Letters to the Editor

The Dangerous Warming Thesis

SIR: Bravo for the threesome article (“An Intelligent Voter’s Guide to Global Warming”, March 2011) on the dangerous warming thesis. I look forward to the next instalment.

It is very helpful to have the issues dealt with in a language that non-scientists can understand—or almost (there are one or two bits that I do not). I fear, however, that it will pass over the shoulders of the believers (which include most of the media). Politically, scientifically and journalistically, we are stuck with those who have locked themselves into a belief and will not budge. My latest informant in the USA reports on two climate scientists who postulate that snowfalls do nothing to refute the dangerous warming thesis—and they are not, it seems, talking only about the short term. They have not said, however, whether this also applies to urgent requests by the port of Riga for ice-breakers to keep the port free of ice.

As a parallel to the article, I recommend a recent book published by the Idsos—a father and son scientific combination. They have addressed, again in almost layman’s language, about ten major issues used to support the dangerous warming thesis. In about 110 pages they quote those who use the issues to support it and then, in each case, go on to refer to peer-reviewed papers that reject it or point to serious doubts. The book is Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future and a copy can be found at www.co2science.org. The Idsos were members of a group of thirty-six scientists who wrote recently to the US Congress after a group of eighteen scientists wrote advocating the need for a “fresh look” at the need for government action to reduce emissions. It is a pity that we do not have more of this in Australia.

My only quibble with the Quadrant article is that it concedes that the majority of scientists support the dangerous warming thesis. That is certainly true of scientific organisations, although even there important recent qualifications have emerged, such as those by the Royal Society, where there is no longer a consensus.

It seems quite likely that a majority of individual scientists may be sceptics. In the USA the Oregon Petition rejection of the thesis has been signed by over 30,000 scientists, including 9000 with PhDs, which might be compared with the warmists’ claim that about 1600 scientists contributed to the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Des Moore,
Institute for Private Enterprise,
South Yarra, Vic. 

Urban Planning and Decay

SIR: To deal fully with the many criticisms of urban planning in Australian cities as presented in Michael Warby’s article “Why Our Major Cities Are in Decay” (March 2011) would take more than one letter. But here are a few comments to suggest that his views need to be treated with caution:

• Urban planning and urban planners, the process and the professional body: “Urban planning” is not captured by focusing on what professional “urban planners” do (any more than the administration of law is covered by what lawyers do). Myriad players—governments (local, state and federal), infrastructure providers, public demands and pressures, developers, and so on—have as great, if not greater, input into a city’s expansion. Each decision that finally puts buildings on sites needs to be unpeeled to see the respective influence of all these actors. If there are gripes, the parts played by every participant, and the economic climate and population policies of the day, need to be carefully considered.

• Land use controls: Michael Warby doesn’t like these, but I wonder if, following the Brisbane floods where houses and properties had been developed in utterly inappropriate locations, or following Christchurch’s earthquake destruction, he might like to think again about the potential usefulness of these government tools and their rigorous application.

• “Romanticisation of nature” and “urban sprawl”: For Michael Warby “people wanting houses-with-gardens at prices they can afford” have been demonised. Sure, that happens, and often with a snobbish insensitivity. But he leaves himself open to a strange contradiction here by referring, in a pejorative tone, to planners’ and other attempts to preserve natural surrounds as “romanticisation”. For what is an essential element in people’s desire for a house and garden? Surely it’s to be away from intense urban development and to be among plants, hills, creeks and rivers, open spaces, seascapes and so on where you’re able to enjoy your own outdoor space? How inapt is it to describe a desire by planners and others to preserve these attractions as “romanticisation”, especially at a time when a plethora of high-rise developments, a heavily supported government-market push, are denying such ready-to-hand nature opportunities?

