The dangers produced by political polarisation

In his new article ‘Rethinking Polarization’, American political scientist Jonathan Raunch argues that the increasing polarisation of the American electorate since Bill Clinton’s impeachment is purely and essentially a reflection of fear of the enemy rather than belief in the party one follows.

Raunch notes that the most recent polls form last year show that Democrats are now as averse to compromise as Republicans – who have long been criticised on that issue. However, what Raunch shows is that:

1. the political center has little interest in politics and its reluctance makes those who do show interest more extreme
2. polarisation has been affective in nature – Republicans have developed a hatred of Democrats and Democrats a hatred of Republicans
3. people hate the opposite party because of disappointment in their own political party

Raunch also argues that the collapse of mainline Protestant denominations has displaced apocalyptic and redemptive impulses into politics, and when one combines this with stagnant real wages for the less educated and the absolute decline of industrial jobs, poor white men become marginalised and extremely open to demagoguery.

When Raunch points out this, I am reminded of the situation in Protestant parts of Weimar Germany. There, urban workers, who had unlike their US counterparts completely discarded organised religion, turned en masse to the Communists, whilst the remainder of ancestrally Protestant Weimar Germany turned en masse to the Nazis. The radically individuoegalitarian nature of the Left’s “identity politics” where each person is special due to his or her lifestyle choice and has no connections with even adjacent residents, was also replicated in the culture of Weimar Germany. This lack of connections eliminates senses of shared citizenship.

Dietrich Rüschemeyer showed in his Capitalist Development and Democracy that the combination of these features with a powerful class of large resource owners was – in part – the cause of the collapse of Weimar into the totalitarian Nazi regime. There is to my mind little doubt that in the US the owners of large natural resources like coal and oil fields are at least privately hostile to democracy for nonwhite peoples, because mass mobilization of nonwhites would create demands for extremely high tax rates for these corporations. Unlike in Nazi Germany, the Republican Party has been able to make changes – felony disfranchisement, mass incarceration, voter ID – in a gradual manner. However, it does seem plausible that – even if only the “fringe of the fringe” like Lawrence Auster will dare to say so publicly or in print – the Republican Party’s business backers are emotionally dissatisfied with anything bar a lily-white electorate and no income taxes like existed before the Civil War. If this be true, polarisation is likely only to widen, even if its danger should the Republicans gain more and more power would be economic. Big businesses would be propped up by government to the exclusion of other services, which would create severe social (as “pull” factors lessen in the United States and it becomes less attractive to immigrate to) and environmental (via greenhouse gas emissions increases) effects that would flow on to the rest of the globe.

Is this a simple basis for understanding the PIGs?

In recent years, my brother has become more and more critical of the Politically Incorrect Guides and their allies, arguing that the PIGs (as I always call them) have one single objective that is not mentioned in any of their books: to enrich rich people more and more. My brother argues that every policy they argue for is designed to either do this directly or encourage poor people to support their objective.

PIG Policy:

1. Does it enrich rich people?
1. If not, do not support it
2. If it does:
1. Will it help gain poor votes?
1. If it does, support it openly
2. If it does not, support it quietly

When this was discussed, I asked my brother why the PIGs support Christianity. Given that I know traditional religion and moral laws lessen the demands of the majority – if not their actual consumption because of resultant lower taxes and living costs – supporting traditional religion will enrich rich people. It will also help gain the votes of poor people, many of whom fear changing morals from the secular and “big government” Millennial Generation.

In contrast, corporate welfare – consistently ignored by the PIGs although it utterly contradicts their philosophy of zero government regulation – helps make the super-rich richer, so the PIGs simply ignore it for the most part.

Robert P. Murphy is, however, very critical of bank bailouts in his Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal. If my brother’s thesis be true, this could only be because he thinks that they serve as a criticism of Barack Obama, whom the PIGs hate, according to my brother, because he is black and a Democrat rather than because of his policies or dislike of the Constitution as Stephen Hayward says in The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents. The same is true of other PIG-allied groups criticising General Motors, which was once called “Government Motors”.

Philosophically I can only be highly supportive of a constitution that strictly outlaws all business bailouts. Were they outlawed, rich people would lose substantial protection from government, without many costs I can testify from my own life to result from large-scale public welfare. Cuts to corporate welfare would also save a large – if unknown to me – sum of public money to return to the public or to reduce printing of new money. The only problem I do see is that jobs might not be provided rapidly enough to replace those in large businesses after they collapse.

Another book – one of the worst of the series – whose connection to “enriching rich people” I do not see is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East. Paying for aid to Israel must cost rich people a lot of money given the amount of aid given by the US, yet it is supported vigorously by the PIGs despite their general isolationist leanings and the fact that the US aided the most virulent Muslim regimes to fight Communism. Opposing Saudi Arabia as proposed consistently by Robert Spencer in the Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam would not enrich rich people – it would have made Asia more vulnerable to Communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, the contradictions between those two PIGs are indication of very bad quality control in the writing of the series, and even Robert Spencer acknowledged these contradictions when I messaged him many years ago.

“The Rap Bias” and race

Twenty-two years ago, I have a vivid recollection of reading Peter Kreeft’s Ecumenical Jihad and seeing some of the most outlandish claims I have ever read like:

“Even polls by the far-left Los Angeles Times in 1992 proved the existence of a massive media bias against traditional values, especially families, fidelity, morality, and religion.”

“We are not surprised when a teenager, who has typically seen fifteen thousand murders, rapes, and brutal beatings on TV and MTV and has heard this type of behavior encouraged and idealized on rap “music”, turns to violence.”

The notion that children could see fifteen thousand “murders, rapes and brutal beatings” on television or MTV has always made me laugh. So has the claim about the Los Angeles Times after reading such publications as Socialist Alternative, Socialist Worker and Green Left Weekly. Nonetheless, having in 1994 experienced a threatened murder leading to loss of $50 in Keilor Downs, and also bullying of a similar nature at school and during my early years in Carlton, I possessed and possess more sympathy for views like Kreeft’s than those around me would like.

Whilst some rap music – like gangsta rap – certainly does condone violence regardless of what its apologists say, critics neglect that many other genres of cutting-edge music were frequently equally or more violent:

1. heavy metal
2. grunge
3. hardcore punk
4. industrial

Moreover, extreme violence in heavy metal dates back to AC/DC. That band influenced but predate (most of) the above-mentioned sub-genres and were the first band to celebrate violence in their songs, as I have noted many times before. Celebratory violence in rap developed much later, beginning with N.W.A. around seven years after Back in Black’s ‘Shoot to Thrill’ glorified violence against women and stated there were “too many women” in the population.

Nonetheless, as Rachel Powers showed in ‘The Rap Bias’ from Orange Coast four years ago, it is rap that is associated with crime. Power says that:

“The bottom line of this research is that if you are somehow implicated in a crime, or if you are pulled over in a traffic stop, just the presence of rap music on your person or in your car can dramatically affect whether or not you’ll end up being prosecuted and convicted.”

