adelaide.

Look, I know my memory of childhood carefree days is heavily tinged by my rose-coloured glasses. There must have been the occasional hotter day, and indeed, the only context the news media provides for these recent heatwaves is the occasional reference to a hotter day in 1939 or 1909. But whether the actual temperature on a particular day is a record is really not the point. We are getting more and more of these very hot days, more and more sequences of unbearable temperatures. And as temperatures rise more and more people turn on more and more air conditioners (and nobody had those at all when I was a child) causing more and more of the CO2 gas to be pumped out that is racking our climatic conditions higher and higher. Another one of those feedback loops that make things rapidly worse - Arctic ice melting leads to more melting; less rainfall means more irrigation water taken from already drying rivers; hotter dryer forests lead to fires lead to forests more under stress leads to more fires; and so on. It's all going like a house on fire, climate change; you know, the more the fire burns, the hotter it gets and the more the fire burns until the house is "gutted" as the tabloids say.

This is the stuff scientists have been warning about for years. It wasn't just a matter of a degree or two warmer, "welcome on a cold Yass day" (as denialists would say), but a fundamental shift in our climate. But action from the politicians? Not so much. A different feedback loop there. The less Mr Rudd promises to do, then Mr Turnbull promises to do even less, and down and down we go, until we will have politicians promising to build more power stations to actually increase CO2 output (oh, wait, Mr Turnbull already promised that). Gotta break this feedback if we are going to break the other one - make politicians see they will be rewarded for taking action, not punished electorally. Let them know as soon as you can.

Put the heat on them in fact. Make those cats jump, just like ...

6 February 2009
Category Climate change
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The skeptic who came in from the cold

I have in the past, and will again in the future, launch deservedly vicious tirades against the stupid and ignorant, paid and unpaid, energy company denialist stooges in the International Anti Global Warming Conspiracy. But I realize that in addition to these braying idiots there are still a few genuine skeptics, people who really have tried to keep up to date with evidence as it floods in, and who remain puzzled by aspects of it, or believe that some findings are contradictory, or who think that the accuracy of some measurements might be questioned. Such approaches are in the best traditions of science, and lead to further advances in theories, further refinements of analysis or measurement.

Perhaps the most common element of the world view of such skeptics is the proposition that climate has changed in the past, and that therefore the current changes are neither special nor, generally, of concern. Such people might also believe that if the current warming is just the latest bump in the roller coaster ride of world climates over hundreds of millions of years, then we can do little if anything to prevent it, but should act to adapt to the new conditions. This genuine set of beliefs has been cynically used by the denialists, but just because it can be misused, doesn't mean that skeptics shouldn't look at the world through such a prism.

But because of the misuse, "the climate has changed before" gets lumped in with "global warming on Mars" or "urban heat effects" or "more ice in Antarctica" as just another part of the random word generator nonsense that makes climate change denialism the UFO affirmation of the 21st century. But I have gradually realized that this is wrong and self-defeating. By responding impatiently ("Yes, the climate has changed before. So?") to skeptics and denialists alike we keep pushing together these reluctant and odd bedfellows.

Trouble is, I think, we haven't done a good job of explaining what we mean when we say the climate is changing as a result of global warming as a result of increasing CO2 levels. We don't mean "the climate hasn't changed before and now it is". Nor do we mean "all of the changes in climate we see now are the result of global warming". Nor do we mean "the only thing that influences climate is changing CO2 level". But these seem to be the messages that the skeptics are hearing, and, rightly, disputing. And having, in their mind, disputed those perceived messages, they then think there must be something wrong with the science that has formulated them, and so they poke away questioning stuff that doesn't, in fact, need questioning.

So let's clear the air (so to speak, ho ho). "Climate changes" is, yes indeed, a tautology on this old and complex blue dot on the outskirts of a galaxy. Ever since the planet stabilized enough to have a molten core inside and land (moving continents) and air and water outside, together with a variable and elliptical orbit around a variable star, etcetera etcetera, the average temperature and moisture regimes it has experienced have seen great swings and roundabouts, and the species human beings (and the ancestors of human beings) share this garden of eden with have appeared and disappeared like so many candles in the wind.

There have been times when the climate was very much harsher than today, and (with or without the help of rocky visitors from outer space) great raft loads, enough to fill Noah's Ark many times over, of species have been lost forever. Continents have moved through the latitudes, ocean currents have changed direction, large bodies of water have oscillated in temperature, mountains have risen, forests have been cleared. And human beings, since we evolved from the primeval ooze, have shivered through centuries of blizzards; tried to deal with drought through changes in agriculture; have seen glaciers wipe out villages; have walked across dry land bridges between land masses and been cut off when seas rose again; have painted pictures of creatures they shared the land with, now long gone; have developed clever engineering solutions to move water, or hold back sand dunes, or reclaim land from the sea, or make houses livable when baby it's cold outside or when there is a tropical heatwave. So, no secrets there, the only certain thing about the climate of the Earth is its uncertainty. If you plot a graph of average temperature of the Earth it bounces around like a ball in an arcade game - up to the top, back down to the bottom, whoops, up it goes again, and down. A jagged line looking for all the world like the trace of vibrations from an earthquake. A climatic earthquake.

But wait, there's more.

We have known for a long time that carbon dioxide can act as an accessory after the fact of climate change. Can (working in tandem with water vapor and even, Sarah Palin help us, methane), rather in the way that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, make times of high temperatures even higher. Nothing magic, not the work of Harry Potter or Al Gore, just fundamental physics and, for good measure, ice on the cake, the measurement of past carbon dioxide levels. Wouldn't matter greatly, just another of those curiosities of this magnificently complex real estate designed for a billion or so people, except for one very inconvenient fact. Part of the ebb and flow of animals like dinosaurs and the trees they ate while waiting to provide transport for biblical humans is that they finished up being reduced to their carbon components which were then captured and stored safely underground. All of those once vibrant ancient communities, lush in biodiversity, vibrant in evolutionary potential, reduced to wet or dry black stuff forming some of the layers in the great layer cake of earth's geological history. Safely buried until a particular species of wise ape discovered you could burn the damn stuff and do all kinds of neat things like providing heat and light and running Hummers. Oh, and adding carbon dioxide to the air - invisible, odorless, tasteless, disappearing into the sunset, gone and forgotten. And more. And more.

