The Changing Climate - 1992

This post is a follow-up to a post from a few years ago. At a second-hand store, I'd found a Reader's Digest Atlas, published 1987, that had some curious statements about climate change. The paragraph that I thought anachronistic is below. It read as though it were from the 1970s.

There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2°C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves.

I returned to the second-hand store months later and bought a copy of the atlas. At least, I thought it was the same book. I recently re-read the paragraph and had one of those "everything you know is wrong" moments. It read nothing like I remembered. I found the original photo I took and the paragraph I thought was dodgy appeared to be the only change across the two-page spread when compared to the 1992 printing.

Original photo, take 2022, from the book probably printed 1987

The 1992 printing, with amendments

We inhabit a thin, damp tissue of the atmosphere, where hospitable warmth and moisture are maintained in a critical balance. What we think of as the planet's "normal" weather patterns are typical only of the period in which we live.

Clues to the climate of the distant future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2C) could initiate a new ice age.

A much more immediate threat is of global warming, with man's ever-increasing use of fossil fuels and destruction of forests, which release huge amounts of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. We are also producing more methane and other gases. These gases block the escape of the Sun's reflected infra-red radiation back into space. Without any of this "greenhouse effect" our world would be so cold as to be uninhabitable, but man is now tilting the balance too far in the opposite direction. An increase in global temperatures would raise sea levels and might eventually change worldwide patterns of agriculture and population.

Many other forces interact to create changes in the Earth's climate. These include tilts in the planet's axis and changes in its orbital path, sunspots that swell the stream of radiation emitted by the Sun, and spasms of volcanic activity that hurl veils of dust into the atmosphere and may slow down warming.

The amendments from the 1992 printing are superb. They predate the climate denialist movement, starting from the 1990s, that continue today. I wouldn't be surprised to read an atlas from 2025 that reads like the 1987 printing.

The Changing Climate

I found two pages about climate change in a Reader's Digest Atlas, published 1987. That's one year before Hansen's US Senate committee testimony. Is that a good enough excuse? (The emphasis below is mine.)

The Changing Climate

We inhabit a thin, damp tissue of the atmosphere, where hospitable warmth and moisture are maintained in a critical balance. What we think of as the planet's "normal" weather patterns are typical only of the period in which we live.

Clues to the climate of the future lie in the facts of the past. There is every likelihood that the climatic conditions that gripped the Earth at the height of the last ice age 18,000 years ago will return one day. A drop in global average temperature of only 4°F (2°C) could initiate a new ice age. The advancing glaciers would imprison so much of the world's water that the oceans would shrink, stripping the seas from the continental shelves. New York City would lie under an ice sheet thick enough to bury the Empire State Building twice over. Montreal, Detroit, and Chicago would be entombed in snow, and the Midwestern prairies would survive only as wind-whipped steppe. Japan would become a peninsula of Asia, and you would be able to walk from England to France. On the other hand, some scientists believe that a rise of only a few degrees in global temperature would start a meltdown of the polar ice sheets and flood low-lying cities worldwide.

Many forces interact to create changes in the Earth's climate. These include tilts in the planet's axis and changes in its orbital path, sunspots that swell the stream of radiation emitted by the Sun, and spasms of volcanic activity that hurl veils of dust into the atmosphere.

1. ICE COVER. Ice sheets covered much of North America and Europe, New York, Berlin, Stockholm, Montreal, and Copenhagen would be buried beneath the ice if such conditions returned. 

2. CONTINENTAL CONNECTIONS. The sea level was lower, baring continental shelves and creating land bridges, Asian nomads migrated to America over the bridge that connected Siberia and Alaska. 

3. GREAT LAKE. Fed by melting snow from the Rockies, the now-vanished Lake Bonneville grew almost as big as today's Lake Michigan. 

4. DRY LAND. Monsoons were weaker than today, with the result that in West Africa the Sahara stretched farther south than its present extent. 

5. LARGER LAKES AND INLAND SEAS. Because of lower temperatures, there was less evaporation in arid lands, and some lakes and inland seas increased in size. 

6. POLAR HIGH. Vast high-pressure cells lingered over the polar ice sheets. Strong winds blew silt across the barren areas surrounding the ice and created dust storms.  

Happy Australia Day!

Every year, on this day, Australians celebrate the discovery and settlement of their country. Such a beautiful gift that God bestowed on us - an unsettled land for our enjoyment. And we have enjoyed.

1788 marks the end of one dreamtime and the beginning of a new dreamtime - the time to dream of work, commodities, debt and infinite growth. Here is a short list of some of the wonderful memories.

From Wikipedia pages:

Black Line

After many years of conflict between British colonists and the Aborigines known as the Black War, Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur decided to remove all Aborigines from the settled areas in order to end the escalating raids upon settlers' huts. To accomplish this he called upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain that then swept across the settled districts, moving south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island) where Arthur hoped that they could live and maintain their culture and language.

Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1869 and 1969, although in some places children were still being taken until the 1970s.

Australian referendum, 1967

This gave the Commonwealth parliament power to legislate with respect to Aborigines living in a State as well as those living in a federal Territory. The intent was that this new power for the Commonwealth would be used beneficially, yet despite several opportunities, the High Court has never resolved that it cannot also be used detrimentally. 

