I had no idea...

Saudi Arabia squandered its groundwater and agriculture collapsed. California, take note. - Vox

I was just speculating the other day that the Arabian peninsula countries must grow next to nothing of the food they need.  I had no idea that Saudia Arabia in fact had gone on a ridiculous exercise in my lifetime:

Over at Reveal News, Nathan Halverson has a terrific piece
on how Saudi Arabia squandered its groundwater supplies in just a few
short decades. Back in the 1970s, the government allowed landowners to
dig as many wells as they desired, in order to transform the desert into
lush farmland. An agricultural boom followed, and Saudi Arabia
improbably became the world's sixth-largest exporter of wheat.

"By the 1990s, farmers were pumping an average of 5 trillion gallons a
year," Halverson writes. "At that rate, it would take just 25 years to
completely drain Lake Erie." The problem was that Saudi Arabia doesn't
get nearly enough annual rainfall to replace those withdrawals. Its
aquifers had built up over tens of thousands of years and were now being
drained all at once.

Not surprisingly, the party didn't last. By the 2000s, the aquifers
had become dangerously depleted. Wells dried up. Oases that had
persisted since biblical times were now gone. The country will need to
build costly desalination plants for drinking water. Most important,
Saudi Arabia's agricultural output declined sharply, with the amount of
farmland now less than half of what it was in the 1990s. In an attempt
to conserve what water remains, the country has announced that the 2016 wheat harvest will be its last. An entire industry, gone.

 Why do I get the feeling that libertarian types at the time would have been ridiculing environmentalist's warnings that this was a bad idea.  Let the market decide, etc.

Very witty

A few more post Abbott observations...

*  I am somewhat in agreement with those saying that Abbott not making a statement to the media yet makes it look like he's not "manning up" to his loss, in contrast to Gillard.   But is that too sexist in its own way? :)  Does it mean he is white hot angry about it all?   Would make me laugh if he is.   It would be all very karmic in it's own way, no?

*  It must be hurting the egos of Bolt and Jones that they can't convince their side of politics to follow their direction on leadership.   Particularly when they were instrumental on getting Abbott the leadership based on their promotion of climate change denial, which was always utterly foolish.  The tide's turning, guys.   Are you capable of admitting error?

[Update:  I had forgotten this:

Just over a year ago, Jones, the Sydney broadcaster, told Malcolm Turnbull he “had no hope of ever being the leader, you have got to get that into your head”.]

*  I like Turnbull - intelligent, articulate, humane - but he has a very difficult job dealing with those in his Party (and the Nationals) poisoned by too much influence from the American Right (and the likes of the IPA.)  I would like him to be ruthless in his approach to climate denialists in the party - tell them straight up that they have always been wrong and have been conned by populist fools in the media, and ideological driven economists who don't understand a thing about what actual science and scientific bodies all agree on. Someone has to tell them someday, it will do them good.

[Update:  even better, Turnbull could go on Bolt's show and tell him the same thing to his face - that he's been completed fooled and conned by non-scientists and it's about time he grew up and recognised facts.]

*  Has Steve Kates had to up his blood pressure medication yet?   This nuttily obsessed economist hates Turnbull irrationally and with the same vigour with which he thinks Obama and "damaged women" are causing the end of civilisation:

Malcolm is almost the perfect reflection of media opinion. He is like blotting paper, soaking up every conventional opinion without any actual apparent ability to think for himself. He is a non-entity in the Barack Obama mould, filled with vapid thoughts and a high opinion of his own abilities and intellect that is never at any stage reflected in anything he says or any action he takes.

He apparently won on the promise that he would not change any of the more contentious compromises Abbott had been able to meld, which is to say, he won promising not to do the very things that he wants to do, and which the media will look to him to do. The Great Communicator he is not. He is a shallow and pompous blowhard.

 *  I'll be livid if a few, persistent and potentially damaging rumours about Abbott's private life are only now exposed as true by journalists.

Bird love

Birds reveal the evolutionary importance of love

Sort of a cute study here.  

Was Abbott too ideologically driven, or not ideologically driven enough?