And as it rises so it begins, inexorably, to push up that bouncing ball of changing climate. That choppy sea (to mix metaphors well beyond the capacity of anyone to control by pouring oil on troubled waters) with its millions of years of ups and downs is gradually forming into a wave as the ups become uppier. A big wave, threatening to engulf humanity and dinosaur descendants alike. Not just climate change, which continues on largely oblivious to the way it is being supercharged, but the mother of all climate changes, ready to unleash shock and awe, a weapon of mass destruction, on climate scientists and denialists alike.

So if you are a skeptic, paddling around in the shallows, watching the little waves bounce up and down and saying, to your children, "see, the sea is always changing, always has, up and down", then watch out for the tsunami just in sight on the horizon, doesn't look much in the distance, but it is moving fast. And when it arrives you will hear the voice of Crocodile Dundee booming out "Call that climate change? THIS is climate change."

So if you have been a skeptic on the grounds that climate has always changed, nothing to see here, move right along folks, then it is time you came in from the cold. We weren't talking about climate change, we were talking about CLIMATE CHANGE. And we need you on this side of the barricades, welcome any time, free pass, no questions asked, but please make it quick. Things are going to get a lot worse before (if) they get better.



And the vicious tirades against the stupid and ignorant, paid and unpaid, energy company denialist stooges can still be found on the Watermelon Blog - no free pass for them.

12 January 2009
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Hot/hotter/hottest

If you have been getting confused/concerned/puzzled/angered by the increasingly strident (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/66848/Whacko_Texas.html) climate change denialists, with their latest talking point about how the planet is actually cooling now/since 2007/this decade/last 10 years, then here http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/stupid-is-as-stupid-does/#comment-26358 is the simplest set of graphs I have seen for a while showing what is going on with actual figures, 5 year averages, 10 year averages, and the cherry-picking data of the "cooling since 1998" crowd.

5 January 2009
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Atlas Shrieked

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through an imaginary land. I am, I ask you to imagine, a fanatic believer in ultra-unregulated nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw-and-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism. I am against any form of public ownership or activity - no public schools, hospitals, aged care, transport, communications - nothing for public good, all for private wealth. I am a religious fundamentalist, especially because I like the bit about man having dominion over nature, and I am against any form of environmental regulation of big business.

I have decided to set up the Murrumbidgee Science Institute. It has no buildings, no staff, just myself as President and CEO, and a web site. The prestigious (it will say so on the web site) Institute has a number of divisions, each charged with the task of asserting things I believe. One division will assert that Australian rivers have plenty of water, though when they dry up it is natural, and there should be much more irrigation; another will assert that there are more trees than ever before in Australia and farmers should be clearing them; another will promote the use of clean green nuclear power; another will press for the privatisation of all national parks, turning them into managed forests for timber and woodchips; another will press for the rejection of godless Darwinism and the teaching of creationism in schools; another will push the proposition that GM food is harmless, nay, beneficial; still another will assert that cigarettes are not addictive and smoking does not damage health (oh, no, sorry, that one was left over from my earlier Cigarette Institute agenda). And then the biggie. The A Division will assert that the planet isn't warming, or if it is the process is purely natural, and that there should be no attempt to curb greenhouse gases. I will of course be the spokesperson for all these divisions (and in fact the only member of each) since they will simply be asserting what I believe.

Each time an environmental issue arises I will phone the television networks and introduce myself as, say, the Head of the Rivers Division, Murrumbidgee Science Institute. The tv stations, desperate for balance, and faced with the unanimous opinion of all the freshwater scientists of Australia, will be delighted to hear a dissenting view. And so it goes.

After the first few appearances money will come flooding in, from farmer's associations, mining companies, business groups, foresters, providing the means for me to spread our messages even further. I will be able to monitor any media message which contradicts my beliefs, and instantly respond. No need to present actual research (there will be none), since I will describe the outcomes of scientific research as "opinion", and therefore my own opinions provide a perfect counterbalance. But I need something else, the ultimate killer application.

In September 1950 "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky, one of the first of the blockbuster "popular science" books was published and reprinted a staggering 13 times over the next ten years selling many tens of thousands of copies, and author and title were household names in the 1950s. The book was nonsense. Velikovsky's theory was that the planets had moved around the solar system in a kind of celestial game of snooker, and the collisions between them, and the after effects, could explain all the history of climate and geology of the planet, and the evolution of organisms, and all human development. The collisions and their effects had continued not only through the last few hundred thousand years but into historical times. The book was based on an obsessive belief in the theory and a willingness to force every piece of information the author could find, every reference to the heavens in ancient texts, into the mould of his vision. The acceptance of the book by the general public was understandable - a claim to explain everything about the past all wrapped up in a simple theory is enormously appealing. Why though wasn't Velikovsky's book immediately discredited by the scientists of the day? Because a cosmologist reading it would say - "well, the cosmology is of course complete rubbish but the geology looks very interesting". A geologist would say, "well the geology is nonsense, but gee there are some interesting ideas about biology here", an historian would say, "well of course his reading of history is insane, but this stuff about planetary movement is really intriguing". And so on (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/84979/Fire_and_Australian_Society.html).

Since I know how all this worked I can add another technique to my repertoire of Breakfast Show interviews and letters to the editor. Petitions. Here is a thing that will surprise you - there are lots and lots of "scientists" round the world. They range from people with PhDs from prestigious universities followed by a lifetime of publishing in major scientific journals and a laboratory or two named after them; down through the girl in the headache tablet advert who has a "science degree" and a white coat and is using them to see whether one tablet dissolves faster than another, by carefully placing the two tablets in, respectively, 2 glasses of water; and on down through people who have done first year remedial biology at a technical college, subsequently closed, in a very small rural town in Uzbekhistan. Anyway, hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom would be happy to say, with a little modest smile, "oh, I don't know if I would call myself a scientist, that would be up to others, but I certainly think of myself as one". And not many Albert Einsteins, or Charles Darwins, or James Hansens among them.

