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In the intercessory prayers at church on Sunday, a congregant prayed for those affected by floods in Pakistan and NSW. While I was certainly willing to add my “hear our prayer” response, I confess to momentarily forgetting about the floods in Pakistan. The world is full of woe and it’s hard to keep up, particularly as I’m not the avid follower of the news as once I was. Anyway, I find myself too much in the minority, too often, to want to talk about it. For example, when I go onto the comments section of the conservative UK Daily Telegraph following an article on Ukraine; overwhelmingly, I find jingoism by proxy aimed at Russia. No one quite sees the immorality, as I do, of America and the UK (to a lesser extent, along with Australia) supplying unlimited armaments to one side while studiously spilling no blood. Something about it, doesn’t square with me. I might be wrong. Need an authoritative script to say what’s right and wrong. There is such a script of course. It’s the Bible. But it appears to be opaque on this specific matter. Not on all, as I’ll come to.
On the NSW’s floods, I read that “Condobolin, west of Forbes, is preparing for the Lachlan River to hit 7.8m, its highest level since 1894.” Tried to look up the 1894 flood and before I knew I was reading The Maitland Daily Mercury dated 18 June 1930. The headlines cascaded: “Flood waters sweep over farms and pastoral lands. Lower Hunter devastated. Worst disaster in places since 1893. Vast inland seas of water. Many people driven from their homes. Farmers lose heavily.” I assume the floods of the late nineteenth century traversed 1893 and 1894. Must have been pretty bad. However, call me a non-presentist, my predilection is to think that there were major floods between 1788, when Captain Phillip landed, and 1893; and, I just bet, the Aboriginals saw worse floods in the centuries before 1788.
Solomon put it in perspective. “Sometimes there is something of which one says: look this is new! – it has already existed in the ages before us.” (Ecclesiastes, 1:10) Unfortunately, the wisdom of Solomon has had zero influence on climate hysterics; including Chris Bowen and the Teals, and the sheep bleating and voting in their wake. Perhaps if they ever even conceded that weather happened before records were kept, it might help.
I looked up floods in the United States. Can’t vouch for it but Time lists the top ten. The earliest recorded is in California in 1861-62. Only two could be remotely connected with climate change, the Mississippi River in 1993 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And what a long bow such a connection would represent. A little while ago I wrote piece elsewhere on Australian and American weather records. Here’s a potted list:
♦ According to NOAA, “the 1930s ‘Dust Bowl’ drought remains the most significant drought –– in the United States’ historical record.”
♦ According to National Museum Australia, “the ‘Federation Drought’ from 1895 to 1903 was the worst in Australia’s history, if measured by the enormous stock losses it caused [moreover] South-Eastern Australia experienced 27 drought years between 1788 and 1860, and at least 10 major droughts between 1860 and 2000.”
♦ On June 24, 1852, “a catastrophic flood swept through the New South Wales town of Gundagai…The disaster is still the deadliest flood in Australia’s recorded history.”
♦ “For the Upper Mississippi River Valley, the first few weeks of July 1936 provided the hottest temperatures of that period, including many all-time record highs.”
♦ Despite the Australian Bureau of Meteorology trying to scrub the inconvenient measurement from history, the highest temperature ever recorded in Australia was 51.7°C in Bourke on January 3, 1909.
♦“Australia ablaze” set the Hollywood set abuzz during the 2019-20 Australian summer. Here’s Bjorn Lomborg: “Fires burned 10% of Australia’s land surface on average every year in 20th century… this century 6% [and in] 2019-20 [less than] 4%.”
♦ On broken infrastructure, go to Galveston in 1900 and to the greatest natural disaster in the history of the United States.
As the Labor government wrestles with high gas and electricity prices and contemplates interventions of a damaging kind, it would be nice if facts took centre stage. What’s hard, for example, about conceding that cyclones in the Australian region have trended down since 1970-71?
What’s hard about it? It undermines the narrative. When the “facts” on which your whole edifice is built are, literally, made up, with no basis in reality, truth cannot be allowed to shine a light. So, today’s floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones are attributed to man-made climate change; even, bizarrely, to Australia’s recalcitrance or Scott Morrison’s. That worse things happened a century ago is blanked out. Lying, of which the Bible speaks much, becomes addictive. It’s a short step from blaming inclement weather on climate change to claiming that intermittent low-density renewable energy will power a modern economy and reduce electricity prices.
