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Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

On “Political Correctness”

March 5, 2019

“Political correctness” is the all round term of denunciation for any proposition which would like rightwingers to think, not be impolite, or not sanctify the suppression of someone, as in:

“Perhaps we should stop destroying our environment?”
“Oh stop being politically correct.”
“Maybe [racism, sexism, corporate power etc] needs to be recognized as a problem?”
“Shut up and stop being politically correct”
“The evidence suggests that the cardinal raped children, and suported other rapists.”
“Political correctness is everywhere. He’s the real victim.”

Gaining political support can often depend on people not thinking and not discussing things with other groups, so slur terms can spread and multiply, once you have decided on that approach.

Calling something “political correctness” is part of a general strategy in which Republicans and Republican media have done their best to shut down discussion over the years – from at least the Gingrich congress onwards.

We can see it in those rightwingers who:

continually scream their righteous abuse at those who disagree with them;
go after people because they made a remark they construed as “socialist” ie against corporate supremacy;
make a big show to each other of their righteous virtue while dismissing other people for “virtue signaling”;
dismissing someone as a “sjw” if they object to some blatant injustice;
dismissing another line of thought they don’t like and cannot be bothered to try and read as “Cultural Marxism”;
stomping around angrily calling the corporately owned media “biased” and “left wing”, if it slightly varies from the party line;
giving death threats to climate scientists for not supporting the pro-fossil fuel, pro-pollution, position;
invent terms like “libtard” to help stop discussion;
sneer at people who realise that capitalism can sometimes be destructive, or that the ecology is in crisis, or that racism and sexism exist, as “woke”, again so the don’t have to think about these things and can condemn those who do as stupid or following the crowd – unlike them who are following the corporate elites;
scream about how unamerican it was to object to the last Iraq war, while pretending their opponents are warmongers;
support a president who slams any coverage which is not 100% behind him, as being made by enemies of the people.

We know through these right whingers that they (with all their corporate backing) are the real victims, and that only women can be sexist, and only black people racist. Anyone who might offer sympathy to people who they think are being affected by racism, or sexism is a deluded busybody. Similarly, it’s a “witch hunt”, when a guilty, or probably guilty, right winger is questioned instead of being let-off to continue with their crimes.

Through rightwingers we also know that all fact checkers, scientists and people who study society have a liberal bias, as presumably the way you get to be right wing is through total ignorance of reality.

But then again we can be told by rightwingers that discussion, or finding the truth, is not what discussion is about; victory is the only thing that counts, with total annihilation of the other side the aim. What is the point of discussion other than to reinforce your own biases and scream a lot?

The republican media, starting with Rush Limbaugh and Fox taught these techniques, partly as a way of marketing – get the audience angry and upset so they can’t think properly, and tell them that any other source (that might disagree with that anger or think it is misplaced) is biased and out to get them. You get your audience to stick with you whatever rubbish you spout, and that brings more sponsorship and more wealth for you.

Partly this technique was developed because the policies the right sells (what is called ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘privileging the rich while kicking the poor and middle classes’), may not be that popular if they had been upfront about the known consequences of those policies.

To avoid people understanding this policy reality, they began to construct the idea that discussion involved the endless headkicking of difference and invention of scandal. They build the “culture wars”. They constantly accuse their opponents of positions they do not hold, so as to make them seem more evil to their ingroup and reinforce their own groupthink. The technique helps build conformity, and fear of attack, in their own group, because people see what happens to those who think for themselves, and they have the options of staying loyal or facing the consequences of having their friends forsake them….

The Right has been so free of facts and so full of denunciation they helped build the political polarisation of the US (and similar techniques were employed in the UK and Australia) and made way for a President who openly denies climate change, and denounces opponents, to protect corporate polluters and the extremely wealthy.

