What does the demise of Campbell Newman tell us about Queensland?

The LNP's loss to Labor in January 2015 raises the question of what Queenslanders actually want for their state.

Following its defeat in the recent Queensland election, the Liberal-National Party has conducted a post mortem and decided that the main reason for its loss was the policies, approach and personalities of Campbell Newman and his cabinet.

So what did Campbell Newman do wrong?

The answer is that Newman was a motivated, articulate, focussed, progressivist Premier who wanted to bring Queensland into the 21^st century. For Queensland, you can’t get much more wrong than that.

For those unfamiliar with it, Queensland is the odd one out of the Australian states, always some fifty years behind the rest of the country. In the post-Whitlam period when other Australian states were governed by premiers such as Neville Wran, Carmen Lawrence, Don Dunstan and Dick Hamer Queensland was governed by the redoubtable and reactionary Jo Bjelke Petersen, a man who made George Wallace look like Jane Fonda.

Petersen’s political philosophy was not just dominated by Ol’ Time religion, obsessive anti-socialism and a magnanimous tolerance for bribery but a Mugabe-like paranoia regarding the southern states and the Federal government - indeed Federation itself. What most made him popular was his insistence that there was a “Queensland way” of doing things which was not to be disrupted or corrupted by the communists and homosexuals from the south.

Jeff Seeney (the guy who probably would have been the premier if Newman had not been parachuted in from the outside) unconsciously echoed this recently when he said that bringing former Brisbane Lord Mayor Newman in to lead the party was “an experiment that failed”, that Newman and his team of novices didn’t understand “the way things were done.”

First of all, given that Newman won 42 seats to Labor’s 37, it was scarcely an experiment that failed but second, and more important in my view, changing the way “things are done” in Queensland is something that ought to be admired.

The criticisms of Newman seem to reduce to the following:

Inexperience   He did not abide by the political processes that are entrenched in Queensland.

Arrogance        He wanted set goals and took action to achieve them.

Hubris               He was prepared to defy powerful organisation such as

(a)    outlaw motorcycle gangs.

(b)   The bench of the Supreme Court.

In the tradition of the American gang-busters, Newman and his Attorney General launched an all-out attack on outlaw motorcycle gangs that were engaged in multiple illegal activities and were directly connected to American drug syndicates. The government’s measures were aimed at putting the gangs out of business and driving them out of the state which they largely succeeded in doing. Oddly, rather than supporting these measures some civil liberties activists condemned them. In an amazing logical about-face, violent, drug dealing, psychopaths were painted as “victims” of a brutal government. Newman however was leading the way and now other states have either passed similar legislation or are planning to.

Newman and his Attorney General Jarod Bleijie however were to come up against a force more dangerous than the Banditos and the Mongols; the Queensland judiciary.

That Bleijie was a young Attorney General of 30 was bound to raise doubts in the minds of the older members of the legal fraternity – which is to say most of them. He was accused of being “under-educated” for an AG even though his qualifications were the same as almost every AG in the last 20 years. The real problem was that he was rather abrupt and some of his behaviour was seen as indiscreet. He did not seem, as might be expected of a young AG, to have sufficient respect for the judicial establishment and he probably didn’t. Soon a furore erupted over the decision to promote the plain-speaking Chief Magistrate Tim Carmody to Chief Justice. I imagine that Newman and Bleijie thought Carmody might bring a measure of common sense and real world experience (he was a former policeman) to the rarefied culture of the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, trying to introduce common sense to the legal world is a bit like trying to introduce empiricism to the Vatican. The judges almost unanimously condemned Carmody’s appointment (they obviously felt it should have been one of them) and refused to even attend his swearing in – a unbecoming act of petulance. The campaign to remove Carmody was relentless, culminating recently in his offering to resign.

Lawyers may spend their days opposing each other in court but if someone outside the law dares to challenge them they will snap into combat like ants pouring out of the nest to attack an intruder.

The last expression of “arrogance” in the Newman government was the plan to sell so-called government assets.  Newman and his cabinet were aware that Queensland badly needed to develop infrastructure. Schools were old and crumbling. The vast state had no adequate transport system: roads were unmade, narrow and dangerous and got washed away every time there was a flood. Even railway lines were closed or destroyed every time it rained heavily. The coastal cities needed new and deeper ports and so on. The plan was to sell government assets such as electricity providers and use that money to reduce the deficit, maintain the credit rating and start work on much needed developments. Unfortunately, this initiative provided the Labor party with a large stick to beat the Newman government with.

In the 2015 election, the Labor party ran perhaps the most dishonest series of television commercials ever broadcast during an Australian election campaign. A “whingeing Wendy” housewife sulkily accused “Mr Newman” of selling off the assets which would cause electricity prices to rise. Of course, in states like Victoria and N.S.W. where electricity companies have been privatised, prices are lower than Queensland but that didn’t matter. The Newman government was “arrogant”; they weren’t “listening to the people”; they were “out of touch.” etc - the usual barrage of political slurs and slogans that are now flung about during elections instead of actual policy debate. 

And so, a significant section of the electorate that had voted the LNP into power three years earlier with a healthy majority and a clear mandate, voted in a Labor government with arguably less experience than the one they were ousting. Remarkably some of the biggest swings against the LNP were in the coastal cities – Bundaberg, Gladstone and Cairns - that had most to gain economically from the LNP policies.

Now, as mentioned above, we must remember that the defeat of the Newman government was not a rout. The LNP still polled more votes than the Labor Party which only governs with the support of the Greens and Independents (déjà vu Julia Gillard in 2010). The question is why the LNP lost the massive majority it enjoyed in the 2012 election. Some would say it was just a correction: a normalising reduction often follows a landslide. Others blame the feud with the legal establishment and the proposed asset sell-off but I believe it stems from something deeper.

Campbell Newman was visibly a Liberal in a party which, though it calls itself the LNP, is still dominated by the old National Party personalities and more importantly a National Party outlook. Queensland is unique in that it is the only state in Australia where the bulk of the population does not live in the capital. Brisbane and the Gold Coast account for less than half the population of Queensland which means politicians must juggle a host of competing demands and ancient hostilities between Brisbane and the rest of the state. This is not to say that Queensland politics are still dominated by the farming sector for there is also strong support for Labor in many of the provincial cities – as the swings of 2015 demonstrated. What it means is that, as in Britain, the Liberal party in Queensland has historically been a minor party squeezed between two larger bodies. And there is also not as much difference between the old Nationals and the Labor party as might be supposed: farmers and lower income voters both look to and rely on government for continual financial assistance and both are suspicious of commercially-focussed city folk. That traditional suspicion has not been allayed by combining Liberals and Nationals into one party. 