“A [University of Georgia] law professor named Andrea Dennis wrote one of the earliest pieces on this practice, analyzing every case where defendant-authored lyrics were introduced as evidence in a criminal trial. All but one were rap lyrics...”

“The people who thought the lyrics were from a rap song [as opposed to a country song] saw them as more dangerous, offensive, threatening, in need of regulation, and literal.”

The last statement’s context demonstrates how conservative cultural critics simply ignore heavy metal and related genres of what my brother calls “white people’s music” or lump them in with “rap” as Robert Bork ridiculously did in Slouching Towards Gomorrah. This implies that criticism of rap is not related to (justifiable) moral complaints about lyrics condoning violence, but about criticising and blaming blacks – and that rap’s critics believe criticising heavy metal or other white genres will lose votes. However, in my view, the whites who listen to heavy metal are exceedingly unlikely to be persuaded to vote for conservative policies. Rather than being the struggling industrial workers upon whom Bush junior and Trump based their victories, heavy metal listeners are likely to be urban welfare-receiving whites. These people would be extremely unlikely to support tax cuts on bases of race because they would know that blacks suffer the same problems as whites, and because they are extremely dependent on the public sector for essential services.

In contrast, the whites upon whom Bush junior and Trump based their victories were poor rural folk who – owing to laws established between 1840 and 1940 excluding blacks from their communities (see James Löwen’s Sundown Towns) – have no direct contact with blacks and rely on outside media for their images thereof. Unavailability of noncommercial radio and concerts in rural areas means that these rural whites have had zero access to other than “middle-of-the-road” music ever since the tightening and standardisation of commercial radio playlists during the Carter Era. Consequently, they have missed the urban revolution in moral values during the past four decades, and feel severely threatened both socially and economically thereby.

Nonetheless, it is impossible for me to not believe that white musicians and cultural leaders are much more responsible for these radical cultural changes than black, even if white people have shown greater overt resistance to it. Moreover, because audiences for rap and cutting edge white music strongly overlap, criticism of the two needs to be linked and related to the economic and demographic problems faced by today’s Enriched World.

The first newspaper to identify where the climate was moving?

During the middle 1970s, most climate scientists believed that another ice age was imminent, with fears reaching their highest point during the frigid Eastern United States winter of 1976/1977, and in several cool Arctic summers earlier that decade.

In the Northern Hemisphere, a general cooling was widely noticed between 1940 and 1975. For instance:

• there was not one subzero Central England Temperature (CET) month between March 1895 and December 1939, but
• five between 1940 and 1975
• and as many as seven between 1850 and 1895

However, in Australia, annual mean temperatures showed a somewhat different pattern, as can be seen from this graph of annual mean maximum temperature:

As you can see, and as I have noticed since 2000, Australia saw a major rise in mean annual temperatures in the late 1950s, notably from (fiscal year) 1955/1956 to (fiscal year) 1957/1958. There was no downward trend in Australian mean maximum temperature at any point between 1956 and 1975. Only one year (July 1966 to June 1967) between 1957/1958 and 1972/1973 is more than fractionally below the virgin mean.

Whilst these figures would have been valuable to those discussing climate trends during the 1970s, it surprised me that the Brisbane Courier-Mail, in February 1974, published a detailed analysis of January 1974’s super-monsoon that saw an all-Australia rainfall of over 230 millimetres – whereas Australia’s wettest month between 1890 and 1973 was around 128 millimetres!

The Brisbane Courier-Mail’s article, titled ‘Floods Part of Our New CLIMATE Pattern’ was also focused on the unusual equatorward displacement of summer rain belts in the Southern Hemisphere during the 1960s. Great Barrier Reef coral cores suggest that the decade from 1960/1961 to 1969/1970 may have been Queensland’s driest since at least 1631.

What ‘Floods Part of Our New CLIMATE Pattern’ and published on 19 February 1974, was highly prescient about is:

1. the (continuing at an accelerating rate) southward shift of winter rain belts in the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere (central Chile, southern Australia, southwest Cape)
1. that in these regions there already existed evidence of poleward movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, though not nearly so much as since 2010 when climatic displacements poleward reach between 5˚ and 7˚ of latitude (550 to 770 kilometres) vis-à-vis preindustrial climates
   
2. the poleward shift of summer rain belts in Australia, and also Northeastern Brazil and Southern Africa, during the 1970s, especially January 1974
1. although January 1974’s record has not been approached subsequently, there have nonetheless been ten months since with higher all-Australian rainfalls than the wettest month between 1890 and 1973.
2. these months and years could be called super-monsoon months, since all were due to more southerly monsoon troughs and depressions than anything known before 1974, and likely anything since minimally the fifteenth century
3. the continuation of the observed trends in rainfall over the previous few years indefinitely
   

The only problem with ‘Floods Part of Our New CLIMATE Pattern’, of course, is that the article does not relate it to man-made greenhouse gas emissions, in which Australia is (since 1980 at least) of course by far the world’s worst offender. It is remarkable even with this severe limitation that such a popular article manages to explain climatic changes that were beginning in 1974 and are accelerating as I write this. The tragedy is that the public was never encouraged to grasp the changes – but then, encouraging the public to understand would be immensely threatening to Australia’s super-rich and super-powerful greenhouse emitters.

The AFL though the lens of Cherin-Gordon

To an Australian encountering US team sports, and soccer in Europe, it would no doubt feel surprising to discover how many games are played in Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association. Whereas no major sport in Australia plays more than 25 games per season, those three leagues play 82 games (NBA and NHL) or 162 games (MLB). European soccer leagues play between 30 and 46 games per season.

In his Untangling Skill and Luck from 2012, Michael Maubossin noted that a 50 percent ratio of skill to luck can be achieved by:

• 12 NFL games
• 69 MLB games
• 15 NBA games

For ice hockey and soccer, estimates are extremely variable, ranging from 35 to 75 games for ice hockey and 25 to 50 for soccer.

Last year – though I discovered this only today – journalist Simon Cherin-Gordon offered a further insight into the difference in season length between gridiron (NFL) and the other major leagues in North America. In an article titled ‘Why Are We Playing 82 Games, Anyway’ – written to advocate a shorter NBA season, which Maubossin had shown to be more practicable than any other US or European team sport – Cherin-Gordon said:

“Much of this has to do with the inherent nature of each sport. A baseball star will only bat four or five times in an average game, or pitch one out of every five days. Runs are hard to come by, and lower scores lead to higher variance and make a short season untenable (the same can be said for the NHL, which has an 82-game season just like the NBA).” 

“[Gridiron] Football, meanwhile, is a sport where the best players are involved in somewhere between 60 and 70 snaps per game (which constitutes roughly half of the game’s plays). Its scoring is less random, and the best team usually wins. It is also as violent a sport as there is, thus frequent games and a long season are out of the question” 

“While the NBA season falls just in between that of the MLB and NFL in terms of length, it has far more inherent similarities to [gridiron] football than it does to baseball.” 

