Silly jokes about Jennifer Bate – again

On my thirty-eighth birthday – and feeling how much time I have simply wasted – my visiting brother and I went into some details about how the Austrian School of economics tries to hide its funding by what he calls the “richey rich” and organisations like Socialist Alternative call more simply the “super-rich”. He says that the Austrian School simply try to hide their interest in the “super-rich” in order to gain wider appeal than they would have otherwise. I have assumed with both Austrians and Trotskyites that ignorance is the reason people do not read them and that, notwithstanding the fact that it is possible that both groups argue too much that the same solution exists for every problem, that they are committed to find genuine solutions as few others are.

After a bit of diversionary talk with my mother, who was very busy cooking our birthday dinner, Jonjo began to move onto one of his favourite – and least appealing to me – criticisms of me. He said that organist Jennifer Bate, whom he had previously ludicrously called a “cat”:

• had to have “meows” removed from her recordings!
• had to have “purrs” removed from her recordings!
• that she loved to drink milk!
• that she loved Whiskas!
• in an old joke, the the quieter parts of Messiaen organ works were Bate the cat sleeping on the organ!
• was the oldest cat ever known in the world
• At 71 Bate would be almost twice as old as the oldest certified real cat!
• that Jennifer Bate might already be dead and that a cat might be doing the work credited to her!

As I said in a previous post, there is no way any cat could perform real Messiaen organ works! It would also cost a lot of money to edit purrs from a cat playing the organ (though it is also possible that purrs and meows would not be recorded at all and the cost would be less). The possibility a cat – a terrestrial carnivore which could easily be injured killing prey – could live as long as Jennifer Bate has is incredibly remote. Even the largest and wildest “big cats” of the subfamily Pantherinae never live nearly as long as 71 years in the wild or even in captivity!

It would be wonderful for my brother to accept that recordings of Messiaen are played by real humans, but though I never had trouble liking his music and appreciating its uniqueness many people apparently are different and react in an aggressive manner against it. Maybe, maybe, ignoring is better than trying to be rude??

A horrible accident on a horrible day

Although I knew that today was going to be very hot – and thus a great day to wash my delicate bamboo summer sheets that require low spin and hence more natural drying – I had a moment of virtual madness a couple of hours ago that I feared would cost me a great deal and left me in the worst of quandries.

It is a familiar practice on uncomfortably hot days to move the clothes horse out to the balcony to aid drying – and necessary with bamboo sheets that must be spun at 400 revs per minute instead of 800 (I am careful about these instructions, although my mother urges me not to be).

This morning, as I was discovering that one sock was missing, I went back from the balcony to get the other sock which I assumed (correctly) remained in the washing machine. However, to my dreadful shock, I found that I could not get out of the balcony as I had locked the door from the inside by tuning the latch! The first inclination I had was to try to climb down from the balcony to the courtyard below and get back inside from there. However, with my fat stomach and bare feet I knew three things:

1. it would be tough to climb down the narrow holes
2. I would risk breaking the ledges if I tried
3. I would risk an ankle injury from landing on the hard bricks

Consequently, I shouted “HELP, HELP, HELP” southward towards Coleman Place, whose houses (though not the actual lane) can be seen directly from the balcony. At first there was no response and I – imaging extreme ascetics I have been reading about like the eighteenth-century Ephrata Cloister who slept on hard wood – I tried to fall asleep in the hope I would be able to get enough sleep even in the hot weather to forget that I was locked out in a hot balcony.

This is the bed of a Brother or Sister (celibate) in the eighteenth-century Ephrata Cloister. I imagine it easier to sleep on than the outdoors balcony I tried to sleep the day on waiting for my mother.

For a little while I did sleep, but the hot air and wind eventually woke me up and I resumed calling “HELP, HELP” towards Coleman Place. Eventually, a man by the name of Chris (at first when I heard I though his name to be “Cress”) caught my call and I told him – without even seeing – that I was locked out on my balcony. After an error, I managed to get my mother’s mobile number, but although Chris did manage to call it my mother was busy teaching. I thus asked Chris to message my mother with an urgent notice that I was locked out on the balcony, and to get the police in case there was no way she could come home. I also gave my half-sister’s number (the only other one I could remember) but there was no answer either. So, I was desperate and unable to rest as Chris left, saying that he was going around to try to get the police in by the front door, which I was not sure practicable because they might not have had the appropriate tool to get locked-in people back in like locksmiths do.