Liberal politicians today face opposition on multiple fronts, from Greens, Labor voters, Independents and even the old dyed-in-the-wool conservatives of the National Party who see them as being too small L liberal. Though they may hate each other, what all these different parties have in common is suspicion of or even outright opposition to economic development.

A fear of change, a mistrust of development, and a sense of “things are okay the way they are” has stalled the economic and social development of Queensland for many decades. If you consider the changes over the last quarter century in Melbourne or Perth – which is also the capital of a large resource-based state – the developments in Brisbane seem astonishingly meagre. The last major project in the state capital  - unless you count the spaghetti like mess of freeway overpasses and tunnels - was the Southbank development for Expo 88.  Despite its abundance of natural resources, national and international companies have not flocked to build their headquarters in Brisbane or anywhere else in Queensland. The state boasts a  multitude of universities, and indeed tertiary education is one of the most successful industries in the state, but graduates have to move interstate to get jobs.

If Queensland were a country it would be the 15^th largest in the world. Its per capita product is equivalent to New South Wales, larger than Victoria's but it has much greater opportunities for expansion northwards and westward, and more unutilised resources, than either of those states. Yet, it remains a vast, sparsely settled, under-capitalised, collection of sleepy country towns and Miami-style coastal retirement communities.

But apparently, that’s how a lot of Queenslanders like it.          

  

Objections to gay marriage are unsupportable and dishonest.

With the success of the Irish referendum on gay marriage, Bill Shorten has, somewhat opportunistically, announced a private member’s bill to legalise gay marriage in Australia. The government now faces the choice of allowing a conscience vote which would be likely to result in the passing of the bill, thus giving Shorten brownie points for leadership, or trying to delay the issue until some point when the government might be seen to be taking the initiative, which is probably never.  At any rate, the threat of the vote has stirred up a swarm of objections from those opposed to the notion of gay marriage.

Suffice it to say that these objections are basically both ludicrous and fundamentally dishonest.

The first thing that is obvious is that many of the objections to gay marriage would, if applied, also disqualify a large number of straight marriages.

These include.The purpose of marriage is to conceive and raise children: gay couples cannot naturally conceive children and so a gay marriage is not really a marriage.  Well, millions of heterosexual couples cannot conceive children either because one partner is infertile or they are past child bearing age or the couple simply has no desire to have children. So, the first challenge to the anti-gay marriage advocates is:  are you going to prevent couples who are infertile, or aged 65, from getting married because they cannot have children?  And further, if one agrees that two people aged, say, 65 can get married, how does it matter if they are both women or both men?

While arguing, on the one hand that gay couples cannot be "married" because they cannot have children naturally, opponents are also concerned that gay couples might adopt children which they see as being bad for the children for  the reason that children require a mother and a father.This is an argument based on considerable ignorance and a painfully narrow view of what constitutes a “mother” and a “father.”.

For a start, it is not uncommon for a gay couple to have children that are the genetic offspring of one of the partners. For example, a women has children by a male partner, they separate and she ends up raising her children with a female partner. How is this different from a divorced or widowed woman living with, say, her sister or a female friend? Consider the thousands of women who raised children with the assistance of their parents and siblings when their husbands were away at war. There are many instances of children being raised by single mothers or fathers with the assistance of other members of the family. Why is it a problem if the mother, or father, is in a sexual relationship with the other non-genetic parent? The answer is given below.

Whether the children of the gay couple are genetic offspring of one partner, or adopted, there is still the argument that children need both a mother and father because men and women bring "different qualities" to parenthood. This is based on the archaic notion that men and women are fundamentally different in personality and basically conform to the traits commonly ascribed to their gender. This is nonsense. If we look at the artificial stereotypes of “masculinity” and “femininity” we immediately see that we cannot impose them with any reliability on men and women.  There are countless marriages which are characterised by, what is called, “role reversal”. (Itself a sexist term that implies "normal" roles for men and women). It is not uncommon to find couples where the woman is career minded, the man more domestically oriented; where the woman is the assertive decision maker, the man more passive; the woman stricter the children, the man more tolerant. There are, indeed, women who are not particularly maternal, and men that are very much so.

The value of having two parents is not that one is ‘masculine’ and the other ‘feminine’ but that children are raised by two people with different points of view, different temperaments, different abilities. A gay couple offers children exactly the same diversity of personality and intellect as a straight couple.

But the arguments against gay marriage are also fundamentally dishonest: they are a smoke-screen. They are desperate rationalisations for what is actually a visceral reaction. What is really bothering these people is not the notion of gay marriage but gay sex. Every so often it slips through in the letters to the papers and other communications that “what gay people do is unnatural.” This is, I believe, the real reason people object to legitimising gay relationships as “marriage” and it in a way the most puzzling reason because there is nothing that gay couples do sexually that heterosexual couples don’t and yet this is the issue that is lurking in the background behind the entire debate. 

In the end, we are not dealing with a discussion about quality of childcare or reproductive capacity, but a fixation on sexual activities that perhaps says more about the objectors than the gay people they are discriminating against. 

What the opponents of gay-marriage need to do is get their mind off gay-sex (which is really not that different from straight sex) and think about the real basis of marriage which is the degree of commitment between the partners. It doesn’t matter what gay couples do in the bedroom any more than what straight couples do, and the definition of what constitutes a “man” and a “woman” are not as clearly defined at these opponents would like to think. One could go on at length asking them how they would apply their arguments to people who are transvestite, transsexual, hermaphroditic, androgynous, etc but it is a waste of time. Opponents of gay marriage just have far too limited concepts of gender, sexuality, personality, parenting and, dare I say it, love.

Dumb Science. "Scientists discover why we need men."

Hello readers. All twelve of you.

And here's today's Dumbness Report.

The ABC and some papers today carry a story from The Times (once a great paper) that "scientists have finally discovered why we have sex."  What they mean of course is why we have sexual reproduction. Of course the simple answer is because it's much more fun but they're talking about it from an evolutionary point of view.

The story contains some interesting narrative teasers such as "Why do we have men?" (clearly to draw in the female readers) and "Sex and gender have long been an evolutionary mystery." and "Superficially, asexual reproduction, in which cloned daughters are sent into the world instead, would seem far more sensible."  It then goes on to talk about how an experiment with beetles showed that populations where females had a choice of mates developed fewer mutations. Wow. How about that.

The problem is of course is that we have understood the reasons for sexual reproduction for over a hundred years. The statements that "gender (has) long been an "evolutionary mystery" and asexual reproduction would "seem far more sensible." are simply not true. In fact they're idiotic. Ever since Darwin, evolutionary biologists have known that sexual reproduction, where the genes of parents were mixed to create variation amongst offspring was a driver of evolution. In fact it can be argued that sexual reproduction was evolution's greatest invention.

