Vigilantes – or a world not knowing its enemy?

According to those in power in Australia, laws to prevent rape of Australia’s fragile environment constitute “vigilante litigation”:

Attorney General George Brandis has branded the case against Carmichael “vigilante litigation”. So the government is proposing to water down community groups’ rights to challenge these projects under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBCA).

If one judges by experience of the Enriched World and reading as a student journals like Socialist Worker, Socialist Alternative and Green Left Weekly, it’s easy to understand Brandis’ stance. There is no doubt that modern Enriched World politics and culture has its roots in class war that could be described as “vigilante”: workers came to believe they produced bosses’ wealth and should own it themselves, producing continual demands for increased redistribution and absolute equality of condition. Except at its theoretical beginnings the switch from limited traditionally religious monarchy to big-government, atheist democracy has been continuously driven by lower classes’ demands for equality of outcome. This tendency has by no means disappeared from the Enriched World: we still see workers demand redistribution and regulation when their security is threatened. Land-surfeited Australia has been substantially immune to this, probably because the majority are too physically distant from the super-rich to produce envy. Vigilante politics, radical egalitarianism and envy-based cultures are – as one can see on an ecological level – incompatible with civilisation. The failure of the most fertile regions of the Western Hemisphere – the North American prairies and the whole Southern Cone of South America – to develop any sort of indigenous civilisation is a dramatic expression thereof. Their “ecology” does not allow for any sort of cooperation because phosphate and chalcophile nutrients are exceptionally abundant, favouring those species that can reproduce most rapidly and/or simply evade predators best. Both traits – especially the latter – exclude the cooperation essential for complex societies.

According to one 2009 Sydney Morning Herald article Australia may directly and indirectly total 16 percent of global greenhouse emissions – or fifty times the per capita average. Self-interest rather than local community interest dictates protest, just as it does in the Enriched World. The crucial difference is that, unlike the Enriched World, more jobs in Australia are produced from coal production that preservation of unique, localised and rare species.

At the same time, the costs to Australia’s economy from global warming are unpaid by the present political powers in the mining industry. The most terrifying problem is how those who suffer most from Australian greenhouse gas emissions – West Australian farmers losing their former winter rainfall – are the people most dependent for current livelihoods upon Australian greenhouse emissions not being cut to zero, as doing so would multiply energy costs of transportation. Australian farmland is sufficiently cheap that private owners’ incentive is not to maintain its limited value but to extract it as a non-renewable resource. Because little soil formation has occurred in Australia since the Carbo-Permian glaciation around three hundred million years ago, lost soil stands irreplaceable and Australian soils are strictly non-renewable, unlike the Enriched World where active volcanoes or glaciers continuously supply new soil

The question is whether the problem of Australian greenhouse emissions and species extinctions will become so severe in the long term that the rest of the world – uncompetitive against a nation with per person incomparably more flat land and undiscovered minerals than the global average – will recognise Australia as the keystone in all environmental treaties from endangered species to pollution to greenhouse warming. Should this occur, Enriched and Tropical World governments and people would understand they possess every right to demand Australia’s polluting industries pay all global costs, both of direct overseas losses from Australian greenhouse pollution and by wholly remedying the cause. This complete remedy would require an uncompromising zero-emissions Australian economy be created via:

1. Complete demolition of Australia’s trunk road system
2. Ensuring all transport investment is constitutionally mandated to be on rail – both the most energy-efficient land transport system and ideally suited to Australia’s flat terrain
3. If private motoring does continue, mandating all vehicles on Australian roads consume no more than 3 litres per 100 km of fuel (minimum fuel economy of 80 miles per US gallon)
• this is ¼ the current average, but technologically achievable as early as the middle 1980s
4. Complete demolition of coal-fired power stations in favour of renewable energy and shifting energy-intensive production to nations with reliable hydropower
5. Complete bans on land clearing and large-scale revegetation programs on farms likely to be or already being rendered unviable by Australia’s own greenhouse gas emissions
6. Large-scale investment in a national park system to protect Australia’s numerous paleoendemic species and ecosystems essentially unchanged from before the Antarctic Ice Sheet formed 38,000,000 years ago

Making these demands without compromise is recognising who the global environment’s enemy is – Australian mining companies who export their pollution scot free.

