The plain facts about runaway climate change that are never heard

Today, as I had a look at the latest BOM forecast showing that Melbourne will be over 30˚ for the next seven days — and the forecast goes no further – it is painfully clear to me that we are seeing a move into another phase of runaway climate change.

As you should be able to see from the latest BOM synoptic forecasts, what is happening is that a stationary monsoon low far south over the continent, and two equally stationary anticyclones to the southwest and southeast of the continent are blocking any cold fronts or cool changes over the southeast and over the west coast. This has produced an endless spell of record hot weather over the historical winter rainfall zone between Northwest Cape and Cape Arid due to continuous flow of hot easterly air without countering flows from the milder ocean.

Synoptic forecast for next four days. Note creation of a super-monsoon over the interior of Australia with cold fronts far to the south of Tasmania. This super-monsoonal circulation is likely to be stable for many weeks, even months, beyond the last forecast day (two days later than this map reaches)

What the map above shows is that there is not the smallest sign of any cool change over the southeast of the west coast even after the last forecast day of January 27. Instead, what appears to be happening is that the super-monsoon will simply intensify and intensify into the last few days of January, and further into February and March. The persistent block south of Cape Leeuwin will be stationary and forbidding any cool changes for many months. This will mean that Melbourne‘s forecast ten consecutive days (minimally!) over 30˚C will not end until the close of March at the very earliest! Thus, Melbourne will have had sixty-three consecutive days over 30˚C before there is any prospect that a retreating super-monsoon will allow the weather to finally cool. The historic record was eight, occurring four times in:

1. 31 January, 1890 to 7 February, 1890
2. 28 January, 1898 to 4 February, 1898
3. 25 January, 1951 to 1 February, 1951
4. 15 February, 1961 to 22 February, 1961

In fact, the most consecutive days over 25˚C in the virgin period up to 1973 was a mere seventeen between 16 January 1951 and 1 February 1951.

This will apply even more to morning temperatures – the possibility of a morning under 20˚C, let alone under the 14˚C that we would average but for our own obscene greenhouse emissions performance, is probably nil until May at the earliest. In the worst-case (and most likely) scenario, we will never see a morning under 14˚C ever again.

There is no doubt that the public is aware runaway global warming is occurring, even if a majority are largely unaware just how responsible Australia is for this looming disaster. This seen via a table of largest greenhouse emitters from Dimitri Lafleur’s 2018 ‘Aspects of Australia’s fugitive and overseas emissions from fossil fuel exports’:

Country	Percent of Present Global Emissions (extraction-based)	Percent of Cumulative Emissions (extraction-based)
China	23.54%	13.23%
United States	12.44%	27.07%
Russian Federation	9.46%	12.15%
Saudi Arabia	4.47%	4.69%
India	4.20%	2.85%
Australia	3.22%	2.38%
Iran	2.83%	2.62%
Indonesia	2.80%	1.77%
Canada	2.77%	2.92%
South Africa	2.35%	2.31%
Mexico	1.78%	1.92%
United Arab Emirates	1.43%	1.23%
Top 12 countries	71.29%	75.04%
Top 12 countries excluding US	58.85%	48.07%

As this shows, Australia is the world’s sixth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and its contribution is increasing substantially over time. This demonstrates how ineffective policies to reduce Australia’s emissions are, and/or how deep the hegemony of the car and coal lobbies upon government policy is. Either way, Australia’s bad performance is untenable, as has been demonstrated by Julian Bolleter, Bill Grace, Sarah Foster, Anthony Duckworth and Paula Hooper in their recent ‘Projected Extreme Heat Stress in Northern Australia and the Implications for Development Policy’, where they show that attempts to develop the natural-resource-glutted interior are likely to be untenable under virtually certain 3˚C rises in temperature — rises that, it must be stated, would have been avoided if the rest of the world had in the middle 1990s insisted upon Australia achieving zero net emissions no later than 2010 and preferably by 2005. Bolster and his team demonstrate that wet-bulb temperatures in northern Australia are certain to reach levels not seen anywhere since the Eocene and ipso facto deadly for mammals who lose the ability to remove heat.

What neither Bolster and his team nor the Bureau of Meteorology have the courage to say — fear the powerful and rich will sack them is undeniable but unspoken — is that

1. immediate and radical changes in Australia’s energy, transport and land-use policy are decades overdue
2. Australia is every bit as much a rogue state for its abysmal environment performance as the Gulf monarchies are for this and for their support of Islamic terrorism
3. global class struggle to ostracise Australia and the Gulf States — with the target of a workers’ revolution to expropriate their oil sheikhs and fossil fuel barons — was overdue in 1996 and is up to forty years overdue now
4. runaway anthropogenic climate change is likely to be fatal to a substantial proportion of the human population in the relatively proximate future due to wet-bulb temperatures far above the historic maximum of around 31˚C or 87.6˚F

As a final word, Diogo S. A. Araujo, Francesco Marra, Cory Merow and Efthymios I. Nikolopoulos have noted that historical 100-year (or, more probably, 300-year) droughts are likely to become the norm by 2100 under likely emissions scenarios. In Central Chile and Zona Sur historical 300- or 500-year droughts have already become the norm since 2010 due to the greenhouse pollution of Australia and the Gulf States, yet even radical media like Red Flag Magazine fail to note this fact. These facts, much more in fact than Arctic warming, are what confirm runaway man-made climatic change, and what we are seeing today shows how rapid it can become in the absence of demolition of the existing corporate power structure.

