Climate 'Controversy' and 'Direct' Action.

In 1912, the world was astonished with the 'unearthing' of Piltdown Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man), a fossil that seemed to exhibit the perfect qualities of both man and ape, the perfect 'missing link' that the 'men of science' had been searching for (see the problem emerging?). It was accepted easily as the true example of evolution and hailed as a scientific miracle without any sort of in-depth testing or review. No actual papers were published on the history and archaeological evidence that should have surrounded the fossil (since there were none), and it set the science world up for its own fall.


It was later (much later) revealed as a hoax, and only since then has our understanding of evolution improved, people who understand the science have stopped searching for the mythical 'missing link' - a being that has the perfect half-half traits of man and ape, but rather, on branches of evolution from the original ancestor of man that eventually led to the modern homo sapiens.


A key feature of a good con is that the con artist or artists manage to scam a bigger and/or more powerful target (otherwise there is often little benefit to the con). Since the aim was scientific recognition, the con artists only had to convince the society of scientists to accept their evidence, and given that their evidence was exactly what everyone expected, that wasn't very hard.


We have moved on from the days of the evolution con, and now scientific consensus is no longer reached by hefty men in plaid waistcoats being impressed with the presentation of the exact evidence they expect to see. Scientists are now very eager to test and retest anything that could be contentious, and it is only through multiple tests, each designed more rigorously than the last (due to criticisms that would undoubtedly arise), followed by painful analysis and debate, do scientists reach tentative statements about our existence and the world around us.


So it is perhaps amazing that we have fallen for the same type of con as the scientists of yore did. It suggests that the rest of the world is lagging behind in its understanding of scientific method, and we're as gullible and easily influenced by prejudice and expectation as the hefty 'men of science' of 1912.


Climate change is the poster-child of dissension between public and scientific opinion, and it shares many similarities with the usual con. A facade of legitimacy is created by giving airtime and finance to any scientist (whether they are connected to the field or reputable is questionable at best), the relatively few in the profession is swaying the opinion of the many that are not, rather than the opposite, and there is a huge difference in 'belief' versus scientific evidence.


There is also the interesting correlation of who we listen to and what is important to us, have a look at the maps to the right hand side in the following page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_change


To help decipher it, lets look only at Australia in comparison with Russia (the trend exists all over the map with very few anomalies, and these usually in countries where climate change is most observable physically). The first picture shows results of surveying how much reporting has been done on climate change (reporting in this case means media attention, that is, including the controversy that is drummed up about it). In this picture, it is obvious that Australia (the darker grey) pays a lot more media attention to climate change, while Russia doesn't as much.


The second image, which shows whether respondents believed in humans causing climate change, shows a huge change of shading in Australia, although the gauge still remains above half-way. This means many people do not believe in man-made climate change. In Russia the shading is about the same as Australia.


What is most hilarious (and sad) however, is the last map, showing who thought of climate change as a serious personal threat. Russians responded less dramatically, while Australians suddenly swung towards the darker side. America and Canada both follow this trend, while some places like Greenland and Norway buck this trend). It is also easy to see that the horn of Africa is pretty much unanimously in agreement that man-made climate change is real, and the media concentration there on this issue is moderate. Those who feel its effects most directly buck the trend in media manipulation.


Australians, if the map is credible, are then pretty likely to respond that climate change is a serious personal risk and yet be 'fluffy' about whether it is man-made. If we translate to normal, average Aussie talk, it means this: "I want the government to do something about climate change because it's affecting the way I live my life, but I don't want to be blamed for or pay for the fact climate change is a big risk for me because it may not be my fault."  While in less media-concentrated places the response is this: "I want the government to do something about climate change because it may affect my life, I acknowledge my part in climate change."


So we as Australians are pretty selfish and melodramatic. We want other people to do something about climate change (usually scientists), but we don't want to believe (the scientists) that we are causing it, and we really don't want to pay anything for it (well, we believe we didn't cause it, so someone else should foot the bill). It's easy to see that we're heavily influenced by the media, which is flogging the controversy for all it's worth with no moral regard for what the world needs. The heavy media presence on climate reporting and the lack of understanding from journalists on scientific methods giving equal weight to both 'sides' (despite one side vastly outnumbering the other in the scientific community) means we are seeing the debate as just that, and many people believe in the authority figures that agree with them (see: Piltdown Man above).


On the other hand, we are also being encouraged to be melodramatic. The media needs stories it can fall back on during slow news days, and climate change has been churning out news since the 80's. To make the controversy actually relevant, they make the story sensational, bring in personal scandals and treat the scientists like political celebrities. After all, if people didn't believe climate change issues affected them at all then they wouldn't be interested in watching 'scientists' argue with each other using big charts and graphs on TV. 


