Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside


"We can do better" (Kennedy)

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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

Our Gang

Remember when Butch Cassidy and Sundance, endlessly pursued by a gang of vigilantes, unable to shake them off, looked at each other and said, in wonderment, "Who are these guys?"

Feel the same way about the gang of vigilante know-nothings hunting down every post about climate change all over the world, endlessly coming back, no matter how many times partly shaken off, to repeat the same kinds of unscientific nonsense learnt from denier blogs. Endlessly attacking, both in public (libelling scientists) and in private (death threats and abuse), science, the crowning glory and achievement of western civilisation. Determined to destroy science and replace it with extreme right wing ideology and religion. Back to the Dark Ages but this time into a society run not by king and established church but by multinational corporation and fundamentalist church.

And they seem to have appeared from nowhere, these rabid naysayers.

If you had asked me, say ten years ago, how the world was going to respond to climate change and the absolutely imperative need to reduce greenhouse gas production, I would have responded somewhat pessimistically, knew that it was going to be a battle between science and vested interests, just like earlier battles over DDT, tobacco, CFCs, acid rain, asbestos, tree clearing, and on, and on. Whenever there are trillions of dollars (minimum $1 billion per day lost to oil industry if there is co-ordinated action to restrict the increase in global temperatures to 2ºC) at stake then the gloves come off. Donations will be made to political parties and individuals, lobbyists will set to work bending arms, right wing think tanks established with tame scientists willing to manufacture doubt, the Murdoch Press will open its opinion and news pages to outright denial, unions will be convinced that their natural allies are the bosses, scientific bodies will be silenced, opposition parties will buy votes by offering to do nothing. I could see all that coming to pass but I would not say that the struggle nought availeth. I thought that dispassionate and disinterested calm statements and restatements of scientific truths would eventually prevail over the forces of the energy company bottom line. But "Good, too, logic of course, but not in fine weather". And so the labour and the wounds were in vain, the enemy fainted not, nor faileth, "and as things have been, things remain".

What I hadn't counted on was the help that the vigilante know-nothings would give to the big corporations. Who could have known that, just as the battle was in the balance, a damned near run thing, red devils carrying pitchforks and pitch would come screaming over the hill on a Saturday night and destroy the representatives of five hundred years of scientific endeavour. That science's regimental colours, with images of Galileo, Newton, Arrhenius, and Einstein, would be trampled in the mud by striped uniform heathens with banners bearing the images of radio shock jocks and right wing bloggers and hereditary lords.

A number of us have tried to understand this phenomenon of the new dark ages, for example Clive Hamilton, John Quiggin, and myself, but all of us, not being football fans, have failed to really come to grips with that always lethal combination of hatred and ignorance seen on blog after blog about the reality and dangers of climate change. Having read the incredible number of vitriolic responses to Clive Hamilton's climate change series on Unleashed, and the positive applauding "you go girl" responses to Joanne Nova's Unleashed piece (in which the forces of light, the energy companies, desperately poverty stricken and outnumbered, are fighting the good fight against the forces of darkness, the  green peril who have untold riches provided by governments), an LED light bulb suddenly lit up in my cerebellum. This was football. This was Manchester United supporters coming into Arsenal territory, or Collingwood and Essendon supporters outside the gates of the MCG. This was overweight and middle-aged men wearing no-longer-fitting-if-they-ever-did striped or red football jumpers, singing "We are the Champions", or "We'll do you on the train".

And each gang is led by the biggest meanest s.o.b. of all, the denialist bloggers. These are the leaders who start off the slogan chanting, lead the rush to the enemy, smash opposing leaders, put the boot into prone figures. This is the stuff of secret societies, our gang, outsiders, bogans, the rejected, the unpopular kids in school. They can be convinced that the Other (the elites, intelligentsia, government, scientists, authorities, people who look down on the unwashed hordes) is the enemy. And now comes payback time, hit back at those who you blame for your unsatisfied life. Show them who is really boss. Very powerful emotions. Used to motivate mobs since time began.

Have always been around, these people. I once met a chap over lunch. Normal conversation until he mentioned his large gun collection. Why so many, I asked. For when the Indonesians invade, he said. I began to go along with the joke, as you do, ho, ho, yes, they'll be charging through Alice Springs any day now, when something about his expression and silence made me realise he was deadly serious. Seems that is exactly what they would be doing and the Howard government had a secret agreement with them, like the Brisbane Line of WW2, to give them the top half of the country, he had read this in his conspiracy theory magazine (secret UFO research, fluoride poisoning our children). My lunch companion was ready to take to the hills and fight them.

