Coalition Will Protect Great Barrier Reef With $1bn Fund, Says PM

The Guardian - Gareth Hutchens

Amid a series of reports detailing the poor state of the reef, Malcolm Turnbull is promising improved water quality and clean energy for the region

A 15km section of the Great Barrier reef photographed from space. Photograph: ISS/Nasa/ESA

Malcolm Turnbull has promised that a re-elected Coalition government will protect the Great Barrier Reef by tackling its two biggest challenges – climate change and water quality.
The prime minister will pledge to set up a new $1bn reef fund with $1bn – taken from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation’s $10bn special account – to invest in projects that will improve water quality, reduce emissions and provide clean energy in the reef catchment region.
The fund would deliver the $1bn over 10 years and build on $461m in funding already committed to the reef since the Coalition came to office.
“Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to the Great Barrier Reef and to all coral reefs around the world,” Turnbull said, adding that the government’s plan to protect the reef stood in “stark contrast” to Labor’s record of mismanagement.
“Australia is playing its part in the global climate change effort through signing the Paris agreement and implementing policies to reduce Australia’s emissions.
“The $1bn reef fund builds on the Coalition’s existing policies, including the landmark reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan, as well as the innovative reef trust which is improving water quality and fighting the coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.”
The policy comes amid a flurry of reports about the poor state of the reef.
Surveys have revealed that 93% of the almost 3,000 individual reefs in the reef system have been touched by bleaching this year, and almost a quarter – 22% – of coral over the entire Great Barrier Reef has been killed by this bleaching event.
Many scientists believe it could be too late for the rest.
A study found that on the current warming trajectory, within 20 years the conditions that caused this year’s bleaching would be normal on the reef.
The Greens say they want coal companies to start paying “for the damage they are doing” to the teef and they have announced a plan to tax miners heavily and use the money to revitalise the reef and to invest in clean energy projects and jobs.
Labor has promised to invest $500m over five years to boost scientific monitoring and management of the reef, and say it will adopt every recommendation in the Great Barrier Reef water science taskforce final report, released in May.
Turnbull said he was committed to protecting the reef for future generations, and his $1bn in funding would “support clean energy projects that reduce runoff of pollutants, fertiliser and sediment, and it will support the installation of more energy and water efficient irrigation systems, pesticide sprayers and fertiliser application systems”.
“The fund will also help coastal sewage treatment plants to reduce ocean outfalls with efficient pumps, biogas electricity generation and next-generation waste water treatment. Improving water quality will enhance the reef’s resilience to climate change, coral bleaching and outbreaks of the destructive crown of thorns starfish.”
The $1bn that will come from the reef fund is not new funding.

Links

• The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare
• Great Barrier Reef election explainer: how do the parties compare?
• Great Barrier Reef: 93% of reefs hit by coral bleaching
• Great Barrier Reef: devastating images tell story of coral colonies' destruction

Global Warming Is Starving West Coast Waters of Oxygen

Climate Central - John Upton

Just west of Los Angeles, decimated populations of spiny rockfish rummage for prey among bush-like corals. Cold currents from deep valleys wash nutrients between the Channel Islands, fertilizing plants that are eaten by fish. The fish are eaten by dolphins and pelicans and served with fries to diners watching ocean sunsets from Venice Beach.
Rockfish populations that crashed off the southern Californian coast in the 1990s have been protected by fishing rules and marine parks. But climate change is making a natural threat to the fish even worse.
As atmospheric pollution warms the planet and its seas, oxygen levels are declining in the oceans, making it harder for the bottom-dwelling fish to breathe.

Swells roll past the Channel Islands into Venice Beach, where they break. Credit: Chris Goldberg/Flickr

Ocean warming is projected to continue reducing oxygen levels in some hotspots that are naturally low in oxygen, such as the eastern Pacific Ocean. The oxygen declines in coastal waters like California’s threaten to create invisible chemical barriers, boxing vulnerable wildlife into smaller territories.
“The importance of oxygen loss has been underestimated or overlooked by ocean scientists,” said Lisa Levin, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor who is helping to pioneer research into the problem.
Levin’s lab published a study last week revealing the heavy influence of oxygen levels on the biodiversity of worms, molluscs and other creatures that live in West Coast mud, which are eaten by rockfish and other marine predators.
That’s jeopardizing fisheries already afflicted by overfishing, wetland losses, water pollution, ocean warming and ocean acidification.As oceans warm, fish and other sea animals need more oxygen, yet the sea water they breathe holds less of it. Ocean circulation changes caused by global warming can also reduce oxygen levels below the ocean’s surface, where it’s absorbed from the atmosphere.
“For some things that can’t move, it’s going to kill them,” Levin said. “For things that can swim away, it’s going to shrink their habitat.”
Oxygen levels can be highly variable, and scientists are still trying to untangle the role climate change may have played in declining West Coast oxygen levels since the 1980s, some of which coincided with local ocean cooling.
Scripps and federal government scientists calculated in 2010 that the oxygen declines could reduce cowcod habitat in protected Southern California Bight areas by 18 percent by the 2020s, if trends continued.
“Ocean warming and ocean acidification have had much more attention,” Levin said. “The people who have been studying changes in oxygen didn’t raise the issue about global declines until probably eight years ago, and haven’t focused on communicating to the media, to the public, everywhere it needs to go.”
Levin led a three-person Scripps research team that analyzed data from biological surveys of ocean mud using advanced statistical techniques. They reported last week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that oxygen levels appear to have more influence than temperature or a measure of acidity over the number of small mud-dwelling species found on West Coast coastlines.
The results were very different when the researchers examined samples from a different region. In the Arabian sea, the scientists discovered that the measure of ocean acidity was more closely tied to biodiversity levels than oxygen concentrations.

Cowcod are recovering from overfishing off the southern California coast, but oxygen declines threaten their revival. Credit: John Butler, NOAA

The finding helped to illuminate the local and regional nature of the low-oxygen threat, and the complex relationships between warming, acidification and oxygen depletion that are being caused by climate change.
“If more data were available from another area, such as the East African coast, I suspect that may be different as well,” said Nancy Rabalais, a Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium professor who was not involved with the research.
Rabalais said the new Scripps study could help scientists predict how the three major ocean changes caused by global warming — warming, acidification and deoxygenation — could affect biodiversity in key marine habitats.
Each of the trifecta of global warming impacts tends to harm wildlife. Each of those impacts could be slowed if a United Nations climate treaty, which was negotiated in Paris in December, succeeds in sharply curbing fossil fuel use and deforestation.
Scientists point out that battered marine ecosystems would have greater chances of surviving impacts from warming if overfishing, plastic pollution and habitat destruction are also curbed. Marine parks can also help.
Extreme oxygen shortfalls already occur in seasonal dead zones, such as in the Gulf of Mexico, which is caused by farming and sewage pollution. By warming seawater, climate change can make dead zones bigger.
In areas where oxygen levels are naturally low, including off the West Coast and in the eastern Atlantic and southern Indian oceans, recent modeling showed climate change is already worsening the problem — which can fuel severe oxygen shortfalls that scientists call hypoxia.
Those impacts were projected by computer models to spread to additional regions during future years and decades. Some high-oxygen parts of oceans, by contrast, might not experience any impacts from the declines this century, the research showed.
“It’s hard to attribute a single year of hypoxia to warming,” said Curtis Deutsch, a professor at the University of Washington who contributed to the modeling analysis, which was published this year in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles. “And yet, at the same time, we expect it to become more frequent.”