After a while they created the sense that right wing discourse was creation of an atmosphere of threat, and it became invisible to them; it was water to a fish. Eventually, after being abused and threatened for years, without any Republicans calling their side out for these techniques, the ‘liberal left’ began to respond in kind, and lo! Republicans suddenly became concerned about rudeness in discussion, after their years of silence on the issue. The separation of the debate into two sides who abuse each other was part of the aim of all this. Then you don’t have to worry so much about explaining what your policies achieve, as no one cares about anything other than point scoring.

These techniques have made the US vulnerable to Russian interference. People in the US don’t need Russia to divide them, because that was the Right’s aim and it has been achieved, but the Russians can, and have, increased those manufactured divisions for their own purposes. And yes we now have Trump, who the US’s enemies know is incapable of making anything great.

Tags:Disinformation, mentalities, narrative
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The difficulties of being climate aware: Social and Psychological

March 4, 2019

Official climate action is way too slow. Despite Rightist allegations that governments are pro-climate change because they could use it to increase their power and suppress dissent, on the whole governments seem extremely reluctant to do anything about climate change or ecological destruction. We can see them threaten scientists or others who talk out, remove useful information from official websites, appoint industry figures to investigate climate change or to lead departments of environment, attempt to destroy data, support coal mining and construction of coal power, change regulations constantly so as to make renewable ventures more difficult, make it easier to do more land clearing and emit more pollution and so on. There are few governments in the world who don’t exhibit at least some of these policies.

Why does this happen? For two main reasons.

1) Dealing with climate change is difficult both practically and psychologically, and

2) [a related factor] Dealing with climate change disadvantages quite a number of established powerful people who would have to stop making money from actions which lead to climate change. Change is threatening, as other people might displace them, or they might lose out on their current positions. Imagining change is psychologically disorienting for many people.

Those people who are interested in doing something about climate change, may need to remember that an extremely powerful and wealthy group of elites oppose them. Activists are the underdog, and this can be a hard position to accept.

Corporations and Governments have (for about the last 100 years or so) been tied in with a model of profit and development which depends on fossil fuel consumption, the massive dumping of pollution on less powerful people (where possible) together with the destruction of natural resources, through mining, deforestation, housing development, industrial farming, modes of warfare, and so on.

It should be hardly necessary to add that while this process has helped lift millions of people out of poverty, it has also forcibly dispossessed millions of people from relative self-sufficiency into wage labour and dependece, and stopped people from living a roughly sustainable life style. It has also produced truly massive inequalities of wealth. And massive inequalities of wealth lead to massive inequalities of power, confidence and apparent ability to act.

Those wealthy people and organisations who get wealthy from producing climate change and ecological destruction as side-effects of their wealth generation, can buy governments all over the world. They are marked as wise and successful people by their wealth, they have access to governments, they can provide well-paying jobs for people who help them and so on.

In most countries they own and control the media, and hence they either attack ideas of climate change, threaten climate scientists, provide money for ‘skeptical’ research, or at the best pretend that the science is undecided and hire opinion writers to scare people about climate science, the economic consequences of change, or the abuse and exile you will suffer if you oppose them. This occurs irrespectively of whether the media is supposed to be ‘left’ or ‘righteous’, as it is still largely owned by corporate people. This wealthy group also supports think-tanks which make money by providing arguments in favour of their aims.

Government people often give more credence to endlessly repeated ‘information’ they read and hear, than they do to real research, and if governments were to act then they might lose media and donor support, so they could lose government. Governments (particularly in ‘developing countries’) also fear that if they did not maintain ecological destruction then it would be difficult to increase living standards for their people, and thus they would be replaced by governments who might be even worse. Investors might go on strike and take their money elsewhere. There is no obvious way forward – renewables may not work as well as fossil fuels.

So you will find power and bought-information working against any progress towards not destroying our current ecology and eventually our civilisation.

It almost goes without saying that realizing the world you depend upon is being destroyed, and that powerful people support that destruction or, at best turn away from it, is deeply depressing. It is also isolating as most people follow the lead established and find it difficult to talk about climate change, or will dismiss it as a ‘downer’; and it does hit people by reminding them of ends and mortality. Global ecological destruction is too upsetting for many people to face.