The other day I met an at first apparently normal truck driver who said he was "cured" of blindness by the laying on of hands, and how all sickness was the result of not obeying the exact word of the Bible. Another fellow, met in a country pub, discovering that I was working on Aboriginal archaeology, told me proudly that they had "got rid of all the Abos in this town a while back" (Myall Creek massacre of 1838, 170 years before our conversation, but still a source of pride). Ah, if I had a dollar for every nutter I have met I would be as rich as George Soros and could take over the world. Point is, the knowledge-poor have always been with us, but once upon a time they were left to bloom unseen and waste their ignorance on the desert air. Now, what with first talk back radio, and now blogs, they not only have microphones, but are welcomed as statistics on visitor counters. Fair enough, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public, or as some shock jock said - there's a sucker born every minute. Gotta make a living how you can, and if your living involves inciting mobs to trash science and prevent action on global warming, well, then, what of it? Ya wanna fight?

But always look on the bright side of life. The advantage of all this is that these people are making themselves known. No longer spreading anonymous poison in pubs or at a football match. The hidden casual racism, the conspiracy theories, the anti government rhetoric, the gun ownership, the hatred of environmentalism and science in general, the extreme nationalism, are now exposed to the light of the internet. It will take another ten years of science and reason, another ten wasted years that are going to see CO2 levels so high as to cause serious planetary damage, but at least the battle will be fought knowing who all the players are, and who is over the hill waiting to attack.

Football is not just a matter of life and death, it's much more serious than that.

15 March 2010
Category Climate change
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Power to the people

Warmest. Decade. Ever. Even the weatherpersons on commercial television seem aware of that fact now. Second warmest year on record for Australia (after 2005, both ahead, remarkably, of extreme El Nino 1998), fifth warmest globally. Highest temperatures extending right through NSW and SA, very low rainfalls for this area. The results, not that they were a surprise to anyone paying attention, came, in a depressing coincidence, just a day or so after yet more media publicity for the Cooma farmer determined to clear trees. Disappointing to see that he was being supported not just by Barnaby Joyce, whose blindness and actively obstructive behaviour on climate change is sadly no longer a surprise, but also by a crew of right wing climate change denialists with links to an extreme neoconservative think tank in America. At least Bill Heffernan retained some sanity on the matter (a sentence I never saw myself writing).

Usually when I write about climate change I get criticism from some readers, who, knowing that I think we should leave both coal and uranium in the ground, demand to know what my answer is, because, and I had never thought of this, solar panels don't produce electricity when the sun don't shine. Who knew? Well, John Howard of course, who always demanded to know where us extreme greens thought we were going to get "baseload power" from. It is the kind of question the Labor Party, in government, is fond of repeating. Well, I thought I knew the answer, and so, in an encouraging coincidence last week, came the news that the Europeans do too.

They have announced the aim of linking, and developing further, all the renewable energy sources into a single grid across Europe. Wind power in Scotland, solar power in Germany, wave power in Denmark, hydroelectricity in Norway, etcetera, etcetera. Even when the sun don't shine, waves keep moving, rivers flow, wind blows; and if the wind don't blow, the sun is probably shining. The grid won't discriminate, just take whichever power source is producing. In addition, the power can be stored by using it at low demand times to pump water up to the hydroelectric dams for use later. Or solar power can be used to boil water and feed the superheated liquid into turbines. Later they are looking to add in further solar power resources in North Africa. Twenty percent of renewable power by 2020, much higher aims for 2050. Our pitiful target of 5%, even that blocked by the Liberals and Nationals, looks pathetic by comparison.

Time we lifted our game, don't you think? Improved our performance. Raised our sights. Stopped listening to idiots on the one hand and coal mine owners on the other, exercised some famous Australian ingenuity. I reckon we could do even better than the Europeans, couldn't we? We'd better get on, next decade is going to be warmer again, much warmer. Time is running out. Come down from the tree Barnaby.

Oh, and stop clearing trees, start planting instead. Every bit helps. But we need an awful lot of bits.

8 January 2010
Category Climate change
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Canary in a coal mine

Well, who would have thought. Tony Abbott's first action as Opposition Leader was to visit a coal mine and talk gravely about jobs jobs jobs. All a bit reminiscent of John Howard's speech to the forestry workers before the 2004 election, and just as cynical. Tony Abbott now leads a party which, if the mine owners suggested it, would without a moment's hesitation approve the slashing of miner's wages and conditions, the removal of regulations, the sacking of thousands of miners and their replacement by machinery, or by cheap overseas workers, or the sale of a mine to overseas private equity firms, or just the closing of a mine to cut costs and push up prices. But phasing out coal gradually, retraining workers and promoting alternative jobs in communities, in order to keep the whole planet habitable? No sirree.

