Did Barrington Moore write too early?

Re-downloading and re-reading Ron Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, I was struck by a quite interesting and revealing quotation:

“In one of the classic works of modern comparative sociology, Barrington Moore, Jr. (1967) [Social Origin of Dictatorship and Democracy] focused attention on a particularly malignant — indeed, protofascist — developmental coalition, namely the protectionist one of capitalists and landowners against labor. If the present [Commerce and Coalitions, 1989] approach is correct, such an alliance was likeliest to arise in the formative nineteenth century in countries where land and capital were both scarce and only labor was abundant — that is, virtually all of Europe save its economically advanced northwestern corner, and all of eastern and southern Asia. There capital and land could be expected to unite in support of protection and imperialism; only labor, and the most labor-intensive agricultural and manufacturing enterprises, will normally have supported free trade and a less expansive foreign policy.

What Moore saw — rightly, in my [Rogowski’s] estimation — as the far more hopeful coalition of capital and labor should have arisen, according to the present theory, principally in two quite different circumstances: where both of those factors were abundant, and only land was scarce (essentially northwestern Europe, our first case[)]; and where both labor and capital were scarce, and only land was abundant (the “frontier” societies of the third case). In the former case, workers and capitalists alike will have favored free trade and a foreign policy of restraint; in the latter, both will have embraced protection and imperialism. In either of the two cases, however, the fatal alliance of land and capital is circumvented and, in Moore's perceptive telling, the path to a tolerably free society remains open.”

In light of last year’s US presidential election, the rise of Peter Dutton, and the much longer-term rise of geopolitically powerful petro-dictatorships, I get the feeling that Moore wrote his book too early, indeed much too early.

As I have repeatedly emphasised over the past two years, during the era discussed by Moore there existed no example of Rogowski’s “fourth case” — where both capital and land were abundant and only labour was scarce. Under such a situation, which today prevails in:

1. North America
2. continental Oceania [Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia]
3. the Persian Gulf oil states
4. the more advanced countries within North and Central Asia

capital and land are expected to unite in favour of free trade and a (theoretically) less expansive foreign policy, while labour and more labour-intensive enterprises will favour protectionism and (theoretically) imperialism. The problem, which Rogowski does hint at, is that the recent history of the United States and the East Slavic and Turkic “core USSR”, alongside the entire history of the Gulf States since oil was discovered, demonstrate the capital and land are never satisfied with whatever suppression of labour they achieve, because their goal, as emphasised here and here by Red Flag Magazine, is always to increase profit. Moreover, the scarcity of labour encourages ruling classes to import labour in order to lower wages in the labour-intensive nontradable sector. This has several critical effects:

1. it virtually eliminates the ability of labour in those labour-abundant countries [South Asia, Tajikistan, the Levant, Central America and the Caribbean, non-continental Oceania] from which labour is imported to gain from exporting
2. it reduces the ability of the countries noted in 1) to offer competition for the capital- and land-intensive production via labour-intensive production
3. it thus eliminates the political power of labour in the countries noted in 1) and further increases the control of capital and land in countries rich in both
4. as Christopher Allen Culver of Pennsylvania State University and the US Air Force Academy has noted in his ‘Remittances and Autocratic Regime Stability’ and ‘Manipulating Remittances’, remittances sent back to the countries noted in 1) allow these labour-abundant countries stronger currencies, which further:
1. weakens export competitiveness
2. strengthens local capital and land against labour
3. strengthens the global hand of the ruling elites in capital- and land-rich nations

As discussed most explicitly by the late Sophie Body-Gendtrot in her 2002 The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective, the ruling elites of this free-trading coalition favour the most extreme possible social control of the domestic underclass. Although it is not explicitly discussed, the fact that the wealthy favour the most intense policing is, plainly, because political activity — requiring international class solidarity — is the only exit route for the ghetto underclass. Mass incarceration is a direct reflection of the political hegemony of America’s very rich, whose primary goal is closing any route to a challenge from the bottom ninety percent. Placing the poorest and potentially most dangerous under direct control is a huge step towards this goal, and the Gulf States do the same thing via their contract system with expatriate workers. Labour, contrariwise, will favour a much more open and free domestic policy, illustrating Sigmund Freud’s principle that economic freedom is opposed to political and sexual freedom.

Free-trading capital and land under expanding trade must ensure trade continues to expand. Externally driven declining trade [via export controls by labour-rich nations, as with Cold War-era Southern Africa] will in these labour-scarce trade-open economies empower previously powerless labour, as discussed by Ron Rogowski, and Texas Tech’s David Letzkian and Dennis Patterson. A free-trading coalition of capital and land must thus ensure labour-rich nations cannot restrict exports to them. Consequently, the theoretically less expansive foreign policy of the free-trading coalition of capital and land becomes much less restrained than Stolper–Samuelson theory predicts. This factor explains the existence of the IMF, World Bank and WTO, whose strict and enforceable trade rules are exceedingly critical to the global power of the United States and its Gulf Cooperation Council allies. Alexander Etkind in his Russia Against Modernity (reviewed here) similarly suggests that Russia’s war against Ukraine is aimed to prevent foreign states decarbonising and Russia losing its fossil fuel profits. Whilst Etkind’s assessment is debatable, massive and influential lobbying by the Gulf States in the West is much more definitively aimed at preventing the loss of profits through reduced global oil and gas use. US wars against Central America (between 1944 and 1996) undoubtedly had the same aim of preventing those nations controlling trade.