For those on the libertarian/small government right, such as Chris Berg, Abbott was not ideological enough.   And I think it is true that Abbott's ideas seemed to not follow any consistent line.  His overly generous parental leave plan, for example, won applause only from a handful of feminists who would normally align with Labor; his approach to climate change attempted (unsuccessfully) to straddle the divide between those who accept and those who reject science in his party; similarly, he seemed awkwardly positioned on manufacturing policy - not willing to completely abandon shipbuilding in Australia as a rigorously "dry" economic approach may suggest, but not doing enough to make the current industry feel viable, either.

But from my point of view, over allegiance to ideology is bad in politics anyway.  Successful government  responds to situations in a practical matter, without getting too concerned as to whether it fits in with preconceived theories or world views.

The problem with Abbott came down to the opportunism and the lack of practical sense in the contradictory nature of so many of his policies.  

Not being consistently ideologically driven can indeed lead to good, sensible government.  It didn't work that way for Abbott, though.   He needed a set of policies that made sense in a practical and global sense, but not necessarily from a purely ideologically consistent sense.  He failed.

An under-reported effect of an El Nino

I  hadn't even realised, until some recent reports out of the mainstream news media came to my attention, that New Guinea suffered a severe drought in 1997, and is in the midst of El Nino related drought again.

And recall that only last year, a paper predicted a doubling of severe El Nino as a result of global warming.

In light of the dire effect these have on our poor neighbours, you'd think the media might report the tropical droughts more prominently....

Worst PM gone

Quite a few people are noting that Abbott was PM for less time than either Rudd or Gillard.  Couldn't happen to more deserving embodiment of the Peter Principle. 

Let's not forget, Abbott got his party's leadership by waving his finger in the breeze and going with the climate change denying populists of the Right:  Bolt, Jones and a host of Murdoch writers.   He in fact had never been particularly interested in science, or economics, and his sloganeering tactics ever since he took the top job discredits the idea that he's more than a political opportunist with no idea who to take advice from.   He has spent his Prime Ministership with no sense of consistency or principle - the "say anything" PM adjusting his message according to the audience in front of him.  

What's worse, he sought legitimacy through the creepy upscaling  of the role of the military and paramilitary in day to day government.   He shows no remorse or misgivings over the plainly cruel permanent warehousing of men, women and children to deter others from attempting sea entry into Australia; his refusal to support Gillard in attempting the relatively humane Malaysian solution, while now seeking to send people to dirt poor Cambodia, is a stunning case of cynical political opportunism that deserves condemnation.   The swathe of secrecy that he has legislated, or co-opted from pliant military figures, regarding the tactics being deployed on the high seas and in his detention centres  is an absolute low for open, democratic government in this country.  His highly personal attacks on Gillian Triggs and the ABC also showed a somewhat eccentric  political thin skin that wasn't so  obvious until he became PM.

Going back further in time, don't forget his hidden role in funding action that lead to the jailing of a political problem, Pauline Hanson.   People seem too willing to overlook how dirty he has been prepared to get as a political operative.

He may have done some worthy work when a Minister under Howard, but his elevation to leadership has proved to be the long term disaster that even half of his party suspected it may be when he got the job.

I can only say that there was one good thing resulting from his election as PM - the resignation of Kevin Rudd from politics and his poisonous destructive role within Labor.   Yeah, thanks for that, Tony.  Pity you then had to hang around to prove yourself to be the PM with the least worthy legacy of any in my lifetime.  

Seems I may as well be writing this now

Gillard legacies:    some serious education reform (NAPLAN, widespread acknowledgement  of increased funding needed), wide-ranging and permanent change to improve disability services;  world leading public health measures (plain packaging); a carbon pricing scheme that showed it could work. 

Abbott's legacies of value:   [insert cricket sounds]

Spill

While I was thinking about the future of sex in cars, I see that a challenge to Abbott's leadership by Turnbull is definitely on.



Good news - I think.

I actually wonder whether much of the incentive for this was Abbott's disastrously poor interview on 7.30 last week.  The thing that struck me most about it was his apparent genuineness when he was claiming that  he was leading a good government that had achieved a lot.  I can just imagine cabinet members rolling their eyes and thinking "He really doesn't have a clue.  It's time..."

Driverless cars and bad behaviour

I can't say that I have noticed one potential issue about driverless cars being discussed - how will they stop users doing unsavoury things in them whilst going for the ride?

