Tag Archives: ecology

Like snowflake crystal

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by Climate Change, Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

When I was, many years ago, a youngish archaeozoologist (or zooarchaeologist, the difference in name being a matter of taste), one of the skills I needed, and had, was a combination of pattern recognition and pattern memory. I would be faced with dozens, hundreds perhaps, of pieces of bone in various sizes, shapes, colours, textures. The challenge was to look at them one at a time and remember that you had seen, somewhere else on the table, perhaps in another bag or box, another piece that was similar, very similar, in colour, texture, and that had a broken end that matched this broken end. I could reach out for where I knew it was and, hey presto, join together two parts of a broken bone.

Then I could begin constructing narratives about how the bones had been broken, whether they were burnt, how far they had moved, what species were present (two halves of a jaw reassembled being easier to identify than the two separate halves), and so on. A narrative that helped make sense of the lives of the people who had once lived in that place.

I don’t do that work any more, haven’t for a long time. But now I work in social media and similar skills are once again in play. Firstly because of the way I work I suppose. Once I used to hastily jot down ideas while stopped at traffic lights on the car, jot them on any rubbish I could find like supermarket receipts, car park vouchers, paper bags, and then try to put fragments, bulging out of my pockets, together into a narrative when I got home.

One narrative I was trying to construct was my own family history/autobiography one (see under tab marked “Dream”) for publication on this blog. Lives are fragmentary, both as they are lived and more so in recollection. We take a childhood memory here, an object there, a photograph of a friend, and shape it together to form a coherent fragment of a life. Or at least a narrative of a fragment, because memoirs are nothing if not unreliable, to lesser and greater extents. But as an autobiographer you get to construct your own narrative, before your biographer comes along later and reconstructs it with his or her own narrative of your life.

These days fragments of ideas, internet links, quotes, photos, headings, half written posts, are jotted down on computer documents, and bulge out of computer folders cunningly labelled things like “Blog Ideas”. Every so often I go through them, remembering an idea from here, a link from there, a quote from someone, and suddenly realise that a narrative can be constructed.

And the material from which these fragments are derived is itself fragmented. Every day stories come pouring in from all over the world, important, frivolous, happy, sad, serious, trivial, fact, fiction. Long, short, stark, expanded, checked, unchecked, information, disinformation. All grist to the social media mill. Problem is though that it all comes through the filter of the mainstream media and is converted into their narratives before it reaches us. We’d like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and decide the narrative, having seen patterns, put two and two together, for ourselves.

So we need to deconstruct what we get. If I was looking at a table full of bones that someone else had stuck together, using their own criteria for best fit, and their own filter for narrative construction, I wouldn’t accept it. Instead I would dissolve the glue, separate the bones back to their original state, and start again from scratch. Much the same with the media narratives. We need to see what they are made from, and how and why they have been constructed. Then deconstruct them and make up our own minds.

The environment we all live in is often seen as fragments. Sometimes in a positive way “one might begin to write a book about a hedgerow when a boy and find it incomplete in old age” (from my lovely Ricard Jefferies). A realisation of the enormous complexity of the world we evolved in. Sometimes in a negative way, when politicians, developers, farmers, fishermen, think that destroying one fragment of woodland, driving one species to extinction, polluting one waterway, won’t matter because it is just a small thing.

But just as in our own lives, and in the social and political worlds, the environmental fragments are all inter-connected, and we need to reassemble those fragments to understand all of the narratives.

Have we got the skills?

Fiery particles

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by Cancer, Environment • Tags: , , , ,

So here I am again. Blogging, one-handed, in the oncology day treatment ward. For the last time. Ever.

No, mustn’t tempt the fates, waiting with their deadly scissors to punish both optimism and hubris. This is hopefully the last chemo treatment (astonishingly number 19) for quite a while after two years and 4 days since my first one, an age ago.

Side effects a bit rough last time, hope better this time.

This whole process is a bit like burning the forest to get rid of weeds and then seeing the good green shoots appearing again through the blackened landscape. Chemotherapy burns up all the white blood cells, including the bad lymphoma particles, and then the blood ecology comes back.

But just as the forest is damaged by each fire, and the more you burn, the less well the ecology recovers, so the more you “burn” the good cells in the body the more you damage them, and the less your body returns to normal. Moderation in both are needed.

There, managed to combine my fire research with my cancer treatment, not a bad metaphor eh?

So don’t forget to vote for me as Best Blog at http://www.writerscentre.com.au/bloggingcomp/peopleschoice.html – page 5 under THE Watermelon Blog.

The Old Astronomer*

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by Education • Tags: , , , , , ,

Look, there’s a lot of different careers I could have had. Hell, had three different ones, three and a half, as it was. But if I ever manage to decide what I want to do with my life (and yes, that is a winged chariot you hear), astronomy is right up there as a possibility.

Oh, not really a possibility, with my lack of physics and mathematics abilities. I suppose my wishful thinking was always based on Herschel, hell Galileo, staring at the mysterious skies through a telescope and seeing, things never seen before, heavenly messengers.

We are of course, long past the time when amateurs could point a telescope from their backyard and make discoveries in the cosmos. Although, that said, it is from a backyard not a million parsecs from mine that a chap does keep making discoveries, most recently of bits of a comet crashing into Jupiter.

But my old eyes are too old anyway, these days, astronomy a young person’s game, these days. Besides, had my academic careers, working in zoology and archaeology. But it’s all the same thing, really, archaeology being part of zoology, and zoology a subsection of astronomy.