Returning to Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Moore did note the importance of the alliance between Southern planters and northern industrialists to US politics — transformed today into an alliance of fossil fuel producers and giant agribusinesses — since the great globalisation following Reconstruction. He noted the possibility of this coalition evolving earlier, which presumably would have shaped the US into the de facto oligarchy it became during the Jim Crow era and more decisively after the expansion of trade that began according to Rogowski in 1963 — but minus the democratising reforms of Reconstruction. In Saudi Arabia, power-sharing between the Al Saud and Al Ash-Sheikh meant an alliance between the rentier capital of the state and the Wahhabi clergy (land) had forged a free-trading coalition even before capital became abundant after oil was discovered. Similar links between imams and sheikhs developed in other Gulf states. This has prevented any possibility of a tolerably free society for anyone except capitalists and the traditional nomadic pastoralists, and, as noted in the preceding paragraph, is potentially much more dangerous in the long term than the better-known protectionist alliance of land and capital.

A final proof the “March on Canberra” is a quarter-century and counting overdue

According to a new paper in the journal Nature, regardless of what the rest of the world does, record-breaking temperature rises are already inevitable until 2040.

At the same time, the Sydney Morning Herald is noting a zero-emissions plan for Britain – whose parity emissions per capita are minimally four times those of Australia – as Australia approves the polluting Adani coal mine. There is – and was even before last month’s surprise election – a certainty Australia will expand fossil fuels whilst the EU moves to zero-net-emissions.

Many (including my brother) naïvely believe that Australia will eventually be condemned as a pariah state for expanding fossil fuels. Nevertheless, this viewpoint overlooks demographic reality. Australia already has substantially higher total fertility than those nations most advanced in decarbonisation. Recent trends towards lowest-low fertility in Finland (from 1.9 to 1.5 children since 2010) and other European nations whose fertility was the least low during the 2000s suggests that Morrison’s policies will widen this gap.

The fact is that – as I have emphasised for two decades – Australia must ecologically have by far the lowest emissions per capita in the world. This demand places human energy consumption upon its natural biological “footing”. Environment, Capitalism and Socialism demonstrated three decades ago that the money existed to finance a rapid transition to a carbon-free Australia as early as 2005 or 2010 – were major polluters taxed severely enough.

As Dimitri Lafleur has partially shown, a carbon-free Australia would remake the world economy by:

1. radically limiting energy and materials use on a global scale, especially in desert nations with naturally low-energy ecologies and zero hydropower potential
2. shifting “developing” economies towards renewable energy once they do not have cheap fossil fuels from Australia and the oil states
3. shifting energy-intensive industries towards those (Enriched and Tropical) nations with large resources in hydropower
4. shifting agriculture towards the high-latitude nations with youngest and most fertile soils
1. this would occur because land clearing is a major source (around 20 percent) of greenhouse emissions in Australia
2. also, Australian soils are thirty thousand times older and more weathered than soils of most other Quaternary landmasses
3. young, high-latitude areas are also least affected by runaway climate change shown as certain by Nature
5. shifting away from planned obsolescence towards long-lasting consumer goods that use fewer resources over the long term

What needed to be done back in the 1990s was for the globe to recognise that – regardless of its relatively small aggregate emissions that have led even environmentalists to neglect it – a rigid, zero-compromise, zero-emissions target for Australia no later than 2010 would have:

1. largely solved global greenhouse gas emissions by radically altering global development patterns
2. paid for the ecological crisis out of the pockets of those people – alongside the Arab Gulf royal families – with greatest duty and ability to pay
3. achieved this in a manner in agreement with Earth’s natural ecology (smallest per-capita energy consumption and emissions in arid desert nations)
4. in an Enriched World then and now crippled by excessive environmental regulations, which stand likely to achieve negligible global gains while Australia mines and uses more and more coal, created major economic opportunities including:
• phase-out of economically crippling Enriched World farm subsidies as Australia’s unsustainable pastoral and broad-acre farmland would be converted to ecotourism
• revitalising such industries as aluminum and titanium smelting when coal use in phased out in Australia and other nations lacking hydropower potential

Given the experiences of the past quarter-century and especially last month’s election, there exists zero possibility that Australia will ever elect a more environmentally responsive government. Thus, other countries are burdened with the critical task of clamping down on the worst environmental performer – a task entirely ignored but unless achieved even a total carbon phase-out in the EU and East Asia will achieve little in the long term.

Instead of decentralised global environmental protests (as seen in recent weeks) what was needed in 1994 and stands three decades overdue was and is a global focus upon the centre of power in the worst environmental performer: protests demanding uncompromising, rapid decarbonisation of Australia, or a “March on Canberra”. Whilst the effects would not be immediate, would be costly to the rest of the world and would need to be sustained over years and even decades, they possess potential to actually deal with the planet’s worst polluter rather than permit Australia indefinite emissions increases negating large-scale decarbonisation abroad.

