Lessen for buying Pink Lady apples

Two Pink Lady apples bought at Woolworths mid-week. Notice how they are completely infected with a brown fungus, species not known to me or my family

Mummy and I have liked the fresh, crunchy flavour of Pink Lady apples for over a decade now, so much so that apart from occasional purchases by myself of Granny Smiths we rarely buy any other type.

This week, as we prepare for a lengthy holiday in Singapore, Japan, and with a not-yet-acquired visa Vietnam, I had a rude shock when I brought a few Pink Ladies to tide ourselves over in our last few days in Australia. I bought four Pink Ladies, and found the first to be so brown – infected with a fungus of a species I have not researched personally – that I dared not eat it. When I was in the local Woolworths buying the apples, they felt quite OK, and in the past buying fruit I have always tended to rely on feel since bad fruit is more often than not bad only inside.

However, when we discovered another completely infected and inedible apple on this last day in Australia, and when I first noticed the earlier bad one, my mother said that bad Pink Ladies can in fact be detected by means of their yellow colour in the core skin. One can faintly see a yellow colour in the core of the opened apple, and the one uninfected Pink Lady was green or red all over.

This really should be a lesson for all shoppers, as well as for Woolworths itself!

How artificial blocs doomed Kyōtō

As Time magazine shows another year of record hot global temperatures, we see that the country whose populace (per person) bears most responsibility is still doing absolutely nothing to ameliorate climatic changes. Australia has since at least 1980 had, alongside analogous high-income resource-rich nations surrounding the Persian Gulf, the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, as shown by this map from 2005.

Per capita emissions from 2005, excluding land use change 

When we consider CO₂ emissions from the longer 1950 to 2000 period, Australia is less striking but its per capita emissions remain high compared to Europe, East Asia and most of Latin America.

Yet, when diverse countries with opposing interests met as “Annex B” nineteen years ago for a protocol to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions, the Persian Gulf oil states were given no targets at all, whilst Australia was allowed an increase of 8 percent over its 1990 emissions. In contrast, European nations with (1990) per capita emissions one-fifth Australia’s were required to reduce their emissions by 8 percent.

Even permitted such a target, Australia under John Howard refused to sign. Australia’s real powerbrokers – the coal and aluminium industries (Crowley, 2007) alongside car-dependent suburban  families – voted Howard into power. These groups had and have a stake in unlimited greenhouse emissions because that allows them lower taxes and living costs, plus higher corporate profits. Australia’s major parties have had to work within the bounds set by these groups, which simply forbid any reductions in emissions. Aluminium, coal and farming interests, who would surrender their wealth and political power if required to make the requisite in emissions to avoid dangerous impacts from global warming, set rigid limits to policy, as seen in Australia’s carbon tax fiasco earlier this decade. Australia’s greater economic and demographic growth vis-à-vis other “developed” nations – not to mention its limitless reserves of important but energy-intensive aluminium and titanium ores – ensures that as presently framed Australia can simply ignore global demands for reduced emissions.

Officially, Australia’s refusal to ratify the Kyōtō Protocol was due to the absence of participation of so-called “developing” or “Third World” nations. In reality, excepting high-income oil exporters – whose global economic role is analogous to Australia’s as a wealthy coal/lithophile metal exporter – the per capita contributions of “developing” (“G77”) nations to global greenhouse emissions are small. One decisive problem dooming Kyōtō was “G77” nations failure to demand deep and immediate emissions cuts from high-emissions oil exporters inside their ranks. Failure to confront the oil exporters head-on allowed those nations to escape even more scot-free than did Australia. Indeed, Kasa et. al. (2008) has revealed the “G77” as an alliance between unwilling oil exporters and powerless but culturally aligned (via Islam or indigenous culture) Least Developed Countries, and thus wholly ineffective for reducing emissions.

To achieve large cuts to global emissions before 2010, an alliance was required between the industrial high-technology nations of Europe and East Asia on the one hand, and the Least Developed Countries on the other. Despite the large differences in these blocs’ cultures, lifestyles and living standards, they share an economic interest in low emissions because they are:

1. poor in fossil fuels
2. poor in lithophile metal ores
3. usually mountainous (hence opportunities for land clearing are limited).

This requisite alliance would have been directed at Australia, the OPEC States and Southern Africa, demanding rigid and severe emissions reduction targets there without opportunity for negotiating compromise. A move for deep uniform cuts, strict baselines, no bubbles or baskets, fewer gases, early timetables and the exclusion of sinks was proposed for the disparate “developed countries” by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) (Liverman, 2008). AOSIS made credible demands – unfortunately aimed toward a bloc with conflicting interests. If AOSIS and the Least Developed Countries had focused their ire on Australia, OPEC nations, and perhaps South Africa, they might have gained essential support from the EU and East Asia and campaigned for exceedingly deep and rapid emissions cuts for Australia and OPEC.

