WAKING THE GIANT: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes BILL McGUIRE

WAKING THE GIANT: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes
BILL McGUIRE
Oxford University Press, 2012, 303 pages, $35.95 (hb)
 
Review by Phil Shannon

It is easy to forget, says Professor Bill McGuire of University College London in Waking the Giant, that human civilisation has thrived only in the broadly benign climate of the last few thousand years following the end of the last post-glacial era.  This spacious window of climatic and geologic calm, however, is closing well ahead of its allotted global freeze-thaw-cycle time as a result of human-caused climate change capable of compressing vast geologic eras into mere human generations.

Despite some “muddle-headed” cyber-speculation that anthropogenic climate change caused the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Japanese marine earthquake-tsunamis (which were driven by plate boundary tectonic forces alone), there is well-established scientific evidence, says McGuire, that global warming of the atmosphere interacts with the geosphere (the solid Earth) through changes in the hydrosphere (sea-level rises from thermal expansion of the oceans and from melting polar and glacier ice), with potentially harmful consequences for the biosphere (humanity and other life forms) through more volcano, earthquake and tsunami action.

Volcanic activity is stimulated by global warming through the added weight of seawater stressing the Earth’s crust to trigger the expulsion of stored magma in ‘primed’ volcanoes.  Primed volcanoes “teeter on the edge of stability” and are highly sensitive to even miniscule changes in the environment such as tidal stresses, rainfall,  annual variations in the shape of the planet and, especially, changes in the hydrological cycle.

A volcano eruption season (November to April) exists during which the wholesale redistribution of 10¹⁶ kilograms of the planet’s water is shifted between the two hemispheres during their respective winters, causing deformations at the Earth’s surface from the extra load exerted by lying snow, rainfall-recharged groundwater and a cooler, denser atmosphere.  The resulting crustal squash prompts primed volcanoes to blow their top in classic volcano fashion whilst increased ocean stress-loading also makes the flanks of volcanoes more prone to collapse with explosive decompression of magma.

Thinning ice also plays a role in increased earthquake activity.  The bouncing back of the planet’s crust following extended glacial detention beneath thick ice allows long-subdued tectonic faults, kept in stasis by the weight of the ice, to rupture.  Ten thousand years after the end of the last Ice Age, the resulting changes in ice mass at that time still continue to trigger, or at least facilitate, earthquakes (especially in Alaska, the Andes and New Zealand) whilst the burst of post-glacial earthquakes in Canada and Europe provide testimony for a possible earthquake future should the great, but shrinking, ice masses that now cover Greenland and West Antarctica go the same way as the ice sheets of the late Pleistocene.

If less ice weight is a causal mechanism for more earthquakes directly below the ice, so is the increased weight at the edges from the newly freed-up water (which weighs more than ice).  At over a hundred dam locations, the weight of reservoir water has been found to  increase the risk of seismic activity through destabilising geological faults at the periphery.  This same principle will apply to the water released from polar ice caps, glaciers and permafrost by global warming.

With increased volcanic and seismic activity comes increased tsunami risk.  The tsunami lethality of massive undersea earthquakes is well known but tsunamis can also derive from collapsing coastal or island volcanoes which are far from rare (around twenty per century) and likely to become less rare because such collapses show a “clear preference” for a warming world.

Unlike the geologist glove-puppets of the climate change denialist mining industry, McGuire sources peer-reviewed science, ranging from long-established consensus to plausible conjecture, with scientific unknowns and hotly contentious research recognised as such.  The geological science in McGuire’s book requires concentration but his accessible presentation repays the effort.

With the advent of fossil fuel burning in the second half of the 20^th century, says McGuire, “nature has”, for the first time in the history of our planet, “lost its role as the primary determinant of what is happening to our climate” and so “how we live and what we do in the next few decades” is crucial to the future of our world.

Will violent geological upheaval “compound all the other woes” of anthropogenic climate change?  If scientists like McGuire prevail, the worst may yet be avoided.  If carbon-dirty profits prevail, then cataclysmic geological grief will be added to an already unappetising climate change agenda.

MULLAHS WITHOUT MERCY: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons by GEOFFREY ROBERTSON

MULLAHS WITHOUT MERCY: Human Rights and Nuclear Weapons

GEOFFREY ROBERTSON
Vintage Books, 2012, 389 pages, $34.95 (pb)
 
Review by Phil Shannon

“Just how much blood is on the hands that could soon grasp nuclear weapons”, asks human rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, of Iran’s rulers.  Quite a bit, he shows in Mullahs Without Mercy, with the logical inference that “it is surely obvious that a state which mass-murders its own people is more likely to misuse a weapon that can mass-murder its enemies”.