The media is also very unreliable these days. Facts and figures that are poorly understood are blown up to their sensational extremes in tabloids and morning 'news' shows (on any given day there will be a false or skewed statistic being paraded about during breakfast TV or on radios and paper media, I guarantee you). These fictitious figures are then used by politicians to argue their point (see a circular logic starting here?). Anytime a politician brings up a newspaper headline or poll data from the media in Question Time, I cringe. Newspaper headlines are designed to be melodramatic, but when our politicians adopt that stance and feed back into the fear-mongering and sensationalising (because it sells), it takes our nation on a very weed-strewn path in the democratic landscape.


By now most people probably know I'm talking about the Hon. Tony Abbott, opposition leader and Christian family-man, and climate-change denier. I won't actually go into his track record on denying climate change, or the fact that he attacks Gillard constantly about her 'lie' on the Carbon Tax when he has also backflipped and somersaulted over the whole climate change issue amongst other things. This is about his plans for climate change, because a good argument should take the most charitable view possible about an opponent's policies and actions, rather than focus on singular mistakes (learn something here, fear-mongers).


Direct Action. We've heard those words paraded about by Liberals and their supporters (and even Labour supporters who don't like the Carbon Tax) as the bee's knees solution to climate change. It sounds great, instead of a complicated ETS and tax filtering money through gods know how many bureaucratic levels, the money will instead be used on policies that 'directly' cuts our Carbon footprint. Sounds good, works not so good (a thousand grammar teachers cry out for mercy).


Lets examine it (charitably, remember), but avoid some of the things the media has focused on, because they are more interested in things like budget concerns and how much one package is compared to the other, not the practicality behind them (or the science, but we know the media isn't interested in actual science, they think the audience have too short an attention span). So dismissing the economic modelling that has already been bamboozling economists (most of them say it's rubbish, unrealistic and unsustainable at the costs given), and looking only at the ways Carbon emissions will be reduced, we still get a pretty grim (and sometimes hilarious) results.


Firstly, Mr Abbott wants to plant trees. He will hire a green army of thousands strong, and make them go out and do 'good works' for the planet. He has obviously not read many scientific journals or tried to grow a forest, or he might have realised what even many kids can tell him now: plantation forests take years and years to grow, deforestation just within Australia outpaces plantation growth, and planting forests require good, arable land.


There have been experiments in planting forests, but modern, impatient methods (genetically modified, fast-growing trees, using any land available without restoration etc) have done much to reduce the overall effect of reforestation to combat climate change. Plantation trees tend to suffer in groups from natural blights like insects and disease, as they don't have the years of natural selection to provide specimens that could survive such an event. Soil quality in intensively-farmed or previous industrial/mining areas is extremely poor, and the Australian desert is no place for trees. As it is, an average of 70-75% of forests die after being planted in unsuitable environments (land not contested for use in agriculture and tourism). Their death causes an emission of CO2 that can outweigh the benefit of the surviving trees and sometimes even the old forests.


Temperate forests are also poorer Carbon 'sponges' compared to their tropical counterparts (NCAR, Boulder, US), and most of Australia isn't tropical (in fact, most of Australia isn't good for growing trees, because most of Australia also isn't good for growing food or people).


So Mr Abbott's proposal will be to spend a lot of money hiring a green army to plant and maintain trees that will likely end up in areas unsuitable for their growth. No doubt the heads of the 'green army' will be blamed for this idiocy, similar to how underlings in the Chinese government were blamed for Mao's stupid movements. He also had an 'army' that went out and did his 'good works' for the environment - a 'red guard' that killed all the 'pests' including sparrows, causing the biggest locust feast and related human starvation event since biblical times in the year that followed. They also went around destroying cultural artefacts and bashing intellectuals (for oppressing the little people), until the government blamed them for Mao's policy and sent them all to the farms to learn to be people again.


Another of Abbott's plans is to pump Carbon into the soil. This is a highly contentious policy, largely because there is little scientific basis suggesting it would actually work. There is in fact evidence that the Carbon pumped underground escape, and where it doesn't, it may acidify the soil if 'locking' actually occurs (CO2 meets H2O, it doesn't take a genius to figure out what that makes). In the policy outline, costs were calculated based on farmers receiving $8-12 per tonne of Carbon injected into their land, which is much too little, even by the body that the Liberals used to look into their Direct Action plan (they considered a starting price around $25). So farmers struggling with the changing climate could look forward to no extra expenditures on their operations (due to whatever passed on energy/fuel costs they get from the corporate Carbon Tax), and $8-12 per tonne of Carbon injected into their agricultural lands.


