Two cheers for coercion, and other stories

Coercion: Do we ever think coercion might be a good thing? Brad contemplates what a cheating athlete can teach us about the place of law in public life.

Magic economics: The economy is a Pied Piper - a delightful and insightful image from Gillian.

Debate vs argument: What's the difference? And what difference does it make to recognise the distinction?

Peak coal: John celebrates the 140th anniversary of the death of William Stanley Jevons, an English writer who foresaw the end of British coal-expansion from way back in 1865 (and who also gave his name to the Jevons paradox). Jevons was aware that relying on finite resources brought a false complacency to social questions by enabling the deferral of questions of distributive justice. If we expect the economy to keep growing, then we can skirt of over gross inequality, trusting that a rising tide will lift all boats. If we accept that the global economy faces certain physical limits within timeframes of human interest, then the deferral of questions of distributive justice can no longer be maintained. In short, faced with limits to growth, there is a certain sense in which it becomes incumbent upon us to make wealth history (which is also the name of this excellent blog, in which Jeremy wrestles with the economic and social implications of this insight).

Mortality: Ben Myers is dying.

Chalk wars: Chalk it up to the suppression of dissent; increasingly, people are being arrested for chalking pavements, at least in the Land of the Free™. The Edinburgh Festival would go out of business if this attitude were introduced over here. And Arthur Stace (a.k.a. Mr Eternity) would have gone to gaol.
H/T Gordon for the final observation.

Twenty questions: The questions that the US press ought to asking of those who oppose climate action. These questions, from climate ethicist Donald Brown, would make for some interesting discussion starters for groups wanting to wrestle with some of the ethical implications of climate change.

Growth myths: Herman Daly walks us through eight fallacies about economic growth. A very useful and insightful summary of some of Daly's contributions to these discussions.

Last words: The final unpublished letter from eco-author Ernest Callenbach, discovered after his death. His top tips? Hope, offer mutual support, gain practical skills, organise, learn to live with contradictions.

Climate intro: The basics of climate science. It's worth posting pieces like this from time to time, since I am constantly reminding just how common it is for otherwise intelligent people to have some basic misunderstandings (myself included!).

Compliance: You never know you're in prison until you try the door. Glenn Greenwald reflects on why oppression and tyranny are often invisible when close to home.

Australian media: what a week

This week has been a momentous one in Australian news media. The two largest print media corporations (Murdoch's News Ltd and Fairfax) have both announced major restructuring leading to more than 3,000 job losses. Furthermore, the world's richest woman and Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart has announced her intention to take a controlling share of the beleaguered Fairfax. Rinehart has made it clear that her goal is not profit, nor public service but influence, and she intends to exert editorial control, refusing to sign the Fairfax Media Charter of editorial independence. The implications of these changes are wide ranging and yet the precise shape remains uncertain. Rinehart is a noted climate dissenter and fierce opponent of the government's superprofits mining tax. I am no particular fan of Fairfax media, but am not feeling very confident that it will improve under Rinehart. Indeed, if I look at the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) pieces I've linked to over the last few years, I wonder how many would have made the cut under Rinehart's hand. Perhaps we may have little difficulty anticipating more voices like Andrew Bolt and his serial disinformation. It will be interesting to see whether those like Elizabeth Farrelly or Ross Gittins remain.

The week's events have only made me feel more favourably towards The Conversation (which I introduced back here), a not for profit news media site set up by CSIRO and five universities (with a few other corporate partners) that runs ad-free, is editorially independent and with nearly all contributions by accredited experts in the subject who have to declare all potential conflicts of interest next to their article. And just today I've realised that they also publish all their material under a Creative Commons license, meaning it can be republished for free (under certain very non-onerous conditions).

Here are some perspectives on these developments that appeared this week at The Conversation:

Malcolm Fraser: Does it matter who owns our papers? Yes it does.
Malcolm Fraser was Australian Prime Minister between 1975 and 1983 for the more conservative of Australia's two main parties.

Stephan Lewandowsky: Rinehart’s tilt at power is bad news for public debate.

David McKnight: Gina Rinehart and Rupert Murdoch: a study of power in the media.

Andrew Jaspar: Fairfax or Gina-fax? Let’s have the debate before it’s over and Media earthquake: panic, disinformation, and competing visions at Fairfax and News.

UPDATE: GetUp are running a simple survey on public attitudes towards Fairfax, which will take less than 60 seconds.

People and Planet: a new report and other stories

Royal Society report (Summary and recommendations) calls for both population stabilisation and big cuts in consumption to avoid "a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills". This is a significant contribution to the discussion of the relationship between population and consumption (which I discussed back here). I haven't had a chance to read the full report yet, but the conclusions seem to be broadly consistent with the points I made: that both population and consumption need to be addressed, but the latter can be addressed faster, further and with fewer ethical conundrums and so ought to be the primary immediate focus.