Abbott’s unspoken goal: a global economic and “opportunity” monopoly for Australia

In the mainstream (Age) and even in business papers, as seen here in the Spectator, there is the ingrained belief that if Australia falls behind in climate action it will suffer economically. There tends to be little evidence or reasoning behind this, but rather an unspoken belief that if Australia removes regulations on greenhouse emissions, pollution and land clearing it will lose opportunities to invest in new technology that will grow its economy.

The fact is, however, that there are a number of severe fallacies behind this myth – a myth that I know has existed for a long time but have taken little notice of.

The basic problem is that it ignores the severe social and economic problems faced by nations with technology-based economies. Without one solitary exception, their fertility rates are extremely low – almost always less than 1.5 children per women or a population declining by 25 percent each generation. Even for historically free market-oriented nations, government debt is a major problem and likely to grow in the future as there are fewer taxpayers to pay it off.

More than this, as taxpayers become fewer in technology-oriented economies, they are forced to specialise in higher and higher technology, which tends to make them even more inhuman – there is so little ordinary work being done by people that those without the most advanced education are excluded. This exclusion, of course, serves to severely limit the range of people a technology-oriented economy can include: in most such cases, even basic necessities such as housing, food and transport become very expensive for those without higher education.

An additional problem is that seeking to emulate technology-oriented economies is the norm throughout the Enriched and Tropical Worlds, because it promises more rapid growth and Enriched and Tropical nations are losing to exhaustion most of the mineral and energy resources they ever had. This produces a uniform specialisation that offers little room for diversification – especially with most major companies thoroughly globalised – and much room for economic decline.

What Tony Abbott wants to do to Australia is what the Politically Incorrect Guides and their allies wanted to do to America in the 2000s:

1. remove all the vast books of government restrictions from minimum wages to pollution
2. remove the high taxes faced by working people
3. dismantle most of the public sector and make what is needed (defence) more efficient
4. privatise such government services as education, national parks, hospitals, public transport, public housing etc. etc.
5. allow entrepreneurs to provide essential services like housing and transport without restriction
6. encourage the poor to depend upon their own labour rather than welfare
7. encourage those with limited academic talents to work in basic occupations and form families

For all the PIGs have told me about how a society without government regulation would be better, there is no practical example of the PIGs’ policies actually being tried in a country for one to evaluate. However, the evidence they do give and what I do know about past history does make me feel instinctively that the policies Abbott wants to implement will shift virtually all the opportunity for work and social capital amongst the poor to Australia. If the poor had no taxes to pay they could save their earnings to a much greater extent than I do – especially with essential services provided at lower cost due to greater incentive for cheapness. If the “super rich” had no taxes to pay the PIGs argue that they would create many more jobs than they can now even in Australia, and unemployment would be eliminated without minimum wage laws as expensive education would be unnecessary to maintain a liveable existence.

There is no doubt that requiring more and more expensive education to maintain a liveable existence is a dead-end – it is making the Enriched and Tropical Worlds elitist and unable to cater for the poor, besides their lack of natural resources. Abbott, on the contrary, desires a nation where the market gives the poor opportunities rather than the radical equality which the poor of the Enriched World wish for – but which invariably produces aselfish and shallow culture with no sense of community.

Facing up to our responsibility

This Law Dome snowfall series has been used in Tas D. van Ommen’s and Vin Morgan’s ‘Snowfall increase in coastal East Antarctica linked with southwestWestern Australian drought’ (Nature Geoscience, 7 February 2010) to demonstate how un-natural modern observed low rainfalls are.

Tonight, after a rather quiet afternoon and evening in the State Library, I was told by a tired mother that it was 42˚C today. This could lead to a record number of days over 40˚C this summer with another forecast and no sign of mild weather again – after a promising start to January. Whilst I feel I have said too much too “noisily” over the years about the solution to the problem, I will note very clearly two utterly false denial signs:

1. Greenhouse scepticism – whilst it reigns supreme amongst those who fear loss of convenience or privacy in Australia’s suburbs, the scientific evidence from studies such as those of the Law Dome ice core and Perth water flow data is too strong.
• What needs to be done is for education series, instead of being focused fuzzily on abstract temperature series, to be focused instead on practical cases like changes in SWWA, Central Chile, or CWA rainfall, where easily understood, precise data can be seen.
2. Denial of responsibility – an all-too-common problem is belief that Australia’s emissions have no significant impact by themselves on the global climate. This occurs even in peer-reviewed articles like ‘Halving global CO₂ by 2050: technologies and costs’ and ‘Illustrated implications of the Terrifying New Math of Meinshausen and McKibben’ which do not go into details about Australia’s emissions and instead focus on China, India, Russia and the United States. There are several problems with this attitude:
1. As Zhang et. al. have shown, Australia’s extremely low soil phosphate means that it has much lower absorption capacities than other major emitters, and hence a lower allowable emissions value
2. Australia’s per capita emissions are the highest in the world so that each Australian – living on the lowest-energy land in the world – makes the greatest contribution
3. Most greenhouse emissions in China and India, and to a lesser extent other Eurasian and Western Hemisphere nations, are built from Australian coal and aluminium so are indirectly the responsibility of Australia

For these three reasons, there needs to be a culture of responsibility amongst the next generation of Australians – one where it is acknowledged Australia bears unique responsibility for creating and hence for solving climate change. This responsibility is one that must extend to both ordinary Australian citizens – most especially when doing the responsible thing and cycling or using public transit for every journey is uniquely tough – and for tourists who, used to higher-quality public transport in countries with incomparably less need for it, must not sacrifice keeping emissions lower for convenience even if they could at home. In fact, the attitude towards Australia’s environment among tourists is one that has to change a great deal: although Australia may seem peculiar and strange to those used to uniquely fertile and young soils, it is not peculiar but how Eurasia and the Americas looked a mere 20 million years ago.