It’s a self-supporting empire of lies – each one propping up the other. Can’t afford a chink of truth lest the edifice crumbles.
I wonder how many Australians saw any “immorality” in America’s “supplying unlimited armaments to one side while studiously spilling no blood” back in 1940? Of course, I’m sure plenty did wish that the US would stop playing around and just join the side that she was on instead of claiming to be “neutral.” I certainly agree that Western nations should have the backbone to actually fight Russia if she will not cease her attacks on a free nation.
A study of the region’s history from the time of the Khazarian empire, in particuolar the period from 1917 to 1991 might well cause one to question the notion of the whole of Ukraine as a “free nation”.
A critical look at the history of just about any modern nation in the world (perhaps with the exception of Australia!) would raise serious doubts about its right to exist as an independent entity.
We don’t need to turn to the Bible for advice on Ukraine, Machiavelli will do. His advice would be to avoid using mercenaries to fight your battles. The Ukrainian war is being fought by mercenaries of course, mostly of the Jew hating, Russian hating, neo-Nazi variety. While the Ukrainians, as Peter alludes, are convenient untermenschen in our dispute with Russia (ie – how very dare they not be like us or subject to us), they’re not that stupid. They too are happy to use others to do the dirty work. This is why Russia will win – has won, aside from all other considerations. As Machiavelli advises, two things happen with mercenaries. They get tired of it because their heart isn’t really in it, then they turn on you. Especially when they’re neo-Nazis with their eyes on your nation as their traditional home.
I went through Immigration at Vladivostok in early January 1979 in the middle of Europe’s “Winter of Discontent”, having strategically placed a magazine at the top of my luggage. The official gabbed it and brandished it shouting “Playboy” to the enjoyment of the other staff, then looked seriously at me and said “confiscated”, I winked and he left my luggage unchecked while the others’ were gone through “with a fine tooth comb”, and we chatted.
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He was agog at having heard of birds falling out of the sky at Cocklebiddy because it was so hot, saying “I can’t imagine 51°” – “I can’t imagine minus 50°”, which it was where I was headed.
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When I was back home, I found it reported in Oz papers as having been 51.7°C on Jan 3, 1979, but apart from Trove, I can’t find a reference to it (because it was not an official BOM site?).
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From the Canberra Times, courtesy of Trove
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Birds reportedly dropped out of the sky yesterday during extreme heat which caused distress and mechanical problems for motorists travelling the Eyre Highway on the Nullarbor Plain.
The maximum temperature at the small settlement of Cocklebiddy was 51.7 degrees (125 deg on the fahrenheit scale).
Cocklebiddy is not an official reporting station to the weather bureau, but today’s maximum there exceeded the highest official recording in W.A. – 50.7C at Eucla, on January 22, 1906.
I can’t remember whether I was out there in 1979 but I did do one trip across in the early 70s when the vehicle kept stuttering from what I believe was fuel vaporization.
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It was so hot on the unsealed, sandy road section that I looked for a place to stop and rest. But there were no trees for shade so I had to keep going.
You’re an supreme optimist – looking for a tree on the Null Arbor.
In the year of Cyclone Tracy I was driving to Marble Bar and the thermometer on the dashboard was showing 53°C, exaggerated by the sun no doubt, but it was HOT and the engine was overheating, so I turned the heater on full blast to cool the engine and got to the Ironclad Hotel without further fuss.
Peter, to add to the 1894 picture of flooding across the Australian eastern seaboard, can I suggest you simply google ‘Brisbane Floods 1894’ utilising the google images tab. Floods devastated the centre of Brisbane 3 times that year and it has never experienced floods as bad since, with only 2012 being of a similar magnitude.
“No one quite sees the immorality, as I do, of America and the UK (to a lesser extent, along with Australia) supplying unlimited armaments to one side while studiously spilling no blood.”
If no-one quite sees it, Peter, perhaps you need to look again.
There’s nothing “immoral” about supplying arms to a victim of naked aggression, and you haven’t yet articulated why it should be. Should the US, before it entered WW2, have just left Britain to its fate, because it was “ímmoral” to provide it with arms?