The actual costs of deep emissions reduction in these critical nations are unclear, but Australia – the worst offender given its ancient land and low-energy ecology (Orians and Milewski, 2007) that biologically demands it have the world’s lowest per capita emissions rather than the highest – could certainly transform to a solar energy- and ecotourism-based economy if the polluters were less powerful. OPEC nations with fewer options would have more trouble, but Barnett et. al. (2004) has suggested that losses could have been made minimal by an accord similar to the Marrakesh Accord. As for the resource-poor manufacturing and Least Developed nations, modifications of their economies (for instance designing goods to last longer and consume fewer resources in the long term) would multiply the effect of eliminating the emissions of the mineral states.

The basic message from the middle 1990s Kyōtō negotiations, and indeed from the Kyōtō Protocol itself, is the failure of blocs based primarily or even substantially upon culture. Needed were and are blocs based upon ecology and economic interests. It is logical that the small number of fossil fuel- and lithophile metal-rich nations with high per capita emissions would be outnumbered, and the rest of the world would demand the severest and quickest emissions reductions by the mineral exporters. This was where Kyōtō should have began, not as a virtual dispute over a serious issue between nations whose economies and ecologies lie diametrically opposed, and we continue to pay the consequences.

References:

• Barnett, Jon; Dessai, Suraje and Webber, Michael; ‘Will OPEC lose from the Kyoto Protocol?’; Energy Policy, vol. 32 (2004), pp. 2077-2088 
• Crowley, Kate; ‘Is Australia Faking It? The Kyōtō Protocol and the Greenhouse Policy Challenge’; Global Environmental Politics, Volume 7, Number 4, November 2007, pp. 118-139
• Kasa, Sjur; Gullberg, Anne T. Gullberg and Heggelund, Gørild; ‘The Group of 77 in the international climate negotiations: recent developments and future directions’; International Environmental Agreements vol. 8 (2008) pp. 113-127
• Liverman, Diana M.; ‘Conventions of climate change: constructions of danger and the dispossession of the atmosphere’; Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 35 (2009), pp. 279-296
• 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

An unclear result vis-à-vis necessity

Today, the Animal Legal Defense Fund in the United States has ranked the states in order of animal rights.

Although I am sceptical of the arguments of extreme animal rights advocates, I understand that at least in hotter climates with poorer soils there certainly is need for restrictions on animal killing and possibly even on use in some cases (which probably are not found in most of the Western Hemisphere). Nonetheless, the soil map below, which shows lower-fertility and older soils in the South and nutrient-poor parent materials in the central west coast, does suggest that these hotter regions need more regulations on animal use:

This belief of greater regulation in hotter climates is supported by native cultures: generally there were greater taboos on animal food in hotter regions than in cooler ones, and the greatest taboos of all were found in arid desert regions and in southern Australia where poor soils and dry climates (which create alkaline soils that immobilise phosphorus, zinc and copper) severely limit the availability of animal protein. Many primitive peoples in these regions were de jure and/or de facto vegetarians as a means of conservation – it is ironic that vegetarianism is most “trendy” today in some extremely protein-rich regions such as the Pacific Northwest and Germany where diets based upon animal foods cause limited or negligible ecological costs and comparative disadvantages in plant-based food production tend to be very large.

As can be seen from the map above, there does not seem to be a strong relationship between laws and actual ecological need – though I will stress that this is better than the usual result of inverse relationship whereby the best ecological laws found precisely where there exists least need.

In general, the best animal protection laws would be needed in the low-nutrient Southern states and perhaps in the “southwest” (which ecologically includes California and Oregon as well as the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Nevada normally known as the “Southwest”). As can be seen, some of the relevant states, like Oregon, California, Arizona, Louisiana and Florida, are in the top third, but on the other hand New Mexico, Alabama and Mississippi have laws relatively much poorer than would be required. At the same time, numerous Northeastern states like Maine, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Massachusetts are relatively overregulated.