What was the question? Oh, you think I need to defend those suggestions? Well, if I must, it’s your blog.

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” Carl Sagan of course, in a rather wonderful thought. We don’t need to go out to the stars, they have come to us. And not just to humans, but every living being on the planet, and the very structure of the planet we live on.

The other rather wonderful thought is that we, you and I dear reader, are related to every other human being currently on the planet, and all those who came before. And if that isn’t a wonderful enough thought, we, you and I, are also related to every other living being, animal and plant, on the planet. How good is that eh?

And not just related in the literal, direct genetic sense, but in an ecological one. As the first of the apes that would become human walked across the African savannah they began to adapt to different habitats to their nearest relatives, and to make use of different plants and animals in their diet. Their hunting will have subtly altered species compositions among their prey and plant foods. And eventually, as some groups shifted towards agriculture or pastoralism, their interactions with other species actually affected evolution, in a process we call domestication.

We study early humans in exactly the same way we study their relatives, through palaeontology, studying not only their bony remains, but, where possible, diet and behaviour. As we reach the creation of stone and other tools we call this branch of palaeontology “archaeology”, but it’s all one thing. And palaeontology is of course just one aspect of zoology.

Convinced yet?

But wait, there’s more. For a long time another branch of zoology (well, biochemistry, but really I’m in an imperial mood) has investigated the origins of life. Plenty of ideas, successful experiments in forming organic molecules in conditions approximating early Earth in terms of water, heat, electrical discharge, low oxygen, clay minerals etc. But all with the deliberately built-in, assumed requirement that organic had to come from an original inorganic chemistry on Earth. [This is, was, a necessary assumption. The nonsense from Hoyle and Wickramasinghe about life forms arriving on Earth from comet tails or whatever was not only mad-brained, but didn't affect the study of the origin of life, merely shifted the location to somewhere else where, obviously, organic must have still been derived from inorganic, and on a surface of some kind].

But the young lads and lasses of modern astronomy have shown in effect (and I never thought I’d find myself writing this phrase) that Fred and Chandra were sort of right. No, no, not in the sense of showers of frogs or beetles or bacteria from outer space, I haven’t lost my wits totally (nor my sarcasm). But what recent years of observation have shown us is that organic molecules of various kinds are common in space. Are produced, as I understand it, from dust clouds and the radiation from evolving and exploding stars. That it isn’t necessary to start from scratch to form life on this planet (and quite possibly also on Mars and moons like Titan and Enceladus), but that various organic molecules will provide a kind of kick start for electrical discharges, water, heat, clay substrates to go to work and develop the kind of self-reproducing complex organic molecules we call “life”. [This also, incidentally, makes it absolutely certain that many other millions of the planets the young astronomers are now also able to observe will also have life].

So, not just star stuff to build bones etc, but the very materials that can, in the right conditions, form life, come from out there. There is no gap between us and all the other life forms on this planet, and none between our organics and those spread throughout this awfully big universe. Another rather wonderful thought.

Oh, and of course no longer any need to distinguish between astronomy, zoology, and archaeology. And no need for me to plan (thank goodness) another end of life career – I always was an astronomer really, it turns out, just one studying the bits of the universe that happened to sit on this planet.

Not now, sadly though, a young astronomer but an old astronomer. Almost as old as the universe, I can feel it in my bones.

*see poem “The Old Astronomer” by Sarah Williams about a third of the way through my “Values” section, click tag above or http://davidhortonsblog.com/values/.

The Write Stuff

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by Education, Environment, Media • Tags: , , , , ,

“…he lounged up and down the pavement, and gazed vacantly at the ground, the sky, the opposite houses, and the line of railings. Having finished his scrutiny, he proceeded slowly down the path, or rather down the fringe of grass that flanked the path, keeping his eyes riveted on the ground. Twice he stopped, and once I saw him smile, and heard him utter an exclamation of satisfaction. There were many marks of footsteps on the wet clayey soil; but since the police had been coming over it, I was unable to see how my companion could learn anything from it” … “… the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg …” Sherlock Holmes ‘A Study in Scarlet’.

When I was young I thought “Oh, if only I could write like Enid Blyton”. A little later it was “Oh if only I could write like WE Johns”. Then followed Charles Dickens, and a little later JD Salinger, and on and on through a life spent reading and writing. These days I will read some beautifully argued and written blog post or newspaper column and think, oh, if only I could write like that, perhaps I should copy their style, see what I can do.

But you can’t, really of course. Your writing style is born with you, grows with you, is the result of nature and nurture, is as individual as a fingerprint.

Or your track through a desert. It is often remarked (though I think much exaggerated and mythologised) that Australian Aborigines, Kalahari Bushmen, North American Indians, can identify not just which species of animal they are tracking but an individual, and the same when tracking humans. And what they were doing – here they paused to rest, here ate some food, there drank, at this point they were running, at that they were sleeping and so on. A track across a landscape becomes a history of an individual.

As does the track across your life of the things you write. We all leave behind not broken twigs, crushed leaves, footprints in soft mud; but letters, wills, academic research papers, letters to editor, books, post cards, theses, speeches, school essays, diaries, newspaper columns, poetry, book chapters, reviews, referee reports, and, more recently, emails, tweets, blogs. We don’t all leave all of those of course, but the combination of written works we do leave will also help to define our lives, define who we are, as much as the style and content of what is written.

