Green thought, in a green shade,
Green views
The Watermelon Blog 
Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
The Goodies
good television
good movies
good books
good poetry
more good books
good songs
good children
good boys
good people
good leaders
Try a lucky dip:
"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."
"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."
"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."
"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."
"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."
"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."
"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."
"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."
"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."
"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."
"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."
"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."
"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."
"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."
"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."
"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"
"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."
"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."
"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."
"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."
"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."
"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."
"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"
"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."
"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."
"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."
"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."
"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."
"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."
"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."
"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."
"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."
"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"
"but where are my slippers"
"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."
"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."
"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"
"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."
"the evening star is coming."
"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."
"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."
" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."
" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."
" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."
" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."
" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."
" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."
" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."
" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."
" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"
" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."
" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."
" 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
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.
global warming
5 October 2008
Category Climate change
1 comments
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
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.
global warming
9 September 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
I find the defendant
Whenever there is a court case involving violence towards a victim that the media likes, the journalists always want to know whether the criminal has shown remorse. It is part of the package of law reporting (did the victim cry; was the sentence too light - of course it was; did victim's family achieve closure; did the expression on the criminal's face change when the sentence was read out; will the lawyers appeal; did the criminal show remorse) from the corporate media.These days criminals, especially juvenile criminals, are often forced to confront their victims (the old lady whose purse was snatched, the shopkeeper whose window was broken, the family whose home was broken into) - we have ways of making you show remorse. And obviously the greater the crime the more remorse will be demanded. The boy who steals an apple might simply say sorry. A murderer might break down in tears. The owner of an oil tanker that destroys a coast might pay a huge compensation. A war criminal might beg forgiveness from the families of his victims.
I don't know how effective any of that is in fighting crime, but I guess it makes the victims feel a little better and helps to fill a news bulletin with cheap shots of tears. If it is to make the victims feel better it has to seem like genuine remorse, and the cameras and microphones thrust into the face of the evil doer will make sure that the remorse can be examined and dissected.
But when it comes to the worst crime of all I find myself at a loss - how are the climate denialists going to show remorse? How can they be made to confront their victims when their victims are all the people of the world? And how late will the remorse come? And in what form? "I'm sorry, I didn't know", won't cut it I'm afraid.
Let me be clear. I am not talking about the kind of apology that involves rationalisation of motives. "I didn't know" has not been a useful defense since Nuremberg. "I was paid by the energy companies to be a denialist" is a bit like the defense of the criminal who was asked why he robbed banks - "that's where the money is". "I was driven by an ideological belief in favor of neoconservative capitalism/against socialism" is probably the kind of defense Radovan Karadzic might mount, but murder in the defense of ideology is no virtue. "It would have been ok if we had won" might have been said by Hitler in the bunker underneath the ruined Berlin.
No. I want a straightforward uncomplicated, unqualified admission of guilt from these people who have undoubtedly sentenced the world, including my grandchildren, to a society in which life is brutish nasty and short. A world in which the ecology is destroyed and civilisation ruined. A world indeed in which life may not survive at all.
"Please forgive me, for I did not know what I was doing" is probably as close as we will get to remorse from denialists.
And I can't.
Forgive them.
And on the Watermelon Blog I don't even try.
global warming
1 August 2008
Category Climate change
1 comments
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Sailing down the river
I was trying to think what Kevin and Penny, selling their "Emissions Trading Scheme" this week, reminded me of, and then it came to me. A couple of gamblers hitching a ride on the river boat, playing the thimble and pea game with the local yokels. "Here, see the lump of coal? I place it under this thimble, and then I move all three thimbles around. Keep your eye on the one with the coal. There, we stop, now, where is it? Under that one? No, sorry, not under that one, or this one I'm afraid. Done your dough mate. Now, want to play again?"All of us I think have been yokels for the last couple of days, trying to understand under which thimble the actual greenhouse gas savings were located. Not under petrol, not under power stations, or aluminium smelters, or farming. Not under anywhere you might expect to find them in fact. I'm not sure that Kevin and Penny actually understand the supposed point of the game they are playing. You see at the end of the day an ETS isn't just an illusion to make the voters think you are doing something you are not, but it is supposed to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Australia. And reduce them by a lot (not "60% of 2000 emissions by 2050", which apparently has replaced, by sleight of hand, the original goal of 60% of 1990 emissions by 2050, in itself well short of the 90% of 1990 emissions the science tells us is needed) as fast as possible. The shuffling hands, and the postponement of action at least until after the next election, is going to produce nothing.
And since when, out of curiosity, did a Labor prime minister happily admit that he was being criticised "from the left" by the Greens? Long been true of course, but it has taken a phony emissions trading scheme, and a refusal to take any other action, to see it being happily admitted (Mr Rudd said he would "take it on the chin" and I guess brawls do happen on river boats when the gamblers are found to be cheating}.
emissions trading
17 July 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Jam tomorrow
Did you see the story the other day about the glacier in Argentina that had bits of ice falling off it? Wasn't much of a story, just one of those filler "aren't foreigners and their animals and their countries funny?" stories that the mainstream tv news producers now use to pad out most of their bulletins, there being, it seems, not enough real news in the world to fill the 6 minutes or so they devote to items that are not either sport, celebrity, or royalty. Anyway, there was the glacier, bits falling of, and it must have occurred to someone in editorial that this might be verging on a no-go area of news. Not to worry, we will reassure the public, the otherwise meaningless images were concluded with the words - "locals said that this wasn't related to global warming, the glacier melts every year". So that's all right then.Very similar sequence a few days earlier when there was an announcement that the area of NSW now drought-declared had come back up, and was now once again, 107% as it had been last year (before the "drought-breaking rains" that appear so often on news bulletins for as long as a drought continues). The NSW Minister for Agriculture, in making the announcement, quickly added that it was quite normal for 112% of NSW to be in drought and that it was nothing to do with global warming. And just before that (and still) we had the terrible bushfires in California, not the result, you guessed it, of global warming.