England/Wales v CONUS temperatures

Having digested overseas climate in recent years, I noted the record-warm January 1880 over the eastern US as exceptionally dry and cold over Western Europe – although similarly dry months there are not necessarily hot as far west as the US.

It is well-known that the contiguous US (CONUS) is by areal average much hotter than England and Wales in the northern summer, and colder in the winter. What I will try to do here is see how much variation there is between these normals, since the annual temperature means overlap somewhat. Since the CONUS averages a little hotter than England and Wales over the whole year, I will take positive as meaning the CONUS is hotter, negative that the CONUS is cooler than England and Wales.

Data exist for the years from 1895 to 2014, and I will do figures for fiscal year (July to June) as well as temperature. Fiscal year should provide a better picture than calendar year due to the greater influence of winter temperatures an annual variation, avoiding situations where unusually cold or warm winters are divided between two years.

Month	# CONUS hotter	# CONUS cooler	Year of “highest” departure		Year of “lowest” departure
July	120	0	1954	+17.94˚F +9.967˚C	1983	+6.89˚F +3.827˚C
August	120	0	1922	+16.33˚F +9.072˚C	1997	+5.72˚F +3.178˚C
September	120	0	1931	+15.43˚F +8.572˚C	2006	+1.06˚F +0.589˚C
October	108	12	1931	+8.72˚F +4.844˚C	1969	-4.37˚F -2.428˚C
November	29	91	1915	+6.07˚F +3.322˚C	1951	-9.22˚F -5.122˚C
December	3	117	2010	+1.73˚F +0.961˚C	1924	-16.65˚F -9.250˚C
January	0	120	1941	-0.70˚F -0.389˚C	1930	-18.54˚F -10.300˚C
February	8	112	1991	+5.83˚F +3.239˚C	1903	-16.36˚F -9.089˚C
March	45	75	1910	+6.46˚F +3.589˚C	1912	-9.20˚F -5.111˚C
April	114	6	1986	+10.42˚F +5.789˚C	2007	-1.62˚F -0.900˚C
May	120	0	1902	+13.97˚F +7.761˚C	1917	+0.09˚F +0.050˚C
June	120	0	1977	+16.38˚F +9.100˚C	1976	+5.2˚F +2.889˚C
Fiscal year	118	2	1962/1963	+5.40˚F +3.000˚C	1911/1912	-0.37˚F -0.206˚C

It can be observed that some extremes, noted in red above, seem to be systematically influenced by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Although I could use an earlier date since rainfall records in the southern hemisphere indicate man-made global warming (countered in the northern hemisphere by short-lived aerosol pollution) was taking control of the climate as early as 1967, I will use the 1980 Lonie Report – which paved the way for major expansion of polluting freeways in by far the planet’s worst greenhouse polluter (Australia) – as a cut-off for “natural” variability. Previous records for those established since are:

• July “lowest”: 1976 (CONUS averaged 72.90˚F or 22.72˚C; CET was 18.7˚C or 65.66˚F)
• August “lowest”: 1975 (CONUS averaged 71.53˚F or 21.96˚C; CET was 18.7˚C or 65.66˚F)
• September “lowest”: 1949 (CONUS averaged 63.73˚F or 17.63˚C; CET was 16.3˚C or 61.34˚F)
• April “lowest”: 1944 (CONUS averaged 48.97˚F or 9.43˚C; CET was 10.2˚C or 50.36˚F)
• December “highest”: 1933 (CONUS averaged 36.43˚F or 2.46˚C; CET was 1.3˚C or 34.88˚F – though Scotland was actually milder than England or the CONUS)
• April “highest”: 1908 (CONUS averaged 52.75˚F or 11.53˚C; CET was 6.0˚C or 42.8˚F)
• February “highest”: 1954 (CONUS averaged a record 41.11˚F or 5.06˚C; CET was 2.6˚C or 36.68˚F)

Temperature for the winter of 1916/1917. Note the uniform cold over most of the northern hemisphere apart from the subtropics, Central Asia, Greenland and Sakhalin.