Some disciplines impose strong frameworks not just on what is written but on how it is written. Law, Science, Medicine, Engineering, for example, impose style and content requirements that greatly reduce the individual footprint that can be produced in them. On the other hand writing history for example, or of course literature, is very much open to, indeed demands, that the writer develop their own style.

So you could, and people called biographers do, deduce a great deal about a person, their personality, ideas, creativity, influences, life story, from the written works they leave behind. A box, an attic, full of old papers doth a biography make. But for it to be a true, accurate, portrait of a lady, or gentleman, the record must be complete. There are many heartbreaking stories to the biographer or historian, of letters burnt after death on an author’s instructions (Dickens for example), of manuscripts lost in some way, of material discarded when a family moves house, and, these days, of crashed computers or damaged discs. The problem is not just that some detail is absent, some chunk of time not described, but that the missing material may well have totally altered our understanding of a life, a character, an achievement.

Material from which to cut the whole cloth of a life need not be actually physically lost, but can be merely lost sight of. A classic example in science is Gregor Mendel. He published the paper which showed how genetic inheritance worked in 1866. It was ignored for the next 34 years (and all his papers burnt after his death in 1884), during which time Darwin’s discovery of natural selection remained without a proper framework of genetic inheritance, until rediscovered in 1900. It was only after that time that modern genetics began to develop, and the genius of Mendel recognised. There have been many similar cases in all scientific disciplines I suspect.

This kind of failing is not just a thing of the past. Today the standard approach to “reviewing the literature” in an academic paper is to look only at the last few years, an event horizon at 5 years apparently prevents any further investigation. A literature review once was, should be, the following of a trail of evidence and argument back to its origins, in order to understand the life story of a theory or set of data. It only takes one or two literature reviews in which some papers are ignored for them to disappear into a black hole and never be referenced again (because future researchers will come to this point in their search and, not finding them, remain unaware of their existence).

Does it matter? Yes it does. If older works disappear from consideration then newer ones will keep reinventing the wheel, keep coming up with suggestions long ago dismissed for good reason (see my earlier post “The Burning Bush” for an example of this). Science is supposed to grow steadily as data and ideas accumulate, not keep slipping down to the bottom of the hill and start again the next day.

And for the individuals concerned (like poor old Mendel), ignoring work is as bad as having the maid burn a manuscript while lighting a fire, or work being done on a computer tape that can no longer be read by modern computers. Their life story, their achievements, their personal style as illustrated in the fingerprints of their writing, will be invisible to history, be incomplete. And we have no Sherlock Holmes now to decipher the biographical footprints scuffed out by policemen.

No one will ever know I smoked Trichinopoly cigars.

We need to talk about Kevin

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by Environment, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

The other day I saw the start of one of the Kevin McCloud lifestyle programs “Grand Designs” (a British series which follows people building unusual/interesting houses). I was struck by his opening scene. The camera ran a close-up on his face as he walked along. He said “What do you do in Britain if you want to build a house in the wilderness?” As he spoke the camera panned back to show that he was walking across a paddock, one of hundreds of acres of such paddocks as far as you could see, of pasture for sheep (which were, lambs at foot, dotted across the grass)! It would have been impossible to find a scene less “wildernessy”.

So pause for a moment, as I did, to absorb this incongruity. He isn’t a stupid man, Mr McCloud, so what on earth did he mean? Well, what he meant was that “wilderness” is anything that isn’t in a city. It’s like the ancient Greek sense of “Barbarians” meaning anyone who wasn’t Greek living in a Greek City State (a concept shared with most other cultures, everywhere from England, to China, to Aboriginal Australia, but I digress.

Let’s look at another, related, misused word, “pristine”. Once it meant what “wilderness” once meant – an environment unmodified by humans. Then it was turned on its head, by advertising agencies who decided it had a nice sound, to use, essentially, for a landscape with grass. As in a pristine golf course, a pristine housing development, a pristine farm (see the overlap with McCloud). But then it developed to pristine beaches (with added sand, breakwaters, carefully manicured by sand graders), pristine tropical islands (totally turned into tourist resorts) pristine snow resorts (trees and boulders removed from runs, ski lodges added, artificial snow created by machines), and so on. In this most recent sense it means something like “picturesque” “chocolate boxy” “place that photographs well” or, most simply “special offer, wouldn’t you love to have a holiday here?” Or, in a general sense, places that aren’t the city. Which brings us back neatly to Mr McCloud and his sheep paddock.

In the old days in Britain “wilderness” meant basically “places where we haven’t cut the trees down yet”. They were, consequently, dangerous, and might hide wolves, bears, brigands, ghosts, evil spirits and so on. A farm definitely wasn’t wilderness, but what lay beyond its fence line was.

The Romantics adopted this kind of definition, but turned it into a positive (following the original lead, in a different sense, of Rousseau). Wilderness was where we could get back in touch with nature, get away from the artificiality, indeed evils, of the city, where we were never meant to be, and get back to our roots. Now, instead of being feared, wild places of mountain or swamp or forest were celebrated in art and literature. People went hiking in them, climbed mountains, communed where the wild things were.

And then began creating “wilderness” on their estates – artificial waterfalls, clumps of trees, piles of rocks, fake ruins of temples, and so on. You could visit “wilderness” without the bother of travelling. And paintings, by Constable for example, treated as a single landscape the trees and rivers as well as the farm cottages or watermills or labourers in a field. At the same time the population was on the move as those same labourers tossed it in for more lucrative and perhaps easier work in factories and moved their families into town. The countryside was where they had escaped from, the primitive life, and they had no interest in it. If you needed a holiday from town then you travelled to a seaside resort which was a different kind of town, with a “pristine” beach, but with all the comforts of home. All views, and behaviour, which were exported to Australia with the first convicts and settlers.