Your view looks to me like a visceral reaction deriving from a degree of sympathy for Putin’s supposed views – something else that’s unexamined, frankly. Putin rabbits on about patriotism and defending Russia and Christian values, but its deeds, not words, that matter, and by every measure his chatter is the purest hypocrisy. The latest case in point is his ever-increasing cosiness with the brutal, primitive, corrupt theocrats of Iran, who shoot schoolgirls who want to ditch their hijabs: this from a man who burnishes his supposed credentials as a defender of civilisation from Islamists.
I am with you Sindri. It was a shame that Peter had to debase an otherwise excellent, well documented article on climate with that “immoral” opinion.
Funny how some so-called conservatives are so quick to go into bat for the ukrainian corruptocracy , which is home of the Biden family’s and WEF’s dirty money and simply a proxy war to protect those interests with Zelensky as the puppet and then claim some moral high ground. Last time I looked, Putin was a voice against climate change hysteria, the rainbow alliance, rampant COVID mania, the WEF’s version of globalisation, open border immigration, the destruction of family values and the devaluation of religious practice. Its alarming that in the wake of COVID many are also willing to swallow lock, stock and barrel the narrative on the Ukranian conflict fed to them by the MSM – some people never learn. Me thinks many here require a mirror!
Putin may be “a voice against climate change hysteria, the rainbow alliance, rampant COVID mania, the WEF’s version of globalisation, open border immigration, the destruction of family values and the devaluation of religious practice”. I don’t know about his position on any of that, nor am I in support of “corruptocracy”.
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What I do know is that Putin’s actions are wrecking Ukrainian cities and their infrastructure prior to the harsh winter they have. I also know that his actions have destroyed a great many homes, killed a great many, caused millions to flee their homes and no doubt terrified the Ukrainian population including the little children.
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I don’t care if otherwise he is mother Teresa on steroids, his military actions in Ukraine are despicable and they revolt me. That is why governments, right, left and centre, overwhelmingly, around the world have condemned his actions.
Well said BB.
And I couldn’t care less what Putin is a “voice against”. It’s what he does that matters.
Putin has acted consistently with all of those policy positions above within the domestic Russian sphere.
Hmmm, I seem to recall the British Empire conducting themselves in a similar manner in times past. Happy to overlook that are we? or is your disgust tainted by juvenile notions of goodies and baddies?
CK, you’ve forgotten to mention that Putin initially invaded Ukraine to get rid of all those Nazis, and now he’s also trying to eliminate Satan. Not bad for a recently atheistic KGB boss. And he’s relying on a bunch of ex-prisoner thugs, mercenaries and conscripts to do his dirty work, while treating the Russian public like mushrooms (i.e. keeping them in the dark while feeding them truckloads of BS). Frankly, I’m surprised and disappointed you can’t see this.
And the conscripts being sent to Ukraine are mostly dirt-poor ethnic minority boys from the east and south east, who don’t have a voice and whose mothers the FSB can easily keep under control. The nice ethnic Russian boys from Moscow and Leningrad are largely spared. Putin’s Christian principles and family values at work.
I have given my reasons above. When I consider any event, I make my judgement on the basis of the facts in the issue as I understand them at the time.
I recall not long ago, the ‘facts’ as the MSM would have you believe was that Putin and Russia colluded in the 2016 US election. I also remember the ‘facts’ that the MSM would have you believe that mRNA vaccination was effective at curbing COVID transmission. I read and hear the MSM delivered ‘facts’ daily that the world faces an existential climate crisis. If Putin wanted to, he could flatten central Kiev in a single strike. Why has hasn’t this happened? There is as sucker born every minute!
You use terms like “juvenile” and “sucker”. I have explained above how I make my judgements. I don’t wish to engage further with you. Goodbye CK. You may go on and have the last word if you wish but I shall not be replying.
Good one Peter and I’m with you on my “hear our prayer” response. I can only rarely in conscience voice it…too many secular political messages slipped in on top for me, and I’m not Robinson Crusoe I can assure you.
Regarding the reading of thermometers I’m afraid in my eyes it can very much depend on just how you look at them, particularly the mercury and alcohol ones. I noted it many times in the past at my home on our NQ cane farm. If three of us read the same thermometer we’d get 3 different readings, until we sort of agreed, and it was the same at my boarding school and in the engine rooms of the ships I sailed on.
My favourite temp. record from the past is still the one from Marble Bar, when the records say that for 160 days between 31-10-23 and 7-4-24 the day time maximum reached 100 degrees fahrenheit, or more…every day.