Waiting for beneficial mutations - i,e genetic errors - to occur in cloned organisms takes a long time, which is which why evolution in the pre-sexual reproduction era on Earth took about a billion years. The emergence of sexual reproduction led to a rapid increase in diversity and probable contributed to life on Earth surviving some of the severe changes of the pre-Cambrian era. The first advantage of the sexual mixing of genes was that it led to variations that were mostly non-fatal (unlike error mutations that were mostly harmful). Somatic variation meant that, if environmental conditions changed, there was a probability that some of the off-spring would survive whereas, if they were genetically identical (clones), they could all perish. Also, the variations were reversible: if conditions changed back again, there was always the possibility evolving back towards a previous genome. Last of all, the role of sexual selection in constantly improving the genome by organisms choosing "the best mate" has long been understood.

We seem to get a constant stream of these kinds of scientific "announcements" in the media. Almost once a week some discovery is trumpeted where we think 'Didn't we already know that?' Often they are completely stupid in the "Scientist's prove hitting people with sticks causes pain" type of way. Others are just rehashes of all studies. What they all have in common is that there is something in their subject matter or title which the media feels it can link to current controversies or political issues. This one for example, was promulgated because the press managed to twist a fairly prosaic study about mutation reduction in beetles into a "Scientists discover why we need men." headline which seems to contribute to some sort feminist discourse.

Dumbness Rating:  8 out of 10. (where higher is dumber.) 

I wish to apply for the job of Head of the ABC.

Dear Mr Turnbull

I hear you’re looking for a new head of the ABC. I would like to apply for the job. Let me say right from the outset, that in managing the ABC, the first requirement is understanding what the ABC could be and should be, which at present it is not. Here’s a brief historical overview:

When radio was invented it was immediately heralded, as so many new inventions are, as a potential boon to the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. It was also recognised that the medium could deliver entertainment. Thus, when the BBC was set up as a monopoly in Britain there was a “high-brow” station which broadcast lectures and discussions on history, art, politics, science, and classical music and a “low-brow” station that broadcast drama serials, comedy, quiz shows and popular and dance music. At first Australia followed the US practice of issuing commercial licences but when concerns arose that no one was broadcasting high-brow material, the ABC was formed. Since there were multiple commercial stations the ABC did not have to cater to popular tastes but deliver programs that raised or at least maintained standards of knowledge, culture and education in the community. In other words, like BBC 1, the ABC was a cultural and educational facility not unlike public libraries, art galleries, botanic gardens, herbariums, observatories, zoos and concert halls.

When it came to reporting the news, both the BBC and the ABC maintained a strict policy of objectivity. The principle was to reports the facts as accurately as possible but not to offer opinions, commentary or analysis except by invited guests such as university professors.

When television arrived, as with the radio arrangement, Australian capital cities had two commercial channels and one ABC channel. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, Channel 2 remained a rather stuffy channel committed to intellectual matters and the arts. Amongst its activities, it ran the state symphony orchestras.

With the arrival of colour television there was revolution in public broadcasting in Britain. Realising that colour could bring things like art, history and science to life as never before, the first controller of the BBC’s colour channel – David Attenborough – commissioned series such as Sir Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation, a history of art, and Abraham Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, a history of science. He built a studio that could stage and record operas and at one point even financed an archaeological dig to be broadcast live. He then went back into the field to produce the Life on Earth documentaries which are not only an invaluable record of natural history but probably the biggest money makers the BBC has ever had. Attenborough conclusively demonstrated that the public broadcasting could be and should be part of the knowledge industry and that high-brow topics could be immensely popular with the general population.

The ABC never took this route.

In the early Seventies, the heady days of Vietnam, Whitlam and Watergate, the ABC found itself moving in a different direction towards “investigative journalism”. Woodward and Bernstein had become heroes in the journalistic profession by nailing a president. The key to journalist fame was no longer just experience and an ability to write well: you had to break stories, get exclusives, get someone sent to jail. Journalists were no longer just reporters: they were interrogators, inquisitors and even prosecutors. The ABC series This Day Tonight incubated an entire generation of sideburns and flairs-wearing journalists who confronted, ambushed and door-stopped politicians and conducted interviews with informants whose faces were dramatically blacked out. They became the new stars of television as borne out by their huge salaries.

(In the Sixties, the highest paid people on Australian TV were variety hosts like Graham Kennedy. In the Seventies the highest paid were journalists like Mike Willisee, Michael Carleton and Peter Couchman.)

The old way of interviewing where you asked a question and then moved on to the next was replaced by what became known as the “But surely… “ technique, where every statement made by the interviewee was challenged with a contradiction: "But surely you'd have to admit..." "But surely that is not what you said last week..."

This type of aggressive interrogating, particularly of government ministers prompted some to wonder if the ABC saw its function as being a kind of permanent political opposition. In fact the ABC did come to see that as its principal function, an idea now so entrenched that we cannot see the ABC as really anything else. The original charter of the ABC – to Educate, Entertain and Inform – was essentially replaced by – Interrogate, Cross-examine and Expose.

Today on ABC-TV, programs about the arts, music, literature are rare but current affairs in the form of The 7:30 Report, Q&A, Lateline and The Drum are permanent fixtures. Even on radio, discussions about art seem to be confined to art that is radical and confronting. In fact, the very notion of the high-brow – art, politics, or science discussed at a highly informed level - is now pretty much regarded as a relic of conservative, white, male, capitalistic, patriarchal culture. Thus a comedian like Hannah Gadsby can do a program on Australian art where she wanders through a gallery disparaging Australian art of the 19^th century for its colonialist limitations. The only art that matters to the ABC is art that “questions assumptions.” It no longer runs symphony orchestras, presumably because no one has found a way to make orchestral music challenge assumptions. And there is just one ABC-TV program a month on literature, unashamedly called The First Tuesday Book Club.

It’s not that television does not offer opportunities to watch programs about nature, history, geography, music and so on. It’s just that we have to subscribe to pay TV to watch them on the History Channel, National Geographic and Ovation. This conflicts violently with the original belief that high quality informative and educational programs should be available to everyone in the community regardless of their income.

In short, the ABC has abandoned the whole idea of being some sort of electronic public library or university of the air and has evolved into something else. The problem is working out what that something else is. It is clear it does not see itself as primarily a provider of general knowledge, or even specialised knowledge, as it screens very few documentary programs.

(I spent much of my time as a Development Officer with the ABC rejecting a lot of very good proposals for documentaries because the ABC had no slots in which to place them.)