A forgotten lesson from Ford closure

The news that Ford would close its Australian car manufacturing plants in 2016 was a shock to me, but one I have been very well prepared for over the past few years.

It is long forgotten by almost everbody else who discussing the issue, but Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan was planning to close car manufacture in Australia twenty years ago until the Federal Government offered aid in terms of devaluing (even undervaluing) the Aussie dollar and direct financial help – as well as eliminating indexation of fuel excise to help thirsty local cars and imported 4x4s.

In 1993 I was quietly worried about Ford closing its doors after the highly publicised Nissan closure of 1992, but with hindsight I recognise that the government ought to focus research in a very different direction. Given Australia’s extremely fragile ecology it requires a much more (not less) energy-efficient transport sector than the Enriched World. This would necessarily require transportation to be focused on mass surface transit both in urban and rural areas – that is, on railways.

It is interesting to me to consider whether an Australia without a car industry would have a less powerful road lobby, but I do not believe that so because the parent companies of importers know how much more sympathetic Australia is to wastage of money on roads, so car companies know well where to focus their energies.

What people do not realise is that, rather than focus on car transport, Australia needs to see whether a mass transit vehicle industry – even if supported by something like the old 57.5 percent tariff on cars – could develop the same sorts of skills as a car industry, an idea neglected by Remy Davison.

The two-party denial machine

As I was just searching through my email, I found that Time had eight months ago published an article showing that since Obama came to power in 2008 the proportion of Republicans accepting man-made global warming as undisputed science has declined by two fifths from fifty to thirty percent. At the same time, those on the liberal side of politics have not changed remotely.

This is awfully troubling, not only because my own research clearly shows how rapid climate change has been in Australia over the past forty-five years, but also because non-academic parts of Australia, even if they vote Labor, appear to me politically akin to the most conservative parts of the United States.

What is crucial, but seldom understood, is how well-placed Australian corporations with a vested interest in denying the science behind anthropogenic global warming already were when climatic changes began to take hold in the late 1960s. Immediately before the big climatic turning point between 1967 and 1976, Australia had a mining boom somewhat analogous to what it is having today, with the only difference that the countries whose industrialisation was fuelled by Australian minerals were Japan, Italy and Spain rather than China and India.

What that meant was that at the very time anthropogenic global warming was “discovered” by writers like Barrie Pittock in the 1980s (his first major article was ‘Recent Climatic Change in Australia’ from 1983) politicians were being advised via roads departments directly by the car and related industries. Murray Lonie, after whom the 1980 ‘Victorian Transport Study’ upon which freeway expansion in Melbourne has been based was named, was originally an executive with General Motors. It says a lot about Australia’s politicians if any government chose or was forced to use someone likely to be so biased to assess transport policy! Along with the findings of the 2006 documentary The Greenhouse Mafia, this proves how corporations directly responsible for Australia’s very poor greenhouse emissions have been indisputably and constantly at very close call to politicians of both major parties, whilst climate belts have shifted so far that Perth now has the climate Carnarvon had before 1967. International strategies for reducing global greenhouse emissions must make countering such influence a top priority.

Even if Australia’s politicians are seriously not greenhouse sceptics (exceedingly doubtful with John Howard to mention only one), they are on a tight leash and have never showed themselves willing to execute essential changes to Australian energy and transport policy that would threaten the profits of the coal and aluminum industries, from greatly improved energy efficiency in houses to full taxation of aviation fuel to fund high-speed rail – which Australia should have developed decades ahead of countries like France and Japan.

As it stands, neither major parties nor even climate researchers are willing to come in tough on major greenhouse emitters, creating a situation where Australia alone could create runaway climate change without being policed internationally – as it should have been ever since the problem began. What is worse is that if the influence of these corporations grows, they might well deny climate changes even more obvious than those in Western Australia over the past forty-five years.

Greenhouse sceptics as a carryover from Stalinism in China?

Today in the Sydney Morning Herald, there is some strange news that it is not only Australia where greenhouse sceptics have tremendous political influence. I outline in the link the fact that greenhouse sceptics are more often than not ordinary working people who would suffer a great deal from serious moves to reduce greenhouse emissions and believe adaptation is cheaper and more efficient than mitigation. The trouble with this view is that adaptation is very likely to make the problem worse, especially in a nation like Australia possessing a surfeit of fossil fuel resources.

What the Sydney Morning Herald is surprisingly showing is that in formerly Stalinist China, despite privatisation and extremely rapid economic growth, greenhouse sceptics may have more influence in academia than they do in Australia:

"Global warming is a bogus proposition," says Zhang Musheng, one of China's most influential intellectuals and a close adviser to a powerful and hawkish general in the People's Liberation Army, Liu Yuan.