The recent modeling study projected when current high rates of climate pollution would cause oxygen declines to become evident. Credit: Long et al., "Finding forced trends in oceanic oxygen," Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 2016.

Scientists like Deutsch are turning to models to try to understand how climate change may be influencing oxygen levels in oceans. Those concentrations are influenced by a confounding array of natural and human factors, and they haven’t been well measured.
“There are parts of the ocean where models predict that we can be detecting real, long-term changes in the ocean that are distinct from natural fluctuations right now,” Deutsch said. “For fisheries, it hasn’t been detected in data, but all of the indicators point toward this being an important concern for the future.”
The modeling study honed in on oxygen impacts in the open ocean, but it didn’t reveal or project more complicated changes in coastal regions, such as in the colorful coral and sponge habitats of the Southern California Bight.
The findings from the modeling runs corroborated those from similar studies that have been published in recent years.
“These are very expected results,” said John Dunne, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration biogeochemist and climate modeler who has researched the topic.
Dunne said impacts from projected oxygen declines will matter most in parts of the ocean where levels are naturally low to begin with, such as along the West Coast, including the waters off Los Angeles.
Changes in southern California may already be squeezing decimated populations of fish that are popular with fishermen and diners, such as cowcod and other rockfish, into dangerously small territories, further threatening their survival.
“At high levels of oxygen, it doesn’t matter,” Dunne said. “At low levels of oxygen, it matters a great deal.”

Links

• Climate Change is ‘Devastating’ The Great Barrier Reef
• Ocean Warming is Making Floods Worse, Study Finds
• Here’s Where Ocean Acidification Will Hit the U.S. Hardest
• Carbon Fee Debate Goes Mainstream in Washington State
• Satellite Shows U.S. Has the Most Gas Flares in the World
• With The Paris Agreement Signed, Hard Work Begins

Globalization Made Economic Production More Vulnerable To Climate Change

Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

The susceptibility of the global economic network to workers' heat-stress has doubled in the last decade, a new study published in the journal Science Advances finds.
The analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University shows for the first time how enhanced connectivity of the global network of supply can amplify production losses, as these losses can be spread more easily across countries.

Shown are the 1000 largest trade flows between 26 industry sectors and final demand in 186 countries for the year 2011 (based on data from the Eora World MRIO, by M. Lenzen at U Sydney). The study analyzes the susceptibility of the global economic network to heat-stress for the years 1991-2011. Source: zeean.net

"Climate damages do not only depend on the warming of our planet, but also on the resilience of our societies and economies," says lead author Leonie Wenz.
"Our study shows that since the beginning of the 21st century the structure of our economic system has changed in a way that production losses in one place can more easily cause further losses elsewhere."
The study examines the example  of local heat-stress-related productivity reductions causing global effects.
Across the world, production is interlinked.
"What is self-evident for us today is really a phenomenon of the last two decades," Wenz explains.

From typhoons to heat-stress on workers: local events, global effects
Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines destroyed more than half the world's production of coconut oil which is one of the two most commonly used vegetable fats in food production worldwide.
The 2011 flood in Queensland stopped production in the fourth biggest coal exploration site on Earth for weeks, with economic repercussions well beyond Australia.
While single major shocks to economic networks like these illustrate how economic activity is globally linked, the researchers focused on the effects of small daily perturbations due to extreme temperatures leading to heat-stress among workers in construction, agriculture and other economic sectors.
Previous research shows that increasing temperatures decrease productivity, because, for instance, workers get exhausted more rapidly.
The study covers economic flows between 26 industry sectors from mining and quarrying to textiles and wearing apparel and to post and telecommunications as well as final demand in 186 countries.
Combining data on temperature, population and the global economic network from 1991-2011 and based on existing research on temperature effects on workers, the scientists run computer simulations of heat-stress consequences in order to find out more about the network's vulnerability to the propagation of production losses in each year.

"This is the basis for implementing appropriate adaptation measures"
"With unabated climate change, the effects of increasing weather extremes, like most recently seen in Paris, will have severe impacts on natural and societal systems," says co-author Anders Levermann.
"To estimate the costs of future climate change we need to assess global economic impacts of more frequent heat extremes and meteorological impacts, such as floods and tropical storms, and understand their relation to the economic network's structure.
"This is the basis for implementing appropriate adaptation measures – in a warming world with more intense weather extremes it is likely that society needs to become more resilient and more flexible."

Links

• Globalized economy more susceptible to weather extremes, scientists warn
• Climate Economics: Make supply chains climate smart
• Changing the Resilience Paradigm

Election 2016: How To Win Friends, Influence People And Help Them Taste, Feel And See The Truth (Part 3)

New Matilda - Dr Lissa Johnson

In the final in a special New Matilda Election 2016 three part series, Dr Lissa Johnson explains the psychology behind why we vote the way we do, and how to create positive change.

(IMAGE: Lazar Slavkovic, Flickr)

Week 3 of the election campaign and emotions have been running higher.
Peter Dutton fell victim to a left wing mob, according to The Australian, for dehumanising and stereotyping asylum seekers last week.
The week before, a father getting by on minimum wage, Duncan Storrar, found himself at the epicentre of a viral storm after posing a straightforward question on the ABCs Q&A program. Storrar had asked the Assistant Treasurer why low income earners receive no tax breaks under the Coalition's budget.
The question unleashed a merciless class-war smear campaign against Storrar from News Corp, lest he give equality a good name. The viciousness of the attack prompted a heartening display of support for Storrar, whose question resonated with many voters.
The whole maelstrom served, inconveniently for the Coalition, to place equality more clearly in the electoral spotlight.
In Part 1 of this series, I examined the role of emotion in political cognition. I reviewed evidence that political decision-making is infused with feeling, and that unconscious emotional forces powerfully shape political opinion and votes.
Prosocial (altruistic, benevolent) emotions are stirred powerfully by other human beings, and are anathema to antisocial policies, or policies that cause wanton harm to human beings.

Duncan Storrar on Q&A.

One way to prevent prosocial stirrings is through stereotyping and character assassination. Another is to keep 'empathy targets' out of view.
Which speaks to a second function of News Corp's assault on Duncan Storrar. It served as a savage message to any underling who dares participate in public debate.
Storrar said of the whole controversy, "Q&A is the only place where people like me can ask questions of our leaders and policy makers, and as it's so hard to see your politicians we don't have any other contact with these people. As such, this is the most important part of democracy I have available to me."
Indeed.
The Murdoch Press, however, has other ideas. It is not for ordinary people to participate in democracy. That is the preserve of media empires and elites.
How else can you keep empathy targets out of sight?
Take this man and his two children, made homeless by the rising tides of climate change, for instance. Where would we be if they had a voice?
In Part 2 of this series I explored structural and power-based media influences on political cognition, including contemporary propaganda, or media content designed to "influence emotion, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately… behaviour"
News Corp's smear campaign against Duncan Storrar, for instance.
In Part 2, I examined another more subtle, protracted and sophisticated propagandistic smear campaign, the corporate misinformation war against climate science.
I traced that campaign, and the ABCs participation in it, to voters' willingness to support climate policies that threaten life on Earth.
Associate Professor of Communications John Arthos describes such self-destructive processes as arising from "the neutralization of the mainstream press" which he says has fostered "techniques of rhetorical manipulation [that]misdirect … a public… into undermining its own interests."
Arthos sees this as stemming from an "entrenched corporate ideological apparatus that has captured our state institutions, mainstream media, and the governing classes".
Against this, he notes, "progressive voices seem at times to be spitting into the wind."
Or a raging inferno, as the case may be.
If we are up against such an entrenched corporate ideological apparatus, how can progressive voices, or even just honest voices asking honest questions, do more than spit into the wind?