Come on, everyone has heard stories about airline passengers trying to get away with sex under blankets, or in the toilet; and that's in a place with the obvious potential for detection.  I predict it will be barely a week from when the first driverless car fleet comes into service that someone will have a video on the net of "what my girlfriend and I got up to when we didn't have to drive".   Or there'll be some solo act on show.   Maybe big windows will be a daytime deterrent from this.  Not sure about nighttime, though.

How will they stop it?   Photos taken inside every 30 seconds?  Random video monitoring?   Apart from the likely privacy uproar, how hard would it be to cover the camera, anyway?

For that matter, there might also be issues with littering in them; or late night drunks' vomit.   (I suppose if one is too much of a mess, the person being picked up may just report it and wait for the next.  But it would be much better not to have them messed up in the first place.)

I trust Google is working on this...

Just retire, part 3

Good to hear that even Abbott Ministers are now talking about their inglorious leader getting the boot. 

Andrew Bolt doesn't seem to be on the case yet, but surely he'll be out with fear and loathing of a Turnbull leadership any minute now....

Update:   I wonder how Catallaxy threadsters are taking this?

Pretty much as expected, then.

[But honestly, where else but on Australia's "leading Libertarian and Centre-Right blog" can one get such a scintillating mix of quasi homophobic insult and "blame the woman" analysis.]

Update 2:  and how are Catallaxy threadster's coping with political reaction to two women being killed in public by their ex partners in Queensland last week?   And the news that there are about 12,000 breaches of domestic violence orders in Queensland each year?:

Help for the aging gut

Delaying Age Related Diseases by Keeping Gut Bacteria in Balance | Neuroscience News

Interesting research here, showing that fiddling with the gut bacteria of fruit flies as they age can significantly increase their life expectancy.  It would be pretty amazing if they could squeeze an extra 10 years or so of average healthy human life by adjustments to our own gut microbes, too.

As as aside:  I wonder if some scientist is out there gathering the poop of particularly healthy 80 or 90 year olds, and checking the composition of its microbes.  Given the massive interest in this area of research now, I wouldn't be surprised...

Abbott's Canadian inspiration is on his way out

Why David Frum Is Wrong About Stephen Harper and Canada's Conservative Party - The Atlantic

The tactics of Stephen Harper are not identical to those of Tony Abbott, but reading this article, there are certainly many similarities.  I get the impression that Harper may be nastier and much more assertive in private than Abbott, who is probably more just an ambitious dill out of his depth who doesn't know who to listen to.

From this morning's AFR

Explaining the Abbott pathology, one of his senior colleagues said it is rooted in a biblical belief of good and evil, hence his frustrations with a nuanced Obama administration. "Abbott would have us do things in the Middle East that would have had your hair stand up on end," said this individual without going into details.

Link.

He writes well

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show – both a beginning and the end? | Daily Review: film, stage and music reviews, interviews and more

Gee.  Guy Rundle's dissection of American late night talk shows is pretty good.  He writes well, even if you can't always agree on every point.

I haven't watched my recordings of Colbert yet.  Maybe tonight.

In Australian political nonsense news...

I see that, apparently, David Leyonhjelm's look-at-me "Nanny State" enquiry  has received most of its submissions on bicycle helmet laws    Not only are Leyonhjelm's findings on this (and any other "nanny State" issue) utterly predictable, so is the fact that experts will disagree with him, and more importantly - it's a State responsibility, not a Commonwealth one.

I see Chris Berg will also turn up and bleat about lock out laws, amongst other things  - again, entirely a State responsibility, and one which the Commonwealth has utterly no power to intervene in.   OK, tobacco plain packaging laws will get a mention too - as if any party except Leyonhjelm's one man show is going to seriously propose undoing those while the smoking figures continue to drop.

This inquiry is a complete and utter waste of time.   I would much prefer that Leyonhjelm pleasure himself in private. 

The fractured Australian Right

OK, it's not (quite) the same level of disaster as the US political situation, but it appears that there are many unhappy campers in the Coalition at the moment.  I wonder how many of them are secretly hoping for a bad result in the Canning by-election, so that a move on Abbott's leadership can be convincingly mounted.

PS:  on the populist Right, Andrew Bolt is in a frenzy of Muslim-mania again, and is virtually unreadable. 