The case of May 1917, after a very long and severe winter across the northern hemisphere apart from Central Asia and Greenland (à la January 1963) is amazing. The month was by mean percentile (as opposed to temperature) easily the coolest every observed across North America. At 55.13˚F or 12.85˚C, May 1917’s mean temperature stands 5.06˚F or 2.8˚C below the virgin mean, and only May 1907 comes within 2˚F (1.1˚C) in terms of coolness.The pattern from the winter of 1916/1917 persisted remarkably through the spring, as can be seen below, although England and parts of southwestern Canada would come out slightly hotter than normal if something closer to the virgin mean were used:

Temperature anomalies for May 1917. Note the extreme and uniform cool over North America, Australia, East Asia and and eastern Europe

What’s more amazing is that no district in the contiguous US ranks higher than 41st coolest for the month, although it was not especially wet (very dry in the north). In fact, only the mid-Atlantic region (in 1967) the central-west coast (in 1933) and the Great Basin (in 1953) has widely experienced a record cool May since.

Rankings for May 1917 in the contiguous US. With over 87 percent in the “very cool” category this month is by mean temperature percentile by far the coolest from coast to coast.

In fact, May’s case of the CONUS being as cool as England and Wales during what is almost summer is much more exceptional than January 1880. Although accurate data do not exist, it is almost certain that in January 1880 the United States was around 2˚C (3.6˚F) hotter than England and Wales. Most places east of the Rockies averaged 9˚F or 5˚C above normal, and even the Pacific Northwest which received snowfalls comparable to the record cold January of 1950, was slightly milder than normal – though Canada was extremely cold.

Mean temperatures for January 1880, the most recent January where the CONUS averaged hotter than England and Wales (it’s a pity I can’t obtain figures relative to a mean less influenced by Australian greenhouse gas emissions, which would not show the western US as substantially cooler than average).

February 1954 was globally an exceptional month, notable for the complete lack of monsoonal rainfall over northwestern and central-western Australia (before CFCs and Australian coal power and freeways spread the monsoon far beyond its natural domain!) and for a major cyclone on the east coast that saw some of the heaviest rainfalls recorded in the world. Lismore record 480 millimetres or 18.90 inches in two days, and at Dorrigo Post Office a daily fall of 774.7 millimetres (30.50 inches) is generally regarded as an NSW record. The Macleay River was thirty feet (nine metres) deep as it raced through Kempsey.

Rainfall over Australia, February 1954. Note the extreme dryness over WA, where essentially no rain fell south of the Kimberley – then affected by a four-year drought of a type unknown to its present inhabitants.

February 1954 was exceptionally cold over Alaska, Central Asia and southeastern Europe. The extreme cool over eastern Australia is clearly due to the nonexistent monsoon over the northwest allowing anticyclones over the Bight to drive cool southerly air far inland. The month, however, was remarkably hot over the United States and south-of-treeline Canada: apart from perhaps March 1910 or October 1947, no pre-Lonie Report month matches February 1954 for average mean monthly temperature percentile over the CONUS, with the first and last weeks seeing shorts temperatures as far north as the border. It was also warm over eastern Greenland, the Sea of Okhotsk and the extreme north of Russia.

October 1969 is a striking month, which I have long known in Australia as the driest October in Perth and Adelaide, but a very wet month in northern New South Wales with Gilgandra under water from its biggest flood since 1956.

Rainfall over Australia for October 1969. Note the heavy rainfall over northeastern NSW and southeast Queensland, as well as over the wet-dry tropics (where it proved a false beginning and was followed by the last big wet season failure before Australian greenhouse emissions eliminated such occurrences.