Guardian: IEA warns of 6ºC rise. It is hard to get a handle on just how catastrophic 6ºC would be. Let's just say that if we get to 6ºC, I don't think we'll be doing cost-benefit analyses anymore. David Roberts reflects on whether 6ºC is alarmist or realistic and points out that science alone can't tell us how bad climate change will be - because the most important unknown is just how we are all going to act and react over the next couple of decades. Those who think that 6ºC by 2100 is entirely unrealistic implicitly assume either (a) massive global co-ordinated action to mitigate through aggressive emissions reductions across the board or (b) global and long term economic collapse arriving sooner rather than later.

Mongabay: Organic agriculture has lower yields than industrial farming, according to a new study in Nature, especially for grains, though that is not the whole story, since there are various downstream costs of industrial agriculture that reduce yields elsewhere (and elsewhen).

ScienceDaily: Plastic in ocean underestimated by at least a factor of 2.5 due to the effects of wind pushing pollution beneath the surface, rendering measurements and calculations based on skimming the surface inaccurate.

SMH: India's border fence. Not with Pakistan or China, but the 4,000 km militarised fence on the border with Bangladesh, in the face of a rising tide of people fleeing, amongst other things, a rising tide. Though speaking of that rising tide...
H/T Donna.

ABC: Australasia at hottest for (at least) 1,000 years (also in the Guardian and the original study is here). This is a significant finding since most temperature reconstructions have focused on the northern hemisphere, where a greater number of proxy records mean more data is available.

Science: Some good news from Greenland. A review of ten years of satellite data appears to indicate that we are not on track for the "worst case" (i.e. 2 metre) sea level rise by 2100. Of course, "good" is relative; even a rise of a few feet will lead to massive headaches, but multi-metre rises probably mean infrastructure vulnerabilities worth trillions. Sea level rise is one of the most serious long term effects of climate change, though I suspect that over the next few decades it is not going to dominate in comparison with, for example, concerns over food security.

Grist: What would it look like for media to take climate seriously? A very interesting conversation between two journalists about media coverage of the climate threat.

Wisdom in the wild, and other stories

Orion: Wisdom in the wild. What are the effects of removing the aged from a population? Are our hunting and fishing habits not only decimating numbers, but also breaking the cultural continuity of animals?

Guardian: My son, the terror suspect. A father tells the brutal and moving story of his son's conversion to Islam, travels to Pakistan, experiences fighting for the Taliban and eventual capture and suffering at the hands of his own government.

Common Dreams: One more reason why mountaintop removal is really stupid - along with poisoning rivers, destroying forests, levelling mountains and contributing to the destruction of a livable climate, it also doubles cancer rates in the local area.

Bright Green: What's happening in Somalia is no natural disaster.

And the prize for best rant on the Australian carbon price goes to this piece of inspired prose (which comes with a language warning).

Corporate failure: more than a few bad apples

With all the current discussion about News International and its parent company News Corp, many pixels are being devoted to a discussion of just how things went so wrong. After a string of recent revelations, the claim, maintained by News executives for years, that it was one (or then a few) bad apple(s) in an otherwise honest company now appears as either deluded, deceitful or the result of seriously deficient oversight. Since it is nearly always better to assume incompetence rather than conspiracy, at best Tuesday's parliamentary inquiry revealed a string of failed leaders - spanning media editors, senior corporate executives, police and politicians - who remained dangerously out of touch with what was going on around them. At worst, collusion, corruption and cover up on an industrial scale dwarf the significance of the original criminal data acquisition. Whatever the true nature of the rot, it goes beyond a couple of apples, whether at the top or bottom of the pile.

When confronted with misdeeds on this scale, a common reaction (which I notice in my own instincts) is to seek to put a face on the problem, a single individual who can be held ultimately responsible. We want the buck to stop somewhere. The legal pursuit of the questions of who knew what when is important and such investigations are likely to take some time. In the meantime, an impatient public desires visible signs of justice. If we cannot get convictions just yet, we will settle for resignations.

We so desperately want to be able to find someone to blame, some focus for our fury at the damage caused by a system of corruption in which media, police and politicians were too close and saw their own good in terms of a small circle than the national interest they claimed to be representing. We want to know that our violated trust is being taken seriously. Resignations serve as symbolic steps in this direction; they speak to a collective desire to start again and are a metaphor of what it looks like for an organisation to repent.

But there are deeper questions at stake. Individuals did indeed commit crimes and moral failures (either of commission or omission). Many participated in looking the other way, being willfully blind to what was going on because it was more convenient to maintain deniability (or perhaps they continue to mislead political authorities). But to leave the analysis at the level of individuals fails to take account of the dynamics that can exist at a supra-individual level. The whole can often be greater than the sum of the parts. If the only lessons we take away from this saga involve the need for greater personal integrity, we miss the opportunity to ask how the very structures might have served to sideline, subvert or dilute integrity.

There are individual failures, but also failures of structure, failures of collective imagination. They are failures of systems that are based on seeking the wrong kinds of inclusion, systems that punish those who speak up while rewarding those who conform without questioning the quality of what is shared. Whether a for-profit corporation can simulatenously claim to be serving its shareholders and the common good is an interesting question, as is whether a political system in which an MP is required to win more votes than any other candidate every five years encourages a myopic and image-driven politics.