“If you think 60-70 plays per game is a lot for a [gridiron] football player, try more than doubling that. Basketball players play both offense and defense, and NBA games generally feature around 200 possessions. The best players play between two-thirds and three-quarters of those possessions (32-36 minutes).” 

“That’s just one of many ways the NBA takes out variance. It is the only sport where every successful play is quantified on the scoreboard. There are no base hits or first downs. When you do score in other sports, it is a more random occurrence with more impactful ramifications. Crossing home plate or the goal line one time is worth exponentially more than putting the ball in the hoop. There are also less [fewer] players involved, and less [fewer] quirky advantages to playing at home. The best team in an NBA game wins more often than they do in any other sport.”

What strikes me about this list is that if we apply what Cherin-Gordon says to the AFL, we have the following comparison:

Sport	“Possessions” per game	% played by best players	“Possessions” played by best players
Baseball	≅240 (pitches)	≤⅙ (16.67 percent)	≤40 (pitches)
Gridiron	≅140 (downs)	≅½ (50 percent)	≅70 (downs)
Basketball	≅200	≅¾ (75 percent)	≅150
(Australian rules) football	≅600-700 (total possessions)	≥⅞ (87.5 percent)	≥525

This table does not measure how many team possessions there are per (Australian rules) football game. However, in basketball the rules make teams to alternate possession after every score, which gives weaker teams more of a chance than in football, where a team can extremely easily score and then regain possession without one opposition possession. (In one game in 1954, it is known Richmond kicked five goals without a Melbourne player touching the ball, and as the Demons actually won that game this is unlikely to be the most extreme possible case.) Football is also analogous to basketball in that every “successful” play is rewarded on the scoreboard – although if a team kicks out of bounds on the bounce or a pack forms that team can regain possession without an opponent necessarily touching the ball.

The table above suggests that, although the AFL season is much shorter than those of baseball, ice hockey or soccer, it is not proportionately so relative to the requisite length for a passable skill-to-luck ratio. In fact, if in Cherin-Gordon’s words,

“MLB needs 162 [games], the NHL needs 82 [games]... the NFL needs 16 [games]”

then the AFL would “need” no more than 10, or maximally 12, games per season.

However, although Australian football has exceedingly low internal variance via randomness in player performance, external variance from variation in weather and ground conditions was highly significant before the climatic “magic gate” of 1997/1998 and the closure of Waverley Park and the AFL’s old suburban grounds. Subsequently this external variance has been effectively eliminated by:

1. rapid poleward expansion of the subtropical arid belt, totalling 800 kilometres since 1964, which has:
• reduced the incidence of wet weather and increased evaporative drying of grounds when it does rain
• also reduced the possibility of extremely windy conditions that favour shorter players
2. artificial drying of grounds during rare cases of wet weather, and improved drainage
3. the opening of closed-roof Docklands Stadium where weather conditions are consistently dry

This history of significant external variance undoubtedly explains why the AFL has a longer season than required for a passable skill-to-luck ratio. In addition, on softer surfaces football was less physically taxing than the present-day game, as seen by players frequently playing mid-week Foster’s Cup matches as well as weekend premiership matches. More than that:

1. even a minor reduction in games would be extremely unpopular with football fans, as demonstrated in the 20-game 1993 season
2. a reduction to 10 or 12 games would require a radical restructuring of the AFL’s season
3. many pairs of teams would – as in the NFL between 1978 and 2001 – go up to twenty seasons without opposing each other
4. it is highly plausible that the game would become even more vigorous and physically demanding with only half as many games, so that the reduction in injuries would be much less than Cherin-Gordon supposes (this also applied to the NBA)

Most likely, only major increases in severe – likely only in career-ending – injuries would cause the AFL to reduce the number of games on its schedule. This is plausible in an even hotter and drier climate than observed today thanks to Australian and Gulf Cooperation Council greenhouse pollution. However, if a shorter season be judged inevitable it could create a vicious circle of harder, more anaerobic play and more injuries, because if AFL players knew they had only 10 or 12 home-and-away games to play, they would almost certainly play harder than they do now knowing they have to get through 22.

Rarity of full-period prime denominators in rational approximations of irrational numbers

Ever since, a few months ago, I began to discover that – in addition to the very well-known approximation of 22/7 for 𝜋 – other irrational numbers had frequently used rational approximations, I have been struck by one fact: that full-period primes occur very rarely as denominators in such fractions, especially in the most useful rational approximations for hand calculations.

In order to test this hypothesis I have compiled a representative selection of irrational numbers in the table below, useful rational approximations for these numbers, and the periods of these rational approximations. For most numbers the most common rational approximation has been used; in certain cases like the square root of 6 and 𝜋, I have given more than one rational approximation, with that with the larger denominator naturally more accurate.

Number	Decimal expansion	Rational Approximation	Period	Prime factorisation of denominator	Character and type of prime factors
√2	1.4142135623730950488016887242	99/70	6	2•5•7	Composite Full-period and terminating factors
√3	1.7320508075688772935274463415	97/56	7	2•2•2•7	Composite Full-period and terminating factors
√5	2.2360679774997896964091736687	161/72	1	2•2•2•3•3	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
√6	2.4494897427831780981972840747	49/20	0	2•2•5	Composite Terminating decimal
		218/89	44	89	Half-period prime
√7	2.6457513110645905905016157536	127/48	1	2•2•2•2•3	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
√10	3.1622776601683793319988935444	117/37	3	37	Short-period (unique) prime
√11	3.3166247903553998491149327366	199/60	1	2•2•3•5	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
∛2	1.2599210498948731647672106072	63/50	0	2•5•5	Composite Terminating decimal
∛3	1.4422495703074083823216383107	75/52	6	2•2•13	Composite Half-period prime factor
∛4	1.5874010519681994747517056392	100/63	6	3•3•7	Composite Half-period and short-period (unique) factors
		227/143	6	11•13
∛5	1.7099759466766969893531088725	171/100	0	2•2•5•5	Composite Terminating decimal
∛6	1.8171205928321396588912117563	467/257	256	257	Full-period prime (accurate to 1-in-33,629,323!)
∜2	1.1892071150027210667174999705	44/37	3	37	Short-period (unique) prime
∜3	1.3160740129524924608192189017	25/19	18	19	Full-period prime
		229/174	28	2•3•29	Composite Full-period, short-period and terminating factors
21/5	1.1486983549970350067986269467	85/74	3	2•37	Composite Short-period (unique) and terminating factors
21/12	1.0594630943592952645618252949	89/84	6	2•2•3•7	Composite Full-period, short-period and terminating factors
𝜋	3.1415926535897932384626433832	22/7	6	7	Full-period prime
		355/113	112	113	Full-period prime
e	2.7182818284590452353602874713	193/71	35	71	Half-period prime
ee	15.154262241479264189760430272	197/13	6	13	Half-period prime
		2849/188	46	2•2•47	Composite Full-period prime factor
e𝜋	23.140692632779269005729086367	1481/64	0	2•2•2•2•2•2	Terminating decimal
ln 2	0.6931471805599453094172321214	61/88	2	2•2•2•11	Composite Short-period (unique) prime factor
log10 2	0.3010299956639811952137388947	59/196	42	2•2•7•7	Composite Terminating and squared full-period prime factor

If we study this table, we see that, for whatever reason, there seem to be very few full-period prime denominators. The two well-known approximations for 𝜋, one approximation for the fourth root of three, and one remarkable approximation for the cube root of six are the only exceptions. [The cube root of six – which has minor notability as the geometric mean of 1, 2 and 3 – I did not originally intend to include but decided to do so because the approximation ⁴⁶⁷/₂₅₇ is so amazingly accurate, being superior to the famous Milü approximation for 𝜋].