Since there is very little scientific evidence that this would work, and quite a bit of common sense suggesting that it would be disastrous for the soil, that would mean farmers are being compensated at very minimal rates for pollutants to be dumped into their food-growing lands. There is no extra compensation mentioned for when this operation kills the land and contaminates the water table. The Direct Action plan isn't about long-term effects though, it's about a magical silver bullet that cuts our emissions by a certain target on a certain year (it doesn't matter if CO2 emissions skyrocket after that as plans begin to fail, the promise has been met).


And what about industry? Abbott is closing down some of the dirty fuel stations (like in Gillard's current scheme), and they would turn it into a 'green' fuel station (no mention of exactly how this is done, except by pumping money into the polluting company, Gillard's current scheme involves a tender process for how to shut down and turn the stations into green fuel stations, this guarantees that Australia gets the best 'deal' for closing down and converting power stations). There was also a couple of lines describing a 'fluffy' direct action on building in 'green' methods. Some kind of meeting/discussion will take place amongst some important sounding bodies who oversee building planning and methods. No funding or actual direct action was mentioned.


The most direct (taxpayer to policy) action being applied is probably Abbott's little 'green bank' (it won't in fact be 'little', it will probably take up a large chunk of the money to be poured into this plan). The idea is this: the economy will suffer too much if we ask big companies to pay for their pollution, so we will give them an incentive package instead to reduce emissions.


Now... I'm not sure how Mr Abbott divides his faith, but it seems certain at this point that he has a lot of faith in the moral and civic attitudes of big polluters. Since big polluters have resisted any change to their operations thus far (beyond government regulation, and even that is shaky), giving them more money as an 'incentive' to stop polluting doesn't seem like a great idea. Even if we take the most charitable stance, that a regulatory body will be set up to police these grants to ensure money has gone the right way (a similar force in Labour policy has been deemed 'draconian' by Abbott though, so maybe he doesn't plan to oversee the money once it leaves government hands), there are still lots of problems.


Firstly, companies that already operate on or towards a 'carbon neutral' strategy will gain nothing. Instead of their competitors having to pay for their CO2 emissions and thus levelling the playing field, their opposites - the big polluters - will instead get free money from the government to help them change. It would mean companies would at best begin to delay their switch to green energy and cut Carbon emissions until their government grant has been cleared. A bit further on, we will have companies who pump more CO2 out in order to match whatever minimum polluting criteria must be met before grants will be given for cuts. 


At worse scenarios, we will have polluting shell companies being set up purely to take the government grant, and shut down again to 'turn green'. This would cause a huge imbalance in the stock market, monopoly would be common to those companies that operate with no moral/ethical standards (big polluters), as investors would be more likely to invest in a company that was about to get a free government grant. There would then be no incentive to become a permanently 'green' company, a company wanting to get a constant flow of taxpayer money from the government (or even large tax cuts directly on them) would ensure that once one section went green, another section can pump out more CO2 so they can apply for the grant all over again (after staying on it for as many years as they can, dawdling in changes so they keep getting cash).

It is evident that a politician (from the Greek word 'polis', meaning 'city'), whom we elect to make policies on our behalf, should be responsible for the good of the broader citizenry and try to be as knowledgeable as they can be on a subject that affects our wellbeing. It is perhaps too much to ask for our politicians to be completely rational people, sensible and thoughtful people, but it is not too much to ask them to admit it when they don't understand something. Mao was an ignorant leader whose influence was too great with the people for academics to dare stand up to him (they tried anyway, and a generation of children went about bashing their parents and teachers as a result under Mao's direction). 

Australia doesn't want or need a leader who verbally bashes scientists, economists, environmentalists, ethicists and other professionals when they don't agree with his agenda. Ignorance has suddenly become a powerful tool to bring Abbott closer to the little people, he understands science and economics as well as they do (very little), so he understands them better (or so he tells us). The problem then is that we're listening to the 'majority', but not the 'academic/professional majority'. So in fact we're believing more of the stuff people with little knowledge are saying (because it agrees with our expectations), and less of the stuff people with more knowledge are saying (because it challenges our way of life). It's not okay in daily life to do this, we wouldn't want our surgeons having a conscience vote from non-professionals on whether or not you should have surgery for a life-threatening illness. Yet we think it's fine when politics is involved.

We believe in controversy, when it is widely accepted science, with new studies sometimes coming out that question the status quo, without understanding that this is exactly how science works, it doesn't mean all previous studies were false. We trust in politicians who use ignorance as a banner, and follow suit as they dismiss professional opinion and the academic sphere in favour of what suits their rhetoric. There is a 'con' in the controversy, and it isn't being played by the vast majority of scientists, because they don't have the most to gain. There is nothing direct either about Direct Action, except in directly giving taxpayer money to major polluters in the hopes that they can police themselves into polluting less.