For cyclones I always use the surge height of 14 metres for cyclone Mahina, that struck Bathurst Bay in NQ in 1899, said to have wiped out a pearling fleet and killed hundreds. Still a world record I believe or at least an officially known record.
Yes, Rebekah, Sindri, and Brian you have a point. Is there a difference between the US supplying arms to Britain in the 1940s and supplying arms to Ukraine? Perhaps not in principle; though the circumstances and the scope of the threat are not nearly the same. Still, even going back to the 1940s, I would question the morality of a country supplying unlimited quantities of arms, for an unlimited time, prolonging the bloodletting indefinitely, without otherwise engaging in the conflict. The US did of course engage in the conflict in the 1940s. But, as I implied, it’s not something that I can totally get my head around. I am uneasy however, about how long the Ukraine conflict will be stretched out if the intrinsically weaker side is buttressed by a never-ending supply of free high-tech weaponry. Remembering too that a lot of money is at stake. The incentives are not quite right when companies in a country not engaged in the conflict make vastly more money, the longer the conflict persists. Finally, I should have stuck to the weather and not digressed into Ukraine. Mea culpa.
” Is there a difference between the US supplying arms to Britain in the 1940s and supplying arms to Ukraine?”
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In my understanding a massive difference. The US gave arms to Ukraine but sold arms to Britain, albeit “under the counter”. One example was the early, maybe the first, shipment of “surplus to requirements” arms – 500,000 Lee Enfield rifles of First World War vintage, 250 rounds for each weapon, 25,000 Browning automatic rifles, 900 howitzers, 22,000 machine guns and 500 mortars:
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Under American neutrality laws, it was illegal for the US government to sell arms directly to any belligerent nation but a private company was allowed to do that, so the weapons destined for Britain were officially purchased from the War Department by the US Steel Corporation, which then signed a contract in Washington with the British government, selling the entire arsenal for $37.6 million.
In a typical schoolyard brawl, the pertinent quest is often “Who started it?”
In consideration of British behaviour in 1939, can a case be made for the British being the cause of the altercation?
How about the US Neocons (John MccCain and Victoria Newland) in 2014. How about the regime change brought about by the Obama Adminsitration in the Maidan? How about the eight years of constant shelling and abuse that the US led regime in Kiev rained down on the ethnic Russians East of the Dneiper?
Who started it? If February 2022 was a “Russian invasion”, was the sixth of June 1944 an “invasion”?
What British behavior in 1939 did you have in mind that caused ww2? If you mean appeasing hitler and letting him overrun the Sudetenland, I suppose you could argue it, though it rather smacks of, to use that fashionable phrase, “victim blaming”.
That’s the way is sounded, but not what I meant.
I was trying to compare a situation in which the Brits were not responsible for the military action that followed, with the behaviour of the CIA in creating havoc in Ukraine in 2014 and before.
I don’t pretend to know all of the ins and outs of this conflict, but it certainly seems to me to be fishy.
Or to state what seems obvious, the USA is determined through its foreign policy that it will not lose its hegemony, and in order to do so it must defeat Russia and China. The Ukrainians are just cannon fodder caught in the middle. American diplomats appear oblivious to the downward spiral in which they are wedged, which does not bode well for their success.
In the schoolyard we all learnt that bullies keep bullying until someone gives them a blood nose. So it also is, unfortunately, in world affairs.
Peter, I agree with you regarding this most recent itereration of conflict in eastern Europe, which is what they have been doing for hundreds is not thousands of years. We should mind our own business, because this country is in its own crisis of conflict!
“There is nothing new under the sun”! (Ecclesiastes, 1:9)
Regarding the weather, it is instructive to read the narrative of Watkin Tench, the Royal Marine lieutenant at Sydney from 1788-1791, where he recorded 108 ½ degrees F. on December 27, 1790. The following February, more blasts of heat from the NW were experienced, and at Rose Hill (Parramatta) great numbers of bats and birds fell from the trees!
During an expedition to the Nepean/Hawkesbury River in April 1791, Tench recorded:
“The banks are about twenty feet high and covered with trees, many which had been evidently bent by the force of the current in the direction which it runs, and some of them contained rubbish and drift wood in their branches at least forty-five feet above the level of the stream.”