Media magnate, Rupert Murdoch.

In terms of marginalising dissent, the hysterical Murdoch press is the least of everyone's worries. When rabid right-wing voices put their viciousness on full display, the obvious zealotry at least alienates all but the like-minded.
It is the more subtle, imperceptible media influences, the ones that go undetected and unnamed, that have the potential to do more widespread harm.
These are the influences capable of leading a population to sleepwalk into environmental catastrophe.
As is happening now.
Although up to 70 per cent of voters say that they would vote for a party with strong environmental policies, almost half of the population is nevertheless willing to re-elect the Coalition, environmental antagonism and all.
Psychologically, this is not surprising. Explicit attitudes typically predict only 10-15 per cent of observed behaviour, for reasons outlined in Part 1. Only the most strongly held attitudes translate into action.
Many Australians, then, need to feel more strongly about climate change before it influences their votes.

Solutions
But what can be done? How can more people be moved to care? Given all the countervailing forces, what hope is there for a self-respecting and participative electorate?
As experts in political cognition with 20 years' research under their belt, and leading theorists in the field, political scientists Milton Lodge and Charles S Taber are well placed to provide answers. Having studied unconscious influences on political reasoning they would know better than anyone how to overcome voters' self-destructive tendencies.
What might work against media influences, political spin, appearance-based voting and even propaganda? How can we prevent people from undermining their own interests and sleepwalking into catastrophe?
Towards the end of their book, Lodge and Taber advance some unworkable suggestions before concluding, "based on our own and others' experimental work… we have become increasingly pessimistic about the ability of citizens to override their biases."
Oh.
No wonder people deceive themselves. The truth is harsh.
However, Lodge and Taber wrote their conclusion before Bernie Sanders took the voting world by storm.

The lessons of Bernie Sanders
The success of Vermont senator and US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has defied not only expectations, but research literatures on media, electorates and voting.
Just as News Corp took an instant set against Storrar, the mainstream media in the US has been decidedly against Sanders from the outset. In an interview with CNN on the subject, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! noted that in 2015 Donald Trump received 23 times the coverage of Sanders.
Goodman took the networks to task for broadcasting Trump's empty stage on Super Tuesday 3 in preference to Sanders' speech. She added that in one 24-hour period alone the Washington Post ran 16 articles that were negative towards Sanders.
Based on what we know about the media and voting, Sanders should have been dead in the water.
Yet he has attracted 71 per cent of the youth vote (under 30s), and has beat Clinton 82-18 in some states. His campaign contributions have topped those of Barack Obama at comparable points in Obama's campaign, and Sanders has achieved record turnouts to events. His social media following is double that of Hillary Clinton's.

US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. (IMAGE: Phil Roeder, Flickr)

Although he is unlikely to win, Harvard University's Institute of Politics Polling Director John Della Volpe says, "He's not moving a party to the left. He's moving a generation to the left… Whether or not he's winning or losing, it's really that he's impacting the way in which a generation – the largest generation in the history of America – thinks about politics".
Della Volpe cites unprecedented increases in the proportion of 18-29 year-olds who see health care, food and shelter as basic rights, and who support government spending to reduce poverty. He credits this shift to Sanders.
But how did Sanders manage it? All with the antagonism of the mainstream media? What is his secret? What can we learn from him?
Is it his looks? Does he have a particularly likeable face? His tone of voice? Is there something subliminally brilliant about his campaign?
Or is it that Sanders' supporters don't watch mainstream news?
Sanders has the youth vote. This age group gets their news primarily from the internet.
According to the Pew Research Centre, 61 per cent of 18-33 year olds in America rely on Facebook for their news. Only 37 per cent watch TV news in any given week. This pattern is essentially reversed in over-50s.
The young voters supporting Sanders are also distinctive in that they have grown up under neoliberalism. Neoliberalism of the kind the Coalition would like to roll out in Australia.
The kind that has resulted in the "breakdown of society" according to Noam Chomsky. And the kind that Duncan Storrar questioned on Q&A.
Perhaps this is why only a minority of 18-33 year olds now supports capitalism in the US.
Young adults in America may be more ready for a progressive change than we are here in Australia. They have been asking the kinds of questions Duncan Storrar asked for a long time.
They may be feeling the pain of the status quo more acutely than us, feeling the weight of the world in their financial struggles, feeling the unfairness, feeling done-over by the 1 percent, feeling tired of it all, and feeling ready for a change.
Which is why #FeelTheBern was such a brilliant hashtag. It spoke to people where their political cognition lives: their feelings.
Lodge and Taber quote William Butler Yeats who said, "We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it."
Given the psychology of media, perception management and political cognition, I draw three main lessons from Bernie Sanders' success:

1. Forget the mainstream media as an agent of public interest or progressive change. Despite some exceptional individual journalists, as an institution it is lost (see parts 1 and 2).
2. Embrace the internet.
3. Speak to people's emotions.

The new media ecology
Scholars in communication studies call the internet and social media the 'new media ecology'. The new media ecology, it turns out, is a thorn in the side of political elites' propaganda efforts.
Professor of Political Science Laura Roselle, who gave a talk to NATO in Brussels last year, wrote a 2014 paper on 'strategic narrative' and 'soft power'. In it she said that in the 'new media environment' (the internet) state power "face[s]a new vulnerability from increased transparency. As more of the global population become familiar with more media they become more literate… Elites sense they have lost relative power over information."
In a separate article on 'weaponising information', Roselle's co-authors Alister Miskimmon and Ben O'Loughlin, from the University of London, write of "uncertainty among policymakers about how to wield influence. In the face of a diffuse media ecology, policy elites feel they are struggling to cope with the dizzying range of opinions and rapidly changing news, complicating their ability to shape the reception of emerging events in multiple audiences… Governments may never have had total information control, but policymakers' sense of control has never been more fragile."

