Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

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The Hunter’s Legacy

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Greenpeace co-founder and its first President Bob Hunter died yesterday aged 63 following a battle with prostate cancer.

Hunter was a journalist by training. He wanted to stop whaling and nuclear testing and in many ways succeeded with his brand new environment group Greenpeace where others had failed.

He wanted to “affect the attitude of millions”. He approached the issues from the perspective of a media war and unashamedly used propaganda.

In an insightful review of Greenpeace’s early years, Fred Pearce has written “Greenpeace was far from being the first green group to oppose whaling. But it was the first green group to ignore the scientific arguments about whale reproduction rates, population dynamics, and how large a sustainable cull might be, in favour of an undiluted ethical argument: save the whale.”

The media war was effectively reduced to the simple issue of whether or not “whales are good”.

On the issue of nuclear testing Hunter admitted “we painted a rather extravagant picture .. tidal waves, earthquakes, radioactive death clouds, decimated fisheries, deformed babies. We never said that’s what would happen, only that it could happen”.

I have previously written about attending People for Nuclear Disarmament rallies in the early 1980s. It is for relentlessly pursuing the French and their nuclear testing program in the Pacific that I would like to thank Bob Hunter.

Messages of condolence are being posted at an online BBC site.

Interests versus Propaganda

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“The reality is that all scientists have personal ideologies, motivations and goals – all of which can potentially introduce bias into research. Scientific work should be evaluated on its merits, not on ‘conflicts of interest’ that may or may not exist,” wrote Elizabeth Whelan recently in Spiked Online.

Playing the card of ‘conflict of interest’ is perhaps playing the first rule of propaganda:

1. The rule of simplification: reducing all data to a simple confrontation between ‘Good and Bad’, ‘Friend and Foe’.

Norman Davies in Europe a History, has written that theorists of propaganda have identified four other basic rules:

2. The rule of disfiguration: discrediting the opposition by crude smears and parodies.

3. The rule of transfusion: manipulating the consensus values of the target audience for one’s own ends.

4. The rule of unanimity: presenting one’s viewpoint as if it were the
unanimous opinion of all right-thinking people: drawing the doubting individual into agreement by the appeal of star-performers, by social pressure and by ‘psychological contagion’.

5. The rule of orchestration: endless repeating the same messages in different variations and combinations.

Many of these rules of propaganda are applied in various combinations on popular blogs – but I wonder how often they are recognized as such.

The rule of unanimity (no. 4) is perhaps the card most frequently played against my work on the Murray River and also often played against ‘climate skeptics’.

And I am reminded of Henry Miller’s joke:

“How can you tell whether a whale is a mammal or a fish?” a teacher asks her third-grade class.

“Take a vote?” pipes up one of the pupils.

Back from Extinction!

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I was rather excited to read this morning that a woodpecker considered extinct since 1944 has been rediscovered. The story is at ABC Online.

According to Cornell University ornithologist Tim Gallagher, “Its like a funeral shroud has been pulled back, giving us a glimpse of a living bird, rising Lazarus-like from the grave.”

I just thought, “How Wonderful!”

It reminded me of rediscoveries in Australia: Mahogany glider, North Queensland, 1988; Leadbeaters possum, Central Highlands, Victoria, 1966.

Does anyone know of others?

Also what about recent extinctions? Does anyone know of any?

According to the 2002 ABS Measuring Australia’s Progress Report there don’t appear to have been any official extinctions in Australia during the last two decades.

What do Geologists know about Climate?

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After Michael Duffy interviewed Prof Bob Carter on climate change on his ABC radio program Counterpoint, there was comment on at least one web-blog site.

John Quiggin wrote:
“It would be more accurate to describe Carter as a prominent research geologist with a personal interest in the issue of climate change, and a strongly-held view that Kyoto is a bad idea.
As regards the major issues, I see little evidence to suggest that Carter is any better informed than I am.”

Some of my geologist mates have interpreted this as a slight on their profession and an inference that geologist know nothing more than economists about climate.

I received the following from a geologist:

“Astonishingly, some persons appear to believe that geologists have no part to play in the current public discussion on climate change.

Geologists, as scientists, operate in deep time. They study environmental phenomena on scales commensurate with the earth’s dynamic and changing nature, over periods of hundreds to thousands to millions of years and more.

Geologists are therefore the persons to whom one should turn for accurate advice on whether current meteorological trends, if projected as climate trends, are in any way unusual when compared with Earth’s past behaviour.

Using information from ice cores, deep sea cores, lake cores and other data, first year geology students the world over are taught:

1. That climate has always changed, and always will. Some of the climatic changes are due to slow trends, others due to sudden climate shifts whose origin is not yet understood.

2. That rates of ‘climate’change during the 20th century, as manifest from surface meteorological records of temperature, are in now way unusual in either their magnitude or rate of temperature change.

3. That the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere in past times has not infrequently attained values of 1000 ppm or more (i.e. much more than a doubling of current levels), without any known adverse affects apart from the prolific growth of plant life, for which carbon dioxide is a powerful aerial fertilizer.

4. That over the last half million years the earth has experienced several glaciations and interglaciations. For the majority (>90%) of that time, Earth’s average surface temperature has been substantially, and often much, colder than today.

5. That the current warm period, called the Holocene, has already lasted about 10,000 years, which is the average length of earlier warm periods, and that beyond question Earth’s biggest near future environmental changes are going to be those associated with the onset of the next ice age.

6. Geologists freely admit, however, that it is not possible to predict exactly WHEN the next ice age will start, and also th at despite the magnificent climatic records that they have assembled, there are still many things about climate that are not understood.

It is strange that anyone would assert that geologists have nothing to contribute to the understanding of climate change.”

There is a transcript of the interview with Prof Carter at the Counterpoint site.