When we settle, farm and build on a “Flood Plain”, why the shock and horror when it floods? Guess what made the flat alluvial landscape? (hint: the answer is in the name)
Sorry to continue on your side-track, Peter, but the huge difference now is the threat of N-weapons. NATO and the USA don’t want to give Putin an excuse to start throwing them around — although, if pushed, I’m sure they’ll send in troops, for starters. As for Roosevelt in WWII, he was attuned to the strong German support among his fellow countrymen at the time — it was only the shock of Pearl Harbour that fired up public opinion and allowed his breakthrough. After he declared war, 80% of US men and materiel went to Europe, even though Japan was the nominal bad guy (and don’t forget Lend Lease for the USSR).
‘Finally, I should have stuck to the weather and not digressed into Ukraine. Mea culpa.’
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Why on earth Peter? Because it upset those who are still willing to believe any lie perpetrated by the socialist media if it suits their personal prejudice? Are we not to offend those who would shut down any discussion that questions the prevailing anti-Russia orthodoxy?
“was the sixth of June 1944 an ‘invasion?'”
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Yes according to The Official Home Page of the United States Army which contains at
https://www.army.mil/d-day/history.html
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“The airborne assault into Normandy, as part of the D-Day allied invasion of Europe, was the largest use of airborne troops up to that time”
I go to a Book of Common Prayer service. The most beautiful liturgy in the English language with the added bonus of an intercession without the free-form nursery moralising.
I was in the 1955 Maitland floods. I remember houses and cattle floating and being rushed off in the torrent. Our food was dropped in by parachute from Dakotas. A lot of fun for us kids then but not for the adults. My dad was reported missing in floodwaters when the levee-bank he was working on gave way. We only found out he was alive about ten days later. He and a mate had washed up at our house, the only one in the street to stay dry. Maitland like many settlements on rivers became inured to the floods. Floods were accepted as a cyclic phenomenon. Floods, minor to catastrophic, had always happened. It would have been futile and laughable, especially in rural communities, to propose the cause as being CO₂ and CH₄ in cow farts.
It is probably safe to say that floods have been a fact of life since Noah became a boatbuilder.
Fast forwarding to present time I can say that after enduring many seasons of floods in Grafton, one thing I noticed is that the landscape shows evidence of super floods that would dwarf any historically recorded flood.
That being said, yes, there is nothing new under the sun and yes, lying is included. But a new and pernicious lie has been foisted upon us. That is the lie that “….today’s floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones are (can be) attributed to man-made climate change”.
Of course, SJOG. When I was a kid in the 1950s, hardly a summer went by without reports of big floods up your way. Dammit, all these folk build on and grow their cattle and produce on floodplains, because that’s where the good soil and water happen to be, and it’s conveniently flat. And how was that soil put there? By past floods, of course! Why is this stuff not being taught to schoolkids? Or at least to our politicians . . .
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Joseph Goebbels.
This is another great essay about the left wing ‘climate crisis’ emotional sooks. Not sure how the commentary collapses into the Ukraine/Russian argument, but unfortunately I’m old enough to remember 80 years ago when there was no such gibberish and fantasy as ‘climate change’, rather there was this Russian guy called Stalin and he set his armies against the nazis and the world graciously thanked him. Sadly today the political climate changes where we have a Russian guy called Putin who set his armies against the corrosive nazis and the world curses him without hindsight.
Is this the political climate crisis the left wing infant sooks are looking for?
Yes, and I am old enough to remember that Stalin firstly did a deal with the Nazis and then perpetrated the Katyn Massacre. It was only after the Nazis turned on him that he went after them.
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You now say that Putin is going after Nazis. You are apologizing for a Putin operation that is now wrecking hospitals and killing day old babies (latest news).
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You are correct however when you say the world curses Putin.
Greg Sheridan has an up-to-date photo, albeit replete with black hair, in today’s The Australian (25/11).
Late to the party again, and again find myself in agreement with, CK, pgang, and Philip. Putin may be the known known, but Zelensky is a manipulative snake in the grass. And rule of thumb, don’t believe a word the msm peddles, also don’t particularly care what happens that i cannot control – am i supposed to weep for Pakistani flood victims? More concerned I am with the Western world’s deliberate destruction. On the main piece re climate lies, what they (media/alarmists) benefit from is instantaneous news from any part of the globe to hype, and that so many more people live in areas that are affected by flood or fire that of course makes them more newsworthy than a century ago.