So we come, gradually, to McCloud’s definition. Both symbolically, and actually, civilised life is in the city, and all that lies beyond is untamed, and rather threatening and uncomfortable, wilderness. Which people never really see, never want to see. Holidays still involve travel to artificial resorts (either in Australia, say the Gold Coast, or more often these days, in places like Thailand or Bali), the more “pristine” the better. They don’t involve contact with actual wilderness.

Does it matter? Of course it does. If wilderness is an undifferentiated “other” world out there beyond the outer suburbs, and a golf course or resort are “pristine”, then efforts at conservation will make no sense to you. Conversely nonsense like “farmers are the only true conservationists” or “miners restore the environment after mining” or “logging is good for forests” or “you got to choose between frogs and people” will seem to make perfect sense.

If you have no idea that what are trendily called “ecosystem services” these days – clean air, water, pest control, soil conservation – can only be provided by intact functioning ecosystems (wilderness), then you will see no problem in losing them. When populist politicians from Left or Right, or unionists, or big business, call for the felling of forests, the trawling of oceans, the complete use of river water for irrigation, the construction of huge open cut mines, the opening up of the North, shooting or grazing in forests, removal of marine reserves, the culling of bats or crocodiles, the public, in blissful ignorance, will applaud and vote accordingly.

Until the public understands that farmland is an environment little less degraded than cities and suburbs, and that actual functioning wilderness is consequently only in tiny, rapidly disappearing, areas, which are being woodchipped, mined, cleared, developed as I write these words, then there is no hope of trying to develop a public, and therefore political, conservation ethos.

Perhaps I could start with Kevin McCloud. Get him to make a program.

The Burning Bush

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , ,

As climate change effects in Australia (and elsewhere) begin to intensify, one of the most notable, and deadly, is the increase in frequency and intensity of bushfires.

It’s important to say that more subtle effects will have been underway for sometime. Local populations of species will have become extinct in some places, will have expanded into others. There will be, as a result, species ranges slowly moving south, moving up mountains, moving towards coasts. There will be acceleration of losses and shifts when disasters like droughts, floods, fires, strike particular habitats.

Some populations will achieve more speed than others – larger birds and marsupials for example, some invertebrates that can float in water or air, plants that have very effective seed dispersal, micro-organisms that can travel via water or dust clouds, and so on. But the great majority of organisms will struggle to move quickly enough, and many whole species are going to rapidly become extinct.

Important to note that we are not talking evolutionary adaptation here. That takes thousands of years, climate change is happening over decades. Consequently, even species that can readily move are soon going to find themselves trapped, unable to move further south over water perhaps, or running out of altitude on mountains. They don’t have time to adapt.

Which brings us to fire. Following the recent horrifying bushfire in southern Tasmania there were yet again complaints about the “lack of fuel reduction” nearby. Look, I get this, really I do. Fire is my greatest fear every Summer. I dread the sight of a column of smoke nearby. I imagine, all too graphically, what a fire would do to us.

But this “fuel reduction” thing is nonsense of course. Either someone would need to have predicted 6 months earlier exactly where the fire was going to strike and burnt accordingly. Or, every square inch of forest in Australia would have to be burnt constantly.

Indeed the latter is essentially the demand of “fire managers” and their populist politician friends. Their alibi, when challenged by conservationists, is supplied by a small string of writers. Bill Gammage has done an illustrated Flannery, Tim Flannery popularised Jones, Rhys Jones publicised Norman Tindale. All four writers promoted the view that the Australian environment was not only “adapted to fire” but actually needed it, and that consequently the Aborigines had regularly burnt the whole country and we should copy them.

For some reason media and therefore the public love this nonsense, and there is never any mention of the fact that this flimsy hypothesis has been challenged over and over again in last 50 years.

When the most recent of the four, Bill Gammage, began working on his much awarded book, he sent me a paper which formed the core of his book. I wrote to him (in 2003) as follows:

“Hi Bill
Thank you for sending a reprint, that was thoughtful of you. You argue your case like a lawyer. Trouble is lawyers are obliged to present all the evidence in favour of their client, not look at it in all possible ways. You seem not to have read my book yet. You would find it interesting I think.

The problems with your case, as I see it are in summary: 1. There is no question that Aborigines knew their own patch intimately. How could they not? I know my patch pretty intimately after a few years, and I am not relying on it for food. But knowing where kangaroos are likely to be, or when the yams are ripe, is not the same as causing the kangaroos to be there or the yams to ripen.
2. You must assume that natural features have natural causes until you can prove otherwise. To revert to the legal metaphor it should be a question of innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. Rhys Jones deliberately turned the burden of proof on its head for a very good reason – it is much harder to prove a negative than a positive. That is, apparently ‘anomalous’ patches occur for all sorts of natural reasons (of soil type, topography, rain, evaporation, biogeography, natural fire history etc). Eliminate all those and what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. But you do have to eliminate them first.
3. Vegetation doesn’t depend on fire so much as fire depends upon vegetation.
4. You can’t rely on nineteenth century theories about ecology and anthropology. You also can’t rely totally on apparent observations, and certainly not on the context of observations. Not only were observers prisoners of their prejudices (as are we all) but they were prisoners of the political agenda of the day and of the lack of knowledge of Australia’s people and biology.