Democrats presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. (IMAGE: iprimages, Flickr)

This is no doubt why Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the Broadcasting Board of Governors have declared themselves at war with online news organisations such as RT and CCTV, likening them to Boko Haram. Clinton even conceded that the US is losing the information war.
Not for want of trying, however. As the Huffington post notes "It turns out that Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google's parent company, has funded a semi-secret company, The Groundwork, to provide Hillary Clinton the engineering talent she needs to win the election, prompting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to call Google "Hillary's secret weapon." Meanwhile, Hillary has hired a longtime Google executive as chief technology officer. If Google were prioritizing pro-Hillary search results over those favoring Bernie Sanders, we'd never know".
Even so, Winnie Wong, the creator of the #FeelTheBern hashtag remarked, "You could say Berne Sanders is winning the internet."
Rather than hiring Google executives, Sanders has created large networks of volunteers connecting on social media, who are "making commitments to each other rather than to paid staff".
Writing prophetically in 2004 on internet activism and the rise of blogging, social and cultural theorists Richard Kahn and Douglas Kellner of UCLA talked about the potential for internet activism to create "new social relations and forms of political possibility". Including, it turns out, a self-professed socialist coming within spitting distance of the White House. While campaigning aggressively against fossil fuel subsidies.
Kahn and Kellner cite the power of internet activism to enable "not only democratic self-expression and networking, but also global media critique and journalistic sociopolitical intervention".
Wong agrees. She says,"the beauty of the internet is the way you can express yourself in a very democratic way."
Without the character assassination you risk when you do it on TV.
Researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide make a similar point. Between 2008 and 2014 the research team studied patterns in 1.5 million tweets on climate. They found that climate conversation on Twitter favoured activism over skepticism and denial, and reflected "a democratization of knowledge transfer… [that]can circumvent the influence of large stakeholders on public opinion".
They concluded that as a result, Twitter shows promise as "a useful asset in the ongoing battle against anthropogenic climate change".
An article summarising their research added, "As social media continues to replace more traditional news outlets, Twitter could be key in… shaping the cultural politics of climate change, in ways that newspapers and broadcast television no longer can."
In Australia, Getup! estimates that the average person has the ability to reach 8,000 others through their networks, including friends of friends of friends. One in 10 of those people, according to Getup!, are undecided about how to vote at the next election.
We don't have a Sanders movement in Australia, but we do have our own movements such as Getup!, 350 Org and others. Environmental groups, for instance, are planning to hold over 100 community events before the next election.
Joining, sharing, posting, and occasionally showing up, is all that most Sanders supporters did. Along with some messaging of their own.
But what message? How to reach the one in 10….

Counter hegemonic communication
In a paper titled, The Just Use of Propaganda: Ethical Criteria for Counter-Hegemonic Communication Strategies, John Arthos recommends "using the 'master tools' of strategic communication [propaganda]to fight the vast political machinery of the corporate state".
He discusses doing this ethically. In other words, truthfully, in order to prevent harm, and for "the mobilisation of the disempowered".
Arthos reasons that "propaganda is the unfortunate but necessary public discourse of a modern society".
Perhaps, but what does that mean? How do the disempowered practice the master tools of strategic communication in the new media ecology? Strategic communication is complicated.

(IMAGE: The People Speak!, Flickr)

And it isn't.
You don't need impressive rhetorical powers to reach unconscious hearts and minds. You just need to be able to string two words together. Literally.
In research, simply pairing the word "vomit" with a politician's name will suffice to influence political opinion. Or "rainbow" if you prefer. Other words such as syphilis, rabies, ulcer and torture have proven equally effective.
Outside the research lab, in the real-world experiment of politics, 'fair' and 'unfair' have resonated with Australian voters in the past.
'Dangerous' and 'radical' have been used by MIT Professor Noam Chomsky to describe nihilistic climate policies.
I'm not suggesting that you use these words, necessarily, but rather that strategic communication is a process of tagging, even hashtagging, something with "good" or "bad" feeling. That is what our unconscious minds understand.
Politicians routinely exploit this notion when they pair concepts such as environmentalism and terrorism, as in 'eco-terrorism' for example.
'Eco-heroism' might be a simple, Tweetable counter hegemonic response.
A similar political tactic has been to pair coal mining with philanthropy, in the "coal is good for humanity" and "energy poverty" refrains.
If you are counter-hegemonically inclined, you can experiment with conceptual pairings of your own.

Communicating about climate change
Tweets with feelings are not only more likely to influence people, they are more likely to increase your following.
While Tweets on climate change and global warming often entail statistical information and fact, Tweets that are emotionally arousing are more likely to be shared. So concluded a study of 60,000 climate change Tweets at the Universities of London and Leicester.
Princeton University social psychologist, Dr Sander van der Linden, formerly of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, talks about the importance of emotion in this interview on climate change perceptions (if you are interested in the psychology of climate change, it is the most succinctly comprehensive summary I have found).
Van der Linden says, "Showing people long-term trends in the average global temperature simply does not carry the same weight in our decisions as the type of strong emotional reactions we form through (negative) experiences. So-called affective cues — fast and associative judgments of things we like and dislike… help us make judgments and decisions."
He notes that climate change is at a distinct disadvantage in this regard. If we could see or experience first-hand the fires, rising seas and storm surges of global warming, we would perceive it as a genuine threat.
However, when global warming is presented as a "statistical phenomenon that cannot be experienced directly, it presents a unique challenge for the human brain".
In other words, people need assistance to "taste and feel and see the truth" of climate change.
One way to help people to feel the truth is to simply express your own emotions. 'The Great Barrier Reef is dying. It breaks my heart", for instance.

(IMAGE: Paul Toogood, Flickr)

Another is to focus on the human dimensions of climate change. We are all wired to respond emotionally to one another. Less so to abstract facts. Moreover, as Van der Linden says "tons of psychological research shows that people are often intrinsically motivated to help others".
The most recent issue of Princeton University journal The Future of Children, for example, is devoted to the impact of climate change on children. As is this UNICEF report. This article alone is full of sad but shareable emotional factual information.
For example,
Children are more sensitive to heat, unable to swim through rising waters, and more likely to drown from AGW than adults. Such as this little boy. Save the Children estimates that in the next decade, 175 million children will experience AGW-induced weather disasters, like this one. (Scroll down for images). Children are 50-100% more vulnerable to heat-related death from climate change than adults. Imagery is another simple way to speak to people's emotions.
In research, images of deserts help people to feel that climate change is real. Images of renewable technologies foster feelings of empowerment, and images of people and animals suffering consequences help others to care.
Coming from you, emotionally evocative messages carry special psychological weight with your friends.

