Those Canterbury Plains - many centuries of change

All environments are local, and the Canterbury Plains have been through many centuries of vast change - affecting climate, sedimentation, rivers, surface water bodies and of course soils. A quick history:

1. Originally, forest from mountains to sea. Check the Forested Areas map in 'Tangata Whenua'...
2. Extensive 12-13 century burning of the forest cover, as the early Maori chased moas and other forest dwelling grocery items - inducing a much drier east coast climate over the ensuing centuries and leaving remnant bush only in foothills, valleys and isolated patches on the Plains proper.
3. Revegetation - low growth, tussock, spaniards, matagouri
4. Burning round #2 as the early Europeans cleared tussock and began to farm
5. Extensive sheep farms and some minor cropping, but limited by access to water until the race schemes of the 1870's onwards
6. Water races, fed from the Waimak, Kowai, Selwyn, and the foothill streams behind Windwhistle, for reliable stock water. This recharged aquifers as well as providing household water: the races eventually spanned fairly much the entire Plains excepting the dry stony Te Pirita corner. Farming extended to cropping on the deep silt loams where feasible.
7. The irrigation era - wells to 2-300m deep, and then the river-fed canal schemes of recent date. Uses expanded as well - seeds, more and different animals

To think that it is even possible to adjudge climate, river flows, optimal uses, and livelihoods, against such a background of continual change, is quite simply hubris.....some such changes (vegetation cover being a classic example) affect climate very slowly - on a scale of centuries.

The Rush to Judge is not assisted in terms of likely acceptance by the High and Mighty pronouncements from the We Know Best pulpits. There's more than a hint of Millenarian Fever about most of these, and like any other monomaniacal fixations, there's always the awful but (of course unacknowledged) possibility that despite the Perfection of their Vision, they are Quite Wrong.....

A Tale of Two Gabbys

Gabby Hakoops, esteemed slack-key guitarist to the King of Diamonds, stood before the Witchsmeller Pursuivant, accused of playing Gabby Faure's 'After the Dream' instead of the programmed 'Ride of the Valkyries' at a recent State Banquet for the Queen of Hearts.

Hakoops averred that the sheet music was, in his words, 'Pukaroo', that it had been safely stored in a Music Shack with a locked, strong - albeit somewhat rusty yet still impressive - iron front door with many Big Bolts, that Dark Forces in the Land were to blame, and then referred the matter to the Grand Inquisitor.

The latter had returned after a fifteen-second Conflab with his minions, stated that no Dark Forces were involved, and that he 'does not appreciate Frivolous Litigation and can he please have another Inquisition Chamber, as he is perennially Under-Resourced'. He was also heard, sotto voce, to complain that he had not been invited to the State Banquet.

The MinionQuisitors have revealed that, after failing to open the Music Shack's front door despite many repeated attempts to hammer out the weakest-looking Rusty Bolt, they thought to try the Back door. This was not only wide open, but seemed never to have had locks or, indeed, Hinges. They concluded that Starveling Waifs, who may have included a noted Cellist in their number - or perhaps all were wearing Stillettos - to judge by the marks on the floor, may have conducted a rehearsal for a Symphony, which included Gabby Faure's piece, and had left behind the 'After the Dream' music. This was, in their summation, then picked up by the esteemed, but perhaps short-sighted, Hakoops, who then faithfully rendered it in mellifluous slack-key fingerings, to the assembled multitudes at the State Banquet.

As the theme of the Banquet was to have been 'Victory and Livery' - hence the Wagner on the playlist - the rendition of 'After the Dream' completely spoiled the occasion. Not only was the King of Diamonds mortified, but the Queen of Hearts had to endure a mild Inquisition after the Witchsmeller Pursuivant was summoned and immediately smelt Something Fishy. She, we are informed, was Not Amused.

Hakoops has been sentenced to a long gig in a Folk Band in a far-off land over the Edge of the Earth. He departs on the morrow. The Music Shack is currently the subject of demolition and re-build, hopefully, this time, with only one entry, and with code-compliant, non-rusty, Big Bolts. But, being as how it's being rebuilt by the very Minions who assembled the Last Shack, and despite including the very Latest Technology, we are reliably informed that Dark Forces, via the Afeared Five-Eyed Raven, are this very minute Watching and Waiting.....

A Baseline for Wellbeing Accounting

In a scoop, Interest has been made privy to an important advancement in the Wellbeing Accounting space.