Mr Zhang told the Herald that global warming was an American ruse to sell green energy technology and thereby claw its way out of its deep structural economic problems.

According to another Australian source, Zhang is a "left leaning" intellectual. If this is remotely true, it suggests that for all its rapid economic growth, China remains in many ways a fundamentally Stalinist nation whereby the interests of a dictatorial ruling class dominate despite growth of a type Mao Zedong could never have wanted or even imagined. What the ruling class of China will do in the future is an interesting question given the country's demographic decline as outlined by The Economist in Graysia a month ago. It may make it hard for China to adapt new technology, especially with such an old population and extreme scarcity of flat land. China is also turning to the much-discredited policy of farm subsidies to stabilise its economy: Beijing now pays more in farm subsidies than even France or Germany. As I outlined with Japan here, this may be a key cause of its low birth rate since removing farm subsidies would permit construction of affordable housing.

Still, once China's population falls into free-fall, one cannot say even a China that lags behind Europe in efficiency is a threat to the planet's ecosystems as an Australia with a pacified working class and a surfeit of fossil fuels.

It’s not de-funding, it’s equitably taxing

In my email today, I had an advertisement for Credo Mobile Phones given to me by the American journal Mother Jones (MoJo). I had never expected it to be an advertisement, but the point of de-funding the greenhouse sceptics is one which really needs serious attention.

Greenhouse sceptics are very marginal in most of the world today. However, in non-academic suburbs and rural areas of Australia they are essentially mainstream, yet greenhouse-sceptic opinions among Australia’s politicians do not result from the car-dependence of Australia’s low-density suburbs. They result instead from Australia’s surfeit of mineral and energy resources, which in turn gives greenhouse-emitting industries in Australia unique wealth and hence political influence.

As I have explained many times before, most countries in Eurasia and the Americas do not have any significant deposits of major lithophile metals, and the less energy-intensive chalcophile metals are too scarce in the crust to be a long-term resource. This allows the overwhelming scientific view that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are the cause of observed global warming to be universal in parliaments.

The results are that governments of these countries, which actually have no need for environmental regulations, are able to plan for a rapid transition to renewable energy and electric cars or mass transit. The social costs of a selfish and inhospitable culture and the potential for a demographic time bomb of extreme old age dependency ratios are very great. There is likewise no doubt that government regulation, as Johan Surkyn and Ron Lesthaeghe have shown in their relationship between government size and religion (which determines how gentle and hospitable a culture is), is the cause of the extremely selfish and inhospitable cultures dominant in Europe, East Asia, Canada and New Zealand today. (In fact, this character of these cultures may worsen Australia’s destructive carbon emissions by encouraging people who might consider migrating to these countries to settle in the gentler culture of suburban Australia).

In Australia, by contrast, mineral companies have had virtually complete control over the country’s energy policies ever since the first lithophile mining boom of the 1950s. Their complete control was seen in the dreadful Lonie Report of 1980 - written not by urban planners or economists but by the chiefs of Broken Hill Proprietaries and the Country Roads Board - and in Australia’s laggardly status with renewable energy and emissions reductions. Those within and outside Australia who wish for the country to improve its emissions from the highest per capita to the lowest (the only acceptable situation) need to realise that this grip on policy by corporations with great wealth and vested interests in unrestricted emissions in their hands must be broken completely for anything to be achieved.

My opinion - strange as it might seem - is that corporate taxes really must be judged on the natural inorganic resources available. Whilst I do not deny that high taxes can lead to inefficiency, even Kevin Williamson admits that when they become wealthy enough corporations are able to control governments - and nowhere is this more possible or real than in Australia. Even if taxes on corporations in the Enriched World are undoubtedly excessive, those in the Unenriched World may be quite inadequate. Indeed, Australia’s 30 percent company tax allows corporations more political influence than a tax haven would permit in the Enriched World, whereas similar rates in Europe stifle economic and family development completely. Capping mining income would, as I said in my last post, not affect Australia’s mineral output significantly and would give a genuine opportunity to give Australia a public transit system superior to any in the Enriched World. It would also mean that Australia could invest in solar power without having demands of the fossil fuel industry on its back.

The trouble is that Australia’s working class - the people whose duty it should be to do this - live comfortable lives that protesting would greatly disturb. More than that, those in Western Australia - the very state whose climate has become unrecognisable from pre-1969 climates purely via man-made global warming - is the state whose working masses rejected the mining tax most vehemently, even those in southwestern Australia whose rainfall has declined by fifty percent and judging by the last five years is declining at an exponential rate.

Coorong salinisation shows Megalogenis is right

In today’s Age, there is a despairing article showing how very low flows in the Murray River is already changing the former estuary in the Coorong, making it five times as salty as the sea and eliminating its outlet to the ocean completely.

Whilst a ten-degree poleward expansion since 1975 of the Hadley circulation is clearly responsible for the record low flows in the Murray River – and as I said earlier could have been predicted without the sophisticated computer models now used by the CSIRO (all we really needed were paleoclimatic indicators from the Tertiary), that does not mean we should do something to prevent the Coorong from becoming a sterile wasteland.

I have always thought George Megalogenis right in saying it would not be a bad thing if Australia were a net importer of food because of the very low runoff ratios and consequent fragility of Australian hydrological systems, as shown by the following data based upon Tom McMahon’s brilliant book Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges.

