Don,
World Net Daily rang you got the job, you’re going to replace Lord Mockingtion starting next months as their official global warming denier and general contrarian.
Their lead story they want you to write has the bi-line “Asbestos is it really that bad”?

'morning Don,

A provocative article for the alarmists and ho hum, told you so from the deniers.

You will be ridiculed ('morning Cobber), vilified, shot as the messenger, bombed with links to group think, served with large portions of emotive rhetoric and treated as intellectually challenged.

This will be because that is all the alarmists have left.

At the risk of killing off your thread, we only need to ask why they bother to try to convince us of their science, when all they have to do is to write to the UN and make their case to the people who invented it in the first place.

What they will never even spot is the fact that in trying to convince the public and our politicians, they are acknowledging the fact that CAGW is a political issue rather than scientific. But hey! Who am I tooting to that fact that they have become victims of their own ideology.

Don, I agree a fair bit about the 2 degree target. It was always going to be unachievable, largely as a result of a lack of action on political fronts. For the rest of your argument, sadly it is much the same tired old stuff. Just some general comments about where you have gone wrong.

1. “because on the evidence a warmer world is better for nearly all living things”

The evidence in fact contradicts such a statement. In fact most of the evidence points to increased risks to species as varied as coral http://www.sciencemag.org/content/318/5857/1737.short to polar bears http://www.esajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1890/09-1641.1. Frankly, anyone living in Australia would recognise that a 2 degree increase in temperature would make more of the country less productive due to earlier heat stress in spring http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2010.02262.x/full, and less comfortable to humans due to increased summer temperatures.

2. “The Pause has just passed its 18th year on the RSS dataset”

There are in fact two data sets of global surface temperatures GISS http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.txt and HadCRUT http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT4-gl.dat. Both show a significant increase in global temperatures since 1998 averaging 0.07 degrees per decade. On current projections HadCRUT4 has 2014 on track to be the equal warmest year in the 164 year data set. RSS is a data set of lower troposphere temperatures, like the UAH data set. RSS is the only data set which shows no significant warming if cherry-picked from a 1998 starting point. So that raises the question, why did you select the only data set that shows no significant warming as your evidence?

Why bring up this stupid subject again and again? It's dead and buried!

‘morning Agronomist,

Many thanks for your timely “scientific” response and acknowledgement that the failure of CAGW is “largely as a result of a lack of action on political fronts” Bingo.

Now all you have to do is follow the advice offered previously.

Just send your posts and associated scientific links to the IPCC, ask them to raise your science concerns with the politicians who invented it.

Please ensure you keep OLO’ers posted on any responses you get.

If you don’t happen to get a response then I guess you will have to find a way to live without the UNFCCC, IPCC, the science, the absence of Kyoto, the collapse of emissions trading markets, the collapse of the RENIXX renewable industry index, the global decline in renewables subsidies, of the original 119 signatories to Kyoto there are now just 11, a global glut of fossil fuels and the absence of Germany, India, Russia, Japan, Australia, NZ, Canada, Poland and China at the climate talk fest.

It all seems to be going quite well for you really don’t you think? That “science” of yours is certainly having an impact? What is it with you and dead parrots?

Got any more of those links please, mmmm delicious

spindoc,

Maybe you should equate the inaction by govts and world bodies in the same way as with Ebola, where the seriousness of the threat was not acted on more quickly.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/10/04/how-ebola-sped-out-of-control/

"The virus easily outran the plodding response. The WHO, an arm of the United Nations, is responsible for coordinating international action in a crisis like this, but it has suffered budget cuts, has lost many of its brightest minds and was slow to sound a global alarm on Ebola. Not until Aug. 8, 4 1/2 months into the epidemic, did the organization declare a global emergency. Its Africa office, which oversees the region, initially did not welcome a robust role by the CDC in the response to the outbreak."

Always a laugh a minute (don't you think) when govts and world bodies ignore such threats when there's still time to thwart disaster.

Does initial inaction on the Ebola front equate to there having been no threat of it getting out of control?

Seems that's the the way you look at climate science and its inadequate response from govts who are merely interested in propping up the status quo.

Who is going to stop the Volcanoes from raising the temperature?

The solution is in action now Ebola should, if let go have a few million depart.

'morning Poirot,

Unicorns anyone?

My God you are such a tragic.

If you are going to speak for Agronomist you might wish to cover what was asked of him rather than diverting the thread to Ebola?

What are you going to do about the loss of the UNFCCC, IPCC, the science, the absence of Kyoto, the collapse of emissions trading markets, the collapse of the RENIXX renewable industry index, the global decline in renewables subsidies, of the original 119 signatories to Kyoto there are now just 11, a global glut of fossil fuels and the absence of Germany, India, Russia, Japan, Australia, NZ, Canada, Poland and China at the climate talk fest.

Any more Unicorns Poirot? mmm, yummy

So sorry, spindoc,

But from here it looks like you judge the veracity of climate "science" based on the action/inaction of govts.

I'm glad that's not the case with medical "science" and something like Ebola.

Yes Poirot, and hear hear!
Rhrosty.

Hi Spindoc,

Dead parrot ? No, it's just resting. For eighteen years so far.

IF that pause is genuine, eighteen years of it, and yet the IPCC et al. firmly believes that world temperatures will rise some time soon, then we will have to wait for at least another eighteen years to confirm it as a trend, not just a temporary increase, won't we ?

What sorts of technological innovations have been developed in the past eighteen years, to improve solar, wind, tidal, thorium, etc. power generation ?

So what new innovations might be developed in the next eighteen years ?

She'll be right !

Regards,

Joe

Nice one Don, keep after them.

Agronomist referencing this stuff, which we all know is produced with data so doctored & corrupted that it's only resemblance of the raw is in the scales used on the graphs is counter productive. All such posts do is raise another groan from those interested in the subject.

Cobber I have often wondered what a hound gets from howling at the moon all night, it seems so counterproductive. As an expert, perhaps you could tell me what it achieves, or what objective you hope to achieve.

Poirot your post merely highlights the fact that the entire UN is a waste of space. Long suffering taxpayers be much better off if we gave the entire staff of the corrupt pile of trash, a pick & shovel, & sent them out to do an honest day's work.

Don,

Another thought-provoking post. Thanks.

"If it takes a century or two to teach the 2C target, I don't think it's much of a problem, because on the evidence a warmer world is better for nearly all living things. "

I agree. An interesting paper by Canadian economist Ross McKitrick has just been released. It summarises the recent evidence that climate sensitivity is probably much lower than the models use, and the damages of GHG emissions are probably lower than the models project. Regarding the 2 C target the report says:

"Over the whole of the post-1900 interval, the warming trend is just under
0.075 °C/decade, or about 0.75 °C per century. At this rate it would take
about 267 years to get to the 2 °C target level of warming that many world
leaders say needs to be avoided.", p6: http://www.fraserinstitute.org/uploadedFiles/fraser-ca/Content/research-news/research/publications/climate-policy-implications-of-the-hiatus-in-global-warming.pdf

spindoc, general ignorance is one thing, but failing to read what was written is surely something you can do something about.

My post did not state that there has been a failure of “CAGW”, in fact it did not reference CAGW at all. My comment was that the target of maintaining the global temperature at no more than 2 degrees above the pre-industrial average was most likely doomed to failure. And that likely failure can be blamed squarely on the lack of political actions. Which of course means the Earth will most likely end up with more than 2 degrees temperature increase.

As a result of your quite spectacular failure to read what I wrote, the things you suggest I do are of course complete nonsense.

Phillip S “Who is going to stop the Volcanoes from raising the temperature?”

Volcanoes do not increase the global temperature. They decrease it by putting sunlight absorbing particulates into the atmosphere http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v330/n6146/abs/330365a0.html

Peter Lang, that quote from Ross McKitrick amply shows why McKitrick is an economist and not knowledgeable about climate science.

‘morning Madam Poirot,

You are such a joy to play with. Your hypocrisy, diversions and rhetoric were always bound to trip you up. Such a pleasure to see you digging huge holes and then jumping into them and start digging again.

So, rather than acknowledge your diversion from CAGW, you still want to talk about “medical science” and Ebola?

OK.

You say << But from here it looks like you judge the veracity of climate "science" based on the action/inaction of governments, glad that's not the case with medical "science" and something like Ebola>>.

Oh really? Now lets just have a little look at your Unicorn shall we?

Some recent alarmism that does not included either the most recent alarmist threats of either the Ice Age or CAGW but hey, look at what tops the list? One of Madame Poirot’s “science based” Medical issues.

DDT and cancer (Silent Spring) 1962
Electromagnetic fields and Childhood Cancer 1979
Acid Rain in the U.S. 1974
Population growth and famine (Club of Rome) 1968
Natural resource shortages and economic collapse
(Ehrlich & Ehrlich 1974)
Uncontrolled reproduction and degeneration (Eugenics) 1883

So what happened? Well it was demonstrated by alarmism that DDT used in Africa to kill mosquito’s was carcinogenic and that the UN should ban its use. Based on the “Medical Science” to which Poirot refers of course. The UN did ban its use and the result was millions of dead Africans from malaria outbreaks. Oops!

But hey, this was in the very best interests of Poirot’s “medical science”. Which is just like “Climate Science” apparently.

It gets even better. Poirot’s Climate Science and Medical Science have a couple of very interesting common links.

Now let me just think, it was the UN and err, the same Senator was behind both these “sciences”, if I could just remember his name, tobacco tycoon, billionaire? Ah yes of course, Al Gore!

What a coincidence Poirot, Al Gore and the UN, now who‘da thunk dat?

Millions of dead Africans, a $Trillions out of the global economy, it just makes you feel so good about your science, hey?

OK you denialists why are you wasting your time (and space on this forum) with your continued nonsense?
You have made your point and with all of the BS that AGW is a huge world wide conspiracy , the confusion in the minds of the proles has finished all chance of acting in time to stop the end result of runaway global warming.
They do not want to hear anything that moves them out of their comfort zone and into the real world so they will side with the likes of the abbott gang to stop any efforts to negate warming.
Well done guys but give it a rest now and sit back and wait for calamity one day.
We are past the point of no return so you have done your job.

Hi Robert,

Point of no return ? With an 18-year pause ? With unstinting technological developments, thanks to capitalism's constant searching for the next big thing ?

Consider this: it does appear that AGW, if it is occurring, is occurring in the Northern Hemisphere rather than in ours. Most of the landmass of the world is in the northern hemisphere. For every degree rise in the NH's temperature, the extent of viable grain-growing moves north by maybe a hundred kilometres. Across Canada and Scandinavia and Russia. By a total of maybe a million square kilometres for every degree rise. A million square kilometres can produce how much grain ? Half a billion tonnes ?

And that's a catastrophe ?!

There was a time when the Vikings were planting grapes in eastern Canada - Vinland, they called it. If it can happen again and in my lifetime, I'll drink to that !

Joe

Damn the climate (torpedos?) full economic growth speed ahead!

It's a simple matter of doing the math.

The one thing we know for certain is that our population is going to increase. It would also be fair to assume that within that growth, only a selected few will be contributing in the form of net taxes, the stuff that pays the bills. In Australia anyway and I suspect most are places are similar, if not worse.

So there will be more mouths to feed, with less money yet some still think we can achieve this, and accommodate these extras without increasing CO2 emmisioms, not to mention cutting them.

All I can say is dream on, because unless we are willing to wind back our standards of living, it's simply not achievable. Evidence being in the huon crys made when Tony Abbott introduced his tough budget into the mix

Yes, spindoc...most entertaining...

But you still haven't explained why you think the veracity of climate science is demonstrated by the rate of action or inaction of governments.