Once upon a time Australia was seen as a quarry. Shovelling up mineral riches as quickly as possible and selling them off cheaply overseas. Gradually Australians, and politicians, became aware that this probably wasn't the smartest long term strategy for the economy. We might be a little bigger than Nauru, but, just as inevitably, resources will eventually run out or become too costly to retrieve. And then what do you do? Nauru eventually settled for housing a prison where Australia sent its unwanted prisoners, but it's hard to imagine Australia being a penal colony, isn't it?

Eventually governments of both political persuasions realised that it might be prudent to plan for the future by encouraging, and even investing in, a manufacturing capacity for the country and an ability to develop the smart technology ideas Australians have always been good at.

But in recent years, bedeviled by ideological blinkers that insist that governments mustn't "pick winners" (why ever not, would picking losers be better?) the Australian economy must be run by the market, the whole market, and nothing but the market, Australia has seen the collapse of this program. Inventors and inventions have headed overseas, scientists likewise. The universities and CSIRO have been squashed, silenced, privatised, monetised. Policies on imports have seen manufacturers going broke and closing or taking their assembly lines offshore. A devil may care attitude to takeovers has seen many companies bought by overseas giants.

And so we have run gleefully back to just digging stuff out of the ground and sending it off - and even much of that is now being done by overseas companies buying, or buying into, Australian mining companies.

We are back to Quarry Australia. Back to the dumb country, with Mr Abbott's blessing. But picking winners would be easy peasy at the moment Tony. Easier than it's ever been. The winners are going to be companies, and countries, that encourage, and invest in, renewable energies. We are, or were, world leaders in solar power and the rest. Now we are not (the solar panels I bought recently were made in China - how ironic is that?) - inventors and inventions are heading overseas, local firms going broke. Kevin isn't doing anything Tony - you say you want to oppose, then here is a good thing to oppose.

And you have invented something called "Climate Action". Here is an action Tony, if you think you are an environmentalist as you say - start by announcing an immediate ban on all tree clearing, including Tasmanian forestry operations, in Australia (you're right Tony, land use is important). Then visit another coal mine and announce that all Australian coal mines are going to close by 2020 (with substantial help for miners and communities to adjust), that your Liberal Government is going to start work towards a Minimum Renewable Energy Target of 100% by 2050, that you will set up a massive "Sustainable Energy Investment Fund" which will support not just research but the implementation of all forms of renewable energy across Australia and support them with appropriate infrastructure development.

That will make us a Clever Country again. Oh, and help save the planet.

You there Tony? Tony?

17 December 2009
Category Climate change
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DUI - Denying under influence

Are climate change denialists all drunk all the time?

Increasingly, as I read threads relating to climate change the responses from denialists have become shriller and shriller, words are slurred, offers to fight becoming more common, vomiting on the floor not out of the question.

And hesitatingly offering a quiet rebuttal of some nonsense quickly gets you arguing with the town drunk/village idiot in the corner of the bar. "Greenland. Used to be ... Wotsis? green, thass it. Greenland useta be green. Didn't know that didya, Mr smarty ecofascist"?

You say "Um, well, no, it didn't, the icecap is very thick and was there at least 119,000 years before the Vikings".

"Rubbish, green, all over, cows everywhere. Anyway climate is always .... Hey Fred, what is it climate is always doing? Changing, that's it. Always changing. Them geologists, smart fellows, had to explain to Mr Fat Gore that climate changes. Didn't know apparently. Nor that alarmist Hansen fellow."

You reply "Uh, actually everyone did know that ..."

"No they didn't. Thought it was all new. Coulda told them - remember a hot year when I was a boy. Very hot. There you are ... And them fellows somewhere who were cooking the books. Ha ha, get it, cooking the books, they admitted they had hidden the fact that isn't getting warm, getting cold in fact, much colder than that Midlevel warm period. Couldn't tell because they had crook computers, and they'd stuck all their therm ..., thermo ... thermomometers over steam vents in NY. You know, those vents that blew Marilyn's skirt up, hee hee hee. Funny place to put a therm ... thermo....., oh, never mind, know what I'd like to have put ... never mind. Snort, slurp, burp, where was I? Oh yes, there's snow outside in't there? Not goin' to get snow if things are gettin' warm are ya, stands to reason. Cold enough to play ice hockey like they did in the ice age in the 1970s 'cept they broke all the hockey sticks them scientist fellows. "

"Anyway, CO2 is good for you, makes plants grow. Breathe it in and out, we do, like this ... See, like a food, isn't it, breath. Be trying to stop me breathing next, that Marxist Obama."