Your power as a friend
In the absence of direct experiences of global warming, van der Linden says that "even with the emotional and cognitive alarms deactivated, there's still another way that we often learn about risks, and that is socially, through our conversations and connections with other people we care about".
Psychologists call this 'shared reality'. It is one of the processes by which our unconscious minds determine what is real and what is important.
Van der Linden says, "You might feel that your family won't listen to you, but what people often don't realize is that you have a special status with people you know".
Politicians' messages, in contrast, are soured in the emotional marinade of mistrust. As one Australian participant in a study of climate change communication said, "I just think if we're going to rely on any politician. . . we're in trouble."
This may be partly why Sanders' network of volunteers has attracted a larger online following that Clinton's Google collaboration.
Sanders' campaign has also undoubtedly benefitted from what psychologists call "normative influence". This is the phenomenon whereby we do what our friends do. It is not just for teenagers. It is in the human DNA.
Harnessing this, says Van der Linden, "would mean simply informing your friends and family about all the things you are already doing to help reduce climate change".
For example,
I just signed Adrian Burragubba's petition against the Carmichael mega-mine. If your friends see you enjoying what you do, even better.
I am grateful for the opportunity to stand with the Wangan and Jagalingou people for Aboriginal rights and the Earth. Helping people to think about the shared consequences of climate change across communities has the additional advantage that it fosters what psychologists call 'psychological sense of global community' or 'identification with all humanity'. This mindset works against prejudice and fosters action in the greater good.
Whatever images or words you use, two words or thousands, yours or someone else's, the point is to speak to people's feelings, however you can.
These messages to future generations, for instance, speak to me.
"You were born, and something happened to me. All of a sudden I realized it was your world, and your children and children's children, that I'd been using all these years."  – WeKnew.org, May 20, 2015 "In 2020, you will be 7 years old, in school, and learning about climate change. Perhaps for the first time you will ask me what I did about it. I hope I can make you proud." – WeKnew.org, May 27, 2015 The more real it is for you the more likely it is to be real for others. If you are feeling it, others will feel it too.
The power of knowing this is the seed of potential that it unearths in your own experience. It is the 'master's tool' to pretend that participative democracy is complicated and beyond our reach. That we are each in our experiences alone.
And it is the master's tool to punish those who seek to participate in democracy, as Duncan Storrar did, lest others get ideas and follow suit.
Perhaps Sanders' success stems partly from his efforts to do the reverse. By placing faith in his supporters, encouraging their participation, and fostering connections between them, he has helped to transform their private realities into political action and empowerment.
One Sanders supporter said, "Bernie very much almost bets on how ordinary people can change lives. This is something I will forever be indebted to."
As the fellow in the climate change study observed, if we wait for our politicians to do it, we're in trouble.

Links

• ELECTION 2016: Why People Will Vote For Their Own Destruction, And How To Stop Them (Part 1)
• ELECTION 2016: The ABC Of Election Spin 'Psy-ops', And How To Fight Back To Save The World (Part 2)
• Truth Hurts: The Science Behind Why People Don't Care About The Death Of Our Planet And Democracy
• Malcolm Turnbull: 'Small L' Liberal Or Planet-Eating Death Star? Early Indications From The Turnbull Government

Election 2016: The ABC Of Election Spin ‘Psy-ops’, And How To Fight Back To Save The World (Part 2)

New Matilda - Dr Lissa Johnson

In the second of a three part series on the psychological warfare that pervades our election campaigns, New Matilda columnist Dr Lissa Johnson explores the media's 'false balance', and how to see through it.

(DVIDSHUB, Flickr)

We're almost a week into the federal election campaign. To kick things into second gear, Turnbull and Shorten faced off in front of 100 undecided voters on Friday.
Centre stage in the debate and its coverage was the political climate. Shorten wins audience vote. Turnbull misreads mood.
The earth's climate was of less interest.
Both candidates stayed on-message: voodoo economics or growth-through-tax-cuts versus quality education and healthcare.
At this unusual time in human history, it is business-as-usual on the campaign trail.
In part 1 of this series I argued that were voting a rational endeavour, climate change would be at the forefront of the election agenda, election coverage, and voters' minds. Instead, half of Australian voters are willing to vote for a political party whose climate policies endanger life on Earth.
To explain this state of affairs, I examined the role of emotion in voting and political cognition. I began by summarising findings that glimpsing headshots of political candidates, with no knowledge of their policies, is enough to predict election outcomes with 70 per cent accuracy. I also reviewed evidence that voters use similar cues as children to evaluate political candidates' competency.
I then explored the psychological underpinnings of these phenomena, namely that human beings feel first and think later. Such emotion-driven processing occurs at an unconscious and automatic level, where the vast majority of human information processing occurs. In this subterranean realm, feelings rather than logic direct the political decision-making flow.
To understand electoral self-destructiveness further, I reviewed research examining unconscious media influences on voting behaviour, such as presenters' nonverbal demeanour towards candidates, ranking of news items, and the balance of positive and negative stories across news organisations.
I traced evidence linking these subtleties in media content to real-world voting patterns, including voting for Ronald Reagan, and discussed implications for the Australian political landscape.
At the next election, I asked, with power over life on Earth in their hands, will Australian voters choose the headshot of whoever won the popularity contest of the day, or will they choose life on Earth?

(IMAGE: Gianluca Di natale, Flickr)

While face-value voting may decide the answer, being a force strong enough to swing elections, does it fully explain Australian voters sleepwalking into environmental catastrophe? The media influences discussed in part 1 primarily concern subtleties in content and placement, which undoubtedly do shape voters' support for candidates.
But is there more going on?
In the bigger picture of media influence, could other forces be at work?

The ABC example
In January of this year New Matilda broke a story that opened an illuminating window into opinion-shaping processes in the media, and the machinations behind them.
In a special investigation titled False Balance, New Matilda published transcripts of a secretly recorded conversation between ABC technology journalist Nick Ross and his boss, the Head of ABCs Current Affairs division, Bruce Belsham.
The conversation occurred during a meeting in 2013 concerning Ross's coverage of the National Broadband Network (NBN), an important election issue at the time. Ross had written a detailed investigative piece critical of the Coalition's NBN strategy.
Ross was directed in the meeting to withhold his article on the Coalition's NBN policy, and first publish a story critical of Labor, as "insurance" against the "Turnbull camp" and ABC "superiors" on "the Fourteenth Floor". Belsham was concerned that his superiors would come down on Ross and Belsham "like a tonne of bricks" if Ross's piece ran.
Turnbull had previously tweeted his displeasure at the ABC's NBN coverage, including a Tweet on "the bias and ignorance of the ABC's Nick Ross". Turnbull had also contacted ABC management to relay his displeasure.
In the meeting with Belsham, when Ross objected that a "tough" piece on Labor's policy didn't fit the facts as he knew them, Belsham said "I'm not talking morality here, I'm talking about realpolitik"
Later, defending the decision in Senate Estimates, ABC Chief Executive at the time, Mark Scott, argued that Ross's piece was withheld because it "didn't canvass all the 'principal, relevant viewpoints'" (pro- and con- Coalition).
Oh, OK. Well fair enough. That's what it's all about, right? Impartiality and balance? To prevent bias?
However, one of the many weaknesses of this defense, which goes to the heart of structural problems with dominant media conventions, is that it rests on a fantasy of human cognition. Including a fantasy of media bias and objectivity.

Former ABC Tech editor Nick Ross (left) and Head of ABC's Current Affairs division, Bruce Belsham (right). (IMAGE: Belsham image courtesy of Mumbrella)