Docklands: an odd harbinger of sport‘s future

Although I have long been suspicious that – as those close to me like to presume – sport will return to something like what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, this article by Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel shows beyond doubt that this is unlikely.

For a start, no vaccine has been found against any past coronavirus. A drug is a more promising solution, but Dr. Emmanuel says that it is extremely unlikely that lockdown laws will end altogether for eighteen months, or before October 2021. In the context of the shut-down sporting industry, this has several implications:

1. Given the extreme risk of transmission of such a contagious virus, it is unlikely spectators will attend again anywhere before the 2021/2022 southern summer sporting season
• Even a return of spectators in 2021/2022 is by no means certain or even likely
• The longest possible time before spectators might return is not even noted or discussed, as if it is plausible that many years might pass before spectators return
2. Sports that do return will have to play with no spectators until at least the 2021/2022 southern summer season and possibly for many seasons beyond
3. Sports that do play will be totally reliant on television (and perhaps radio) audiences for several complete seasons and a revised revenue model will be required
4. It is quite probable that sports that do return will play in neutral venues in remote areas freed from COVID-19

So far, sporting commentators have ignored the long-term implications of the points noted above. However, it is clear to me from my knowledge of the history of cricket and [Australian rules] football that the unavailability of the traditional live audience will have profound, permanent, long-term effects on how sports are played:

1. Because television’s main revenue source – corporate advertising – is likely to return several seasons before spectators do, television contracts will grow rapidly once sport returns without spectators
2. Sports leagues and rule-makers will have at least one season and most likely three or four to adjust rules to make their sports more suitable for television
3. These changes will no doubt:
1. Make sporting contests much shorter and more stop-start-stop-start-stop to fit in more games and advertisements on television
2. Make playing top-level sport more exclusive by requiring more specific and specialised body types to play particular sports
3. Make playing sports much riskier because shorter playing periods and stop-start play will allow players to put much more energy into short bursts, creating much more intense contact (no necessarily player-to-player)
4. The changes noted in (3) will make it much less worthwhile to attend sports with the much smaller quantity of play
5. The requirement of strict quarantine for players to protect against contagious COVID-19 and future viruses will no doubt mean that sport will be much more confined to the major leagues than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The only exception will be junior leagues for players too young to play in the major leagues
• Rather than have minor leagues, players of lesser ability will serve in the major leagues as reserve players, creating systems akin to the “huge interchange bench” feared by Eddie McGuire in my old Football Year 1991
6. Lack of minor leagues will produce much more pruning of junior players
• However talent pools will be much smaller due to more rigid size requirements (à la telegenic basketball and volleyball) as discussed in point (3(3)).
7. Players will be required to develop at much younger ages due to absence of opportunities in lower leagues for slow-developing talent.
• Typically they will go from high school to high-level professional leagues – previously a great rarity seen only for such precocious talents as the late Kobe Bryant

There is, in fact, a very strong possibility that sports when they do return will be under a totally new model, but one reminiscent of the changes brought about on [Australian rules] football by the replacement of Waverley by Docklands twenty years ago. The creation of closed-roof stadiums has mimicked this to some extent in other sports, but it may not have had the same effect it has on football.

What is unique to the AFL but which COVID-19 may make the global norm is centralised grounds, where all matches are played at a few nearby venues. Although the AFL has centralised grounds only for its Melbourne matches, it is possible that MLB and the NHL may adopt this policy for entire post-COVID-19 leagues. It is indeed possible that outdated facilities – as the VFL’s old suburban grounds were due to of of government neglect, health regulations or fixed ticket prices – will not be replaced.

It is also possible that – as has happened in the AFL to a considerable extent since the phase-out of the suburban grounds – teams will no longer be identified geographically or locally but will be truly global businesses identified by name (what we could call “brand”). There is some advantage to this in that teams may not be able to be located in unviable markets and will have to work out themselves where to look for supporters; however, I have not spent any time looking at the full implications.

Whilst under present conditions this new model may be necessary, experience watching football and other sports makes me more than critical. It is a model of restricted opportunities, necessarily fast player development, and potentially very high injury risk. All of this I have recognised ever since studying not merely football and the transition to Docklands, but even cricket and the transition away from first-class cricket – which has been played for the last time before I write this – to one-day and 20/20 forms.