Comparative Köppen BS, Cfa, Cfb, and Cs climate runoffs in Australia and other developed nations
Mean annual rainfall	Typical runoff in Australia	Typical runoff in Europe, the Americas and New Zealand	Ratio of Australian runoff	Ratio of Australian evapotranspiration (rainfall minus runoff)
280 mm	2 mm	30 mm	1:15	23:20
380 mm	10 mm	90 mm	1:9	≈5:4
650 mm	30 mm	180 mm	1:6	≈4:3
1,150 mm	250 mm	750 mm	1:3	9:4

Recent record low flows in the Murray suggest that under man-made global warming the extreme age of Australia’s soils, which caused the original difference through requiring much higher floral rooting densities to absorb minimal phosphate that is provided in highly bioavailable forms in the very young soils of Eurasia, the Americas and New Zealand, may have an exaggerated effect.

If this is correct, Megalogenis’ September 2007 Australian article (mentioned above) is a blanket understatement. Runoffs from the last few years represent expected conditions under present atmospheric CO₂ levels. This means levels of runoff ten percent or less those observed from 1885 to 1996, and worse still the runoff includes that runoff which in the absence of irrigation would evaporate rather than reach the Coorong.

Hence, Australia cannot afford to allow any water that might reach the Coorong to be lost in the long term, so that saving the Coorong really does mean not irrigation in the Murray-Darling basin whatsoever. Since paleoclimate records give no evidence that at projected future carbon dioxide levels there will be any winter rain for grain crops, Australia’s only option is to import its food supply.

Most Australians probably think it unfair that Australia should have to import its food supply with so much farmland and would fear the extra cost of transport will add to global warming. The realities are instead:

1. Australia’s farmland is all very low-yielding due to extremely old soils
2. Australia’s abundance of land and energy deposits provides very low living costs
3. Australia’s abundant farmland makes farmers on land abroad farmed sustainably for thousands of years economically unviable without subsidies
4. Large-scale farmland revegetation in the Murray-Darling Basin provides opportunities for phasing out farm subsidies in most Eurasian and North American nations without the risk of these nations becoming wholly dependent on tourism and technology
5. Those services are merely, as even Hans Hoppe exceedingly sensibly says, the services they are at a least disadvantage in producing rather than those they have special advantages producing.
6. Australia’s abundant land gives its residents a privilege in low living costs that present climate change and greenhouse emissions show unsustainable. It similarly gives its farmers a privilege in cheap land – and low prices naturally cause poor maintenance and inefficiency, as was observed with grazing in western Queensland as early as 1957.
7. If food prices in Australia increase, it will be merely to normal global levels and not to something unusually expensive, especially if one factors in the ecological cost of living in a fragile environment.
8. Farming without lavish subsidies will offer hope that a culture where children are not a liability can develop and dangerously low fertility disappear abroad. This is because unsubsidised farmers have an incentive to hand their property down in a way not present with tenant or long-term mortgage-payers in cities.
9. The cost of protecting Australia under an “Australian Treaty” might not be as high as Europe’s and East Asia’s lavish farm subsidies, especially if returns from high-cost tourism in which a visit to Australia is seen as the most special of experiences (in environmental terms, for the European or North American or New Zealander, it is a step into the Earth’s history).

The issue of whose side the public is on is too important

Today in the Age, Penny Wong appears to be complaining about the Coalition's refusal to sign up for totally unacceptable greenhouse emissions reductions.

Whilst, as I have said way, way too often, Wong is herself ludicrously half-hearted, the real issue of what the ultraconservative, poorly-understood Australian public wants and thinks is unfortunately never mentioned. The mere fact that polls suggest support for emissions reductions - though surveys are not done in a manner such as to create what I feel is necessary - is hardly sufficient when evidence from abroad suggests those who are most sceptical of global warming are likely to have the largest families. Moreover, the Coalition may well sense (and in my opinions they have every right to) that the apparent recession provides, as the one in the early 1990s did, an opportunity for radically downsizing public services and quite possibly for much more thoroughgoing deregulation than carried out by Kennett and Howard.

The failure to realise the possibility that Australia's next generation will be greenhouse-sceptic to an extent unforeseen abroad has another side: that, as Dennis Prager said, Europeans really care about little apart from their own leisure and pleasure. If they really did care about global warming, they would be trying as hard as they could to nullify Australia's immense advantage in cheap land by conscientiously refusing to ever buy food grown in Australia and to use as little as possible of materials from Australia.

Even if such a move does not reduce Australia's wealth to the level of the rest of the world, it would at least increase the wealth of Europe, East Asia and New Zealand above absolute zero. That of itself would enhance their culture's chance of survival and reverse the masculinisation (secularisation) that is leading to problems like lowest-low fertility and collapsing pension systems.

Caution before taking sceptics seriously

A site shown to me by my recent RMIT minder recently published an article stating that 2008 was an unusually cool year and that it is justification for global warming scepticism.

It is a pity I have been unable to contact John J. Ray, since I could show him by means of decile maps for 2008 that the rainfall over southern Victoria and Tasmania, which has shown alarming declines of 25 percent since 1997, showed not the tiniest improvement this year. In fact, 2008 ranks as the sixth-driest year in Hobart since records began in 1882.