On the other hand, since these are, by and large, ordinary people, they represent the same range of wisdom and foolishness as the population at large. Among them will be religious fanatics, gun freaks, racists, political ultra-conservatives, foresters, talk back radio listeners, taxi drivers, and those who believe that capitalism will one day make them rich. So here is what I do. I set up an online petition - perhaps one asserting that evolution and "intelligent design" are equally valid theories, or one asserting that GM organisms are harmless, or one asserting that there is no such thing as wilderness and all forest should be managed, or one asserting that climate change is not happening but if it was it wouldn't be caused by humans. I know that real scientists who know anything about the particular topic will ignore me, but that people who don't will rush to sign up, to see their names on a list of "scientists". And, even among real scientists, just as with Velikovsky, chemists may think there is something to be said for intelligent design, physicists may see some logic in forest management, and geologists may think that recent climate change is insignificant. So among all the dross, there will be a few names of genuine scientists, signing up on an issue on which they have no expertise, and doing so because of some religious or philosophical or psychological imperative in their minds. Anyway, no problem racking up the numbers, and I will soon be able to make announcements - 20,000 scientists think schools should teach creationism, 25,000 scientists think national parks should be abandoned, 30,000 scientists think global warming is not caused by CO2, 40,000 scientists say GM organisms are good for you.

Not me saying those things you understand, but scientists, thousands of them. And I know that next time I go on breakfast tv armed with such a petition no one will question the make up of the list concerned (including the surprising number of "Mickey Mouses" who have scientific opinions), the quality and quantity of the "scientists" concerned. Even if I have to debate, say, James Hansen or the ghost of Charles Darwin, my list will trump them - 30,000 to 1 you see, take that James. And the success of such petitions in swaying public opinion through a scientifically-illiterate entertainment-obsessed popular media will impress politicians, making decisions on, say, whether a derisory 5% in emission cuts is enough or do they need to go to 10%. And, in turn, my ability to impress politicians and turn around some scientifically irrefutable, but giant-corporation-unpopular piece of public policy will lead to even more money pouring into my virtual coffers. A license to print money really.

And a license to impose my beliefs on a grateful nation, a grateful planet. Well, grateful eventually when they realise what I have done for them. Don't think anyone will be throwing shoes at me!

19 December 2008
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Cooked goose

If you thought that electing Obama was going to lead to action on global warming you might take a look at this week's events in Australia. A year ago the equivalent of the Democratic Party was elected in Australia, replacing the Republican equivalent party of John Howard (George Bush's best buddy). Howard had worked with Bush to prevent any international action on climate change and refusing to sign up to Kyoto. Kevin Rudd was elected on a platform a significant element of which was an immediate signing of Kyoto (which he did) and a promise to set GHG reduction targets of 20% by 2020 (and 60% by 2050, for what that is worth). He has postponed the latter, first by setting up an enquiry with an effectively predetermined outcome (recommending only a 2020 target in the range 5-15%) and then this week announcing that he would accept only the very lowest target in that range - a derisory 5%. In that year there has been massive pressure from big business, energy companies, mining companies, farmer's organisations, and the Murdoch press. In addition Rudd's cabinet seems to have a number of denialists present. And in the background, beavering away, racking up the pressure when it seemed there was some chance of a real target being set, are the right wing think tanks and denialist organisations. Germany may well have seen similar activity with its announcements last week in Poznan which simply reflected the wishes of big business.

I would like to see Barack Obama put pressure on both Rudd and Merkel, in the nicest possible way, to rejoin the international community. But I think he is going to have his work cut out not being swamped by the same wave that has overtaken Mr Rudd. Most of us thought that with growing public awareness of the rapidity of climate change and its dangers, and with the completion of the Bush term of office, the world could at last, very belatedly, start to move. But the closer that has come to reality, the more active becomes the resistance. These people are determined to exploit every last inch of the Earth while there is still an Earth to exploit. I don't think they have thought beyond that point.  We have to, and we have to make sure that the pressure coming from the climate realist side is greater than that coming from the climate denialists. So far they are 2 to zip, coming into the ninth.

If you have a blog - use it, if you have the ear of a politician - speak into it, if you are able to protest - make a banner, if you hear a lie - correct it. Be as noisy as the geese who saved Rome.  If Copenhagen fails all our gooses are cooked.

16 December 2008
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Summertime, and the living is ...

They were at it again the other night. The blond weatherperson had just finished the very pleasant forecast of cloud and rain and a maximum of 25 degrees when the news anchorperson turned to them and said "When are we going to get summer? Can't wait for summer."

You could only say this if you were a television celebrityperson who spends life either in an airconditioned home or an airconditioned car or an airconditioned office or a party in an airconditioned hotel, or occasionally venturing out to loll beside a swimming pool or lie on a trendyperson beach.

My summers are hot, often unbearably hot, with pastures bleaching dry, dams and water tanks drying up, sheep panting, dust swirling, snakes slithering, gardens wilting, savage winds blowing, grasshoppers munching, boots and shirts sweaty. Oh and being constantly alert for the columns of smoke on the horizon, or the smell of smoke in my nose. Summer is an awful season on the southern tablelands. It arrives like a hungry bear with a sore head emerging from hibernation and gets worse. Give me the Springs and Autumns of mellow fruitfulness, and even the Winter of rugging up against the misty rain. I feel comfortable when the earth and the animals feel comfortable, and that involves cloud and rain and a maximum of 25 degrees. When the thermometer hits 40 for the third day in a row, and the air is so dry it sucks the beer off your tongue, and the ground is so dry it crackles as you walk and winces when you try to dig a hole, I feel like curling up into a little ball and hibernating until March.

No one who has any acquaintance with the real world could long for Summer round here. I groan when I turn the calendar over to the 1 of December and keep on groaning until February leaves like a lion and March comes in like a lamb.

And what makes it worse is that even an old old man like me is going to see summers get worse and worse as climate change bites deeper and deeper. There was a movie called Endless Summer - surfing all year round, just like the blond weatherpersons - my idea of hell, I'm afraid. But also what we are faced with not too many years down the track - Australia, land of the endless summer.

Tell you what, you know how they have schemes where you can swap houses with someone? Live in another city, experience a different lifestyle for a week or so, cheaply? I reckon we could have a "swap summers" scheme. I would be happy to experience the celebrityperson's summer for once, while they come and experience mine. Just one month of that and I reckon the next time the weatherperson spoke about cool cloudy days the anchorperson would say "Please sir, I want some more".

5 December 2008
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You say drought, I say ...

I was sitting quietly in the editorial suite on the 99th floor of Watermelon House the other day when I heard a thump outside. There, sitting next to a Margaret Merrill rose, was a Little Eagle who had swooped down out of the clear sky, seized a baby rabbit who had been enjoying life and minding its own business in the garden, and then took off again to eat the poor little fellow (or perhaps feed it to its young) in a Candlebark tree. “Why can’t you grab the fox that killed my lamb last night instead?” I called, but he was gone. There has to be a metaphor here for something in the human condition I thought, but I’m darned if I know what it is. And I hate to see a good metaphor go to waste. Perhaps you can think of something.