This is odd, because it’s not as though the ABC doesn’t have room in the schedule for documentaries. It has five digital channels which are currently cluttered with confused programming and many repeats. The parent station (ABC 1) is dominated by current affairs, British travel docos, light-weight comedy programs like The Weekly and Mad As Hell, British whodunnits, and Australian imitations of British whodunnits; the confusingly named ABC 2 which you might expect to be an documentary/educational channel, seems to be just repeats from ABC 1. ABC 3 was supposed to be a quality kids’ channel but many of its timeslots are filled with low grade Japanese and comic book animation. ABC 4 doesn’t seem to exist at all.

The truth is that the ABC has plenty of room to screen quality documentaries but it chooses not to, usually pleading lack of funds but it is really matter of priorities. It is also worth noting that production of educational programs for schools has virtually disappeared from the ABC.

(My first job with the ABC was producing programs for schools, several of which were shown in classrooms for many years. There was an idea then that the classroom of the future would be an electronic classroom where kids could conjure up audio-visual material at the touch of a button. With the Internet, that world has now arrived but oddly the ABC, which was originally well placed to be a content provider for such a classroom, lost interest in education.)

In the end, the problem with the ABC is not that is sees itself as an unelected political Opposition or a self-appointed Ombudsman but that it is an organisation that has produced little of lasting value in its past and has no vision for the future. It has a vague idea that its future might lie on the Internet but its current website demonstrates the same lack of clarity of purpose as its television wing. Is it a news site or is it cross-promotional site for ABC programs? If it is a news site, perhaps it should be updated hourly instead of twice a day and be slightly comprehensive making the most of the ABC's news gathering potential. And if it wants to be taken seriously as a primary source of news on the Internet, perhaps it should drop the inane Green/Left opinion pieces which it presents under the sub-heading of The Drum.

The ABC is an organisation that does some good things well, and some good things badly. It also does a lot of bad things badly. It’s greatest failing is its mediocrity, the tragic reality that it has the power to do so much and actually does so little. It desperately needs a modern day Attenborough who sees that radio and television can not only reflect or comment on culture but actually make a contribution to the scientific, artistic and the intellectual capacity of the nation.

I am available for a job interview most days next week, but not too early please.

Yours

Ian McFadyen 

10 Myths about Climate Change.

Here are some of the most common mistakes people make when discussing climate change. They are by no means the only ones, but this will do to start with.

 

 1                         The planet is experiencing unprecedented warming.

The press and the climate propagandists are fond of using phrases like “highest ever recorded” or “unprecedented” in their dispatches but the truth is the Earth has been hotter than it is today for most of its 4,500 million year history. The Tertiary period which we now are in has been the coolest period for 300 million years - so cool that the planet is actually going in and out of ice-ages. Even relatively recently, the world has been warmer. It was warmer a thousand years ago during the Medieval Warming when the Vikings were farming in Greenland and also warmer 2000 years ago during the Roman Warming when the ancient Britons were battling Julius Caesar wearing nothing but blue paint.

2                 Okay, the planet has been warmer but the rate of warming is faster than it’s ever been.

This is a case of both “We don’t know that.” and “So what?” The planet has warmed and cooled at all sorts of rates over the last four billion years. There is no evidence to suggest that it has never warmed as quickly as it is now (which in fact is not that quick). In any case, the rate of warming is kind of irrelevant. It’s how much it warms that matters, not how fast. Living creatures on this planet already experience rapid changes in temperature between day and night and summer and winter, from year to year. It’s not as though plants and animals can’t cope with a rise of one degree over two centuries which is the current rate as measured by the IPCC.

3                   If CO² emissions continue to rise they will reach a “tipping point” and the planet will experience “runaway warming.”

There is no known instance in geological history of “runaway warming.”  There has been “runaway cooling” because cooling can create a positive feedback loop through increased albedo. A fall in temperature causes ice-sheets to expand; the larger areas of ice reflect more heat back into space which cools the planet more and causes the ice sheet to expand further – etc. etc.  There is no known mechanism by which warming the planet will cause more warming to occur in an endless loop.

(Note  even the “runaway cooling” such as occurred in the ice ages, and the “snowball Earth” of the Cryogenic Age, eventually came to an end.)

A level of 400 ppm (parts per million) of carbon dioxide is being currently being treated as a "warning" sign by the alarmists, saying that if it keeps rising, say to 500 ppm, runaway warming could occur. It is worth remembering that when life first started on Earth, the carbon dioxide levels were at least 250,000 ppm. In other words the atmosphere was probably around a quarter carbon dioxide. (Some palaeontologists suggest that Earth's atmosphere was almost 100% carbon dioxide but that doesn't compute.) The point is, if runaway warming did not occur when CO2 levels were in the hundred thousands of parts per million, it is not likely to occur when CO2 is only 400 parts per million.

4                  What about the permafrost? If temperatures rise, the permafrost of the Siberia and Canada will thaw and release millions of tonnes of CO² into the atmosphere and that will cause runaway warming.

During the last ice age, like all the ones before it, ice-sheets covered all of Canada (the Great Lakes mark the southern boundary), almost all of Russia, Scotland, Scandinavia and the northern half of Europe.  When the ice age ended, those ice sheets retreated, exposing the frozen ground underneath. Did that release a lot of CO². Yes, in fact. We can see a spike in atmospheric CO² levels in the ice-core samples from that time. Did that cause runaway global warming? (Remember we’re talking about an area of permafrost far greater than what exists today.)  Answer: No. There is a spike in temperatures around that time but it soon drops again.

Why did the temperature restabilise? Simple. What happens after the permafrost melts? It revegetates. The vast area of land that was trapped under the ice-sheets is today covered by the great northern pine forests that provide a lot of our oxygen. The CO² absorbed by the trees and grasses and mosses that grew vastly exceeded the amount of CO² released in the thaw. Thus former permafrost thus becomes a huge carbon sink.

5                 But we know that CO² traps heat in the atmosphere and therefore if CO² increases then more heat must be trapped and things must warm up.

Not quite. Only partly true. The thing is this. The surface of the Earth is warmed by solar radiation: it then re-radiates energy mostly in the form of IR – Infrared radiation – into the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide molecules absorb the IR radiation, which excites them – i.e. heats them up – and they then heat the nitrogen and oxygen around them by direct transfer of kinetic energy (conduction). So, yes, the CO² is warmed by the radiation and it warms the air around it.

The problem is CO² only absorbs IR radiation of specific wavelengths, the main one being around the 15 micron range. Most of the other wavelengths, the bulk of the IR radiation, simply pass through the molecules - as they do with Nitrogen and Oxygen - out into space. If you look at a graph of the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum, as seen by a satellite, it shows a huge dip in the middle of the IR spectrum around the 15 micron level. The IR radiation on either side of the dip continues to radiate.  

