crooked paths

On January 1 1858 two hundred and sixty-eight convicts arrived at the Swan River colony at Fremantle, Western Australia, after a 100 day voyage on the sailing ship Nile. One oval-faced middling stout prisoner with light brown hair, grey eyes, and bearing a "round lump on crown of head", his convict record notes, a labourer five-foot six and a quarter inches, married with one child, was exiled from England forever.

Transported for life, Edward Agar was a master criminal in his forties. With his common-law wife, Fanny Kay, "a respectable-looking female", London newspapers reported, "about 26 years of age whose parents reside at Margate", Edward was a supergrass and minor London celebrity whose evidence solved the sensational Great Train Robbery of May, 1855. Ninety-one kilograms of gold was stolen from a South Eastern Railway Train between London and Bologne. Most of the haul was never seen again. But Agar was ensnared in a sting and sandbagged by a tangle of forged documents and police informers, convicted unfairly and sentenced unjustly, some said. Fanny Kaye and the child remained in England, in the care of Detective Inspector Thornton, of the London Metropolitan Police.

Railways were like the Internet of the Victorian era; Edward Agar and his associates were skilled technology hackers and social engineers. Edward was a friend of London Barrister James Saward, the original Jim the Penman, a master forger who practised the trade from chambers in Temple Bar at the Royal Court of Justice.

The year of the Great Train Robbery, 1855, a hundred-mile long set of hoof-like footprints, impressed in light overnight snow, appeared in rural Devon on the morning of February 9. Rumours of a Devil-like appirition raging along the English coast swept London, and few were surprised. All eyes turned to the Thames, and the devilish fog that stalked the river and its banks in old London town, bringing cholera and death, and the odour of hell itself, to the heart of Victorian Empire.

Three million people lived packed on the banks of the Thames alongside slaughterhouses, tanneries, shops, breweries, wagoners, hostelries, fullers, stables, dyers, metal works, soap factories, saddlery's, tenement apartments, people four, eight and sixteen to a room. The river itself was so polluted by human, animal and industrial waste that it "was an opaque pale brown fluid", scientist Robert Faraday wrote, and "A Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror" to the more classically inclined George Hamilton-Gordon, English Prime Minister and fourth Earl of Aberdeen.

1855 was the year the London Metropolitan Board of Works was established for the "merciful abatement of the epidemic that ravaged the Metropolis". It assumed the task of eliminating London's miasma, a noxious invisible vapour or mist synonymous with pollution, or "stink".

"The smell was of the most horrible description, the air being so foul that explosions and choke damp were frequent. We were very nearly losing a whole party by choke damp, the last man being dragged out on his back through two feet of black fetid deposit in a state of insensibility."

It was an established scientific fact of the day that miasma caused contagions of cholera, though opinion divided on the question of how. There were miasma skeptics, the contagionists, who believed disease was spread by touch. But the orthodox airists generally prevailed, along with Robert Boyle's Suspicions about the Hidden Realities of the Air .

…this is not as many imagine a simple and elementary body, but a confused aggregate of 'effluviums' from such differing bodies, that, though they all agree in constituting by their minuteness and various motions one great mass of fluid matter, yet perhaps there is scarce a more heterogeneous body in the world (1674)

The London summer of 1858 was much warmer than usual. And the smell from London's fouled river and sewers grew far worse than normal to spread, jeered some, as far as Paris, carried on hot winds to Vienna, even Rome. Chemicals by the barrel and gallon and cartload and ton: chloride of lime, chalk lime, slaked lime, and carbolic acid, were mixed and dumped and poured on the river and did nothing to relieve the stink at all. The Thames was prayed over, and some whispered sacrificed to in the dead of night, all to no avail. Parliament retired, the law courts closed, and those who could fled the city. After a fortnight it rained.

By the time of London's Great Stink of 1858 six separate inquiries and commissions, kind of the Australian Multiparty Committee on Climate Change of their day, had examined one hundred and thirty and more proposed solutions to the miasma problem without achieving a single thing. But in a few months following the Great Stink the English Parliament endorsed Metropolitan Board of Works engineer Joseph Bazalgette's three million pound plan, already partly underway, to integrate thousands of miles of underground sewers. And build enormous rotative beam engines, triple-expansion steam propelled pumps named Victoria, Albert, Alexandra, and Prince Consort, after the Queen and her family. The powerful pumps rotated and lifted and belched eleven times a minute, nearly sixteen thousand times each day, push-pulling London's waste and effluviums and unbearable horrors through cavernous outfalls and lifts to emerge and spew out in the Thames River Estuary by Barking and Crossness.