"Just wanna take over the world you lot, Hitler youth, like that funny English fellow said. Take over the world and kill everybody. Gonna have them panels, death panels, kill everone off who doesn't believe their lies."

"Shoutin, who's shoutin? You lookin at me?"

Yeah, I'm looking at you on The Watermelon Blog, want to make something of it?

13 December 2009
Category Climate change
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Game over

There are times when all good women, and men, need to come to the aid of the party. Times when profound changes in understanding occur. Times that put a stamp on a man (or woman) for better or worse. Times that try men's souls.

We have just celebrated the 150 year anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. There had been other ideas about where species came from - creation, inheritance of acquired characteristics - but Darwin (and Wallace) put an end to all that, once and forever. The combination of natural selection producing change in response to environment, and geographic separation letting that change produce different species, was so simple, and yet so profound, that it was game over. Oh there were all kinds of details Darwin didn't know about, and that have been worked on by tens of thousands of other scientists ever since - genes, DNA, exactly how separation causes species to diverge, how genes control development, the real age of the Earth, continental drift, the climatic changes of the past, the extent of the fossil record, and so on. But none of it mattered, none of it affected the basic theory. Game over.

Oh and game over for the combination of religion and science which was so common in Darwin's time. After 1859 it was no longer possible for a scientist to be religious. A true scientist. Anyone who claimed to be both a god-botherer and a scientist was either a fool or a liar.

One hundred years later another shift of a different kind. For years doctors and biological scientists had happily smoked cigarettes. Both groups had often appeared in the media to promote cigarettes, as being not only not bad for you but indeed possibly good for you, as smoking cowboys rode off into the sunset. But from the time the statistical link between heart disease and lung cancer and smoking was demonstrated, it was no longer possible to call yourself a scientist and promote tobacco. Oh, sure, there were details to be worked out - how did smoking actually cause the cell damage, what were the active ingredients, how did they relate to other environmental factors like diet and air pollution, and what about genetics. But these were details, the game was up, smoking was bad for you, devastatingly bad for you, and anyone who claimed to be a scientist and not understand that was either a fool or a well-paid liar. They were certainly not scientists.

And so to the third of this trio, climate change. From the mid 1990s when the physics of CO2 absorption of radiation was combined with measurements of rising CO2 levels caused by burning fossil fuels and observations of global warming, it was no longer possible to be a scientist and a climate change denialist. Anyone who claimed to be both was either a fool or a well-paid liar. Oh sure, there were all kinds of details to be sorted out relating to CO2 absorption by the oceans, positive and negative feedback mechanisms, research into CO2 levels in the distant past, measurements of glacial and polar ice responses, analysis of responses to warming in the ecology of plants and animals, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Work of tens of thousands of real scientists over the last 15 years have greatly refined the understanding of climate systems and how they work in detail. But nothing has altered that initial breakthrough in understanding about the role of CO2 in the atmosphere and the origin and implications of its rise and rise.

You think you know scientists who accept religion, but who don't accept evolution, tobacco effects on health, or anthropogenic climate change?

No, you don't.

But real science on The Watermelon Blog.

28 November 2009
Category Climate change
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Dream of money-bags tonight

All of us who are concerned about the future of the planet have misunderestimated the opposition from those who are not. We thought that the flooding of web sites, talk back radio, television chat shows, letters columns in newspapers, blogs, with tens of thousands of mindless repetitions of a few talking points, was the main tactic. It had been modelled, perhaps, on the dropping of aluminum foil plates ("Window") by planes heading for Calais on 6 June 1944. The foil looked like massed planes and ships to German radar, making them believe, until too late, that the invasion force was heading in that direction, and not Normandy.

The mindless denialist chatter has had the same effect, masking the real science going on and preventing public, and politicians, understanding the very real threat of climate change. And this was bad enough - a very effective tactic which has prevented any serious action on greenhouse gases for ten long desperate years. A tactic which has let the big polluters slip under the radar, continue sucking trillions of dollars out of the Earth while carelessly pouring CO2 into the air.