Robertson documents three episodes of human rights abuses by the Islamic state which usurped power in Iran following the 1979 popular revolution against a brutal, US-supported dictatorship.  The first mass liquidation of regime opponents came in 1988 when seven thousand jailed members of an Islamic-Marxist party were executed, followed by thousands of their more godless socialist peers whose atheistic thought-crimes and refusal to adopt the religious rituals of the theocratic state condemned them to whipping, torture and murder.

Second, the terror regime spread its global wings between 1989 and 1996 with an assassination campaign of Iranian dissenters in foreign countries (160 killed), plus the ‘chain murders’ of Iran’s domestic intelligentsia (80 killed), all victims of a regime that “could not tolerate the intellectual, the scholar or the poet”.

Third, ‘Green Movement’ protests over the rigged 2009 elections which returned President Ahmadinejad were met with four thousand arrests involving rape, beatings, torture, show trials and murder.

Many of the regime authors of these atrocities remain in power in Iran, men in the “Ayatollah’s inner circle, ministers and diplomats who knew what was happening, judges who betrayed their calling by zealously sentencing prisoners to death and torture without trial, prison governors and intelligence officers who ushered victims into the gallows’ queues”.  These same men want nuclear weapons - for nationalist political fervour, for Shia supremacy against Iran’s Sunni neighbours and for deterrence against Israel’s strike-ready nuclear arsenal.

Iran’s bomb aspirations began with the Shah who established a covert nuclear weapons program, ironically scuppered by the post-revolutionary Islamic leaders who regarded the nuclear bomb as ‘Western-inspired’ and therefore ‘un-Islamic’, a religious dogma which was to be overcome by a draining eight year war with Iraq.

Iran’s history about its nuclear ambitions has, says Robertson, involved some honesty larded with lying, evasion, deception, secretiveness and diplomatic time-buying.  From the 2011 and 2012 reports of the UN’s nuclear monitoring body, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Robertson concludes that Iran is “on course” for producing a bomb by around 2015.

Can Iran’s rulers, such flagrant human rights criminals, be trusted on nuclear weapons?, asks Robertson.  Clearly not, he says, arguing, as he would in court, that past illegal form matters to any consideration of current or future illegality.

As a lawyer, however, Robertson might have been expected to produce better evidence on Iran’s nuclear bomb acquisition than that contained in IEAE reports, although, to be fair, he notes that the IEAE often relies on “the CIA and other state intelligence services prepared to inform, not always accurately, on their enemies” and that the current IEAE head, Yikia Amano, has declared (secretly, until Wikileaks got hold of it) that he is ‘solidly in the US court’.  Robertson argues, however, that IEAE “suspicions” of an Iranian bomb-making program are not allayed by Tehran’s refusal to allow inspections of its underground military base site. 

Should the necessary “clear proof” of an Iranian bomb be produced, Robertson argues, then bombing of Iran, targeting  its four nuclear sites, may be required as a “last resort” but he is aghast at the prospect because it would result in tens of thousands of deaths with hundreds of thousands exposed to radiation fallout.  

Such an unappetising Hobson’s Choice, says Robertson, is a result of weak international law.  The only global nuclear weapons legal agreement, the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was designed to keep the bomb in the hands of the big five initial nuclear-armed powers (America, Britain, Russia, China and France) by promising, at some unspecified time, to reduce their stockpile to zero in return for assisting other countries with civilian nuclear energy.

The NPT failed to ban the bomb because the big five have not disarmed (although down from Cold War heights of 70,000, some 19,000 nuclear weapons still bristle) whilst forty countries have been encouraged to develop a nuclear fuel cycle which inevitably includes a nuclear weapons potential. 

The nuclear fuel cycle enriches the concentration of ‘fissile’ uranium (U-235, capable of nuclear chain-reaction) from 0.7% of naturally-occurring uranium (the rest is non-fissile U-238) to 3.5% (suitable for nuclear power).  It is only a few months and a few spins of the gas centrifuges to enrich to 90% (suitable for nuclear weapons). Iran is reported to have reached the 29% mark.

Given the jealous guarding of their nuclear weapons’ monopoly by the big five, since joined by the nuclear-armed NPT non-signatories (India, Pakistan and Israel) and the NPT-withdrawalist (North Korea), “the non-proliferation system now serves the interests of proliferators” desirous of joining the bomb club for domestic and international politico-military reasons.

Robertson’s preferred, legalistic, solution is for a revamped international human rights law, one which recognises that the nuclear bomb is the ultimate human rights issue (vaporised humans are not around to have human rights).  For “untrustworthy” nations (Robertson puts Iran at the head of a queue of bomb-seeking countries whose “rulers lack all decency”), this law would put the bomb-making “politicians and prelates, scientists and generals, in prison”.  The law would also compel existing nuclear powers to decommission all their nuclear weapons.