Two global temperature databases compared

Perhaps seeking to expand my knowledge of how Australia’s appalling record of the highest per capita greenhouse emissions in the world (in ecological terms, Australians would logically be permitted vastly smaller per capita emissions than Eurasians and Americans since Australia’s ecosystems are based on much slower metabolism) – I have in recent months studied global temperature data and then found two major sets of global temperature maps, both of which date back to 1880. I have shown a comparison for the northern hemisphere winter season of 1933/1934 as an illustration:

Comparison of the GISS and NOAA global temperature anomalies for the season of December 1933, January 1934 and February 1934

The GISS temperature setlist is generally preferable to the NOAA site as the reader can look at natural climate variability at least partially insulated from Australian-made greenhouse pollution. Being restricted to 1961-1990 and 1971-2000 means, the NOAA site cannot give figures relative to something even approaching a genuinely natural average, which is problematic when assessing temperature anomalies for stations with long records. The GISS site also has data for a wider range of stations in most cases, especially in earlier years which are the purest indication of natural variability before Australia’s coal and aluminum industries were developed and bloodlessly took control of the global climate:

Comparative NOAA and GISS temperature anomalies for the winter of 1885/1886. Note that in all three maps large areas have no data. Because Australian land clearing and fossil fuel burning was less developed or not at all, however, these early maps are very valuable as representing the most natural climate variability available.

A problem with the GISS setup that makes NOAA of some use, however, can be seen from their data for the winter of 1940/1941. Actual station data in northern interior British Columbia and northern Alberta (e.g. from Baldonnel) seem to verify the NOAA figures rather than the GISS ones. In Baldonnel, British Columbia the monthly anomalies from December 1940 to February 1941 via-à-vis 1971 to 2000 are:

• December 1940: +0.542106˚C
• January 1941: -4.62105˚C
• February 1941: +2.08500˚C

whilst for Fairview, Alberta the figures are:

• December 1940: +1.06842˚C
• January 1941: -3.58˚C
• February 1941: -0.28˚C

Yet, the GISS maps do not show colder-than-normal temperatures in northern Alberta and northern interior British Columbia in January 1941:

NOAA and GISS temperature data for December 1940, January 1941 and February 1941. Note the negative anomaly in January 1941 – verified by data over northeastern British Columbia and northwestern Alberta – is not shown in GISS.

It’s notable that the stations previously noted do not possess data for the hotter years after 1990, which would add to the negative anomalies.

The subsequent winter of 1941/1942 had a similar problem around the Gulf of Ob and Gulf of Yenisey, which can be verified for the station of Dudinka on the Yenisey River west of Norilsk:

• December 1941: +1.51052˚C
• January 1942: +9.47˚C
• February 1942: +2.62˚C

Global temperature maps for December 1941, January 1942 and February 1942. Note the positive anomaly in the NOAA map but not the GISS map around the Gulf of Ob and Gulf of Yenisey

It’s notable that I have not so far been able to verify major errors in the GISS maps from earlier dates as I have for the World War II years, but this may be because of poorer NOAA data.

All in all, whilst despite these problems GISS is still the best site, NOAA nonetheless has considerable value for earlier years. Those interested in the weather need to know changes in temperature just as they do anthropogenically produced changes in rainfall in southwestern Australia and central Chile, because they demonstrate how unsustainable Australian energy, farming and transport policies have been for over half a century – and without protest from elsewhere in the world.

Longman reveals – unconsciously – the Enriched World as “circle of exclusive clubs”

Percent of mean national per capita income for each region of the US, 1929-1979

The now-veteran demographer Phillip Longman (he turns sixty in April), whose The Empty Cradle remains the best look – if without likely remedies – at the Enriched and Tropical Worlds’ severe demographic problems, has today showed, without having that aim, just how the Enriched World is becoming nothing except an exclusive club caught in a whirlpool of demographic suicide.

In November’s Washington Monthly, Longman in his new article ‘Bloom and Bust’, has argued that “regional inequality is out of control” after, as the graph on the left shows, having fallen for almost a century and a half until the 1980s. His data show that income inequality in the United States is increasing as

“geography has come roaring back as a determinant of economic fortune, as a few elite cities have surged ahead of the rest of the country in their wealth and income”

and

“only the very rich can still afford to work in Manhattan, much less live there, while increasing numbers of working- and middle-class families are moving to places like Texas or Florida... even though wages in Texas and Florida are much lower.”

Percent of New York mean per capita income for outlying US regions, 1969 to date

Longman then points out that the cities with highest per capita incomes have tended, in fact, to see large net out-migration, whilst areas where per capita incomes are not growing at all have tended to attract most in-migrants.