But we thought that was it. That soon reality would appear like the D-Day invasion fleet suddenly appearing with the dawn off Normandy. That the combination of measurements and the now obvious effects of global warming on world climates was going to bring politicians kicking and screaming to the negotiating tables of Copenhagen. If that was the worst that the shadowy figures of the energy industry and other giant corporations could throw at us then we had, like Ali, roped a dope, and were about to bounce back with the knock-out blow.

Silly us. The invasion of Iraq and then the Health Care debate should have warned us that the Armies of the Right stop at nothing these days to impose their will and maintain their robber baron status. And so, like WMD and "Death Panels" now we have the "CRU email scandal", discussed earlier by Kevin Grandia. Just two weeks from Copenhagen the British Climate Research Unit computers are hacked, their emails downloaded and sent off into Deniaworld. There, just as in the lead up to the Iraq War, words are cherry picked, context removed, common sense abandoned, outrage simulated, war declared, counter views demonised. Vials of imaginary anthrax are displayed, trucks become mobile laboratories, aluminum tubes become nuclear bombs, rockets are ready to launch at New York in ten minutes.

And suddenly, it seems, temperatures are no longer rising, the Arctic is no longer melting, glaciers don't retreat, droughts don't happen, record temperatures are no longer set, marine acidity doesn't increase, sea levels don't rise, plants don't flower at different times, birds don't breed at different times, firestorms no longer erupt.

It was, apparently, all just a dream.

But I'm a wake up on The Watermelon Blog.

21 November 2009
Category Climate change
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Less light than heat

I confess, and it is like confessing to a murder, that I was once a smoker (I stopped 18 years, 3 months, 5 days, 6 hours ago, but who's counting). There was a lot of it about in the fifties and sixties. My uncle and grandfather both smoked, pretty much all the men I knew did. Film heroes on screen smoked, and so did their audience. Doctors smoked, patients in hospital smoked, James Bond smoked, sportsmen smoked. Many of my peers smoked, in fact the coolest guy in school, Robert Patterson, used to smoke behind the sports pavilion while the rest of us played cricket - how cool was that? So I began smoking. Who knew there was a problem eh? There were giant billboards with cowboys smoking, ads on buses, television ads of really cool guys and gals in tuxedos smoking, radio ads, full page newspaper ads. And there were doctors and scientists who swore on a stack of chesterfields that smoking wasn't harmful (lies, damned lies and statistics, where was the proof?), and tobacco company executives who swore nicotine wasn't addictive, good heavens no, what an idea. Little did anyone know that the executives were lying, knew they were lying, but that not only were they being paid big dollars by cigarette companies but so were the scientists and doctors in their white coats.

All of us smokers agreed with each other in pubs and restaurants, in trains, in cars, in planes, smoking was doing us no harm, oh my goodness gracious no. Coughing in the morning was from dust in the bedroom, sneezing was hay fever, perfectly natural in Summer, breathlessness was just old age, lack of appetite was weight watching, inability to smell and taste - never been good at that. It was in fact, good for us, calmed the nerves, slowed us down, cleared the lungs, made a natural end to a meal, was essential to accompany coffee. And we knew, or knew of, smokers who lived a long time. Not many, but one was enough to prove that there was nothing to worry about, smoking didn't damage health. Anyway, we could give up, or at least cut down, any time we chose. Not addicted at all, just enjoyed it, why, at times I could avoid opening that third pack of cigarettes in a day. Willpower was all that was needed, and if I ever thought I needed to, could cut down slowly, steadily. So no need for alarm - doctors, mothers, friends, children - panic merchants, alarmists, totally over the top.

But as I got older the symptoms got worse, the cough constant, the blocked nose also, and playing sport became a memory. And then there was that odd sensation in the lips, and mouth. What was that? Finally, a bit chopped out, and "pre-cancerous" the last stage before developing something that would kill me, quickly, nastily. And I stopped, not quite cold turkey, but with help from the chewing gum and patches that eased me towards being a former smoker. Not easy, but what was the choice?

And it all came back to me - the self-deception, the denial, the anger at well meaning friends, the acceptance of fake experts and the rejection of real ones, the refusal to change anything in my life even at the certain risk of losing it - these last few weeks listening to the so-called skeptics among the Liberal and National parties (the Labor skeptics have their heads down). It could have been me talking about cigarettes 20 years ago. But where I was just being stupid on my own behalf (and, well, I suppose, family and friends), these parliamentary representatives of the people of Australia are being stupid on behalf of 21 million Australians. Particularly stupid on behalf of rural Australians, in the front line as the continent fries and dries and burns. That awful image last week of a fire burning through, and destroying, a mature wheat crop, should be played over and over to all members of parliament, as a symbol of what we are in for.