When a corporation is accountable to its shareholders' interests and those interests are understood in narrow financial terms (as they usually are), then the only place that ethical considerations enter into it is the impulse to avoid anything unethical insofar as it hurts the bottom line. Therefore, the recent fall in News Corp shares is the real crime Rupert and his various officers have committed.

But of course that way madness lies, and the reaction of the public to this scandal is partly media-driven hysteria (the very same hysteria that News have used to successfully to drive sales) and partly genuine moral outrage that speaks to a standard other than the bottom line. There is more to living well than making a profit and there is more to a flourishing nation (or world) than a growing GDP. Therefore, there must be more to a healthy company than a rising share price. Let us resist the colonisation of our ethical thought by cost-benefit risk analysis that seeks to put a price on everything. The language of money cannot adequately translate the full complexity and richness of our moral existence and to rely on it to do so is to abdicate our responsibility for pursuing good and shunning evil.

Amidst the repeated failure of not just scattered individuals but of our most trusted social institutions - of corporations and parliaments, banks and police, sensationalist newspapers and a reading public that buys them - it may be worth considering again the apostle Paul's exhortation to his readers in Rome, who were at the heart of a vast empire with powerful cultural incentives to fit in: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds (Romans 12.2 NRSV). This is addressed not simply to the individual believers, but to the church as a whole. It is an invitation to a way of corporate existence based on the good news of God's mercies (verse 1). The church, of course, is not immune from moral failure. Yet the good news here is an invitation to discover anew a source of belonging that does not require us to narrow our moral vision lest we stick out, but which gives us permission to find fresh ways of thinking and seeing amidst a culture that has lost its way. The church has no monopoly on wisdom, has not cornered the market in corporate governance or collective integrity. Yet in its practices of humility, confession, forgiveness and love of neighbour to the glory of God, in its memory of Jesus accepting the outcast and breaking bread with the traitor, in its grasp of the promise of a Spirit who leads into both honesty and new begingings, it has something that is genuinely different and worth rediscovering and sharing by each generation.

Two naughty (Aussie) boys

In the last twelve months, two of the biggest news stories* have had some remarkable parallels. The best known character of each was male, born in Australia, worked in journalism and widely perceived to be arrogant and controlling. Both published secret information (allegedly) obtained by illegal means that others wanted kept private and which proved controversial and explosive. In both cases, the original source of the secret information was incarcerated. In both cases, the events opened the lid on the seedy underbelly of power acting in its own interests. In both cases, the Guardian played a major role in bringing the story to light and in both cases the subsequent legal drama played out in the UK (and to a lesser extent, the US).
*Biggest in terms of media attention they have received, not necessarily the most important at either an immediate or protracted scale.

But the two cases could also not be more different. In the first, an almost unheard of nobody took information that was leaked to him for free, which was of obvious public interest and revealed the double standards, corruption and abuses of power associated with some of the most world's most powerful polities. In the second, a household name and one of the most powerful people in the world owning and leading the world's largest media group was in charge of a newspaper in which a significant culture of double standards, corruption and abuse of power was rife, and which systematically stole and paid bribes for information that was very frequently not in the public interest from thousands of individuals and which was published for titillation and profit. The first, for all his faults, was holding power to account for its manifold abuses. The second, for all his strengths, is responsible for an immensely powerful organisation guilty of manifold abuses, repeatedly denied and (allegedly) illegally suppressed (and he apparently pays no tax). And yet some continue to compare or conflate the two as though they are both simply stories about "illegal hacking".

The outcomes in each case could also not be more different. Julian Assange was quickly labelled a terrorist, pressure from the US government on PayPal, Mastercard and Visa cut off WikiLeaks' funding, there were widespread calls - even from senior US politicians - for his assassination, he was condemned by his own Prime Minister without trial and, ironically, Murdoch media joined in and helped magnify the character assassination on multiple continents. Yet, as far as I am aware, none of those whose abuses he revealed have been charged or resigned. In contrast, so far, Rupert Murdoch has had his next plaything taken away, fielded some embarrassing questions, received professional PR advice to eat humble pie, and taken another kind of pie in the face. Arrests and resignations continue to happen to other people. If we take his repeated professions of ignorance at face value, then my conclusion is that a corporation that has grown too large for the boss to take responsibility for a culture of systematic abuses within it is a corporation that is too large. Julian Assange is not the Messiah; Rupert Murdoch is far more than just a naughty boy.
Image by ALS.

The Conversation: media done better

I frequently complain about the quality of mainstream media (for example, see yesterday's post or last Thursday's). Today I have a brief recommendation of an Australian-based alternative.

One of the (many) major problems with much contemporary commercial media is declining standards of journalistic expertise. This has numerous causes, including the rise of the 24/7 news cycle culture (blame the interwebs) and declining advertising revenues in traditional media (blame the interwebs). But the effect is that more and more news stories are barely re-hashed corporate press releases (known as churnalism) and even those that are not are frequently written by individuals with little background in their subject, making them more prone to shallow, inaccurate and falsely balanced reporting.

Wouldn't it be nice if real experts were to write stories on some of the complex topics we face? Wouldn't it be nice if articles were not simply filling the space between ads? Wouldn't it be nice if contributors' conflicts of interest were made more transparent? Wouldn't it be nice if readers were treated as more than the product being sold to the advertisers?