I remained fidgety all along until I saw Chris’ neighbour, Lorraine, and a Chilean woman called “Coca” (full name “Catherina”). I told them what had happened and Lorraine said that being locked out was not a unique problem for me. When it was inquired how the police – who were slow to the point of some worry – would get in, I suggested that they climb the wall at the back of our house and Lorraine tried herself with a ladder she had – hoping in fact that the builders (rebuilding the Carlton Baths) would offer the police one for the emergency! It was thought that a big person could do it easily – and indeed when the police came they had no trouble at all and soon unlocked me, the weather already horribly hot!

I feel from this that I was dreadfully careless – and was in a daydream when I went out to the balcony! What lessons can be learnt from this unfortunate accident I do not know – since in many circumstances I would not have been able to call for help as I did.

A day that shows the Enriched World needs to “swallow its pride” and make no petty quarrels

Although I had known the weather was going to be be hot, I did not realise for quite a long time yesterday just how bad it would be. Melbourne surpassed by two weeks its earliest first 35˚C — and despite promise of some rain for the first time in a while when I looked outside yesterday none is forecast for a long time. In fact, it looks likely Melbourne will have a rainless October and during the least likely season beat its record forty day dry spell with little hope held out by the (not always accurate) 28-day forecasts.

Although when I checked rainfall in Central Chile was not as bad as I feared this June, this is due entirely to one big fall in the first week of August — in a year when rainfalls closer to or even above the virgin mean were forecast. Moreover, in Perth the situation is as bad as ever, with rainfall barely above the virgin record low.

News of records like this, unfortunately, is not absorbed permanently by the Enriched World – which often takes a “blame yourself” route re global warming that modern ecologists show demonstrably counterproductive. Enriched World ecology permits much greater energy consumption and more lenient greenhouse standards than required of Australia (especially given greater genuine local energy need in cold weather). Yet, based upon directly and indirectly created greenhouse emissions Enriched World per capita emissions average a mere two percent those of Australia — and even based upon only directly created emissions they average less than a quarter Australia’s per capita emissions.

For genuine environmental justice that reflects relative ecological energy availability — direct and indirect Australian emissions must be cut by several orders of magnitude before Enriched World reductions are so much as assessed. One “zooty2shoes” said last February that:

“But I question your figures — everything I have accessed points to the Gulf states and Brunei as being the worst offenders with Australia a distance behind at 5th per capita. And with 1.3% of the worlds total, it would take 15 years of Australia’s greenhouse emissions to tie with China.”

Whilst the oil states and Southern Africa are after Australia the worst polluters in the world — Australia has ecologically and politically much more in common with them than with Europe, East Asia or the Western Hemisphere — if we take into account indirect emissions Australia, with 16 percent of the total, would more than tie with China (who would “lose” emissions contributed by Australian minerals). Moreover, each Australian emits in four days as much greenhouse gases as each Chinese does in a whole year! As I noted in my previous post, the political power of the mineral industry and mortgage belt has been able to blockade well-intentioned efforts from the 1980s to make minimal reductions in Australian greenhouse emissions. The fact is though, that if zero-emissions laws be widely enforced in the Enriched and Tropical Worlds, polluting industries could simply relocate to Australia, where they have advantages of cheaper land, cheaper energy (one-sixth the price paid in Europe) and potentially less politically active workers.

The Enriched and Tropical Worlds have a clear need to do the following:

1. momentarily forget about their own greenhouse emissions — which per capita direct and indirect are small compared to the mineral-rich desert states of the Indian Rim
• when the much lower energy consumptions of native species in the desert states are factored in, the smallness of Enriched World emissions is further emphasised
2. recognise that they are not the superpowers they were before aluminum and titanium metallurgy transformed the global power base to deserts too infertile to be civilised
3. eliminate quarrels — related to differing dates of industrial development rather than different trajectories — that have occurred between Europe, the US and China over reducing their own emissions
4. unite solidly with each other to demand reductions of two to three orders of magnitude in Australian greenhouse emissions
• similarly if possible those of Southern Africa and the Arab Gulf States, though cultural and political differences are much greater than even with Australia, and may make this far less practical than an attempt with Australia
• direct payment for the right to pollute could potentially be more effective with these nations and even with Australia, although it would be difficult to finance
• the trouble is how to make these payments large enough to alter the main polluters’ behaviour
5. demand without compromise that costs resulting from climatic changes due to man-made greenhouse emissions be paid for by the actual polluters noted in (4)

This is the most difficult of plans. The powerlessness of the Enriched World — let alone the poorer Tropical World — against the big polluting nations of the Indian Rim has been consistently demonstrated ever since apartheid and the energy crisis of the 1970s. US efforts to police the Middle East have had few impacts on global emissions produced there, nor on the political effects from naturally religious and conservative nations funding radical Islam.

