Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Opinion

Bigots, Climate Change Deniers and George Orwell

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GEORGE Brandis says it is “deplorable” deniers are being excluded from the climate change debate and people who say the science is settled are ignorant and medieval.

The attorney general called the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong, the “high priestess of political correctness” and said he did not regret his comment that everyone has the right to be a bigot in an interview with the online magazine Spiked.

He said one of the main motivators for his passionate defence of free speech has been the “deplorable” way climate change has been debated and he was “really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate-change deniers”.

“One side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong,” he said…

“The moment you establish the state as the arbiter of what might be said, you establish the state as the arbiter of what might be thought, and you are right in the territory that George Orwell foreshadowed.”

And I’m quoting from Bridie Jabour writing in the The Guardian!

March Against Democracy

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JULIA Gillard promised, if she was elected, that there would be no carbon tax. Tony Abbot promised, if he was elected, that he would scrap the carbon tax. But the learned ignorant promote mass action to get their way, all the while claiming tolerance, and respect for democracy. march rally

Many of the posters on display at the ‘March in March’ rallies today, in which tens of thousand gathered in Australia cities to boo capitalists and lament the lack of action on climate change, clearly showed the prejudices of the increasingly vocal, Australian inner city pseudo-intellectual.

As Carl Jung wrote in about 1957, “People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest slogans.”

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Link to original photograph of poster with ‘step aside or be deposed’ from the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tens-of-thousands-gather-for-march-in-march-protest-20140316-34v1x.html

Nick Cater’s book, entitled ‘The Lucky Culture: The Rise of an Australian Ruling Class’, gives great insight into the totems and prejudices of these self-labelled ‘progressives’.

Best Book: Belly of the Beast

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“AS a generalization, most hunters love animals, most foresters love trees, most fishermen love fish, most miners love rocks and most farmers love the soil.

“Strong proponents of the intrinsic values of wildlife today tend to be intolerant of any uses of wildlife by people, particularly consumptive uses, because the uses clash with the moral and ethical positions they have adopted.

“It does not make intrinsic or use-values right or wrong, but does tend to confirm that intolerance of values held by other peoples and cultures is the root cause of a great deal of conflict in the world today.”

I’m quoting from page 6 of an interesting new book, part philosophy, part history of animal conservation, lots of quirky cartoons, and many case studies from turtles in Cuba to crocodiles in Australia.

Written by someone I much admire, Grahame Webb, entitled Wildlife Conservation: In the Belly of the Beast, it is a must read for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on wildlife conservation.

More information and order form here… http://www.crocodyluspark.com.au/pages/Wildlife-Conservation-%252d-In-the-Belly-of-the-Beast.html

Belly of the Beast

What is Wilderness (Part 13)

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What is wilderness? Dave W provides some insights…

IT is a place that is not under human control: a place where people might pass through, but not stay: a land where the wild beasts rule. Before people existed, the world was one vast wilderness. Since we’ve been around, wild areas are less and less common. An antonym would be city or any other noun defining more or less permanent human habitations, e.g. town, village, campsite. A campfire is a very basic method of keeping wilderness at bay.

This, I think, has been the generally accepted meaning of wilderness. I find it a more robust and useful word than ‘nature’, which is usually debased by the attempt to exclude people from the definition. People are part of Nature – we evolved here and we haven’t left yet. People are not part of a wilderness.

Of course, once ‘wilderness’ has been defined by legislation, other definitions may apply, but at least the US Wilderness Act (1964) seemed to follow the general sense: “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

I think it is reasonable to define wilderness as a continuum, rather than an absolute. Areas are more or less wild depending on how much control people are able to exert. I don’t think that pollution, exotic weeds, or similar effluvia of human life are of any relevance to defining wilderness. Those do not result from attempts to control an area. Also, I don’t demand that everyone respond the same to wilderness. Some may find it exhilarating and renewing, others may find it terrifying. I’ve been lost in wild areas, so I’ve felt both extremes.

Wilderness Dave

The picture/image is of a wild place, but not a wilderness: White Spruce regenerating in Alberta Aspen Parkland thanks to fire suppression regime (favours spruce), the reintroduction of beaver (eat aspen), and increasing moose populations (eat aspen before spruce) thanks to hunting regulation and extermination of wolves. Click on the image to see more, to gain perspective.