Does it matter, other than as a fascinating debating point? Yes it does, because people of ill will use theories about the past to justify actions they want to carry out anyway. The attack on the environment of Australia is now so serious that letting people who want to put cattle in the high country, and burn every inch of Australia every year, and get rid of national parks and wilderness areas, support their demands with notions about what Aborigines did, is really very dangerous.
Best Regards
David”

So there you are, alibi destroyed. But does that matter, I hear you ask? Whatever Aborigines did, if the bush is “adapted to fire” shouldn’t we burn it?

Yesterday tv coverage of one of the recent nasty local fires ended with the obligatory comment about the bush recovering, a comment illustrated by the obligatory shot of some shoots emerging from the blackened trunk of a gum tree. But the ability to recover has nothing to do with being “adapted” or “needing to be burnt”. All species of plant can recover after disasters – if they couldn’t then long before now the planet would be as lifeless and empty as Mars. There can’t be a square metre of land that hasn’t at some stage been affected by the fast or slow disasters of fire, flood, glacier, tsunami, landslide, drought, tornado, volcanic eruption.

After the disaster some plants, not actually killed, begin regenerating. Others, surviving as seeds, begin germinating if not buried too deeply. Others, unable to survive the catastrophe themselves, will gradually return to the area via wind or birds or flowing water, or just by gradually expanding back onto the ground from surrounding areas. Different species have different abilities to do all these things, and, in addition, some can grow on bare or disturbed ground, some can not. So we have what is called a “succession” – some species arrive early (often the ones we call weed species, or those which have the capacity to become weeds), their growth modifies the environment and others begin to colonise, then finally, after the passage of a lesser or greater number of years, depending on the nature of the disaster and that of the original ecosystem, the plant community will look much as it did before it was destroyed. Although it is worth pointing out that it is very unlikely to be identical either in the totality of species present, or in their relative proportions.

Fine, good, comforting to know that however bad things look good old Mother Nature will recover. But note that I haven’t distinguished between any of the natural disasters in this regard, and that’s because there is nothing special about fire – plants are no more adapted to fire than they are to flood or tsunami. No one (I assume) in their right mind would call for the forests to be regularly flooded, or landslides triggered, nor welcome tsunamis or cyclones, just because later recovery is eventually possible? Also, and this is very important, no matter how fast and complete recovery might be after a single event, a repetition of the event in a short time would snuff out recovery and will certainly alter the composition of the new ecosystem. If you germinate all the seeds of a species, and then kill them all off before they can mature enough to set new seed, the species is gone. Again, it doesn’t matter what kind of a disaster, if it is repeated at short intervals (like, for example the recent massive floods in Queensland, just 2 years after the previous ones) the environment will be irreversibly damaged.

So we come full circle. If you want to strategically burn small areas to (possibly) help provide protection for particular places, then go right ahead. If you regularly burn all the bush any time in Australia you will change the ecosystems for the worse. If you do it when climate change is already impacting on the bush through fire, drought, flood, heat, then the damage you inflict will be infinitely greater. This is not a good thing.

PS – for other writing about fire on this blog click on the “Fire” and “History” tabs above.

The Colour Purple

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by Climate Change, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Media Matters has analysed media coverage in the US media of climate change in recent years and found, in spite of record temperatures and droughts etc, that coverage was actually declining. Furthermore, even when climate change was mentioned, the vast majority of those interviewed were Republican climate change deniers, with actual climate scientists rarely if ever interviewed. I don’t know if a similar study has been done recently in Australia, although there are studies of the abysmal News Ltd newspapers coverage, but it is absolutely clear that similar, if not worse, statistics would apply. I’m looking here a one particular Australian case which probably has relevance everywhere.

The record high temperatures in Australia this week, followed by devastating bushfires, were an obvious “teachable moment” for the media to join the dots for the public. This is what climate scientists have been predicting, this is what happened, this is what the future holds. Instead there was again a studious silence. It was as if there was no such thing as climate change, as if (like the America drought last year) these things were happening by chance in some world in which nothing else had changed.

Here is a recent example from Australia’s national broadcaster the ABC. Some background. The “7.30 Report” is a relatively serious current affair program, immediately following the main evening news bulletin, and often expanding on the main stories from the news. On the 8 January, as temperatures soared and fires raged, a great deal of the News Bulletin was devoted to those events, and then the 7.30 Report devoted the whole program to them.

None of the news items mentioned climate change, nor did the 7.30 Report in its first half, to my increasing frustration and yelling at the tv set. Then came an interview with “Alasdair Hainsworth from the Bureau of Meteorology”. The presenter, Ben Knight, introduced the segment by noting temperature records, and then noting that the Bureau had been forced to add more colours, black and purple, to its temperature maps to cope with the new high records. Extraordinary, right, and the obvious time to have a discussion about climate change, and indeed Mr Knight began the interview with the question “why are we in this situation where Australia is breaking these temperature records?”