The airists and the contagionists continued their ferocious debates over cholera and miasma that failed to abate as the epidemics did, by 1865, after Bazalgette's massive pumps began their grisly work. It turns out that neither Boyle's airists or the modern and skeptical contagionists got it right. Microorganisms, bacterium Vibrio cholerae which contaminate water and food, do all of cholera's dirty work instead. London's royal family of pumps sucked them all out to sea anyway.

Progress. Never a straight line.

Climate strange

Still feeling my way on teh bloggingsphere. Who cares what I think? I think. Am opinionated, but never believed I needed an opinion on everything. Perhaps that is lazy. It is supposed to be an information age, with every who what where when and why known to humankind at my fingertips, waiting for an opinion to form.

I don't really get what people call the climate change debate, all this hot air and angst, strident rhetoric gushing in torrents from car radios, from the TV news or a current affairs program I get to watch, if I'm lucky. Time was, the weather changed as a matter of course. If you don't like the weather in Melbourne right now, just wait a couple of hours.

But now "the climate change debate plays out amid a chorus of populism and self-interest", a senior retired politician said. And "I don't understand it at all", one of my neighbours remarked today.

It made me think, or remember, or tingle of deja-vu though, as if I had heard it all before. What it might be is the feeling that the climate change thing is going the same way as the bomb thing did a few decades ago.

The bomb thing was a perception that one or all nations that had nuclear weapons would use them, blowing the world up along the way. What to do about the bomb preoccupied politics it seemed for ever. And it was really divisive politics, with some taking -ist and -wing positions, and vehemently demanding the rest of us do the same, crying foul treason if we did not.

Numbers were big news then as well, I recall. The number of nuclear missiles that were somewhere caused violence, and television spectacles of banners condemning war used as clubs to beat people with banners wanting peace. And numbers were apparently the answer, because there were so many of them being hawked, or doved, around. And it all dragged on for years.

The climate thing seems as big and divisive now as the bomb thing was, in the day, oozing from media, everywhere, all the time. Pretty much impossible to ignore. Or understand in any detail.

Trying to make sense of all this the usual way, by listening to all sides of the debate, seems as futile as it was when people were arguing about the bomb. Global warming, say some. The Earth is cooling, argue others. No it isn't at all, others affirm. Look at the science, all sides urge. The facts. We have proof, evidence, numbers, and the other guys are making it up for sinister reasons of their own.

Everyone seems to be arguing over computer simulations (they call them climate models, but aren't they weather forecasts?) as if they were real.

I don't know how true, but there is an old story that Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, called Caligula, (12-41 CE) made war upon the Sea-God Neptune, in the waters of the English Channel, capturing a booty of sea-shells and kelp that were paraded around Rome in triumph. He was assassinated, because people thought him weird. The legend of King Canute, who said "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings" also comes to mind, a cautionary tale. Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard got involved in the drought. Controversy over his big thing, rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, rages still, with books of numbers set ablaze in public demonstrations of loathing and fear. The next Prime Minister didn't do so well either, after making the weather a great moral issue of his time.

I guess there is a moral in there somewhere, but I'm not quite sure what. Other than people who take credit for the weather are really brave. Or something.

you want facts with that?

time travel to the review for real, a month or so later

I was going to review The Bolt Report, News Limited Columnist Andrew Bolt's new television program on the Ten Television Network.

That was before the news broke that the Australian National University in Canberra had increased security at facilities where its climate scientists are working after receiving many death threats aimed at the scientists and their families.

If Andrew Bolt didn't exist we would need to invent him. The News Limited political commentator has for many years been a lightning rod for Australians with dissenting social and political opinions, and his columns are widely read, and commented upon, from a broad spectrum of political perspectives.

Bolt has an opinion on almost everything, and if you don't like those, he has plenty more. Bolt waves what Frank Hardy used to call the finger of scorn at public policies and political figures, a single-digit bullshit detector working overtime.

But today, just as I sit to write a review of the four episodes of his television program I watched, Bolt writes

Global warmists are terrified of debate. No warming activist or Labor minister has agreed to come on The Bolt Report to discuss their claims. Almost no global warming scientists here will agree to debate sceptical ones.