Carbon Tax, Chemtrails and Reality TV, oh my!

We live in an exciting and dramatic time. Television has never been more accessible, and we have never had as much access to drama in our daily lives as now. We seem hungry for Reality TV shows like Masterchef and various dating and renovations programs, and we're reliant on Midday Doctors like Dr Phil for our more personal troubles. It is no surprise then, that we are now reliant on TV news as a major source of 'information'. What is troubling however, is our acceptance of news information as 'factual', without doing any of our homework.


To put it into perspective, we return to our friend, the imagination.


Imagine you're back in high school, and the world is offering a variety of distractions (WWII, Elvis, the Beatles, hippies, tamagochis, pokemon, iphones...), but you're forced to sit down and learn boring facts. We pick up all kinds of factoids and snippets about these distractions very easily, while homework remains something to chew through, and understanding of how facts come about can be easily dismissed in favour of fact sheets (wiki) to pass our tests.


Now imagine (it shouldn't be a stretch), that you are a busy working adult, with a life of other distractions (children, royal weddings, work stress, pain in your back, dinner parties, iphones), and you need some quick facts about life that are pertinent to you. Well, it's too much to ask for you to go back to compulsory homework days, so you take a soundbite about life, maybe though the news, or wiki, or a combination of both through your iphone screen.


This reduction of facts into just that - facts, leaves a lot of room for manipulation. While both sides (and there are definitely sides on the Carbon debate) do it, one side does it with more shamelessness and pride than the other, now brandishing a new banner of 'science'.


A lot of climate change deniers will now say "if you look through the internet..." as the beginnings of an argument. The roots of this can actually be blamed on the tactical standpoints of climate change supporters in the early days. By relying heavily on facts, scientists, information websites to make a point (you have 255 characters, a link to more information saves space), the climate change supporters have actually built the groundwork for a populace that will readily accept 'facts' and anyone with a 'Dr' in their name (or Lord as the case may be), and any website masquerading itself as 'independent' (not synonymous with nonpartisan) and 'informative'.


The inability to make a prolonged argument countering a well-positioned slogan means that the supporter has to speak through reduction, playing a game that deniers are already much better at. And the deniers have caught on. Their better arguments now have a veil of truthfulness and 'fairness' about it. There are now many sites on the internet that propose partisan (and often erroneous) information as facts, while openly denouncing the scientific community (upon which their credibility as scientists lie) as actors in a global conspiracy. By 'looking through the internet' what one is impressed with is how much controversy there is.


There isn't that much, though there is some, and it is always healthy to keep an open mind about things. What isn't healthy however, is using the words of the opposition to attack them without any sort of backing, in the same way 'facts' can be used without any background or explanation.


A lot of this has a basis in the population misunderstanding of science, and again with the reduction of science into 255 character soundbites. I'm not going to call myself a professional, because I'm not, and it distances me from those I might be reaching with this blog. I'm just a rational, thinking human being like yourself (as people on both sides of the debate say about themselves), and I've read up a bit about facts and how they are not all equal. There is a lot more on this at http://badscience.net if you're interested.


See, I've just done it too, instead of explaining my point further, I foist you off somewhere else to do your homework. And that is a key weakness in the field of sound arguments. Things are always more complicated than a 30-minute dose of Reality TV or a 5 minute factoid on the News, or even a 1 hour lecture. It takes years to arrive at results in science, and many minds working on it at that. Yet we constantly expect a single, clear answer to even the most complicated of problems.


In the Carbon Tax debate, we've taken what is a reasonable amount of hesitation (a new tax on a climate issue that is not fully understood) and turned it into a full-blown conspiracy theory, and one that is becoming publicly accepted. Perhaps lowered trust in global governance is to blame, or the demand that democracy overrule science and professional opinion (because democracy isn't about voting in the most responsibly leader anymore, it's about how many people can be swayed by advertising). Whatever it is, we've taken a reasonable debate and ran amuck, so much so that literal ignorance is taken as 'gospel' truth, and cherry-picking is the order of the day.


Dr Art Raiche recently spoke at the Anti-CarbonTax Rally and quoted phrases from his 'hero' Freeman Dyson. His hero would probably have been aghast at the way Raiche attacked his idealogical opponents, and branded those who do not aspire to his beliefs should know better ("as any internet search will tell you..." he went on to say that they didn't understand science, so if they read things to the contrary then they didn't get it). This seems to echo and mishmash of previous arguments of climate change supporters, and the formula works, until it's broken down.


