Author Archives: geoffdavies1944

Once and future landscape care

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[I am involved in organising an unusual local festival that combines Arts and Activism, the Two Fires Festival in Braidwood, NSW, 12-14 April – soon!  That’s the main reason there hasn’t been much posted here lately.  I’ll put a few more festival things up over coming days.  Here is the blurb on the session I care most about.]

BIggestEstateThe challenge for our generation is to create an enduring way of being, in Australia and around the world, so that our children may look forward to an indefinite future of healthy life in a healthy landscape.  Our agricultural and other direct involvements in the landscape have a key role, and the search for enduring systems has been under way for some time.

Historian Bill Gammage’s remarkable recent book The Biggest Estate on Earth teaches us that if our descendants fulfil this aspiration they will not have been the first.  For millennia prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Australian landscape was managed comprehensively, intimately and enduringly to be productive, diverse, and safer from fire, flood and drought.

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Who’s Extremist?

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[I sent this to The Canberra Times Sunday (24th).  Still waiting for a response, though it’s highly apposite to the local Senate race, with Zed Seselja having ousted Gary Humphries from number one on the Liberal Senate ticket, and Simon Sheikh being a vigorous Greens candidate with at least an outside chance.]

“Left wing” and the “most extreme government in Australia”, is how Jeremy Hanson chose to label the ACT’s Labor-Green Government upon winning the local Liberal leadership recently.  Clearly he was singing from the current Liberal Party song sheet, which seeks to label the Greens “extremists” at every slight opportunity.

Now that local Liberal Zed Seselja is gunning for the national stage in the Senate, we should put these claims in a little perspective, and examine who is extreme and who reflects “good common-sense values”, to quote Hanson again.

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A Dramatic Shift to the Right

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Part 1 of 3 on Independent Australia.  These three pieces are taken from my long essay The Rise and Failure of the Radical Right:

DitchTheWitch

“In the first of a three part series, Dr Geoff Davies considers the worldwide shift to the political Right since the 1980s, and how traditional conservatives have now become radicals.”

 

 

No Denying: Global Warming Has Neither Slowed Nor Stopped

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[ The first part of this post is an article I’ll peddle around the traps.  After that I provide some more detail, which is quite illuminating, especially a changing gif and a video.  I was alerted to all this by Grist. ]

Perhaps in this season of heat and fire we might finally stop listening to climate denialists, the vast majority of whom are not scientists.  Their only remaining argument is a grand conspiracy theory.  Despite what you hear in mainstream discussion, the evidence supporting the conclusions of climate scientists is very strong, and just gets stronger.

Take, for example, the claim that global warming has stopped.  This claim has been around for quite a few years now, but it got a bit of a boost recently when that well-known bastion of sober scientific analysis, Britain’s Daily Mail, interrupted its usual fare of tits, celebrity scandal and tits to misconstrue a UK Met Office report, claiming the report showed there has been no warming for 16 years.  The claim is bunk, and a debunking is provided by the website The Carbon Brief, among others.

Meanwhile a careful analysis of the recent record of global warming that came out a year ago has made little or no impression on public discussion.  It shows very simply and clearly that global warming has proceeded steadily for the past thirty years.

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No More Climate Denialist “Debate” Here

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I have decided it’s past time to stop humouring climate skepticism and denial by allowing their “debate” on my posts.  Why?  Because tolerating it only helps to perpetuate the myth that climate scientists are divided and there’s a lot of doubt about the cause of global warming.  It feeds the trolls.

The AGW menu and submenu lists items related to global warming that are archived here, so I don’t have to keep repeating the same arguments to sceptics who keep repeating the same old arguments.  I just updated the AGW tag with the following.

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The Forecast, 7-day and 200-year

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On Tuesday January 8 Australia’s Bureau of Meterology  released the 7-day projection for the continent shown below (top panel) for Monday January 14.  The purple patch, about 250×350 km, is above 50°C.  It has since been superseded by slightly lower projected temperatures, but the heat wave is continuing, being one of the longest and hottest on record.

The bottom panel is to put this in perspective.  So far we have had about 0.8°C of global warming since 1900.  I can say the climate projections are for 4-6°C of warming, but perhaps the picture brings it home rather more directly than words.

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What if Gillard Were to Lead?

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English: Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gil...

Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Published at Independent Australia 19 Jan.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s October parliamentary speech, in which she systematically tore down Opposition Leader Tony Abbot for his persistent misogyny, got a big reaction world-wide.  Why?  Because it is a problem not often addressed in mainstream politics, and because of her obvious passion and authenticity, delivered with devastatingly articulate precision.

In all the discussion that followed, about whether this was routine parliamentary posturing, about why the commentariat was caught off-guard, about whether she is hypocritical about other issues, one question was missing.

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Warming beyond 2100

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The IPCC (InterGOVERNMENTAL Panel on Climate Change) cops a lot of stick for allegedly being radical, part of the great climate-science-greenie-leftie-jewish-commo conspiracy, etc.  But in fact it is too slow and conservative, witness the world is tracking on the high side of its projections.

One IPCC habit that annoys me is running projections only to the year 2100.  We know warming and its consequences won’t stop there, so the choice is pure bureaucratic nonsense.

Here is a rare example of a more useful graph, showing warming continuing for more than a century beyond 2100.  God knows what sort of world our great- … – grandchildren would be contending with.

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