Now, theoretically, if you add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it will absorb more radiation in that 15 micron range, except that nearly all the energy in that range is already being absorbed by the CO2 that now exists. It is possible that more CO2 will mop up some of the IR that currently escapes but once that small fragment is gone, that’s it. The CO2 cannot be warmed beyond a certain level because, unless solar radiation increases, the amount of black body radiation coming from the Earth’s surface is fixed and radiation in those specific wavelengths is limited.  

6                  What about Venus, which has a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead? That’s what could happen to Earth if we allow CO2 to accumulate.

The alarmists love the Venus horror story but what happens on Venus stays on Venus.  For a start, Venus receives twice as much solar radiation as Earth, being 1/3 closer to the Sun. Also Venus rotates very slowly so its surface doesn’t warm and cool on a 24 hour cycle like Earth. The atmosphere on Venus is so dense that its air pressure is 90 times as much as Earth. In other words being on the surface of Venus would be like being deep in the ocean on Earth. The pressure is so great that the carbon dioxide is almost in a liquid state.

Most of all, even though sources such as Wikipedia will refer to Venus being the result a “runaway greenhouse effect”, Venus is not strictly speaking a “greenhouse” planet. Its atmosphere is not heated by radiation reflected up from its surface. It is heated directly by the Sun. The atmosphere is so dense that very little solar radiation reaches the surface. So, rather than a greenhouse, Venus is more like a house with bitumen roof.

(Interestingly, if you look at the spectrum of infrared radiation from Venus, you see the same dip around the 15 micron wavelengths. Much longwave radiation still escapes from Venus because even its vast amount of CO² cannot capture it.)

7                  Okay, there may not be runaway warming but even a few degrees could melt the Antarctic ice cap and raise ocean levels 200 metres.

The average temperature in Antarctica, (not the coldest, just the average) is -60 degrees. That’s 60 degrees below freezing. So if the planet warmed by even as much as 5^o overall, Antarctica’s average temperature would still be -55^o. Not really enough to melt all the ice. To substantially melt Antarctica’s ice the planet would have to warm by about 70^o which would mean the oceans near the equator would be boiling like a saucepan on the stove.

8                   Well, anyway, let’s agree: CO2 warms the planet.

Yes, well it seems so, but the relationship is uncertain. Periods of high atmospheric carbon appear to be periods of higher temperatures but it is an uneven correlation. Records of CO² and temperature over the last million years show that the high peaks of CO² and the high peaks of temperature roughly coincide but the temperature peaks come first.  As we speak – or write - scientists are trying to re-analyse their data to try and solve this anomaly (i.e. try and make the data fit the theory). It has also been a problem over the past two decades.  The most recent data suggest that CO² levels have continued to rise past the 400 ppm level, yet temperatures have flat-lined. This, of course, makes sense if you take note of the point made in paragraph 5 above that CO² cannot absorb more IR radiation than is available.

9                 Surely as developing countries like India, China and African nations start to get “westernised” and to build coal fired power stations. CO² emissions are going to increase dramatically and catastrophically.

In fact, historically, most human CO² emissions have not been from factories, cars and power plants but from people cooking their meals every day on open fires. Today there are still some 3 billion people on Earth – almost half the population - who cook on open fires or simple stoves every day. This not only produces a huge amount of CO², it is also contributes to loss of natural habitat as forests and jungle are cut down for fuel.

The idea of building coal powered power stations in, for example, India, outrages environmentalists, but gas and electricity produce far less carbon emissions than wood-burning stoves and open fires. Firstly, electricity and gas are only used when required while wood fires tend to be kept going all day. Secondly, power stations extract energy from fuel more efficiently: more energy is extracted per tonne of fuel and less is wasted. Establishment of coal (or nuclear) based power grids in developing countries also hastens modernisation and provides the infrastructure for alternative power sources in the future.

10                Australia is one of the world’s highest emitters of greenhouse gases and we need to reduce our emissions.

Australia is only a high emitter if you look at the per capita – per person - emissions which put us up there with countries like the United States and the Gulf States. This high rate is not an indication of any particular recklessness or voracity on the part of individual Australians; it is just that Australia has one of the highest standards of living in the world but compared to other countries with high standards of living we have no nuclear power stations and very little hydro-electric generation. In terms of contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions, however, the critical issue is the total amount that Australians contribute to the atmosphere. If we multiply the per capita rate of about 18 tonnes of CO² per year per person by our population we get a total of about 414,000,000 tonnes. Though seemingly large, this is about 1.3% (0.013) of the world’s total emissions.

Now, when you are talking about emitting .013 of the world’s greenhouse gases, the notion that we need to cut those emissions by, say, 20% seems a little silly. That would represent an annual reduction of .0026  (26 ten thousandths) in world emissions. By contrast China’s emissions have increased annually this century by around 2.2% . In other words, China’s emissions have tended to increase each year by more than Australia’s total output.

But there is another important consideration. Australia has around 140 million hectares of forest both native and plantation. Forests absorb around 2 tonnes of CO² per year which means that Australia’s forests subtract about 280 million tonnes of CO² from the atmosphere each year. We also have around 600 million hectares of grassland. Grassland absorbs a lower amount of CO² and also emits it but in general it soaks up about half a tonne a year. So our grasslands take up around another 300 millions tonnes of carbon dioxide. Taken at these values – a total of 580 million tonnes - the carbon dioxide that is absorbed by Australia’s tree and grasses exceeds the population’s emissions. If you add in crops, gardens, spinifex and all the other plant regimes, even if you vary those absorption rates down, Australia is still a net carbon sink.  On this basis, when people like Barak Obama and U.N. climate change commissioners tell Australians that we need to do more to curb emissions, we have every right to tell them to get stuffed.

 

3: The limitations of climate science.

In my last post I speculated on why belief in global warming was so closely associated with a left-wing political stance and suggested it was because global warming gave people who were anti-capitalist the “smoking gun” they needed to attack large corporations and conservative governments. Whether that is true or not, the question you might legitimately ask is why should that matter? Just because a scientific theory provides ammunition for a political belief does not mean it is invalid, does it?

Well, the problem is, it does, or it can.

If a scientific theory adds support to a belief or attitude or offers any some sort of advantage to the researcher there is a significant risk of confirmation bias.