Globally, October 1969 saw an “Indian summer” in England and the beginning of a warm winter in a cold era for Alaska, but cold weather in western Russia, South America and New Zealand as well as the contiguous United States:

March 1912 was the end of one of the most famous cold winters in the US – and a key part of one of only two years since 1895/1896 where the England averaged hotter than the contiguous US. It also saw a “March miracle” in Southern California, whereby Los Angeles, which had not seen rain for 49 days at February’s end and recorded just 1.60 inches (40.6 millimetres) between October and February, accumulated 8.65 inches in the next six weeks. San Diego had an amazing 20 wet days that March. In Britain, this March was very wet (top ten wettest since 1766) but extremely mild at 2.0˚C above the virgin mean and warmest since 1882. What’s notable on a broad scale about March 1912 is that the western ends of both main northern hemisphere continental landmasses were warm, but that the rest was uniformly very cold, suggesting two big blocking patterns were driving cold air into Canada, the contiguous US and Russia, whilst – as is typical during a Lower 48 cold wave – Alaska was unusually warm. Even with anthropogenic global warming have major impacts, Fairbanks has experienced only four milder Marches since and was as warm as Sioux City and 3˚F (1.7˚C) warmer than Helena, Montana.

The summers of 1954 for being cool and wet, and 1975 and 1976 for being hot and dry, are legendary in the UK. It’s interesting to see that these contrasting summers seem to have opposite-signed anomalies extending quite widely over the globe, and that 1954 appears to have a somewhat similar pattern to the fabled year of 1816, being very cool in Western Europe and hot in the east, though I have not checked how general this is for cool or wet English summers.

Although the summer of 1975 in the US is most famous for the northeastern heatwave that saw several New England states set still-standing temperature records (and it’s notable that Maine’s record of 105˚F or 40.6˚C comes from the very hot European summer of 1911), the two 1970s summers were generally very cool across the US. Indeed, the record July cool in Texas approaches that of 1993 in Idaho and surrounds for its exceptional character, with anomalies in maximum temperature as large as 9.6˚F or 5.3˚C below normal, so that it was sometimes hotter in England than in Texas!

This animation shows US temperatures during the hot and dry English summers of 1975 and 1976. It was notably cool in the West and South, where 1976 is the coolest calendar year since records begin.

The summer of 1954 – the coolest since 1907 in the UK – is famous for its severe southern heatwave and drought, likely related to a highly positive Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). July saw the hottest temperatures east of the Mississippi River, although the summer – like that of 1980 – was as cool over the Pacific Northwest as over Western Europe so it does not come out exceptionally hot over the CONUS as a whole:

Contiguous US temperatures for the summer of 1954. Note the unusual cool (and rain) over the Pacific Northwest and heat (and drought) over the Southern Plains

April 1944 was very cool in the US and also in most of Australia (in Melbourne it is the seventh coolest April since records began in 1855, whilst the West Central division of Kansas was equal coolest) but notably warm in Canada, western Siberia and western Europe. It does not appear as striking as previously reviewed months.

Global temperature anomalies for April 1944. Note the cool over Australia, Beringia and the central US, plus the heat over Western Europe that made Britain hotter than the CONUS.

April 1944 was also notable for being extremely wet – record floods on the Missouri occurred early that summer in Montana’s wettest month on record – and part of a very dry spring across Western Europe. In Victoria the autumn was wet between two record-dry seasons, but was a blip on the longest genuine drought during the period before Australia’s mining and road-building industries began to control the global climate.  
September and October 1931 were very hot over the interior US – the end of the great drought of 1930-1931 as November saw big rains:

The hot September and October of 1931 over the US – it’s a pity the colour was lost when I formed an animation!

February 1903 is one a of a number of months (the winter of 1948/1949 being outstanding in this line, as was January 1932) that was very cold over the western US, but mild over the eastern US and England. That winter was also the mildest over northern Japan until 1948/1949, and in fact February 1903 was one of the mildest on record over all of Russia west of the “cold pole”. It is remarkable for the heavy rains in the eastern US as well as England and extreme cold over the Southwest under a flow of Arctic air to the west of the cyclone:

This hopefully will be a good summary of CONUS versus CET temperatures, and a “big picture” look at some outstanding contrasts therein. I hope readers find these historical data of interest.