European beliefs their nations’ own technologies can reduce global emissions are similarly flawed: their lack of lithophile metal reserves (destroyed by the Alpine Orogeny and glaciation) acts as an extreme natural limit to their potential emissions absent in today’s major greenhouse polluters. By moving towards a carbon-free economy the EU and related nations may actually be turning themselves into an exclusive club whose taxes and living costs only the most skilled workers can afford. Absence of economic opportunities for the less-skilled no doubt contributes to lowest-low fertility in much of Eurasia – a severe political problem because making families valuable would require huge, politically impossible reductions in their lavish “Daddy States”.

Another trouble is that the richest nations of the Enriched World who would not benefit most from a rigid “polluter pays” approach to global warming. Rather, it is the Tropical World and lower latitudes of the Enriched, along with the farm and tourism sectors in the Unenriched World, who would so benefit.

Nonetheless, all the Enriched World has reason to support groups like southwestern Australian urban dwellers and Chilean cities who have lost their rain to a rapid expansion of the Hadley Circulation or high-desert people who have lost glacier-fed water supplies. If greenhouse emissions from the key polluters like Australia and South Africa grow unchecked, the higher latitudes of the Enriched World could be faced with the same problems currently affecting its equatorward edges and the Tropical World. Northern Europe, East Asia and North America have ecologically — as Tom McMahon showed in his seminal 1991 Global Runoff — much more in common with potentially badly-hit low-income tropical and Mediterranean nations that with Australia, who constitutes a cuckoo in the OECD’s nest.

Petty quarrels over differences in living standards must be replaced by unity based on similarity in ecology. In its absence, international energy policy remains silently controlled by the very nations responsible for expanding the Hadley circulation and melting glaciers.

Changed policies, changed system, same power centre

A year ago today – though I forgot – I read an article from the West Australian dating back to 1980, the year of the appalling Lonie Report whose effects will be seen this week in record hot October temperatures.

In my early 2000s university classes, it was taught that Australia only became a dreadful laggard on environmental issues with the demise of the Hawke Government following swings against Labor in Victoria with the 1990 Federal election. This has been outlined much more recently by the magazine Chain Reaction in Maria Taylor’s Global warming and climate change: What Australians knew and buried ... then framed a new reality for the public (available for free download here).

In some respects Australia’s environmental policies during the 1980s did not stand out so badly as they did in the 1990s and beyond – for instance we possessed much tougher pollution legislations than the UK and New Zealand.

Australia’s lesser laggardness in the 1980s is enhanced by the fact that many seminal environmental papers showing the continent’s unique ecology had not yet been published. None of The Future Eaters, Tom McMahon’s studies of global runoff (Global Runoff: Continental Comparisons of Annual Flows and Peak Discharges) plus Barry Lovegrove’s study ‘The Zoogeography of Mammalian Basal Metabolic Rate’, which reveals the exceptionally slow metabolism of Australia’s largest native mammals compared to large mammals elsewhere (though a search failed to find the supplementary material I was looking for), were published before 1990.

However, this article by later Age journalist Tim Colebatch, titled ‘Japan Cleans Air, Cleans Up Myths’, suggests – as the incidence of unnecessary road projects even before the Lonie Report made me suspect – that there was an extremely powerful lobby eliminating the ability of Australia to be anything but a laggard in environmental policy.

Colebatch shows that in 1980 Australia’s car industry was rigidly opposed to legislation to move Australia’s pollution standards closer to the strictest standards of Japan and California, despite the fact that motor cars were clearly the cause not only of a significant proportion of greenhouse gas emissions but also of toxic pollutants like nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide. Given that Australian environments are much lower in volatile elements than the Enriched World, Australian native species likely have smaller tolerance for these toxic pollutants, and it thus stands logical that Australian environments required much cleaner air than those of Europe or Japan.

It is true that Colebatch ignore Australia’s lack of engineering skill compared to Japan or Germany – undoubtedly a direct result of Australia’s superabundant land and lithophile minerals which allow it to be very wealthy without these skills – and the potential influence of unions to slow adoption of new technologies. Nonetheless, Australia most likely had the skill to develop the technology to radically reduce both emissions and fuel consumption to a quarter of the long-term standard of approximately 11.5 litres per 100 kilometres (20.5 miles per US gallon). Greater fuel tax revenues and even the 57.5 percent import tariff then in use could have been used to permit the vast investment in rail transit that was overdue even in 1980, and import quotas could have been used to restrict car availability with improved public transport.