And I wonder how those SA Senators, in particular, trotting out the most arrant rubbish (some coming from the same "experts" who, funded by tobacco companies, denied the harm in cigarettes - coincidence or what!) while refusing to listen to a delegation of actual climate scientists felt as the state they represent broke more and more temperature records and catastrophic fire warnings were issued?

Guilty, I hope. But I wouldn't count on it.

There is a place in hell for climate change denialists, particularly those who should know better - it's called Australia.

19 November 2009
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You are no Galileo

You all know about Godwin's Law - first person to introduce Hitler into a thread loses the argument. Well, I'm about to invent a new law, let's call it (oh, I don't know, do you really think so? all right then) Horton's Law. Very similar idea, different hero - first climate change denialist to claim Galileo as a hero in a thread loses the argument.

I was going to use Einstein, because I came across Albert being used as a substitute Galileo the other day. It was the usual kind of discussion in which the rationalists were suggesting that listening to climatologists was probably a better path to enlightenment than listening to unqualified shock jocks or anonymous, and unqualified, bloggers on denialist sites. Came the answer - "What about self-taught geniuses - like that guy from the swiss patent office who invented ... relativity ?"

See how clever that is? Einstein was unqualified, self taught, and yet he overturned the whole establishment of physics. So, your average Joe, working in patent office, or plumber's shop, is potentially able to fluke an answer that has eluded all the climatologists (might also win a big lottery too, while he's at it, no qualifications needed, just gotta be in it to win it).

And the second lesson, implicit in this one, usually explicit when Galileo (Horton's Law, remember) is being used, is of the lone hero, misunderstood and abused, standing alone against the establishment, the forces of evil. Knowing the truth, and single-handedly battling to have his voice heard, have the received wisdom overturned, cause a paradigm shift. In the end beaten down by an oppressive religion and forced to recant, but still, in one last gesture of defiance, one last nod to the posterity that will vindicate him, sadly posthumously, manages to whisper out of the corner of his mouth "Nevertheless it moves".

For the climate change denialist there are a number of Galileos, according to personal preference - Richard Lindzen, Ian Plimer, Anthony Watts, Bob Carter, Christopher Monckton, Tom Cobley. One day, just like Galileo, they will be accorded the recognition they deserve for saving the world from solar panels and the socialist one world government, but meanwhile they battle on, misunderstood and ridiculed, while whispering, from the corner of the mouth, "nevertheless it does not warm".

Now as you might expect from the denialist industry, this kind of mythologizing is a total inversion of reality, like confusing the Arctic with the Antarctic. What was going on between 400 and 500 years ago was a revolution in scientific ideas about the nature of the universe. Beginning with Copernicus, who was a rebel with a cause, the Galileo of his day, and then through Kepler and Galileo, these three scientists overturned the accepted wisdom of Ptolemy (the Sun travelling around the Earth), and the religious establishment that accepted the Ptolemaic universe because it fitted scriptures and the common sense view of the world.

Twenty years ago, the equivalent accepted wisdom, fitting both commonsense and the scriptures, was that the climate of the Earth in the recent past and near future was constant. That humans had a right to do whatever they wished to the planet, having been given dominion over it by god, and, whatever they chose to do, they could never have any effect on the climate. This commonsense view, that there would always be an Arctic, with polar bears; wheat grown in southern Australia; coral reefs flourishing everywhere, would have been held by pretty much everyone. A few geologists would have pointed out that in the longer term climates change, but the response from the man in the street would have been, well, in the longer term we are all dead, worrying about the climate changing some time in the future is like worrying about the Sun burning out.

The Galileo, or Copernicus, of our day was James Hansen. Hansen saw that the climate not only could, but would, change rapidly as a result of human actions and that the change had in fact begun. No one took any more notice of him than they did when Copernicus said the Earth went round the Sun. He was pretty much ignored and then scorned and abused. But, just as Kepler and Galileo, and later others, made observations that established the reality of the Copernican nature of the universe, gradually accumulating so much evidence that science, public opinion, and the church, were forced to accept it, so have other scientists in all the disciplines established the reality of Hansen's hypothesis. James Hansen has been spectacularly vindicated, and he didn't even have to die first!

So next time you are on a thread where some denialist claims to be the new Galileo (or Copernicus), say "I knew Galileo Galilei, Galileo Galilei was a friend of mine, and you, Sir, are no Galileo Galilei."

Then point out that James Hansen is the new Copernicus.

And invoke Horton's Law.

Plenty of questioning of received wisdom on The Watermelon Blog.