The Conversation aims to do just that. Just three months old, The Coversation is a not-for-profit independent news source where all the main contributors are academics at universities or the CSIRO. Writers can only contribute on topics they are actively researching or have a history of researching. Conflicts of interest, corporate funding or associations with think-tanks have to be acknowledged upfront. Anonymous comments are banned (indeed, one needs to have an academic email address to even contribute a comment). There are no ads.

One highlight is a recent series of fourteen articles called Cleaning Up the Climate Debate. Each of the articles is given a one paragraph summary here. They are worth more than a causal glance.

I have no conflict of interest in writing this post. It is just a good site.

Rupert's pollution: What does UK phone hacking have to do with Australia's carbon debate?

Two apparently very different stories have been dominating the news in the land of my birth and where I currently live.

In the UK, the News of the World phone hacking saga continues to snowball, with more revelations promised. There are now over 4,000 targets identified (including royalty, celebrities, politicians (even Prime Minister Brown), police, as well as bereaved relatives of soldiers, homocides and terrorism victim), but the story has grown much larger as it becomes clear that the real issue is the cover up. The phone hacking itself was illegal and shockingly callous, representing an abuse of society's willingness to grant journalistic freedom in the pursuit of truth (compare the Wikileaks saga, where the revelations are of much greater social significance and the methods used by the media apparently legal). But knowing that the practice was indefensible, it is becoming clear that News of the World apparently went to great lengths to prevent the full extent of the abuse from becoming public: making payments to police, seeking to pay for silence from early victims in a way that would remove evidence from police investigations, obstructing those investigations by foot dragging, destroying evidence, making misleading statements under oath and contributing substantially to a culture of fearful self-protection amongst politicians who might speak out about the problem. It is not yet clear how far up the chain of authority blame lies, but it seems fair to say that if some of the people currently denying knowledge of what was going on are speaking the truth, then they have become immensely successful while simultaneously being willfully neglectful and culpably negligent. The relative portions of blame to be assigned to journalists, editors, owners, police, politicians and the reading public are still unclear, but the problems are systemic.

It is, however, hard to deny that a hefty portion of the culture in which such abuses can occur can be traced to a situation in which a single man owns such a large chunk of the media that he can threaten political careers and so create the complicit silence in which police corruption can flourish and his underlings feel untouchable. Numerous politicians, including Cameron himself, have been emboldened by the events of the last week to admit their fear of Murdoch had lead them to silence or a soft tread.

So my hunch is that such systemic wickedness arises not so much due to the press being under-regulated, as from its being too concentrated. The crimes and wrongdoings that occurred at News of the World (and likely at other major papers) occurred not simply through lack of oversight, but because editors felt that they were in certain senses above the law, that public figures who openly questioned their modus operandi could be crushed in the court of public opinion through the very media they would be trying to shine a light upon.

Removing that dangerous sense of invincibility includes diluting the power of any one individual through diversifying media ownership. And this, of course, is where the BSkyB deal is intimately related to the whole scandal. Not only ought it be thrown out in light of the revelations of widespread illegality and contempt of the rule of law operating within News Corp, but the appropriate response ought to include the break-up of Murdoch's existing empire into smaller pieces to prevent the kinds of concentration of power that help to generate such pervasive corruption.
And to make Murdoch and News Corp pay their taxes. They are amongst the worst offenders for tax dodging. Murdoch has personally dodged hundreds of millions of pounds of taxes, possibly billions. Of course, this doesn't stop his papers offering lectures on the need for austerity measures to balance the budget.

What does this have to do with the carbon debate in Australia? While phone hacking is getting some coverage, the antipodean front pages are filled with claim and counterclaim about atmospheric chemistry and tax reform. The link is Rupert.

Murdoch's media empire spans four continents and is, by some margin, the largest news media conglomerate in the world. And from Fox News to the Australian, from The Wall Street Journal to The Daily Telegraph (the Sydney tabloid, not the UK broadsheet), Murdoch publishes a huge share of the denial, false balance and misinformation about climate change to be found in the mainstream media (as documented here, here, here and many other places). This is not to say that he only publishes denial, but many of his organisations are the worst offenders at giving equal weight to the claims of highly reputable scientific institutions and ideological think-tanks with significant funding from major fossil fuel companies. It is clear that this is often deliberate policy in order to sow confusion and thus delay and dilute effective collective action.
Murdoch is not, of course, the only wealthy individual deliberately throwing (bull)dust into the air.

This is part of the insidious effect of hyper-capitalism upon democracy. Rather than generating competition and diversity, the concentration of extreme financial wealth in the hands of the few that defines hyper-capitalism risks enabling the further conformity of politics to the interests of the ultra-wealthy. Media plurality is a necessary condition of a free society. So is the avoidance of extreme inequality.

And a postscript: stories like this give me hope. A young TV reporter with a dream career ahead of him makes an important realisation.
H/T Rod Benson.