Why this should be so is an interesting question. It is possibly because the way in which the continued fractions used to find such approximations as ⁴⁶⁷/₂₅₇ for ∛6 would add factors in the finding of “common denominators” needed for addition of fractions, although I have not checked this yet.

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.

A “famous” typo recalled – and Trump beating it

2019 Melbourne rainfall to today. With nothing forecast Melbourne seems very likely to not merely receive less than the city’s existing record low (332.3 millimetres), but receive less than the existing Victorian record low calendar-year total

Victoria’s record low annual rainfall up to 2018 – almost certain to be beaten by a substantial portion of the state in 2019 – from Kyndalyn Park (latitude 34.71° S, longitude 142.93° E)

In recent days with only 43 millimetres of rain in Melbourne for 2019 and a probable record dry year by a factor of four or more – likely Melbourne will beat even Kyndalyn Park’s 1967 state record low rainfall of 75.9 millimetres – I have gleefully recalled a personally famous typo from Perth’s Sunday Times on 27 April, 2008:

What you're paying

Unleaded petrol prices in Brisbane and on the southern Queensland coast today hit $1.46 a litre, according to petrol price monitoring website Motor Mouth.

But unleaded fuel was available at some northern Brisbane outlets for as little as $1.30. Prices on the Gold and Sunshine coasts have also reached $1.46, but some fuel could be found for up to 15 cents a litre less, according to petrol price monitoring website, MotorMouth. Queensland has an eight cents a litre petrol subsidy.

Unleaded prices in Adelaide are nearing $1.55 a litre. Sydney prices range from $1.47 to $1.55 a litre. Melbourne drivers are paying up to $153.90 a litre, while Perth motorists are faring better at $1.40 a litre.”

Seeing this text, nobody would miss the typo. The typist writing for the Sunday Times obviously meant to write

153.90¢ a litre,

which the news.com.au system apparently automatically would change to $1.54 a litre, whilst automatically changing 153.90$ a litre to $153.90 a litre.

Rather than ignoring the typo, I – who has long known Australian petrol as untenably cheap – saw it as one typo I wished were true. Such increased fuel prices would – even with much less fuel sold – give Australia’s governments funding for neglected environmental projects like:

1. complete closure of coal-fired power stations
2. a large-scale renewable energy plan and budget to decarbonise the whole continent
3. a nationwide high-speed rail network to reduce pressure on Tullamarine and Kingsford-Smith Airports
4. public transport networks in all major cities and their surrounding semi-rural districts surpassing the world’s best extant networks
5. complete revegetation of southern Australian farmland certain to be aridified by the rapid poleward widening of the subtropical arid belt

When I told Mummy about the Sunday Times typo a day ago, I was told that Donald Trump has made a much worse blunder when discussing a major Sri Lanka attack on Easter Sunday, whereby eight bombs exploded in churches and hotels. I will quote Trump:

Heartfelt condolences from the people of the United States to the people of Sri Lanka on the horrible terrorist attacks on churches and hotels that have killed at least 138 million people and badly injured 600 more. We stand ready to help!

My mother has always been extreemly critical of President Trump, seeing him as a racist, sexist populist appealing to the emotions of white rural Americans who feel left out with modern technological changes. Mummy, who knew the 2008 typo and my admittedly emotional response to it, said that Trump “surpassed” the Perth newspaper’s typo by a thousand if I recall correctly. Actually, Trump’s error surpassed the 2008 typo by ten thousand. Some of his critics believe Trump magnified the death toll intentionally, presumably to make Americans more scared of Muslims.

However, one difference exists that stands far more critical than the magnitude of the errors. There would exist major benefits to Earth’s ecology, frequently discussed on this blog, from less cheap Australian petrol. There would exist no benefits to anybody or anything from terrorists achieving a death toll corresponding to a nuclear mini-holocaust. If it were true that terrorists could murder on the scale President Trump claimed, there would be the danger of terrorism killing entire civilisations.

Plotting actual versus parity per capita greenhouse gas emissions

In recent posts about the failures of the Kyōtō Protocol, I have expressed extreme anger that:

1. the highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters – excluding a few remote small tropical islands – are desert states whose natural ecologies are based on extreme limitation of energy consumption
2. excepting Least Developed Countries (LDCs) there appears to be an anticorrelation between actual per capita emissions and the relative per capita energy consumption allowed by ecology
3. (1) and (2) are poorly noted by either ecologists or climatologists
• even Tim Flannery, who would be expected to be the most aware person in the world of this, seldom makes the connection so explicit as it should be made

In order to have a reasonable look at the actual situation, I have plotted a graph of actual per capita emissions against those which I believe reflect relative ecological parity of each nation (for methodology see below):

2013 per capita emissions versus relative ecological parity emissions. The actual Pearson correlation coefficient is +0.06

Being aware that very poor Least Developed Countries would distort any observable anticorrelation, I did another experiment without the Least Developed Countries, but Least Developed Countries actually had less effect on the result than I expected. However, when I included only the upper-middle and upper-income countries, I did find a very clear negative correlation between actual and ecological parity per capita emissions:

2013 per capita emissions versus relative ecological parity emissions for upper-middle and upper-income countries. The Pearson correlation coefficient is -0.27

This observed anticorrelation does suggest that in the Enriched World there exist inherent political or resource limitations to the growth of per capita greenhouse emissions that are absent from the arid subtropics of the Eastern Hemisphere or from the humid tropics (e.g. Årts and Janssen, 2006, Cornwallis et. al, 2017). In resource-exporting nations, extremely high energy consumption by the ruling classes is actively supported by suburban citizens who gain a low-tax, high-energy lifestyle based around large, comfortable cars. This is one reason for the exceedingly high emissions of Australia and the Gulf States. In the Enriched World ruling classes lack such cheap energy, while demands by lower classes for redistribution are much stronger. This serves to limit per capita energy consumption to a level frequently exceeded in the resource-richest nations.

Such an anticorrelation is wholly untenable and ignorance thereof a significant problem. It also suggests development in historically poor tropical and desert nations as fraught with severe danger for the planet’s climate.