Robertson’s solution, however, raises an obvious question – how are governments to be assessed as sufficiently vile to be candidates for sanctions and military intervention?  They must be, says Robertson, “headed by international criminals” but will we see NATO countries invading themselves to enforce disarmament, for, after all, their track record for illegal mass-murder and torture of foreigners gives Iran’s scorecard some competition.  Robertson’s proposed legal solution to nuclear weapons is likely to be just a law of the powerful, as Robertson himself concedes, noting that forcible nuclear disarmament “will be used opportunistically and mainly by the US against its enemies”.

Robertson does, however, approach the political nub of the issue when he argues that any “global legal architecture” for disarmament merely “supports but does not bring about” a nuclear-free world and that “public awareness” is needed to force governments to act.  Robertson’s most cogent argument in his book is that nuclear energy, even if it was ‘clean’ energy, is inseparable from the nuclear bomb.  Nuclear disarmament begins at home, at whatever stage of any country’s nuclear fuel cycle, from finished bomb product to raw material input, including Australia’s uranium which, at 40% of the world supply, is nearly half of the world’s nuclear problem right here.

JOSEPH ANTON: A Memoir by SALMAN RUSHDIE

JOSEPH ANTON: A Memoir
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Random House, 2012, 636 pages, $35 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

There was much that was hard to take for the author of The Satanic Verses – not being able to pick up his own mail, not being able to go for a walk without armed police taking an hour to set it up for him, being robbed of the deep concentration necessary for creative writing.  That, and the constant threat of violent assassination.

Salman Rushdie’s memoir of his decade dodging death vividly shows how he (as Joseph Anton, his security alias named after two of his favourite authors – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov) coped with his loss of liberty and the death threat (fatwa) issued against him in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini by, in the end, taking his fight for free speech to his would-be silencers.

The London-based writer from a free-thinking Indian Muslim family artfully combined left wing politics with the personal in his novels.  In 1981 came the Booker-winning Midnight’s Children, about India’s independence, then Shame, about Pakistan’s military governments, followed by The Satanic Verses, his “origin story of Islam” which scrutinised Muhammad’s ‘divinely revealed’ text, the Qur’an, like any other book, as a human product of history, sociology, psychology and politics.

In Iran, Khomeini headed up a “mullocracy” which had usurped the 1979 revolution - the Ayatollah, says Rushdie, had “murdered those who brought him to head of the revolution” and dispatched others he disliked – “unionists, feminists, socialists, Communists, homosexuals”.  The Satanic Verses had a portrait of an Imam like Khomeini, “eating his own revolution”.  Unpopular because of a disastrous war with Iraq, the ruling clerical caste needed to regain political momentum and found its rallying point in Rushdie and his ‘offensive’ novel.

Iranian government hit squads and a million dollar, quasi-governmental bounty, and British Islamic extremists, meant the death threat “was not merely theoretical”.  Books were burnt, bookstores and libraries fire-bombed, mass ‘KILL THE DOG’ Muslim rallies held in Hyde Park, threatening letters sent written in blood, translators and publishers stabbed, shot and killed.

Rushdie was protected by Special Branch police - their “ordinary human kindness … toward a fellow human being in ‘one hell of a jam’ … never ceased to move him”.  He was less enamoured of their ‘higher-ups’ in Scotland Yard who poorly disguised their distaste for him because he was a Labour man in a Tory administration who, unlike the politicians under their guard, ‘had not performed a service to the nation’.

There were others hostile to Rushdie.  Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, would not meet him because this would ‘send the wrong message’ to Iran (it certainly sent the wrong message on free speech).  A meeting with her successor, John Major, was scuttled by a Tory backbench which “by a curious coincidence” allowed a proposed British trade delegation to Iran to proceed.  The historian and Tory peer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, mused on how British Muslims should ‘waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve his manners’.

Labour politicians equivocated, worried about the Muslim vote.  A British Muslim community leader who declared  that ‘death is, perhaps, a bit too easy’ for Rushdie was knighted on the recommendation of Labour Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Prince Charles called Rushdie a bad writer who cost the government too much to protect (the irony detector of this expensive, taxpayer-supported social parasite who has never written anything of interest must have been on the fritz when he said this).  Pop singer and Muslim convert, Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam) kept bubbling up in the media “like a fart in a bathtub”, joining the chorus demanding a grovelling apology from Rushdie for causing religious ‘offense’. 