Acting requires people to change their lives, and to admit that their children and grandchildren are endangered by ordinary life; you too are partially responsible for climate change, through how you live, what you buy, and what you consume. It is hard to keep psychologically functional and live with the realization that you face almost overwhelming power and overwhelming routine. Changing one’s life is threatening for both powerful and ordinary people. Climate change and its consequences may even satisfy any unconscious desires you have for self destruction.

To some extent, continuing with climate change depends on you giving up, and accepting some other group’s superior power over your life and fate, and that too is hard to face.

But, despite the overwhelming odds and difficulties, you have to continue to fight anyway, in whatever way you can. It is helpful to remember that many local communities are working together, sometimes rather anarchically, outside the system, or breaking the regulations, in order to do something. There are likely to be people in your local area interested in practical action, who are not blinded by the wealthy and powerful, and who just get on with things. They may be prepared to talk and express their feelings and recognize the difficulties even while they act. They act even if all seems dark, just as people have done when facing invasion or tyranny – and acting is a tonic providing you recognize the darkness within and do not suppress it or let yourself be taken over by it.

See if you can find such groups and join in. If you don’t like a particular group, there will probably be some other groups you can link together with. It may be useful to engage in therapy, providing the therapist does not encourage you to isolate yourself from action, or the problem. It may be useful to learn how to work with your dreams as they reveal information, symbolically, that you may otherwise be unaware of. There is no reason why action cannot lead to a happier more contented self, once you realise the traps. The current state of affairs leads to a despondent, or suppressive, self. Moving to oppose, or get out of the system, may help you in every way possible.

Tags:Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, narrative
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Climate Consensus?

March 4, 2019

The question often arises of “what does consensus mean in the usual talk of the consensus on climate change?”

The answer is simple, but controversial. It means that almost everyone who works and publishes in climate science is convinced by the current evidence that climate change is happening, and that it is primarily caused by human beings.

That is all. And yet that is quite significant, given the nature of science.

The theory and supporting data has been around and largely unchallenged in general (specific points have been challenged and refined) for more than 50 years, and it goes back to the 19th Century. This general consensus is unusual, because most scientific theories are constantly under challenge from within their domains, as scientists can gain status for showing problems with theories and proposing persuasive new interpretations of data. Science tends to be fractured that way. Furthermore, there will always be problems with the data and its interpretation that need to be explained, and this gives an opening for new theories and approaches. Finally, in complex systems predictions are hard to make, and sometimes predictions have been conservative and wrong – although this is not discussed that much.

When a scientific theory remains around for that length of time and the consensus is high, it’s usually pretty good. It is better than the alternatives.

Now of course, the great thing about science is that people eventually change their minds when faced with better theories, or data which contradicts the theories. The theory can be abandoned. So far this has not happened. It could happen, but hoping that it could happen is not the best way to run your politics.

The question people need to think about is: is climate change a conspiracy joining the notoriously factional UN (which usually can’t get its act together to do anything simple) with competitive scientists of all kinds of political persuasion (who often face hostility from governments who don’t want to act on climate change) to put forward a socialist conspiracy, or is it more likely that fossil fuel companies who (at best) have a dubious reputation for honesty and democracy, fund think-thanks to deny climate change, and promote climate change denial, because it is in their economic interest to do so?

Climate change is one of the most highly probable pieces of contemporary science. It should not be rendered political, even though it is in some corporate interests to do so.

Where climate change should be political and openly so, is on the question of how we try and prevent, or ameliorate, it.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation
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Cardinals and Crimes

February 28, 2019

An Australian Cardinal has just been convicted of child abuse/rape. It is possible he may be acquitted on appeal but this is not a comment on the Cardinal, but a comment on some of his supporters. Please note it is not a call to stop Christians from offering him forgiveness if he is not acquitted, but there is something which needs comment.

He has been roundly defended by members of Australia’s Righteous establishment. They have argued things like he was convicted by an atheist or left-wing conspiracy, the case was bad (despite the well-known difficulties of getting unanimous convictions in such cases, and their ignorance of the testimony or the records of testimony) and so on. They almost universally refer to his character as making the charges unlikely. One ex-prime minister called his character ‘exemplary’.