The idea of confirmation bias might seem odd because we imagine that all scientists are keen to confirm their hypotheses but what many people don’t realise is that when doing research you not only have to try and validate your hypothesis, you have to do your best to invalidate it. This is called scientific rigour. Confirmation bias can occur in many ways in science: it can lead to researchers to stop testing once they have got the result they seek; it can lead them to select a preferred result out of ambiguous data; it can cause them to “round off” calculations or eliminate things such as ‘outliers’ in data. It is also, I am afraid, embedded in the “peer review” system. Confirmation bias on a secondary level is evident in studies such as the one that found “97% of climate scientists accept the global warming theory” and the use of "h-scores" (number of times cited in papers) to try an discredit Bjorn Lomborg.

In most scientific research the confirmation bias arises from the ambitions of the researcher. A notorious case was that of Dr William McBride, the first person to link Thalidomide to birth defects who, 20 years later tried to show that the morning sickness drug Debendox also produced defects. It was revealed he had falsified his results to reach his conclusion. This was a case of one person wishing to make a second valuable discovery. The desire to prove that global warming is “real” is held by many millions of people and which raises particular concerns for the whole field of climate research.

Because there are so many people who want, a priori, the theory of global warming to be true, research in this area must be subject to even more than usually stringent methodological rigour.

Unfortunately, research into global warming is not more rigorous that other research. This is not due to any failing by researchers but because of inherent problems in the area itself. Those problems include the following:

 

Lack of a Control

If we test a drug for a particular illness, we cannot simply give the drug to a group of people who have the illness and see how many get better. We have to have a control group which does not take the drug and see how many of them get better without taking the medication.

The first problem with testing the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures is that we do not have a control. We do not have an identical Earth without the emissions to compare with this one. That means we are unable to isolate greenhouse gases as a factor in warming. The lack of a control is not simply an inconvenient hurdle to be overcome in climate research, it is a major obstacle. Without a “control Earth” researchers have to try and extrapolate climate data from the recent past and generate projections of what temperatures might have been if not for rising CO2 levels. But this does not constitute having a real control because these “what if” projections are themselves hypothetical and also require to be validated.  This process is compounded by the next problem: 

Incomplete and Uncalibrated Data.

One of the major problems climatologists face is that we have only had accurate comprehensive climate data for less than a century. When the press announces things like “Hottest March on record” they mean, since records have been kept, i.e. about a hundred years ago. To make matters worse, the climate data that has existed over the last few centuries has been recorded using a variety of methods or varying accuracy. In Australia for example, temperature and rainfall readings in the outback were for many years reported by people with a thermometer and a rain gauge on a post outside the house. Vast areas of the planet have had no proper means of recording data until satellites started to take measurements 50 years ago.

Given this paucity of uniform, calibrated data, climate scientists have to rely for historical data on proxies, that is to say, things like lacustrine and marine depositions and tree growth rings. This research in turn depends on other fields of research that seek to correlate things such as temperature and rainfall or temperature and CO2 levels with plant growth. (That process is complicated in itself because higher temperatures and higher CO2 levels can independently affect growth.)

While patterns of climate and atmospheric CO2 levels can be painstakingly derived from proxies, those data are compromised by: 

Error Margins

Calculations of historical and even present global temperatures, gas emissions, ice-cap thicknesses etc are not precise. All such measurements entail ranges: e.g. the average summer temperatures in Britain in 1850 might be calculated as 18 – 20^o C and CO² levels as 240-260 ppm. (These are simply  examples not real figures)  Now, many people might think that when you start to plot graphs and derive correlations, that error margins somehow cancel themselves out. That is not necessarily true. Self-cancellation assumes that if we overestimate one figure in our data we are likely to underestimate some other figure thereby correcting the problem. But this is not always the case. In some systems, error margins can compound each other. This becomes a serious issue where there is a risk of confirmation bias because, by selecting, say, the highest values in each range we can produce a very severe “worst case scenario” which is quite unrealistic compared to taking the median values in the ranges.

Consider the following:

The average temperature of a region in 1960 is calculated as 21^o (plus or minus 2^o). In 1970 the temperature in the same regions are calculated as 23^o (plus or minus 2^o). The researcher concludes that temperatures have risen 2 degrees. However, if the actual temperature in 1960 was at the top of the range at 23^o and the actual temperature in 1970 was at the bottom of the range at 21^o, it means temperatures have actually fallen 2 degrees.

This is a simple example but the problem of error margins applies equally to large scale long-term calculations of global temperatures. The manipulation of ranges is apparent in many of the earlier findings of the IPCC. 

The problem of error margins – which is related to issues of randomness – leads onto:

Significance Issues

In any testing process, there is always a chance of outcomes that are the result of chance.  In our case above of testing a new drug, if we gave the drug to a sample of 20 people and 12 of them got better, compared to 10 people in the control group, we would scarcely be concluding that our drug was a success. We would want to test on a much larger group, and do so many times over before we concluded that our drug produced a 20% better rate of cure.

The significance of any result must always be compared to the normal random fluctuations of parameters in the target population.

The "significance problem" in global warming theory is that, according to the IPCC, global temperatures over the last 200 years, have risen by only 1 (one) degree.

Given the normal random variations of temperatures over millennia, it is very hard to show that this is a statistically significant result. It is compounded by the fact that a one degree rise, represents a proportional rise of one three hundredth - 1/300  - above pre-1800 temperatures. This tiny fraction is smaller than the error margins in the data that have gone into calculating it.

(Note: in comparing temperatures proportionally and calculating contingent probabilities, remember you have to convert them to the zeroed Kelvin scale. A rise of 21^o to 23^oC is a rise from 294 to 296^oK. This puts a rather different complexion on the ratio of increase.)

 

Problems of computer modelling

When a climate scientist makes a prediction such as “at present emission rates, global temperatures will rise by 2 to 3 degrees by 2080” they are putting forward a hypothesis. If the world warms by that much in 2080, the hypothesis is confirmed, if not, it is disproved. The point is that the hypothesis remains a hypothesis until 2080 when the data is in: there is no way of confirming or rejecting it before that date. This of course is not acceptable to people who believe we are facing imminent destruction, so they have convinced themselves that perhaps we do not have to wait that long; that perhaps there is a way to prove the accuracy of the hypothesis right now through calculation: perhaps there can be a mathematical proof of global warming.

Alas this is not true.

People have come to think it is possible because scientists use computers to create simulations of the Earth’s climate. They feed in all the data we have mentioned above, satellite readings, terrestrial readings, proxies and so on and this allows them to look for patterns, discover underlying relationships and, most importantly, generate future scenarios. By varying the values of different factors they can derive different possible outcomes. These models are very important in trying to understand climatic processes. The problem, some people seem to them as a form of data. But they are not.

Computer climate models are not data they are just more detailed hypotheses.