The tabloid media banged on about the ungrateful reprobate who ‘hated Britain’, with the Daily Insult maintaining a steady character assassination (he was ‘bad-mannered, sullen, graceless, silly, curmudgeonly, unattractive, small-minded, arrogant and egocentric’).  The ‘liberal’ media found the usual two sides to it all, “shifting the blame from the men of violence to the target of their attack” because Rushdie had ‘brought it on himself’.

Many more, however, sprang to Rushdie’s defense.  With moral support, solidarity declarations and safe houses, writers rallied to his side universally (apart from John le Carré, nursing a grudge about a negative book review Rushdie had once written of a le Carré novel, saying that Rushdie had been ‘impertinent to great religions’ and was engaging in ‘cultural intolerance masquerading as free speech’).

Many people bought Rushdie’s book as an act of solidarity, and wore ‘I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE’ badges.  Building workers guessed why bullet-proof glass was required in the ground-floor windows in a house they were renovating for Mr Anton but staid mum because they “understood that this was an important secret to keep; and so, quite simply, they kept it”.

Warmly-received, surprise appearances at literary events were life-giving whilst, on airlines which allowed the terrorist target to board, he found spontaneous “friendship, solidarity and sympathy” from the passengers.  Eighty thousand U2 fans cheered him on stage at Wembley Stadium.  When nervous bookchains in North America withdrew the book from sale, their staff unions protested and volunteered to stand next to plate-glass windows with the book display.

On a world book tour, an Algerian restaurateur named Rouchdy (pronounced Rushdie) was proud of the high-risk name-association - ‘I was always getting mistaken for you!  I say, no, no, I am much better looking!’.  In Australia, an ambulance officer who attended a near-fatal crash between Rushdie and a semi-trailer on the Princes Highway was delighted to ask for his autograph.

This  determination of his supporters “not to allow the darkness to prevail” strengthened Rushdie’s “battle against hopelessness”, making him straighten his shoulders and campaign against the fatwa.  Staying low, and trying to love and be loved by his enemy, had proved futile.  “Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt”, he resolved – “there was more dignity in being a combatant than a victim”.

 

Pugnacious ripostes to all his detractors were delivered with elegant scorn and Rushdie also took up his case directly with world leaders, slowly making the tide turn.  Rushdie suspected that he was “being used by the West as a pawn in a larger game” of geo-political power plays in Iran and the Middle East but he quite justifiably used this to grab his life back.

In 1998, Iran formally ended the fatwa, a victory won by “ordinary people”, says Rushdie, for the principle of free speech.  All those who vacillated, who demanded apology and compromise, who dragged the red herrings of taxpayer cost and Rushdie’s personality across the free speech trail, who muddied the waters in the name of opposing ‘Islamophobia’, were objectively on the side of the book-burners and assassins.  Rushdie is wholly persuasive about this.

What he is less than convincing on is that “Islam itself”, and not just the radical fringes of its one billion followers, is fatally corrupted by religious intolerance.  Some of Rushdie’s toughest defenders were Muslims, who were assaulted or killed by their fanatical brethren for their pains.  Rushdie’s attempt to taint all Muslims with the “bloody theocracies” of dictatorial Islamic states, as with his glib parallel of equating Marxism with repressive Stalinist states, is not compelling.

Part of a critique of “religious unreason” is how power inequalities between the West and the Muslim world are refracted through religion, not caused by it.  A radical anti-Islam stand can lead to uncritical support for the hypocritical donning of the mantle of ‘freedom’ by Western powers in their political crusades against Muslim countries, and, sure enough, Rushdie fell into trap of supporting the US-led war against Afghanistan on anti-terrorism grounds. 

As Rushdie would no doubt accept, however, the “ability to quarrel”, over his politics as with religion or anything else, is fundamental to a free society.  His own determination to fight violent censorship, and his brilliantly-written memoir, have strengthened the right to free speech.

GREENWASH: Big Brands and Carbon Scams by GUY PEARSE

GREENWASH: Big Brands and Carbon Scams
GUY PEARSE
Black Inc., 2012, 264 pages, $29.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The response of big business to global warming, their propaganda would have us believe, is to ride to the rescue by reducing their carbon emissions.  As Guy Pearse shows in Greenwash, however, this is just a marketing ploy to attract the dollars of the environmentally-concerned customer.

Techniques for slapping on the green veneer include the cost-free chart-toppers of green rhetoric, slogans, logos and name changes  – the oil company, BP, for example, becomes Beyond Petroleum although fossil fuels deliver 98% of its revenue.

Also popular are the setting of vague and distant ‘carbon-neutral’ targets or timelines, if any.  Where carbon-reduction is quantified and documented in glossy sustainability reports, mathematical sleight-of-hand and fancy linguistic footwork obscure the bigger picture of rising emissions.  Excluding overseas operations or the manufacturing outsourced to carbon-intensive factories of developing countries helps to cook the carbon books, as does ignoring the 90% or more of a big corporate’s total carbon footprint which is to be found in supply chain carbon emissions (raw materials, packaging, transport, etc.).