PPS:   according to Phil Coorey, even frontbenchers are saying there'll be another leadership challenge. 

The fractured American Right

Oh look, George Will not only disses Trump, but finds big hypocrisy in the GOP on the matter of gay marriage and the law:

Some, who loudly lament how illegal immigrants damage the rule of law, have found a heroine in Kentucky. A county clerk, whose devotion to her faith is not stronger than her desire to keep her paycheck, chose jail rather than resignation when confronted with having to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court and the Constitution regarding same-sex marriage.

Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Bobby Jindal and Scott Walker think her religious freedom is being trampled. So does Ted Cruz, who surely knows better. He clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and must remember the 1892 case in which a Massachusetts policeman claimed that rules restricting political activity by police violated his constitutional rights. Rejecting this claim, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote that the officer “may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.”

Meanwhile, armed paranoid Right wing nutters claim they will "defend" said clerk, and what's the bet that followers of gormless Gateway Pundit will clap their hands in excitement and approval.  (There are only 2 comments there so far, but I'll check back later.)

The American Right is truly in a crisis of disunity and nonsense. 

A very strange ruse

US politicians face sack for gay sex ruse - BBC News

Tea party Republicans Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat concocted a false
story that Mr Courser had solicited a male sex worker, to make the story
of their affair less credible....

The allegations stem from a spurious email that Mr Courser asked an
aide to send, that claimed he was caught with a male prostitute.

The email was sent to party activists in the hope it would make allegations of his and Ms Gamrat's affair sound less credible.

The report doesn't explain how a Republican politician could think he faced less trouble by spreading a rumour that he used male prostitutes than he could from knowledge of an affair with a woman...

Japanese floods - worldwide floods

The remarkable sight of the Japanese floods on television last night was "old news" by this morning, but yet again, I make the point that flash flooding from increased extreme rainfall is an underacknowledged immediate consequence of global warming.

So I was a bit surprised to read this at the end of one report about yesterday's flood:

Kei Yoshimura, a hydrologist at the University of Tokyo’s Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute, said the magnitude of the Kinugawa River flooding on Thursday was “something that takes place only once in 100 years.”
He added that it was too early to conclude the flooding was linked to climate change, saying the heavy rainfall happened to occur along that river.
“It’s my view that the effect of climate change on this particular incident is zero, or unknown at this point,” he said.

This is one of those cases of over-caution on the matter of attribution to individual events.  If Kei had wanted to paint the "bigger picture" he might of cited this 2007 paper about increased rainfall intensity in his country:

This paper explores features of long-term changes in precipitation in Japan based on recent studies using daily data from 51 stations since 1901, partly updated for the present article. We show that heavy daily precipitation ( 200 mm and 100 mm) has significantly increased during the last century as weak to moderate precipitation ( 1 mm to 10 mm) has decreased.  New analysis using hourly precipitation records at over 600 stations on the AMeDAS network has shown an increase in very intense hourly and six-hourly precipitations ( 100 mm/h and 300 mm/6h) during the last 28 years.

Or he might have referred to the worldwide trend, as discussed here in a 2012 paper:

Based on the discussions above, we can make the following conclusions. First, the large increase in global average precipitation intensity increase derived from the GPCP data, with the top 10% heavy precipitation increased by about 108% for each degree Kelvin increase in global mean temperature and the bottom 30%–60% bins decreased by about 20% K 1, is credible. Increases in heavy precipitation can lead to more and worse floods and mudslides, while decreases of light and moderate precipitation can increase the risk of droughts. The 100-year linear trend (1906–2005) of global temperature is 0.74 C 0.18 C, and is expected to increase even faster [Solomon et al., 2007].  This implies that the global top 10% heavy precipitation had already increased by about 80% and will continue increase at a faster rate. Meanwhile there are corresponding increases in the risk of droughts. It follows that the increasing occurrence and severity of floods, mudslides, as well as shortage of water resources has been and would increasingly be one of the worst hazards to the global ecosystem as the result of global warming.

The lesson:  this key damaging aspect of climate change is already happening.

And, second lesson:   ANDREW BOLT - YOU ARE WRONG AND A FOOL FOR NOT ACKNOWLEDGING CLIMATE CHANGE HAS LONG BEEN PREDICTED TO INCREASE BOTH FLOOD AND DROUGHT.