I do not know the man and have never met him. However, he is on record as having led the Church’s denial response to priestly rape. He has defended rapist priests, been unaware of rapist priests (even when he lived with them), attempted to silence victims, successfully argued that the Catholic Church was not a legal body which could be sued, limited compensation to $50,000 dollars, and smeared people who challenged him or presented evidence of abuse. He has fought fiercely to protect the Church from the appearance of scandal, while allowing the scandalous acts to continue for years. This implies that for the Righteous, institutions exist solely:

to promote the authority of those who hold office in them;

to defend the reputation of the institution and its office holders;

to treat those with less authority in the institution, or those who complain from outside, as sub-human;

to crush, isolate and silence those who are hurt by the institution, so it may continue to pretend there are no problems and allow its members to carry on the abuse;

to minimize any expenditure on reparation for those hurt;

to deny any responsibility for harm;

To issue reassuring lies that allow the institution to carry on, and keep its authority secure; and

to crush any form of dissent, even if the dissent is simply an attempt to get the institutions’ office holders to recognize there is a problem.

That this is considered ‘exemplary,’ I think, tells you a lot about Right wing politics and morality. It is about maintaining their authority, supporting the powerful when they fall, and headkicking those hurt by the system. There is little else to it, whatsoever.

Tags:Disinformation, religion, social category theory
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Further reflections on energy and entropy in economics – Jancovici again

February 25, 2019

In the previous post, I suggested that Jean-Marc Jancovici insists that economists ignore problems of energy availability, and this distorts their (and our) economic expectations.

As previously implied, we can add that life and economics exist on this planet because of the slow self-destruction of our Sun. If the Sun emitted too much radiation (or the planet received too much radiation) it is doubtful that sophisticated life could exist anywhere on the planet – although possibly some life could survive deep underground or near vents in the deep oceans. If we received too little radiation, life might be similarly constrained. Eventually in the far distant future the sun will die, but this is way too far in the future for us to bother about at the moment.

In this sense solar energy is fundamental to life and society. Manual labour (the basis of many economic theories) and human thought, experiment or design only exist because of the energy humans and creatures extract from food, and that ultimately depends upon the Sun’s radiation and self-destruction. Energy from the sun is stored by, amongst other things, coal and oil, and is released in fire.

As we know, forms of organisation can massively magnify the power of human thought and labour (and massively disorganise them, or waste then, as well). Putting these points together, Jancovici’s argument declares that the energy we can extract through the ways we organise burning fossil fuels massively overshadows the power of human labour in creating social ‘value’ and material goods.

To restate:
Energy consumption and its organisation and implementation through social organisations and other technologies (the social aspects) is fundamental for the kind of economies we have today.

We should note that we also adapt our economies to the kinds of availabilities of energy that we have to deal with. Power is currently cheap at night because coal fueled electricity has not been ‘dispatchable,’ or particularly variable, and much energy is wasted.

Changes in energy supply and availability will have economic and organisational consequences, and we currently need to change energy supplies because an unintended consequence of fossil fuel based energy supplies is climate change. There are other forms of ecological destruction happening which are as important, and which reinforce climate change, but I’m currently putting them to onside – not, I hope, ignoring them. The prime cause of climate change reintroduces the importance of entropy.

Entropy is one of those scientific concepts over which there seems a fair bit of dispute, and a relative ease of misunderstanding. I’m warning any readers that this may be all be wrong. Please let me know if you know better. ‘Entropy’ is a description of a process, rather than a thing, so it is possibly better to talk about ‘entropic processes’ rather than ‘entropy’. The point of entropy is that any use of energy, any ‘work,’ engages entropic processes alongside that usage. These entropic processes are usually dissipated as heat (random molecular movement) and/or through reduction of what appears to be constructive order or demarcation.