Green tokenism is a favourite in the greenwasher’s palette.  A few green products, made in miniscule numbers, are heavily promoted to lend “green kudos” to their major line of carbon-heavy business - car-makers plug their hybrid and electric vehicles, coal-fired electricity producers tout their tiny involvement in renewable energy, and builders such as Australia’s Grocon showcase on-site renewable energy buildings but their core business remains, respectively, petrol-guzzling cars, fossil fuel power and huge concrete-and-steel high rises.

Hyped-up examples of renewable energy use (solar panels at head office, for example) also act as tokenistic diversions.  McDonald’s turns the organic waste from its restaurants in Switzerland into bio-gas for its trucks but the rest of their 33,500 restaurants serve 64 million cheeseburgers a day, each with a serving of the three kilograms of CO₂ used to make it.

Richard Branson finds that bio-fuels make great window-dressing for Virgin’s aeroplanes but he doesn’t mention how such ‘green’ jet fuels rely on the destruction of forest carbon-sinks, nor does he publicise the force-feeding of CO₂ from coal-fired power stations to turbo-charge algae growth.  Meanwhile, Virgin Galactic sets itself quietly for a six-fold increase in CO₂ per space passenger.  

Banks promote the earth-friendly way they shuffle money around in their greened offices but they are mute over the fossil fuel projects the money finances (the ANZ bank is the largest financer of new coal projects in Australia, for example).  Greened-up accounting, legal and consultancy firms also “play a crucial role in floating, financing and defending” the world’s biggest carbon polluters amongst their fossil fuel clients.

Green minimalism plunges to its depths with ‘Earth Hour’ – killing their office lights for one hour on one Saturday night a year is the cheap entry price to this green charade for Earth Hour’s 20,000 business sponsors including such heavy carbon polluters as mining companies, coal-fired power-generators, car-makers and steel-makers.  And the result for the atmosphere?  The equivalent of pausing global coal use for two minutes.

Of course, it never hurts one’s green image to collaborate with green academia (Panasonic funded the establishment of a Chair in Environmental Sustainability at Macquarie University in Sydney) or certain environmental groups (the World Wildlife Fund accepts $70 million a year from corporations who prize the green business value of the WWF’s panda logo).

‘Green’ power companies make valuable greenwash partners, too.  The Australian Football League went carbon-neutral in 2006 with Origin Energy, the largest green energy retailer in Australia which nevertheless produces half its electricity from coal or gas-fired sources and whose one-third share in the coal seam gas from the massive Australia Pacific Liquefied Natural Gas export project will erase all the emissions saved by Origin’s green power sales since 1999, ten times over.

“In the end”, concludes Pearse, greenwashing is simply about “looking green to increase profits”.  Don’t just take his word for it.  The casino giant, Caesars Entertainment, explicitly says a green image makeover is good for business profits - ‘climate change presents the company with an opportunity to strengthen its reputation and brand … we anticipate that over time this will lead to increased market share and revenues’. 

Despite Pearse’s capitalist sympathies (he doesn’t want to “demonise big business or overlook the positive steps that many companies are making” in the challenge to be green “while remaining profitable and competitive”), as he deftly peels away the green façade from many of world’s biggest capitalists, it becomes apparent that the environmental challenge is beyond them, beyond the profit-driven market economy.  To be truly green, we need to be Red, too.

THE HOCKEY STICK AND THE CLIMATE WARS: Dispatches from the Front Line by MICHAEL E. MANN and THE INQUISITION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE by JAMES LAWRENCE POWELL

THE HOCKEY STICK AND THE CLIMATE WARS: Dispatches from the Front Line
MICHAEL E. MANN
Columbia University Press, 2012, 395 pages, $42.95 (hb)

THE INQUISITION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

JAMES LAWRENCE POWELL
Columbia University Press, 2012, 232 pages, $32.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

The “six stages of denial” for the climate change non-believer, says Professor Michael Mann in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, are (1) climate change isn’t happening, (2) even if it is, it isn’t caused by humans, (3) even if humans are involved, their impact is minor, (4) even if it is major, the results will be good, making crops grow, (5) even if the results are bad, humanity can adapt or rig up a technical fix, and (6) besides, it’s too late to do anything about it, even if it is happening, which happily brings the climate change denier back to (1).

No amount of scientific evidence or logic can breach the fortress of denialism, as Mann has personally found out.  For over two decades, he and his “hockey stick” graph of historical temperatures have been under siege from the “denialist machine”.