Firstly, Freeman Dyson supports the ideal of global, anthropogenic climate change (and has supported the use of 'climate change' and 'anthropogenic climate change' as synonymous phrases). What he does not support is the idea that controversial findings should be shut down or not studied (they are in fact being studied, but more on that in a bit), and he is opposed to the idea that people must be labelled or defamed. He also believes that government spending should focus more on immediate problems like poverty, starvation, disease and so forth.


Strangely, his views are not echoed truthfully by his 'follower' Dr Raiche. In the rally speech, Raiche cherry-picked phrases Dyson provided that supported his views, and did not mention what his 'hero' in fact said about global climate change (just about how controversy should not be disallowed). The speech gave the sentiment that Dyson agrees that climate chance science is wrong (false), and that Dyson agrees with the fact that climate change supporters are ignorant of science and are trying to shut out the truth (false). 


Freeman Dyson is not a climate change denier, nor does he think anyone is ignorant for believing in climate change, nor does he think deniers have the 'truth'. He thinks it's not that simple, that the issue is complicated, though the evidence suggests it is happening, he thinks we have other problems we should deal with first (from actual quotes in interviews).


Raiche also draws attention to the point that people who were at the rally shouted 'yes' when asked if they were climate change believers, justifying the rally as a movement that unites both sides of the climate debate, and should give everyone a cuddly warm feeling that has nothing to do with global warming. Well, upon closer examination, we notice the keyword missing - anthropogenic. And it might be interesting to do an anonymous survey of these people instead of a 'hands-up to support my point'.


It is no longer fashionable to be a full climate denier (you look stupid, and people argue quite rightly that you're ignorant of mounting evidence), but in order to keep up the facade that life doesn't have to change in the changing climate, we have to find something else wrong with the idea of paying for pollution. And the golden goose turned out to be the little tag that Dr Raiche omitted so very subtly. To argue that climate change isn't happening at all is to fly in the face of vast scientific ridicule, but to argue why it is happening is a very lucrative venture.


For a Carbon Tax to make sense it needs to be a tax on something the payers are doing (lets not go into the fact it is corporations that pay, and take it on faith that consumers will be very much worse off), so if the cause of climate change is in fact not man-made, then it stands to reason that this tax makes no sense. There is no need for a person who is anti-CarbonTax to be an ignorant climate denier, now you can have your cake and eat it too.


Raiche manipulated a question so that its meaning and its result is perverted, but this stilted answer is still accepted by people at the rally as proof that they are informed, self-thinking individuals (even if we don't go into the correlation between that answer and the conclusion). We are eager to believe in authority figures, and it is for this reason that the anti-Tax debate has been fuelled by attacks on scientists while relying on people with 'Dr' in their names to make their points. 


As an authority figure himself (his speech comes with a list of previous credentials), Dr Raiche is eager to use his 'hero' Dyson in distorted ways to support his ideas, but is just as quick to dismiss the work of other scientists and economists by making a joke early on that he is not a 'scientist in the field or an economist, so probably shouldn't have the right to speak on the topic'. He's quite right in fact, he doesn't have the authority to speak on behalf of truth if he doesn't know the studies and the topic he's talking about. Otherwise, it's what we in Australia call 'bullshit'. Yet he happily goes on to assure his crowd that those in support of the tax are ignorant, deluded, lazy (don't do their homework) and don't understand science (stupid). 


In a half hour soundbite, he was able to make everyone feel better about not doing their homework by assuring them that they are on the side of the ones who have. A bit like how reality TV show how 'fail' other people can be, and assure us we're not idiots/talentless/lazy/stressed/ugly/fat (because there are people who are worse than us, even if that's a distorted untruth).


So why are the anti-Tax people so desperate to hold onto any authority figure (scientists, people with Dr in their names), so much so that they are willing to cherry-pick their 'heros' and doublespeak in strange and wonderful ways? Is it because it's easier? Surely not, it takes effort to jump on a bandwagon and go to a rally and get grass in your knickers, and it takes time (and a lot of eye-strain) to trawl through the vast amount of partisan information available. Is it because they are gullible? No, some of these people would be logical, reasonable people in their everyday lives.


There is never a single, simple solution, and that's a trap that's always waiting for us to jump in. There can be attempts at answers, and this is one of them: people are people, and want what is immediately best in their and their family's interests.


Everyone knows that extra tax will mean extra cost. There is no way around it (it's why Gillard is bringing in compensation for worst hit families). Opponents complain about rising costs, then about wealth distribution (as if the two weren't linked), but the bottom line is that there will be a cost hike, it won't be as direct or as much as the GST, and the poorest will be given a bit of extra money to compensate for the extra cost. It's actually a fairly simple thing, but once slogans have been attached, it becomes a monster that suddenly costs money in cumulative percentages.