When he appeared on the Bolt Report's first episode Federal Opposition and Liberal Party Leader Tony Abbot wasn't asked a single question about climate change, even though he is (in Boltspeak) a "warmist". "I believe", Abbot told anyone who would listen earlier this year, "that climate change is real and that human activity is at least partly responsible for it". Australia's alternative leader has, in fact, budgeted to take twelve billion dollars from government expenditure for programs to mitigate climate change over four years, a fairly activist putting-yer-money-where-yer-mouth-is political position. The Bolt Report's host might have questioned Abbot's wisdom, given a golden opportunity to, for Andrew Bolt is on the record as believing Global Warming is a great fraud perpetrated by scheming scientists and green enterprises grasping for wads of government money like the twelve billion dollars Tony Abbott proposes to hand out.

The Bolt Report is driven by belief. In a comment on the Victorian State Government's decision to make Welcome To Country Ceremonies optional, where they were obligatory under the previous Labour Government's protocols for state-sponsored events, its host asserts "These welcome events seem very traditional, but were in fact invented by popular Actor and TV presenter Ernie Dingo, and my next guest, distinguished didgeridoo player and artist, Doctor Richard Walley."

"Well, you don't invent welcome to country, the welcome to country has been here for thousands of years amongst Aboriginal peoples themselves", Walley replied.

There followed some banter about us being all Australians, and the whole welcome to country, and Aboriginal thing in general, being so divisive.

"Whatever happens to Aboriginals affects Australia. Whatever happens to Australia affects Aboriginals", Walley observes dryly.

"Well, thank you very much for coming on the show to put your point of view, I don't agree with it but I'm glad you are here to say it", the host wraps up.

Well, hang on. Point of view? Was it a matter of fact that the Welcome To Country events "were in fact invented by Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley", in the host's words?

It seems to me that The Bolt Report suffers from post-modernity's great melancholia of uncertainty. Bolt's other media ventures find their audience in a generation swept aside by mighty change, multiculturalism and workplace restructuring, with little left to sustain them beyond belief and shrinking pensions. Uncertainty resonates with the 55-64 demo displaced and made redundant by rationalization and globalization.

But is it fair to assert that someone made something up, and to then disagree with a matter of fact that he did not on the basis that the fact contradicts a belief?

Until the news of death threats to the academics at the ANU and their families I would have said, unreservedly, yes. Let everyone have their say. And encouragingly, Australians are turning to opinion-driven media to find a voice. The Bolt Report's capital city averages are around the same as for many opinion-driven programs on the Community TV stations around the nation.

Now I read reports that Australian media regulator, the Communications and Media Authority, has begun an investigation into a Sydney radio station's coverage of the climate change debate with a degree of trepidation. The last time they did that, Australian commentators were revealed to have been taking money to talk about stuff they didn't believe in as if they did.

So I'm going to reserve judgement on The Bolt Report, for now. It is just possible that I'm old fashioned enough to be entertained by facts alone, and don't need them filtered through a bunch of beliefs, no matter how entertaining, or off-the-wall.

The Bolt Report is on television Channel 10, Sundays at 10 AM. I watched episodes 1 to 4.

taxing hot air

I would rather sit in a dentist's chair than have lunch on an inner Melbourne footpath. So the tax on local restaurants using outdoor heating introduced in my 'hood to "discourage the use of outdoor gas heaters" won't change my alfresco dining habits one bit.

But I am interested in the reasoning behind the introduction of a tax on hot air. One commentator writes:

Diners who choose to dine outside on very cold days should wear appropriate attire instead of using external gas heaters installed by the business owners. Most of the heat is wasted in warming up the open air, and only small proportion benefits the diners. Such inconsideration reflects on the naivety and hypocrisy of the diners on climate change and global warming argument.

Scrutiny of dress and behaviour, the preoccupation of moralising writers since ancient times, places this tax on outdoor heaters in a moral sphere. Lacking experience, wisdom and judgement, diners are not conforming to moral standards or beliefs to which they profess to aspire. Like wayward children, diners at restaurants that use outdoor heating will be encouraged to act morally by adopting uniform attire, in this case a government issued blanket.

“I would like to start to build a culture in outdoor dining areas of people using a blanket rather than a heater,” one local official told Melbourne media.

Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd labelled what the correspondent I quoted refers to as the global warming argument the greatest moral issue of our time.

Around seventy cafe's in the 'hood use outdoor heaters on footpath dining areas. Those heaters are estimated to produce fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, around three-quarters of a tonne per cafe per year. By contrast, Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, which supplies around a quarter of the electricity used in my 'hood, produces sixteen million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, capped at a net four hundred and fifty million tonnes over time. If global carbon dioxide emissions are changing the weather, as seems likely, common sense suggests that some kind of debate over what to do about that must follow. But I doubt that framing the debate in moral terms will produce any useful outcome.