13 November 2009
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Your shoes get so hot

Roses blooming outside my window. Birds nesting and singing outside my window. Grass and clover growing outside my window. Echidnas and stumpy tail lizards strolling outside my window. Must be Spring, hooray.

But unlike the chirpy weather presenters on television I don't say "hooray, Summer is coming". That lovely thick grass that is creating contented fat sheep will soon begin to dry. I will watch as the hillsides go from green to brown, leaving just a fine network of green lines along the gullies; and then from brown to yellow with no green lines. And just down the road, last weekend, billowing clouds of smoke from a neighbour's paddock gave me an awful scare until I realised that the number of fire trucks meant it was a training exercise burn. Fire season underway in Victoria, and Queensland has had major bush fires already. And the snake in the grass is climate change, the warmer and drier it gets, the more, and more severe, bushfires we will get all over southern Australia.

If stumpy tails are strolling on my door step then snakes will soon be slithering over it, and a few days ago I saw the first one hurrying over my driveway. Always seems to be the way with farming - rain gets the pasture growing but also can lead to worms in sheep and will certainly lead to long dry grass that can be a fire hazard. Warm weather brings on the growth of flowers but also brings the snakes out of hibernation.

Is it just me that dreads summer? Maybe it is, maybe the whole population of Yass would be cheering on the Sydney weather presenter who in the record high temperatures a week or so ago strolled on to Bondi Beach, wriggled her high heels firmly into the sand, and proceeded to tell us how wonderful it was that it was already hot enough for the beach and Summer couldn't come fast enough. Funny isn't it that these people always present the weather from the beach on these sweltering days and not, say, from a bare paddock on the hills around Yass.

Come to think of it, isn't it funny that the climate change deniers (of whom my one time favourite National Barnaby is now sadly a leader) always make their pronouncements about how there is no such thing as global warming from the air conditioned environment of parliament house in Spring, and not from that same bare Yass paddock in Summer? Same reason I suppose.

Look I know Winter can have its down side on the southern tablelands. What's that you say? "Grim"? Well, yes, it can be grim. But you can always dress up warmly, stoke up a fire, close the curtains early on a dark evening, eat a roast hot from the oven. And Spring and Autumn can also have miserable windy and wet days. But those nine months don't have you watching your step for brown snakes in the long grass, or wondering whether one is visiting the shed to hunt mice around the feed bags.

And they don't have you anxiously scanning the horizon for columns of smoke, don't have you wondering whether you can smell smoke, don't have you feverishly reading weather bulletins to see how high the danger levels are going to be. Summer is tension for me, digging my fingers into the yard rail, not digging my toes into Bondi Beach, and I don't relax again until well into Autumn, endlessly grateful that the bush fire brigade people are hard at work on our behalf.

I bet they hate Summer too.

6 November 2009
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Childish things

A year ago I nearly had a fatal heart attack. Fortunately my wife spotted that the warning signs I had been either ignoring or explaining away (indigestion, flu, lung problems) were serious and whisked me off to hospital. Even then it wasn't cut and dried. My heart is a subtle thing, and initial tests were indecisive. I was putting my coat back on, heading out the door, nothing to worry about, when one last test came back positive, and I found myself in a hospital bed with cannulas inserted and monitor machines ticking away. And as a result I wasn't history.

Some of my readers will be young, others may be able to remember being young back in the dark ages of the 1960s. I, we, were bullet proof. I drank, on frequent occasion, to excess, smoked heavily, occasionally may have tried another chemical, slept little, ate take away food, exercised little, drove without great care. But my body could handle whatever I threw at it. One good night's sleep, a decent meal or two, a day playing sport, and I was tuned up again ready for the next all night party. My body felt good, and whatever shortness of breath, or twinges or aches and pains, or morning cough I had, well, they could be turned around any time. Could stop smoking, if I wanted to, just like that, had done many times. Could easily go to a party, if I wanted to, and just drink Coke. But no need, I was fit, well, pretty fit, and doctor's warnings were meant for the elderly, not the young.

But here I am, an aging 60 something, with holes in my lungs, a metal coil in my heart, a growing weight problem, eyesight and hearing failing, and an inability to prune roses without frequent rests to get my breath back; and I wish I could go back in time to have a few words in the ear of that cocky, bulletproof teenager. Actions have consequences I might say. Or, more simply, stop smoking. Now.