Regardless of how sophisticated computer models are they still need to be calibrated against the actual events. In other words, we won’t know whether the computer’s algorithms accurately reflect what will happen in 2080 until 2080. There is no way of short cutting the testing procedure.

Now, computer modellers know that their predictions are tentative and so they do not claim absolutely validity so what they do, to give their calculations some credibility, is attach probability values to them. These take the form of “if the present rate of emissions continues there is an 80% chance of a rise in temperatures of between 2 and 4 degrees etc…” This is designed to make the predictions more believable but it doesn’t because those probabilities are simply an outcome of the modelling process itself. What they are saying is “we have run this simulation in our computer 100 times with various values and in 80 of those times the result has been 2-4 degrees warming.” This is not the same as saying “there is an 80% probability that our computer simulation is right.”

The only way a hypothesis can calculate a viable probability is from previous events.

If the climate scientists could point to multiple times in the past where the Earth was in its present configuration, where human activity was similar, and greenhouse gases were increasing at their present rates and show that in 80% of those occasions temperatures rose by the specified amount, then the probability would have actuarial validity. But, of course, the Earth never has been in this situation before. As climate activists love to point out, the present situation is unprecedented and you cannot generate probabilities for a unique situation.

However there is an even more significant and, unfortunately, fundamental problem in relation to calculating climate change.

Computational Irreducibility

A few years ago, following the development of Chaos Theory, Stephen Wolfram, the man who wrote the world’s most used mathematical software Mathematica coined the phrase computational irreducibility to describe a troubling limitation of mathematics. Wolfram astutely describes mathematics as a “race between humans and the universe, to calculate events before they happen.” The problem is that there are situations where the events could never be calculated before they actually happened.

The principle has serious implications for the testing of hypotheses such as global warming.

It can be illustrated as follows:

Imagine you fire a shell out of a cannon. Even the simplest computer, the chip in a mobile phone, is capable of calculating where that shell will land and when it will land there before it gets there.

Now imagine you throw a leaf into a babbling brook, a small stream that is splashing over rocks and whirling around reeds as it makes its way down the hillside. No computer that exists, or possibly ever will exist, can calculate where that leaf will be 20 seconds later.

Calculating the trajectory and flight time of the shell can be achieved using a small set of input conditions and some basic Newtonian physics. Plotting the course of the leaf requires calculating the velocity, direction and atomic forces of trillions of water and air molecules which are all interacting with each other as well as the leaf. In other words, to find the position of the leaf at the designated time, it is quicker to simply wait and see.

Calculating the interaction between the factors that govern global temperatures -  variations in solar radiation, CO² levels, water droplet levels, cloud formation, ocean currents, air currents, albedo, ozone levels, biological feedback mechanisms, agricultural developments etc. - is very much the same as calculating all the factors determining the path of the leaf in the stream only greater. Even if you can calculate those effects individually, these factors all influence each other.

The upshot of this is that there is no way to accurately calculate global climatic events, such as rises in temperature, before those events occur.

If you want to see whether the predictions of the climate scientists are accurate or not, you just have to wait.

Now some people will argue that you can generate accurate predictions by looking at current circumstances, detecting a trend, and extending that trend into the future but when you look at the real world it is surprising how few systems that applies to. Consider the stock market: if the market is rising steeply, can we conclude that it is going to continue to rise for decades? No. Almost certainly there is going to be correction soon and the market will fall. Snow piling up on a ridge will continue until it reaches a critical mass and then an avalanche will occur. If the leaf in the stream is sailing along the left hand side will it continue in that direction? We don't know.  A single puff of wind can steer it to the other side. Trends mean nothing in a chaotic system and the Earth’s atmosphere is the ultimate chaotic system.

Chaos, by the way, does not mean that the system is unstable or completely unpredictable. Chaotic systems are still deterministic and often have converging outcomes. Imagine dropping marbles into a round bowl. Each marble will take its own unpredictable course but all will end up in the bottom of the bowl. Chaos is characterised by two seemingly opposite principles (1) that small differences in inputs can produce huge differences in outputs - such as a pinball machine where minute differences in the momentum of the ball produce vastly different and unpredictable trajectories and (2) different trajectories can converge on the same final outcome like the marbles in the bowl. Although its route  is unpredictable, the leaf usually, eventually. floats to the bottom of the stream.

The Earth’s climate is governed by the second of these principles.

Next rave:  Some global warming myths dispelled.

 

2: Global Warming Theory a Left-Wing conspiracy?

As someone with a specific interest in human cognition, what is most interesting to me about the climate change debate/argument/stoush is that it operates on two quite distinct levels.

The first is the scientific level. On this level, the discussion is about things such as photon scattering, saturation and extinction rates, spectrum broadening, biological feedback systems, quantum uncertainty lichens and coccoliths etc. The idea that these matters are in some way "settled" is of course ridiculous. If the "jury was in" on these issues scientists wouldn't be continuing to try to refine their climate models. The fact that scientists are continuing to collect data, drill ice-cores, analyse satellite data, measure gas levels etc. is an indication that climate science is still a work in progress. Thinking that we now know all about climate mechanics is as silly as saying that, once Gregor Mendel proposed his theory of chromosomes in 1866, we knew all about genetics.

The other level however, is the political level and this is the interesting one. While the discussions in the scientific community over climate are ongoing, polite and informed, the debate over the politics of climate are uninformed, vicious and bigoted.

So how did a complex question about atmospheric heat become a political hot-potato? After all, few scientific issues end up having political as opposed to religious implications. Certainly, studies of intelligence challenged and threatened long-held but erroneous assumptions about the genetic superiority of Caucasians over other races and men over women - arguments over biology have always had the capacity to upset prejudices. But how did an issue in physics, end up being divided along Left/Right political lines?

In the 1950s, the western world, basking in not-unjustified triumphalism over having won two world wars, was imbued with almost palpable optimism. The western way of life had been vindicated, material prosperity had returned and seemed ensured, levels of education were rising and Science was the hero of the day. Humans were starting to explore space and the optimism of the times culminated in the Moon landing of 1969. Yet, at the same time, in hidden recesses of society, there were pockets of discontent - mainly Communists. Communists, who did not necessarily call themselves by that name, were people who adhered to Marx's theory that capitalism (and, with it, democracy) was a system that oppressed the common people. The fact that the common people were prospering in the post-war period did not seem to faze them. They were staunch defenders of the USSR, despite its treatment of dissidents and brutality towards its satellites and blamed the United States for the cold-war, and just about every other war in the world. Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin and the sight of tanks rolling into Budapest and Prague finally disillusioned a fair few of them and many of them ceased to see the Soviet Union as the utopia they had once thought. Nevertheless, while they acknowledged that Marxism needed some tweaking here and there, they still felt that its fundamental assumption was true - that there was something fundamentally wrong with the western way of life.