Did you see the report on drought relief for farmers, that suggested that instead of using the term “drought”, with its implications of short term change, we should start talking about “dryness”, indicating that this new climatic regime is what we are stuck with from now on (thank you Mr Bush, Mr Howard). Then one of those giant intellects that seem to naturally gravitate towards the National Party for reasons that escape me, said that, no, we should keep saying “drought” because then farmers will have confidence that it will come to an end. Put his finger right on the issue, did Mr Cobb.

See after an excellent, great, good October we have clover all over. The pregnant ewes can’t keep up. So I’m confident that the 2002, 2004, 2006 drought is over. And me, and the ewes, will spend the rest of our lives in clover. Mind you, another drought might strike from a cloudless sky next year, and the year after, but each time, as Mr Cobb says, I can have confidence that it will come to an end.

But I’m more inclined to go with Jack Nicholson “Is this as good as it gets?”, and the answer, sadly, is yes. We are going to have good months, perhaps even the occasional relatively good years when La Nina bubbles up in the eastern Pacific, but the clear blue skies are now the norm, for the foreseeable future.

Run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run.

7 November 2008
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Nobler in the mind

Heard about an opinion poll the other day. Australian people, it seemed, were in favour of action on climate change unless it resulted in job losses. Well, I thought to myself, if you stop someone in the street and ask them if they are happy to lose their job in order to fight global warming, they will probably, certainly, say "Not me mate", hurrying on past in the way you do when one of those evangelicals tries to catch your eye.

Turns out that the way the commercial television news bulletins reported the poll, and I know this will surprise you as much as it did me, wasn't quite accurate. In fact, not surprisingly at a time when the ideologically driven deregulation of the US finance industry has caused the meltdown of world financial markets, what was happening was that people were expressing a desire for protecting jobs and strengthening the economy. And consequently action on climate change as a priority had fallen a bit but still, even in these uncertain times, stood at a very high 66%.

But forget the details for a moment and consider how odd the question is. No one has ever thought that fighting to get CO2 levels down meant that everyone would be out of work. How could that even happen? And no one except the Business Council and Martin Ferguson thinks that we have some kind of choice about whether we try to lower CO2 levels. So there is no point in asking people whether they want to keep their present jobs or deal with climate change, we have to deal with climate change. There is no point even in simply asking people if they want to deal with climate change and what priority they would put on it, we have to deal with climate change.

So what should we ask? How about whether people think we should develop new sustainable energy or encourage efficiency? Nope, gotta do both. How about the "choice" between "clean coal" and real sustainable energy? Nope, clean coal isn't, and it isn't a solution of any kind. Hmm, do you always want to stay in the same job, or do you foresee changes in the industries people are employed in? Well, better, but it is really a non question - of course there will be changes, always have been.

Does it matter? Plenty of silly polls around (just check out one of the breakfast tv shows for questions whose answers are of no interest to anyone, and whose results, based on a completely biased sample, are meaningless). But I think this subject matters more than most. A poll setting jobs against environment as an either/or proposition reinforces the propaganda being pushed by the Business Council, that if you try to do anything to conserve the world we live in, up to and including dealing with greenhouse gases, you will lose your job. Yes, you. Not true of course, an all out effort to race the Vatican to being the first carbon neutral country would be a massive stimulus to the Australian economy.

I hope the next poll on global warming reads - "Do you think we should deal with greenhouse gases or let the planet fry?"

To be or not to be, now that is a poll question.

5 October 2008
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On the other hand

Do you know the book "Vice Versa" by Anstey - a Victorian children's story in which, thanks to magic, a father becomes his son, and, well, vice versa. This has followed the father telling the son what an easy time he has at school, and how the father wished he could once again be a schoolboy instead of having to go to work. The continuing saga of the sale of NSW Electricity power stations is a modern re-telling of this great story. Here a Labor government, whose union membership is vehemently opposed to the privatisation, is pushing hard for the sale, while a Liberal opposition, strongly supportive of flogging off every public asset, is opposing it. A Labor government, supportive of the democratic process when the unions protest against the sale, cuts off parliamentary debate when it is clear they will lose that debate. A Labor environment minister, nominally in favour of protecting the environment, criticises the Liberal vote against the privatisation, a rare case of conservative action in favour of conservation, as "economic vandalism". The National Party and The Greens both firmly opposed the sale (shoulder to shoulder, holding the bridge - strange shield buddies), while Labor and Liberal both supported it (the difference being in the details and the timing). Confused? Me too.

Hard to know where we will be by the time you read this, given the events of the last couple of weeks, so I write with some trepidation. But I have not yet heard any discussion about the actual issues in relation to the sale, as distinct from the politics. Forget about the money - if we need to sell assets in order to fund the things the people of the state need then what do you do when the asset is sold? In as much as there is any validity to this it is a case of not wanting to match income and expenditure, at least until after the next election. But any household knows, if you are selling of the silver to buy the groceries you are going to run out of silver and then run out of food. So the sale is economic vandalism, not the opposition to it.

But there is a much more important concern. Private companies these days are required to make not just profits but profits that rise year after year. How do you do this? By using cheaper and cheaper materials each year, cutting costs more and more each year, and by selling more and more product each year. For a private electricity generator this means using the cheapest coal that can be found, not spending money on R&D or infrastructure or pollution control or maintenance, cutting staff numbers, and encouraging customers to use ever increasing amounts of electricity. If all of this sounds familiar in an upside down vice versa kind of way it is because it is the mirror image of what we need to do to reduce greenhouse gases and climate change. Putting a privatised energy generator in charge of reducing energy consumption is like putting a fox in charge of a hen house. Environmental vandalism, a responsible Environment Minister might say.

It would be like having private oil companies regulating petrol sales and prices and that would be just as silly. Can't see anyone agreeing to that.

So it's back to school for Rees and O'Farrell. Or O'Farrell and Rees.

9 September 2008
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I find the defendant

Whenever there is a court case involving violence towards a victim that the media likes, the journalists always want to know whether the criminal has shown remorse. It is part of the package of law reporting (did the victim cry; was the sentence too light - of course it was; did victim's family achieve closure; did the expression on the criminal's face change when the sentence was read out; will the lawyers appeal; did the criminal show remorse) from the corporate media.