It is often postulated that entropic processes will lead to “universal heat death.” This is a state in which there is no more energy in one part of the universe than in another. Particles are completely randomly distributed. Whether this state is a state of total order or total disorder is up to you – the paradox is obvious and implies life is a ‘mess’ (or ‘balance’ if you prefer) of order and disorder.

At the extreme, this idea also implies that too much work will generate too many entropic processes and the planet will warm independently of what precautions we take. The use of air-conditioners in some Cities is supposed to increase the heat of those cities (as the heat involved in producing the cooling dissipates outside the area of cooling), and thus encourages more air-conditioning and more heating. The same may be true of automobiles (engines moving people around get hot, and dissipate that heat). An economy necessarily produces (semi-organized forms of?) dissipated heat.

We all hope that this extreme fate is ultimately avoidable or far off, or avoidable because we have spare energy to do something about it. We could develop more efficient engines or ways of cooling, or better ways of organising those processes (but this can never stop excess heat being dissipated). Ordering processes can always create disordering processes – and we should not ignore the disordering, or entropic, processes simply because we like, or are impressed by, the order. What we define as order and disorder come together. Another problem here is that the more complex the processes we use to prevent the entropy we generate from overwhelming our order, then the more energy the order may take to keep going, and the more prone the system may be to accident or collapse.

Entropy also suggests that, while we use energy to produce useful transformations, we also produce waste or pollution by breaking things down. This is furthered by forms of social organisation which make it acceptable to create waste, or allow waste and poisons to be allocated to ‘unimportant’ areas, and onto relatively powerless people, where the effects can be ignored. If you like, blockage of information (in this case about pollution) is as important a part of current economic life as is accurate and resolvable transmission of information.

Just as wealth gets allocated by patterns and processes of ‘social class’, so does waste, probably in an inverse form; waste and risk of harm gets distributed away from wealth. However, as waste tends to randomness, this distribution may not be quite as rigorous. Few will totally escape climate change.

So we may say that the implications of Jancovici’s argument suggests orthodox economists not only ignore the availability and organisation of energy as important to economy (other than as labour), they also ignore entropic processes and waste and their forms of organisation and disorganistion.

It therefore appears we need a new orthodox economics which deal with these things. So part of the next stage is to look at some criticisms of Jancovici and the work that has been done to factor energy and entropy into economics.

To restate, yet again:

Energy availability, its capacities, organisation, distribution, implementation and consumption through social organisations and other technologies, and the effects (both intended and unintended, such as entropy waste and pollutions etc) of its production and organisation (etc.) is fundamental for understanding the kind of economies we have today.

Energy cannot be ignored

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, disorder, economics, Energy, technology
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Individualism and the Right?

February 24, 2019

I’m frequently told that the division between Right and Left is between ‘individualism’ and ‘egalitarianism’. However, I remain unconvinced. Let’s ignore whether right and left are well-defined categories at this moment, but assume they mean something useful – they certainly operate in the contemporary English Speaking world.

Certainly people on the Right, frequently describe themselves as ‘individualists’, that is true. After all, can individualism, be bad? “We are all individuals!”. We don’t want to be controlled by others. Maturity is a form of ‘individuation’. We should discover our individual talents, and so on.

The problem is that people on the Right, seem to be more accurately described as ‘supremacists’. They nearly always imply things like: the wealthy are great and good, men are better than women, gay people are inferior, white culture is better than any other and needs to be protected and promulgated, and so on. People of the right type are dominant because they are superior and deserve it. We frequently hear how Trump is a great leader because he is a great man, successful at business etc. He is superior and even favoured by God.

The current Right’s favourite policy of neoliberalism seeks to use the State to enhance powerful and wealthy interests, and suppress opposition through talk of ‘free markets’. Even in its individualistic forms this movement seeks to protect the powerful from the people and democratic regulation, but not the people from the powerful and what promotes their profit. It is implied that the corporately powerful are inherently better people; they do stuff.