Methodology for Parity Emissions:

1. Each point of land was aligned to one of the ecoregions outlined in the second Kyōtō Protocol post
1. high mountain regions of the tropics – if wet enough to qualify as humid under the Köppen classification – had the same weighted emissions as the Enriched World
2. in the cases of New Zealand (Milewski, personal communication) and the Iberian Peninsula and southern Mediterranean (McMahon and Finlayson, 1991), ecological peculiarities allowed me to lower the parity emissions from 3 to 2.75
2. For each country, the weighted geometric mean of the parity regions for each point of land was assigned as its parity emissions
3. To make the graph, these parity emissions were graphed on the x-axis against actual emissions from 2013 (World Resources Institute, 2014)

References:

• Cornwallis, Charlie K.; Botero, Carlos A.; Rubenstein, Dustin R.; Downing, Philip A.; West, Stuart A. and Griffin, Ashleigh S.; ‘Cooperation facilitates the colonization of harsh environments’; Nature, Ecology and Evolution, vol. 1 (2017) article 0057
• Flannery, Tim F.; The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People; ISBN 0730104222
• Lovegrove, Barry G.; ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’; The American Naturalist, vol. 156, no. 2 (August 2000), pp. 201-218
• McMahon, T.A. and Finlayson, B.L.; Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges. ISBN 3-923381-27-1
• World Resources Institute; ‘Climate Analysis Indicators Tool (CAIT) Version 2.0. (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute, 2014)’
• Årts, Paul and Janssen, Dennis; ‘Shades of Opinion: The Oil Exporting Countries and International Climate Politics’; The Review of International Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2003, pp. 332-351

How Kyōtō needed to be done – elevated-emissions Enriched countries

In my previous post, I demonstrated the the Kyōtō Protocol of 1996 almost entirely targeted countries of limited significance, and whose ecology (Lovegrove, 2000) does not dictate low energy consumption. The Enriched World, where every “Annex 1” country bar Australia was located, constituted the ecological bloc least required to lower emissions for ecological parity (Koch, 2003, p. 147; Najam et. al, 2003). Thus, the countries set emissions targets were – with the paramount exception of Australia – the very countries with least requirement therefor.

Nonetheless, within the Enriched World a sub-bloc of nations with elevated per capita emissions did exist. This sub-bloc comprised three Anglophone Western Hemisphere nations in the United States, Canada and New Zealand, plus four countries in Northern Asia: Russia and the former Soviet republics or satellites of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia. The following facts confirm these nations as a distinct sub-bloc:

1. excluding New Zealand, they occupy one continuous area centred upon the North Pacific
2. all except New Zealand at least substantially occupy dry, highly continental steppe and/or taiga
3. all except New Zealand are rich in mineral resources, although completely lacking greenhouse-intensive bauxite
4. the Pacific Northwest and New Zealand occupy similarly mountainous maritime zones substantially too wet for agriculture
5. none are high mountain states (as Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan are) because:
• all have substantial contiguous lowland areas
• most of North America’s and Mongolia’s highland is plateau-like rather than steep mountains
6. their relatively high per capita emissions are due to:
1. low population densities and absence of energy-efficient transport, though this issue is not so pronounced as in Australia or the Gulf States
2. high heating requirements due to freezing winters
3. generally abundant fossil fuel reserves (except for New Zealand and Mongolia)

If we combine these countries with China, which borders this region on its southwest flank, we create a continuous bloc of seven countries accounting for over forty percent of total global emissions.  On this ground, targeting this bloc for punitive emissions reductions (demonstrably necessary for Australia and Gulf oil states) would have appeared desirable.

However, the economic disadvantages of their cool climates, plus their low ecological fragility (Huston and Wolverton, 2009) and their void in bauxite deposits, mitigate against severe relative targets for even the worst Enriched polluters. Moreover, historical climate politics demonstrates the likelihood or the United States and Canada siding with Australia rather than lower-emissions Enriched nations (Flannery, 2007). New Zealand, Russia, and the former Soviet satellites behaved similarly. Consequently, I have made a 20% allowance above parity targets for all nations in the sub-bloc. Essential emissions cuts by Australia and the Gulf States would mandate large efficiency improvements elsewhere, which would have reduced this elevated-emissions Enriched sub-bloc’s emissions beyond the targets listed below.

Country	1990s per capita emissions (Australia = 1)	Requisite Kyōtō emissions target (relative to 1985-1995)	Actual Kyōtō emissions target	Notes
United States	0.83	-35%	±0%	— “Red” states substantially resource-rich mineral exporters — Over one-quarter of global coal reserves, primarily in Appalachia and the Ozarks — “Blue” states typically resource-poor Enriched World
		15% allowance for political effects
Canada	0.73	-35%	-6%	— Allowances for political divides much less than in United States
New Zealand	0.67	-35%	±0%	— Does possess certain ecological peculiarities due to chalcophile-poor rhyolitic geology — High per capita emissions due to low population density caused by remoteness and extreme natural resource poverty
Turkmenistan	0.48	-28%	∞	— Intermediate in character between other elevated-emissions Enriched States and wealthy Arab oil exporters
Russia	0.51	-25%	±0%	— Second largest coal reserves in world.
Kazakhstan	0.51	-18%	∞
Mongolia	0.41	-18%	∞	— Exceedingly high emissions relative to GDP
China	0.11	±0%	∞	— By 2010s accounted for over ¼ of global greenhouse gas emissions — 2010s per capita emissions already above world average — Highly abundant coal reserves (13 percent of global total) — Target was to develop without increasing emissions — Inability to do so potentially  result of lenience towards resource-exporting nations’ emissions

Suspicions that after-effects of the Kyōtō Protocol have been a major factor in the United States’ growing partisan political divide has led me to propose a substantial allowance for that nation. This allowance has the virtue of simplifying matters for the sub-bloc as a group.

I have tabulated China although it differs from the other nations of this sub-bloc in its dense population because:

1. China’s very high total emissions make it important to global warming mitigation regardless of its per capita emissions, and
2. China shares with the US, Canada, Russia and Kazakhstan abundant coal reserves which would reduce the after-effect of severe emissions cuts in the wealthy subtropical desert resource exporters
3. China was similarly reluctant to commit to large emissions reductions proposed by the EU and AOSIS

Overall, these proposed direct reductions in the elevated-emissions sub-bloc would triple those from the much severer reductions ecologically demanded from the oil exporters and Australia (see previous post), totalling 14 percent of global emissions. Unlike the radical infrastructure projects that were ecologically essential in Australia and oil states, reductions in these nations would have merely required improvements in efficiency from nations that for the most part were already wealthy, such as improved fuel efficiency technology in American and Russian road vehicles and homes, and altered product cycles for consumer goods to deal with the reduced supply of metals from Australia.