Hobart’s climate has dried out from anthropogenic global warming so much that four of the twelve driest years and none of the thirty-seven wettest years have occurred since 1999. (Indeed, of these thirty-seven wettest years only two – 1985 and 1996 – have occurred since the first “magic gate” was passed in 1976).

Even the claims about 2008 being a cool year are false. Here in Melbourne it was yet again among the warmest ten percent of years since 1910, whilst over Central Australia where the monsoon did not penetrate as between 1997 and 2001 it was similarly warm compared to historic temperature records. Only over the densely-settled area bounded by Nowra, Bundaberg and Moree was 2008 a noticeably cool year: in fact in Sydney, despite rainfall being a little below normal, it was among the coolest ten percent of years since 1910. This would mean that, even if 2008 was still warm over Australia as a whole, it was perceived as a cool year because it was cool over the small densely settled region of the continent.

Such anomalies, noted in the first Annual Climate Statement I read back in 2000, are in fact more common than even the Bureau makes them out to be. They are most notable for the dry years of 1905, 1928 and 1935, which all rank among Australia’s eight driest years on record, but would be perceived as distinctly wet by most Australians (see for instance the Hobart table above).

All in all, rainfall and temperature data for 2008, even if the Eucla and Goldfields have hardly maintained their excessive rainfall of the 1997 to 2006 decade, is no evidence against man-made global warming.

Strangely, one is hearing no claims that it is the “Asian Haze” that has cause the drying of Melbourne’s dams (though I imagine at least some laymen do believe this): it is possible that the “Asian Haze” could reduce rainfall over Victoria and Tasmania, though I cannot believe it could do so to the extent seen since 1997.

“Greenhouse robots” might be real, but they’re not who we think they are

In the face of a rainfall for the last two months of one-sixth of the 1885 to 1996 mean and for the last three years has been only 22 percent of that 1885 to 1996 average, I have generally had the extremely minor satisfaction that Australia’s major newspapers have avoided going towards positions that suggest, contrary to all paleoclimatic data, that global warming is not man-made but cyclical.

With no rain having fallen in Melbourne since the seventh of October and none forecast for the next week, one hopes that the major newspapers will move from a position of acceptance tainted by refusal to accept the need for head-on struggle with those forces responsible for global warming such as the coal and car industries to a position of demanding radical change via protests that have been conspicuously absent despite warming from such scientists as George Monbiot.

In this context, The Australian’s most recent article, titled ‘Greenhouse robots clamp down on true climate debate’ is an embarrassment. The manner in which it asserts that the decline in Melbourne’s rainfall, which up to 1996 had a reliability as good as that of Europe, could be part of a natural cycle and that temperature increases which recent data show to be unprecedented in the past four hundred and twenty thousand years could be related to the power of the sun, clearly does not fit in with what experienced scientists know.

What The Australian might have a point about is that those who recognise man-made global warming as real do not seem to provide as wide a variety of evidence as they should. Never does one see in papers like Green Left Weekly the story of Western District lakes drying out for the first time since the Last Glacial Maximum. Nor are rainfall changes ever mentioned in even the most “alarmist” books on global warming.

Similarly, few moderates advocating desalination or more efficient water use ever realise that such moves will encourage many of the ecological problems inherent in agriculture in Australia.

Nor do people ever discuss the paradox of Australia having the least productive soils and at the same time the lowest farm subsidies in the world.

It is the failure to discuss these critical issues that amounts to “robotics” and should be challenged, not the existence of anthropogenic climate change!

"Mosque of Global Warming"??

One thing that strikes me about the more extreme sceptics of global warming is how they seem to take so much of their utterly imaginary and ridiculous "liturgies" of their so-called "Church of Global Warming" from Islam.

For instance, saying "Praise be to Algore" is exactly like "Praise Be to Allah" of the Exordium or opening chapter of the Qur'an, and they even borrow from Christian Churches whom most sceptics are devout members of.

The use of "Algore" or "AlGore" might be interpreted as meaning "the gore" and fits with the way climate sceptics use the phrase "Goreacle" as if Al Gore is viewed by people who believe global warming is manmade (which evidence of past Victorian lake levels compared to present complete drying shows conclusively) as a god rather than as a hero for his research into a critically important topic.

Another aspect of the way greenhouse sceptics view global warming advocates in a way exactly akin to Muslims can be seen with the symbol for the so-called "Church of Global Warming" The crescent and star suggests in a silly way how global warming believers are supposed to want to run people's lives in the way Muslim clerics do. Even if in Australia alone restrictions of a punitive nature might be necessary to deal with real or potential ecological devastation, even scientists called "alarmist loons" by sceptics actually do not believe in abolishing freedom or democracy like Islamic activists do.

All in all, knowing these people I wonder why sceptics don't speak of a "Mosque of Global Warming". Calling it a "Mosque" would fit much better with the way these people:

- speak of Islam as a cult (à la Srđa Trifković) and do the same with global warming
- see believers in global warming as ignoring a huge amount of evidence (which is actually phoney evidence without exception) because of devotion to people like Al Gore and consequent indoctrination like in mosque schools with the Qur'an
- see both Islam and global warming as threats to core values of Western, Christian civilisation
- see both as religions competing with Christianity for human souls

The absurd "rituals" spoken of by greenhouse sceptics really should be further ammunition to support the reality of man-made global warming, and it's a pity nobody has though to use them as such.