All of these people seem quite happy to join together to enforce their supremacy; they have little reluctance to put the rights of their group ahead of the rights of outsider individuals, especially individuals who they define as inferior.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that they need inferior groups to denounce to make it clear that they are superior. These groups are nearly always groups which are not that powerful: unemployed people, unmarried mothers, drug addicts, refugees, racial minorities, sexual minorities, religious minorities and so on. Sometimes they denounce minor elites, when those elites disagree with them or say that their ideas are wrong: people like scientists, academics, non-neoclassical economists, post-modernists or so on. Often these people are people who have studied these areas of contention, but they can be denounced as inferior or corrupt. They don’t seem to worry that much about violence being directed at the inferior. It’s either necessary, provoked, or simply does not occur, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes people on the Right pretend they are the victims of these inferior people, and this proves how the inferior really need to be put back in their place. We can think of men claiming they are victimized by feminism, white folk claiming the only racism comes from black folk, wealthy people claiming they are being held down by envy, taxes or unions, and so on. The inferior folk are deadly cunning and deserve what is coming to them.

It is this necessity for the construction and denunciation of the ‘inferior,’ that seems to lead to the ease with which people on the Right can join up with fascists, religious authoritarians, military authoritarians, racist groups and so on. It would be hard to explain how individualism merges with authoritarian collectivism if the Right were really individualists rather than supremacists.

If they were individualists, then it would be illogical to condemn other individuals who live differently, but if they are group-supremacists then it is quite logical and even necessary.

The group binding forces, also make it necessary for them to praise people on their side, even when it is clear they would be furious if people on the other side had done the same kinds of things – as is clearly shown by supremacist reactions to the Mueller inquiry. Does anyone seriously think that they would not be calling for Clinton to be executed if the evidence pointed to her being supported by Russians, trying to make contact with Russians, having commercial ties with Russians, and trying to suppress an inquiry into her contacts with Russians. But being a group promoting supremacy, it again becomes logical. Truth is irrelevant to supporting their power as is support for lack of corruption. They are superior and can do no wrong.

There may be people on the right who don’t support supremacy, but they are not that easy to find.

Tags:Disinformation, social category theory
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More on Population and River flow

February 22, 2019

I have a somewhat cynical tendency to think that blaming population is a way that Western people (of a largely Protestant heritage) like dealing with climate change because it absolves them. Population growth is not happening because of ‘us’, it has happening because of people in India, China (now the one child policy is gone) and because of Muslims and Catholics who breed uncontrollably. This could be seen as an example of social category theory in action: it is an outgroup that is the problem, not us.

It probably does need to be said population could become a problem. 100 billion people is probably too many for any kind of civilization to survive and it probably would alter nature irreparably however we lived or died. We need to deal with population, but it is not our primary problem at the moment. It just intensifies the problem – we would still be in a mess if population growth stopped immediately.

A bigger issue is the question of how much in the way of resources people consume. The Murray Darling’s water was largely consumed by business, and these businesses were draining the water not because of population, but because of the demands that business always grow and because government values business over the environment (and everything else, we might add). Water could have been held back, but as we know through an article in the SMH yesterday, more water was allocated to business despite knowledge of the likely pressures faced by the river and its marginal safety. There was no consideration for the environment at all.

We have this reinforced by the official Coalition sponsored report which surprisingly mentions the forbidden term ‘climate change’ to explain the problem. [“The fish death events in the lower Darling were preceded and affected by exceptional climatic conditions, unparalleled in the observed climate record“. and “The recent extreme weather events in the northern Basin have been amplified by climate change.”] However, it hardly mentions irrigation usage at all. It also does not mention the facts that these irrigation businesses appear to have stolen water and engaged in fraud to get more water. Business as a explanatory cause is even more forbidden to the Right than ‘climate change’.

This has nothing to do with population – it has to do with an ideology that says business, and short term profit, must come first.

However, if we are going to blame population then how many people do we have to kill to solve the issue? 2 billion? 3 Billion? Reduction cannot happen naturally fast enough.