• Pressures on house prices: More needs to be thrown into the pile of factors here than Michael Warby allows. In addition to up-front developer contributions to achieve early facilities and services that the public has indicated time and again they want, there are other massive pressures: high levels of population growth demanding living space allocation, and an affluent urge for more, and more costly, fitted-out space that’s arisen as a result of an upsurge in income and borrowing capacity. Maybe we can look here for some relief through a saver-mentality that economists tell us is now noticeable amongst the general public. And we can stop bawling for retailer chains as their sales dip.

• “Land shortage” claims: PR-inspired releases by development companies should be treated by the media as ritualistic and repetitious. A prolonging of the destructive and out-of-date public versus private dialogues of the past! If fixing the system is what we’re truly on about, perhaps we could move to another type of public discourse, one suggested in general terms by Michael Porter and Mark Kramer (Harvard Business Review, January-February 2011) that promotes “shared value creation” focusing on “identifying and expanding the connections between societal and economic progress”. And one must add after the Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquakes, also building-in environmental resilience. The better development companies have already sought to some extent to work in this way. If they’re doing their job properly, they’ll make a point of challenging urban planners to dig deeper into these issues.

A. (Len) Puglisi,
Burwood East, Vic. 

Who’s Responsible?

SIR: Michael Warby’s article on city decay is interesting reading but the first concern of regional Victoria is the ceaseless battle with shire councils, or rather the bureaucrats who work the levers. Many letters to the editor of the local newspaper fail to elicit just what is the chain of command, indeed the legal nexus, between the two.

Should Mr Warby write us something on this matter I’m sure many country folk would be grateful.

Murray Mitchell,
Bairnsdale, Vic. 

Makers of Lasting Peace

SIR: Michael Jensen’s case (March 2011) that religion and violence are not specially connected is convincing, but surely the conclusion is more obvious than he states? The outstanding perpetrators of pure violence in history—Mao, Stalin, Hitler—had not an ounce of religion between them. What do you expect, since fearing neither God nor man is very liberating, when killing is on the agenda?

The converse is more interesting and less well-known. If one looks for societies that have achieved the difficult task of creating islands of lasting peace in the sea of violence that is most of history, the cases that come to mind are ones like the settlement of 1688 that produced three hundred years of political stability in England (inherited by the Anglosphere) and Christian Democrat Western Europe after 1945. The religious views informing those societies were more tepid than some might like, but atheist they weren’t.

James Franklin,
Lane Cove, NSW. 

By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

SIR: At the risk of testing the editor’s indulgence, I must respond briefly to Robert McLaughlin and his sceptical attack on my theistic contribution to the God Wars (Letters, January-February 2011).

McLaughlin cites unnamed and unexplicated schools of philosophy which believe that determinism and free will are compatible. In my extensive experience on responses to this argument, the overwhelming bulk of thinking people see at once with Euclidean clarity that the two things are not compatible.

Contra McLaughlin, my criticism of Singer is not ad hominem, it is an attack on his philosophy, which legitimises infanticide on “abnormal” infants such as I once was. My lambasting of philosophy in context was not a rejection of reason or philosophy in general, but a rejection of currently fashionable extremists like Singer and other sceptics who are tendentious in views, demeanour or both. “By their fruits you shall know them.” That is both rationally and empirically sound.

My rejection of extremism includes McLaughlin’s endorsement of Kitcher’s ridiculous attempt at demonstrating moral equivalence between any religion and Mein Kampf. If Christ had preached the latter doctrine, on the basis of “faith” alone’ or anything else, He would never have acquired a major following spanning 2000 years and behaving on average, warts and all, rather better than Hitler.

Even if McLaughlin is right in speculating that nationalism has killed more people than Marxism, this is irrelevant to the existence or otherwise of a deity. The by-their-fruits test here is to compare twentieth-century Marxist atheism to theism in that century. Which killed the most?

David Elder,
Grange, SA. 

Palliative Care and Euthanasia

SIR: I write in response to Brian Pollard’s article “Why Safe Voluntary Euthanasia is a Myth” (January-February 2011).