The fantasy is that a logical human information processor extracts facts on both sides of an argument, weighs them against one another, and comes to a rational judgement.
If the judgement is biased, it is either the fault of the judgement itself or the argument, not the journalism. By not taking sides, journalism places itself outside the decision-making equation, in the position of a neutral observer.
Makes sense.
In reality, however, as Political Scientists Milton Lodge and Charles S Taber explain in their book The Rationalising Voter, such 'cold evaluations' in human cognition are 'exceedingly rare'. Lodge and Taber review extensive evidence that the human mind simply does not arrive at judgements based on a 'moral algebra' in which pros and cons are rationally weighed against one another.
The real forces shaping opinion, free to sneak in undetected on either side of a 'balanced' debate, emanate from unconscious and unnoticed influences such as those described in part 1. Influences such as appearance, likeability, subtleties in presenters' demeanour, subtleties of language, subtleties of the order of arguments, how interviewers treat interviewees, and even tone of voice.
To pretend that 'balancing' air time circumvents these subterranean influences, and enables 'moral algebra', is journalistic pantomime. A pantomime that we will no doubt witness repeatedly during the current election campaign.
Moreover, without investigative background to assist people to understand and evaluate each side of an argument (context, chronology, explanation of concepts, analysis of implications), merely presenting both sides serves primarily to confuse.
This is particularly true of complex topics requiring specialised areas of expertise such as science, technology and economics.
National Broadband policy is a case in point. As is economic policy at election time.
As discussed in part 1, it is precisely when people are confused or overloaded that their implicit, automatic, unconscious systems are wired to take over, and take shortcuts, rendering them more, rather than less, susceptible to unconscious influences.
In other words, the 'balance' model of journalism encourages, rather than protects against, suggestibility and bias.
Even worse, insisting on 'balancing' pro- and con- positions speaks the language of the unconscious mind. To summarise part 1, our implicit, unconscious information processing systems evaluate issues, candidates and parties by tagging them with positive and negative feelings, or 'affective tags'.
The more positively or negatively emotionally tagged an issue, the more positive or negative our opinions on the subject. When such tags line up with reality they serve us well.
When they are forced into an artificial state of balance (pro-con, anti-con) by journalistic convention rather than reality, we are misled.
The ABC NBN coverage brought this vividly to life, in that real information, gathered by extensive real world investigation, with real experts offering real analysis, was withheld in order to maintain the pantomime of balance. Journalistic convention, and the will of the 'Turnbull Camp' trumped reality in voters' unconscious decision-making minds.
All in the lead-up to an election.
The ABC False Balance story is germane to our current election and its coverage not only because it illustrates the machinations of 'real politik' behind election reporting, but because it illustrates the psychologically manipulative power of news conventions themselves.

(IMAGE: The People Speak!, Flickr)

What Scott neglected to mention in Senate Estimates is that the journalistic tradition of canvassing opposing viewpoints (balance) is but one of many news traditions available to editors and their reporters. In fact, it is among the least informative and democratic of news traditions.
Professor of Communication, Simon Cottle and his colleague Julian Matthews explore this issue in a paper titled U.S. TV News and Communicative Architecture: Between Manufacturing Consent and Mediating Democracy.
They argue that "the established 'communicative structures' [journalistic conventions]of TV news, generally overlooked and under-theorized in the research field, are deeply implicated in both processes of manufacturing consent and mediating democracy".
In the case of ABC NBN coverage, to manufacture 'balance' was to manufacture consent to the Coalition's NBN strategy.
'Manufacturing consent' was a concept put forward in 1988 by Noam Chomsky and Edward S Herman (borrowed from Walter Lippmann) to describe the propaganda functions of mainstream media. In short, as Cottle and Matthews explain, this view sees media as "dependent on powerful sources and advertisers, and working in the service of the established system and its political elites".
Elites such as "The Fourteenth Floor" and "The Turnbull camp".
Cottle and Matthews argue that 'communicative structures' or 'communicative architectures', (ie. 'ways of organizing and telling news stories'), are an under-studied and under-recognised instrument for the manufacture of consent.
To offer a framework for studying these communicative architectures, Cottle and Matthews identified 10 different communicative structures, and examined their frequency in mainstream news outlets in the US. By far the most common was what they called the classic reporting structure (57.2 per cent of news items). This involves brief updates on stories in the news cycle, which, they say "deliver at best thin accounts of events".
The next most common (18 per cent) was the 'balance' structure, which they called contest and contention, in which "opposing views and arguments [are]generally given approximately equal weight or representation."
They noted that within this structure, rarely more than two perspectives are presented.
Among the most informative but least common news architecture was what they called expose/investigation.
Cottle and Matthews said, "The exposé/investigation frame conforms to the idealized liberal democratic role of journalism as public watchdog. Here journalists actively set out to investigate, expose, and uncover information and practices that would not otherwise be revealed within the public domain. This frame includes, therefore, traditional investigative journalism based on intensive research and exploratory fact-finding as well as exposé journalism of public or private affairs."
Nick Ross's investigation of the NBN comes to mind. As does New Matilda's expose of ABC pressure on Ross to withhold his investigation, so as to appease the Turnbull camp.
Cottle and Matthews note, "The limited use of the expose/investigation frame by [news organisations], across the board, further indicates a decline in the traditional democratic "watchdog" role of critically scrutinizing the activities of the state or other power holders in society — a finding in keeping with trends in TV news around the world."
Don't we know it. At least the ABC is en trend.
In Cottle and Matthews' research, expose/investigation structures accounted for just 0.4 per cent of news content.
Zero point four.
If only 0.4 per cent of our election coverage is investigative, or if even 10 times that amount is investigative, our politicians will find it easy to confuse and overwhelm voters with claims and counter claims.
This speaks to Cottle and Matthews' main point. By sidelining communicative architectures that facilitate democracy and an informed electorate, dominant journalistic conventions are key components of propaganda, or the manufacture of consent.
Consistent with this, as well as being dominant conventions in news and election coverage, the conflict and contest structures (balance) are used in 'psychological operations' or 'psy-ops', otherwise known as 'perception management', 'information operations', 'propaganda' 'information warfare' or, the contemporary preferred term, 'strategic communication'.

(IMAGE: Play the Game, Flickr)

Bearing in mind that the unconscious responds to feelings, simply cloaking information in a feel of objectivity, impartiality and authority is enough to seduce the human information processing stream. As far as the unconscious is concerned, if it looks and sounds and feels like a fact, it probably is a fact.
In a chapter of the book Military Life: The Psychology of Serving in Peace and Combat, Steven Collins traces the history of psychological operations in the US. He describes the wartime use of radio, TV and newspapers in foreign countries as a means to "influence emotion, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately… behaviour."
In one example, in 2003 a US psy-ops radio station in Iraq ran news coverage that was both favourable and unfavourable to Saddam Hussein. The coverage was initially mostly favourable to Hussein, and gradually became less favourable over time, with the hope that this would be deemed "more credible" by Iraqi listeners.
Collins says that rather than "tell the really big lie", psy-ops works best "in the grey areas where truth and lies coexist".
Grey areas, for instance, in which you run manufactured criticism of a political party in the lead up to an election, to 'manage perceptions' such that unequal policies appear neck-and-neck.
In a fascinating, if disturbing, article on the current state of psy-ops in the US, Professor of Conflict Studies, Stephen Badsey, a world expert in war and the media, says that "psy-ops and public affairs have effectively fused". He notes, "The long argument as to whether a firewall should be maintained between psy-ops and information activities and public affairs has now largely ended, and in my view the wrong side won."
On a related topic, long-time investigative reporter Robert Parry has written a thorough history of domestic propaganda in the US, titled The Victory of Perception Management. Parry says, "Reagan's creation of a domestic propaganda bureaucracy… continue[s]to reverberate today in how the perceptions of the American people are now routinely managed.
Parry was awarded the Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard University's Nieman Foundation in 2015.
I am not arguing that the ABC is a branch of STRATCOM. I am simply arguing that communication architectures and their functions share similarities across mainstream media and 'perception management' spheres.
Another opinion-shaping aspect of the 'balance' model stems from public feelings towards news organisations themselves.
The 'perception management' apparatus of the US government, for instance, uses organisations and agencies with names that imply independence, integrity and trustworthiness, such as the 'National Endowment for Democracy', the 'Office of Public Diplomacy', or 'Freedom House'.
In the Iraqi radio example above, the radio station was falsely depicted as a local Iraqi-run station, in order to elicit listeners' trust. Again, to the unconscious mind, if it looks, sounds and feels trustworthy, it probably is.
This is an area in which trusted organisations such as the ABC hold special power to shape opinion. In the grey areas where truth and lies coexist, lies and half-truths aired by trusted organisations such as the ABC are particularly likely to be taken as fact.
In one clear example of domestic propaganda, the corporate information war against climate science, the ABC played an active and trust-building role. A role that is coming home to roost this election time.