This is the kind of nonsense that denialists (no, they are not "sceptics") pick up on all the time. Nothing, it seems, can be attributed to global warming by the time they have finished, and so, what, me worry? Let me try to spell out reality for anyone confused by these announcements. Of course there has always been weather, and extreme events. There have been storms, floods, droughts, winds, snow, and yes, bush fires, in the past. Recent past and distant past, weather is weather. The issue was never that global warming caused a particular event. But adding more heat to land, sea and air raises the energy levels in the climate systems, and it is those energy levels that affect both how extreme the weather events will be, and how often they will happen. More frequent, longer lasting, more severe droughts - global warming. More frequent bush fires burning with more intensity for longer - global warming. More frequent, higher category cyclones and hurricanes causing more damage - global warming. Glaciers melting more rapidly and out of season (the real story from Argentina was that this glacier was melting in Winter) - global warming.
Next time you come across a denialist suggesting that some particular event is not the result of global warming agree with him (they are almost always men, funny that), warmly. But then go on to point out that the previous one, and the next one, and the one after that, are. You know the old saying - jam yesterday, jam tomorrow, but never jam today. We are certainly in a jam today, and more of a jam tomorrow.
global warming
14 July 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Dr Yes
Not that anyone would do this, but try to imagine that you know, or strongly suspect, that you have a serious illness. Symptoms keep coming over a number of years, but you take no action, frightened of the treatment you might have to have. Eventually, unable to totally pretend that all is well any longer, you go to a doctor. The doctor says, "yes indeed, you have a really serious illness, so serious that you will die if you don't have a major operation, give up smoking, change your diet, get more exercise". All your mates are listening outside the window, and they say, "No, no, don't listen to her, how are we going to have fun down the pub if you behave like that?" You say, "oh, come on doc, you can do better than that, how about you just prescribe some pills for me?" And she says, "well, ok, but they won't do any more than delay the inevitable, and they have some nasty side effects". "No, no, doc", you say, "no side effects, what about some of those little herbal pills that those nice people wearing white coats, almost certainly doctors, promote on tv that can fix up any ailment painlessly? Or what about a Placebo, they are always good?" "Oh, I can't do that" she says, "you would die very quickly". "Well", you say, "if you don't I'm taking my custom elsewhere to that nice doctor down the road, he believes in alternative medicines and placebos".No need to go on, you will all recognise the analogy with the farce that went on this week with the first serious report on the actions needed to deal with climate change. Dr Garnaut was the first doctor, "Dr Maybe" we could call him. He knows reality, but with a bit of nudging he seemed prepared to prescribe the placebo that is "clean coal", and to try to make things as painless as possible. And Michael Costa was one of your pub mates cat-calling from the window, telling you there was nothing wrong, and it was time you had a smoke. And Dr Nelson (telescope to the blind eye "Climate change? I see no climate change signal") of course is that good fellow down the road, "Dr No". No nasty medicine from him. Whatever the unions and big business want, which is no action at all, they will get.
We need a Dr Yes. Someone who will acknowledge the serious situation, the wasted years, the need for action right now. Someone Churchillian who can mobilise public opinion while offering nothing but higher electricity costs and long hot summers, very hot summers, on the beaches. Someone who will proceed with the nasty medicine, knowing that in the long run it is the only way to save you.
Can farmer's organisations and country GPs (sorry, MPs) help with this - get Mr Rudd an honorary doctorate from Charles Sturt University and give him the honorary nickname of Dr Yes? Doesn't look promising, they have been among the mates calling through the window. Denying and denying and denying there was a problem. Demanding that tree clearing continue and water allocations increase and coal be dug ever faster, and accusing anyone who tried to contradict them of being "extreme green".
So, is there a doctor in your house? Or are you going to keep listening to your mates down the pub, and visiting Dr No, when it comes to the health of the planet?
global warming
7 July 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Quiddities and quillets
Usually when we use Titanic metaphors in relation to global warming we find ourselves up on the bridge speaking to the Captain who, blind eye to the telescope, is signaling full speed ahead, and saying "Icebergs, what Icebergs?" Or perhaps in the ballroom with the rich, dancing the night away, literally.Instead, this time, I want to take you down, past the ballroom, past the second class passenger cabins, and down into the depths of the ship near the third class passengers. There you will find a climate change denier, potentially of course the grandfather of one of our own deniers. Shush, go quietly so you don't disturb him, and so you can hear him above the roar of the engines and the scraping of an iceberg along the hull. Listen ....
"Ssssss, ah the lovely, the lovely hull, my precious ssssssship, greatest ssssssship ever built, and it'sssss mine, all mine, my precious. Sssssee the water coming through that little hole? Ah, lovely water, we lovesssss the water we do. But not very much water, really, just a little bit, and water is sssso natural in a ship. Anyway, there is supposed to be water coming in through the hole, they probably put the hole in so the water could get out again. All ships have holes, I'm sure. And not so much water on the floor yet, really, only covers my feet, oh yes, now my legsssss. It will stop soon, bound to. And if it doesn't, well then, my preciousssss can't sink, nothing can happen to her, unsinkable. Anyway, even if she does sink into the lovely water, full of fishes, lovely fishes, there are life boats on board, we can all escape. But really, my preciousss will be fine, and I can stay in her forever."