Mr Pollard seems well qualified to write an article on “voluntary euthanasia” given his experience as a palliative care physician and as a director of a palliative care service for five years. I wonder then why his article is founded on legalistic and moralistic arguments, amplified by the fear of involuntary euthanasia, rather than focusing on his personal experience of the physical and emotional pain of the countless patients he must have encountered in palliative care.

Why are the patients in palliative care? They are there to die. Did he not encounter, many times, patients in physical or emotional distress who wanted the release of death? Was his answer to them, “Never kill yourself when you are suicidal” or “My ethics are more important than your physical or emotional pain”? Did all his patients lie back and accept pain and indignity in silence?

Contrary to his assertion in another article that “Euthanasia is the intentional taking of the life of another person, by act or omission, for compassionate motives”; “Euthanasia” means “peaceful death”, no more, no less.

In the absence of relevant law (not including his spurious reference to laws related to killing) we have a laissez faire attitude to euthanasia in Victoria. If you can find a doctor to help you out, or you can find a doctor to help out a loved one, it can all go ahead—quietly, not sanctioned by law, not reported, and last but not least it may not be in accord with the wishes of the person who dies, even if only because they are unconscious or legally incapable of giving consent.

Is this the situation we want to continue, unsupervised, uncontrolled, swept under the carpet, because laws might be difficult to frame and may attract some abuse? Is this better than having those who are not “in the know” dying a painful and undignified death?

Steven Mendelson,
Daylesford, Vic.  

The 1789 Smallpox

SIR: Quadrant has reviewed the 1789 smallpox issue on several occasions, starting from a review of Noel Butlin’s book Our Original Aggression. I would have thought that the literature since 2000 almost certainly resolved the two questions that have plagued this aspect of our history, namely whether or not the 1789 disease was true smallpox, and if so, whether the British bottles of smallpox virus were a possible source. Unfortunately, as at 2010, the nature of the disease is still being contested by at least one contributor on the ABC’s Ockham’s Razor, and your contributor H.A. Willis (September 2010), continues to contest whether or not the British smallpox could have been a possible source of the 1789 outbreak.

In fact it is clear that the First Fleet stock of smallpox would have retained sufficient residual viral activity to infect highly susceptible people such as local Aborigines sometime before April 1789. This is based on a rigorous review of the available source materials as at 2005. I published the full temperature data and results of this review in 2007 in Aboriginal History 31. Craig Mear’s and Michael Bennett’s independent work can be taken as firm corroboration of this work.

The key difference between Willis’s and earlier presentations can be summarised by considering the different approaches taken to the findings of Wolff and Croon. Their findings were published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization 38 (1968). I hold that Wolff and Croon’s experiment can be used to assess the impact of temperature on smallpox during a voyage and then at Sydney Cove. Wolff and Croon’s data showed that where smallpox was stored in temperatures ranging from 30^oC to below 15^oC, smallpox virus declined to around half strength every couple of years. Mear and Bennett both used Wolff and Croon’s findings in making their judgments. It appears that Willis has not, and it must be admitted that if Wolff and Croon’s findings are not utilised, discordant conclusions may arise.

The fact that the British bottles still contained viable smallpox virus does not mean this was the actual source of the outbreak. This argument by some is based on circumstantial evidence and it is not clear that historians have yet found sufficient records or other circumstantial evidence to allow them to reach firm conclusions. On the other hand, it does appear that the case for the source being the British bottles is stronger than the case for transmission from Macassar. According to Peter Boomgaard’s review of medical data (published in van Heteren’s Dutch Medicine in the Malay Archipelago 1816–1942) an outbreak of smallpox occurred in Macassar in 1789, too late to be associated with the Port Jackson outbreak. In general, during outbreaks, the spread of smallpox into east Indonesia was restricted principally by population density (see World Health Organization report, pdf p633.

Christopher Warren,
Canberra, ACT.

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