The confusion is vast even just on this single issue of the tax. And people are most eager to prepare for 'worst case scenarios' because lets face it, we all need a bit of drama in our lives. Playing victim is especially popular right now, and in a 'climate of revolution', people are hitching themselves to bandwagons in support of ideals that are a far throw from the original, simple debate.


Liberty is suddenly an issue. Where the introduction of a tax on the pollution that major companies are spewing out is a curb on public freedom. Only months ago, we were crying foul of government corruption and being in company pockets in regards to the lacklustre chemical control body NICNAS, now we're practically weeping for the corporations that will pay this tax directly (because it will raise our costs of living by a fraction of the GST). The liberty of big companies to choke our air (CO2 is harmful at just 5% of whatever patch of air you're breathing) is on the table, and we the people are saying 'yes go ahead'.


And as you move further from the logical fears (and sometimes reasonable arguments) like job losses (fictitious models of job loss that also ignore the fictitious possibility of job gains), cost of living including energy, cost of food due to fuel costs (though petrol is exempt, which is somehow a bad thing for the little people too), and government debt (from introducing a new tax?), the path gets a lot narrower and weirder.


People we'd deride earlier as cooky are now on the forefront of the anti-CarbonTax battle. Chemtrail proponents are now arguing that the government is deluding us about a world-wide conspiracy in wealth distribution through Carbon Taxation. The idea is so overwhelming that it might need some breaking down (the same sites that promote non-man-made climate change science will often have these kind of leaps of logic too).


It is proposed that governments are using 'technology' (it is unclear what kind) to influence weather patterns and solve/cause/aggravate/exaggerate climate change, in order to set up a New World Order (yes, the capitals exist) for global governance and wealth distribution through taxation. 


It is a bit mind-boggling to suggest that because governments across the world are taking up the idea, there is a global 'conspiracy' to set up a Carbon Tax-governed global welfare state. That's like saying voting is a 'conspiracy' to set up democratic governments across the world. There is a clear-cut goal in the Carbon Tax policy, and it takes a bit of over-exaggeration and imagination to add rather than truth-find it into a conspiracy. The Carbon Tax policy is to tax corporations (hopefully) for the most directly linked substance in global climate change that is present in fossil fuel use. In other words, making them pay for the shit they pump out when they burn fossil fuel.


Chemtrails being involved is just so far into the crazy scale that I honestly don't group them automatically with the average Jane or Joe going to an anti-tax rally. I'm mentioning it because it's getting harder to talk to a hardcore anti-CarbonTax rally-goer without Chemtrails being mentioned as evidence of the groundless and conspiratorial nature of the Carbon Tax.


Chemtrails don't exist, have never existed, and still don't exist. There are lots of chemicals being poured into our skies, not the least of which is the jet fuel from air traffic (ignoring all the ground based sources from factories and mines), there can be genuine concern about all of that pollution, but Chemtrail proponents seem to worry only about what they can 'observe'. The criss-crossing lines of white fluff in the sky has been demonstrated to be a natural phenomenon caused by air-traffic, with increasing air-traffic, more and more people are reporting these sightings of 'strange skies'. And with rising pollution levels, more and more people are getting respiratory illnesses.


Any reasonable person could see the glaringly obvious correlation that does not include Chemtrails. Ignoring any sort of scientific study that has to be done, a logical person might be expected to conclude that pollution cause respiratory illness in a population to increase, while more air-traffic causes more white fluff. It takes a leap of logic to then conclude the two must somehow be linked, and that the white fluff is the cause of respiratory illness, and extra air-traffic must be linked to the government 'doing stuff'. By ignoring the facts - Chemtrails don't exist, polluted air causes disease - it is easy to join the dots into: Chemtrails are sprays of chemicals from jets that cause diseases, and the government is making chemical sprays more frequently (hence more disease and more Chemtrails).


Now add climate change. Taking into account that some key facts were being ignored (cherry-picking). And we get this: Chemtrails are sprays of chemicals to change the climate so that we the taxpayer have to pay more money. This ignores even more facts than before: There are no chemtrails, there are no magical climate-fix chemicals (there are some that encourage rainfall, and China has been using it heavily to combat drought and the encroaching desert on Beijing), the climate is changing (probably more because of all the other invisible, non-imaginary chemicals we're spewing into the air), corporations are paying.


The only thing that rings true about the Chemtrail Carbon Tax issue is the fact that we will have to pay more money. How much we will be paying is debated heavily, and I'm not an economist. So now we return finally to who to trust, since that is at the basis of every argument, every conspiracy theory, every rally and every 'Lord' M lecture.