Using your reasoning, Thabo Mbeki's denialism that HIV caused AIDS, was fair and reasonable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_denialism_in_South_Africa

"In South Africa, HIV/AIDS denialism had a significant, and entirely negative, impact during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki from 1999 to 2008. Mbeki criticized the scientific consensus that HIV does cause AIDS beginning shortly after his election to the presidency. In 2000, he organized a Presidential Advisory Panel regarding HIV/AIDS including several scientists who denied that HIV caused AIDS. In the following eight years of his presidency, Mbeki continued to express sympathy for HIV/AIDS denialism, and instituted policies denying antiretroviral drugs to AIDS patients.[1] Instead of providing these drugs, which he described as "poisons",[2] shortly after he was elected to the presidency, he appointed Manto Tshabalala-Msimang as the country's health minister, who promoted the use of unproven herbal remedies such as ubhejane, garlic, beetroot, and lemon juice to treat AIDS,[3][4] which led to her acquiring the nickname "Dr. Beetroot."[5] These policies have been blamed for the preventable deaths of between 343,000 and 365,000 people from AIDS"

So a govt refused to act - therefore HIV did not cause AIDS?

Global warming is a discursive fetish, putting deniers in precisely the same 'warmist' camp as those they despise.
Warming is only one anthropogenic effect, and given the 'glacial' pace of it, apropos our paltry human spans, and its necessarily equivocal nature in the geological scheme of things, it's a topic that excites existential and reactionary sensibilities alike--one millenarian and the other indifferent.
This at least accounts for the popular debate, over whether we are warming the planet or not. There are of course sensible people on both sides for whom the equivocation is properly 'academic'. The science of AGW, a discrete symptom, should be left to dedicated experts who are at least trying to be objective.
For such people the question of warming, cooling, or its causes and effects, has no bearing on anthropogenic effects generally.
The populists equivocate because they can, because the science of climate change is prodigious and uncertain--though growing less so.
There's no question but that our oceans grow more acidic, nor that the effects will be dire. There's no denying the rate of species extinction, or the loss of bio-diversity, and all that that entails. We can measure desertification and the loss of topsoil, while anticipating the looming crisis of fertility and observing the concomitant effects of chemical run-off on our waterways and coastlines. We know that natural resources are becoming less accessible and running out.
Given the changeable nature of the earth's climate, in geological terms, and the vagaries of the weather in human terms, indeed given the immensity of the climate system apropos one puny species, its no wonder the disease seems aymptomatic and the denialist conceit prospers.
But look at the big picture; it's taken hundreds of years of unrelenting growth and destruction, fed by fossil fuels, to effect global climate, but the other symptoms have also been accumulating and there's no denying their provenance.
Yes we should ditch the 2 degree target, or any target based on business as usual. The problem demands radical action; we have to rethink the whole human enterprise; that's the real challenge.

"With an 18-year pause"
Don't fool yourself. There are reasons for the APPARENT slow down in temp rise.

"Comparisons of direct measurements with satellite data and climate models suggest that the oceans of the southern hemisphere have been sucking up more than twice as much of the heat trapped by our excess greenhouse gases than previously calculated. This means we may have underestimated the extent to which our world has been warming."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26317-the-world-is-warming-faster-than-we-thought.html

Time will tell who is right about this but if you deniers are wrong there will be no time to do anything.
With an attitude like yours I hope that you have cancelled your house insurance?

Oh do grow up & do a bit of reading Squeers, there is no way our oceans can go acidic, they are sitting in a bed of limestone.

You waffle on about a "looming crisis of fertility" while complaining about our efforts to increase it by bringing the CO2 balance back up to something more normal in terms of geological time.

If you are truly looking for some reason to justify your miserable existence, consider this is your answer. The human species was developed to recycle some of the CO2 lost to the flora of the earth, mostly by precipitation to the ocean floor.

Fact is we have only just started correcting that balance soon enough for the good of all life. Burning long unavailable carbon will help restore what was a fading ecosystem, headed for extinction.

Now cheer up & go for a long drive, it's time you started pulling your weight.

Hasbeen,
I don't know what to say to that; we're "correcting the balance" etc.
astonishing.

Yes, Squeers....

Good old, Hasbeen, he's a vaudeville hack from way back.

Here's a pearler!....

"The human species was developed to recycle some of the CO2 lost to the flora of the earth, mostly by precipitation to the ocean floor.

Fact is we have only just started correcting that balance soon enough for the good of all life. Burning long unavailable carbon will help restore what was a fading ecosystem, headed for extinction."

Burning long unavailable credibility, more like it.....

Wood, trees & useful idiots all spring to mind.

Hi Has been,

Yeah, as a Scottish friend pointed out, what a calamity it would be if Scotland was one degree warmer.

Scottish humour !

Joe

Squeers
That's just discursive fetishism on your part. Your populist equivocations just excite existential and reactionary sensibilities alike, putting you in the same camp as those you despise. There are of course sensible people who don't share your ideology that society is made better by blindly crawling up the arrse of the most powerful and promoting crony capitalism while not understanding what you're talking about. Your ideology is just a discrete symptom, and you should leave discussion of political economy to people who are at least trying to be objective. For such people the question of warming, cooling, or its causes and effects, has no bearing on anthropogenic effects generally. You've got a PhD in Marxism, and you can't understand the difference between the private and the public control of the means of production BWAHAHAHAHAHAH - that would have to qualify as profoundly stupid, even in your own book, wouldn't it?

As for you our vapid trendoid pap about climatology, ecology and economics, which you have obviously picked up in the corridors of academe without understanding them - Do you think it's not obvious to everyone that you haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about?

"Yes we should ditch the 2 degree target, or any target based on business as usual. The problem demands radical action; we have to rethink the whole human enterprise; that's the real challenge."

Don't tell me, lemme guess.... Socialisation of the means of production?

You've got 6 children and want to talk down to everyone else about sustainability? How about you tell us what radical action you've done to change your own business-as-usual. Stopped buying and selling things on those wicked markets? Stopped using those wicked petrol-driven vehicles? Stopped consuming things produced by those wicked capitalists? Stopped using those wicked fossil fuels?

Squeers has given us a perfect example of the warmists' self-contradictory, conceited, kindergarten level intellectual and moral drivel. And these are the people who want to forcibly re-organise the whole world's economy and ecology - when they won't even take their own advice themselves?

Come on, genius, answer the questions.

JKJ - aka Peter Hume, etc,

"....BWAHAHAHAHAHAH...."

Yeah, it's pretty hard to argue against that sort of rock-solid reasoning on this or any subject.

He employs "....BWAHAHAHAHAHAH..." when he's giving his other favourites a rest - like "fallacy" - and "appealling to absent authority".

" ....Do you think it's not obvious to everyone that you haven't got the faintest idea what you're talking about?"

When JKJ's most forceful rebuttal is "You've lost the argument" - and "....BWAHAHAHAHAHAH..." you know you're dealing with a giant of intellect.

And then we're dished up this old canard:

".....How about you tell us what radical action you've done to change your own business-as-usual. Stopped buying and selling things on those wicked markets? Stopped using those wicked petrol-driven vehicles? Stopped consuming things produced by those wicked capitalists? Stopped using those wicked fossil fuels?"

Which is always a handy device for who never go near any climate science, but who rely on their hackneyed generic argument for any subject they happen to parachute in on.

JKJ, why don't you write a paper accusing climate scientists of having the gall to live in the 21st century and employing modern technology to come to their conclusions? (how dare they not live a sustainable life in caves and wear loin cloths!)

Poirot
At no stage have you established any basis for saying that science supports anything you are contending for.

By your own criterion, you are not qualified to comment on the entire issue because you are not a climatologist.

Merely endlessly squarking the word "science", ignoring all the issues, and posting links to the Guardian and the ABC, proves nothing relevant and is not science.

When asked for you to prove what you're claiming, you have nothing but evasion.

We have already established that you have no rational basis for your support for climate policy here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16680&page=0

And we'll prove it again, shall we?

What would you accept as disproving your beliefs in support of global warming policy?

Assuming that all issues of climatology were conceded in your favour - (which they aren't):
- how have you established that the ecological consequences of AGW would be worse rather than better? How have you compared the human evaluations of the status quo you want to change, to the situation you want to achieve? Show your workings.
- how have you established that your policy proposal will produce a net benefit, rather than a net detriment, in terms of the human evaluations of all affected persons now and as far into the future as you claim to be concerned with. Show your workings.

All
Poirot's response is emblematic of all warmists argument, and that is, being faced with the inability to defend their entire belief system when challenged, to just ignore the fact, and keep endlessly asserting their claims backed by every kind of diversionary tactic, supercilious condescension, and intellectual dishonesty.

That's it. That's their entire liturgy.

"When JKJ's most forceful rebuttal is "You've lost the argument" - and "....BWAHAHAHAHAHAH..." you know you're dealing with a giant of intellect."

My most forceful rebuttal is the questions that you keep running away from because you know they prove you wrong and you have no answer for them.

So your misrepresenting what my argument is, is just more intellectual dishonesty on your part.

All
Still looking, folks.

You see unlike the warmists, who assume they're right from the outset and then look for something, anything, to confirm it, I always *ask* them what makes their belief rational, and then seek to falsify my own beliefs.

My questions of Poirot and all warmists are just that. An attempt to have the warmists prove me wrong. They seek to know whether they have the information, or the process of reasoning, they would need in order for their beliefs to be rational, and disprove mine, even in their own terms.

And yet all we get from all of them is simply evasion. Faced with the opportunity to prove me wrong, and them right, they simply don't answer, and try re-running all their gabble-yarp all over again.

The reason NOT ONE of them has ever answered them, is because they can't, obviously, otherwise they would have done it.

It's the warmists who are the real denialists. Their method is to fervently hold an article of faith, circularly seek to confirm it, castigate anyone who dares to question it, and steadfastly reject any fact, any thought, and any process of reasoning that does not conform with it - the exact opposite of science.

These people are just a throwback to the worst kind of dark ages superstition, and they JUST HAPPEN to be funded to the tune of billions by the State which has every interest in encouraging it.

Ask them to demonstrate the rational basis of their assertions about "science" and ... nothing, nada, zip, zero, not a sausage.

Don Aitkin...at it again:)...Well Don, the cooking's are still in the oven as per-unmasked. I try to give an honest opinion, "but" ( and I know you hate that word)....speaks of higher volumes.

Tally

Very useful article by Don Aitken but can I take the debate about what we should be doing one step further in terms of our goal being something that people can understand and which better reflects what people are actually doing to cause climate change? Instead of setting 2 degrees C or 450ppm CO2 as the desirable goal, we should be saying to world governments things such as:
* motor vehicle engine technology allows cars to have fuel efficiencies of 3 litres per 100km - this should be the world standard and all governments should mandate this as their 2020 target
and
* solar hot water systems are environmentally and economically sustainable in climates that enjoy X hours of sunlight per day and average year-round temperatures of Y degrees C - all governments should implement policies to assist 100% of private dwellings to have a solar hot water system on their roof
and
* lighting technology has moved beyond incandescent globes to compact fluorescents or LEDs or whatever, with an energy usage of ..... etc - governments should move to phase out incandescent bubs by 2020
and
* waste to landfill should be banned by 2025 and all domestic waste used in waste to energy plants in all towns or cities with urban populations above 50,000 people
and
......I hope you can see what I'm suggesting. Stop pushing a difficult to understand goal that's remote from human conceptualisation and instead provide a list of what's achievable right now and ask all governments of the world to commit to these practical steps, most of which provide economic as well as environmental benefits far in excess of their costs.