However, lobbying from car manufacturers and mortgage belt voters – who would struggle financially if petrol in Australia cost the environmental price of its use, which modern ecological knowledge suggests as minimally ten times present Australian fuel prices – would undoubtedly have made these radical changes politically suicidal.

The essential conclusion from ‘Japan Cleans Air, Cleans Up Myths’ is that Australia’s status as an embarrassing environmental laggard is much older than Maria Taylor presumes. In fact, Australia’s descent to such a woeful laggard became inevitable with demands for lower taxes and reduced regulation from the late 1980s. By 1987, it was clear our massively protected local car industry (protection in 1984 was equivalent to a 135 percent tariff) was economically unprofitable even with that protection. The powerful mining industries no doubt sensed potential increased profits with no import quotas and much lower car taxes. With the support of car-dependent and family-oriented mortgage belt voters on a uniquely abundant land supply, there was no way Australia’s politicians were clearly incapable of achieving even the very modest 20 percent reduction planned in 1990 – although that would have threatened the powers-that-be in the mineral, coal and road industries enough.

Two “little ice ages” revealed by CET summer data

The past couple of weeks have been preoccupied by studies of UK and US precipitation and temperature data – often with the inclination to prepare things for publication here without doing anything on this line.

Yesterday and today, in between trips to visit my brother in Balaclava, I have prepared a comprehensive, tabulated analysis of the CET data as a follow-up to the work of Uncharted Territory on the famous anomaly of 1740 – the coldest twelve months in the CET record.

Mean annual Central England Temperature for each fiscal year from 1659/1660 to 2014/2015

As we can see from this graph of fiscal year Central England Temperature, there has been a general increase since the extremely cold decade of the 1690s, so much so that many recent years are off the map of what would be possible without Australian greenhouse gas emissions. There were exceptions in the 1740s and 1750s, the 1810s following a known but undocumented major eruption, and between the middle 1880s and middle 1890s following the eruption of Krakatoa. The major rise in the late 1980s no doubt coincides with the beginning of the gradual elimination of import tariffs on cars in Australia, previously so high (57.5 percent from 1978 to 1988) as to push up car prices and lower Australian greenhouse emissions.

Uncharted Territory’s work on winter CET has given me the incentive to look at summer CET over time, so we shall do this one next. This is especially significant as long-term ice fluctuations are much more influenced by summer than winter temperature – colder winters actually inhibit the growth of ice sheets as seen in completely unglaciated Siberia and Manchuria. Following on from Uncharted Territory, I have provided a 9-year and 75-year running mean on the graph:

Conclusions one might draw from the graph:

1. As with the fiscal year CET graph, there is a general rise in summer CET since the 1690s
2. There are numerous clear groups of cool summers such as:
1. from 1679 to 1700 (14 of 22 summers in lowest quartile)
2. from 1809 to 1823 (nine of fifteen summers in lowest quartile)
3. from 1839 to 1848 (seven of ten summers in lowest quartile)
4. from 1860 to 1862 (two of three in lowest five percent)
5. from 1879 to 1894 (ten of sixteen summers in lowest quartile)
6. from 1902 to 1924 (twelve of 23 summers in lowest quartile)
3. Before global warming intensified in the 1980s, there were noticeable fewer long runs of hot summers than of cool summers
• there were only two periods (plus a brief one from 1893 to 1901) with five or more “hot summers” (top quartile) in nine years
• these were as noted above all between 1771 and 1783 before the Laki eruption
• or in the late 1720s and early 1730s
4. It is notable that, before the 1980s, extremely hot summers never occurred close together apart from those of 1778 to 1781 – in contrast to the spells of cool summers in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries
5. There are many cases of isolated hot summers during periods dominated by cool summers (1826, 1846, 1911) but except perhaps 1725 no instance of an exceptionally cool summer during periods dominated by hot summers
6. The 75-year running mean shows a notable peak in the latter half of the eighteenth century centred around 1770 (corresponding to the period from 1730 to 1810)
7. The nine-year peak of hot summers in the 1770s (from 1773 to 1781) was not rivalled until Australian road and coal industries took control of the climate
8. The 75-year running mean reaches an all-series minimum centred around the early 1890s following the eruption of Krakatoa

Thus, summer CET data suggest two “little ice ages”, one peaking in the late seventeenth century and one in the late nineteenth. I am too unfamiliar with summer temperature patterns elsewhere in the globe to know how general these trends are. Precipitation-sensitive glaciers in central Chile – a region ranking among the most severely affected by anthropogenic greenhouse warming – reached maxima late in the nineteenth century after a wet period from 1820 to 1905, which strongly suggests the width of the Hadley circulation reached its narrowest in this era. It is true that in other regions glaciers were already retreating during the latter half of the nineteenth century, though whether this reflects temperature or precipitation changes I am unsure.