All wellbeing measures, to be credible, require a baseline from which to adjudge progress in the various indicators.  This is not easy to establish:  the requirements include solid records, a sufficient sample size, and a time lapse of well over a century to let the noise in the data settle down.  The Department of Statistics has established just such a baseline, and by a novel technique.

There is no immediately usable baseline within New Zealand itself.  It is a young country, records of sufficient size and credibility are sparse, and with rapid rises in population over the century-plus time lapse deemed necessary, data from the early years cannot be taken as being at all representative. Drawing on settled science techniques from other disciplines, infill data from a close and analogous neighbour has been used to establish this baseline.

The data comes from several large Tasmanian organisations.  These meet the stipulated requirements:  records, sample size, and age.  The work involved to shape this data into a form suitable for use in a 21st century public accounting context is substantial:  raw data, as for other disciplines, needs to be viewed with 21st century eyes, rather than be taken at face value or have 19th century concepts of 'wellbeing' simply echoed verbatim .  There have been several streams of work to refine the original records along the alignments mandated by the Wellbeing Budget now being finalised.   These have reached conclusions, and some observations are reported in precis form below.

The Tasmanian data reveals two main threads reported in the quite voluminous records kept at these institutions: falling under the following broad Wellbeing headings.

Social:  the general impression is that social interaction was muted to an extent rarely seen today.  And such interactions as did occur were formal, short, and evidenced high levels of power imbalance.  There is little to no evidence of much informal interaction, and similarly, diversity of gender, race, and religion is minimal.

Environmental:  the records reveal that there was strong self-sufficiency and little reliance on external inputs.  The populations gardened, built using local materials, extended existing, older buildings and generally 'did for themselves'.  Interestingly, and not unlike the present day, they seem to have been subject to tight supervision and control in these activities, albeit of perhaps different types.

The result of this baseline establishment is vital to the Wellbeing Budget which forms the cornerstone of  the forthcoming 2019 Budget.  Current-day soundings are compared to this baseline, and rates of progress can, with some caution, be assessed.  The infill technique, novel but certainly well-established in other settled science, has been a vital instrument for this purpose.  Once again, New Zealand leads the world in placing Wellbeing Growth at the heart of its Governmental activity.

Millenarial Movements

The Historian Norman Cohn, in his 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, found that Millenarian movements always picture salvation as:

• Collective, in the sense that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful as a collectivity.
• Terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some other-worldly heaven.
• Imminent, in the sense that it is to come both soon and suddenly.
• Total, in the sense that it is utterly to transform life on earth, so that the new dispensation will be no mere improvement on the present but perfection itself.
• Miraculous, in the sense that it is to be accomplished by, or with the help of, supernatural agencies.

It might have been expected that millenarian thinking would disappear with the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. But Cohn found that these ideas and the manias they inspired reemerged in the twentieth century’s secular totalitarian and revolutionary movements.

In what could be a description of the Green New Deal (USA), Cohn argued that these movements felt themselves to be engaged in a struggle of unique importance, “different in kind from all other struggles known to history, a cataclysm from which the world is to emerge totally transformed and redeemed…this is the essence of the recurrent phenomenon of revolutionary millenarianism.”

Now tell me that this does not largely describe those young, easily-led, desperate-to-be-Liked Youf who recently lay about various places to draw attention to Weather in 2100.....

The bitter fruit of the 'Personal is Political'

Jeffrey Tucker writes that

"The attempt to turn every subjectively felt personal issue into a collective cause with a collective action has hatched a brutal form of identity politics that has generated no end to social conflict, with vast carnage along the way."

The 60's slogan has morphed into a profoundly divisive attitude, with the predictable result that 

"in practice .. to have as little human contact with others as possible, especially in a business environment. Literally, anyone can be accused and play-it-safe companies would rather toss out the targetted employee rather than risk bad public relations and an unwinnable lawsuit. The toll adds up daily."

How does it all end up?

The demand that we politicize every personal grievance presumes that people only exist as part of groups and those groups must be defined politically and such groupings can be infinitely complex as intersectionality theory demonstrates. One group’s winnings come at the expense of everyone else, and thus does every advance create the conditions for more oppression, disgust, outrage, condemnation, activism, and power grabbing, even as those groups are constantly changing in composition depending on political influence. There is no safety for anyone under this moral code; there is only fear and dread of exposure, and a miserable life overall.