Brooks' finding of individualism in cool lands

The cultural differences between Australia and other OECD nations are obvious merely from their different environmental and political policies – especially as those with any education will know how vastly older and more distinctive Australia’s flora, fauna and ecology is compared to the relatively universal and structurally uniform ecosystems that occur on young Enriched World soils.

Over the years, I have seen many and consistently opposiing explanations for observed cultural differences – which can be much deeper than is apparent from a surficial look at popular images of various cultures around the globe.

Although there are obvious flaws in Botero’s attempt to relate the two arguments, Carlos Botero and Russel Gray’s ‘The Ecology of Religious Beliefs’, John Snarey’s 1996 ‘The Natural Environment’s Impact upon Religious Ethics: A Cross-Cultural Study’ and Dustin Rubinstein’s ‘Environmental Uncertainty and the Global Biogeography of Cooperative Breeding in Birds’ suggest that Australia’s conservative policies are linked to a variable environment with a strong sense of community and cooperation. The more activist policies of the Enriched and Tropical Worlds are linked to lower climate variability and stronger individualism, which reduces the level of support in response to unforeseen variability in climate.

In his article ‘What Vacations Say about You’ in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Arthur C. Brooks – most famous for his landmark study of private charity Who Really Cares: the Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism – demonstrates that people who prefer to holiday – and one presumes to live – in mountainous regions tend to be more introverted than those who prefer the sea. This translates, given the fact that beaches tend to be in hot climates (where swimming is comfortable) and mountainous regions are inherently cool due to altitudinal “lapse” (jargon for temperature decrease due to adiabatic cooling), into a preference among introverts for cool climates and extroverts for hot ones.

Because introverts are more concerned about their own thoughts and feelings than others around them, they tend to be more creative and individualistic than extroverts, who tend to try to conform to cultural expectations. If we combine this empirical observation with the results of Brooks – actually done by psychologists from the University of Virginia and published in Journal of Research in Personality – one sees quite independent support for the findings of Botero, Snarey and Rubinstein that people in cool climates tend to be more individualistic than those in hot ones.

The implications of this result for global politics, culture and environment are profound. My personal experience with Australian politics and art shows extremes of conformity compared to the Enriched World. I have noticed Australian conformism and lack of creativity since I first read music reviews in The Age’s EG twenty years ago, but the writers were to my mind quietly baffled by why Australia never produced innovative artists. All these recent studies seem to quite conclusively demonstrate that conformism and risk-aversion is inherent (potentially necessary) in the oligotrophic, climatically erratic Australian environment, because risk might produce extreme and permanent food shortages and/or ecological collapse.

Risk-aversion may also explain the absence of encephalisation and cultural development among Australian Aborigines and Bushmen before improved fertilisers and lithophile metallurgy permitted their distant colonisation and economic development.

Paradoxically, in certain modern cases – most critically refusal among the mortgage belt to accept the smallest risk that transfer of investment from roads and coal to cleaner public transit and solar energy might reduce mobility or the reliability of household electricity – risk-aversion actually places Australia’s population at greater long-term risk (from greenhouse pollution and resultant radical climatic changes). This paradox is no doubt both an essential cause of the present ecological crisis and one that makes solving it so difficult.

“Googly Summer” or the true “Year without a Summer”?

The year 1816, following a major volcanic eruption, is often referred to in US and European history chronicles as “The year without a Summer” as Western Europe and the United States went through a summer where – at least supposedly in the absence of large-scale climatological data – frosts and snows occurred all through the “summer”. What data does exist does suggest a very cool summer in these regions, but nothing to suggest a major global cooling.