The inherent limitations of a political élite

Today, conservative journalist Rod Dreher – a man I have followed since his 2005 Crunchy Cons – provides a revealing look at a problem of which I have long been very aware without ever saying a word or even taking the slightest notice thereof. This problem – one which I can understand very easily – is in the words of ‘Ace of Spades’ that:

“the Establishment’s (my capitalisation) failure to see the appeal of Trump represents their own limitations, not Trump supporters’”

Dreher argues in his article ‘Trump: Fishtown’s Champion Against Belmont’ that the media conservatives who support causes like those of the Politically Incorrect Guides are totally different from the people to whom Donald Trump strongly appeals:

“This alienation separates Trump’s voters from the constituency of another firebrand insurgent, Ted Cruz. Cruz draws from married voters, evangelical Christians, the elderly and those who identify as “very conservative.” These folks might be angry about the political process, but their anger is ideological and their lives – filled with family and church – are fundamentally intact.”

“Trump’s voters, instead, wear an almost existential sense of betrayal. He relies on unmarried voters, individuals who rarely attend church services and those without much higher education. Many of these Trump voters have abandoned the faith of their forefathers and myriad social benefits that come with it. Their marriages have failed, and their families have fractured. The factories that moved overseas used to provide not just high-paying jobs, but also a sense of purpose and community. Their kids (and themselves) might be more likely to die from a heroin overdose than any other group in the country.”

What I can say re-reading this is that the problem of conflict between what ‘Ace of Spaces’ calls:

1. the “gentry” – those who care predominantly about lifestyle and aesthetic issues and
2. “economic/populist people” – primarily concerned about tangible wants and not how a Platonic “good society” would look

is one of the most important conflicts within a society. The first and most important part of this question is that it stands completely independent from the liberal versus conservative, Christian versus atheist battles that have dominated cultural thinking. That my mother and brother – increasingly committed atheists with age – cannot understand this conflict can be seen in their inability to grasp how claimed Catholic miracles such as Marian apparitions (e.g. Fatima) or stigmata and inedia (e.g. Therese Neumann, Alexandrina da Costa) were more successful converting highly educated literati than converting the less-educated working classes.

This observation, however, becomes explicable via the contrasting desires of these two groups. Literati – like most groups in the “liberal arts” – tend to be largely concerned with matters of lifestyle and ideology, and thus are prone to not be practically motivated by the difficulties their ideologies may create for people of lesser intellectual capabilities. Their views are shaped by culture and aesthetics, which can be either liberal or conservative depending upon what they observe in the lower classes. Many intellectuals in early and mid-twentieth century Europe saw the demands of union members, lower income workers and people on welfare as pure greed and wanting wealth earned or inherited by others. These intellectuals were also frequently disparaging toward the culture created by industrialisation, even where improved fertiliser technology created hopeless comparative disadvantages in their older industries of farming and fishing. In contrast, in today’s globalised world the tendency is to see greed within extremely wealthy corporations who exploit workers in distant nations rather than within the “precariat” (freelancers, construction workers and other temporary employees) for whom a stable job, homeownership and decent retirement is an impossibility.

Workers, by comparison, are concerned with the practicalities of making a living and do not care about the aesthetics nor the morals. Thus, it tends to be difficult for them to accept the rigid moral standards of either the “gentry left” (e.g. environmental protection via higher taxes or increased regulation) or the “gentry right” (no extramarital sex, no public welfare), whilst a narrow nationalism via restricted trade and subsidies to manufacturing offers hope to them. Like with the “gentry”, however, these working class demands can either be turned to the Left or the Right – I am familiar with how Jeff Kennett used populist demands to reform inefficient government to major advantage in the outer suburbs during the 1992 and 1996 election, despite being increasingly unable to forgive the global climatic effects of his policies that spent $6,000,000,000 on freeways. I am also aware of how soon after many farmers and small businessmen affected by globalisation turned to One Nation because they felt that public money was lavished upon migrants and Aborigines, who were taking their jobs.

In contrast, workers in Europe and East Asia lack competition with indigenous peoples or recent immigrants, and being more exposed to the wealth of the very rich are more likely to channel their anger towards them or to their own corporations setting up shop in low-wage nations. This was true even with very poorly educated workers: their only interest was a more comfortable and secure lifespan, while Catholicism (and the miracles associated therewith) preaches simplicity and asceticism incompatible with these demands. Thus, the workers of Europe and East Asia are – even with the same basic needs as Australian workers – much more socially liberal.

The key part is that none of these working-class demands, whatever they lead to, are talked about by academics of any political stripe, nor by less-educated mystics who also saw something wrong with how the world was changing. It’s a mistake that academics must avoid to understand most political trends in the modern age, and one too easily forgotten by myself when I have been reading new ideologies.

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.