References:

• Flannery, Tim (2005); The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change; ISBN 1920885846
• Huston, Michael A. and Wolverton, Steve; ‘The global distribution of net primary production: resolving the paradox’; Ecological Monographs, vol. 79, no. 3 (2009), pp. 343-377
• Koch, Max (2003); Capitalism and Climate Change: Theoretical Discussion, Historical Development and Policy Responses; ISBN 978-1-349-32328-9
• Lovegrove, Barry G.; ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’; The American Naturalist, vol. 156, no. 2 (August 2000), pp. 201-218
• Najam, Adil, Saleem-ul-Huq and Sokona, Youba; ‘Climate negotiations beyond Kyōtō: Developing countries’ concerns and interests’; Climate Policy 3(3) (September 2003), pp. 221-231

How Kyōtō needed to be done – an Australian perspective

In a recently-updated post from over three years ago, I pointed out that the Kyōtō Protocol failed because it was formed from alliances of nations with diametrically opposed interests regarding regulation of man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

As Key (1949) has demonstrated, a disorganised politics favours the “haves” over the “have-nots”. During the the Kyōtō Protocol, disorganisation of international alliances permitted the fossil fuel “haves” – Australia and the Gulf States with already the world’s highest per capita emissions – carte blanche to increase their emissions. A properly organised system of alliances would have seen these wealthy resource-exporting nations outnumbered and under fierce pressure from LDCs, SISs, high mountain states and the high-technology industrial nations for deep and rapid emissions reductions.

Per capita greenhouse gas emissions including land use change in 2000, around the time of the actual Kyōtō Protocol

As things stood, two greenhouse sceptic organisations – The Climate Council and Global Climate Coalition (Oberthür and Ott, 1999, page 45) – were able to control OPEC’s delegations and “miss few opportunities to slow down progress towards taking common action in international negotiations” (Oberthür and Ott, 1999, page 26). The oil exporters also (Årts and Janssen, 2003) developed a tight partnership with US fossil fuel businesses that effected elimination of any quantified emissions targers for these exceedingly high per-capita polluters.

In contrast the LDCs, SISs and the EU – the resource-poor pro-reduction countries – placed themselves in disparate blocs and failed to develop a plan to counter the OPEC nations, nor the analogous Australian greenhouse sceptic organisations who dictated policy there. Luomi (2011) has demonstrated how the LDCs – at least Muslim LDCs – were led and had their interests represented by oil states with opposing interests rather than the by EU with aligned interests. In fact, the effort to exclude “developing” nations was not done by the poor LDCs, but by wealthy oil exporters to prevent them having to make deep cuts that would necessarily extirpate the wealth of the oil sheikhs like the Al Sa^cud, Al Sabah, Al Thani, Al Nahyan and Al Maktoum families.

The most basic target at the world’s first climate change protocol (Koch, 2003, p. 147; Najam et. al, 2003) was to set an ecologically-based allowance of emissions per capita. The most logical basis for ecologically-based emissions allowance is energy consumption of native fauna measured by basal metabolism (Flannery 1994, Lovegrove 2000, Orians and Milewski 2007) as this should reflect each ecoregion’s naturally sustainable pattern of energy use. Knowledge of geographical patterns of human metabolism is very scanty; however what evidence does exist (Tranah et. al, 2011; Roberts, 1978, pp. 44, 94; Leonard et. al., 2002; Coon, 1965, pp. 16-17, 244-245) suggests similar patterns of metabolic rates.

Nation or group of nations (average value)	Approximate relative homiotherm BMR (Australia = 1; Lovegrove, 2000)	Allowable per capita emissions (Australia = 1)	Actual per capita emissions (Australia = 1)	Required reduction to meet parity (assuming no nation increases emissions)
Australia	1		1	93%
Arid subtropical Asia and North Africa	1.25		0.75	88%
Southern Africa	1.25 to 2 (depending on taxon; higher for larger species)	1.4	0.30	33%
Tropical Americas	2		0.20	33%
Tropical Africa and Asia	1.5		0.10 (possible cap)	0%
Enriched World (northern)	3		0.30	0%
Enriched World (Southern Cone)	4 (Milewski, personal communication)

The above table does demonstrates why achieving deep and rapid reductions in Australian and Gulf States emissions constituted Kyōtō’s urgent task. The Protocol failed completely, and at great cost judging by the certainty of 2019 annual rainfalls in southern Australia of less than one quarter previous record lows.

The above table shows that the highest per capita emitters outside the Enriched World needed to be the countries set severe reduction targets at the first Kyōtō Protocol. Apart from Australia, South Africa and Malaysia, these nations correspond to the oil exporters (OPEC), although low-emissions Nigeria can be exempted. If we follow from the table above, we can estimate requisite emissions reductions in the table below:

Country	Requisite Kyōtō emissions target (relative to 1985-1995)	Actual Kyōtō emissions target	Notes
Wealthy Lithophile Metal Exporters
Australia	-93%	+8%	Lowest allowable per capita emissions due to unique ecology. Considerable room for investment in solar and geothermal technology to phase out coal power Climate change severe threat to agriculture Opportunity to meet substantial part of 93 percent reduction target via large-scale farmland revegetation
High-Emissions Siderophile Metal Exporters
New Caledonia	-93%	-8% (as part of EU)	Low-energy ecology closely related to that of Australia Emissions target as part of EU (French overseas territory), but per capita emissions higher than any EU nation and three times that of France itself
South Africa	-50%	∞	Low-energy ecology most similar to Australia of all remaining (sub)continents Some potential for achieving large part of reductions by eliminating land clearing
Namibia	-33%	∞	Low-energy ecology most similar to Australia of all remaining (sub)continents Mineral exports variable in geochemistry Per capita emissions relatively low, but parity emissions very low Some potential for achieving large part of reductions by eliminating land clearing
Botswana
Middle Eastern and North African Oil Exporters
Kuwait	-97%	∞	In actual Protocol used the proxy of “developing countries” to be allowed carte blanche to increase emissions Saudi Arabia may be third-largest global emitter with “fugitive” emissions (Lafleur 2020, in publication) counted May require global efforts to reduce coal usage for any cooperation Considerable solar energy potential due to abundant sunlight, but little other renewable potential
Baḥrain
Qaṭar
United Arab Emirates
Saudi Arabia	-95%	∞
Libya	-93%	∞
Oman
Algeria
Iran	-33%	∞	Ecologically diverse, ranging from pure Enriched on Caspian to pure arid subtropical on Gulf Amongst top ten total emitters, and top five with “fugitive” emissions (Lafleur 2020, in publication)
Tropical World Oil Exporters
Brunei	-93%	∞
Indonesia	-50%	∞	Historically very poor, but large per capita emissions from forest clearance Possibility of achieving requisite emissions cuts via eliminating land clearing
Equatorial Guinea
Gabon	-33%	∞	Possibility of achieving requisite emissions cuts via eliminating land clearing
Ecuador
Venezuela
Mexico
Other Tropical World Mineral States
Malaysia	-50%	∞	Possibility of achieving requisite emissions cuts via eliminating land clearing Not an oil exporter, but very high per capita emissions when land use change is included
Papua New Guinea	-50%	∞	Not an oil exporter, but very high per capita emissions when land use change is included – although very low without them All emissions cuts can only be achieved via eliminating land clearing