Look, I know, I know, easy target, next thing I'll be poking fun at Jehovah's Witnesses or Scientology or the La Rouche movement or Australia First. The world seems to always have an endless supply of gullible-willing-to-suspend-all-diseblief potential followers for any new leader who hoists a flag. I've been poking fun at denialists for some time now, but enough is enough, no more Mr Funny Guy, it's time, deadly serious from now on. For ten years these people have been babbling on, not critical, not sceptical, but just in complete denial, like our slippery friend in the bowels of the Titanic. Nothing will do the trick - not the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, or the loss of the Barrier Reef, or the complete drying up of the Murray River. They will still keep spouting the same old rubbish, like a player piano roll; ice caps on Mars, climate has changed before, 1970s ice age, sun spots, crops in Greenland, 1998 a hot year, cold in Melbourne today, CO2 good for you, can't predict weather even next week, etc etc. The points can be, and have been, answered a thousand times, but into the piano goes the roll, and the same old tune is played again and again.
And it isn't funny any more, not even with clever "Gollum on the Titanic" metaphors. For over ten years now you have obfuscated and quibbled; turned to quiddities, quillets, cases, tenures, and tricks. For ten long years you have given governments everywhere, urged on by giant corporations, an excuse to believe there was debate when there was none. Out with the lot of you. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you.
We tend to think of climate change denialists as some kind of new breed, new cult, new sect, but there is really nothing new about them. They have infested Australia from the first day they went ashore in Sydney Cove with axes. Ever since then they have resisted all attempts at conservation measures. Pretended to believe nonsense about the large number of trees in Australia, about the natural dryness of the Murray, about pollution blowing away in the wind, about the need to kill native species. Have continued to clear woodlands, withdraw too much water from rivers, woodchip forests, develop sand dunes, over fish. Every attempt to warn of coming problems being met with contempt and obfuscation, and a demand that big business (and big agribusiness) must be allowed to get on with things, unfettered by any environmental regulation.
Well, the last 220 years have been an extended home and away season, where the Denialist Dragons have met and beaten every team of Environmentalist Bilbys that challenged them. And now Global Warming, it's the big one, the Premiership. Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen. Businessmen and conservative politicians hate global warming because it is one of those stubborn facts that keep getting in the way of ideology. Global warming is the final match for the difference of opinion between conservationists and the Right, and the Right know that they have lost the game. So they continue to thrash about, demanding extra time, video replays, injury stoppages, player substitutions, goal kicks to be retaken.
And please, whatever talking points you have left in your supporters kit, forget it. I don't want to hear them. I know it is going to be something (global cooling since 2001 perhaps?) that is just as silly as all the other nonsense you have spouted to an increasingly bored crowd of spectators.
Game over. Go home. Let us get on with trying to work out how to clean up the mess you and your supporters have left us with.
Alas poor Yoricks? No.
Note for non-Australian subscribers and visitors. A version of this post with American cultural references (Jamestown, Spotted Owls, Kansas hurricanes, Super Bowl etc - sadly the similarities are greater than the differences) can be found here.
global warming
8 June 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
No going back
Beautiful mind, Stephen Hawking. Saw a question from him the other day - if there is life elsewhere in the universe, why haven't we stumbled across alien broadcasts by now? An alien "Wheel of Fortune" comes to mind, for example, or a radio soap opera starring lovelorn little green men and women. The implication of his question, if I may be so bold, is that there are no other intelligent life forms in the universe. Although I suppose you could argue that an intelligent life form would have better things to do than watch tv quiz shows or listen to radio soap operas, so perhaps the lack of such broadcasts simply means that we are the dumbest intelligent life form in the universe.A similar question arises from the lack of space travellers arriving on Earth (except at Roswell of course). I can't remember if this was Hawking, or someone else, or me, but this lack of flying saucers also suggests that faster than light travel is not just theoretically but practically impossible, otherwise they would have been here by now. Or it may just mean there is a sign on the space lane to Earth warning travellers "Wrong way, go back".
It was certainly Hawking though who also pointed out another piece of evidence about space time mysteries - there are no people travelling back from the future. We don't get time travellers appearing in our major cities shopping for future antiques in Ikea stores, or sending our bookmakers bankrupt with certain knowledge about the winners of major horse races. Time travel seems to be theoretically possible, but the absence of arrivals from the future suggests that it is not practically possible, and has never been invented any time in the future.
In a sense these ideas are based on the old "mark and recapture" technique, one of the first things young ecology students are taught about field research. The idea is so simple that it makes you (well, it made me) want to hug yourself with delight at the sheer ingenuity of it. Want to know how big a population of wild animals is without the impossible task of counting them? Simple, catch a few, mark them in some way that doesn't adversely affect them (for example rings on the legs of birds) but lets them be instantly recognized when seen again, and then let them go. Let some time go by, and then go out and catch some number of animals, say 100, from the population. Count how many of the 100 have your mark on them. Then the proportion of marked animals in the sample is the same as the percentage of marked animals in the total population. You know how many animals you marked and released, how many you caught, hey presto, solve an equation with three known figures and one unknown and you can calculate the total size of the population.
So Hawking's thought experiment is equivalent to seeing whether space travellers can be "marked", and the absence of sightings means either they can't be, or they don't exist - there is no population of aliens elsewhere in the universe to be marked. In the case of time travellers, Hawking assumes that the absence of strangely dressed lottery winners in our street means that they can't be "marked", time travel simply can't be invented and never will be. But, just as with alien travellers from space, there is a second possibility. We know time travel is theoretically possible, and therefore should be invented by our clever descendants. So what if the absence of time travellers means that there are no people in the future of the planet?
Climate change denialists have lately taken to pretending that the Earth has started cooling. Have continued to claim that two lines trending upwards for fifty years have no implications for the future. I have taken to wondering how long the trend line has to be for these people to admit that the globe is warming as a result of the CO2 being poured into the air by their industrialist friends. At what point do they stop pretending that the modelling that projects that trend forward 10, 50, 100 years has no relevance because we don't know what the future holds (being unable, as they wrongly claim, to predict the weather tomorrow)?