First developed in the late 1990s, the hockey stick (by now a hockey team, with Mann’s graph confirmed by a dozen independent studies) shows that, for two millennia, there has never been a global temperature spike anywhere near that which has occurred since coal, oil and gas powered the Industrial Revolution, resulting in the dramatic and historically anomalous upwards curve of the hockey stick end of the temperature graph).

The hockey stick sent to the knacker’s yard the denialists’ sacred cow of an earlier warming (the Mediaeval Warm Period [MWP], 950-1250 AD) which they had used to argue that if warming from natural factors (volcanic activity, solar output, etc.) happened before, it could happen again, thus absolving fossil fuels from any blame.  The MWP, however, was a molehill compared to the current temperature mountain which can not be explained by natural factors alone and which, indeed, should have, on their own, resulted in a cooling.  Only human factors, specifically fossil fuel burning, can explain the abrupt current warming.

The hockey stick thus became for the deniers a powerful icon that needed to be attacked as part of “the best funded, most carefully orchestrated assault on science the world has known” by those, says Mann, who were “profiting handily from civilisation’s addiction to fossil fuels”.  James Powell, a geology professor, in The Inquisition of Climate Science, agrees that the deniers’ campaign  is “the most vicious … attack on science in history”.

The “contrarian barrage” that has ensued has had much success.  As Powell notes, whilst the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming has risen, public acceptance has fallen.  In 2009, two thirds of Americans believed scientists still disagreed about global warming, thanks to the “willing accomplices” of the media which cloaks its denialism behind the spurious notion of ‘journalistic balance’.  Between 1980 and 2002, for example, the four major US newspapers gave all, equal or some positive attention to the deniers in 94% of their global warming coverage, with only 6% of coverage reflecting the scientific consensus.

Global warming deniers are given a free media ride, say Mann and Powell, because Big Oil and Big Auto have a lot at stake and Big Media protects its own.  If the deniers’ case “has misinformed or confused” people, adds Mann, “it has served its purpose in manufacturing doubt and confusion”, with the goal of thwarting government efforts to regulate carbon emissions.  Meanwhile, “carbon dioxide concentrations and temperatures rise and precious time is lost”.

Who are the deniers, so trumpeted by the shouting hacks of the establishment media?  A handful have scientific credentials (and conservative politics), masquerading their denialism as healthy scientific scepticism and are tamely in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry.

Their non-scientist sidekicks provide the light humour.  The deceased science fiction writer, Michael Crichton (author of Jurassic Park), was motivated by animosity to environmentalism which he scorned as ‘the religion of choice for urban atheists’.  Legions of credentialed climate scientists were apparently trumped by Bjorn Lomborg (author of the error-riddled The Skeptical Environmentalist) a young unknown who disproved global warming after just a year or two of reading, whilst the loopy Viscount Monckton of Benchley, a Cambridge classics graduate, dispenses denialist lies (from doodled calculations on the back of an envelope) in between dispensing a farrago of dishonest self-promotion.

The deniers all portray themselves as latter-day Galileos repressed by the scientific establishment in a giant conspiracy in which data is fabricated or hidden to keep research dollars flowing and advance the “liberal political agenda of the United Nations”.

This would have to be, as Powell patiently dissects it, the mother of all conspiracies, involving all 2,500 scientists on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all the world’s governments who appoint the bureaucrats to oversee the scientists’ work, and all the 70 international science organisations and the peak national science academies in dozens of countries which have formally accepted the reality of anthropogenic global warming, not to mention the 97-98% of the world’s most active climate researchers whose publication and citation data showed, in a 2010 analysis, support for the tenets of human-caused global warming.

Or, perhaps, it is the most feeble conspiracy ever.  The so-called ‘Climategate’ affair of 2009 (when a thousand private emails between Mann and his colleagues in the Climatic Research Unit at the UK’s East Anglia university were criminally hacked) was, says Powell summarising the six enquiries by distinguished panels which cleared all accused scientists of any impropriety, “much ado about nothing”. The investigations found possibly half a dozen incautious words amongst the million in the emails but found, says Powell of the allegations of conspiracy, not “a single faked data point, not a single deleted email, not a single [denialist] article prevented from publication”.

All climate change deniers operate outside the normal, robust scientific process, with peer-review of research by anonymous scientific experts at its core, which involves good faith and respectful challenges and responses between colleagues with the aim of better scientific understanding.

Bereft of real science, the deniers resort to their weapon of choice, says Mann – personal attacks on individual scientists.  This has included vexatious demands under Freedom of Information for decades of research materials and computer codes, vitriolic cyber-bullying (including placing climate scientists’ photographs on neo-Nazi websites), campaigns against their government funding and academic tenure, plus stalking, death threats, abusive phone calls and shock jocks calling for their capital punishment, flogging and suicide.