Yes, I thought, here comes a decent climate change discussion at last. But I was wrong. Whether by design, or because that was the way the meteorologist interpreted the question, we immediately moved into a routine that has become very familiar. The ABC (and other networks) when it asks about the cause of events, means only the proximate cause, not the ultimate one. By this means, turning climate discussions into discussions about weather, every time, it avoids every opportunity to talk climate change. And so it was yet again, Mr Hainsworh talking about the trapping of heat on the continent, lack of cloud and moisture, delay in monsoon season and so on. Now, fair enough, this seems to be Mr Hainsworth’s area of expertise (a manager, Assistant Director Services, a meteorologist involved in IT systems and so on, his team recently won an award for “Our Next Generation Forecast and Warning System was highly commended at the Comcover Awards for Excellence in Risk Management in March 2012. These awards recognise exceptional and inspiring leadership in the management of risks faced by Commonwealth Government agencies. The judging panel recognised that the system improved our ability to manage and inform the community about severe weather events, including severe thunderstorms and flash flooding. These events present a significant risk to the safety of the Australian community”). But that being the case, why was he asked to appear? Well, apparently because he is responsible for the area that had to put new colours on the map. OK, now we have an another opportunity to talk climate change.

And here we go, the conversation proceeding as follows:

“BEN KNIGHT: It’s always a difficult question but how much of an aberration is this or does this actually fit into this pattern we’ve seen over the past decades where it’s been progressively getting hotter and hotter?
ALASDAIR HAINSWORTH: Certainly I can comment that this has broken the record as the hottest period. We’ve had six days in a row where the national average maximum temperature has been in excess of 39 degrees. The previous record was four days and we’ve also seen the hottest average day in Australia which was Monday and perhaps it could have been broken again today, although it’s somewhat cooler in Tasmania today. So, that may not be the case. Certainly it’s almost unprecedented as far as records are concerned.
BEN KNIGHT: And you now have this really quite interesting situation where Australian temperature maps have actually had to change because previously they only went up to 50 degrees, we’re now seeing that you’ve got an extra couple of gradings in purple and black to show temperatures which go beyond 50 degrees and indeed on Sunday and Monday in parts of Australia are forecast to do just that?
ALASDAIR HAINSWORTH: Yes, that’s right. The charts previously did go above 50 degrees, our models certainly were picking temperatures above 50 degrees but they were, it was showing up as white and so we decided that we would alter the temperature scale to ensure it showed it properly and we’ve added the extra two gradations which take the temperatures up to between 52 and 54 degrees Celsius.
At this stage we’ve only seen the first gradation, which is between 50 and 52 populated but yeah, it’s certainly extraordinarily hot over South Australia and central Australia and unfortunately it does appear as though it’s going to, it’s set to continue.
BEN KNIGHT: Do you think we are seeing a new reality, a new paradigm?
ALASDAIR HAINSWORTH: Well, as far as the models are concerned then yes. We haven’t seen these temperatures before but by the same token our computer modelling is getting better, it’s getting more accurate, it’s getting higher resolution. So it could be a combination of these factors which in actual fact just means that it’s actually modelling these things better, that it may not necessarily mean that they haven’t happened before but it’s simply that we haven’t been able to model it before.”

Now I had to not only listen to this extraordinary exchange, but read it several times, to try to make sense of it. I think we have here not really a conspiracy of silence, as it were, but more a combination of circumstances resulting in the same outcome. Mr Hainsworth, I’m guessing, is there because the ABC researcher rang the BOM and said we want to do an interview about this heatwave and about the altering of the weather map parameters could you put us on to one of your people to interview please? And the BOM public relations person has said, oh, you want Mr Hainsworth, his area is responsible for the map. So there we are. Mr Hainsworth is there to talk about the map (and is in any case not a climatologist), Mr Knight is there to talk about record-breaking hot weather (although I am guessing he is also under some kind of ABC protocol that doesn’t let him use the phrase “climate change”).

So, potential cross-purposes established, we start this part of the interview. Mr Knight tries to ask whether this hot weather is the result of the changing climate (without using the term, instead going for the euphemism “past decades where it’s been progressively getting hotter and hotter”) or is some kind of “freak event” as it were. Mr Hainsworth is there to talk about hot weather events, and about his map which reports them, so he does. The map and nothing but the map.

Mr Knight, perhaps hoping that although he can’t mention climate change, perhaps he can get his interviewee to do so (again, I am guessing that an ABC protocol may specify this) tries again with a different euphemism. Are we, he asks “seeing a new reality, a new paradigm?” Knight (again I’m guessing) hears his own question as “come on Buddy, talk about climate change FFS, ‘new paradigm’, get it?”. Hainsworth, having been invited on to talk about his map, hears “how did you construct your wonderful new map on your computer, what were the computer paradigms?” and answers accordingly, yes indeed, our computers are bigger and better so the maps are getting better. Or perhaps I am being too kind.

Whatever, the outcome is that extraordinary weather, a clear prediction of climate science, and obvious further evidence that the planet is warming, are both apparently “discussed” in serious tv programs on the national public broadcaster without climate change ever being mentioned. Furthermore the guest manages (I think unintentionally) to suggest that all of this could be just some kind of computer modelling glitch and we aren’t really getting hotter at all. In any case, it’s all because of some odd combination of weather circumstances. (It’s worth noting that the Bureau of Meteorology has apparently issued a statement I can’t find that “Clearly the climate system is responding to the background warming trend”. Which is fine but too mild, and as far as I know was little reported if at all).

Now, if I were to complain to the ABC about this, I would be met with incredulity. “What are you talking about? We talked about the map and got the senior person from the BOM responsible for it to talk about it. What more do you want?” And, at one level, fair enough. But at another level, why not get a climate scientist on? Why not mention climate change by name even once in half an hour of news and current affairs tv?