We as a population in Australia consume and destroy far, far more (massively more) than an equivalent population of people in India. Again this points to the fact that degree and style of consumption of resources by a population is the problem, not the population by itself. If the Average person in Australia or the US consumes 20 or more times what the average person does in China should we wipe out Australians or Chinese? It would clearly be more economic and easier to wipe out Australians and people in the US. Is that such an attractive proposition?

However, if we could solve the Murray-Darling crisis by penalising or regulating a few inappropriate businesses who use way too much water, wouldn’t that be easier and better? If businesses cannot work with the Murray Darling flowing, then they should not be there.

Clearly if we think that people in India or China have to consume as much as we have done, or as much as our businesses do, then there will be a problem in the future. Perhaps a solution is that we should consume and destroy less, rather than they consume and destroy more? But, in any case, lets not distract ourselves with future problems when we have problems which are being generated now, and can be fixed now through being aware of what they are.

Tags:Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, economics, social category theory
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Population and Rivers

February 15, 2019

The other day, Dick Smith (a retired Australian businessman), launched an advertisement asking “why don’t you link the Murray Darling crisis to record population growth?”

Now it is true that infinite population growth is not sustainable in any situation, so population growth is a problem. However it is not what has caused the Murray Darling issue NOW. Current population figures do not necessitate pumping the river dry for cotton, or for other large scale agri-businesses. Partly because the cotton and food is largely grown for export: we don’t even process the cotton into goods for sale overseas. It is pretty much independent of the current population size in Australia.

Talking of population is, in this case, an avoidance of the real ‘elephant in the room’ – business – and the idea that business must always grow. If business must always grow then, in the current situation, it will always attempt to consume more water, more raw materials, and extract as much as it can from the land. This is irrespective of population growth. And these actions become particularly bad when the government thinks its main priority is increase the profit of big business, and to increase the consumption or extraction of limited natural resources by such businesses (to keep them going). And that thinking and action is well documented. The Right in particular govern for business profit alone.

Population growth may add to the pressures, but it does so in an environment which makes development, and high profit for some, more important than water conservation or conservation of land for food production and wildlife.

This is the ideology of neoliberalism. Profit and growth of profit is the only thing that counts.

Maybe we do need to slow population growth, but don’t pretend that will solve problems generated by business and compliant government.

Tags:'nature', Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, economics
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IPCC, complexity and climate

February 8, 2019

There seems to be a meme going around that the IPCC disproved climate change in one sentence and removed that sentence from reports. The sentence is:

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible.”

The sentence is found in the “Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report” edited by Robert T. Watson and the ‘Core Writing Team’, Published by Cambridge University Press, and recently available on the IPCC website.
here https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/SYR_TAR_full_report.pdf

(The IPCC website is being reorganized and hence stuff can be difficult to find – google does not appear to have caught up yet)

It is in the Technical Summary Section, p.58. or page 215 of the full report
According to Archive.org the text version of this was available between at least August 4 2009 until at least November 4 2018.

There is no particular evidence that they hid this sentence.

The sentence is included on a section entitled “Advancing Understanding” and is about further research into uncertainties. It is prefixed by the requirement that we need to “Explore more fully the probabilistic character of future climate states by developing multiple ensembles of model calculations.” I’d add that, it seems nowadays more generally realized that we cannot understand ecological, climate and social systems without an understanding of complexity theory.

By my understandings of complex systems, this apparently unsuppressed sentence is entirely true: we cannot predict exact weather, or climate states, within any accuracy in the relatively distant future for a particular date or year. That is the nature of complex systems. However that does not mean we cannot predict trends, or that any result at all is possible.

The sentence is not embarrassing, or disproving of climate science, it is, however, easily misunderstood.

People do not understand the limits on chaos and complexity. Because we cannot predict exactly what will happen does not mean that anything can happen, or that any predictable event has equal probability, which is what ‘deniers’ seem to argue.