News of the World 0; Guardian 1

Extraordinary. The world's most read (and most loathed?) English-language newspaper, in existence for 167 years, is to cease publication this Sunday after the rapidly developing events of the last couple of days. Rupert Murdoch's sensationalist tabloid News of the World has faced escalating revelations of wicked and illegal behaviour, including hacking the phones of up to four thousand people - royalty, politicians, celebrities, murder and terrorism victims and their families, soldiers killed in Afghanistan and those of their relatives - as well as interfering in police investigations, paying police for information, lying under oath and (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the rest of this list) hacking the phones of those involved in the investigations into their own misdeeds.*
*I would provide links to each of these, but it would take all day. There is extensive coverage here and just about everywhere.

Credit must go to the years of investigative work by Nick Davies at the Guardian, who kept following the story despite threats from NotW and scorn or lack of interest from many other mainstream media sources.

The fallout will continue for some time. There will be retrials, public inquiries, reform of how the media are (self-)regulated, questions about how one of the editors at the heart of the scandal ended up working for the Prime Minister, reviews in the role of police corruption and very serious questions (hopefully) about the BSkyB takeover that looked set to give Murdoch even more control over British media (and which ought to be rejected on media plurality grounds alone).
UK voters can sign a petition against the takeover and/or contact your MP.

I have no illusions that this will be the end of bad journalism, nor that Murdoch will be likely to change his ways, or lose his malign influence on the politics of too many continents. A publication like NotW doesn't get to where it was without an extensive public willing to pay good money to read gossip and slander. Those malformed desires will not disappear overnight. Other publications will quickly fill the void.

Nonetheless, perhaps this whole episode is a chance for us to stop momentarily and consider what really counts as news, and whom we trust to tell us about it.

Let us also remember that the self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude offered by the gutter tabloid press at the failings and foibles of the famous is all too easily replaced with self-righteous and vicarious schadenfreude at the humiliation of that very press's flagship. So let us not rejoice at a black eye for Murdoch, but mourn for our own myopic moral vision that all too often secretly wishes to be kept in the dark.

"And this is the judgement, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed."

- John 3.19-20 (NRSV).

Churnalism: when recycling goes bad

Churnalism. n. Journalism based significantly on a press release.

"There are more people working in PR than in journalism now."

"About 54% of news articles are derived at least partially from press releases."

I'd post original content, but I don't currently have time, so I'm just going to recycle a story. I wonder how different this piece is from the website's own press release.

Of course, even when journalists actually go beyond a press release, there is no guarantee of quality. I have been interviewed for a handful of news pieces, and have family and close friends who have been involved in dozens more pieces. Of these instances where I have had direct or very reliable knowledge of the story, I would estimate that more than three quarters of the published stories made basic factual errors, many of them non-trivial.

I have also been (briefly and part-time) a journalist and was frequently given press releases to work from (and not really expected to go beyond them).

Just because it is coming from a major news source doesn't mean it is news. In a recent post I warned against believing everything you read in comments on major sites. The moral of this story is, don't believe everything above the line either.

Top ten climate science stories of the year

Well, actually nine climate stories and one biodiversity story with a climate link.

How many of these did you hear about? If you heard about them, how many did you hear through mainstream media sources? How can the mainstream media spend so long on trivia and fail to mention some of the most significant risks facing our society identified over the last twelve months? Is it because we don't want to know? Insert head (A) into sand (B). Repeat.

Stand with WikiLeaks

The massive campaign of intimidation against WikiLeaks is sending a chill through free media advocates everywhere.

Top US politicians have called WikiLeaks a terrorist organization and suggested assassination of its staff, and the organization has come under intense government and corporate attack. But WikiLeaks is only publishing information passed to it by a whistle-blower. And it has partnered with the world's leading newspapers to vet the information it publishes.

If WikiLeaks has broken laws, it should face legal action. But the immense extra-judicial intimidation is an attack on democracy. We urgently need a public outcry for freedom of the press and expression. Sign the petition to stop the crackdown and forward this email to everyone -- let's get 1 million voices this week!

WikiLeaks isn't acting alone -- it has partnered with the top newspapers in the world (The New York Times, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, etc.) to carefully review 250,000 US diplomatic cables and remove any information that it is irresponsible to publish. Only 800 cables have been published so far. Past WikiLeaks publications have exposed government-backed torture, the murder of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and corporate corruption [plus government corruption and abuses of power in various places around the world].

The US government is currently pursuing all legal avenues to stop WikiLeaks from publishing more cables, but the laws of democracies protect freedom of the press. The US and other governments may not like the laws that protect our freedom of expression, but that's exactly why it's so important that we have them, and why only a democratic process can change them.

Reasonable people can disagree on whether WikiLeaks is releasing more information than the public should see, whether it undermines diplomatic confidentiality and whether that's a good thing, whether its founder Julian Assange has the personal character of a hero or a villain. But none of this justifies a vicious campaign of intimidation to silence a legal media outlet by governments and corporations. Click to join the call to stop the crackdown.

Ever wonder why the media so rarely gives the full story of what happens behind the scenes? This is why - because when they do, governments [and corporations] can be vicious in their response. And when that happens, it's up to the public to stand up for our democratic rights to a free press and freedom of expression. Never has there been a more vital time for us to do so.