As we can see above, the exceptionally cool conditions in Western Europe were balanced by hotter-than-normal conditions further east. This may suggest rain was the culprit behind major agricultural problems, since cool weather on a western flank and hot on an eastern one suggests exceptionally wet conditions at the boundary between the two anomalies, as can be seen here for July 1993 in the US:

Average temperatures for the conterminous US in July 1993. Note the record cool in the Northwest (as much as 9.1˚F or 5.1˚C below normal in southern Idaho – an anomaly which has a virgin or constant-greenhouse-forcing return period certainly far beyond 121 years) and the very hot weather in the Southeast

Rainfall for the conterminous US in July 1993. Note the heavy rainfall in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri near the boundary between much-hotter and much-cooler than normal conditions.

The impression if often given that 1816 is without analog. However, from my knowledge of old county cricket I was aware 1907 was the coolest cricket season in England since the record cool and wet summer of 1879, but recently I found that Winnipeg averaged an amazing 4.3˚C. This is as much as 6˚C cooler than Winnipeg’s virgin mean May temperature – an astonishing anomaly for a month in the hotter half of the year. As can be seen below, anomalies for May 1907 were even larger over northern Minnesota:

Conterminous US temperature anomalies for May 1907. Note the extreme cool in the Upper Midwest, where many places averaged below freezing overnight.

In fact, the April to September half-year was astonishingly cool over the Lower 48 (certainly the coolest since 1895), though the unusual thing is that it followed a winter that was very mild south of the northern tier of states:

Indeed, the 1906/1907 winter is the sole pre-Lonie-Report winter remaining as of 2015 among the top ten warmest in Arizona, and despite the global warming produced by Australian greenhouse emissions still remains the hottest winter on record in Texas and New Mexico. The winter was also extremely wet except in the Northeast and Deep South.

Although it’s often the case that temperature anomalies in the contiguous US do not reflect global trends (e.g. March 1946) the summer of 1907 seems not to follow such a pattern, being cool to very cool almost everywhere with reliable data. May 1907’s extreme cool (if the base period on the top map is manifestly outside the virgin period and unnecessarily influenced by Australian car and coal pollution) can be seen to extend well into the Arctic Circle.

Global temperature anomalies relative to 1880 to 1974 for May 1907, courtesy of GISS. Note that the extreme cool over most of North America is not counterbalanced anywhere

The extremely cool summer in the US and Britain is hardly counterbalanced at all – like we would expect it to be in the maps for the 1906/1907 winter, the summer of 1816, and July 1993. It is true that there is a hotter-than-normal area just west of the Urals, but unlike many more famous months of simultaneous unusually cool weather in the US and Europe, there is no markedly hotter-than-average weather over the Labrador or Bering Seas. This suggests 1907 really was a “year without a summer” on quite a wide scale, though global temperature data do not show this as far as I am aware.

Global temperature anomalies relative to 1880 to 1974 for June to August 1907. Although there is no region so exceptionally cool as in May, the lack of heat is even more striking.

It’s interesting to see that this “year without a summer” saw googly bowlers – expected to be at their best in a hot and dry summer – do so well. It’s almost as if the extreme cool weather did not make pitches softer as would be expected, especially as if it was windy they might have dried out well as is indicate by the high proportion of finished matches for a summer with only 53 dry days out of 123.

It may also have helped Arthur Fielder gain his surprising return of 172 wickets in an era when fast bowlers tended to be valueless in wet weather – if this very cool summer and improved drainage made getting a foothold easier, it makes sense Fielder could against weaker batsmen do so well.

“New Deal Winters”

Tonight, as I have been working in the Bailleau trying to find out more about the notorious North American cold wave of winter 1935/1936 – a winter in which wind chill temperatures are supposed to have reached “100 below zero” or minus 73.3 degrees Celsius – I have discovered a strange article from the New York Times about the relationship between politics and winter temperatures.

The article, titled ‘New Deal Winters’, argued that with democratic administrations since the 1910s, winters over the US became colder, and with Republican administrations warmer. The basis of the argument is that the election of Warren Harding in 1921 saw a trend towards milder winters in the 1920s that was reversed from the anomalous winter of 1933/1934, when extreme cold hit the Northeast.