These days criminals, especially juvenile criminals, are often forced to confront their victims (the old lady whose purse was snatched, the shopkeeper whose window was broken, the family whose home was broken into) - we have ways of making you show remorse. And obviously the greater the crime the more remorse will be demanded. The boy who steals an apple might simply say sorry. A murderer might break down in tears. The owner of an oil tanker that destroys a coast might pay a huge compensation. A war criminal might beg forgiveness from the families of his victims.

I don't know how effective any of that is in fighting crime, but I guess it makes the victims feel a little better and helps to fill a news bulletin with cheap shots of tears. If it is to make the victims feel better it has to seem like genuine remorse, and the cameras and microphones thrust into the face of the evil doer will make sure that the remorse can be examined and dissected.

But when it comes to the worst crime of all I find myself at a loss - how are the climate denialists going to show remorse? How can they be made to confront their victims when their victims are all the people of the world? And how late will the remorse come? And in what form? "I'm sorry, I didn't know", won't cut it I'm afraid.

Let me be clear. I am not talking about the kind of apology that involves rationalisation of motives. "I didn't know" has not been a useful defense since Nuremberg. "I was paid by the energy companies to be a denialist" is a bit like the defense of the criminal who was asked why he robbed banks - "that's where the money is". "I was driven by an ideological belief in favor of neoconservative capitalism/against socialism" is probably the kind of defense Radovan Karadzic might mount, but murder in the defense of ideology is no virtue. "It would have been ok if we had won" might have been said by Hitler in the bunker underneath the ruined Berlin.

No. I want a straightforward uncomplicated, unqualified admission of guilt from these people who have undoubtedly sentenced the world, including my grandchildren, to a society in which life is brutish nasty and short. A world in which the ecology is destroyed and civilisation ruined. A world indeed in which life may not survive at all.

"Please forgive me, for I did not know what I was doing" is probably as close as we will get to remorse from denialists.

And I can't.

Forgive them.

And on the Watermelon Blog I don't even try.

1 August 2008
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Sailing down the river

I was trying to think what Kevin and Penny, selling their "Emissions Trading Scheme" this week, reminded me of, and then it came to me. A couple of gamblers hitching a ride on the river boat, playing the thimble and pea game with the local yokels. "Here, see the lump of coal? I place it under this thimble, and then I move all three thimbles around. Keep your eye on the one with the coal. There, we stop, now, where is it? Under that one? No, sorry, not under that one, or this one I'm afraid. Done your dough mate. Now, want to play again?"

All of us I think have been yokels for the last couple of days, trying to understand under which thimble the actual greenhouse gas savings were located. Not under petrol, not under power stations, or aluminium smelters, or farming. Not under anywhere you might expect to find them in fact. I'm not sure that Kevin and Penny actually understand the supposed point of the game they are playing. You see at the end of the day an ETS isn't just an illusion to make the voters think you are doing something you are not, but it is supposed to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. And reduce them by a lot (not "60% of 2000 emissions by 2050", which apparently has replaced, by sleight of hand, the original goal of 60% of 1990 emissions by 2050, in itself well short of the 90% of 1990 emissions the science tells us is needed) as fast as possible. The shuffling hands, and the postponement of action at least until after the next election, is going to produce nothing.

And since when, out of curiosity, did a Labor prime minister happily admit that he was being criticised "from the left" by the Greens? Long been true of course, but it has taken a phony emissions trading scheme, and a refusal to take any other action, to see it being happily admitted (Mr Rudd said he would "take it on the chin" and I guess brawls do happen on river boats when the gamblers are found to be cheating}.

17 July 2008
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Jam tomorrow

Did you see the story the other day about the glacier in Argentina that had bits of ice falling off it? Wasn't much of a story, just one of those filler "aren't foreigners and their animals and their countries funny?" stories that the mainstream tv news producers now use to pad out most of their bulletins, there being, it seems, not enough real news in the world to fill the 6 minutes or so they devote to items that are not either sport, celebrity, or royalty. Anyway, there was the glacier, bits falling of, and it must have occurred to someone in editorial that this might be verging on a no-go area of news. Not to worry, we will reassure the public, the otherwise meaningless images were concluded with the words - "locals said that this wasn't related to global warming, the glacier melts every year". So that's all right then.

Very similar sequence a few days earlier when there was an announcement that the area of NSW now drought-declared had come back up, and was now once again, 107% as it had been last year (before the "drought-breaking rains" that appear so often on news bulletins for as long as a drought continues). The NSW Minister for Agriculture, in making the announcement, quickly added that it was quite normal for 112% of NSW to be in drought and that it was nothing to do with global warming. And just before that (and still) we had the terrible bushfires in California, not the result, you guessed it, of global warming.

This is the kind of nonsense that denialists (no, they are not "sceptics") pick up on all the time. Nothing, it seems, can be attributed to global warming by the time they have finished, and so, what, me worry? Let me try to spell out reality for anyone confused by these announcements. Of course there has always been weather, and extreme events. There have been storms, floods, droughts, winds, snow, and yes, bush fires, in the past. Recent past and distant past, weather is weather. The issue was never that global warming caused a particular event. But adding more heat to land, sea and air raises the energy levels in the climate systems, and it is those energy levels that affect both how extreme the weather events will be, and how often they will happen. More frequent, longer lasting, more severe droughts - global warming. More frequent bush fires burning with more intensity for longer - global warming. More frequent, higher category cyclones and hurricanes causing more damage - global warming. Glaciers melting more rapidly and out of season (the real story from Argentina was that this glacier was melting in Winter) - global warming.

Next time you come across a denialist suggesting that some particular event is not the result of global warming agree with him (they are almost always men, funny that), warmly. But then go on to point out that the previous one, and the next one, and the one after that, are. You know the old saying - jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today. We are certainly in a jam today, and more of a jam tomorrow.

14 July 2008
Category Climate change
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Dr Yes

Not that anyone would do this, but try to imagine that you know, or strongly suspect, that you have a serious illness. Symptoms keep coming over a number of years, but you take no action, frightened of the treatment you might have to have. Eventually, unable to totally pretend that all is well any longer, you go to a doctor. The doctor says, "yes indeed, you have a really serious illness, so serious that you will die if you don't have a major operation, give up smoking, change your diet, get more exercise". All your mates are listening outside the window, and they say, "No, no, don't listen to her, how are we going to have fun down the pub if you behave like that?" You say, "oh, come on doc, you can do better than that, how about you just prescribe some pills for me?" And she says, "well, ok, but they won't do any more than delay the inevitable, and they have some nasty side effects". "No, no, doc", you say, "no side effects, what about some of those little herbal pills that those nice people wearing white coats, almost certainly doctors, promote on tv that can fix up any ailment painlessly? Or what about a Placebo, they are always good?" "Oh, I can't do that" she says, "you would die very quickly". "Well", you say, "if you don't I'm taking my custom elsewhere to that nice doctor down the road, he believes in alternative medicines and placebos".