I prefer not to trust people who are chronic liars. This puts Lord Monckton out of the picture, as he is a chronic liar (you can make up your mind about him yourself, I'm sure if you are an ardent supporter then no matter what I say won't sway you). I prefer not to trust politicians, especially those who don't have a policy for me to compare against (sloganists). I prefer not to trust surveys (they are easily skewed, self-selecting, and rely on the knowledge of the common man, I wouldn't conduct a survey to decide if I needed surgery). I prefer not to trust single-partisan think tanks (when you gather a group of people and make them agree on something, you're forcing singular opinions).


Who do I trust then? Well, simplest answer is: no one. I don't trust any single person, even myself for the most comprehensive answer. What I do trust is a lot of people from the field I am currently interested in, and even then, only their peer-reviewd studies and not their every opinion. It is ludicrous to believe a journalist, blogger or a politician can understand what has taken years of study by hundreds if not thousands of scientists to conclude, then be able to turn that knowledge into bite-sized chunks for the audience. 


Yet we fall for it time and again. We watch reality TV and believe the problems and errors that encounter the lives of those 'common folk', yet we know that 30-minute highlights are not enough to cover a week of emotion, boredom, decisions, stress, and learning. We trust the judges to make the right decision consistently without questioning their motives, role or background on shows like Masterchef. We trust politicians like Tony A to deliver us 'factoids' about how bad the Carbon Tax will be. We trust scientists who tell us climate change isn't man-made or isn't real, without questioning what they are saying, their affiliations, or even what kind of 'doctor' or 'scientist' they are.


Carbon Tax, Chemtrails and Reality TV. We live in a world of real issues, of real challenges and change, but we're all too eager to comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we're right, we don't need to change, we belong to the informed/intelligent/logical/knowledgable/fair/good crowd and 'they' belong to the tyrannical/ignorant/idiotic/bigoted/bad. Let us wallow in self-pity and false victimisation of our liberty and livelihoods while continuing to trust corporate advertising and TV personalities to stroke our egos and assure us our fears are real, but the solution is easy.

A Child of 1984

"War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength..."

- "Nineteen-eighty-four" by George Orwell

Before reading Orwell's novel, being born in 1984 held no special meaning. It was a year like any other; my mother lived in the capital of Communist China, my father was patrolling the borders a crow's flight away from Siberia (if crows could be convinced to fly through freezing snow flurries), and some geeks in the world were getting excited over a fallen star (elegantly named Allan Hills 84001) that would later provide evidence for life on Mars.

All it all, life wasn't exciting for a small person growing up on a supply of Winter Cabbage* and rice. My father returned home, my elder cousins provided sibling-like care, and I spent much of my time reading and drawing. Even my mother's move to Australia when I turned four was a barely remembered slight on my otherwise unremarkable childhood.

A year later, I had my first taste of the excitement my world had to offer, in the form of a massacre. 

It was 1989, and my eldest cousin was in university, with the second eldest soon to follow. I remember it being a tense spring and summer, with arguments and rows dominating the family landscape between my elder cousins and the family matriarch - my grandmother. I now know what my cousins wanted to stand up for, and what my grandmother feared (and came true, the wisdom of elders is sometimes underestimated), but what I remember from that time is very different, more innocent, and perhaps more terrifying.

There was gunfire that night, and my cousins remained under family-imposed house-arrest. We played cards by candlelight, and our grandmother told us to sit on low chairs and away from the windows. We were inundated by neighbours the next day, 'uncles' and 'aunts' from downstairs coming up to visit the elder residents and seek comfort and gossip. Shells and bullets were provided "for the children to play with", these occupied us for hours.

And I see the faces from that childhood past being mirrored in the news of today. With the riots in England, the Arab Spring movement, even in the climate and Carbon Tax debate, the same faces are shown time and again in the media. The same anonymous masses whose worries are used to fuel fear campaigns, or dismissed as selfish and ignorant. It is no wonder that the Newspeak and doublethink of Orwell's "1984" is now rampant and is the voice we have come to rely on.

What is not heard is the hope for true peace, freedom and strength. Not the ideals, not the slogans, but the wish for a peaceful life, the freedom to have such a life, and the strength to maintain it. That is all the 'little people' (vast majority of us, as much as we hate to think of ourselves as 'commoners') hope for, and being denied with lies, and/or condescension.

The fault does not entirely lie with one party or the other. While those with an agenda sway opinions with lies and falsehoods, the other side does no better in its condescension and inability to identify with those that don't understand or accept science. It is no surprise that people turn to 'news' that agrees with their deepest fears, and believe science to be all 'theory' and therefore able to be dispensed with when convenience dictates. They receive nothing but ridicule and complicated statistics from the other side.