Bernie, your suggestions shows that you are not understanding the issues.

Rationality requires that we compare apples with apples. In order to avoid making a suggestion that is not simply illogical, in order to avoid coming up with a "solution" that is actually worse than the original problem, we need to use the same measure to compare the different things we are talking about, whether that is the same angle, or the same length, or the same common denominator, or whatever.

You're not doing that, so your suggestion fails to meet the most basic standard of rationality.

If you add a value on one side of the equation, and don't account for the same value on the other side of the equation, it means your process of reasoning is invalid.

You can't just *ASSUME* that the actions of government automatically and necessarily make the use of resources more optimal for satisfying society's most urgent and important needs. If you don't understand why, let me know and I'll explain, because there's a number of important reasons.

And those reasons totally invalidate your suggestion.

For your suggestion to be rational and therefore valid as a starter, you need to take into account the relevant human evaluations in the use of resources in both scenarios, for example, policy action versus policy inaction. You haven't done that.

Go ahead. Show your workings because I have never seen anyone do it yet, and I don't believe they can. I think it's just an irrational belief system, like the traditional Christian religious belief that the world is going to end soon because of man's sin.

Prove me wrong please?

"In order to avoid making a suggestion that is not simply illogical..."

Sorry, I mean in order to avoid making a suggestion that is simply illogical.

Jardine, the point of my post was not to suggest that the measures I listed would reduce global CO2 emissions by X million tonnes. It was to explain to the public that the measures needing to be taken to move from our current fossil-fuel dependent economy to one that is more carbon free will have to have a host of actions taken that look like some of the suggestions I listed. The climate change debate has, in my view, gone way beyond the science (which shows that anthropogenic CO2 is causing most of the changes we're seeing to our climate) to the political and social actions needed to act responsibly in response to the science. Sorry if my original post wasn't clear enough to explain that I'm not focused on any one side of the energy equation which I think you were referring to.

Bernie

"Sorry if my original post wasn't clear enough to explain that I'm not focused on any one side of the energy equation which I think you were referring to.'

You're still not understanding.

Firstly it is simply not true that the "science" shows that "anthropogenic CO2 is causing most of the changes we're seeing to our climate". Not even the warmists claim that.

All the warmists central claims have been contradicted by the data - no rise in average global temperatures for the last 18 years. It is now common ground - even among the most senior warmists - that the question is why the theories have failed to predict reality. That's why they're speculating on the "missing heat" supposedly being "in the oceans" - in other words, the warmists theory now is, 'the dog swallowed my homework'.

Secondly, even if all the issues of climatology were conceded - which they're not - it still would not provide any reason whatsoever for your *assumptions*
1. that the net result would be worse rather than better, and
2. that government action could make the net situation better rather than worse.

All you've done is assume both problem and solution, which is not rational and therefore not valid.

In order to come up to the minimum standard of mere rationality, let alone a compelling argument, you need to answer these questions:

1.
What would you accept as disproving your beliefs in support of global warming policy?

Assuming that all issues of climatology were conceded in your favour:

2. how have you established that the ecological consequences of AGW would be worse rather than better? How have you compared the human evaluations of the status quo you want to change, to the situation you want to achieve? Show your workings.

3. how have you established that your policy proposal will produce a net benefit, rather than a net detriment, in terms of the human evaluations of all affected persons now and as far into the future as you claim to be concerned with. Show your workings.

Thanks for the reply, JKJ, now I understand where you're coming from. No one I've met disputes that life on earth exists because of the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere trapping solar heat because of its water vapour and CO2 content. So the first question is whether the increases in CO2 over the last 200 years or so is causing further heat to be trapped. My view is that between 40% and 70% of the increased heat that has been trapped since the start of the industrial revolution is due to humans - burning of fossil fuels, land clearing, etc. So the next question I asked myself when trying to come to grips with this issue is should the world take action to prevent CO2 levels from rising. Considering that to decarbonise the world will cost some $50 trillion, I've concluded that spending this amount of money isn't justified, when 2 billion people are living in poverty and a warming world may bring them more good on average than harm.
So the next question is should Australia go it alone and decarbonise its economy at a cost of about $1 trillion. The answer is the same: no, for a large number of reasons.
My final question then is should Australia do anything at all in response to climate change caused 40 to 70% by human activities. Here, my answer is yes, provided the actions we take make social, environmental and economic sense. On this basis, energy efficiency is highly profitable and should reduce the energy usage of most households and industries by between 10 and 30%. Next, there are some renewable energy systems that make economic sense, such as solar hot water systems which generally have a 3 or 4 year pay back life. Then there is the use of modern technological advances such as turbo-charged diesel cars which can give incredible fuel efficiencies but cost little extra to install, so consumers will benefit by paying $1000 extra for a fuel efficient diesel engine in their car and saving $500 or more a year in fuel costs.

Looking at the big picture, if the world wants to move forward on this climate change issue (and you may choose not to if you doubt the science behind it), then my original post was in support of the theme of the article which suggested we need to make the goals more human friendly, i.e, give up on saying we want to keep the temperature rise to 2 degrees C and aim for something people can understand, hence my suggestion to push for a number of specific, readily understandable actions to be implemented by government and industry and individuals.
I understand the point you make about where has the warming been for the last 18 years but there is absolutely no doubt or argument about the warming that has occurred since the industrial revolution. If you believe that this warming may start up again, or even if you believe we should be conserving our limited supplies of fossil fuels, then hopefully I've provided some useful actions that people around the world can take.

Bernie Masters,

>"So the next question I asked myself when trying to come to grips with this issue is should the world take action to prevent CO2 levels from rising. Considering that to decarbonise the world will cost some $50 trillion, I've concluded that spending this amount of money isn't justified, when 2 billion people are living in poverty and a warming world may bring them more good on average than harm.
So the next question is should Australia go it alone and decarbonise its economy at a cost of about $1 trillion. The answer is the same: no, for a large number of reasons."

Good questions and I agree with these answers (But the cost to Australia is much much more than $1 trillion) - See submission No. 2 here (and note that it would deliver no measurable benefits): http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Clean_Energy_Legislation/Submissions .

>"My final question then is should Australia do anything at all in response to climate change caused 40 to 70% by human activities. Here, my answer is yes, provided the actions we take make social, environmental and economic sense. On this basis, energy efficiency is highly profitable ..."

You added in your (unsupported/incorrect) belief that 40% to 70% of climate change is caused by humans. It is not. So the premise of your questions is false.

If you leave out the false premise and we consider instead your advocacy of government mandated energy efficiency programs, they generally do not work. Government directed energy efficiency is not highly profitable. What is profitable will be done, at the rate it makes economic sense to do it.

There are economically rational ways to decarbonise the global economy, but they are not by government intervention, fiat, mandating or subsidies. They are the opposite of these. They involve removing the impediments governments have imposed, over the past 50 to 100 years, that are preventing low emissions energy from being cheaper than fossil fuels.

Congratulations Bernie,

you've dug just enough below the surface to evoke, "You added in your (unsupported/incorrect) belief that 40% to 70% of climate change is caused by humans. It is not. So the premise of your questions is false."

This is where the rubber hits the road with Lang and JKJ. The rest is pseudo-rational huff'n'puff.

Neither concedes the fact of AGW, let alone CAGW. Don't waste further keystrokes.

Lucerface, you've already demonstrated you don't understand the most basic concepts in the science, such as ECS, let alone have a clue about the damage function or what makes policy achievable. Your comments display repeatedly the traits of the classic denial. You deny the relevant facts. Your belief is cultist and religious. You can't support it with facts, so you resort to repetitious statements of your beliefs. You've demonstrated you are the sort of person who has been retarding progress for decades. There is no point in discussing anything with people who are deniers of the relevant facts. They and you demonstrate most if not all the signs of intellectual dishonesty. If you don't know what they are, read them here: http://judithcurry.com/2013/04/20/10-signs-of-intellectual-honesty/

Like many people, I'm trying to understand the issues relating to climate change, and tending to be agnostic in the face of conflicting claims.

For example, IF there has been a pause - or even a slow-down - in the rise in world temperatures (however that is calculated), IF this is so, why ? CO2 production hasn't declined, so why haven't temperatures continued to rise, if there is actually any connection (and I presume there is supposed to be).

It seems to me to be nonsense to claim that somehow all that extra heat has gone into the deep oceans. Why not claim that it has all gone into the body temperatures of gnus and wildebeests across the African savannah, if only someone would go out and measure them ?

Surely if there has been continued increases in world temperatures, it has gone into EVERYTHING ? That everything should warm up, more or less, and roughly by the same amount ?

Unless there is some sort of God of Global Warming, who picks and chooses where AGW is to be focussed, and has decided that, hmmm, 'let's try deep oceans' ? Next year, gnus and wildebeests.

It's been bloody cold here in Adelaide this morning. I remember October days close to the old century mark. So how can we tap into all that energy in the deep oceans ?

A fool can ask questions that, it appears, wise men can't answer :)

Joe

You've summed it up very well Luciferase.

http://tinyurl.com/prmbp57

Loudmouth, your facetiousness does not serve you very well at all, let alone the science behind the inter-reactions between the oceans, atmosphere, terrestrial biosphere and cryosphere

Loudy Goose,

If your last post was designed to display your ignorance on this issue - I can only say that you couln't have done a better job if you had attached neon flashing lights to it.

Well done!

Loudmouth, is it possible that, in addition to gnus and wildebeests, some of the heat could have gone into the larger African animals such as giraffes and elephants? :-)

Hi Bernie,

No, that's NEXT year.

As usual, Poirot, your post is totally without content. If I'm wrong, which is very likely since climate science is not my thing, then give us all the massive benefit of your deep knowledge and point out how and where.

Yes, a fool like me can ask difficult questions. Can you answer them ? Without a single insult. I don't think so.

Dead silence was the stern reply.

Joe

Loudmouth,

"As usual, Poirot, your post is totally without content...."

Here's what you wrote:

"For example, IF there has been a pause - or even a slow-down - in the rise in world temperatures (however that is calculated), IF this is so, why ? CO2 production hasn't declined, so why haven't temperatures continued to rise, if there is actually any connection (and I presume there is supposed to be).

It seems to me to be nonsense to claim that somehow all that extra heat has gone into the deep oceans. Why not claim that it has all gone into the body temperatures of gnus and wildebeests across the African savannah, if only someone would go out and measure them ?

Surely if there has been continued increases in world temperatures, it has gone into EVERYTHING ? That everything should warm up, more or less, and roughly by the same amount ?

Unless there is some sort of God of Global Warming, who picks and chooses where AGW is to be focussed, and has decided that, hmmm, 'let's try deep oceans' ? Next year, gnus and wildebeests.

It's been bloody cold here in Adelaide this morning. I remember October days close to the old century mark. So how can we tap into all that energy in the deep oceans ? "

You consider that "content"?

I you wish to "understand" the issue, why don't you make tracks for sites which can answer your questions...and stop making stupid sarcastic posts on OLO because your mind is already made up - even though you haven't a clue about the science.

So that's a "dunno" then ?

Loudmouth,

You are the most disingenuous of inquirers.

You're not interested at all in the veracity of climate science - and certainly only ask questions so you can give vent to your "oh-so-clever" line of sarcasm.

Here's a quote from a little exchange we had way back when - Poirot:

"Firstly, Loudmouth, while appearing reasonably intelligent, has an extremely limited repertoire when jumping on board to question climate scientists and their conclusions.

He maintains a stock standard collection of a few simplistic strawman questions which he regularly rolls out - supposedly to confound the experts. He then demands a "yes or no" answer to them.