The platform principles of the deep ecosophy movement (which I have been rather painstakingly working through on this blog for a while now) attempts to frame the debate in rational terms. Those who subscribe to the platform principles "have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes." Taxing fifty five tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions smacks of tokenism, and a lack of intellectual rigour, in what ought to be a debate over human interference in nonhuman life. It is simply not good enough to frame this earth-shaking debate as a moral argument, and rail against the hypocrisy of those who are hungry and cold. We need to do better, and I fear we are incapable of rising above the condemnatory rhetoric of everyday moralising, inevitably a domain of the intellectually bankrupt.

capitalism and monoculture

I want to take up an issue raised in my last post: that I don't think there has been such a mystical political movement as the Greens since the Dark Ages.

Power is everywhere. A political movement seeks to concentrate power to further an agenda. Often that agenda is simply to concentrate more power than other political movements. An oligarchy is an extreme example of the concentration of power forever, for example in a cartel. A movement of political protest is an extreme example of the concentration of power for a moment, for example to end one instance of injustice. Power is everywhere, but its intensity is not everywhere the same. Power is focused, magnified, directed.

The green movement presents as a commonality of action rather than ideology. The major religions: Hindu, Buddhist, Christianity, Islam, participate in it for reasons of their own. And so do a multitude of other, minority faiths. And organizations and individuals in great numbers. Speaking in unison is not the same as being harmonious, and I hesitate to privilege one voice over others. So let Donald Worster do that for me

...the progressive, secular materialist philosophy on which modern life rests, indeed on which Western civilization has rested for the past three hundred years, is deeply flawed and ultimately destructive to ourselves and the whole fabric of life on the planet.

- Donald Worster, “The Shaky Ground of Sustainability,” in George Sessions, Deep

Ecology for the 21st Century (Boston: Shambhala, 1995) pp. 417–27)

Deeply flawed philosophy, ultimately destructive materialism, threats to the whole fabric, are polemics common in discourses of political change. Progressive, secular, materialist, conservative, are labels applicable to many times, places, situations and ideas. The idea that societies are materialistic to their detriment is by no means a new one. Assertions that materialism represents a mortal threat to people does not present a new class of problem. The formation of broad social coalitions to solve problems arising from materialism is not a new action. The abandonment and/or destruction of material goods is not a novel solution. The unravelling of an entire cosmology is not a new catastrophe.

The green movement is a coalition indistinguishable from many geopolitical grass roots movement, for instance International Workers of the World or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It is international, is active in all possible political forums, and has a charter binding the coalition to six guiding principles, the first of which is ecological wisdom.

Ecosophy, or ecological wisdom, is a neologism coined by Arne Naess and Felix Guattari "By an ecosophy I mean a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium", Arne Naess told the Third World Future Research Conference in Bucharest in 1972. Guattari and Naess went their separate philosophical ways and it is not my intent to reunite them here. But I do want to unpack the simple philosophical framework, offered by Naess and others in 1984, called The Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement.

Deep simply means over time. Lots of time, up to all there is. The first three points of the platform principles of ecosophy outline the problem and its scope. The next four suggest a course of action. The last dictates the circumstances in which an obligation arises to act.

The Platform Principles of the Deep Ecology Movement

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.

2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realizations of these values and are also values in themselves.

3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital human needs.

4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

5. Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to directly or indirectly try to implement the necessary changes.

Ecosophy is a field of discourse in which biology and ethics intersect. I say ethics because it seems to me that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring proposes a situation where birds no longer exist, the silent spring, and asks "is it ethical for birds not to exist?"

This is a bigger, more complex problem than it appears. The absence of birds illuminates an ecosphere, in which all living things are entangled. Not only birds, but many living things associated with birds are rendered non-existent in the silent spring. The problem "is it ethical for birds not to exist?" provides an ecosphere with a moral dimension. These issues were previously veiled by piecemeal descriptions of nature. The unveiled ecosphere offers no ready solution to the moral problem it poses: "is it ethical for birds not to exist?"

Morality, Rousseau theorized, arises from a human desire not to witness suffering. A moral position is one that eschews suffering. It is therefore possible to answer the question Is it ethical for birds not to exist? with a simple statement: It is wrong to cause suffering, an answer implying that once suffering is detected - there exists a situation leading to birds not existing - it is necessary to act to end it.

I don't think there has been such a mystical political movement as the Greens since the Dark Ages, a thought to unpack in a subsequent post. But I want to briefly situate that thought, and its unpacking, on some familiar ground.