Well, what if the lack of time travellers tells us that the denialists achieved their aim and prevented action on climate change for so long that the upward graph began to accelerate as tipping points were achieved, and that the next big extinction event on the planet included Homo sapiens sapiens? What if Stephen Hawking's observation doesn't show that time travel wasn't achieved, but that human wisdom wasn't? Not enough people saying "Wrong way, go back".
Big responsibility, being a denialist, but they have broad shoulders. And hey, the future is bunk, as Ford said.
There is a future (and not a bad past) on the Watermelon Blog, but for how long?
global warming
30 May 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Room with no view
I have been puzzling over the paradox that while the new Australian government has, for the first time, an environmentalist as Environment minister, we find that environmental decisions are being made which are no better than those of the previous government. And now, with the slashing of promotion for solar power with the loss of the rebate, we have, unthinkable just 6 months ago, an environmental decision actually worse than those being made by the previous government. Japan with permanent employment for employees still finds that many workers who are redundant, incompetent, or unmotivated must be retained. These are sometimes assigned to the madogiwa-zoku, "the window-seat tribe." As the name implies, they are expected to do little more than look out the windows, while the valued employees work in the inner offices (which often have no windows).I conclude that although Peter Garrett has been made redundant, Kevin Rudd is forced to retain him for the look of the thing, to keep up the pretense that Labor is a party concerned with the environment in general and climate change in particular, and Garrett has therefore become a member of the ministerial "window seat tribe". Has become a minister with a desk, and perhaps a sharpened pencil, but with absolutely nothing to do all day but look out of the window, while the hard men of cabinet (who have no vision in their windowless offices) get on with propping up the coal industry with massive subsidies.
global warming
20 May 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Time of the preacher
Frank Luntz wrote a memo for the American Republican Party in the year of '02, preaching, among other things, that instead of using the term "global warming", Republicans substitute "climate change" because "while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge".Now at the time I couldn't quite see the logic of this - climate change sounds very uncontrollable to me. But this division between the two terms has continued to this day on blogs and other media outlets. While Mr Luntz's attempt to soothe the savage scientist may or may not have worked in semantic terms in quite the way he intended, it has certainly become an effective tactical move.
First the deniers argued that even if the planet was warming the climate wasn't changing. Scientists would be pushed into mindless discussions about the retreat of glaciers, the frequency of hurricanes, the meaning of droughts. This barrage was so effective that it made the media very reluctant to attribute any aspect of the weather to global warming (whereas in fact EVERY aspect of the world's weather is now affected by warmer temperatures). And the politicians would echo this - no of course we couldn't say that Katrina was caused by global warming. The public, reading this "debate" would be encouraged to believe nothing that their senses were telling them about a changing world environment was of any relevance to global warming.
But suddenly a switch. Seizing upon an abnormally high temperature in 1998, and a relatively (in context) low one in 2007, the result of the El Nino - La Nina cycles, the deniers again began pretending to believe that global temperature wasn't increasing. Now snowfalls here, and snow falls there, and very cold nights somewhere else, and an apparent lack of severe tropical storms, and a professed belief that we would all be better off living in Florida's climate anyway, became climatic indicators that there was no problem at all in the world that couldn't be solved by wishing it away.
This major shift in tactics has mirrored the smaller scale shifts that have been used in the media by the denialist claque. Evidence for warming? No, climate is the thing. Evidence for climate change? No, warming is the real test. It is all reminiscent of the old carney hustlers playing the shell game or the three card trick - you think you have the argument nailed down here? No, it's over there. No, not under that one, this one. Oh, you've lost your money? Too bad, next time you might win.
Or in the words of the song - "When you think it's all over, It's only begun". But in the words of the same song - "Now the preaching is over, And the lesson's begun".
No doubt the lessons are beginning, had begun well before the year of '01, as Mr Luntz must have known (and knows now, it seems), and soon all the cards will be the Queen of Spades.
My cards are on the table on The Watermelon Blog.
global warming
15 April 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Especially sweat
Kevin Rudd is clearly a prime minister acutely aware of his place in history to come (although this may be simply a tautology). Even this cynical, stony-hearted, "Extreme Green" is starting to warm to the man in spite of some continuing reservations.So I have a suggestion which would both assure his place in history as not just the most important of all Australian prime ministers (not excepting my beloved John Curtin) but perhaps the most significant world leader who ever lived (a little flattery never goes astray).
James Hansen of NASA, now arguably one of the most significant scientists of all time, has just argued, on the basis of new analysis of palaeoclimates and of climate feedback mechanisms, that the EU target of 550 parts per million of atmospheric C02 - already the most ambitious in the world - should be cut not just to 450ppm (as he previously suggested) but to 350ppm if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. Since we’re already at 385 ppm and rising 2 ppm a year and with a lot of built in rise already on the way, 350 is a stunningly difficult target. Made even more difficult as world leaders (including Kevin Rudd, one source of my reservations) keep stalling by saying they can't move until other countries do, a recipe for no action at all.
So here is my suggestion. Kevin Rudd announces that Australia is going to take the lead in aiming for a level of emissions consistent with a world target of 350ppm. He puts the country on a kind of war footing, with an education program to ensure that everyone in the country knows the 350 figure and its importance, and immediately freezes the development of new coal-fired power stations and sets targets for each state to begin drastically slashing emissions from such sources. He will announce a massive program to support the renewable energy sources that Australians have been so good at inventing and so poor at using, while making it clear that he will have no truck with the snake oil salesmen peddling nuclear power, biofuels, and "clean coal". He will end the madness of land-clearing, and wood-chipping of old growth forests, put a stop to privatisation of electricity supplies, set new standards for energy efficiency in new homes and help ordinary householders to retrofit with insulation and energy saving devices, and establish a program to phase in fuel efficient cars. He will point out that such a program will be a preemptive strike in getting Australia ready for the failure of oil supplies world wide. And he will say we stand ready to work with other countries to help them achieve the same reductions in emissions, but whatever they do, we are going ahead right now.