Sometimes scientists are stupid enough to take his questions as genuine, and will attempt to answer them. bonmot did so once, taking the time to give him a lengthy post in reply - and this was what Loudmouth said to me in response:

"I certainly don't dismiss what someone writes - witness my responses to your constipated friend Bonmot above."

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=13951&page=0#241476

And he finishes of that particular post to me in fine form:

".....See, I'm assuming you're not one of those latte-sipping wa.nkers, that you have ideas :)"

You had asked some questions of bonmot who is a climate scientist - and he replied with a respectful and lengthy explanation of things you don't understand (scroll up on that link to read his reply) - and that was how you replied to him.

You don't wish to know anything...you are assured that you already "know" it's a scam.

Why would anyone - scientist or non-scientist - bother with your game?

Have to chime in there, Poirot.
"Joe's' closed, ideology-driven mind even denies ethnico-political realities close to home, like the stolen generation. His AGW denialism is of a piece

No, I'm interested to know if it is true that there has been no world-wide temperature rise for eighteen years.

I'm also curious whether or not some weather stations have been discontinued, and if others have been kept going even though their immediate environments (i.e. in terms of heat generation) have changed. Or if data have been 'homogenised' at all and why.

As for a sea-level rise of 20 cm, or 8 inches, in the past century, I'm sceptical enough to think that this would mean the severe erosion of beaches near my place - I live half a mile from the sea (a lot of us do in Adelaide), so of course I'm concerned whether that's true or not. An 8-inch sea-level rise would mean that the tide comes up the beach by about, well, it swallows the beach, there would be no more beach. But it was still there last week, and it looked pretty much the same as it did fifty years ago.

So no, I'm not a denier, I'm a sceptic. There may be forces that counter sea-level rise - around Sydney or Melbourne, I would expect that the very long-term rebound from the last Ice Age means that the land is very slowly rising. I don't know. It would be too much of a coincidence if it was 're-bounding' at 8 inches a century.

Put it this way, Poirot, I don't know enough to be a believer, but I'd like to know more :)

I apologise for an insult-free post, nothing to get your teeth into. Do geese have teeth ? There you go, two mild insults in one post.

Joe

No Joe, you are not a sceptic.

A real sceptic studies and works with the stuff from all sides.

By your own admission you clearly don't.

I am a sceptic, I have to be.

Bernie

I agree with your post and with Peter Lang’s where there is any inconsistency.

“Here, my answer is yes, provided the actions we take make social, environmental and economic sense.”

The original question to be answered was whether policy action makes rational sense in the first place. So it is no rational answer to say “it does if it does”, obviously.

Now the end result of everything you have just said is that even if all the issues of climatology are conceded, no-one can demonstrate the minimal level of rationality necessary for the warmist argument to be even logically valid, let alone to be preferable as policy, or justify coercive confiscations and restrictions of people’ s liberty.

Therefore we have just demonstrated that there is no rational justification for climate policy. But notice that this is the reverse of how you entered the discussion which was, ASSUMING that it is justified, then wouldn’t it be better done this way rather than that?

The problem is, that ALL warmist argument takes the same form: entering the discussion assuming that someone somewhere somehow sometime must have established the validity of it, but then immediately unable to cope with even the most basic tests of rationality on being challenged; and fleeing into circularity, appeal to authority, and ad hom.

For example, Poirot's defence crumbles and fails into nothingness here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16680&page=0

So she runs away, and promptly re-loses the same argument for the same reasons in a different thread, with Luciferase, here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16757&page=0,
and then the same again here:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=16757&page=0

And how, having been unable to answer a rational critique with reason, they slink off and pop up *again* here, re-running all the same nonsense, fortified with one more slather of ad hominem.

So please don’t encourage them! We’ve just established that it’s an irrational belief system. It's an episode of popular hysteria and madness of crowds, and that's all it is. There is no more justification for climate policy than there is for throwing-virgins-into-the-volcano policy. It’s only religious groupthink that JUST HAPPENS to serve the ends of corrupt political privilege, that’s all.

JKJ,

"The problem is, that ALL warmist argument takes the same form: entering the discussion assuming that someone somewhere somehow sometime must have established the validity of it, but then immediately unable to cope with even the most basic tests of rationality on being challenged; and fleeing into circularity, appeal to authority, and ad hom."

This is the guy who jumps onto all the climate threads with his kit bag of generic spiel, and proceeds to lay lashings of ad hom while accusing others of the same.

He wouldn't go near an actual science site and argue there, because he wouldn't know or understand the data if it jumped up and bit him.

Same old same old rhetoric no matter what the subject at hand.

Pete's famous line is "You've lost the argument" (coz he says so!)

Lol!

JKJ, you may have established in your own mind that there is no rational justification for climate change but it's not about rationality, it's about science. As a scientist (geologist, zoologist), I have no doubt that human activities are responsible for between 40 and 70% of the warming that has occurred over the last 200 or so years. On this basis, I then asked myself the various questions I've outlined in my previous posts and come to the conclusions that I've come to. If you see the science differently than me and say there has been no climate change since the start of the industrial revolution, you're entitled to your belief and of course will argue for no action to reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. Isn't living in a democracy wonderful?

Bernie Masters,

I am pleased to hear I am dealing with a geologist. However, you damage geologists by making a statement line this:

" I have no doubt that human activities are responsible for between 40 and 70% of the warming that has occurred over the last 200 or so years." That's not a statement based on science. You cannot substantiate it. So it's belief.

Did you see yesterday's post on Climate Etc.: "Words of wisdom from Charles Lyle" (commonly referred to as the father of modern geology) http://judithcurry.com/2014/10/14/words-of-wisdom-from-charles-lyell/. He makes exactly the relevant point in this article about belief v science, and how moder geology moved on. But your doing exactly what geologists did before they adopted the scientific approach . I'd urge you to read it.

I'd also urge you to substantiate your belief that 40% to 70% of climate change is caused by humans.

I'd refer you to the PNAS articles about abrupt climate change:
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=14
Gelogist Harry Broeker: http://www.slc.ca.gov/division_pages/DEPM/Reports/BHP_Port/ERRATA_CSLC/Vol%20II/EDC%20Attachments%20Vol%20II-02.pdf
Geologist: Peter Coxon: http://eprints.nuim.ie/1983/ (refer to Figure 15:21 and note the massive abrupt changes.

Many people who argue "the science is settled" do not realise that climate change doesn't behave like the IPCC's projections. The climate is wild. It changes suddenly and quickly. However, we do not have sufficient resolution to detect the sudden changes over the distant past. But the resolution is improving.

Here is an example:
Coxon and McCarron (2009), ‘Cenozoic: Tertiary and Quaternary (until 11,700 years before 2000)’ (see Figure 15:21)
http://eprints.nuim.ie/1983/1/McCarron.pdf

"Figure 15.21 The stable isotope record (&#8706;18O) from the GRIP ice core (histogram) compared to the record of N.pachyderma a planktonic foraminiferan whose presence indicates cold sea temperatures) from ocean sediments (dotted line). High concentrations of IRD from the Troll 8903 core are marked with arrows. After Haflidason et al. (1995). The transition times for critical lengths of the core were calculated from the sediment accumulation rates by the authors and these gave the following results: Transition A: 9 years; Transition B: 25 years; and Transition C: 7 years. Such rapid transitions have been corroborated from the recent NGRIP ice core data."

This and other figures and the related text suggest:

1. Abrupt warmings occurred in the past before human GHG emissions; in fact, the climate as recorded in paleo data in Ireland, Greenland and Iceland, warmed and cooled in rapid changes many times. This includes the two marked A and B in Figure 15:21, when the climate warmed from near glacial temperatures to near current temperatures in two events in 7 years at 14,500 and 9 years at 11,500 years ago.

2. Life thrived during the warming events (Life loved warming and warmer conditions).

3. There is a periodicity of about 500 to 1000 years represented by minimums at about (eyeballed from the chart):

Years before present:
16,000
15,500
14,500
13,800
13,000
12,600
11,600
11,200
11,000
10,600
10,200
9,500
9,200

The science is far from settled. The evidence for catastrophic climate change is weak and getting weaker (climate sensitivity is decreasing, the burning embers diagram has been doused, and the policies advocated by the alarmists are not viable and have little chance of being implemented let alone sustained.

"The climate is wild. It changes suddenly and quickly"

Globally? Regionally? Ireland?

Climate sensitivity is really, really low for CO2 but any other forcing and it's crazy, Irish wild?

What mystery is responsible for the rate of global temperature rise of the last 150 years, unprecedented in this interglacial period?

Could it come from below? Oh, the deep ocean hasn't warmed. Ah, it's from above, it's the sun! Oh, but no, temperature's risen when the sun's waned. Must be its cumulative beating down, day after day, making things hotter, and hotter. Oops, wither the hiatus?

CO2 is rising and rising but that couldn't be us, and warming can't be us and CO2 has nothing to do with it anyway. The hiatus is doing the job and why fix the roof when it's not raining?

Lang and Co. throw pixie-dust at a tsunami of science, and they've got rationality and they've got a hiatus, and a mantra by golly, "Climate change is not caused by humans! Climate change is not caused by humans! Climate change is not caused by humans! Climate change is not caused by humans! Climate change is not caused by humans!climate change is not caused by humans .......!"
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5NgIqKD_aX4M05NNmsyRXQxWm8/edit

Lucerface,

"Globally? Regionally? Ireland?"

Yes. All of those. Clearly you haven't read what doesn't support your cult's beliefs, eh? Apparently haven't read anything about abrupt climate change or about how life thrives as the planet warms and struggles as it cools. Or of the mounting evidence of the abrupt changes. You display all the symptoms of a denier - i.e. you deny the relevant facts and try to use FUD instead.

As I said before, discussion with you and other deniers, zealots for their cause, doomsayers and those who adopt cults beliefs is pointless.

You're confusing tipping points with climate change.
What humans are doing brings us to thresholds, triggers and tipping points.
Enjoy your faith.

Hi Squeers,

Thanks for you uninformed opinion, that's what OLO is for :)

Perhaps you know of anybody who was 'stolen' ? I know of many people taken into care, but stolen ? No, I don't think so.

If we combine the two myths, that people were herded onto Missions, and that children were stolen, one would expect to see large numbers of strange children on the Mission school rolls, isn't that so ? My late wife came from the largest Mission here in SA, and we got hold of the School Records 1880-1966 some 15 years ago. I typed them up and constructed maps of the numbers of children coming to and going from that School, decade by decade.

In the first twenty years, out of 200 kids who enrolled, about a dozen were from outside, mostly foundling boys brought down from the North by stockmen and abandoned in Adelaide. One was unhappy at the Mission, but had an idea where he was originally from, so the Protector arranged for him to be taken back there, by rail to Oodnadatta then on to his group on the Finke. Two years later, he was back at the mission, working and asking for financial support to buy an organ, which was given. A couple of girls, daughters of single mothers who had died, were brought to the Mission. A single mother brought her two kids down, and a deserted wife her three. And that was it for most of the next sixty years.

As for children taken away from the Mission - by then a government settlement - out of a total of two thousand enrolments, i.e. eight hundred kids, forty seven were taken into care, mostly in the late forties and fifties, and almost all came back within a year or so, and eventually married local people. Mothers died, fathers died, families fell apart, like for white families. One young girl, the daughter of a single mother who died of TB, went to Colebrook Home and I don't know what happened to her.

[TBC]

[continued]

So, no, I don't have evidence of a 'stolen generation'. Or of people being herded onto Missions. In the eight thousand letters of the Protector, there is never a hint of such things, I don't think it crossed their minds in those days. The single full-time employee of the 'Aborigines department' - the Protector - had his hands full supplying up to seventy ration depots all across the State.