It is, for example, if you will pardon the political implications, possible, but exceedingly improbable that President Trump will stop making things up, and everyone will agree that he is constantly telling the truth – at least I cannot predict the exact circumstances under which this would happen, and when it will happen. It is not an impossible event, but it is highly improbable based on the trends. Similarly, because I do not know where an ant will be on a moated table top in exactly quarter of an hour (assuming I have not placed some kind of sticky substance on the table on one spot etc.), does not mean it will start flying, or that it will talk to me. It is, likewise, extremely improbable that despite lack of certainty, and assuming weather stays stable, that it will snow in Sydney Australia in January or February.

The point is that the inability to predict an exact climate or weather state, does not mean we cannot make informed predictions based on the trends, provided we correct for further information as it arises.

The trends so far suggest, and seem confirmed by observation, that sea ice and land ice is thinning near the poles. Likewise glaciers seem to have been getting smaller over the last 30 years. There is no indication that these trends are reversing, and some that they are speeding up. The rate of disappearance appeared to slow down for a while, but it continued and never reversed. This in all probability means that sea levels will increase – it may mean water shortages in some places that depend on glaciation for water supply.

It is possible that as the gulf stream shuts down, some parts of Northern Europe (especially the UK) will freeze up and ice will accumulate there. But this probably will not help that much, and is no evidence that climate change is not happening or not going to have disruptive effects.

Similarly, if the average temperature keeps increasing elsewhere then weather patterns will be disrupted. Disruptions of the standard patterns of complex systems are nearly always fierce as the system ‘seeks’ a new equilibrium. This is especially so, if the pressures towards change continue or increase (ie if we keep emitting greenhouse gasses). It is a good prediction that we can expect more extreme weather (which is what we seem to be observing). We cannot pinpoint exactly when and where that weather will happen, but it would be foolish to pretend that this pattern is extremely unlikely to happen anywhere, or that it will discontinue in the near future. We can also expect it to become increasingly difficult to get insurance, or to find the money to rebuild cities wrecked by these storms.

Likewise increased heat in places which are already difficult for agriculture or prolonged human labour, will probably mean that these areas become increasingly uninhabitable and production will be lowered. If people try to air condition fields with fossil fuel power (or something), that will in the long term increase pressures. This trend probably means population movements as people try to move somewhere more habitable with better food supplies. That probably means national boundary defense issues will increase. Again there is nothing, at present, to suggest that these currently existing trends will not continue.

To encapsulate: While we cannot predict exact events, the trends are clear. If we keep emitting greenhouse gasses then the global average temperature will continue to rise. What we consider normal climate/weather will end. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather events will become more frequent as the climate system destabilizes – the cost of repairing devastated cities may become prohibitive because there are so many crises happening simultaneously. Agricultural systems are highly likely to break down. People movement will intensify as people can no longer live in the areas they have lived recently. This may mean increased armed conflict, which is one reason why the Pentagon would be interested in climate change.

This does not mean that people should not struggle to change the trends and therefore change the likely course of climate disruption, but those actions are likely to have unintended consequences (which are almost inevitable in complex systems), and we need to be aware of this.

However there is almost no sign of such action happening, as people would rather pretend the unlikely is equally probable to the disastrous.

Tags:'nature', Anthropocene, climate change, Disinformation, knowledge
Posted in complexity, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Tax cuts

February 5, 2019

Why tax cuts are not always good:

a) They ignore the benefits that flow when the taxes are spent to do useful things for most people, such as provide open insurance for sickness, support for loss of work, public parks, museums, libraries, useful science and medical research projects, support for developing companies, courts, non-commercial broadcasting, old age pensions etc… Life without these services would be much harder.

b) It does not necessarily encourage wealthy people to do more work – they just got a massive pay increase for doing nothing (or political agitating), and tend to think getting tax cuts is better than working harder or smarter.

c) There is no evidence of a correlation between high tax rates and low rates of ‘growth’ or low living standards for most people. In fact poor countries tend to have much lower rates of total taxation than the rich ones.

d) Tax cuts are popular not because they work, but because high income, and hence powerful, people and organisations end up with more money for nothing, and low income people end up with lower benefits, and hence have to work more for less. It is a system which makes life worse for the majority, but cements power for the wealthy.

Tags:Disinformation, economics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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