His speech will be Churchillian in its cadences, and he could include "blood sweat and tears" if it seems necessary.
Mr Rudd has already ensured a footnote in history as a good prime minister with his signing of Kyoto, his apology to Aboriginal people, and his decision that the last Australian Governor-General will be a woman. This is his chance to be a great prime minister.
global warming
14 April 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Good heavens
It is hard to understand how Don Aitkin (Canberra Times 3 April) could have taken 12 months to put together the extraordinary collection of ill-informed views that he has presented to readers of that newspaper. It is an outburst that would be typical of any shock jock, or oil company funded climate change denier. Impossible to know where to start with refuting it. Melting of sea ice doesn't cause sea level to rise? Good heavens, who would have thought? But the melting of glaciers, as well as the melting of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and other ice covered land does. And the melting of sea ice in the Arctic is a sign of a planet in trouble, and a recipe for feedback growth of heating, quite apart from ecological damage. Temperature rise in the past? Again, who knew? But the recent temperature rise is unprecedented in its speed and of even more concern because it is happening on a planet already under ecological stress, and with the small question of 6 billion human beings whose future is now grim. In addition, temperature rises in the past did cause extinctions. No temperature rise since 1998? Nonsense. The graph heads ever upwards, interrupted only by a particularly hot year in 1998. Sun activity? Only a small part of the warming. In fact temperatures should now be dropping in relation to solar activity. Not linked to CO2? How could anyone present that as a serious proposition? The physics is known, the correlation clearly observed. He is "prepared to accept" temperature rise "0.6 of a degree plus or minus 0.2 of a degree over the 20th century"? What does he mean? What temperature rise is he prepared to accept in the 21st century? Two degrees, three degrees, four degrees? Does he know the climatic and ecological implications of those rises? Try reading climatology and ecology for the next 12 months Professor Aitkin, then come and talk to us again.
global warming
4 April 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Walking backwards at Christmas
Three months ago, while Christmas shopping, I saw a man walking backwards. There we all were, shoppers in the Mall, all hurrying along to the next purchasing decision, all hurrying the right way, and there he was, walking backwards, the crowds parting to make way for him. I could see his point - sometimes I wouldn't mind going back to an earlier time. Back to a slower, gentler, more community-oriented, less dumbed-down time, with an ice covered Arctic. Away from the "war on terror" nonsense, away from a globally corporatized world, away from a dumbed down American presidency, away from a Murdochized media, away from reality television.But of course you can't go back, and he was heading back towards an age of no computers, no television, no antibiotics, no clean water, no anesthetics, no fair legal system, no democracy. Turning his back on this brave new world and heading for the mud huts of the dark ages, unable to cope with the modern world as all around him were doing.
But maybe he was only aiming for the sixties, flowers in his hair and Woodstock mud on his boots, back to a hippier happier time with better music.
Or was I seeing him in the mirror of a shop window? Was he perhaps the only one going the right way and all of us were heading backwards in denial? Was he simply heading to a time of less conspicuous consumption, of public transport, of home grown vegetables, of windows opened for fresh air, of fewer possessions, of community activities?
While we, all the rest of us, were heading, in a headlong rush, towards the dark ages of the 2050s, with mud huts and no electricity, 100 year water wars, food shortages, diseases, desertification. Back to the future of the new medieval times, life brutish, nasty and short.
And I looked back at him, wondering, as the gap between us widened.
global warming
25 March 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Oh Captain, my Captain
Did you see the ABC 'Four Corners" show about how the Liberals in the lead up to the last election were trying to dump Mr Howard? I liked the bit best about how none of the ministers knew that workers could be worse off under "work choices" - oh my goodness gracious me no. Nothing in the program we didn't know at the time of course, if you were paying attention and following the well known rule that if a senior Liberal in the Howard government said something was definitely not true you should believe the opposite.An interesting comment by Costello though, that he had never believed Howard would retire. At least he was a realist then, because all of us knew Howard was never ever going to retire, no matter what he said, what Ian McLachlan wrote, what Peter Costello thought, you couldn't have got him to retire from the job he had craved all his life. Never ever. Not even for a day as captain of the Australian cricket team playing an Ashes Test at Lords.
And it occurred to me that during all this he was not just a climate change denier, but the ultimate climate change denier, the one all others model themselves on (rather in the way that all teenage party givers must now strive to emulate Corey). I have from time to time thought that that the climate change deniers, even the silliest of them, would eventually be so overwhelmed not just by the scientific evidence, but by their own observations of the deteriorating world around them, that they would be converted. Not true. They will never ever believe anything that is demonstrated to them. Never ever. Nothing will do the trick - not the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, or the loss of the Barrier Reef, or the complete drying up of the Murray River. They will still keep spouting the same old rubbish, like a player piano roll; ice caps on Mars, 1970s ice age, crops in Greenland, 1998 a hot year, can't predict weather even next week, etc etc. The points can be, and have been, answered a thousand times, but into the piano goes the roll, and the same old tune is played again and again. They won't go away, just like John Howard, but let's ignore them anyway.
One group of deniers we can't ignore though. They have gone quiet, gritted teeth, lips zipped shut. No more "it's a cold day in Melbourne bring on global warming" for them. They are the Neo-deniers. How do we pick them? They are the ones talking about nuclear power, and "clean coal" and getting oil from shale, and bio-fuels. Oh, and also the ones denying that any renewable energy source, anywhere, can ever be made to work. They are not going away either, big money to be made from pushing through disastrously dirty industries that would never be approved otherwise. Enough money to keep your lip buttoned and pretend to believe in a changing climate.