We're fast losing the middle ground. There is little breathing space left for people to step back, reason out arguments, and sit on the fence a mite longer. If you're not in support of free-market, neo-liberal ideals, then you're a 'commie tree hugger', if you don't have an alarmist attitude about social welfare, refugees and mining, then you're a 'greedy fascist bigot'. Lets not even go into the climate issue (note, I don't call this a debate, more on that at a later date).

Taking the riots as an example. We hear two very opposing views on the media, because controversy is always good for ratings. Even if the 'sides' are misrepresentative of sentiments by a broader audience, by the time the program has gone to air, a chunk of the 'middle' will have been swayed.

During one ABC interview, a young black woman with piercings and eccentric clothing is shown as a supporter for the riots. She espouses the same sort of views as many others, that the riots are indication of the class division problems that plague Britain, but then says "good on them" when questioned about those rioting. The interviewer is quick to catch on to this and the tone of the interview shifts. Her views are no longer relevant as a reasonable argument because she is in support of those rioting, and in the last day, the media's tone has shifted just as much, as if to distance themselves from looters.

David Cameron's speech addressed many problems and hid just as many, and the media was again quick to bring in 'consultants' in related fields (like sociology) who dodge any hint that the riots and looting was motivated by anything but greed, fanned by the evils of social networking. As the Birmingham professor spoke, we were treated to footage of burning buildings, upset shopkeepers, and finger-waving youths.

There are stark contrasts at work here, and it is only through hard examination do we see the true faces of the day. The families who are concerned about their businesses, the families who are disillusioned by the police protecting shopping districts instead of their neighbourhoods, the families who shout out support for the looters as they go by, only one thing links them. They are families, they are people. Their worry is personal, while those that hijack their voices speak in generalisations. 

Some of them are the crème de la crème of society, and believe the 'hooligans' should be jailed and punished, and taught about their views on 'entitlement'. Some of them live in the 'sinks', and compare the looting to 'banker's bonuses' and the sense of 'entitlement' of the upper crust. Some are those caught in the middle, whose homes and businesses have been damaged, who want retribution and responsibility taken up so this would not happen again.

Yet no single answer exists to events like the riots in Britain, or the Arab Spring movement, or why millions are starving in the horn of Africa, or why we still debate climate science. An avalanche is not caused by a single snowflake, a catalyst causes no reaction if there was nothing there to react to it. We can't keep blaming those that don't agree with us, because the problem lies within. We forget that other people are people, we forget that all anyone longs for is true peace, freedom and strength. We ourselves build the slogans that delude us, make walls of prejudice that protect us from new ideas, select to see the evidence we want to see. We're so good at lying that we're not immune to our own lies.

We are the children playing by candlelight, the aunts and uncles that gather to seek comfort, the grandmothers that have seen this before. The people are not its politicians, its media, or its scientists, and should not serve as their pawns. Fields that should work together to remove fear and confusion from those anonymous faces have instead betrayed them, using them as an army of numbers in statistics, quantifying them under flags of ideology, manipulating them and the numbers as if the two are synonymous. As if we are numbers.

Humans have become resources, and in this world, those who understand numbers and those who don't have had their views perverted and twisted, counted towards something that is meaningless, while measurable data is ignored in favour of mass sentiment. Even science has turned to the game of people by numbers, and the 'debates' rage on, making science a thing of democracy and emotion rather than reason. And in this changed landscape of language, we languish in ignorance, blissful in our knowledge that 'our will' is being carried out, reassured by the banner of freedom that unites us.

It is easier to be one of the faces, to not bear the responsibility for anything, to think only of what is in our own interests (and these extend to family). There is little time or inclination in our busy lives to read or listen to everything before we make a decision. So we trust. We trust that those we elected to lead us would do what is best by us. We trust those we watch would review the evidence for us. We trust anyone with a 'Dr' in his title would know science. We trust what is easier to believe. We trust what requires us to change the least. And by our trust, we engineer the tides of anonymous, worried faces, confused and disillusioned, waiting to be reassured, waiting for comfort and the blissful knowledge that all will be all right again.

There can be no middle ground, we can no longer see ourselves as people with varying views based on individual issues and evidence presented. The left and right have become trains, buying a ticket on one carriage means you're sitting in for the whole journey, and not buying a ticket at all means you're left in the dust of apathy. Everything is linked, 'majority rule' is the only resolution for any issue, swaying the masses is now the key to power, and trust is the new faith.

We are all children of 1984. And "war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength".

*Winter Cabbage: In the old days, back before Beijing had supermarkets, vegetables were hard to come by in Winter. Chinese cabbages were bought by the dozens or more and lined up neatly around the corridors of the apartments (in truth, where ever they could fit), and would be the vegetable supply for a whole winter. Pickled cabbage and sauerkraut was a mealtime staple.