Dave W is a biologist who has worked in North America and Au​stralia and has about 150 scientific publications including one in Ecological Modelling on climate change that Google Scholar tells him is his 13th most significant publication, but that he thinks was just an interesting ‘what if?’ exercise with little or no relevance to any actual ecosystem.

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For some other perspectives on wilderness click and scroll here https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/tag/wilderness/

Perhaps send me your thoughts on wilderness…
jennifermarohasy at gmail.com

Myth and the Bureau of Meteorology

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WE know that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology can’t forecast weather more than a few days out. So why should we believe a climate forecast to 2030?

According to Sara Phillips, writing for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the Bureau’s new State of the Climate 2014 report is a reliable source of information because it distils hundreds of experiments into three consistent reports.BOM

In fact there are few if any experiments that have been distilled in the writing of the reports. Rather Bureau staff have ran some computer simulations designed to produce a particular output, and combined this with homogenised and adjusted historical records again designed to produce a particular result. Conclusions include:

1. Australia’s climate has warmed by 0.9°C since 1910, and the frequency of extreme weather has changed, with more extreme heat and fewer cool extremes.

2. Global mean temperature has risen by 0.85°C from 1880 to 2012.

When I wrote to the Bureau in January asking why the national average is only calculated back to 1910, I received a reply explaining that data prior to 1910 “is often fragmented and of uncertain or low quality”. If this were the case, it begs the question how a global mean temperature can be calculated back to 1880?

This is one of seven questions I’ve put to Greg Hunt, Minister for the Environment, in a letter dated 4th March 2014. Minister Hunt is ultimately responsible for the operations of the Bureau and I’m of the opinion their operations deserve close scrutiny.

There is this myth that the Bureau is comprised of hard working scientists providing, like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, information without bias or agenda. More likely the Bureau, like the mainstream climate science community more generally, has become somewhat compromised.

Of particular concern to me, is the Bureau’s decision of last June, to discard the statistical models that had been used to generate seasonal rainfall forecasts in favour of a general circulation model that has no predictive skill at all. I have documented the absence of skill in the general circulation model in a peer-reviewed paper recently published in the journal Atmospheric Research (Volume 138, Pages 166-178).

I conclude my letter to Minster Hunt with comment that:

If the temperature record for Australia can be extended back to 1860, providing an additional 50 years of data, then this should be a priority. This information is more important than the calculation of a national average temperature. If data is to be adjusted and homogenized then the methodology applied needs to be clearly stated. Indeed having access to all the available records as far back as possible is important because it helps unravel the true features of the natural climate cycle, a goal that meteorologists and astronomers were working towards well before the establishment of the Bureau in 1908.

In arriving at theories that explain the natural world, the best scientists always use all the available data, not just the data that happens to fit a particular viewpoint. Furthermore, long historical data series are critical for statistical methods of rainfall forecasts, including the application of artificial neural networks that can currently provide more skillful forecasts than POAMA, the general circulation model currently used by the Bureau to produce the official forecasts. That the Bureau persists with POAMA, while failing to disclose to the Australian public the absence of any measurable skill in its monthly and seasonal forecasts, should be of grave concern to the Australian parliament.

My letter to the Minister can be read in its entirety here: https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/questions-for-the-australian-bureau-of-meteorology/

Why Encourage the Devil’s Advocate: Groupthink by Irving L. Janis

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ALMOST by definition you can’t win an argument against a Devil’s advocate. But the Devil’s advocate can play a valuable role in any serious discussion. If you come to this blog, expect to be challenged. I don’t post for fun, or for followers, I post to test my ideas and to gather more information. So I encourage dissent.

I wrote the following review of a book called ‘Groupthink’ by Irving L. Janis back in 2009 for ‘100 Great Books of Liberty’. The ideas I discuss have relevance to any group. Groups of people, by their nature tend to seek out a consensus, but groups are more resilient and more likely to get closer to the truth when they are open to new ideas and when they confront dissent with rational argument. 100 ideas

“ON April 17, 1961, a brigade of about fourteen hundred Cuban exiles aided by the United States Navy, Air Force and CIA, invaded the swampy coast of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. Its objective was to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro but nothing went as planned. On the first day none of the ships containing reserve ammunition arrived, on the second day the brigade was surrounded by twenty thousand well-equipped Cuban troops and on the third day the surviving twelve hundred men were taken to Cuban prison camps. According to Irving L. Janis (1918 – 1990) this operation, which was approved by the Kennedy administration, ranks among the worst fiascos ever perpetuated by a responsible government.