- Avaaz.org.

I think this is a well-worded petition. There is no need to agree with WikiLeak's tactics or its specific judgements on some cables to be disgusted with or at least disturbed by elements of the official response.
PS Hooray for Rudd: "Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorised release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network. The Americans are responsible for that. [...] I think there are real questions to be asked about the adequacy of [the US] security systems and the level of access that people have had to that material. [...] The core responsibility, and therefore legal liability, goes to those individuals responsible for that initial unauthorised release."

Kudos too to the hundreds of academics, writers, editors, lawyers, journalists, politicians and other Australian figures who have sent this open letter to PM Gillard, calling for her to uphold the rule of law. I have written to her about this as well, which you can do here.

And Malcolm Turnbull talks a great deal of sense.

As does Frank La Rue, the UN representative for freedom of opinion and expression.

And, of course, Assange himself deserves to be heard.

How to be a science journalist

How 95% of all science reporting is done. Don't miss the comments.

Why does the media do so poorly covering climate disruption?

So, in order to sell and appeal, whether public service or commercial, journalism needs events. We need clear causes, agents and forces to be visibly responsible. We need (not that we put it like this) a narrative of baddies and goodies. Where the climate is concerned, things are slow-moving, complex, and what’s more, we ourselves are the baddies. That’s not something listeners and viewers want or wanted to be told.

- Mark Brayne, former BBC correspondent and editor.

The full discussion is here.

What can philosophy say about ecological crises?

"The environmental dangers that now face [hu]mankind put the reflexive non-scientist in an awkward situation. He must acknowledge that he can have precisely nothing interesting to say on the two most important questions in the air, namely, 'What is going to happen to us?' and 'What should we do?' It is not from a philosopher that you stand to be enlightened.

"Which is not to invalidate the attempt to contemplate, rather than simply find a way out of, our ecological dilemmas. It remains valid to try to fathom what the idea of planetary abuse has done to our minds. We may ask what the awareness of the crisis has done to our inner landscape, how it has altered the human psyche.

"One should begin by observing that there is nothing new for mankind about confronting the possibility of its own destruction. The feeling that the present order – the neat fields, the ordered laundry cupboards, the full granaries – might soon disappear, would have been intensely familiar to any inhabitant of medieval Europe. One need only study the carvings on the sides of the cathedrals to see that our imaginations have for centuries been haunted by visions of Armageddon.

"However, we have grown used to conceiving of our present environmental situation as unparalleled, perhaps because we have learnt of it through the media and because for the daily paper, everything must, from an a priori position, be novel. There never was a Lisbon earthquake or a sack of Rome. No one has ever murdered their children or wasted their fortune. This isn’t to deny some intensely novel features behind our anxieties, just to insist that we must carefully separate out the familiar, long-standing morbidity of homo sapiens from the particular features of the current predicament."

- Alain de Botton, "Ecology" in the UN Chronicle.

Populist philosopher Alain de Botton can be somewhat hit and miss, but I think this piece is well worth reading in full (see right hand column).

Fears about our present situation are neither entirely novel nor merely a repetition of ancient patterns. Indeed, part of what I will be arguing in my project is that in certain important respects, we do face genuinely new challenges and fears in the various ecological and resource crises of our time. More on that in future posts, but if you want to get a gist of where I'm headed (at least insofar as the diagnosis of an historically novel issue), read the article.
H/T Stuart.

Another exoneration: IPCC head cleared of financial wrongdoing by KPMG

To go along with the recent string of exonerations that have been given by public enquiries concerning the hacked CRU emails and the vindication of Michael Mann's conduct by PSU, now accusations of financial impropriety made against Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, have also been refuted in an investigation by KPMG. The Sunday Telegraph, which first broke the story, has removed it and offered an apology.

Dr Pachauri has received a sum total of £0 for his work as IPCC chair (yes, far from a socialist plot to install world government, the IPCC is a tiny group co-ordinating the work of thousands of scientists that can't even afford to pay its own chair). And his entire income is under £50,000. More details are found here, with intelligent discussion here.

But like all such retractions, it is too little, too late. The smear did its job, spreading popular doubt about the work of the IPCC around the time of increased global attention on the issue due to the Copenhagen conference.

Yet of all the accusations against climate science flying around at the end of last year, the worst that have been substantiated were a reference to an incorrect date on one page of the IPCC's 2007 report (which ran to thousands of pages), some personal nastiness in private emails and possible evasion of FOI requests by a scientist under siege from dozens of such requests. No consensus has collapsed, no climatologists have been shown to have been fraudulent, no studies have been fatally undermined, no new theory to explain the data has gained wide acceptance. It is still the case that over 97% of the most active climatologists agree that human emissions are the primary culprit for a significant and ongoing rise in global temperatures and shift in climate patterns.

Moral: don't believe every breathless scandal dished out by the popular media, especially when the source is a blogger with an unimpressive track record and the target is a highly politicised figure. But then, most of you knew that already.

Ground zero mosque

See also this take by Charlie Brooker.

How green are the parties?