A plan to phase out coal – whilst anathema to Australia and South Africa – remained desirable as it would have been likely to mollify intransigent OPEC states, and coal is more carbon-intense than oil. Including land clearing – though opposed by AOSIS – I favour as it would have:

1. allowed lower-income Tropical World mineral exporters to meet emissions targets at relatively low cost
2. mandated large-scale revegetation of extremely ancient, climatically vulnerable agricultural soils of uniquely high conservation value in the West Australian Wheatbelt
3. potentially lowered the severe education barriers to economic employment in the land- and resource-poor but uniquely eutrophic Enriched World

With this plan, the EU, LDCs, small-island and high mountain countries would have needed to make rigid demands on Australia, the Gulf States, and to a lesser extent South Africa. Undoubtedly, this would have involved greater sacrifices for all parties than the hopeless Protocol actually achieved, but vast emissions reductions by the wealthiest resource exporters. These nations have consistently been ranked the worst in the world for climate policy (Thwaites 2018; Marriott and Mortimore 2017), native ecology (Flannery 1994, Lovegrove 2000, Orians and Milewski 2007) dictates they be the world’s leaders in climate action, and large reductions by them would create large flow-on effects (Lafleur 2020, in publication).

Targets outlined above would have directly cut global emissions by no more than the targets of the actual Kyōtō Protocol. However, loss of fossil fuel and lithophile metal sources would have necessitated much more efficient use and reuse of these commodities by the big manufacturing nations. One would expect this improved efficiency to multiply reductions far beyond actual Kyōtō targets. Had a substantial proportion of the direct and indirect cuts proposed above been achieved by 2010, southern Australia and Central Chile would not be facing runaway drying with loss of over 90 percent of their virgin rainfall.

Methodology for “Ecological Parity” Emissions Targets:

In order to estimate relative per capita greenhouse gas emissions allowable for each nation, I:

1. took the approximate average relative basal metabolic rate of that nation’s indigenous homiotherms
• it being assumed that the sustainable energy consumption per capita of a nation’s human population should be related to that of homiothermic animals having evolved locally
• BMR is the major contributor to faunal energy consumption, although field rates can be much higher in arid regions
2. assumed that the allowable emissions would be proportional to each region’s average homiotherm BMR
3. compared these with actual emissions to estimate the reduction required for parity with the ecoregion (Enriched) least above parity

References:

• Coon, Carleton S.; The Living Races of Man; published 1965 by Alfred A. Knopf
• Flannery, Tim (1994); The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People; ISBN 0730104222
• Gannon, B.; DiPietro, Loretta and Pöhlman, Eric T.; ‘Do African Americans have lower energy expenditure than Caucasians?’; International Journal of Obesity, vol. 24, issue 1 (February 2000), pp. 4-13
• Key, Valdimer Orlando (1949); Southern Politics in State and Nation, published 1949 by Alfred. A. Knopf, New York
• Koch, Max (2003); Capitalism and Climate Change: Theoretical Discussion, Historical Development and Policy Responses; ISBN 978-1-349-32328-9
• Lafleur, Dimitri (thesis); ‘Aspects of Australia’s fugitive and overseas emissions from fossil fuel exports’ (in print, online July 2020)
• Leonard, William R.; Sorensen, Mark V.; Galloway, Victoria A.; Spencer, Gary J.; Mosher, M.J.; Osipova, Ludmilla and Spitsyn, Victor A.; ‘Climatic Influences on Basal Metabolic Rates Among Circumpolar Populations’; American Journal of Human Biology, vol. 14 (2002); pp. 609-620
• Lovegrove, Barry G.; ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’; The American Naturalist, vol. 156, no. 2 (August 2000), pp. 201-218
• Luomi, Mari; ‘Gulf of Interest: Why Oil Still Dominates Middle Eastern Climate Politics’; Journal of Arabian Studies 1.2 (December 2011), pp. 249-266
• Marriott, Lisa and Mortimore, Anna; ‘Emissions, Road Transport, Regulation and Tax Incentives in Australia and New Zealand’; Journal of the Australasian Tax Teachers Association, vol. 12, no. 1 (2017), pp. 23-52
• Najam, Adil, Saleem-ul-Huq and Sokona, Youba; ‘Climate negotiations beyond Kyōtō: Developing countries’ concerns and interests’; Climate Policy 3(3) (September 2003), pp. 221-231
• Oberthür, Sebastian and Ott, Hermann E. (1999); The Kyōtō Protocol: International Climate Policy for the 21st Century (International and European Environmental Policy Series), Springer Verlag
• Orians, Gordon H. and Milewski, Antoni V. (2007). ‘Ecology of Australia: the effects of nutrient-poor soils and intense fires’ Biological Reviews, 82 (3): pp. 393-423
• Roberts, Derek Frank; Climate and Human Variabillity, published January 1978 by Cummings Publishing Company
• Thwaites, John; ‘Australia ranked worst in world on climate action’; Planning News; Volume 44, Issue 9 (October 2018), p. 13
• Tranah, Gregory J.; Manini, Todd M.; Lohman, Kurt K.; Nalls, Michael A.; Kritchevsky, Stephen; Newman, Anne B.; Harris, Tamara B.; Miljkovic, Ivaf; Biffi, Alessandro; Cummings, Steven R. and Yongmei Liu; ‘Mitochondrial DNA variation in human metabolic rate and energy expenditure’; Mitochondrion, volume 11, issue 6 (November 2011), pp. 855-861
• Årts, Paul and Janssen, Dennis; ‘Shades of Opinion: The Oil Exporting Countries and International Climate Politics’; The Review of International Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2003, pp. 332-351

The lag between tropical expansion and rainfall shifts – is it to disappear?

Synoptic chart for Sunday. Note the subtropical high pressure belt located around 48°S, around eight degrees south of its historic summer position

For over a decade now, I have noticed a major gap between the observed expansion of the tropics (Seidel et. al, 2008) and observed poleward shifts in rainfall in the southern hemisphere. A combination of observed measurements of the poleward edge of the Hadley Circulation suggests an expansion of eight degrees since the 1950s. Whilst as the following table for a representative set of stations in southern Australia and Central Chile shows, rain belts have shifted poleward – to disastrous effect for the water supplies of Perth – the shifts have not been nearly so marked as would be predicted from simply moving each locality seven to eight degrees equatorward:

Station	Virgin mean rainfall (beginning of record to 1974)	Mean rainfall predicted from simple 7.5˚ poleward tropical expansion	Percentage decline vis-à-vis virgin mean rainfall	Actual lowest observed rainfall
Santiago de Chile (MJJA)	272.0 mm	15 mm	94.48%	22.1 mm*
				37.2 mm
Concepción (annual)	1230.3 mm	121.6 mm	90.12%	598.6 mm
				599.3 mm
Valdivia (annual)	2393.5 mm	275 mm	88.51%	1033.1 mm
Perth (annual)	882.0 mm	233.2 mm	73.56%	466.6 mm
Perth (MJJA)	624.9 mm	158.0 mm	74.72%	260.2 mm
Collie (MJJA)	667.0 mm	140.8 mm	78.89%	275.9 mm
				296.3 mm
Manjimup (annual)	1055.6 mm	248.5 mm	72.73%	549.0 mm
Horsham Polkemmet Road (annual)	450.8 mm	185.0 mm	58.96%	181.1 mm

An asterisk (*) indicates that the record low rainfall occurred before 1974. MJJA (May-June-July-August) refers to the May to August period that constitutes the rainy season in Southwest Western Australia and Central Chile.