We will now look at the spring CET graph:

Broadly speaking, the spring CET graph is not dissimilar to the summer CET graph above. Major differences:

1. The 75-year spring CET peak in the eighteenth century is a little later and does not reach above the virgin mean
2. Deep short-term sequences of cool springs occur in the 1740s and 1760s (culminating in the second-coolest spring in 1770) that are not followed by cool summers
3. There is no deep trough following the 1810 volcanic eruption due to several notably hot springs in 1811, 1815 and 1822
4. The minimum in spring temperature following the eruption of Krakatoa is easily the most pronounced since the 1740s.
5. The early-1840s summer temperature trough is a double trough in the spring season due to exceptionally cool springs in 1837 to 1839 and 1855.

If we look at the autumn season, we see a distinctly different pattern from the spring and summer seasons:

Here, unlike the spring and summer seasons, there is no maximum in the 1770s or 1780s. Rather the lowest trough in the entire 75-year running CET mean occurs at the same time as the maximum in spring and summer.

Apart from several hot autumns between 1818 and 1828, the sole significant maximum before the 1930s is during the first half of the eighteenth century – the 75-year maximum is centred upon 1743 and falls off rapidly due to a record cool autumn in 1786 and several other very cool autumns between 1782 and 1794.

Although it is also seen in the spring graph, there is a notable 1680s CET autumn upswing that however, relates only to a pair of succeeding hot autumns in 1680 and 1681.

A critical feature of the autumn graph is that it shows a much larger signature from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions than the spring, summer or winter graphs. Only three cooler-than-normal autumn seasons have occurred in the past forty years, and two of these are only just below the virgin mean. The distance by which record hot recent autumn seasons have exceeded previous records is also considerably greater than for the summer and spring seasons. This probably reflect the low British insolation and considerable seasonal lag during autumn. Absorption and release of heat by greenhouse gases probably has greatest impact during autumn not only in Britain, but just as importantly in areas – Siberia, the Arctic Ocean – from where cold airmasses must be advected into the UK to produce an unusually cool autumn like 1952, 1919, 1887 or 1786.

I will only briefly discuss the winter and extended winter (November to March) graphs as these have been done elsewhere:

The extended winter bears distinct similarities to the autumn graph above – only one November since 1994 has had a CET below the virgin mean of 5.97˚C or 42.74˚F. The major anthropogenic rise is earlier for the extended winter due to two exceptionally warm seasons in 1897/1898 and 1898/1899 (this last was however exceedingly cold in the United States).

Note the extreme cold in the US during the extended winter of 1898/1899, when Central England was having one of its mildest seasons since the 1730s with an average of 5.93˚C or 42.67˚F

In fact, only one extended winter since 1891/1892 has had a CET below 3.5˚C or 38.3˚F, as against twenty-three (two in eleven) between 1765/1766 and 1890/1891! The period from 1702 to 1739 is a near rival, but was not nearly so prolonged and had a decade of cooler seasons than anything seen over the past 120 years from 1716 to 1727. The actual winter CET series shown below shows the same pronounced trough in the 1810s as the summer one, though a scarcity of mild winters dates back to the early 1750s and those mild winters that did occur (e.g. 1778/1779, 1789/1790) were often dry and influenced by Saharan airflows – not as with conventional mild British winters by wet maritime Atlantic air.

A distinct peak in the 1860s and short-term troughs associated with prevailing negative NAO values in the 1940s and 1960s means a relatively steady 75-year mean since 1890 despite two notable severe winters that decade. The winter CET is similar to the autumn one except that its short-term peak is in the middle 1730s rather than late 1720s, and there is no peak but a continuing trough in the 1810s and 1820s.

Although explaining these peaks and troughs observed in CET data before 1974 is beyond the information I have at present, I do know that rainfall proxy data suggest that before the 1720s and from 1760 to 1820 the Sahel was wet and Southern California dry. This combination of high Sahel rainfall and low rainfall in SoCal implies a strongly positive Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (as in the 1950s and 1960s). The mild winters noted by Uncharted Territory for the 1730s suggest a highly negative AMO (perhaps more negative than during the late twentieth century), which is further supported by evidence of Sahel drought and reduced SoCal drought in that decade plus mild British winters during the negative AMO era between about 1905 and 1925. It also suggests a highly negative PNA, which would need verification in western North America (which did have many cold winters between 1896 and 1939) that would be very difficult since winter temperature does not directly influence growth or hydrology in most areas.