Longman’s primary argument is that looser enforcement of antitrust legislation and large amounts of financial deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s has led to the consolidation of extremely wealthy businesses in a small number of major cities on the East and Pacific Coast, notably New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington D.C., Los Angeles and the cities of the Pacific Northwest. He believed the dominance of what he calls “retail goliaths” has meant much less is invested in “flyover” cities of the Plains, Mountain West and the South, with the result that the economies of these cities have severely declined as even new entrepreneurs must move to technology centres like Silicon Valley. Longman quotes Bill Gates to the effect that patent holders’ monopoly power – which he notes was expanded in the 1980s before which the federal government refused to grant any patents for software – makes it more difficult for inventors not allies with the patent holders. (Whilst I understand the value of patents in the context of agriculture, where Australia’s farmers do not pay anything for fertiliser technologies patented overseas but used to farm inherently unsustainable and exceedingly ancient soils, Gates’ and Longman’s criticism has major value.)

The problem is that Longman gives much too little attention to how impossible it is for the middle class – let alone the working masses – to live in such wealthy cities as New York, Boston, the Bay Area, Seattle, Portland and Washington D.C. Demographers ought to know all too well that:

1. lowest-low fertility is a consequence of family formation being unaffordable due to limited housing space and consequent:
   1. simple unaffordability of housing for all but the very rich
   2. extreme lack of space in housing that is uncomfortable for all but one- or two-person houses and cannot accommodate families
   3. it is clear to me that, despite minor criticisms I received years ago Wendell Cox, many indices like fertility would correlate much better with:
   1. cost of housing per unit of housing space (relative to income) rather than actual total cost (because cheap housing is not useful for families if it be too small for comfort)
   2. cost of housing relative to each individual worker’s income, rather than with total household income (because a single income allows the mother to take more care of children)
   3. such criteria would show more accurately the problems Enriched World cities have with housing space and the need for women to work to gain basic sustenance – and of course this work tends to require high levels of education
2. that severe land-use restrictions – in lands devoid of unique biodiversity (ice-free only for 15,000 years) and/or low secondary productivity to justify restrictions – create a large part of this housing shortage
3. that politics in big “imperial cities” tends to be very left-wing due to the concentration of wealthy entrepreneurs there and resultant extreme levels of class resentment
4. a fourth insight, which Longman does give, is that as the public sector has retreated from providing transport, government regulation of land supply and roads in “imperial cities” has precluded the private sector doing anything to improve mobility
5. a fifth insight is that many regulations and much government spending in “imperial cities” is designed to help the very poor but:
1. exacerbates natural flat land scarcity by means of rent control, which often allows less wealthy people who initially lived there to pay very low rents compared to what the market would charge
2. create a culture of welfare dependency amongst these cities’ less wealthy populations, who obtain more from welfare than they could from modest-paying employment locally
3. reduces job and trade opportunities by placing wages far above theoretical market levels given the regions’ resource poverty and dense pre-industrial populations, and by means of extreme and usually unnecessary (vis-à-vis Australia or Africa) environmental regulations

Under these conditions, Enriched World cities have no choice but to compete for the most skill-intensive industries extant. Their lands are generally cool, mountainous and pre-industrially densely populated, so they have large comparative disadvantages in agriculture. Glaciers and the Alpine Orogeny have stripped the Enriched World of difficult-to-smelt lithophile metals and preindustrial mining stripped it of easily smelted chalcophile ores, ruling out mining as a long-term base. The dense population and demands for clean air make unskilled labour totally inadequate as an income even with two partners, so that labour- or capital-intensive manufacturing industries also cannot serve as a long-term base for Enriched World economies.

The educational requirements and demographic consequences of an economy based exclusively upon skill-intensive industries have been documented for over a century. In 1900, when among women generally fertility rates were five to six children per lifetime, those of educated women could be as low as a tenth of that: I recall that one survey estimated the few tertiary-educated women produced merely 0.47 children over their lifetime! The situation has changed little in modern times – the difference is that dependence upon skill-intensive industries is now no isolated phenomenon but characterises most corners of the Enriched World and many of the Tropical, making these regions exclusive clubs for the skilled 1 percent or, in the most mountainous or densely populated, much less than that. Even if they had large pre-industrial populations or rapid modern growth, these nations, as shows dramatically by Japan post-1990, will one by one decline in global importance.

Families – who form the next generation – are being forced to move to land-rich regions like the American South or suburban Australia, which is where the future of the world must lie. Despite these regions’ inherently low soil fertility and generally high species diversity, the former trait tends to enhance cooperation and solid families and minimise the class conflict that produces the excessive regulation in cool climates. This sense of community undoubtedly allows tolerance for much lower quality of life via greater emotional support during social or environmental crises, by avoiding heat-of-passion reactions that can disturb relationships even between those who deeply love each other. It is this family-friendly “community culture” that drives migration to places with poor economies, bad climates and low quality of life, and the politics of the cooler and more mountainous regions of the globe make it unlikely to change.