Globalized capitalism produces monoculture. Although it is common to talk about pluralistic society monoculture is produced as a matter of fact. Carson's Silent Spring arises from a pluralistic monoculture. There is no overt, and perhaps no covert, political insistence upon monoculture - in Australia multiculture appears in the platform principles of most political parties- but in fact global capitalism (Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Caterpillar Tractors, Windows, Firefox) is producing monoculture. Diversity is hand made, but monoculture is (re)produced everywhere. The platform principles of ecosophy could be easily expanded as humans have no right to impose monoculture, not even to satisfy vital needs. Lest there be a Silent Spring.

go to the next post in this thread

Climate Change Forum Geelong 2011 - very few questions answered!

I watched most, if not all of the Climate Change Forum chaired by Professor Tim Flannery in Geelong yesterday (telecast on the ABC) and I can tell you, I'm none the wiser. Although it was stated that 90% of climate scientists agreed with the notion of global warming, climate change skeptics were often the one's given the most media attention. Are they? I've rarely seen a climate change expert referred to in the Australian media, however there is a list of them on Wikipedia if anyone is interested.

Experts at the forum suggested that 'real' climate change experts were either too busy undertaking their research, or too frustrated with having to defend their position to actually want to front up to the media to explain their side of the argument. I still think that we need to know what the skeptics are saying, even if, as one member of the forum said 'It's difficult to understand the science, if you are not a scientist'. If that's so, and I've no doubt it is, then perhaps scientists have a responsibility to explain science to members of the general public in a language that is accessible and understandable to them. No wonder people are up in arms about a carbon tax and confused about the whole issue. Is the planet warming or cooling who knows?!

One of the questions posed to the panel surrounded the fact that it may not be anthropogenic sources, but the ocean that contributes most to CO2 concentration. After what may only be called a protracted response the panel member agreed that ocean warming did contribute greatly to CO2 emission, however it was a feed-back loop: ocean warming = CO2 and more CO2 leads to more ocean warming. Nobody put the El Nina and El Nino phenomenon into the equation. One of the members did admit that he was a member of a group that was in ongoing discussions about whether global warming was a natural occurrence NOT caused by non-anthropogenic intervention. Roy Spencer, PhD, climatologist, author and former NASA scientist addresses the issue of ocean and COs and provides some interesting models on his website.

If it is discovered that global warming has more to do with non-anthropogenic events, then perhaps, as suggested, we should do something to assist nature so that she can get on with what she does. In the 70s the depletion of the ozone and subsequent banning of harmful chlorofluorocarbons resulted in healing of the ozone layer, which should be largely restored by mid century.

Another audience member suggested that deforestation in Australia contributed to CO2, since it contributes to warming through loss of cooling affect of trees and he asked the panel what Australia was doing to combat this. The answer given was more about international trends, rather than local and the panel member suggested that villagers in countries such as Thailand, Borneo, Indonesian etc who garner a living from deforestation should be compensated for loss of income if this source is removed from them. Fact is that Australia, along with 50 other countries is playing a leading role in international efforts to reduce deforestation, which causes approximately 18 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Partial answers are just NOT good enough! When a panel member, who is supposed to be an expert responds to the question: 'What happens when the earth has a 5 degree warming.' With a 'it's too scary to think about', rather than giving an expert answer, then what hope have we of gaining any information?

My own research on the Internet this morning reveals that total warming in the past century is 0.8C or 1.4 F, and although Most of the scientists believed that global warming was occurring and appropriate policy action should be taken, but there was wide disagreement about the likely effects on society and almost all agreed that the predictive ability of currently existing models was limited.

Fact is, no one knows or can accurately predict how long it will take for the planet to warm up to such an extent that it will create dangerous weather situations, and given that natural occurrences such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, drought, flooding as well as anthropogenic events, such as war, human greed, plundering of earth's natural resources already occurs on a regular basis and devastate humanity beyond belief, it's no wonder that most don't have the mind space to worry about global warming that may happen one day - according to scientists.
Having said all of this, one of the most interesting documents I've found to date is from the Council of Europe, Steering Committee for Human Rights, which addresses at length issues surrounding global warming, but even it states:

it is virtually impossible to disentangle the complex causal relationship linking historical greenhouse gas emissions of a particular country with a specific climate change-related effect, let alone with the range of direct and indirect implications for human rights, and  global warming is often only one of several contributing factors to climate change related effects, such as hurricanes, environmental degradation and water shortage.