Conservative politicians have rushed to join in.  The Bush administration attempted to purge Mann’s hockey stick from a 2003 government report (replacing it with a study financed by the American Petroleum Institute), forced Mann to front hostile Senate and House committees, denounced him on the floor of the US Senate, and named him as one of 17 scientists who should be investigated for criminal prosecution.  The overtones of an ugly past (‘are you now or have you ever been a climate scientist?’) were not lost on other climate scientists, as intended.

Mann and other climate scientists have, however, fought back (see their denialist-busting website Realclimate.org).  Mann says that whilst he can “live with the attacks of the corporate-funded denial machine”, he can no longer stand by whilst their lies endanger the world.  As with the scientific apologists for Big Tobacco, who condemned millions to death through their lies about smoking and cancer, Mann asks “will we hold those who have funded or otherwise participated in the fraudulent denial of climate change accountable?”.

As long as Big Capitalism rules the roost, there will be no such accounting.  That will take a world where science, morality and planetary survival count for more than the corporate dollar.  These two marvellous books by Mann and Powell will help to get us there.

AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut - A Life by CHARLES J. SHIELDS & UNSTUCK IN TIME: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels by GREGORY D. SUMNER

AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut - A Life
CHARLES J. SHIELDS
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2012, 515 pages, $39.95 (pb)

UNSTUCK IN TIME: A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels

GREGORY D. SUMNER
Seven Stories Press, 2012, 355 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Not everyone was impressed by Kurt Vonnegut.  His local paper objected to his famous 1969 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five - ‘his style is not conventional, his approach is not delicate, his themes are not conservative’ – whilst in North Dakota in 1973 the school board of the town of Radke ordered three dozen copies of the book to be shovelled into the school furnace.

Vonnegut’s admirers, however, more than made up for his detractors, as two new biographies by Charles Shields and Gregory Sumner attest.

Born in Indianapolis in 1922 of German-American ancestry, journalism sidetracked Vonnegut from completing higher education but taught the future novelist the virtues of clarity and economy in writing.  He also discovered that, to write well, he needed ‘an axe to grind’.  His coming-of-age years provided him with two whetstones – the Great Depression, which turned him against capitalism’s inequities, and World War 2, which made him a pacifist.

Mobilised to Europe after the D-Day landings, Private Vonnegut stumbled headfirst into Hitler’s last gamble (the Battle of the Bulge) and he became a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany where he was forced to dig the graves of watching American POWs who had been condemned to be shot.  It was, however, the mass murder of the horrific Allied firestorm bombing of Dresden in February, 1945, which scarred Vonnegut.

He survived by sheltering in the storage room of a slaughterhouse, two levels below ground, but the ‘tableaux of horrors’ above the abattoir, and his later reflection that the carnage was for no strategic advantage (‘it didn’t shorten the war by half a second, didn’t weaken a German defence or attack anywhere, didn’t free a single person from a death camp’), turned him against all wars, advocating especially, writes Sumner, for the “future bombing victims” of all America’s subsequent wars.

Along with war, other traditional and newly-hyped ideas and institutions (‘progress’, materialism, nationalism, the moon landing, nuclear power, the ‘conquest of nature’) were debunked by Vonnegut the social critic, radical raconteur and protest rally speaker.  Vonnegut, a once-aspirant labour movement organiser, also flailed at the ‘savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate American class system’, praising trade unions as ‘admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers’.

It would be a mistake, however, as both authors agree, to see Vonnegut as a revolutionary.  Sympathetic to socialism, Vonnegut described himself, however, as a ‘lifelong Northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt tradition, a friend of the working stiffs’ whose political philosophy was ‘unsystematic’ and strategically vague.  He wanted not to overthrow capitalism as to somehow make it fairer, more humane and less destructive.

A child of the family-wealth-sapping Depression, Vonnegut “admired entrepreneurship and could be a shrewd businessman”, writes Sumner, whether that involved Saab dealerships or writing for the mass magazine and pulp fiction market which he did early on when his novels had been distributed “along with westerns and teenage romances to drug stores and bus stations”.  Vonnegut sought the security of wealth, even if this meant investing in big property developers, IBM, anti-union mining companies and Dow Chemical (the maker of napalm during the Vietnam War).

Vonnegut’s novels, however, rose above his political contradictions.  Despite the chaotic absurdity of a world ruled by predatory capitalism and mechanised death, Vonnegut found an inherent dignity, humour and kindness in its victims.  Starved and beaten by sadistic guards as a POW, for example, Vonnegut was also fed by sympathetic local German women at much risk to themselves.