It's all on my web-site: www.firstsources.info

Check out the short article there: 'Re-Thinking Aboriginal History'.

If you do have evidence, please share. But an assertion without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence (Christopher Hitchens): actually it's an old Latin maxim: 'asseritur gratis, negatur gratis'.

But you know better, from your gut feelings ? Ideology trumps reality ? In your dreams.

Joe

What's that to do with Younger Dryas events, oh disingenuous inquirer?

Joe,
“stolen generation" is an emotive and hyperbolic term, suggesting wholesale theft for diabolical ends. Taken literally, this kind of rhetoric is easily contradicted by the sorts of qualifications you protest and the whole process can be readily “historicised”—it cuts both ways.

Just so, the ‘debate’ (discursive fetish) has largely descended into semantics and equivocation, drawing partisans to each side—much like climate change. Conservative historians and their groupies (including Howard and Abbott) have plunged historical events in controversy. Indeed culture wars—far more interesting—have displaced the debate altogether. The past is contested ideological ground—not so much over what happened as how it is read.

The “Left”—rarely taken to task, merely ridiculed—motivated by historical and contemporary injustice and awake to the proselytising effects, in the present, of colonial and jingoistic accounts of the past, has an unabashedly progressive agenda.
This is what the dupes (such as yourself, I fear) fail to appreciate; it’s not about the past—it’s about how the past (and AGW for that matter) critiques the present. Conservatives defend the past, celebrate it, so as to preserve its ongoing institutions—the status quo—and keep the masses in check.

The “stolen generation”, however much you try to rationalise and defend it, was real in as much as the stolen motley was “representative” of those who “could” be taken; aboriginals being outsiders, mistrusted, despised, tolerated and at the mercy and indulgence of their betters—much like today.

Conservative historians and statesmen fear the kind of tampering with hegemony (enlightenment) the left attempts and the masses—typically xenophobic and disposed to have their prejudices stoked—are easily recruited to the cause. That is to maintaining a supremacist culture and a vastly inequitable society.

You think you’re arguing about history, and climate change, but it’s about justice, legitimacy and reform.

The conservative and the fool in the street condemn the poor aboriginal behaviour they perceive; they don’t look at the causes, only the effects in isolation—as if it was wilful.

AGW science confronts them with causes they refuse to acknowledge and effects they deny.

I apologise to readers fro going off-topic but I have to respond to Squeers.

Evidence ? You have some ? Anything at all ? Just gut feelings ?

"The past is contested ideological ground — not so much over what happened as how it is read."

Yes, indeed. And without any evidence, you still 'read' it as you wish ?

What is amazing me as I work through these thousands of pages of old documents is how the realities of the nineteenth century differed from our present-day picture of them. I don't observe, from the record, that - at least in South Australia - Aboriginal life was as disrupted as much as I, like you, thought.

Families held together. New conditions offered new opportunities. People may not have even perceived that the new conditions of life were all that negative: rations saved a huge amount of effort by women, the regularity of rations would have kept the old people alive much more predictably than the old days: in droughts, for example, everybody was kept alive by the ration system rather than would have been the case.

After all, in pre-European times of drought, old people, particularly women, would have died. Young children on the breast would have died. No children would have been born until the drought was well and truly over.

Imagine the impact, say, of the eight-year drought of the 1890s. Previously, groups would have scattered to the four winds, while under the ration system, groups would have been able to come together, assured of a regular food supply, and for many years in long droughts, able to maintain traditional practices and processes more easily than ever, and able to maintain their populations. The ration system saved Aboriginal culture.

[TBC]

[continued]

A related surprise: on missions during the nineteenth century, the populations grew, they didn't decline, and that growth was endogenous. In fact, I have doubts whether the Aboriginal population declined much at all, while in pre-European times, during a drought, the population of a group might have declined by half or more, and it would have taken generations to build it back up again.

In SA, during good times, able-bodied Aborigjnal people were expected to find their own food, hunting, fishing and gathering - the land-use laws safeguarded those rights - and were provided with boats, fishing gear and guns to enable that. But in droughts, everybody got rations, and could gather together, often for years.

Back to your topic: here in SA, from at least the 1940s, the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board would have paid single mothers to keep their kids, and paid until the kids were 21. My wife found a list in the SA State Records of about fifty Aboriginal children funded in this way.

And was it a coincidence, that the 'stolen generation' came to an end in about 1972 when the single mothers' benefit was introduced ? Of course, children were taken into care before that, and afterwards, even these days, and - unless you have evidence, for fair reason, the same as with white kids. My father was raised by the Salvos, and my mother's mother by Barnardo's in England. Families fall apart. Mothers die in all societies. Young mothers can't look after babies. So there's nothing unique about it.

But stick with ideology rather than reality, Squeers, it can be very comforting. Reality can be so awkward.

If you wish to assert, then you must provide evidence. Otherwise, your opinion is just that, to be respected as an opinion but not taken seriously.

Cheers,

Joe

"The ration system saved Aboriginal culture."

You appear to be saying that Aboriginal culture would have died out if not for the ration system - even though it had survived for tens of thousands of years amid drought, etc, before British colonisation.

What an odd thing to say.

Dying Swan,

Off topic but OK; in answer to your question, yes, in some cases, very likely. Group by group, maybe.

My point was that, in the event of drought, if a ration station was kept open, not only the aged and infirm, and nursing mothers, would be maintained but everybody would. Able-bodied young men would have been able to group around (say, within a mile or two) of a ration depot, with food assured. Nothing amazing, no three-course meals, but enough. So they would have been able, like everybody else there, to share in the cultural life and work under the older men. They would have been prepped to go through the rules. The cultural life of a group would have been maintained and passed on.

But in pre-European times, groups would have scattered, looking for water and food. Some would have found solace in neighbouring groups, but a wide-ranging drought may have affected them too. Drought are unforgiving. Young children, pregnant mothers, old women and some old men, would have died. Populations could have been halved or worse. Periodic droughts - say every five or ten years - must have wrought havoc on many groups. Cultural life would have been disrupted again and again.

Of course, alongside the ration system, was the new economic system for the able-bodied, with its money, clothes, tobacco, pannicans, guns, grog, means of much more mobility, new forms of economic activity, new technologies, new every bloody thing - all these would have transformed the mindsets of young people, from the 1840s (in SA) onwards. By 1860, people would have been at least bilingual, in their own language as well as English, in which they conversed with people from other groups.

[TBC]

[continued]

The ration system was, to our eyes in 2014, pretty miserly: a pound of flour per person per day, a couple of ounces of sugar, tea, rice, 2 ounces of tobacco a week, a new blanket each year, pannicans, billies, clothing material, etc. Free medical services for most Aboriginal people. Meat and milk for nursing mothers and chronically ill people. Actually the same rates as people under the Destitute Board, and for prisoners. Nothing flash. But probably being handed a bag of flour was, in many women's eyes, a step above going out and spending eight hours a day collecting about the same amount of grass seed and coming back to grind it into a flour.

Similarly, boats, fishing gear and blankets: how did people fish on the Murray pre-European ? By walking through the shallows with a spear, Summer and Winter. Post-European ? Wrap yourself in a blanket and throw a line in and wait. What would you choose ?

Reality is more fascinating and unexpected than fantasy, Poirot.

Cheers,

Joe

Joe,

"Reality is more fascinating and unexpected than fantasy, Poirot."

Yeah, thanks for that.

You may remember me regaling you of my story some years back regrding my ne'er do well dad (who was at the time in work in a nickle mine in the outback, contriving to place me in a mission (even though I'm not indigenous).

So I actually lived in a mission for about 5 months with indigenous kids - which at first I thought was the most surreal experience I'd had till then - but now I see as definitely one of the richer experiences of my life.

1974...and it was a Christian run mission located about 14 miles out of the main town, consisting of a settlement with houses, each having a Christian family and four or five indigenous girls to each family. The boys were housed in a dormitory in town.

How's that for reality, Joe?

I also apologise for being off topic, except by analogy.
I bowled a wobbly and it’s gone straight through to the keeper!
I conceded at the outset that the stolen generation is contentious. That is, all history is contentious and can never be recorded or remembered or reconstructed in its discordant and contingent immediacy, certainly not in terms of a unifying narrative. Even our best efforts are hopelessly preferential and biased. Conventional history is thus little more than a nationalist genre of fiction, whose primary purpose—apart from appealing to our penchant for nostalgia—is to rationalise the provenance of the present, to anoint it with a vindicating sense of predestination and hard-won accomplishment.
Neither the stolen generation nor agw can be allowed to cast a pall on our glorious culture, its past, or its legitimacy into the future. Sans the US, UK et al. Their statesmen all blow the same rhetoric about being the greatest nation on earth, placing it above criticism and tacitly purging the evils of past, present and future as the necessary via media of a great and continuing heritage.
That’s why Labor’s apology was so momentous, not because it acknowledged “a stolen generation”, but because it conceded deep flaws in a national psyche which rationalised the patronage, bigotry and overbearing treatment visited upon the indigenous population.
In contesting whether it even happened, equivocating over numbers and motives, you consecrate the whole one-sided spectacle, you put the blame on aboriginals, and you perpetuate their demeaned station in Australia.
People like you make the apology worthless, not that it can atone for the past, but because it loses its rhetorical power to force reflection and so reform the present. Thus even after the apology, indigenous people have to live with the self-loathing with which they are stigmatised as a birthright, however-much they throw their shoulders back. We are social animals and cannot live contentedly or sanely without the respect of our peers.

My daughter was only telling me this week about a classroom discussion that got out of hand. As we know, the "current" curriculum pays a lot of attention to Australian identity and indigenous culture, but in my daughter's class these efforts, at least in part at reconciliation--what the conservatives like to deprecate as social engineering--still met with lots of resistance. She tells me the majority of the class, given licence to speak up and no doubt parroting their parents' prejudices, complained loudly about the privileges and extra benefits enjoyed by virtue of being aboriginal.
The indigenous population is not merely despised but, perversely, resented!
The cycle goes on despite the Left's efforts. Meanwhile the conservatives bring back the three R's ostensibly to address poor educational outcomes--but imo just as much to purge the history books.

Bernie
"JKJ, you may have established in your own mind that there is no rational justification for climate change..."

I never claimed or believed that there is "no rational justification for climate change". (It's meaningless btw. The climate doesn't need a "rational justification" to change.)

"but it's not about rationality, it's about science..."
Take out the rationality, and what is left of science?

That's what the warmists have got.

Rationality is the implicit precondition of science. If a theory is fallacious, it can't be scientific.

"If you see the science differently than me and say there has been no climate change since the start of the industrial revolution, you're entitled to your belief and of course will argue for no action to reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere."

It's not about beliefs, mere subjective opinions, it's about whether claims are fallacious and therefore invalid or not.

No-one has ever argued that "there has been no climate change since the start of the industrial revolution". That is just a grotesque misrepresentation of the skeptics simple point that the warmists lack reason for their three central contentions.

You clearly have not understood what the public debate has been about.

It is about whether human CO2 emissions are causing catastrophic global warming which policy can remedy at a worthwhile cost.

Nothing of what you have said has established that support for climate policy has any rational basis; while I have shown that it does not.

Merely repeating irrational beliefs does not make them true.

Whatev, Poi.

I must be a bit hung-over this morning because I don't get your point: that you spent some months with Aboriginal kids as a child, so you know all about Indigenous history and policy ? With the greatest of respect, dearie, I beg to differ.