There are many troubles with this. The most obvious is that the trends shown are inapplicable globally and are indeed not applicable to most of the United States itself. The winter of 1928/1929 under Hoover was exceedingly cold over large areas of the United States, and – in spite of numerous records for warmth over the East – the winters of 1931/1932 and especially 1932/1933 were, especially the latter winter, which remains the coldest on record in Arizona very cold over the West.

The winter of 1933/1934 – one of the great “landmark” winters in the history of meteorology in North America – did see severe and costly cold in the Northeast and the Canadian Maritimes where apple crops were especially hard-hit – but in the West this winter was quite unprecedentedly mild. In fact, before Australian greenhouse gas emissions took control of global climate decisively in the 1970s and 1980s, the mild Western winter of 1933/1934 would have been a three standard deviation event, which would mean so mild a winter would have been expected to occur only once every seven hundred and forty years! The New York Times did briefly note that most of the contiguous US had experienced a warm winter in 1933/1934, but did not decisively point out just how warm that abnormal winter was.

It was so warm that many lakes in the Intermountain West failed to freeze for the only time since records have been kept – including in the modern era controlled by Australian greenhouse gas emissions. In Idaho, not only was the ski industry completely ruined by lack of snow, despite very heavy December precipitation, but during the spring of 1934 major pest outbreaks hit agriculture in the Inland Northwest with exceptional severity due to the absence of normal winterkill. The lack of water – it ran off during the winter with significant flooding observed in a very wet December – hit agriculture in the West hard during the hot, dry summer of 1934.

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1928/1929, during the Hoover regime, in the contiguous US. Note the uniform cold west of the Appalachians

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1932/1933 in the contiguous United States. Note the record cold over the Southwest and abnormal warmth (would certainly still be warmest minus Australian greenhouse emissions) over New England)

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1933/1934 in the contiguous US. The extraordinary warmth over the Inland Northwest is difficult to comprehend from this figure – it averaged over three virgin standard deviations above the mean.

It can be seen from these graphs that a trend to warm winters which had been observed to some extent during the 1920s persisted very firmly over the Mississippi Valley, but extremes were observed elsewhere and had been seen in the winter of 1930/1931, which remained the warmest on record in the Prairie Provinces of Canada and interior British Columbia until the “magic gate” of 1998.

Temperature ranks for the winter of 1930/1931 over the contiguous United States. This winter was – before the “magic gate” of 1998 – the warmest on record almost throughout Western Canada and is still the second-driest over the CONUS

What is funny to me about the “New Deal Winter” is the knowledge that if Australia had a respectable level of environmental regulation (crucially taking into account the exceptional age and infertility of its soils) climates over the globe would certainly be or become cooler than they have been over the past forty or so years.

This regulation would necessarily forbid or almost forbid any form of greenhouse pollution whatsoever being used in or produced by Australia, and would necessarily increase the effective size of government (government’s power to control the activities of business) far beyond what is observed in the Enriched World. Australia has never seen this type of “New Deal” because its hot climate and low secondary productivity supports hierarchism over the egalitarianism which, during the past century over the Enriched World, has produced and continues to produce radical political changes. When reading ‘New Deal Winters’, I love to relate seemingly significant global climate changes to such moves by Australian governments as:

1. the Lonie Report leading to large-scale building of freeways in Melbourne
2. the reduction and abolition of tariffs (began in 1988) that has gradually changed Australia’s car prices from the world’s dearest to its cheapest
3. the abolition of indexation of petrol excise in 2001 that has moved Australian fuel prices further down the global list

So the fact is that a “New Deal” in Australia with some serious greenhouse regulation and genuine taxation of highly polluting mineral corporations would rapidly have a major impact on global climate – but the real New Deal did not have the impacts the New York Times claimed during a freakishly harsh winter most probably driven by a highly negative North Atlantic Oscillation.