Keep your eyes and ears open for neo-deniers in action. If they get their way the poor old planet is going to have two disasters on its hands. Maybe they would like to captain Australia at Lords instead. Can't do any harm there.
Note for American readers - think leading the New York Yankees in a World Series game.
global warming
3 March 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Marathon Woman
The response of Labor to the interim Garnaut Report shows that being in thrall to the CFMEU is as effective a way to prevent action on climate change as being in thrall to the resource companies. Nothing that Garnaut is saying about targets comes as any kind of surprise (no matter how surprising the television news and current affairs people seemed to find it) to anyone who has been paying the slightest attention over the last couple of years. Labor's target of 60% in 2050 was known, by anyone who was interested, to be inadequate when it was set. But while Ross Garnaut gets marks for talking about 90%, he loses marks for his John Howard/George Bush impersonation when he said that there was no point in us setting a higher target unless everyone else does. Why not? Imagine you have put your name down for the great world heads of government GHG reduction marathon. You ask the organiser when the race starts, and you are told you can start as soon as you like. All competitors will have to run the course sooner or later, and you can start now if you like and win the race easily.There is no choice about reducing greenhouse gases, the marathon has to be run. Australia will have to reduce its output by 90%. Starting now makes completing the course easier and much less painful, so where is the downside in doing so? And there are major upsides. First it would give us a much stronger moral authority when arguing with Mr Obama and Mr Wu about their emissions reductions. And second, having made the effort ourselves we will have finished the race in a strong position to sell the necessary techniques and technologies to the countries that haven't yet started.
We need to reduce emissions by 2% a year to reach 2020 and 2050 targets. What is Mr Rudd waiting for? By September we will have lost yet another year to add to the 11 lost Howard years. Nothing Ross Garnaut will say in September will impinge on us getting moving with MRET; setting car efficiency standards; energy efficiency standards for new and existing homes; support for solar, geothermal, wind, and tide research and development. And if you need more urgency than Ross Garnaut has provided already, consider this. People, including myself, often talk about the need for Australia to make changes to adapt to the climate change already in the system. Certainly true. But it really is just whistling in the hot dry wind. If the world doesn't get moving now to reduce greenhouse gases, then Australia is not going to be a viable continent for 21 million people to live on. Whatever we do in the way of irrigation practices and so on. The urgent thing is to get the world moving somehow. And having Penny Wong saying we won't change targets, and there need to be "other inputs" (perhaps from Martin Ferguson in his drive for more petroleum exploration and liquified coal development), is just whistling in the dark.
global warming
22 February 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
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Guten Morgan
I have a small model of a 1956 Morgan Series 11 car in British Racing Green. It's one of the most beautiful cars ever made, and ever since I can remember, I would dearly love to have had a real one. Too late, too late, and my daughter gave me the model as a bit of a joke I guess.Saw on the news this week that it looks like the Australian Grand Prix will be canceled (or rather, moved to a more profitable location in another country). In a way it's a bit of a shame. As a child I loved the idea of Grand Prix. Had models of the Ferraris, and Alfa Romeos, and Maseratis, Knew about Fangio and Moss. Pictured myself being Stirling Moss I suppose. Or pictured myself in the sports cars of Le Mans - Jaguars and Aston Martins and Mercedes (did Morgans race there, I forget?).
Less interest from me as time has gone by and the cars became mobile billboards, the tuning done by computer, the cars themselves all virtually identical in looks, the whole thing just big business making big money. So my development as a petrol head came to a stop in the 1950s. And the cars I love all come from that period or earlier. Right back I suppose to the beginning, back to those big clumsy lumbering things, all individually designed, and hand made, hand crafted.
A century ago, when the idea of what a car was and could be (if it could get away from the idea of just being a motorised version of the horse drawn carriage, and only for the very rich) was beginning to develop, my grandfather, then a teenager searching for a trade, told his father he would rather like to go into the automobile industry in some way. "Ah, no son, forget about cars", said his father, "no future in them, my boy". He finished up down the coal mines, his proper place I suppose, plenty of future in coal.
But my great-grandfather was right, just on the wrong time scale. It's a pity, but we have to get away from the old ideas about what cars are, get away from glorifying very fast cars on race tracks, and move to boring, slow, small cars running on electricity. One hundred years of the development of racing cars and their influence on family cars has to come to an end. Just like coal mining. If my grandfather was getting started now I'm sure his father would say - "get a job in renewable energy son, that's where the future is".
And I will just look wistfully at my British Racing Green Morgan, and think of yesteryear.
global warming
11 February 2008
Category Climate change
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Shooting polar bears
Naomi Klein has recently (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-klein/guns-beat-green-the-mark_b_74869.html) pointed out that good old market forces, instead of helping to save the planet, as neocons would have you believe, are channelling money into a protective industry which will protect the uber-rich when the rest of the world goes belly-up. Kind of a metaphor for capitalism generally I guess.But it brought me to another thought. The astonishingly irrational reaction by gun supporters to massacres, has much in common with the reaction of climate change deniers to melting ice caps. To gun supporters, every massacre of children in schools, of shoppers in malls, of patients in emergency rooms, of drivers in cars, is evidence that more and more guns are needed. Arm the teachers, arm the toddlers, arm the nurses and doctors, arm the grannies. Arm everybody.
And arm them with more and more powerful guns because the killers have more and more powerful guns. This bizarre inversion of logic (a rational human being would come to the conclusion that, just as more and more guns bring more massacres, so fewer and fewer guns would bring less) is trotted out after every massacre, just in case the public should begin to question the truthiness of the gun lobby.