ABC and climate coverage
Around the time of the NBN expose, Jeff Sparrow wrote an article in Eureka Street about political pressures on the ABC to go to extreme lengths of journalistic 'balance'. Against a history of attacks from conservative politicians, funding cuts, and threats of more funding cuts, Sparrow says that the ABC was like "the victim in an abusive relationship, desperately trying to ward off the next blow by anticipating the criticism of its enemies".
Sparrow says that airing an opposite view for every view expressed was the ABC's main defense against political attacks.
In this context, after vocal climate skeptic Maurice Newman became ABC chairperson, the ABC began airing climate denialist content. In 2007 it broadcast The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary discounting anthropogenic causes of global warming.

Former NASA scientist and the 'Father of Climate Change' Dr James Hansen, at the COP21 talks in Paris. (IMAGE: Thom Mitchell, New Matilda)

In 2010, when climate scientist James Hansen and climate denialist Christopher Monckton came to Australia, Hansen received scant attention from the ABC, with the exception of two radio interviews, including one on Late Night Live. In contrast, "Monckton received saturation coverage… and was always treated as an authoritative source until the Media Watch report near the end of his tour."
Sparrow notes, "The ABC gave huge publicity to a man that most reputable scientists regard as a crank, even as it largely ignored one of the more influential scientists of our time [James Hansen]."
This can't have been an honest mistake. In 2010, James Hansen had been an influential scientist for over 20 years. And, as Marc Hudson explains in The Conversation, the Office of National Assessment had urged the Fraser Government to consider moving away from fossil fuels as early as 1981, based on science.
By 2010, climate science had long since moved from uncertain to accepted, in both Australia and the US.
The ABC climate denial coverage was, of course, part of a wider industry funded misinformation campaign conducted around the world, which is now well-documented.
The crux of the campaign was to take something simple – anthropogenic global warming is happening – and make it complex and confusing – the science is uncertain, controversial and impossible to understand.
As MIT Media Professor Sut Jhally explains, this is yet another propaganda technique. Jhally, who is also executive producer of the documentary The Occupation of the American Mind, discusses manufactured complexity with respect to US coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Jhally says of the Israeli public relations campaign, "In the United States… the Israeli Palestinian conflict is often presented as an intensely complicated and confusing conflict… In fact…[it]is one of the clearest and least complicated of contemporary geopolitical conflicts. It's actually really easy to understand… [But to elicit public support] you have to take what is clear and make it confusing."
Manufacturing complexity and confusion is a psychologically effective strategy. As well as heightening suggestibility, framing an issue as complex elicits citizen disengagement and a willingness to trust leaders to sort things out.
That is no doubt partly why so many voters trust the Coalition, despite its antagonism to life on Earth, to handle our climate emergency.
The fact the ABC conducted corporate misinformation to avoid political attack doesn't make things any better. It makes them worse.
In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman identify funding sources as the key driver of contemporary propaganda. The psychology of this is simple. Don't bite the hand that feeds you.
Okay, harm done. But all that climate denialism is behind us now. The truth is out. Corporations and think-tanks are even under legal investigation for undermining climate science. People will open their eyes and move on, right?
Unfortunately not.
When associations in the brain are repeated over and over, they become 'crystallised' and resistant to change. A psychologist's maxim is that 'neurons that fire together wire together'. Once "climate science" and "unsettled" have fired together often enough, the association becomes difficult to break.
So what can be done? If decades of media manipulation have closed millions of minds to genuine information on climate change, what's the use?
The ABC might have helped to get us into this mess, but will it help to get us out?
Given what's at stake, will the ABC throw fear of funding cuts to the wind, ramp up its investigative reporting, dial down the fake objectivity, and stand up for humanity this election?
Or will it forge ahead with reporting-as-usual, politics-as-usual, and business-as-usual, like its bosses and our leaders expect?
In their book Climate Change, Capitalism and Corporations, Sydney University Professors Christopher Wright and Daniel Nyberg identify a 'business-as-usual' narrative at the heart of corporate responses to climate change. Wright and Nyberg studied Australian corporations' engagement with global warming, and found that the overarching corporate strategy was to "frame business and markets as the only means of dealing with the climate crisis" in order to enable "industry to make money from it."
The success of the corporate business-as-usual message, they argue, is central to humanity's inability "to muster a meaningful response to the crisis that is engulfing it."
Will the ABC walk the corporate business-as-usual walk this election along with the Government, as voters sleepwalk alongside, or will it reconnect with its "democratic role as public watchdog" and stand up?
Let's be realistic. The ABC needs funding to survive. As does independent media.
The easiest and most powerful remedy for media hegemony and the occupation of the Australian mind is to support independent media, the home of watchdog journalism.
But what else can we do?
In part three I will explore approaches to circumventing the occupation of the Australian mind, and saving voters from their self-destructive impulses, based on the psychology of cognition and voting, strategic communication and lessons from the US presidential primaries.

Links

• ELECTION 2016: Why People Will Vote For Their Own Destruction, And How To Stop Them (Part 1)
• ELECTION 2016: How To Win Friends, Influence People And Help Them Taste, Feel And See The Truth (Part 3)
• Truth Hurts: The Science Behind Why People Don't Care About The Death Of Our Planet And Democracy
• Malcolm Turnbull: 'Small L' Liberal Or Planet-Eating Death Star? Early Indications From The Turnbull Government

The Great Barrier Reef And The Subtle Power Of 'Psychological Distance'

The Guardian - Don Hine | Aaron Driver

Getting people to care about climate change and the imminent threat of damage to the reef depends on a certain concept of distance

This photo released on 20 April, 2016 by XL Catlin Seaview Survey shows a turtle swimming over bleached coral at Heron Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Photograph: STR/AFP/Getty Images