In a comment on a recent post, I was asked "which party [do] you think people should vote for if they really care about environmental issues?"

You can read my response, or better, you can listen to one of Australia's oldest and largest environmental organisations. The Australian Conservation Foundation, a non-profit non-partisan non-government organisation founded in 1966 and with about 40,000 members, has put out a 2010 election scorecard comparing the three major parties across twenty four tests. The ranking may not be a surprise, but the gaps are larger than I expected. You can download the full scorecard (including a discussion of method) here, but the summary table looks like this:

	ALP	Coalition	Greens
Reduce pollution	37%	13%	90%
Clean energy	47%	27%	100%
Sustainable cities	67%	20%	80%
Healthy environment	55%	23%	88%
Overall	50%	20%	89%

Despite claims of some Christians that they all "support greater care of God's environment", the parties are far from equal on this front.

Many readers may also be interested to compare the parties' commitments to international poverty reduction. The Make Poverty History website has published a 2010 election scorecard (or as a pdf). The differences between the parties are again quite significant.

Or if you're concerned about social justice within Australia, UnitingCare has this scorecard (Anglicare's election contribution is here). Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) have also put together this scorecard comparing the parties on indigenous affairs, and the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre have put out this one.

Of course, these are not the only issues, but they are a few of issues that are (to different degrees) quite likely to come up in the next parliament (and, in the case of Senate elections, the next two Parliaments), and which Christians may find particularly interesting, especially since they are not always adequately covered by the mainstream media.

Weather vs climate

There is an important and often misunderstood distinction between weather and climate.

Weather is what is happening when you go outside. It is what meteorologists study and consists of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions driven by the movements of blocks of hot and cold air. It is measured hour by hour (or even minute by minute) and predicted a few days in advance, beyond which the complexities and sensitivities of the system make computational estimation almost impossible.

Climate refers to long term patterns of weather. It is what climatologists study and consists of dynamical systems driven by long term fluctuations in solar activity, oceanic currents, surface albedo and atmospheric chemistry (and, over the very long term, by geological forces and plate tectonics). It is measured in decades, centuries and millennia and predicted in decades.

Predicting the climate
Yet this raises a common question: if we can't predict next weekend's weather, how can we predict the climate in 2050? Remember that climate prediction doesn't mean a prediction of weather, on which day it might rain or be a certain temperature at a given location. It means predicting the overall pattern, which, while chaotic from week to week, fluctuates within a certain range over the long term. Climate prediction means predicting changes in that range within which weather might fluctuate.

Imagine a pot of water being brought to the boil. Although predicting exactly where and when a bubble will appear is almost impossible, it is still quite possible (given knowledge of the original temperature and volume of the water and the amount of heat energy being applied) to predict when it boil with some degree of accuracy. Or consider tossing a coin one thousand times. It is almost impossible to know whether any given toss will be heads or tails, but we can all predict that there will be about five hundred of each. Or think of sitting on a packed train. You mightn't be able to guess how the person next to you is likely to vote in an election, but with knowledge of quality polling data (if that is not an oxymoron), you can make a pretty good estimate of the likely distribution of votes on the train as a whole.

So climate and weather are closely related, but it is important to keep their distinction in mind. One way of putting it I heard recently is that climate trains the boxer, the weather throws the punches.

This distinction means that it is not possible to directly attribute any particular example of weather either to anthropogenic climate change or to natural variation. A cold day doesn't disprove the theory any more than a hot day proves it. Each are a tiny piece of evidence in a much, much larger pattern. And when an extreme weather event comes along (such as the current Russian heat wave and Asian floods), this too doesn't by itself prove anything. What does count, however, is the well-recorded pattern of increasing frequency and intensity of such events. Put simply, climate change doesn't cause extreme weather, but it increases the chances of it happening, and increases the extremity of what is possible. This is because warmer air can hold more water, bringing more intense precipitation. By the way, this includes more intense snowfall if the temperature happens to be below freezing, as was seen in the northeastern US earlier in the year. Or as NASA says, this is what global warming looks like.

Read more

Why I am neither left nor right: where I stand politically

Christians and partisanship
In the comments of a recent post, I claimed that I was a Christian "who was neither left nor right".

As a result, a friend wrote to me expressing concern that I was perhaps being disingenuous about my loyalties considering various experiences and conversations we'd shared in which I'd been critical of one "side" of Australian politics and supportive of the other. My friend encouraged me to be upfront about where I am coming from politically and so I thought I would take the opportunity to do so, if for no other reason than to give a little more context for any comments I might make on policy or party-political issues from time to time.

When I said that I was a Christian who was neither left nor right, I meant it. I didn't mean that I have no political opinions or am apolitical, but that I generally try to be non-partisan for what I believe are good theological reasons.

As a disciple of Jesus, my political allegiance is to him alone. He has received all authority in heaven and on earth from the Father and so all political authorities that remain in this present age have been put on notice. What authority they have is derivative from his and is strictly temporary. Their jurisdiction is similarly limited. And Christians may not place in them anything other than small and provisional hopes, nor expect of them anything other than partial victories and defeats in a world marred by sin and indeed should expect them sometimes to resemble the powers and principalities arranged against God. So any identification by a Christian with a political cause will be under these caveats.
Or, to put this another way, it may come as no surprise that I broadly agree with my PhD supervisor Oliver O'Donovan. For a decent summary of some of his key ideas, see this essay by Andrew Errington, which is Andrew's work but draws upon O'Donovan fairly extensively.