The next day, by contrast, the media was full of the statements by Warren Truss, leader of the Right Wing National Party and future Deputy Prime Minister in a conservative government. No problems with euphemisms, or being cautious for Mr Truss. He announced that linking heatwaves and record temperatures and bushfires with climate change was “utterly simplistic”. He went on to say that “carbon dioxide emissions from bushfires over the past week would eclipse those from coal-fired power stations for decades. Indeed I guess there’ll be more CO2 emissions from these fires than there will be from coal-fired power stations for decades”. It hardly needs saying that Mr Truss has done no research in climate science, has done no postgraduate degree in the subject, and in fact has no undergraduate qualification of any kind. He began work as a farmer, then went into politics.

It also hardly needs saying that his CO2 from bushfires comment is mind-numbingly wrong. “bushfires this year have emitted an amount of CO2 equivalent to 2% of Australia’s annual emissions from coal-fired power. The current bushfires must burn an area of forest greater than Tasmania to generate CO2 emissions equivalent to a year of burning coal for electricity. And the current bushfires must burn an area of forest the size of New South Wales to generate CO2 emissions equivalent to a decade of burning coal for electricity.” In addition of course, the CO2 from bushfires will be reabsorbed as burnt trees regrow, so, unlike coal power stations, there is no net gain of CO2 from bushfires at all. Again, to my knowledge, there was no fact checking of Mr Truss on tv when he was interviewed, or subsequently. Certainly there was none, nor any contrary view in the News Ltd paper report I saw.

So Climate Change denialists, Right Wing politicians, are able to make any outrageous nonsense claim (Mr Truss also said “‘I’m told it’s minus one in Mt Wellington at the present time in Tasmania. Hobart’s expecting a maximum of 16. Australia’s climate, it’s changing, it’s changeable. We have hot times, we have cold times… “!) they like and it will be hyped up by the media (big headline in the Herald-Sun “Climate change link to heatwave, bushfires ‘utterly simplistic’, says Warren Truss”). Conversely, it seems, any situation in which the reality of climate change might by chance become obvious to the public is played down, or structured in such a way as to avoid the possibility of information transfer to public ears.

It has so far proved impossible to get past the media who are guarding the gate against any possibility of action on climate change. The time has come for more direct action, more big claims, like those of Truss but based on reality not fantasy. Aim to generate headlines in spite of the media. And every time you get a chance at an appearance on tv or anywhere else in the media, keep saying “climate change” over and over. The time for being shy, unobtrusive, in the climate change closet, is over, the time has come for purple prose to go with the new purple patches on the map.

Je regrette tout

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by Climate Change, Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Whenever a young person comes to me and says “Listen, wise old man, what career should I think about? What occupations are going to be most needed in the next twenty years?” I am always happy to help.

“Young Person” I say “you have come to the right man. There are just three occupations you should consider:

1. Plastic Surgeon specialising in tattoo removal. There are going to be hundreds of thousands of Australians, millions perhaps, who are going to reach the age of, say, sixty, and say to themselves ‘What the hell was I thinking? What is all this rubbish on my arms and legs and back and neck? Who is this person whose name is on my arm in big letters? And are those Chinese characters? Really? A tiger, a motor bike, the Southern Cross? FFS’ And then they will be desperately searching for someone who can remove all this rubbish, which once seemed like a good idea (perhaps under influence of alcohol) when they were younger and smoother, from their now wrinkly skin.

2. Financial Guru specialising in the return of privatised companies to public ownership. Australia, like a number of other countries, tattooed its economy with once public utilities turned into glossy private companies. What seemed like a good idea (under the influence of neocon think tanks) in those carefree days of the 1980s and 1990s now is revealed as a terrible error of judgement. Smart people are going to be needed to undo the thatcherite damage, and return railways, water, telecommunications, airports, wharves, hospitals, schools, energy, to public ownership.

3. Landscape ecologist specialising in revegetation. Australia has tattooed its landscape (under the influence of agribusinesses, forestry companies, coastal developers) with the scars of bulldozers and fires and chain saws. What seemed like a good idea thirty years ago has left a barren landscape, erosion, loss of biodiversity and species, and contributed to the terrible consequences of climate change, and the public will soon be demanding that sand dunes, water courses, grasslands, ruined farmland be returned as far as now possible, to the habitats they once contained (not totally possible of course, land, like skin, loses its elasticity).”

So there you have it. Where once, devil-may-care about future consequences, singing along with Edith “Je ne regrette rien”, young people and politicians gaily jumped into decisions with little thought for how hard they would be to later reverse, soon all of us will be trying to undo them now the consequences are clear. And there will be plenty of jobs for young persons.

Bad Sports

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by Education, Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” (Duke of Wellington)

After the recent horror in Newtown, Connecticut, all the usual suspects started trotting out their usual gun apologia, in America and here.

Even the good guys though, really don’t get it. Michael Bloomberg, for example “Nobody questions the Second Amendment right to bear arms”. But why not Michael, why not? Everything else in American society can be questioned but not rampant gun ownership? And here, Joe Hockey, also meaning well said he “couldn’t see why any member of the public, apart from farmers and sporting shooters, needed guns”. Quite right, but why should there be “sporting shooters” Joe (farmers are a different question, but I think also shouldn’t be an exception)?

People, like other animals, have always played games. The simpler kinds of athletics like running and jumping, and games involving some kind of ball or similar object, have been played in all human societies. As have frivolous ones like kite-flying, or spinning tops.

But there are other, more complex games, that develop to reflect, and reinforce, particular cultural or social factors in societies, and these come and go throughout history.