To a climate change denier every glacier melted, every drought, every super storm, every climate record broken, every piece of bleached coral, is a sign that we need more and more unbridled capitalism, more and more population growth.
And more and more oil found or gone to war over, more and more refusal to act until some other country does first; the more capitalism we have, the more nationalism, the quicker we can solve any problem that emerges (not that any have yet of course). This bizarre inversion of logic ( a rational person would come to the conclusion that, as unbridled capitalism and nationalism have caused the disaster, so a world community acting together under socialist principles is needed to solve it) is used just in case anyone should question the truthiness of the corporate energy lobby.
Ah the gun lobby, the climate change deniers, the evangelicals - the less evidence for their beliefs the stronger their faith (or as Cheney said about Iran, the fact that there was no evidence for a nuclear program made it even more certain there was one - laugh? I laughed until I cried). Ain't human psychology a strange thing?
Like John Stuart Mill, on the Watermelon Blog we treat "Conservatives ... being by the law of their existence the stupidest party" with all due respect.
gun control
17 January 2008
Category Climate change
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Bells on it
Late last year there was an article in the extreme right wing American newspaper the Washington Times, in which David Deming attempted to cast doubt on global warming by reciting a list of cold weather events. This really is a bit rich coming from the kind of people who have for years refused to admit that episodes of record high temperatures are evidence FOR global warming, but as the public and politicians (though not, it seems, members of the National Party in Australia) have gradually come to realise that the evidence that the planet is warming is indisputable, the efforts from the deniers have become more and more desperate.To make it plain. The temperature records for the planet (eg a recent one at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/) show that the planet is undoubtedly warming at a rapid rate, beginning around 1980. This is not a computer model, as deniers will often say, but a simple record. The temperatures vary on the overall trend, as you would expect (El Nino events for example can have an effect) - 1998 was the warmest year, but this doesn't mean temperatures are now declining, just that 1998 was abnormally warm in a series of warm years. There will undoubtedly be even warmer years than 1998 to come, some years will be cooler than 2007. But the trend is heading up and up, so are CO2 levels, and the correlation between the two isn't rocket science, just high school physics. In addition, and the reason why we know this isn't just some quirk of the weather patterns, plants and animals are responding to the changes by changing breeding seasons and distribution patterns, and there is additional evidence in rising acidity in the sea (high school chemistry), melting glaciers and ice caps, severe storms, extreme weather events in the form of droughts and floods, and, yes, an endless succession of record high temperatures in both summer and winter, all over the world. Denying any of this would be as silly as, oh, I don't know, denying that cigarettes damage your health, and it is no coincidence that scientists in the pay of cigarette companies who took part in that cynical exercise are now part of the climate change denier industry.
If you are farming in NSW you must be aware that the effect of global warming is going to be to wreck agriculture in this state. There is no doubt about this (why do you think Howard sent Heffernan north to see if southern agriculture could be transplanted to the tropics - it can't of course). There must be a program at state and federal level to phase out agricultural activities that are becoming unviable (notably crops relying on irrigation), and to look at whether there might be alternatives. But even alternatives (in the form of new breeds of animal, new crop varieties) are not going to be viable if the temperatures are allowed to rise beyond the 2 degrees that is already certain. Not only must Australia reduce its emissions, but it must pressure America to do the same, and help China and India do the same. This means development of sustainable energy sources (not the nuclear can of mutated worms), and an immediate end to land clearing and the wood-chipping of old growth forests, here and abroad.
Put pressure on politicians and farmers and community organisations to take action. Stay informed and don't take nonsense from them about forestry and land clearing and the health of rivers, or about denial of global warming.
And the next time you see the deniers in action turn the page while saying, "Yeah, right, pull the other one". Just like your grandparents would have done when Neville Chamberlain said there would be no war.
global warming
13 January 2008
Category Climate change
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Never seen anything like it
Like everything else on television now the weather is presented not as a matter of factual analysis in order to provide information, but as a narrative. Part of the narrative involves Australia being the driest continent, another part involves extreme weather events (only where they are captured by a camera), another part involves comical foreigners and their funny weather, another involves our brave farmers battling the odds and defeating everything that Mother Nature can throw at them. The style of the narrative involves immediacy not context. At the most the news will include a small part of the context – the warmest June day for example, or the driest January – presented in such a way as to make it meaningless.The context will perhaps include a longer range comparison, always in the form ‘lowest May rainfall in the last 100 years’, ‘highest temperature in December in the last 100 years’. The implication, for the listener, is that yes indeed I was right to think it was unusually hot, but there were hotter temperatures 100 years ago, so I can’t deduce anything from the high temperatures now. In fact the statement doesn’t mean this, it really means ‘highest temperature since systematic and accurate records began to be kept in Australia’ and that has quite different implications.
Another variant of this narrative is to get just outside a city and find a farmer. The question is ‘Your family has been here three generations have you ever known a hotter/drier/wetter/windier time than this?’ or ‘have you ever know a worse flood, as severe a hailstorm, as bad a cyclone?’ The question is meaningless unless the family concerned has kept detailed records for all of the three generations, and compared them with detailed notes kept by the neighbours, and even then it would tell us little except of local short term interest. Usually the farmer concerned, non-plussed, and lacking such records or the time to analyse them, will say something like ‘well I am 50 years old and I can’t remember such an event’ (or, as I heard after a recent storm, "I've lived here 16 years and never seen a storm like it"!). The television presenter happily ends the interview at that point, the narrative complete. Yes, it is indeed a newsworthy event – someone closely in touch with the environment has confirmed that - but it isn’t so serious (with only say a 50 year context) as to require investigation. And we don’t do investigation, anyway.