No need to go on, you will all recognise the analogy with the farce that went on this week with the first serious report on the actions needed to deal with climate change. Dr Garnaut was the first doctor, "Dr Maybe" we could call him. He knows reality, but with a bit of nudging he seemed prepared to prescribe the placebo that is "clean coal", and to try to make things as painless as possible. And Michael Costa was one of your pub mates cat-calling from the window, telling you there was nothing wrong, and it was time you had a smoke. And Dr Nelson (telescope to the blind eye "Climate change? I see no climate change signal") of course is that good fellow down the road, "Dr No". No nasty medicine from him. Whatever the unions and big business want, which is no action at all, they will get.

We need a Dr Yes. Someone who will acknowledge the serious situation, the wasted years, the need for action right now. Someone Churchillian who can mobilise public opinion while offering nothing but higher electricity costs and long hot summers, very hot summers, on the beaches. Someone who will proceed with the nasty medicine, knowing that in the long run it is the only way to save you.

Can farmer's organisations and country GPs (sorry, MPs) help with this - get Mr Rudd an honorary doctorate from Charles Sturt University and give him the honorary nickname of Dr Yes? Doesn't look promising, they have been among the mates calling through the window. Denying and denying and denying there was a problem. Demanding that tree clearing continue and water allocations increase and coal be dug ever faster, and accusing anyone who tried to contradict them of being "extreme green".

So, is there a doctor in your house? Or are you going to keep listening to your mates down the pub, and visiting Dr No, when it comes to the health of the planet?

7 July 2008
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Quiddities and quillets

Usually when we use Titanic metaphors in relation to global warming we find ourselves up on the bridge speaking to the Captain who, blind eye to the telescope, is signaling full speed ahead, and saying "Icebergs, what Icebergs?" Or perhaps in the ballroom with the rich, dancing the night away, literally.

Instead, this time, I want to take you down, past the ballroom, past the second class passenger cabins, and down into the depths of the ship near the third class passengers. There you will find a climate change denier, potentially of course the grandfather of one of our own deniers. Shush, go quietly so you don't disturb him, and so you can hear him above the roar of the engines and the scraping of an iceberg along the hull. Listen ....

"Ssssss, ah the lovely, the lovely hull, my precious ssssssship, greatest ssssssship ever built, and it'sssss mine, all mine, my precious. Sssssee the water coming through that little hole? Ah, lovely water, we lovesssss the water we do. But not very much water, really, just a little bit, and water is sssso natural in a ship. Anyway, there is supposed to be water coming in through the hole, they probably put the hole in so the water could get out again. All ships have holes, I'm sure. And not so much water on the floor yet, really, only covers my feet, oh yes, now my legsssss. It will stop soon, bound to. And if it doesn't, well then, my preciousssss can't sink, nothing can happen to her, unsinkable. Anyway, even if she does sink into the lovely water, full of fishes, lovely fishes, there are life boats on board, we can all escape. But really, my preciousss will be fine, and I can stay in her forever."

Look, I know, I know, easy target, next thing I'll be poking fun at Jehovah's Witnesses or Scientology or the La Rouche movement or Australia First. The world seems to always have an endless supply of gullible-willing-to-suspend-all-diseblief potential followers for any new leader who hoists a flag. I've been poking fun at denialists for some time now, but enough is enough, no more Mr Funny Guy, it's time, deadly serious from now on. For ten years these people have been babbling on, not critical, not sceptical, but just in complete denial, like our slippery friend in the bowels of the Titanic. Nothing will do the trick - not the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, or the loss of the Barrier Reef, or the complete drying up of the Murray River. They will still keep spouting the same old rubbish, like a player piano roll; ice caps on Mars, climate has changed before, 1970s ice age, sun spots, crops in Greenland, 1998 a hot year, cold in Melbourne today, CO2 good for you, can't predict weather even next week, etc etc. The points can be, and have been, answered a thousand times, but into the piano goes the roll, and the same old tune is played again and again.

And it isn't funny any more, not even with clever "Gollum on the Titanic" metaphors. For over ten years now you have obfuscated and quibbled; turned to quiddities, quillets, cases, tenures, and tricks. For ten long years you have given governments everywhere, urged on by giant corporations, an excuse to believe there was debate when there was none. Out with the lot of you. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.

We tend to think of climate change denialists as some kind of new breed, new cult, new sect, but there is really nothing new about them. They have infested Australia from the first day they went ashore in Sydney Cove with axes. Ever since then they have resisted all attempts at conservation measures. Pretended to believe nonsense about the large number of trees in Australia, about the natural dryness of the Murray, about pollution blowing away in the wind, about the need to kill native species. Have continued to clear woodlands, withdraw too much water from rivers, woodchip forests, develop sand dunes, over fish. Every attempt to warn of coming problems being met with contempt and obfuscation, and a demand that big business (and big agribusiness) must be allowed to get on with things, unfettered by any environmental regulation.

Well, the last 220 years have been an extended home and away season, where the Denialist Dragons have met and beaten every team of Environmentalist Bilbys that challenged them. And now Global Warming, it's the big one, the Premiership. Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen. Businessmen and conservative politicians hate global warming because it is one of those stubborn facts that keep getting in the way of ideology. Global warming is the final match for the difference of opinion between conservationists and the Right, and the Right know that they have lost the game. So they continue to thrash about, demanding extra time, video replays, injury stoppages, player substitutions, goal kicks to be retaken.

And please, whatever talking points you have left in your supporters kit, forget it. I don't want to hear them. I know it is going to be something (global cooling since 2001 perhaps?) that is just as silly as all the other nonsense you have spouted to an increasingly bored crowd of spectators.

Game over. Go home. Let us get on with trying to work out how to clean up the mess you and your supporters have left us with.

Alas poor Yoricks? No.

Note for non-Australian subscribers and visitors. A version of this post with American cultural references (Jamestown, Spotted Owls, Kansas hurricanes, Super Bowl etc - sadly the similarities are greater than the differences) can be found here.