Section 127 was wholly removed. Headed "Aborigines not to be counted in reckoning population", it had read:

In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

Prison

Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed that Indigenous people accounted for 25 percent of Australia's prison population in 2009. The age-standardised imprisonment rate [...] meant that the imprisonment rate for Indigenous people was 14 times higher than that of non-Indigenous people.

Land rights and 10 point plan
 
The Wik Decision in 1996 clarified the uncertainty. The court found that the statutory pastoral leases under consideration by the court did not bestow rights of exclusive possession on the leaseholder. As a result, native title rights could co-exist depending on the terms and nature of the particular pastoral lease. Where there was a conflict of rights, the rights under the pastoral lease would extinguish the remaining native title rights.

The decision found that native title could coexist with other land interests on pastoral leases, which cover some 40% of the Australian land mass.

[The "10 Point Plan" of 1998] provided security of tenure to non-Indigenous holders of pastoral leases and other land title, where that land might potentially be claimed under the Native Title Act 1993.

The Intervention
 
The measures of the response which have attracted most criticism comprise the exemption from the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the compulsory acquisition of an unspecified number of prescribed communities (Measure 5) and the partial abolition of the permit system (Measure 10). These have been interpreted as undermining important principles and parameters established as part of the legal recognition of indigenous land rights in Australia.

The Civil War in France

I recently read Karl Marx's The Civil War in France. It's about the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, 1870-71. This was the book that really began Marx's rise to infamy - accused of plotting the whole uprising from London. It was written during the war and subsequent revolution in Paris.

If, like me, you're not overly familiar with the history of 19th Century France (and Prussia), here is a short description of the main characters you'll encounter reading this book:

• M. Thiers - French historian, prime minister, suppressor of the Paris Commune, president of the Third Republic
• Louis Bonaparte - Emperor of the Second Empire, started the war with Prussia
• Otto von Bismarck -  Minister President of Prussia, credited with unifying modern Germany
• Blanqui - French socialist, absent leader of the Paris Commune
• Louis-Philippe I - King of France until the 1848 revolution

Large chunks of this book aren't very interesting for a modern reader. These sections are largely concerned with military strategy and the criticism of various personalities (mostly Bonaparte and Thiers). At the time, revealing these people for what they were was an important thing to do, but they're now long dead.

There are six chapters. I've summarised them below:

Chapter 1 is amazing in that it contains communiques from French and Prussian workers opposing the war.

The English working class stretch the hand of fellowship to the French and German working people. They feel deeply convinced that whatever turn the impending horrid war may take, the alliance of the working classes of all countries will ultimately kill war. The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and goodwill; this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past, opens the vista of a brighter future.

Chapter 2 is mostly concerned with military tactics, towns of Germany and France and a history of the two nation's conflicts. The chapter ends with an extremely ominous (and prophetic) warning:

Let the sections of the International Working Men’s Association in every country stir the working classes to action. If they forsake their duty, if they remain passive, the present tremendous war will be but the harbinger of still deadlier international feuds, and lead in every nation to a renewed triumph over the workman by the lords of the sword, of the soil, and of capital.

In Chapter 3, Marx gets stuck into Thiers, describing him as a "monstrous gnome" and elucidating the build-up to the massacre. I thought chapters 3 and 4 were the least relevant to anyone reading nowadays.

In chapters 5 and 6 Marx writes about the events of the Paris Commune; its successes and its destruction.

In spite of all the tall talk and all the immense literature, for the last 60 years, about emancipation of labor, no sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of capital and wages-slavery (the landlord now is but the sleeping partner of the capitalist), as if the capitalist society was still in its purest state of virgin innocence, with its antagonisms still undeveloped, with its delusions still unexploded, with its prostitute realities not yet laid bare. The Commune, they exclaim, intends to abolish property, the basis of all civilization!

To find a parallel for the conduct of Thiers and his bloodhounds we must go back to the times of Sulla and the two Triumvirates of Rome. The same wholesale slaughter in cold blood; the same disregard, in massacre, of age and sex, the same system of torturing prisoners; the same proscriptions, but this time of a whole class; the same savage hunt after concealed leaders, lest one might escape; the same denunciations of political and private enemies; the same indifference for the butchery of entire strangers to the feud.

If the acts of the Paris working men were vandalism, it was the vandalism of defence in despair, not the vandalism of triumph, like that which the Christians perpetrated upon the really priceless art treasures of heathen antiquity; and even that vandalism has been justified by the historian as an unavoidable and comparatively trifling concomitant to the titanic struggle between a new society arising and an old one breaking down.

All the chorus of calumny, which the Party of Order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.

Working men’s Paris, with its Commune, will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them.

Engels, in his 1891 Introduction, makes some very interesting comments about the state and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, especially relevant in light of the horrors done in his and Marx's name in the 20th Century.

From the outset the Commune was compelled to recognize that the working class, once come to power, could not manage with the old state machine; that in order not to lose again its only just conquered supremacy, this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.

Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

I read the edition at marxists.org. I've re-formatted it as an e-book (including the bulk of the appendix) and made it available at: The Civil War in France.