As we can see, the annual rainfall one would expect from a 7.5˚ poleward shift in all climate belts remains less than the driest observed year for all selected stations except Horsham Polkemmet Road (BOM 079023). Even there the driest observed year – 1982 – is only a few millimetres drier than the estimated mean. In addition, the stations used to model Wimmera rainfall under a 7.5˚ poleward shift in climate belts suggest it likely that the median would be under 181 millimetres even with a mean of 185 millimetres.

One major problem is that Central Chile rainfall was historically limited much more by unfavourable land-ocean temperature gradients than by the descending limb of the Hadley Cell. The dryness of the El Niño years of 2014, 2015, and 2018 suggest, however, that such is emphatically not the case beyond the 2010 “magic gate”. The implication is that current ongoing expansion of the Hadley Cell sets a rigid ceiling upon Central Chile rainfall in a manner absent even during the 2000s, when Santiago exceeded its maximum 2010s MJJA rainfall of 209.9 millimetres in four non-El Niño years (2000, 2001, 2005 and 2008). Another problem is that the topography and coastal shape 7.5˚ closer to the equator differ from those surrounding the stations listed, although I was careful to choose those stations least likely to be controlled by differences of this type.

What is revealing about the last three months – in which Melbourne has seen only 33 millimetres with little hope for more in the foreseeable future – is that the subtropical anticyclone has been located as far south as 48˚S (see synoptic map at top). If we combine the subtropical anticyclone’s historic summer position and the known expansion of the Hadley Cell since the 1950s, 48 degrees South is almost precisely where we would expect the summer subtropical anticyclone to be today. This has suggested to me that we will be observing a “catch up” of rainfall belts with the observed shifts of the Hadley Cell since the 1950s (Seidel et. al, 2008, Liu et. al, 2012, plus personal communication). Should this be correct, rainfalls in Southwest Western Australia, southeastern Australia and Central Chile will, beginning this year, show dramatic declines below 2010s averages. These 2010s averages are already 30 percent below virgin averages before man-made greenhouse emissions expanded the Hadley Cell, and 50 percent less in the Santiago region.

Given widespread predictions of another record El Niño in 2019, annual rainfalls in southern Australia of one-half or even one-quarter existing record lows appear even at this early stage a probable outcome if we study the above tables. Even if positive Indian Ocean Dipole and negative Southern Oscillations are less persistent than some models (e.g. Chie et. al. 2008) suggest, there is still a likelihood that the frontal rain belt will be wholly shifted beyond any part of mainland Australia by the “catch up” noted in the previous paragraph.

The implications for public and private farming policy of a 7.5˚ or larger shift in annual rainfalls are stark. The winter rain belt would become wholly extinct, and with it rainfed winter grain crops – a complete 2019/2020 crop failure throughout southern Australia already appears plausible. Irrigated crops would also likely disappear. The rainfall declines modelled at the beginning of this article would certainly mean zero median annual runoff (Chiew et. al. 2006) for every river in Australia’s historic winter rainfall zone.

What governments would do confronted with this situation and powerful agribusinesses demanding bailouts from certain severe financial losses is not worth imagining. Expensive schemes to redirect runoff from other parts of Australia, or desalination and pipelines, would create still more disastrous after-effects in greenhouse gas emissions and disturbance to sensitive and unique river ecologies. Nonetheless, I still think it plausible that agribusiness possesses sufficient power to gain such bailouts, tragic as they would be not only for Australia’s ecology but for the remainder of the globe. It would even speak ill of Australia if it were to abandon farming because of catastrophic climate change rather than as a result of recognising it as inherently unsustainable on our uniquely ancient soils.

Rainfall methodology:

To estimate rainfall in Central Chile and Southern Australia under a 7.5˚ of latitude poleward shift of rain belts:

1. rainfall stations with the most similar topography and coastal aspect to land 7.5˚ northward were selected
2. rainfall for stations 7.5˚ northward and the most similar coastal aspect for the period before the first “magic gate” in 1975/1976 was entered for the stations in (1)
1. for stations in southwestern WA, stations in BOM District 6 (West Gascoyne) were chosen, and for Collie (009628) and Manjimup (009573) stations comparably distant from the coast were used
2. for Collie (009628) and Manjimup (009573) the estimated rainfall under a 7.5˚ poleward shift was increased by 10 percent to account for the Darling Scarp orographic effect.
3. for Perth, data from Carnarvon (006062 and 006011) were used without alteration
4. for Horsham Polkemmet Road, stations in BOM district 46 (Western—Far Northwest) were used
5. for stations in Chile, stations on the coast or nearby 7.5˚ northward were used

References:

• Chandler, Mark A.; Rind, David and Rüdy, Reto; ‘Pangaean climate during the Early Jurassic: GCM simulations and the sedimentary record of paleoclimate’; Geological Society of America Bulletin, v. 104 (May 1992), p. 543-559
• Chie Ihara; Yochana Kushnir and Mark A. Cane; ‘Warming Trend of the Indian Ocean SST and Indian Ocean Dipole from 1880 to 2004’; Journal of Climate, vol. 21 (2008), pp. 2035-2046
• Chiew, Francis; Peel, Murray; McMahon, Thomas Aquinas and Siriwardena, Lionel (2006); ‘Precipitation elasticity of streamflow in catchments across the world’; [Harry Lins, Richard Vogel, Mike Bonell, Wolfgang Grabs et al.; WMO/UNESCO WCP-Water, FRIEND 2006, Havana Cuba, 26 November-1 December 2006]
• Hochman, Zvi; Gobbett, David L.; and Horan, Heidi; ‘Climate trends account for stalled wheat yields in Australia since 1990’; Global Change Biology (2017); published by CSIRO Agriculture and Food
• J. Liu, M. Song, Y. Hu and X. Ren; ‘Changes in the strength and width of the Hadley Circulation since 1871’; Climates of the Past; vol. 8 (2012); pp. 1169-1175
• Seidel, Dian J. Qiang Fu; Randel, William J. and Reichler, Thomas J.; ‘Widening of the tropical belt in a changing climate’; Nature Geoscience, vol. 1 (January 2008), pp. 21-24