IT is ten years since the book was published, and I wish I had read it ten years ago. ‘Bodos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There’ by David Brooks, 2000, has made me reassess my understanding of the Australian Greens and what their constituents really value.
While Brook’s book is based on an assessment of the new elite in the US, it is apparent from the work of Australian demographer, John Black, that the new political force in Australian politics is identical in key ways. Importantly, those who vote for the Australian Green are not only the richest voters in Australia but they also have a significant interest in the success of the mining industry.
Mr Black was interviewed by Paul Comrie-Thomson on Counterpoint earlier in the year:
John Black: That’s right, the National Party is traditionally run by wealthy people who represent poor people, and the Greens tends to be run by lower income people representing rich people but who seem to have a view that their constituency is decidedly bolshy in terms of economic policy when in fact there’s absolutely no evidence of that at all, and in fact the evidence is to the contrary.
Paul Comrie-Thomson: So in fact if green voters see green political parties threatening their income stream, they’ll dump them. Is that how you see it?
John Black: In a New York second. This is not rocket science. People vote politically as consumers, and I fall back on my old Marxist historians for that little piece of wisdom. People do not vote to lose money, that’s a case in point. Your green voter now has shares, your green voter now doesn’t have children. Because they don’t have children they have money, they have investment homes, they have shares. The simple correlations between ownership of investments, including shares, and the top income group was +0.94. You don’t get any stronger than that. I mean, share ownership is clustered in then top quartile, green votes are clustered in the top quartile. Green voters are born overseas, they’re the kind of people who were getting $100,000+ in WA on the old AWAs. They were into them with their ears back. These are rich, cosmopolitan, internationally qualified people.
According to David Brooks writing about Bobos in the US: This new elite has been subtly influenced by the counterculture of the sixties and the opportunities provided by information technology. The most successful and most influential individuals are highly educated with one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another in the bourgeois realm of ambition and world success.
A big tension for them, and source of much anxiety, is how to reconcile worldly success with inner virtue. According to Brooks this is achieved by creating a way of living that that lets you be an affluent success and at the same time a free-spirit rebel. Founding design firms, they find a way to be an artist and still qualify for stock options. They incorporate Rolling Stones anthems into their marketing campaigns. They’ve reconciled the antiestablishment style with the corporate imperative.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Sorry, I see greens in two camps, 1/ socialists with an agenda who eventually want to get into power so they and their family can eventually benefit 2/ naive people of whom many are wealthy but have no idea how calculate a return on investment. The press term of wives of doctors (actually batchelors of medicine who do not have PhDs) is apt. They have plenty of in-coming money, plenty of time to chat over cups of coffee and a guilty feeling they should do something for the riff-raff as long as it does not affect them in their life time.
No green supporter cares about the poor people of the world. Greens do not care about democracy. They think the poor are too stupid to vote they only want to make sure they can have a say but then tell everyone else what to do eg the poor can not have cheap power which may pollute (in their definition) or for hydro may affect a tiny proportion of the eco-system but instead they must install solar or wind power sources at an unaffordable cost and which for most of the time gives no or much lower output than rated or required.
Keep well (except green supporters)
I posted this comment at Jo Nova’s; it seems to fit here under this thread as well.
The mentality and behaviour of the green ideologist is the key to AGW and the inherent abrogation of democratic and individual rights in that green ideology.
It occurs to me that Piaget may have something to offer here; there is no doubt in my opinion that Western society has removed many of the oppressive natural consequences of existence; at its best this social structure insulates the citizenry from the real reality of nature.
According to Piaget we learn our intelligence, our mental processing and mental complexity as a process of abstraction from interaction from the environment; however the environment of today isn’t “Nature, red in tooth and claw” but endless choice and nannified encouragement of subjectivity; individualism is no longer a process of considered maturation but of whimsy and vanity; the relevant environment is therefore not external but internal; abstract ideas no longer run the gaunlet of external environmental attrition but are attached to an untested personal morality which in turn is defined by concepts which are cleverly marketed to appeal to this moral sense; things like nature, gaia, the hollywoodised/bambi version of nature. The other side of the coin, filthy lucre, dirty business and CO2 polluting energy is presented as immoral and a threat to the former.
But because most people do not have a hard-won sense of consequence the antithesis intrinsic to the moral juxtaposition, that is the capacity to have a bambi perspective of nature is dependent on CO2 polluting energy, is not understood by the holders of the moral position; the result is a cognitive dissonance; in Piaget’s terminology people have gone to Concrete Operational Stage of mentality without first properly going through a reality based Preoperational stage. A classic example of this is this:
http://www.vexnews.com/news/11692/cant-stand-the-heat-greens-macedon-candidate-nicky-haslinghouse-flees-public-meeting-as-the-going-gets-tough/
This is not meant to be a glib attack on an obviously spoilt and infantile person; in 3 years of blogging I can honestly say that the defining characteristic of AGW supporters is a childish petulance that I can only explain as a resentment of having to be tested; on a more profound level this is what I took from the deviousness, secrecy and patronising refusal of the CRU crew in refusing to reveal their ‘studies’ and their outrage when they were revealed and which we see continuing in the attempted bonfire of the vanities treatment of Wegman.