The mathematical futility of long-term climate projections

The entire climate-prediction edifice as currently promoted, is founded on quicksand, as time-series research at LSE demonstrates - the Hawkmoth Effect rules. The issue comes down to several Inconvenient Modelling Facts:

• Complex systems do not generally have the mathematical property of Structural stability. This leads to quite different projections, using the same initial conditions, even if two models differ to a minute degree - the poster at the link graphically illustrates this.
• Models used for projections simplify real phyical processes (for tractability) and make assumptions (for tuning) - both of which cause structural inadequacy by incomplete description of the phenomena being modeled.
• Turbulent/chaotic systems are pointless to model over long time series if accurate projections are expected: each time-slice depends on the output of the former slice as initial conditions and projections thus rapidly depart from sensible physical-result boundaries as model-time progresses
• The real physical world, as best can be gleaned from observation of history, has close-to-absolute boundaries on temperature = +/- 2-3 degrees Centigrade, and two dominant Attractors: Ice Age and InterGlacial. There have been more than enough long-tail (extremely low- probability) perturbations in the past (vulcanism, comet strikes) to supply a record of any vast excursions from these boundaries. The bounds seem to hold, regardless
• The 'Escape from Model-land' LSE paper suggests that consistency with the past, use of long-tail (very low probability) inputs and expert judgement as to model applicability and utility in the first place, is the only way out of Model-Land
• "The utility and decision-relevance of these model simulations must be judged based on consistency with the past, and out-of-sample predictive performance and expert judgement, never based solely on the plausibility of their underlying principles or on the visual “realism” of outputs."

The two turbulent/chaotic systems which climateers attempt to model are, of course, Atmosphere and Ocean. 

Essentially, they are trying to predict the weather on 27 March, 2119, when predicting the weather on 27 April 2019 is clearly a nonsense: a coin-toss or a dartboard are more useful Models. Next weekend's weather - a reasonable prediction is likely. Tomorrow - the prediction will be close to spot-on. 

Models are always wrong, but mostly they are Useful.....except for the Far Future.  Mathematics rules.

Zoning Causes Commutes

 "We must strive to provide employment close to where people live” Parfitt (of Auckland Council) says. “Long commutes place a huge, unproductive strain on both people's quality of life and our transport infrastructure."

Well, the Plannerz insist on separating all sorts of uses by zonerating to the nth degree. No longer can the shopkeeper live in the flat above the store, the temporary construction crew live in a donga at the latest site, the mechanic trade from a three-bay garage at home, or the budding fashion designer sew and trade from the spare bedroom.

Well, at least not legally. In practice, good neighbours, high fences and quiet work habits mean that all this and more activity is happening anyway: people simply can't be arsed dealing with the Clueless Councils and their minionz.

Planning which enforces separation of uses causes Commuting. It's as sad and as simple as that. The RMA was designed to handle incompatible uses by examination of Effects. This doesn't need spatial Zoning to be present, but the Town and Country Planning Actorz simply could not conceive of a future without squiggles on maps.

So here we sit, locked into spatial use-mandates created by unelected bureaucrats, in our cars, mostly at idle, as we transport ourselves, slowly and expensively, to our Place of Work......

Christianity and Islam - the differences

The difference between the Christian and Islamic systems is that the former has had a Reformation, and the latter hasn't. During the course of the schism in Christianity (dating roughly from Luther in 1517 and Henry VIII in 1538 when the Dissolution was ordered) the texts were gradually re-examined over the next couple of centuries, and the Old Testament was largely consigned to the dustbin. Sam Harris (End of Faith) expounds upon this point with his usual enthusiasm.

Islam neither allows any such re-jigging of its texts (that's blasphemy), nor any withdrawal from the Ummah (that's Apostasy). Both have severe penalties. That's why most rational thinkers regard the whole edifice as an oubliette - easy to get down into, impossible to get out of, thus to be avoided. 

This then is the main root of the disquiet about things Islamic: it cuts right across Enlightenment values of self-determination, personal freedom within a polity, and rationality. To be sure, as long as adherents stay within the guardrails set by the wider non-Islamic society, no issues. But unfortunately for that happy prospect, there's the uncomfortable fact that the Islamic texts regard that wider society as infidels, to be converted if possible.

We've largely abandoned Christian evangelism because of its long history of abuses, mis-steps and ultimate futility. So we are not about to embrace a newer, evangelistic, and intensely patriarchic imperialism......