Hi Squeers,

So you're into cultural studies ? Where stance and pre-conceived ideological bias trumps evidence ? Don't worry about truth or reality, just feel the passion ? Again, with the greatest respect, my boy, sometimes you have to take note of reality. Alas, it seems that your poor daughter has to do that too. Those pesky kids ! Why can't children just BELIEVE, why do they have to ask awkward questions ? Probably because they are not total idiots, even at a young age.

By the way, I'm NOT equivocating over numbers: I have them, you don't. You can equivocate over something you know nothing of, I'll try to stick to what I can empirically demonstrate.

So surprisingly few kids ever taken into care improperly: poor Bruce Trevorrow being the only one in Australia so far. Amazing, really.

So: no, I don't believe people were herded onto Missions. There's not a shred of evidence of that, at least in South Australia.

No, I don't believe people were pushed off their lands: the legislation of 1851 enshrined land-use rights in every pastoral lease. And those rights are still there.

No, I don't believe Missionaries stopped people speaking their languages: all the early Missionaries learnt their local language as quick as they could and tried to teach in it: Teichelmann and Schurmann at the Adelaide School, Meyer at the Encounter Bay School, Taplin at the Pont McLeay School, the Lutherans up at their schools in the north-east at Kopperamanna and Killalpaninna. But people quickly learnt English at most of those places as well - i.e. people gained another language and became bilingual - and with greatly increased mobility, and people moving freely around their regions, in time children at Missions often couldn't speak the local language.

Anything else ? Feel free :)

[TBC]

[continued]

BTT: so the warming pause has, according to the British Met Office, gone on for 15 years. Why and how ? Where has the heat gone ? And how can any assertions be measured ?

Again, Squeers, we come back to empirical evidence. It's a cruel world for cultural theorists. But perhaps the uni bar is open, for commiserations against an unbelieving audience :)

Oh, just a couple of extras for your passionate outrage:

* I don't believe that Indigenous people are in any more poverty than other Australians. Squalor perhaps, but poverty no. I did a study :)

and

* In the light of the Hindmarsh Island scam twenty years ago, I came to realise that a 'tradition' only has to be a few weeks old before people will believe that it is a 'tradition'. I had relations by marriage on both sides of that one, people I had loved and admired, but I was appalled how it was played out by the proponents for gullible white audiences: on one occasion, for the newspapers, one proponent accused one of the elderly dissidents of being a 'woman of the streets'. For the white audience, of course, since anybody who knew them both, knew that they were very closely related, sort of cousins, and through non-Ngarrindjeri relations from Kingston way.

Now, of course, all the young women believe all the secret women's business scam, chapter and verse.

Joe

Loudmouth,

Oh, so sorry to step on your learned bunions....at least my experience was "an experience" and not some trumpeted skewed narrative from someone who wishes to push one view of history.

That mission appeared reasonably well run. However, There was no indigenous cultural input into those girls' lives. They/we were expected to do "all" the chores. The white lady in charge of our house had two toddlers which she cared for in a part of the house sectioned off from the rest. She cooked the meals - that's "cooked"....we prepared the food for cooking, served it, and cleaned up. Everything else was done for her, except the actual task of putting items into the washing machine, which she insisted on doing herself. Hanging it out, bringing it in, ironing (and her family's ironing was shared out amongst we girls) housework....everything was done by "the girls".

The main feeling I gleaned from the indigenous girls was one of resentment. They kept their feelings inside and just carried on. There appeared to be no tangible connect between the girls and their caregivers - save for everyday machinations....no emotional connections at all, especially with the older girls.

My position at 14 being one of the "girls" and yet not was somewhere in the middle - a good vantage point to take note of the nuances of the relationship.

Again, sorry, for the first-hand info...I know how little that means to you and your agenda.

Cheers

<So you're into cultural studies ? Where stance and pre-conceived ideological bias trumps evidence ? Don't worry about truth or reality, just feel the passion ? Again, with the greatest respect, my boy, sometimes you have to take note of reality>

What are you drivelling about?
I have made logical propositions you are at liberty to engage with; what I am talking about is not subject to empiricism, or rather empiricism is inadequate at best.
But your position is not based on empiricism, or rather your "evidence" base is selective, partial and secondary rather than primary; supposing there was such a thing as primary evidence which lent itself to such complex conclusions.
Worse, your rationale is preconceived and your "findings" conform as stubbornly as a compass to that ideological influence. The same influence which dictates your position on climate change.

In any case, you haven't provided any empirical evidence yourself?
Or logical argument!

In fine it is you, poor deluded fellow, who has lost touch with reality, who assembles his own "truths", like themed lego, and unwittingly mocks himself in mocking others.

But I shall try not to be provoked into saying more, off topic, on this thread; though I can back up everything I've said above.
I'm sure we can revisit the subject matter another time.

You've had an interesting life, Poirot : )

Wounded swan,

Still not clear what you are on about. A few months forty years ago gives you some cachet ? Gosh. Wow.

Hi Squeers,

I loved that bit: " .... what I am talking about is not subject to empiricism .... " No, indeed.

As for your slur that I was being selective and partial, I typed up EVERY letter of the Protector - the one and only full-time employee of the 'Aborigines Department' - every letter about every delivery of rations, etc., to the sixty or seventy-odd ration depots. Eight thousand of them OUT, and a Register of thirteen thousand IN. You know better ? How, out of the wonders of your hairy @rse ?

I typed up every entry in the Rev. Taplin's Journal - I never leave anything out [Check out my web-site: www.firstsources.info, it's all there]. Avoiding awkward details, and leaving them entirely out may be the favourite tactic of people in bullsh!t studies such as yourself and Poi, but sooner or later you get copped so I've always acted on the principle of why bother ? The truth will always out. And it's the truth you must base any genuine progress on, not lies.

Of course, lies can be fun, as I'm sure you both have learnt as students. Oops, sorry, I keep forgetting that you are both not under-grads, but mature people. Sort of.

And have you EVER made a total and primary study of anything ? Only piss and wind ? Stance and passion ? Never evidence and fact ? Probably works with the first-year girls but.

What a waste of space :(

Joe

I'm not after "cachet", Joe...I was merely relating an experience after you so kindly pointed out how wonderful "reality" is.

It's a primary source for you - I thought it might be something someone of your vast integrity and industriousness would value as a teeny bit of the mosaic.....but, alas, all you've done so far is sneer at it.

Par for the course......

Hi Wounded Swan,

I have this picture of you and Squeers, like dame Margo and Nureeff on pointe, doing a pas de deux. Ugggghhh !

Yes, I do sneer at your pissy childish experiences. I was just typing up details about patrol officers and welfare officers across Australia in 1963 - about two thousand of them, all over the place, putting in years and years. But I suppose your four months in one place taught you something. Probably.

As you well know, my wife was Indigenous. 43 years of marriage. My kids are Indigenous. We made some of the first Aboriginal flags back in 1972. We lived in a community for four years. We worked in Indigenous student support at universities for a combined thirty five years. We gathered many documents on her community over a period of thirty years, from about 1979. I've spent about five years full-time typing up any documents I could find on Aboriginal policy, especially in the nineteenth century, ten thousand pages. And we read most of the new books that ever come out since the 1960s on the subject.

But if you want to put your four months up against all that, feel free.

I was just remembering the first time I visited an Aboriginal community, I think it was 1959 or 1960, Delissaville across Darwin harbour. Then another one near Adelaide River. Then, in my Maoist days, with a group of like-minded crackpots, a whole rash of communities in about 1964 or 1965. Days of hope !

Yeah, we ran a little scurrilous journal (you should try it some time) called 'Black News', put a few thousand of our own money into it (we were factory workers [you should try THAT some time]); people loved it but contributed $ 0.00 so we had to pack it up.

We ran Career Workshops for about 1200 Aboriginal kids across SA and in western NSW in 1993-1994. Beautiful kids, down to Grade VI, they were so full of ideas and aspirations and hope, especially the girls.

So it's been an interesting life so far :)

Joe

Joe,

You regale me of all your experiences...good experiences...useful experiences....profound even.

You seem to think this is a competition of sorts...dueling braggadocio?

I told you of an experience..

Your reply:

"...I do sneer at your pissy childish experiences...."

You have the graciousness of a brick.

Sad really...

Joe,
By “selective” I didn’t mean to imply you had deliberately selected or excluded anything. I knew nothing about your love of documents and collecting. Rather, I have consistently criticised conventional histories. The so called primary record is nothing of the kind, but is random, partial, selective and exclusive even as it is produced. Strictly, there is no primary data, and what passes for primary is filtered through ideology (then and now) and invisible corruptions of all kinds, at all stages of production, collection, cataloguing and reconstruction.
In any case, having looked at your website, I see no thesis and supporting argument/documentation to the effect that the Stolen Generation didn’t happen. More specifically—since we do need to look beyond the hyperbolic title—nothing to the effect that colonial-indigenous tensions were marked primarily by white benevolence, rather than the depredations university faculties love to lament.
If you are correct, then we can only conclude that the indigenous “problem” is wilful or genetic—the poor buggers can’t help it and are just bad or backwards by nature!
This is exactly what ignorant rednecks, and the bogans of the outer burbs think.
How am I to interpret your gloss—since you offer no thesis and make no reasoned or supported argument—as anything other than another mode of denialism which serves the status quo?
You’re also an “AGW” “denialist”—I don’t like either term because both fetishise warming among a host of undeniable anthropogenic effects, but I’m not going to dignify denialists calling them sceptics—and these are both partisan positions right out of the conservative handbook!
May I suggest you write an article laying out your argument and evidence for the stolen generation “conspiracy”?
You might also offer some explanation for poor and anti-social aboriginal behaviour and high incarceration rates.

Floundering Swan,

Well, you started it.

Hi Squeers,

To take you up on your observation: "The so called primary record is nothing of the kind, but is random, partial, selective and exclusive even as it is produced. Strictly, there is no primary data .... "

Bullsh!t. Perhaps in your universe, where stance rather than truth or reality matters, but there very much IS 'primary data' out there. If you ever try to examine any, you may notice that it is indeed very, very bloody 'primary': hand-written letters, almost illegible, ink blurred or faded, maddening punctuation, idiosyncratic handwriting.

For example: In the nineteenth century, the Protector tended to write two short letters to a page and on one occasion, I thought at first there was just the one letter and was about to move onto the next one when I caught just the hint of something below, and by angling the page, I could just make out the letter. Took about an hour to get it all typed.

When I was given some of the Letter-Books from the Point McLeay Mission, 1880-1900, somebody had fished them out of a rubbish bin, and the books had been exposed to the weather (on Lake Alexandrina) for decades, so the pages were often so brittle (and blurred, faded etc.) that I had to carefully slide a sheet of blank paper under each page in order to be able to read and copy it.

After copying, I have to proof-read it for mistakes, and format each page. Then I usually try to index each letter. So each page of letters can easily take an hour or more. All on my web-site: www.firstsources.info

So, Squeers, I don't have much time to sit back and mentally pontificate about what I'm typing, except to note while I'm going what is there and what isn't there. Analysis will come later. If you ever have to copy out thousands of pages of primary data, you will maybe understand. But, no, I don't think that will ever happen.

But what isn't there, so far, is any evidence or rationale for

[TBC]

[continued]

either taking children away, or driving people off their lands (pastoralists were happy to keep people nearby to use their labour: check out the works of Robert Foster on Google for this), or pushing people onto Missions. Nada. Niente. Niechevo. Dipote. Rien.