How ironic would it be that AGW and the massive dislocation its ‘cure’ will have on our prosperous society has been brought about because that prosperity created a sub-class of unrealistic, untested moral bullies.
Strangely my opinion of lawyers hasn’t changed. Anything for the client. Isn’t the assumption of the moral high ground so nauseating.
Never mind the high moral ground, how do you explain Cai’s latest effort:
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3501.1
I don’t even know what a ‘bobo’ is let alone a ‘bodo’.
Coho – as you know Cai is on another level. It’s be cognitive dissonance overload if you faux sceptics ever come up against him. I suppose now that’s he’s reported a possible non-AGW result in “a” region you’re suddenly becoming a devotee?
More relevant to this intellectual discussion check my new video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL0PbJRc-CI
Alternatively there is also http://eprints.usq.edu.au/8275/1/Cottrill_Ribbe_2010_AV.pdf
The paper by Cottrill et al. is an interesting read, until we get to the conclusion.
‘The increases in the MSLP are directly linked to changes in the behaviour of the subtropical ridge in the southeast Australian region and at least partially due to the positive polarity of the SAM. Since the changes in the SAM are directly related to
ozone depletion and rising greenhouse gases, the changes in rainfall over much of Queensland are could be at least partly anthropogenic in origin and may represent climate change that has developed and persisted in rainfall trends for now over half a century.’
So many worthwhile papers are diminished by the AGW tack on.
It’s not a tack-on numb nuts – its derivative from much other work and quite a reasonable hypothesis. e.g. Timbal on STRi and Solomon and Schmidt on stratospheric ozone/SAM – get educated !
‘Characteristic of AGW supporters is a childish petulance that I can only explain as a resentment of having to be tested.’
Very neat and accurate, cohenite.
Luke Desk, I’ll get educated on Timbal’s STRi.
But before I follow up on the technical detail, we should have a closer look at Timbal. His MO appears to fit someone who ‘has been subtly influenced by the counterculture of the sixties and the opportunities provided by information technology.’
http://www.cawcr.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/btimbal.htm
Fancies himself to be part of the new elite.
Timbal goes on to say that ‘current GCM projections for future rainfall are likely to be unreliable.’
http://iopscience.iop.org/1755-1315/11/1/012013/pdf/1755-1315_11_1_012013.pdf
El Gordo – you’re simply a denialist turd for your comment. He wasn’t even born in the 60s. You have no right to assume anything more than he is doing good science. Why don’t you read it.
You have a serious research effort investigating rainfall decline involving a number of potential mechanisms. Cai’s latest paper shows that AGW links are not de rigeur.
Hypotheses under investigation:
(1) changes in ENSO – severity, frequency, position (Modoki)
(2) that changes in stratospheric ozone over Antarctica combined with tropospheric greenhouse gases have changed the southern annular mode
(3) Asian aerosols have impacted on NW WA rainfall
(4) Changes in Indian Ocean and IOD
(5) Changes in STR – location and intensity (STRi)
(6) interactions with decadal, multi-decadal and centennial natural trends
Level of knowledge or sophistication of sceptics in these areas = 0.0
Level of sceptic science = citing an average for MDB rainfall not even knowing what it means, its relevance or how it was derived.
Smack a denialist in the chops today. (Mottsian diplomacy style)
More importantly check my Sam Neill review – more interesting than this level of non-science discussion.
Timbal recognizes the contributions of ENSO and the IOD in driving inter-annual rainfall and temperature variability across the Australian continent, but ‘while both influences are plausible mechanisms to explain the ongoing rainfall deficiency across SEA, their roles are likely to be secondary; since most of the rainfall decline is happening in autumn, when ENSO and IOD influences on rainfall are negligible.’
Sir, with all due respect, ENSO and the IOD are never secondary.
I have no right to assume that Timbal has been influenced by the idealism of the 1960s.
That’s better ! Be nice to Bertrand.
Well SEACI looked at everything and couldn’t find anything that came up with the Autumn decline with ENSO
For ENSO – autumn is the predictability barrier where things flip over (or not) to neutral or La Nina (or stay as El Nino -unusual). El Nino events can break down with big rains – 1983 – or just fizzle out.
I presume you have some gratitude that they have undertaken some serious analysis of an interesting and pressing issue albeit with somewhat less than totally definitive results.