Well, all of my thousands of long time faithful readers, fans and followers will know already where I am going with this. The Earth has been behaving like a teenager for at least the last 200 years since the industrial revolution got underway. That teenager has cut down forests, dug up coal and oil, spewed fumes into the air, slaughtered fish and other animals, polluted rivers, bulldozed mangroves and coastal sand dunes, farmed soils to oblivion, tested atomic bombs, engaged in wars. This little planet was bullet proof, wasn't it? Everything we threw at her she could take with no obvious ill effects. Bit of fine tuning here and there on the ozone layer, or some tree planting, or the odd national park, or reducing smog in cities, and we were as right as acid rain.

Except we weren't, were we? And now this 4 billion something year old planet is regretting its misspent youth. The vital functions of the planet are under rapidly increasing strain. The abuse that it has happily absorbed since the nineteenth century is now coming back to haunt it. Oh some doubts about the early warning signs, and not wanting to change our ways they could be ignored. Even some of the testing could be interpreted one way or another, but we knew, heart sinking, that tests or no tests, the melting glaciers and ice caps and extreme weather events and changing ecology didn't lie. And finally, beyond question, more sophisticated testing has confirmed what the blind could not see. Would not see.

Too late to go back and tell my coal miner ancestors to stop digging up coal. But it is time we stopped behaving like teenagers, started being a real grown up species on an aging planet. Put childish things away. Stop abusing the life systems that were supporting us. Otherwise we will be history.

3 September 2009
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Life on Mars

My eyes always light up when I see there is a press release from the National Farmers Federation, my fingers itch to hit the keyboard, knowing, for sure, there will be a column in there somewhere for me. So there we were last week, Labor and Liberal parties trying to outdo each other in developing a scheme that gave the most money to energy and coal companies while ensuring that reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was kept to an absolute minimum, certainly any time in the next century. And there were Larry, Curly and Moe, sorry, that should read Wilson, Barnaby and Steve, doing some comedy routine involving fish net stockings and a fruit head dress, in which they not only demanded no reduction in carbon dioxide, but wanted an increase above and beyond business as usual, just to teach those greenies a lesson.

And suddenly, there in the middle, was the Farmer's Federation (yes, the Farmer's Federation that had leading climate change denialist Professor Plimer address their national conference), demanding that not only should agriculture be excluded from whatever minimal emissions reduction scheme eventually got past any of the stooges for the next five years, but that it should be excluded forever, or an infinite number of years, whichever was longer. The Federation seems to see itself not as the NFF but as the MFF, the Mars Farmer's Federation, representing the population of the Red Planet, happily growing crops with irrigation from the melting polar ice caps, and sending the produce off in clipper space ships back to the mother planet of Earth. And Earth's concerns are of no concern to the farmers, not their problem, and if some socialist government wants to reduce emissions on Earth, well then, get on with it, but don't expect the farmers to be involved. "Don't call us", says the MFF, "we'll call you. Not."

It could be so different if the Federation saw themselves as part of the solution, not part of the problem. If they saw opportunities not costs. If they saw themselves as players not uninvolved onlookers. Is it not in the interests of farmers to reduce their energy use and dependence? Can we not look at more efficient engines, more efficient use? Would farmhouses not benefit from renewable energy supplies and insulation? Is it beyond imagining that a viable modernised rail network instead of semi trailers could once again serve country areas? Are there not farming practices (low tillage crops, biochar, changed pastures) that might reduce energy use, absorb CO2, reduce methane? Will farmers really be not interested in putting aside land for, and generating an income from, solar or wind or geothermal arrays? Can farmers not be involved in a greatly expanded LandCare style program to not just put a full stop to land clearing, but bring more wind breaks, tree clusters, native hedgerows to Australian farms? Should there be a nation-wide project to make every country town carbon neutral? Would not all of those things benefit country Australia as well as the rest of the continent that the farmers are, and it's odd to have to make the point, part of?

I don't remember reading that farmers demanded not to be involved at times when Australia was at war. On the contrary, farming sons and daughters flocked to the colours, and farmers themselves kept the home fires burning, kept the nation fed, did their bit, made do in difficult times. And in spite of what the three stooges seem to believe, and in spite of what the Labor and Liberal Parties are failing to do, we should be on a war footing now. The globe is warming, the climate (of Australia, and elsewhere on Earth, though not on Mars) is changing, and not for the better. And farmers are going to be not keeping home fires burning this time but in the front line.

On Mars its cold outside, there's no kind of atmosphere, time the NFF brought its members, all alone now, more or less, in from the cold, got them involved in the fight against global warming. It's going to take us all, working together, to win this fight.

14 August 2009
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
Category Climate change
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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
Category Climate change
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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
Category Climate change
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