The first chapter in Irving’s book Groupthink – Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos explains the Bay of Pigs fiasco in terms of six major miscalculations by well meaning and intelligent men and concludes they suffered from groupthink. Groupthink is a term first coined by American author and sociologist William Whyte writing in Fortune magazine, but it was Irving who went on to write two books about it. He defined groupthink as a syndrome where the strivings for consensus can override the realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. The theory is now sometimes associated with the suppression of individual initiative, but Irving (a research psychologist at Yale University and professor emeritus at the University of California) was most concerned with group dynamics and the value of individual expertise and opinion only as it contributed to the effective functioning of groups with a policy or decision-making role.

According to Janis, during the Bay of Pigs planning sessions President Kenney was provided with alternative courses of action and brought at least one articulate opponent of the invasion plan to an important White House meeting. But the President’s style of conducting meetings provided little opportunity for discussion of alternative perspectives and evidence. Furthermore, some members of the group were silent at critical times because they felt they could not break with formal protocols to express their views. In effect President Kennedy, perhaps unwittingly, prevented a proper evaluation of the flawed CIA invasion plan. Janis also blames groupthink for escalations in the Korean and Vietnam Wars and Pearl Harbour.

But Janis does not suggest that groups of people are doomed to bad judgement and wrong decisions. Rather Janis shows that thinking that does not consider all the available evidence may result in bad judgement and wrong decisions.

In the second part of Groupthink – Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascos under the heading ‘Counterpoint’, Janis uses the Cuban Missile Crisis as an example where President Kennedy and his inner circle successfully avoid succumbing to groupthink tendencies while benefiting from “the morale gains of high cohesiveness”. Janis shows how President Kennedy learnt from the Bay of Pigs fiasco and introduced a series of sweeping changes to the decision-making procedures of his team, which broadened debate and discussion at meetings. Scepticism and critical thinking were now valued and the President’s brother Robert enjoyed playing the role of devil’s advocate.

Even though the book was written over two decades ago, it potentially provides a rigorous frame work for evaluating some of the big policy decisions of our time including the invasion of Iraq and the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is a consequence of United Nation’s policy on anthropogenic global warming as formulated by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This Panel has formal meetings, discourages dissent and has promoted the idea of a scientific consensus. Those who question the scientific consensus were once dismissed as in “the pay of big oil” but as the number of so-called sceptics has grown over the years and now includes many professors with impeccable credentials, these dissenters are now more likely to be dismissed as simply holding a minority and irrelevant opinion.

According to Janis, irrespective of the personality characteristics and other predispositions of the members of a policy-making group, the groupthink syndrome is likely to emerge given particular conditions including when the decision-makers constitute a cohesive group, lack norms requiring methodical procedures and are under stress from external threats. This can lead to illusions of invulnerability and belief in the inherent morality of the group leading to self-censorship, illusions of unanimity and an incomplete consideration of alternatives solutions to the issue at hand. All of these characteristics can be applied to the IPCC Panel, which is particularly convinced of the inherent moral good in both its cause and approach to the issue of global warming.

In order to avoid groupthink Janis suggests that policy-making bodies adopt nine principles including that leaders not express an opinion when assigning tasks to the group, that several independent groups work on the same problem, that alternatives be properly examined, and at least one group member be assigned the role of Devil’s advocate. If such principles were applied at IPCC meetings it is unlikely the Kyoto Protocol in its current form would have ever been proposed as a solution to global warming because it ignores the problem of emissions generated in the developing world, ignores the many factors additional to greenhouse gas emissions that can impact climate, and also fails to consider the many alternatives to reducing greenhouse gas emissions including adaptation to climate change.

It is certainly not too late for the IPCC to change its decision-making process, but the theory of groupthink appears to be not well understood outside of the US. In the US it has been used to understand the Iran-Contra Affair, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and even university politics in particular the overwhelming dominance of Democrats amongst professors on US campuses and as a consequence a tendency to ideological homogeneity.

Janis suggested the theory of groupthink could be applied to understand and improve the operations of any policy-making group and acknowledges that any improvement in the efficiency of decision-making can unfortunately be used for “evil as well as good”.

The theory of groupthink gives us a process for evaluating recent history and also potentially a method for those who care about liberal and free market ideals to test the extent to which their own organisations and groups are likely to reach a premature consensus on important issues. And it gives us more reasons for valuing the sceptic and encouraging the Devil’s advocate.