What IS there are crucial facts, crucial parameters if you like:

* one single full-time member of the Aborigines Department, the Protector;

* up to sixty or seventy ration depots, mainly for the elderly, sick, infirm, nursing mothers and orphans [coloured Spread-sheets for your convenience, available on that web-site];

* instructions to pastoralists (this had to be done only once) to note that a clause in their leases allowed Aboriginal people to use the land as they had done traditionally;

* Mission staff numbering two or three - the Missionary, a teacher, a farm supervisor, one of them doubling up as store-keeper; no fences around any Mission; [so, who's doing the herding ?]

* issue of boats (maybe up to a hundred in SA), fishing gear, guns, with repairs done free for non-working people, half-cost if they were working;

* leases of land, 160-acre blocks, to around a hundred Aboriginal people, including women married to white men, rent-free.

Like it or not, those are 'facts' and you can bullsh!t all you like about how they are 'ideologically produced'. It seems that many Aboriginal people benefited from 'ideologically produced' boats, fishing gear, guns and land leases. Not to mention 'ideologically produced' rations.

By the way, from the amount of rations given out annually, it is intriguing that the amounts increase year by year. So I'm very tentatively surmising that maybe the SA Aboriginal population didn't decline, but hovered around four thousand from the 1840s to the 1940s. Some demographer could make much more out of the Annual Reports that my friend Alistair Crooks has typed up, in which there is an annual Census. Yes, people WERE counted, just not in the National Census.

[TBC]

Joe,
you can chant bullsh!t all you like, what I say about history and primary records has been nothing more than a banality since the early-nineteen-seventies. Look up Hayden White’s "Metahistory".
Paraphrasing Arthur Lovejoy from 1939, anything more than bare chronicle implies preferential interpretation of salient material whose importance is at the predilection of contemporary thought. History, as a map of the past, is muddled into the shape of present concerns, its original milieu largely redundant.
This explains why histories date so quickly or appear naive. As Conyers Read laments, the few written histories that survive are often noteworthy merely for their eccentricity, owing more for their survival to style than to substance.
The primary record offers valuable clues, but can’t open a window onto the past. Even those who defend history as rigorous are forced to acknowledge the fragmentary nature of original documents, often created for specific purposes and/or in a rote manner, rendering the artefacts devoid of the richness of original contexts. Most such primary documents are denuded at the outset, then pared-back further by the purposive and economic manner for which they were created. There remain huge deficits in any identikit picture the historian hopes to depict; and these are too easily coloured-in in the ideological hues of the day.
Journalism is the best form of primary documentation, but even this has to be interrogated closely before conclusions are “postulated”.
That’s why good history is so much more circumspect; the historian shrinks from “automatically” filling in the gaps, likewise cautioning the reader from doing so.
Thus, I reiterate my complaint above. I don’t want to belittle your heroic efforts gathering material. I’m sure it’s a valuable archive. But in a sweeping manner you declare without preamble that the Stolen Generation didn’t happen: you see through all the complexity, missing data and ideology that clouds past and present accounts, and you perceive the truth in a moment of clarity we must all accept. Similarly, like your denialist brethren, you see through the vast complexities of climate-change (which you don’t begin to understand) and conceive a vaster conspiracy.
Bullsh!t

[continued]

Squeers,

Your repulsive conclusion: “If you are correct, then we can only conclude that the Indigenous “problem” is wilful or genetic-- the poor buggers can't help it and are just bad or backward by nature !”

That's YOUR take, certainly not mine. Interesting how you mind works. No, I'm tentatively exploring the interface between a hunter-gatherer ethic and an agriculturalist/early industrial ethic – more particularly, how people embedded in a hunter-gatherer ethic would have interpreted the sudden provision of as much food as they needed, free, no effort. AND how the colonialists, embedded in THEIR ethic, misinterpreted the willingness of people to keep hunting and gathering, and underestimated the impact of the ration system on the continued access to land and traditional land-use. Still teasing that out.

Here in SA, King George IV's Letters Patent recognised Indigenous land-use rights, the right to “occupy or enjoy' their lands. But the ration system – perhaps inadvertently – drew people away from their lands, often for many years. Within very few years, ration depots at key points - Adelaide, Encounter Bay, Wellington, Clare – drew entire populations out of their lands. Whites interpreted this to mean that lands were 'empty', so legislation had to be explicitly drawn up in 1851, so that an explicit clause had to be inserted in all pastoral leases; existing leases were re-contracted that year, to include that clause. Which is still the law.

So my very tentative interpretation of what was going on in the early days doesn't need to rely on racist theories such as yours. I suspect that there was enough miscalculation – on both sides – to go around about the implementation of policy, about how to make the best of totally novel situations. . Perhaps rule # 1 in policy formation is: Implementation will always get cocked-up, especially social policy. Especially at that interface between two very different types of epistemology, society and economy.

[TBC]

[continued]

But I'm trying to avoid putting any 'gloss' on anything – that's up to anyone with courage to draw out of what has been typed up. I'm too busy.

There's so much to type up that I won't have time to sit back and pontificate for some years yet, or until my eyes give out. But of course, you will. You have the benefit of that free labour, if you dare to read it fully. If not, that's your loss. It's there for anybody, what they do with it is up to them: democratic information-sharing, really.

And it's also up to you whether or not you want to be a denialist. The data's there - ignore it if you like, pretend it doesn't exist. Your choice.

To refer to your latest, I didn't say that a Stolen Generation didn't happen, I said “I don't have evidence of a 'stolen generation'.” Look back and check. Like a hidden planet, it maybe there but I haven't found it.

I partly agree with you that “anything more than bare chronicle [which is what I am doing] implies preferential interpretation of salient material whose importance is at the predilection of contemporary thought [yes, indeed]." But: "History, as a map of the past, is middled into the shape of present concerns, its original milieu largely redundant.” Really? So we 'interpret' what isn't actually there, is that it ? And ignore what IS there ?

Then you demand that I do exactly what I won't do yet – to jump off a cliff with interpretations of what I have typed up. No, I'll leave that to you, Squeers – your evidence-free interpretation.

You write “The primary record offers valuable clues, but can't open a window onto the past.” Of course it can, otherwise how can we say anything at all about what might have happened ? And how do we do that with any confidence at all ? By having at least SOME evidence to hang a tentative theory on. Otherwise why flap your lips about a 'stolen generation' ? Your 'theory' is toothless.

[TBC]

OMG, Don Aitken would be so proud!

Well done Loudmouth Joe, NOT!

As far as the article goes, you Joe, have not got a clue, you are way out of your league and your ignorance shows.

Others:

You want to feed Joe?
I'm going, enjoy yourselves!

David,

Gee the blowflies are out early this year.

On-topic: has there, or hasn't there, been a pause in global warming ? Has there, or hasn't there, been an eight-inch (20 cm) sea-level rise in the past century ? More or less everywhere ?

Squeers,

[continued]

Actually I'm fascinated by your posts, they're incredibly illuminating into the relativist, cultural-studies, post-modern mind, or what there is of it.

And your outrageously stupid statement that “journalism is the best form of primary documentation” is too easy to challenge. What, do you mean hearsay ? FIFO observations ? Story ? 'Narrative' ? Based on what ? Twitter 'history' ? Opinion, stance, sense of outrage, etc. ? Placard or T-shirt philosophy ?

How about 'evidence' ? Something that can be corroborated ? Triangulated ? That means nothing ? I hope to God you're not anywhere near impressionable but lazy students.

I'm not suggesting that anybody is necessary a liar if they put forward a story without a shred of evidence. But nobody has to believe it: call it a 'temporary suspension of belief', if you like.

For example, as far as I can tell, there is no solid evidence of the Rabbit-Proof Fence Story. It may be completely true, chapter and verse. But there seems to be not a single mention of it in the literature, nothing in the 'West Australian' of the times, a pro-Labor newspaper during the term of a Conservative government, with a star reporter, named Paul Hasluck, passionately interested in Aboriginal affairs. Nothing in his memoirs. One would have expected that such a story would quickly get out to the local papers, and from there to the 'West Australian'. Nothing in the key Moseley Report of 1936 under the new Labor Government either. Strange. So suspension of belief until the miracle ingredient - evidence.

So is there any chance you can take some of your own advice, along the lines of “the historian shrinks from “automatically” filling in the gaps” ? I seem to have anticipated you on that score, yet you demand that I shouldn't.

Your serve :)

Joe

Loudmouth,

http://press.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Aboriginal+History+Volume+34,+2010/5611/review18.xhtml

"From 1939 to 1953, one man, William Penhall, the Protector of Aborigines and the Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Board (APB), had nearly complete control over the lives and destinies of the 5000 or more Aboriginal people scattered across South Australia. In The Last Protector, Cameron Raynes, an Adelaide historian and writer, documents Penhall’s role in the ‘illegal removal’ of Aboriginal children from their families during the 1940s and early 1950s. In other states, legislation allowed for Aboriginal children to be removed from their parents, but in South Australia, Raynes argues, Aboriginal children could only be taken away by the APB with the approval of the Children’s Welfare and Public Relief Department (CWPRD). After several unsuccessful attempts to get the CWPRD to cooperate in the removal of Aboriginal children, Penhall decided to ignore the legal process. Instead he used a combination of deceit, bluff and intimidation, as well as coercive powers such as withholding child endowment payments or denying rations to uncooperative parents, to remove children from their families, usually on the grounds that the children were ‘neglected’ or their parents ‘unsuitable'....by 1949 Penhall had received advice from the Crown Solicitor that the APB did not have the authority to remove children from their parents. Nevertheless, he continued the practice up to the time of his retirement in 1953."

"What Penhall did, in most cases, was to prevent children temporarily placed in missions or admitted to hospitals from subsequently returning to their homes. Eventually these children would be adopted out to a white family, or committed to Colebrook Home or some other institution, usually without the knowledge or consent of the parents. In other cases documented in The Last Protector, Aboriginal parents succumbed to threats from Penhall or the APB’s Welfare Officer, Sister McKenzie, that if they did not voluntarily admit their child to a mission or other institution, that child would be forcibly taken....an action that the CWPRD was clearly very reluctant to undertake except in extreme circumstances. Once the child was handed over, Penhall did all he could to keep the child in that institution."

Loudmouth,

So there we have some history written from a certain slant, using archived information.(and received a robust critique from the ANU reviewer)

Another review:

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/7647204/book-review-the-last-protector/

"Thirteen-month-old Trevorrow had been sent to hospital in Adelaide by his parents from Meningie (150km away) on Christmas Day, 1957, with a serious intestinal disorder. He was not returned until 10 years later, when his father was dead and he was a disturbed child who had to be taken into care. The Aborigines Department had fostered him out to an immigrant family, lying to his parents that he was still receiving treatment."

"Although the subtitle of Raynes' book focuses on illegal removal, of which he has managed to provide a few examples, most of the evidence in his book is of the illegal withholding of children in missions and government institutions during the years when Penhall was Chief Protector (1939-53): Raynes describes case after harrowing case of Penhall and his officers successfully blocking the efforts by Aboriginal mothers to be reunited with their daughters."

"As an employee of the State Archives, Raynes was in a good position to trawl through the records of the Aborigines Department, amounting to 70 boxes for the period 1939-53. Even so, he suspected that the "smoking gun" (the admission by Crown Law that Penhall and the Minister had exceeded their authority) was to be found in files withheld by the Crown Solicitor's Office, no doubt as a consequence of the Trevorrow case. His attempts to gain access to these files were blocked and subsequently, he and other researchers wanting to consult the other files have had to obtain a clearance through the SA Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation."