Some, many, are used (like the play of lion cubs or foxes) to train the youth of the society in martial pursuits. In Ancient Greece games like Javelin and Discus throwing, and wrestling; in Rome chariot racing, and gladiatorial contests; in Mediaeval England it was jousting and archery (Henry Eighth making this explicit in his law that the young had to practice archery); later, in many societies, it was guns used for target practice, horses doing dressage. Other games relate to people turning their working day occupation into a game or sport – for example wood-chopping, sailing and rowing, hunting, horse riding, motor racing.

Over the last few thousand years societies have grown out of some sports, left others behind as archaic, no longer relevant to warfare, have changed their ethical and moral attitudes to brutality toward other human beings, towards animals.

No longer do we see, nor expect to see, people leaping over bulls, chariot racing, gladiatorial mortal combat, jousting or bear-baiting. Then there are games that do continue, often underground, but that should have (for obvious reasons) gone totally by now – cock fighting, dog fighting, bullfights, hunting (all kinds), fishing and horse racing.

And then there are some new “sports” that should never have started but, having done so, should be stopped – wood chopping, motor racing, boxing, cage fighting, rodeos, and shooting.

Why? Well because sports don’t merely reflect the values and ethics of their time and place, they help to define them, reinforce them. In the Colosseum, watching thousands of rare animals slaughtered, or deciding on the life or death of a defeated gladiator by the whim of the crowd, were not merely reflections of a brutal attitude to life in Rome, but helped to maintain that attitude. No longer seeing defenceless bears torn to death by dogs on the streets of Elizabethan London must have helped to begin the movement towards a gentler society.

And so it is with our modern bad sports. One or two of them certainly seemed like a good idea at the time – other times, other mores – but that time is no longer with us. Take wood-chopping for example. Began as a way for the 7 foot tall, well-muscled, bronzed axemen of the bush, to see who was the fastest at chopping down 500 year-old-trees. Crowds cheered at agricultural shows, as these representatives of all that was magnificent about the Australia of the past chopped away to see who could cut through their log the fastest. Heroes, home-grown heroes. But these heroes had helped to destroy forests all over Australia, had removed magnificent old growth trees, had driven once abundant species like red cedar effectively to near extinction. In 2013, with forests everywhere lost or degraded, and with climate change coming at us like a timber lorry on a narrow road, the time for seeing wood chopping as a celebration of Australia should be long behind us.

Same with motor racing. One hundred years ago, there was a brave new world of fast cars, and brave drivers pushing boundaries, advancing technology. Hurtling around the track without a care in the world except the next chequered flag. The fastest drivers of our youth (such as Juan Fangio and Stirling Moss in my case) heroes in the sense that top footballers and cricketers and tennis players (ah, those were the days) were. But now? Kidding, right? How many cars in the world, a billion? Two billion? All burning petrol, spewing out CO2. We could do without high performance cars driving mindlessly round and round race tracks symbolically and actually wasting fuel for no good reason.

Similarly, with seven billion people on the planet, with wars and rumours of wars, terrorism, ethnic hatreds, violence on the streets of big cities, do we really want to keep glorifying the idea that two men (and even women these days) brutally bashing each other to the cheers and jeers of a crowd until one is so badly injured (even dead sometimes) they cannot go on, is a sport and an entertainment? And, on a planet where species are going extinct at a faster and faster rate, and where climate change and habitat loss are rapidly worsening, why the hell are we hunting and fishing the species that are left? And why are we still encouraging an ethos that animals are there for the mere purpose of entertainment, to be tortured and killed on a whim, in sports such as horse racing, rodeos, and bull fighting? It certainly reduces the level of empathy for the natural world so necessary to get us through the rest of this dangerous century, but, considering only self human interest, leads to less empathy for other humans.

Which brings me to shooting. Put all of the above together and tell me that in the world of 2013 we should be treating and glamourising guns as sporting equipment and not deadly weapons whose use should be reduced to a minimum. There is nothing sporting about shooting. We shouldn’t be treating as normal the idea of possessing and using guns which kill tens of thousands of people every year and millions of animals.

So we need some new games? How about some based on firefighting, tree planting, rescuing sea turtles and seabirds, collecting litter, replanting sand dunes, conservation farming, solar-powered vehicles, public health activities?

Good sports, eh?

Plus ca change, plus ca change

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , ,

* The more CO2 in the air the more coal, oil, gas we dig and drill.
*The more the oceans are ruined the more fish we catch.
*The more frequent and disastrous are marine oil spills the more rapid the development of offshore oil drilling.
*The more the forests are degraded the more clearing, logging, shooting, grazing we introduce.
*The more the Great Barrier Reef begins to collapse the more shipping we send through it.
*The more species head towards extinction, the more habitat destruction, hunting, poaching.
*The more concern about pests and weeds the more introductions of GMO.
*The less farmland available the more mining is approved in it.
*The more cancer rates rise the more carcinogenic chemicals we pump into our homes, air, food.
*As energy use strangles the planet more and more energy guzzling devices are invented and sold.
*The more the rivers dry up the more the irrigators take from them.
*The more fire damages the environment the more it is introduced into the environment.
*The more the world drowns in waste the more plastic crap is produced and wrapped in excessive packaging.
*The more obvious the dangers of nuclear power become the louder the cries for its greater use.
*The greater the need for environmental protection and regulation the faster the removal of existing protections.
*The clearer the coming planetary catastrophe the greater the refusal to accept the evidence for it.

It’s almost as if we were hell-bent on wrecking the joint.