Now, I have not been able, in fifty years of pondering this, been able to work out why people who lived in a society with abundant food, free education, a reasonably equitable justice system, advanced medical services, almost full employment and abundant opportunity, should think there was something fundamentally wrong with that society. And of course the idea that our society was fundamentally flawed was considered absurd by the millions of Australians who thought themselves lucky to live here - especially if they had escaped the devastation of Europe. The malcontents and political agitators were considered (quite correctly in my view) to be "ratbags".
Eventually, faced with the difficulty, if not impossibility, of convincing the general population about the inherent evils of our society, these unrepentant Marxists retreated into enclaves where they could relax in the company of others of the same persuasion. Those enclaves were universities, trade unions and the arts.

I hasten to point out that the Australian labour movement was not dominated by Marxists, though several union leaders who were self-declared communists exerted enough influence to split the entire movement in the Fifties. In the universities, Marxists did not dominate the traditional areas of medicine, science or law but were able to acquire significant influence in the faculties of Political Science, Economics or of course, that new and mysterious, largely bogus, discipline of Sociology. To this day, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the almost complete capitalisation of China, there are lecturers and tutors in universities who are unashamedly Marxist.

As for the arts, there are few writers, actors and musicians who would describe themselves outright as socialists, but they nevertheless consistently express, in their plays and books and public utterances, that same deep concern that there is something fundamentally wrong with western society.

The problem for these people is of course that overall, our social system works. Free enterprise and capitalism has provided wealth for most of the population. Wages in Australia are comparatively high, and social services are comparatively generous. While there are always improvements that can be made, there is not much to suggest that the basic foundations of the social system are not working and certainly not enough to justify a revolution. The malcontents had to look around for something else to complain about.

One of the things that they latched onto was guilt. A new view emerged that our society was basically evil because it was built on the dispossession of others. This is a topic in itself which I will deal with another time. The other issue which emerged just as the economic arguments against capitalism were faltering, was the Environment.

Rachel Carson's book The Silent Spring in in 1962 raised the alarm about how pesticides, particularly DDT, had entered the food chain and were not only killing birds but presenting a cancer risk to humans. That fact that Carson was herself fighting cancer at the time added poignancy to her case. Although the book was challenged by the chemical industry and many scientists, who argued that pesticides produced more health benefits than problems, the use of DDT was curtailed and a greater vigilance towards environmental consequences of chemicals was established. This was a Good Thing. The book however was instrumental in planting a new mental equation in people's minds:

Capitalism = Industry = Chemicals = Pollution = Disease.

Shortly after The Silent Spring, an entomologist Paul Erlich, dropped another bomb -  specifically The Population Bomb - which predicted in 1968 that the world's population would outgrow its ability to feed itself within ten years and millions would die. Virtually no prediction made by this neo-Malthusian epic ever came to pass (thank goodness: Erlich recommended such remedies as putting sterilising chemicals in water-supplies) but it was enough to scare the living be-Jesus out of a whole generation. (Note that the population at that time was about half of what it is today.) While Erlich's catastrophism turned out to be a furphy, his work still managed to implant another kind of equation in the minds of an entire generation:

Science + Medicine = Population Growth = Food Depletion = Mass Extinction of Humans.

The last work in this trilogy of terror was the 1982 book The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell, which opened with the sentence. "There is nothing more certain than that the world will be destroyed by a nuclear war." Thus, in summary, it appeared that humans were going to extinguish all animal life on the planet, then millions would starve and the remainder would nuke themselves into oblivion.

The problem was, that by the end of the 20th century, all these fears had substantially dissolved. The collapse of the Soviet Union had reduced the possibility of global nuclear war significantly, new developments in agriculture had led to a reduction rather than an increase in famine and there were still birds. The concept of western democratic capitalism destroying itself and everyone else suddenly seemed to have faded. And then, someone revived a decades old theory - first floated in the early 20th century - that carbon dioxide emissions could possibly warm the planet, theoretically to dangerous levels. A new version of Paul Erlich, Al Gore, failed presidential candidate, quickly produced An Inconvenient Truth, a film which showed graphically, if mostly fraudulently, what others had been trying to prove for a century: that western industrialised society was threatening the existence of life on Earth.

Despite the fact that much of the information in An Inconvenient Truth was incorrect, misleading or just plain fabricated, the film became virtually an environmental gospel, shown in schools to children and treated almost as scientific text. It successfully implanted a final equation in the mind of a new generation:

Modern Industry + Consumption = Emissions = Warming = Apocalypse.

 



The great advantage of Global Warming was that its predictions were set far in the future. Erlich had made the mistake of predicting disaster within a ten year period. When that time arrived, and what he predicted had not happened, his writings were discredited. The global warming alarmists did not make the same mistake. Their warnings were based on predictions about temperatures towards the end of the 21st century. That meant that their hypotheses could not be discredited for at least fifty to seventy years. Even if temperatures did not rise over the next 20 years (as they in fact have not) this could be dismissed as response lag, storage of heat potential, randomness in the system etc. This makes Global Warming the Perfect Scare because it cannot be disproved within the lifetimes of most people alive today.

Now the anti-capitalists, anti-industrialists, anti-mining, anti-logging, anti-everything people had something to justify their antipathies. Now they had a stick that they could beat mining companies, oil companies, banks, steel makers and virtually all industry with. Of course the Antipathists - if I can call them that - continued to drive cars, use electricity, shop at supermarkets etc but they could justify their contempt for the people who provided those things: those bastards were destroying the Earth.

So is Global Warming Theory a Left-wing conspiracy? Well... yes and no. We must recognise that there are two interpretations of 'left-wing.' The first is what we might call Soft-Left. This is a commitment to specific social reforms - combatting racism, sexism, homophobia, a commitment to social justice and equality, a desire for clean air water and so on.  This however does not clearly delineate people as "left wing" as some or all of those aims are endorsed by people who might be described as Soft-Right.

The Hard Left however can be distinguished from the Hard Right quite easily. The Hard Right believes that nothing in our society should be changed. The Hard Left believes that everything should be changed. That is why the Marxists were against trade-unions: they feared that if workers got better wages and conditions they would be less inclined towards revolution, which is what happened. The Hard Left is not concerned with specific reforms, it wants a massive overhaul of western society and, given the failure of the economic justifications for socialism, the theory of Global Warming has provided then with their best weapon in half a century.

It is no accident therefore that many member of the Australian Greens are socialists and one at least (Lee Rhiannon) is an outright unreconstructed communist.