But surely El Gordo you would think unravelling any AGW impact from background variability would be a most difficult problem?
That other big green fantasy– extreme SLR seems to be faltering badly.
The ABC’s Williams idiot seems to be way, way, way short of his idiot prediction.
Oh well only 99.99 metres to go. http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/williams_sure_wont_get_to_100_metres_at_this_rate/
That general and seasonal predictability of climate parameters such as rainfall is or has become less certain with ENSO due to AGW is another worrying assumption of recent AGW ‘science’; the difficulties in identification of any such ‘effect’ let alone any attribution has been known for some time:
ftp://www.iges.org/pub/ctr/ctr_184.pdf
The issue is this; rainfall and temperature and whatever macro-climate features you like are observed to have both a yearly, multi-year and an intra-seasonal change; leaving the problematic nature of the data aside the problem still remains as to whether an adequate comparison is being made of previous similar natural conditions so that an AGW ‘effect’ can be isolated; if, as is supposed, in the last 20-30 years assumed stable seasonal patterns are deviating from the norm is that deviation concluded from the basis of a comparison with a similar climate pattern and not a different one; that is a +ve PDO with a -ve PDO, or ignoring the distinction as Easterling and Wehner did?
So the question is: are the seasonal variations based on a fair comparison with previous similar climate patterns?
Untangling intrenched AGW theory from natural variability is not difficult, but it will take time to separate the signal from the noise.
‘The most successful and most influential individuals are highly educated with one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another in the bourgeois realm of ambition and world success.’
David Brooks
Not relevant to Oz Greens.
There’s no “assumptions” Cohenite – simply hypotheses and investigation as Cai’s latest papers shows. Go and spend some time at Aspendale and learn that you guys are so far off the game it’s depressing.
New effects don’t have to be continental – they may be regional. They don’t have to be annual – they may be seasonal. They might be totally new or maybe additive to existing variation or maybe feeding back on existing mechanisms. Or maybe they don’t exist.
It’s a grand challenge problem.
If you change the global/regional energy balance – systems should move around.
Additionally you lot should be thrilled that the researchers are hard at work finding out all these mechanisms. You wouldn’t have any ENSO or PDOs to even discuss if it wasn’t for climate science. (and now SAM, Modoki, IODs and STRis)
Have some respect for history. If I was a sceptic I’d be consuming this stuff as fast as I could assimilate it. I’d be on first name basis with the actual scientists. Why resort to habitual ad homs?
luke says: “If you change the global/regional energy balance – systems should move around.”
That is not necessarily true: (A + B)^4 > A^4 + B^4
And who said the global energy balance has changed:
http://miskolczi.webs.com/Fig10.jpg
Natural variability is making a comeback at CSIRO.
http://www.csiro.au/news/SEQ-Drought.html
Ahh…Luke, the PDO was discovered by a fisheries expert chasing salmon.
Cohenite – well that explains this then http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to
el Gordo – do tell – and where are Mantua and Zhang from? BTW CSIRO’s variability work hasn’t made a comeback – it’s 2 years old – but just been published.
Exactly the opposite luke; a rising global temperature does not mean that the Earth’s energy balance has increased or changed; I gave you the reason with this: (A + B)^4 > A^4 + B^4. This is basic application of Stephen-Boltzmann as explained here:
http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-321.pdf
Bunkum – don’t you love how sceptics do pretzels – it’s not warming – OK – well it might be – but if it is it’s nothing. Then let’s do sophistic maths ruses. The endless dragging of logs onto roadways trying to slow down the inevitable conclusion.
And you didn’t even critique my latest videos either.
Fiddlesticks luke; and you are arguing with your mate SoD:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/06/03/lunar-madness-and-physics-basics/
Who says this:
“The right way to calculate a planet’s average radiation is to calculate it for each and every location and average the results. The wrong way is to calculate the average temperature and then convert that to a radiation.”
See also:
http://scienceofdoom.com/2010/03/02/why-global-mean-surface-temperature-should-be-relegated/
Luke, they say it has been flat.
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CRU_decadal.JPG
Oh boring Cohers – I was using the RSS data ! It’s spatially explicit old trout.
El Gordo – more bunk – start your graph in 2000 !
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1979/to
Still looks flat, Luke. As I mentioned before, the AO Index remains a better guide to weather and future climate in the NH. Extra cold winters in Europe will have a huge social impact, dispelling any belief in global warming.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/precip/CWlink/daily_ao_index/ao_index.html
It seems intuitive that a cooling world would result in higher rainfall until stasis was reached and then rainfall would be below long term average. Likewise, a warming world would result in lower rainfall until plateauing, then a higher average should result.
Has anyone found records that support this proposition, or do I have to get busy?
(If there is support for this we are definitely cooling 😉 )