8 June 2008
Category Climate change
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No going back

Beautiful mind, Stephen Hawking. Saw a question from him the other day - if there is life elsewhere in the universe, why haven't we stumbled across alien broadcasts by now? An alien "Wheel of Fortune" comes to mind, for example, or a radio soap opera starring lovelorn little green men and women. The implication of his question, if I may be so bold, is that there are no other intelligent life forms in the universe. Although I suppose you could argue that an intelligent life form would have better things to do than watch tv quiz shows or listen to radio soap operas, so perhaps the lack of such broadcasts simply means that we are the dumbest intelligent life form in the universe.

A similar question arises from the lack of space travellers arriving on Earth (except at Roswell of course). I can't remember if this was Hawking, or someone else, or me, but this lack of flying saucers also suggests that faster than light travel is not just theoretically but practically impossible, otherwise they would have been here by now. Or it may just mean there is a sign on the space lane to Earth warning travellers "Wrong way, go back".

It was certainly Hawking though who also pointed out another piece of evidence about space time mysteries - there are no people travelling back from the future. We don't get time travellers appearing in our major cities shopping for future antiques in Ikea stores, or sending our bookmakers bankrupt with certain knowledge about the winners of major horse races. Time travel seems to be theoretically possible, but the absence of arrivals from the future suggests that it is not practically possible, and has never been invented any time in the future.

In a sense these ideas are based on the old "mark and recapture" technique, one of the first things young ecology students are taught about field research. The idea is so simple that it makes you (well, it made me) want to hug yourself with delight at the sheer ingenuity of it. Want to know how big a population of wild animals is without the impossible task of counting them? Simple, catch a few, mark them in some way that doesn't adversely affect them (for example rings on the legs of birds) but lets them be instantly recognized when seen again, and then let them go. Let some time go by, and then go out and catch some number of animals, say 100, from the population. Count how many of the 100 have your mark on them. Then the proportion of marked animals in the sample is the same as the percentage of marked animals in the total population. You know how many animals you marked and released, how many you caught, hey presto, solve an equation with three known figures and one unknown and you can calculate the total size of the population.

So Hawking's thought experiment is equivalent to seeing whether space travellers can be "marked", and the absence of sightings means either they can't be, or they don't exist - there is no population of aliens elsewhere in the universe to be marked. In the case of time travellers, Hawking assumes that the absence of strangely dressed lottery winners in our street means that they can't be "marked", time travel simply can't be invented and never will be. But, just as with alien travellers from space, there is a second possibility. We know time travel is theoretically possible, and therefore should be invented by our clever descendants. So what if the absence of time travellers means that there are no people in the future of the planet?

Climate change denialists have lately taken to pretending that the Earth has started cooling. Have continued to claim that two lines trending upwards for fifty years have no implications for the future. I have taken to wondering how long the trend line has to be for these people to admit that the globe is warming as a result of the CO2 being poured into the air by their industrialist friends. At what point do they stop pretending that the modelling that projects that trend forward 10, 50, 100 years has no relevance because we don't know what the future holds (being unable, as they wrongly claim, to predict the weather tomorrow)?

Well, what if the lack of time travellers tells us that the denialists achieved their aim and prevented action on climate change for so long that the upward graph began to accelerate as tipping points were achieved, and that the next big extinction event on the planet included Homo sapiens sapiens? What if Stephen Hawking's observation doesn't show that time travel wasn't achieved, but that human wisdom wasn't? Not enough people saying "Wrong way, go back".

Big responsibility, being a denialist, but they have broad shoulders. And hey, the future is bunk, as Ford said.



There is a future (and not a bad past) on the Watermelon Blog, but for how long?

30 May 2008
Category Climate change
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Room with no view

I have been puzzling over the paradox that while the new Australian government has, for the first time, an environmentalist as Environment minister, we find that environmental decisions are being made which are no better than those of the previous government. And now, with the slashing of promotion for solar power with the loss of the rebate, we have, unthinkable just 6 months ago, an environmental decision actually worse than those being made by the previous government. Japan with permanent employment for employees still finds that many workers who are redundant, incompetent, or unmotivated must be retained. These are sometimes assigned to the madogiwa-zoku, "the window-seat tribe." As the name implies, they are expected to do little more than look out the windows, while the valued employees work in the inner offices (which often have no windows).

I conclude that although Peter Garrett has been made redundant, Kevin Rudd is forced to retain him for the look of the thing, to keep up the pretense that Labor is a party concerned with the environment in general and climate change in particular, and Garrett has therefore become a member of the ministerial "window seat tribe". Has become a minister with a desk, and perhaps a sharpened pencil, but with absolutely nothing to do all day but look out of the window, while the hard men of cabinet (who have no vision in their windowless offices) get on with propping up the coal industry with massive subsidies.

20 May 2008
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Time of the preacher

Frank Luntz wrote a memo for the American Republican Party in the year of '02, preaching, among other things, that instead of using the term "global warming", Republicans substitute "climate change" because "while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge".

Now at the time I couldn't quite see the logic of this - climate change sounds very uncontrollable to me. But this division between the two terms has continued to this day on blogs and other media outlets. While Mr Luntz's attempt to soothe the savage scientist may or may not have worked in semantic terms in quite the way he intended, it has certainly become an effective tactical move.

First the deniers argued that even if the planet was warming the climate wasn't changing. Scientists would be pushed into mindless discussions about the retreat of glaciers, the frequency of hurricanes, the meaning of droughts. This barrage was so effective that it made the media very reluctant to attribute any aspect of the weather to global warming (whereas in fact EVERY aspect of the world's weather is now affected by warmer temperatures). And the politicians would echo this - no of course we couldn't say that Katrina was caused by global warming. The public, reading this "debate" would be encouraged to believe nothing that their senses were telling them about a changing world environment was of any relevance to global warming.

But suddenly a switch. Seizing upon an abnormally high temperature in 1998, and a relatively (in context) low one in 2007, the result of the El Nino - La Nina cycles, the deniers again began pretending to believe that global temperature wasn't increasing. Now snowfalls here, and snow falls there, and very cold nights somewhere else, and an apparent lack of severe tropical storms, and a professed belief that we would all be better off living in Florida's climate anyway, became climatic indicators that there was no problem at all in the world that couldn't be solved by wishing it away.