Loudy Goose,

"But what isn't there, so far, is any evidence or rationale for either taking children away, or driving people off their lands (pastoralists were happy to keep people nearby to use their labour: check out the works of Robert Foster on Google for this), or pushing people onto Missions. Nada. Niente. Niechevo. Dipote. Rien."

http://www.slsa.sa.gov.au/manning/sa/aborigines/1858.htm

"The first settlers who arrived at Holdfast Bay in November 1836 described the local Kaurna people as 'friendly, harmless and honest to a remarkable degree.' Within a few months the Kaurna were making themselves useful to the new settlers, acting as guides, carrying water and firewood and performing other chores around the settlement, for which they were rewarded with food, tobacco, clothes and other items. Captain Walter Bromley was appointed Protector of Aborigines in May 1837. He set up his tent on the banks of the Torrens [in what is now Bonython Park]...encouraged the Aborigines to visit him there to receive rations of food and blankets."

"The Colonial Office subsequently enshrined the principal of Aboriginal land rights by inserting in the Letters Patent, the document issued to the Colonisation Commissioners early in 1836 to formally establish the colony of South Australia, a clause which recognised the prior rights of the Aborigines to the land and guaranteed that 'any lands now actually occupied or enjoyed by [the] Natives would not be alienated.'

The Commissioners agreed to set aside 20% of the proceeds from all land sales in the colony to be used for the benefit of the Aborigines and also committed the South Australia Company to protecting 'the natives in the unmolested exercise of their rights of property should such a right be found to exist.'

In the new colony, these commitments were soon forgotten and all the lands were declared open for public sale. A few of the more enlightened colonists saw the Aborigines' dispossession as unjust and public debate on the issue flared occasionally in the newspapers..."

"The Kaurna population sank from about 300 in 1841 to 150 in 1856 and during this period the white settlers intruded upon their lands,"

Wounded Swan,

Dr Raines put up an OLO thread some years ago. When challenged, he couldn't name a single child taken in the ways you suggest.

From memory, two boys, children of an Aboriginal mother who had died, and a white father, were put into a home in about 1914 by their father, as he had every right to do, as their surviving parent.

In another case, the daughter of a half-caste mother was taken into care at the Industrial School in Adelaide, after the mother had taken off from the native camp at a station near Hawker to go to Marree (Hergott Springs), leaving her daughter alone in the camp. When the mother came back several weeks later, she demanded her child back but was refused. Fair enough. Sounds like neglect to me :)

In other cases, it was clear that Dr Raines had little knowledge of a common practice on missions, whereby parents went out to work during the week while their children were looked after in the dormitory on the mission, went to school on the mission with other kids, were fed and looked after on the mission, until the parents came home for the weekend. This was common in the years up until at least the 1960s at Koonibba, Gerard, Finnis Springs and in the nineteenth century at Point McLeay and perhaps Point Pearce (Pierce).

Usually the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board, formed in the late 1920s by bringing together the old Destitute Board and the Children's Council, wouldn't have a bar of Aboriginal children - they were the responsibility of the Aborigines Department, they said. In fact, they had a policy, I'm not sure when it ceased but certainly well into the 1960s, of paying single Aboriginal mothers - perhaps designated as 'guardians' - to look after their children until they were twenty one.

[TBC]

Loudy Goose,

"When challenged, he couldn't name a single child taken in the ways you suggest."

Oh really...?

"Sure Joe. One case of illegal removal. Just one? The case of Terry Mason's daughters, held illegally by the Lutherans of Koonibba Mission. Page 66 of The Last Protector.
Posted by Cameron R, Friday, 19 March 2010 12:17:26 PM"

"And just to pre-empt your response, isn't it curious how the question has gone from 'Just name one Aboriginal person who was taken from their parents illegally' to 'Just name one Aboriginal person who was taken from their parents illegally and then found restitution...

Posted by Cameron R, Friday, 19 March 2010 12:29:01 PM"

"Hey Joe, I already gave you that name. One name. Terry Mason and his daughters. Page 66 of The Last Protector.
Posted by Cameron R, Saturday, 20 March 2010 6:42:26 PM"

"And if you choose to educate yourself, may I suggest that after you've read about Terry Mason's daughters you then have a look at the cases of Thelma Reid (The Last Protector, p. 40 and onwards), of Mrs Anderson's daughters (p. 45 onwards), of Susan Grant (p. 47 onwards), of Paul Hurst (p. 52 onwards), of Justine Reynolds (p. 59 onwards) and so on ...
Posted by Cameron R, Saturday, 20 March 2010 7:13:09 PM"

"Thank you, Dr Raynes, if it's okay with the people you mentioned, I guess we can start - as long as they are aware that confidentiality will be hard to maintain. It's a pity I was stupid enough to ask you to 'name' people, when citing their cases (as Person A, or Family D) would have been more sensible and allowed more confidentiality, but that particular cat is out of the bag now. By the way, to respond to CJ's criterion, were those children removed forcibly from their mothers ?

So where do we go from here ? Are their full records available in State Records ? Or do some of these cases come within the restricted time period ?

Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 21 March 2010 6:25:57 PM"

(My 4 posts for...today)

Joe,
work prevents me from rebutting your latest nonsense. But I am content. I've sought to make the point that your denialism in both instances is ideological, and certainly without substance.
Your "stand" on the Stolen Generation is nothing more than innuendo which so far you've lacked the courage to spell out and have tested. I hope I've at least alerted you to the implications of taking the colonial/conservative stance.
I'd love to hear more of your "tentative" idea of,
"exploring the interface between a hunter-gatherer ethic and an agriculturalist/early industrial ethic – more particularly, how people embedded in a hunter-gatherer ethic would have interpreted the sudden provision of as much food as they needed, free, no effort. AND how the colonialists, embedded in THEIR ethic, misinterpreted the willingness of people to keep hunting and gathering, and underestimated the impact of the ration system on the continued access to land and traditional land-use".

Surely modern aborigines have emerged from their hunter-gatherer roots, just like the rest of us? Unless you think they're still primitive? That would certainly accord with the view of Abbott's "hand-picked" appointee on the national curriculum:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/sydney-university-professor-barry-spurr-claims-racist-emails-were-hacked/story-e6frg996-1227094290191?nk=49cd186d77b2c55a9c3d1ee63f006dce

My own view is that the indigenous population suffers en masse under their social outcast status, which you do nothing to ameliorate.

Ah Wounded Swan,

If you had read more closely, that case was covered by the standard mission policy of caring for people's children while they were working during the week, as I pointed out earlier on this thread.

Yes, it was silly of me to ask for a name - obviously, I meant to ask for a case of improper removal. Dr. Raines couldn't give me one.

Squeers,

Hey, that was MY point, your reliance on ideology not evidence :)

Innuendo ? No, I'll say it straight out: I don't have evidence of a 'stolen generation', not in ten thousand pages of transcriptions. What's YOUR evidence ? With respect, I suggest nothing but ideology and stance. not a shred of evidence.

As for a hunter-gatherer ethic, yes, I'm trying to work that one through - there certainly was an immensely powerful hunter-gatherer ethic in the early days, confronting an agricultural/early industrial ethic. To a very slight extent, they may have overlapped, insofar as many Aboriginal people were able to take advantage of opportunities provided by the ag/ind ethic. And of course, many young children quickly were able, and flexible enough, to operate in both types of society. Of course, there are very few, if any, Aboriginal people who are embedded in this sort of society. If any.

Fundamentally, and very briefly, a hunter-gatherer ethic operates in an environment of boom and bust, of either gorging or starving depending whether resources are available or not, of non-accumulation, and with an epistemology founded on magic and ritual. Hence the reliance on family or clan, as against other families and clans, and certainly against other groups, and the submergence of the individual in the family.

An ag/ind ethic operates in an environment of acquisitiveness, of striving to accumulate, store, and capitalise on that accumulation, and to exploit the labour of others where possible, to this end. Hence the need to privatise property and effort, and the drive towards individualisation.

Check out Frederick Engels' 'Origin of the Family', he cites many early authorities here in Australia on Aboriginal life.

[TBC]

[continued]

Outcast status ? Since 1990, around 120,000 Indigenous people have been enrolled at universities. Thirty six thousand or so have graduated, two thousand more each year. Currently, about fifteen thousand students are enrolled.

Ameliorate ? I've made Aboriginal Flags, hundreds of them. I've worked a one-acre vegetable garden on a community, voluntary. I've worked towards those higher educational goals above for thirty years, mostly voluntary, and I'm proud of it. Fifty thousand graduates by 2020 - it's all on my web-site: www.firstsources.info.

And you've done ...... what ?

Actually, I have fears that the constant victim-hood thrust on Indigenous people by the pseudo-Left has done enormous damage to their sense of worth and their aspirations. They'll defeat it, but to be told over and over that the world has done you down, the rest of the world are b@stards, has been, I'd suggest, very enervating, alienating and tending to push some people towards inaction and paranoia. Some but certainly not even a majority.

It isn't working now as much as it used to, thankfully. People are achieving in spite of the bad advice that the pseudo-Left tries to give them. They're liberating themselves, n spite of the Left and indeed, of some of their own elitist 'leaders' who play the same dirty, enervating game of gutting their own people.

This has been fun.

Oh well, back to topic: when will the 'pause' come to an end, do you think ? When will the 20-cm sea-level rise hit Australian shores ?

Joe

Hi Squeers,

I've been almost as surprised as you to find out what was in all those old documents. I too want to believe. But facts keep getting in the way - for example:

* one full-time employee in the 'Aborigines' department', the Protector - from 1837 right through until the 1930s;

* a growing network of ration depots, up to seventy or more in the 1890s;

* Mission staff rarely numbering more than three or four, all with very busy jobs, no time to go out foraging for children;

* in SA at least, no evidence that people were:

* herded onto missions; or

* driven off their lands; or

* stopped from speaking their languages.

To double-check much of this, one can try to propose what SHOULD be there IF something were true. For example, IF people were herded onto Missions AND children were taken in great numbers, wouldn't you expect to see numbers of stranger children on the School Rolls at Missions ?

At the largest Mission in SA, how many 'stranger' children ever appeared on the Roll, apart from a handful of white kids ? Out of eight hundred children enrolled between 1880 and 1966 - about a dozen, some orphans and some foundlings. Two of the rest were the sons of a single mother who married a local. Three were the children of a deserted wife who took her kids to another Mission.

Not exactly a 'generation'.

I want to believe, to be part of the mob. I want to stop thinking and just feel. It's lonely out here :(

Joe

Sorry to be so off-topic, but there you go.

Further in relation to a 'stolen generation':

A range of 'facts' have to be considered:

* after the War, from the Mission that I have data for, many men left to take up jobs in the rural areas, on all manner of delayed infrastructure projects - irrigation, electrification, railways, roads, forestry, dams and reservoirs, etc. From the late forties, they took their families with them; very few of these children were ever taken into care, even though their accommodation was often far inferior to accommodation back on the Mission;

* who was left behind ? The families of men who were perhaps a little more 'casual' abut seeking work. The 'enterprising' families had been in the habit of looking after the children of these families: "Go down to Auntie Jean's, she'll give you tea tonight." But much of that that had come to an end, although pensioners of course still did what they could to look after children, their grandchildren after all;

* the fifties were by far the most common decade in which children were taken into care from this community, about forty out of the eight hundred ever enrolled at the school - and all but one came back within a year or so;

* from a study I did thirty years ago of infant mortality at this community/Mission (from the Death Records), the worst decade for infant mortality between 1860 and 1965 was the nineteen fifties, 1950s;

* the Mission was set up in 1859. The local police station was set up in 1953.

The 1950s were thus a critical time in the break-down of much of social life of this community. One could cautiously conclude that that conjunction of factors partly help to explain the rise in the number of children being taken into care, and why.

Joe