How to do an about-face on a critical issue

If my experience with my RMIT minder is accurate, greenhouse sceptics will do an about-face when trying to deal with the theories of the "Asian Haze" having increased rainfall over tropical Australia – in spite of the fact that larger increases in the Eucla and Goldfields cannot be explained by the haze and are almost certainly, in the words of CSIRO scientist Ian Smith, “a signature of global warming”.

When I first mentioned the theory of the “Asian Haze”, my minder said that it was far more reasonable an explanation for the rainfall increases in northwestern and central-western Australia and the catastrophic rainfall declines that have occurred at the same time over southern and southwestern Australia than anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

On Tuesday, however, he said that the “Asian Haze” is nothing more than an effort to "shore up holes in the crumbling theory of global warming". Like many Americans who talk of a "Church of Global Warming" and often refer to Al Gore as “Pope Goreus” (ludicrously they call him both “Pope Goreus the IV” and “Pope Goreus the VI”) my minder believes that global cooling is imminent, which would one imagines mean southern Australia regaining its former winter rainfall. However, nobody in the CSIRO or BOM dares to believe this even with probable pressure to do so from car and fossil fuel corporations. Again akin to American sceptics, my minder actually says car and fossil fuel corporations have too much faith in anthropogenic global warming.

Realistically, the investment the CSIRO and BOM have quite probably invested too much money on studying the “Asian Haze” and should have tried to fine-tune their global warming models to explain why the changes have been so large. Had they done that, we might already know a great deal that is still unknown and be able to forecast with greater accuracy future climate changes.

A better understanding of greenhouse sceptics

Greenhouse sceptics (also called "climate sceptics", "climate change deniers", "greenhouse denialists" or "contrarians") have been a very important part of climate change policy in Australia. As a serious, almost self-taught, climate scientist, it is impossible for me to accept any cause except man-made global warming (and possibly stratospheric ozone depletion) for observed rainfall changes over Australia since 1968 because neither the instrumental record since 1885 nor the few Holocene paleoclimate records show parallels. While I actually agree with the problems greenhouse sceptics have with climate models, in a way rare among those who do believe in global warming, I am willing to suggest the possibility increased greenhouse gases will cause much greater changes (at least in rainfall) than any model suggests.

Most "believers" in global warming have a tendency to view greenhouse sceptics as a small group of industry-funded scientists whose motivation is preserving corporate profit. There is a general perception that those without a direct vested interest in the production of greenhouse gases cannot be greenhouse sceptics.

Greenhouse sceptics are much more numerous than a few businessmen. Moreover, the share of greenhouse sceptics in the Australian population is very likely to increase in the future because the small conservative sector of the population producing most future children consists very substantially of greenhouse sceptics. Most people who would consider themselves greenhouse sceptics are not scientists, but neither do they work for road transport, oil, coal, aluminium or titanium industries.

“Typical” greenhouse sceptics are ordinary working people concerned with making enough money to improve his or her standard of living. Most sceptics are fairly poor but have never relied on welfare, typically working what left-wingers in universities would consider long working hours to gain enough money for a large family house in the outer suburban "mortgage belt". Prices for the most basic necessities like food and housing are thus the essential issues for them.

A natural consequence is that greenhouse sceptics believe very firmly that any regulation by government of the economy is wrong. Private entrepreneurs, sceptics believe, will always be more efficient at using any resource as efficiently as possible: private property rights as the most essential right of all and public regulation - let alone public ownership - produces inherent inefficiencies that never solve the problems their advocates intend. Most sceptics believe that government should eliminate itself from wealth redistribution, education, health care, transport, housing, and even water supply, so that these services can be provided by what they call the "natural family", private charity or private enterprise. Greenhouse sceptics have much higher levels of charitable giving and voluntary contribution than advocates of global warming, and they are more likely even to return incorrect change or offer basic help with directions.

The philosophy underpinning this belief is known as the "Austrian School". Austrians believe that every exchange of commodities or services must be absolutely voluntary. Government taxation or regulation is called "coercion" by Austrians and equated with violence. Greenhouse scepticism is a natural result of the beliefs mentioned in the previous paragraph. When one believes all government interference to be unethical, laws to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases are seen as a particular egregious form of coercion, as is protest for radical change to achieve reductions. Consequently, Austrians (and many other conservative Christians) cannot believe anthropogenic global warming the disaster other scientists view it. A few Austrians hint in a quite far-fetched way at assigning private property rights to the atmosphere - which in Australia would mean requiring people to live without electricity or cars at all - but most believe global warming will have positive impacts and will mean longer growing seasons in cool regions, many fewer deaths from cold weather, and improved crop yields from higher levels of carbon dioxide.

In short, greenhouse sceptics, rather than being materialist businesspeople primarily motivated by money, are actually simple working people whose scepticism is caused by their firm belief in nonaggression that does not allow government regulation of private property. I myself have debated with a sceptic at RMIT - and feel I have benefitted greatly in my ability to argue in favour of man-made global warming!