His faith in the counterweight of ‘community’ was resilient, especially amongst the young, those irrepressible questioners of the social order, who (when they looked up from their digital distractions - the typewriter-using Vonnegut had many reservations about the cyber-revolution) strove for meaning and purpose in a better world.

Vonnegut has been dismissed by some in the literary establishment as a cult, sci-fi author.  They dislike his genre-straddling, narrative-subverting, expressionistic style (staccato sentences, short chapters, use of graphics and white space) – the very qualities which make his novels something like poetry.

This is sometimes literary cover for a deeper scorn for Vonnegut’s social and political values.  Alas, this includes one of his biographers, Shields, who disapproves of Vonnegut reminding Americans that Al Qaeda does not have the monopoly on terror because it was the US that was the only nation ever to pulverise civilians with atomic weapons.  Shields also denigrates Vonnegut’s opposition to the US war in Afghanistan as the confused thinking of an 83 year old and a failure to recognise that world freedom and US capitalism are indivisible.  Sumner, fortunately, avoids the political pitfalls of American patriotism, although his close textual analysis of Vonnegut’s fourteen novels requires, to be most useful, familiarity with all of them.

Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007 from brain injury after tripping over the leash of his much loved pet dog.  After surviving both the Nazis and the Allies during terrible war, the superb ironist might have noted of his own demise, using his famous catchphrase, ‘and so it goes’.

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University by RICHARD HIL

WHACKADEMIA: An Insider’s Account of the Troubled University
RICHARD HIL
NewSouth Publishing, 2012, 239 pages, $34.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon 

Universities were better in the olden days, says Dr. Richard Hil in Whackademia.  As an Essex University student in the 1970s, Hil joined the Socialist Workers Party (which expanded his political horizons) and the Campaign for Real Ale (which expanded his waistline) whilst his lecturers stimulated his intellectual growth.  With 25 years behind him as an academic in Australian universities, however, he has seen the excitement of higher education stifled by corporatisation and its business model which treats education as a commodity to be sold, a degree as a “passport to a business career”.

The market assault on higher education in Australia was begun by the federal Labor government in the 1980s under the guise of ‘transparency’ and ‘accountability’ and as an attack on ‘elitism’ and a sheltered workshop of pampered scholars who were not paying their way in Australia’s capitalist economy.

Under Labor’s ‘reformers’, the university workplace was redefined by the values of “economic rationalism, commercialisation, managerialism, corporate governance and other outgrowths of neo-liberalism”, says Hil.  Bureaucracy and corporate jargon dominate - all the crud of Key Performance Indicators, performance reviews, ‘quality assurance’, marketing and promotions, and micro-management of academics presided over by all-powerful corporate managers.

In a context of declining government funding, universities search for revenue streams, the most lucrative being full-fee-paying overseas students, whilst entry requirements for domestic students are eased and ‘soft-marking’ and ‘soft assessment’, especially for the semi-literate, compromise quality in the quest to reduce drop-out rates and keep the university’s market share of students, and their dollars, up.

The transformation of universities from places of intellectual passion into dull commercial enterprises designed to serve industry has seen the economic imperatives of the capitalist economy determine which courses survive.  As universities become managed by the corporation for the corporation, the curriculum increasingly suits vocational, market-oriented ends.

As the Business Council of Australia higher education spokesperson and accountant at one of Australia’s largest accountancy firms, demanding a lock-step customer-supplier business ethos, succinctly put it, “I am your major customer – I take 750 of your product each year”.  The liberal arts, especially, are on the endangered list unless they can be tethered to the ‘creative industries’ of visual design, media, publishing and advertising.

For Australia’s 120,000 academics, they have become cogs in a grinding knowledge machine.  Research has become a distant dream as class sizes expand, bureaucratic monitoring and reporting dogs every day and an administrative burden flourishes.  Academics are “overworked, burnt out, not coping, running out of energy, stressed out, not sleeping, and plain knackered”.  The 67,000 casual teachers have the bonus of poor job security.  Meanwhile, like other corporate CEOs, Vice-Chancellors prosper, soaring into the million dollar salary atmosphere.

Hil argues for a return to a university of community, collegiality, fun, soul, interest and delight.  To a republic of ideas and debate where critical thinking and clear communication matter most.  To education for active citizenship in a vibrant democracy.  To a campus that is “critic and conscience” of capitalist society’s unjust status quo.

Academics, like cats, are difficult to herd but, starved of sustenance by government budgets, sedated by forms and tranquilised by bureaucracy, there has been regrettable success in disciplining them.  As Hil’s entertaining book shows, however, there is a way out beyond just complaint – activism, small and large, for education as intellectual discovery, for education for social change.