This major shift in tactics has mirrored the smaller scale shifts that have been used in the media by the denialist claque. Evidence for warming? No, climate is the thing. Evidence for climate change? No, warming is the real test. It is all reminiscent of the old carney hustlers playing the shell game or the three card trick - you think you have the argument nailed down here? No, it's over there.  No, not under that one, this one. Oh, you've lost your money? Too bad, next time you might win.

Or in the words of the song - "When you think it's all over, It's only begun". But in the words of the same song - "Now the preaching is over, And the lesson's begun".

No doubt the lessons are beginning, had begun well before the year of '01, as Mr Luntz must have known (and knows now, it seems), and soon all the cards will be the Queen of Spades.

My cards are on the table on The Watermelon Blog.

15 April 2008
Category Climate change
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Especially sweat

Kevin Rudd is clearly a prime minister acutely aware of his place in history to come (although this may be simply a tautology). Even this cynical, stony-hearted, "Extreme Green" is starting to warm to the man in spite of some continuing reservations.

So I have a suggestion which would both assure his place in history as not just the most important of all Australian prime ministers (not excepting my beloved John Curtin) but perhaps the most significant world leader who ever lived (a little flattery never goes astray).

James Hansen of NASA, now arguably one of the most significant scientists of all time, has just argued, on the basis of new analysis of palaeoclimates and of climate feedback mechanisms, that the EU target of 550 parts per million of atmospheric C02 - already the most ambitious in the world - should be cut not just to 450ppm (as he previously suggested) but to 350ppm if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. Since we’re already at 385 ppm and rising 2 ppm a year and with a lot of built in rise already on the way, 350 is a stunningly difficult target. Made even more difficult as world leaders (including Kevin Rudd, one source of my reservations) keep stalling by saying they can't move until other countries do, a recipe for no action at all.

So here is my suggestion. Kevin Rudd announces that Australia is going to take the lead in aiming for a level of emissions consistent with a world target of 350ppm. He puts the country on a kind of war footing, with an education program to ensure that everyone in the country knows the 350 figure and its importance, and immediately freezes the development of new coal-fired power stations and sets targets for each state to begin drastically slashing emissions from such sources. He will announce a massive program to support the renewable energy sources that Australians have been so good at inventing and so poor at using, while making it clear that he will have no truck with the snake oil salesmen peddling nuclear power, biofuels, and "clean coal". He will end the madness of land-clearing, and wood-chipping of old growth forests, put a stop to privatisation of electricity supplies, set new standards for energy efficiency in new homes and help ordinary householders to retrofit with insulation and energy saving devices, and establish a program to phase in fuel efficient cars. He will point out that such a program will be a preemptive strike in getting Australia ready for the failure of oil supplies world wide. And he will say we stand ready to work with other countries to help them achieve the same reductions in emissions, but whatever they do, we are going ahead right now.

His speech will be Churchillian in its cadences, and he could include "blood sweat and tears" if it seems necessary.

Mr Rudd has already ensured a footnote in history as a good prime minister with his signing of Kyoto, his apology to Aboriginal people, and his decision that the last Australian Governor-General will be a woman. This is his chance to be a great prime minister.

14 April 2008
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Good heavens

It is hard to understand how Don Aitkin (Canberra Times 3 April) could have taken 12 months to put together the extraordinary collection of ill-informed views that he has presented to readers of that newspaper. It is an outburst that would be typical of any shock jock, or oil company funded climate change denier. Impossible to know where to start with refuting it. Melting of sea ice doesn't cause sea level to rise? Good heavens, who would have thought?  But the melting of glaciers, as well as the melting of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and other ice covered land does. And the melting of sea ice in the Arctic is a sign of a planet in trouble, and a recipe for feedback growth of heating, quite apart from ecological damage. Temperature rise in the past? Again, who knew? But the recent temperature rise is unprecedented in its speed and of even more concern because it is happening on a planet already under ecological stress, and with the small question of 6 billion human beings whose future is now grim. In addition, temperature rises in the past did cause extinctions. No temperature rise since 1998? Nonsense. The graph heads ever upwards, interrupted only by a particularly hot year in 1998. Sun activity? Only a small part of the warming. In fact temperatures should now be dropping in relation to solar activity. Not linked to CO2? How could anyone present that as a serious proposition? The physics is known, the correlation clearly observed. He is "prepared to accept" temperature rise "0.6 of a degree plus or minus 0.2 of a degree over the 20th century"? What does he mean? What temperature rise is he prepared to accept in the 21st century? Two degrees, three degrees, four degrees? Does he know the climatic and ecological implications of those rises? Try reading climatology and ecology for the next 12 months Professor Aitkin, then come and talk to us again.

4 April 2008
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Walking backwards at Christmas

Three months ago, while Christmas shopping, I saw a man walking backwards. There we all were, shoppers in the Mall, all hurrying along to the next purchasing decision, all hurrying the right way, and there he was, walking backwards, the crowds parting to make way for him. I could see his point - sometimes I wouldn't mind going back to an earlier time. Back to a slower, gentler, more community-oriented, less dumbed-down time, with an ice covered Arctic. Away from the "war on terror" nonsense, away from a globally corporatized world, away from a dumbed down American presidency, away from a Murdochized media, away from reality television.

But of course you can't go back, and he was heading back towards an age of no computers, no television, no antibiotics, no clean water, no anesthetics, no fair legal system, no democracy. Turning his back on this brave new world and heading for the mud huts of the dark ages, unable to cope with the modern world as all around him were doing.

But maybe he was only aiming for the sixties, flowers in his hair and Woodstock mud on his boots, back to a hippier happier time with better music.

Or was I seeing him in the mirror of a shop window? Was he perhaps the only one going the right way and all of us were heading backwards in denial? Was he simply heading to a time of less conspicuous consumption, of public transport, of home grown vegetables, of windows opened for fresh air, of fewer possessions, of community activities?

While we, all the rest of us, were heading, in a headlong rush, towards the dark ages of the 2050s, with mud huts and no electricity, 100 year water wars, food shortages, diseases, desertification. Back to the future of the new medieval times, life brutish, nasty and short.

And I looked back at him, wondering, as the gap between us widened.

25 March 2008
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Foreign policy in focus
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Commercial free childhood
Tom Tomorrow
Environment & Development
Robert Kennedy Memorial
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Irish Radio Show
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David Korten
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Question everything
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Ben Pobjie
Alaska Greens
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Wildlife Focus

Contact me directly -
greenviews at optusnet.com.au




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