If the federal government wants Australians to ignore the Great Barrier Reef as it dies beside us, it has done a masterful job by scrubbing all mentions of the reef from the latest UN climate change report.
The government’s actions have been described as Soviet in style and intent but the political thuggery pales compared to the activation of a subtler and more powerful effect known as psychological distance.
Psychological distance is a construct that measures the “distance” of an event or object in terms of geography, time, cultural similarity and factual certainty. If something is nearby, likely to occur soon, involves people like you, and the facts are certain, that “something” is considered psychologically close. The closer it is, the more likely you are to perceive it as concrete and be willing and able to act on it.
Work by our environmental psychology research group at the University of New England shows that alternatively, as psychological distance increases, an object is perceived more abstractly and is less likely to be acted on.
Saving for retirement is a classic example. In our 20s, the facts of retirement are uncertain: it will occur in the distant future, and possibly in a different location and cultural context. Other more concrete concerns capture our attention.
By the time we reach our 50s the abstract has become concrete. We likely know when we’ll be retiring, where to and with who, all with relative certainty. As a result, we’re more likely to save every spare dollar.
But of course with retirement savings – like climate change and coral bleaching – we can’t wait until the last minute to act.
To that end, our research indicates that psychological distance is a significant predictor of climate change concern and intention to act in ways such as reducing household energy use.
We’ve also found that we can increase or decrease psychological distance by framing climate change messages in different ways. When we presented messages designed to increase psychological distance, our participants became less concerned about climate change and more disengaged. When we reduced psychological distance, our participants became more concerned and more willing to take action.
Which brings us back to the federal government’s “bleaching” of UN documents. By requesting that references to reef damage be removed from the Unesco report, the government is, intentionally or otherwise, increasing the psychological distance of climate-related threats to the reef.
Geographic and cultural distances are increased: climate change might be killing coral but there’s no indication that it’s happening in Australia. Therefore it must be happening elsewhere to people who are different to us.
The perception of time, as it relates to psychological distance, is also stretched. Many Australians have heard that climate change will affect our reef, but it’s not happening yet, apparently.
Finally, the release of an authoritative climate change report that doesn’t mention the Great Barrier Reef contrasts with other reports that do mention it. This type of inconsistency creates a level of factual uncertainty that only further increases psychological distance.
Of course we’ve learned that nearly a quarter of the coral on the Great Barrier Reef is now dead, according to two government agencies. How is it possible for almost a quarter of our reef to die without it triggering unprecedented, national concern and debate?
Sadly, those of us who work with the psychology of climate change don’t find this surprising in the least. Psychological distance is one of the many “dragons of inaction” that we wrestle with, psychological barriers that hinder environmental action.
But we also have cause for optimism. Our research suggests that reports of environmental damage that include graphic images can decrease psychological distance, and be an effective mechanism for increasing public concern and engagement. However, for that to occur people must read the articles and see the pictures.
And so it becomes apparent that the government’s very own bleaching event is truly masterful, if the goal is to prevent meaningful action on climate change.
The dying of the Great Barrier Reef is a national tragedy. In a democracy it is mandatory that the electorate be informed about matters of national significance. In this case the opposite has occurred, and the psychological damage done may already be more profound than most realise.

Links

• The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare
• Australia scrubbed from UN climate change report after government intervention
• How the Great Barrier Reef got polluted – from farms and fossil fuels to filthy propaganda
• Ellen DeGeneres urges Australians to help save Great Barrier Reef
• Ellen DeGeneres campaigns for Great Barrier Reef protection – video 

El Niño Is Dead, Leaving Behind Legacy Of A Heated Planet, Devastated Corals And Monster Storms

Washington Post - Jason Samenow

Ocean temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean have cooled and are now near or below normal, signifying that the El Niño is over. (null.earthschool.net)

El Niño has met its demise.
The much-hyped ocean-atmosphere oscillation was declared dead by the National Weather Service today. The pool of unusually warm water in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, the telltale indicator of El Niño, has cooled to nearly normal.
“We’re sticking a fork in this El Niño and calling it done,” writes NOAA climate analyst Emily Becker on its El Niño blog.
But this year’s El Niño, among the strongest on record, will long be remembered for profoundly altering weather extremes in parts of the world while pushing the planet’s temperature to shocking record highs, with devastating consequences.
The Earth’s temperature in 2015 became the warmest on record by a landslide, largely because of the excess heat passed from the tropical Pacific into the atmosphere — superimposed on the long-term climate warming from rising greenhouse gas concentrations.

(NOAA)

The warming effect of El Niño has carried into 2016, with every month so far ranking the warmest on record. 2016 has started off so unusually warm that climate scientists say it is almost certain to beat 2015’s record.
The warming inflicted on the tropical ocean waters has enhanced a coral bleaching event described as one of the worst ever observed. While the long-term climate warming is thought to have initiated the bleaching, El Niño intensified the damage.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef was hit hard. “Only four reefs out of 520 [observed] had no bleaching,” Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, told Science magazine.
Mass bleaching has destroyed as much as 35 percent of the coral on the northern and central Great Barrier Reef, a major blow to the World Heritage Site. (Reuters)

The damage to the corals around the island of Kiritimati in the Pacific, about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, was called a “horror show” by researcher Julia Baum of the University of Victoria.
While El Niño dulled the vibrant corals, it intensified massive wildfires in Indonesia, which emitted more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than Japan does in a year by burning fossil fuels, according to The Washington Post’s Chris Mooney. In part because of the pulse of carbon dioxide from Indonesia, atmospheric concentrations shot up to a record this May of 407.7 parts per million (ppm).

(NOAA)

The Indonesian wildfires were spurred by El Niño-induced drought in the region. While El Niño warmed the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, it cooled the western tropical Pacific, leading to sinking air motions that quashed rainfall.
But the rising air and warm waters on the tropical Pacific’s east side spawned two of the freakiest, most intense tropical cyclones in recorded history. In October, Hurricane Patricia became the strongest storm measured to date by the National Hurricane Center in the Northeast Pacific, with winds of 215 mph. Then, in February, Winston became the fiercest storm on record in the South Pacific, with winds of 185 mph
In the Northern Hemisphere, 25 category 4 or 5 tropical cyclones, the most intense variety, spun up in 2015, the most on record by far.

Patricia, the strongest hurricane ever recorded, near maximum intensity, Oct. 23, 2015. (NOAA)

While El Niño can be implicated in weather and climate extremes all over the world, it did not deliver in the one place that perhaps needed it the most. It was forecast by many to deliver heavy rainfall in Southern California — mired in a multi-year drought — but the rain really never came.
“Instead of torrential rain in Southern California (and the mudslides that came along with it), the region ended winter with well-below average precipitation,” wrote The Post’s Angela Fritz. “Even worse, California statewide snowpack was just 87 percent of average at its peak. It’s true that this year’s snowfall was a huge improvement over the previous winter, but the amount of water stored in the snow has fallen short of what was hoped for, and even expected, due to a very strong El Niño.”
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the El Niño of 2015-2016 is shaping up to be one of the strongest in this past century. Here are the types of weather we can expect around the world due to this year's El Niño. (World Meteorological Organization/ YouTube)

With El Niño in our rearview mirrors, forecasts now say chances are good that La Niña — its opposite phase — will develop by late this summer or this fall.
The impacts associated with El Niño typically reverse during La Niña. So we might expect the rapid rise in global temperatures to slow. This might allow the corals to partially recover while rains return to Indonesia.
Meanwhile, tropical cyclone activity in the eastern Pacific is likely to slow, but potentially ramp up in the Atlantic. As for rainfall in California, La Niña is associated with drier-than-normal weather — meaning the drought might continue or even get worse.

Links

• We are living in the planet’s most unusually warm period in modern history
• ‘And then we wept': Scientists say 93 percent of the Great Barrier Reef now bleached
• Atmospheric carbon dioxide just reached a huge record high
• Record warm oceans have spawned scary slate of monster tropical cyclones