Neither right nor left
I reject being straightforwardly labelled as "left" or "right" for two reasons, one philosophical and one theological. First, I don't think that the spectrums of left/right or conservative/progressive are particularly useful conceptual tools for discussing a political field that has more than one dimension. At best they are a commonly-accepted shorthand, but they often obscure as much as they reveal. The two-party system that dominates politics in Australia, the US and the UK (the three arenas with which I am most familiar) generally simplifies all issues to two positions. Sometimes these two positions are actually very close to one another, but this is hidden by constant focus on their slight distinctions. This represents a (perhaps partially inevitable) dumbing down of political discourse and debate and is not helped by mainstream media sources that are more interested in profit than accuracy or nuance.

But more importantly, speaking theologically and ethically, none of the parties of which I'm aware manifestly represents the cause of the gospel. Each holds positions and priorities that as a Christian I find disappointing, disturbing or repulsive. Furthermore, neither the agenda of the "left" nor the "right" can be entirely adopted or entirely demonised by thoughtful followers of a crucified and risen king. Both contain worthwhile attempts to defend aspects of the good creation. In a world of complex goods, there will rarely be policies that are unambiguous expressions of justice, truth and the common good. By the same token, the parasitic nature of evil means that even the worst policies will lay claim to some good thing, even if, in seeking to defend it, they trample other (and perhaps more important) goods. When the complexity of the moral and political field is combined with human sinfulness and the impossibility of any leader (other than Jesus) being the Messiah,* then no party or "side" can claim the obvious, exclusive, permanent or total commitment of Christians.
*Indeed, some of my longer blog pieces have been critiquing implicit messianism, whether associated with leaders or nations. Here is one example and here is another.

Consequently, voting is only ever possible while holding one's nose. I've rarely voted with much confidence and never without some degree of regret, often quite deep. And remember, voting is only the tip of the iceberg when considering what makes for a healthy political authority. But if and when you do vote, it ought to be done thoughtfully and out of concern for neighbour.

Politics and love
Indeed, all Christian political activity (which may begin with voting, but is not at all limited to it) is a response to the royal law of love - love for God and neighbour. This is also what prevents political apathy or disengagement, or a total retreat into cynicism. To write off the political authorities as irrelevant, uselessly corrupt or ubiquitously anti-Christ frequently means to abandon one's neighbour to the strongest or sneakiest bully. Of course, political engagement is neither the start nor the end of the love command, and it is a task that falls on the church community as a body, in which different members may play different roles. It is not the case that every member needs to be equally well informed or passionate about every political matter.

A significant part of Christian political responsibility will be warning political authorities when they are overstepping their jurisdiction, or when they are neglecting to protect the vulnerable and uphold justice. And so part of this task is unavoidably critical. But it is also important to seek ways forward, to offer creative suggestions, to pursue the best that it is currently possible to achieve, to engage in the often messy and always imperfectible pursuit of justice. And so it may be the case that some Christians will be called into seeking elected office, into partial and provisional loyalty to a party or cause for the sake of the common good. Being a Christian ruler is not necessarily oxymoronic.

My recent political activity
On my blog I have made positive comments about a variety of political parties and individuals and not all on one "side". I have supported particular campaigns by various groups who in some cases identify as either "progressive" or "conservative", but this doesn't mean I endorse everything they do.

I don't think that I have ever campaigned on my blog for a particular party or individual, but even if I have (or do so in future), this would represent a provisional and highly fallible position based on my evaluation of current needs and opportunities.

I am not claiming to be a swinging voter (though I have voted for various parties at various times) nor to be a centrist (though, like the "left" and "right", it has some good points). I am not saying that I have no preferences or sit on the fence.

At different times I have written to MPs, councillors, government and shadow ministers and prime ministers of many parties (in a number of countries) seeking to put forward particular policies, offer praise and humbly present criticism. Always I have promised to pray for them and I try to keep that promise.

At times I have expressed frustration at how common it is in some circles to assume that Christian discipleship entails partisan political conservatism (though I am just as frustrated by the opposite assumption, it is simply a little less prominent at this point in history). I have argued against the idea that most issues have a single and obvious Christian position; I think that it is possible for biblical Christians of goodwill and honesty to disagree on the policies that will best uphold and pursue justice. I reject the assumption that only certain issues are "Christian", or that there are a small range of issues (generally to do with sexuality) on which Christians ought primarily or exclusively to base their voting and other political activity. And, perhaps quite obviously, I believe that there are some issues (such as ecology) that Christians have generally not paid enough attention to.

So if you had me pegged, pigeonholed or stereotyped, I hope that this helps to clarify where I do (and don't!) stand politically. I am not trying to hide anything; I am sorry if I have not always been sufficiently clear on these matters.
UPDATE: a slightly modified version of this post has been included on the CPX site as part of their election coverage.