Overseas the stories write themselves too. Here will be the funny British complaining about 30 degree temperatures, and there it is raining at Wimbledon. Here will be Florida shopkeepers battening down for a hurricane, there will be Russians jumping into icy water, next week will be Chinese villagers washed away, or perhaps a mud slide in Peru. Occasionally, these days, in lip service to a vague idea that there just might be something to global warming after all in spite of what that nice Mr Lomberg said, we sometimes get icebergs breaking off Antarctica. They do make good television anyway with the big splashes and perhaps those cute baby seals being carried to their tragic end.
None of this is presented any differently to the latest fire in a furniture store in Sydney or a motorway pile up in California or an oil spill in Korea. These are isolated events. Disposable news items in disposable television reporting. At best a viewer might get a vague sense over time that severe weather events were increasing in frequency around the world, but even this would be difficult given the random nature of the way such events are reported.
So if commercial television won't provide it, how do we get informed about the real world of climate change?
global warming
3 January 2008
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Forward to the past
I sometimes watch a program about archeology on television, and it usually includes some people who are involved in re-enacting the culture of the period being excavated - people recreating Iron Age huts, or the colony at Jamestown, or Anglo Saxon farmers, or English civil war soldiers. You know the kind of thing - dress in the right clothes, use only tools available at the time, eat foods available locally and prepared simply, live in houses with only wood fires for heat and light, farm primitive breeds and crops, rely on herbs as medicines. More than slightly obsessive people - pretty funny really.It suddenly occurred to me when I last saw it (Anglo-Saxon re-enactors grinding up herbs to cure toothache and arthritis) that we may be looking not at the past but the future. That these people, instead of being slightly eccentric individuals who are romantically attached to a lost past, are actually visionaries who have seen the future and are preparing for it.
Think of it this way. Because of the lack of a switch to renewable energy in time, we are rapidly going to be faced with the inevitable consequences of political stupidity, a return to the days before the industrial revolution. The worse the crash the further back society is going to have to go in search of a low energy economy. And these people who dress up in funny costumes have already leant how to live in low energy societies.
And the rest of us? Well, I think we better get started soon on learning to grind herbs, grow food, make our own clothes, and use wood for heating and lighting. They are skills that have been out of fashion, but are about to come back into fashion.
Still laughing?
The Watermelon Blog remembers Thomas Malthus who said "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio".
global warming
20 December 2007
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Blind date mandate
So in Bali we stayed at the back of the class, giggling with the other naughty children and not only not doing any serious work ourselves, but disrupting the whole class. Kevin Rudd made much, after the election, of his mandate for returning workplaces to the twentieth century, and he certainly has such a mandate. But Guess What Kevin, you also have a mandate to act decisively on climate change. You can't sit around waiting for Godot (sorry, Garnaut), but in any case, what are you waiting for? The only rational question that Ross Garnaut could be asked is - "Now that we have agreed to the substantial cuts by 2020 that the science demands, how do we best go about it in economic terms?" Funny thing about mandates, they work both ways, sort of like rights and responsibilities. If you get elected with the right, the mandate, to do something, you have the responsibility to do it. There is desperately urgent work to be done (no summer ice in the Arctic in 5 years!) - in cutting our own emissions, demanding that others do so, and getting behind our clever inventors to ensure that the renewable energy work that has been done in spite of John Howard can be quickly brought up to speed to sell to China and the other developing countries. And in funding proper biological and agricultural research to find out how we can best adjust to the climate change that has already hit Australia. Having a minister for climate change, with a mandate, means that you act, not prevent others acting. Or is Penny there as a symbolic act but with no mandate, from you Kevin, to do what is needed?
Bali
15 December 2007
Category Climate change
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Bourbon and Strauss
Dear Des Moore (http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2118345.htm), hasn't the memo come from Washington head office yet? That whole Leo Strauss-Grover Norquist-neocon thing? Dead as a door nail I'm afraid. Hurricane Katrina killed it if you like, although it has continued to thrash about a bit, not realising it is dead. And the Climate Change denial stuff? Well Katrina started the rot there too, although I guess your hero Mr Lomberg finished it off when he said the other day that we could fix whatever the tiny problem was by painting all the cities of the world white. Good for paint manufacturers too, I guess. I mean, this nonsense is too silly for anyone to swallow any more, and people have stopped listening as the planet heats and dries all around them, and as societies struggle with the consequences of your whacky economic theories.This stuff arrived from America like so many other third rate religious cults have done. But a cult that has as its fundamentalist belief that the interests of the whole of society, culture and the environment should be completely disregarded in the interests of a very small number of very rich corporations was never going to last was it? The Bourbons found that out when they tried a similar philosophy, although they lasted a bit longer than King Leo has managed to.
Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen. Businessmen and conservative politicians hate global warming because it is one of those stubborn facts that keep getting in the way of ideology. Global warming is the final exam mark for the difference of opinion between conservationists and the Right, and the Right know that they have failed the exam (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/33318/Addicted_to_CO2.html).
So give it away Des. Your time is over. You had a good run here thanks to a conservative government who bought everything you were selling. Surprised to see you given space on the ABC. How small and extreme does a cult have to be before it fails to get an Unleashed column I wonder? Obviously the cut off is set a lot lower than I would have set it.
Clearly in your think tank (and I use the term ironically I'm afraid, but you will have to get used to the slings and arrows now) there is no training in the interpretation of the simplest graphs. Take a look at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/ for example - even a second year high school maths student could interpret that graph. And obviously you have little acquaintance with the non-temperature measurement aspects of climate change - the changing biology and distribution of animal and plant species, the Arctic and Greenland ice melts, the abnormal weather events, the failing crops. Don't know if you give yourself grades in your tank, but this effort deserves no more than an E on a five point scale.
Give it up Des, go and do something useful.
global warming
14 December 2007
Category Climate change
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"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)