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John Quiggin 
The Victorian Trades Hall wants employers who underpay their workers to be subject to criminal penalties including up to 10 years prison time.
They should be careful about what they wish for. Once breaches of industrial relations law are criminalised, the other side will find no shortage of reasons to jail trade union officials.
Abrupt irreversible climate change nears…
Antarctica.
The Great Totten Glacier is Floating on More Warming Water Than We Thought
robertscribbler.com/2018/03/20/the-great-totten-glacier-is-floating-on-more-warming-water-than-we-thought/
Arctic.
The Arctic carbon bomb now may be worse than was thought…
robertscribbler.com/2018/03/20/the-great-totten-glacier-is-floating-on-more-warming-water-than-we-thought/#comment-139243
And… Nature Bats Last.
Guy McPherson: Interview with Canadian Prepper, Part II
guymcpherson.com/2018/04/interview-with-canadian-prepper-part-ii/#more-16541
From 4:54min – “I used to think it would be a financial collapse or an economic collapse rooted in the industrial economy that would cause the house of cards to come down, that people would actually wake up to the fact that the dollar bills they use are fiat and are only as meanigful as the confidence within them. But I’ve concluded that most people around the world are easily deluded and they couldn’t care less if the paper bills were just paper or just ink on paper, or not. So I suspect it will take some sort of large scale event like the inability to grow food that triggers collapse of civilisation.
And it will be a climate induced collapse. I think we’re very near that point right now… I think that the 2 degrees C target promoted by a neo-clasical economist so many years ago for climate change.. I think that’s actually.. I think that has a lot to do with the collapse of grain growing at large scale, and we’re very close to that 2 C above baseline number right now.
It could happen literally any summer at this point, any spring and summer, as wheat and corn enter their terminal demise. Once that happens because of the absence of global dimming we will observe a very very rapid global average increase in temperature as in somewhere between one and up to about three degrees Celsius temperature increase within six weeks after the demise of industrial civilisation. That’s because of something called ‘global dimming’. At the same time as industrial activity is putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which serve to warm the planet by holding the heat down. At the same time industrial civilisation is doing that, industrial civilisation is also putting particulates or aerosols most noteably sulphates into the atmosphere and those sulphates act as something of an umbrella that prevent incoming solar radiation, prevent incoming sunlight, to get to the planet to heat it up, so that incoming radiation is bounced out before it hits the Earth and is allowed to be trapped by the greenhouse gases. Those are primarily composed of sulphates produced by burning, quote, low quality coal. So the notion of clean coal, which is ridiculous to begin with.. if we give up on poor quality coal and switch to clean coal without as much sulphur in it then we’re gonna get rid of those sulphates, those aerosols, and the planet will heat up even faster than it already is. Once civilisation collapses, in other words, the temperature of the planet heats up, up to about three degrees Celsius according to the refereed journal literature and I see no way for very complex life, very complex multicellular life, such as humans and other large animals to survive. A global average temperature increase of one degree Celsius much less three degrees in a six week period of time, our habitat just vanishes so quickly that — I don’t think there’ll be a tree on the planet at three or four degrees above the seventeen fifty baseline — Not with the rapidity — We’re headed in that direction. So that’s how it happens. That’s how it all comes down.. Within the next year, or two, we lose habitat for our species. Then things get really interesting… as there is a mad scramble, probably by the sociopaths pulling the strings of empire to somehow cool the planet down. Does that mean nuclear war? Certainly wouldn’t surprise me. And of course almost everybody living in cities or living near a nuclear power plant will die quickly as a result of a nuclear bomb striking or as a result of a nuclear power facility melting down catastrophically in an uncontrolled manner. And ionising radiation is not something you want to be soaking in when the source is mere miles from your home.
So I think there will be stair steps along the way. I suspect that the collapse of civilisation will mean the inability to deliver water inti peoples’ homes, so everybody living in a city or relying on a municipal water supply will die of dehydration shortly after the water stops coming through the taps. Some people will survive that. Obviously nearly fifty per cent of the people on the planet don’t depend on industrial civilisation directly through water delivery. So that means forty, or forty-five per cent of the people on the planet will survive that first wave, but then the sulphates fall out of the air and the temperature warms up catastrophically.
So after the first few months, or maybe a few years, industrial civilisation will be in the midst of collapsing, and people will persist off stored food in their bunkers and their root cellars – they won’t be able to grow food anymore because that all vanishes as the result of the absence of global dimming and the rapid heating of the planet that occurs after that. You just can’t grow food in soils that are depleted. Depleted of nutrients, depleted of water, depleted of microrhizae, depleted of all the living ‘plant’ that is required to support us and every other living species that we occupy this planet with. So it could be that after a year or two after the house of cards comes down we still have people living in bunkers, quite miserably I would imagine, and maybe even will persist for another half a dozen years in.. a set of living conditions that I personally could not even imagine wanting to survive through. Producing all of your own water, recycling all of your own water.. you can’t grow the food anymore so it’s just so it’s just stored food that you’re living on and the planet around you is effectively dead. Soaking in ionising radiation, plant life, animal life destroyed by abrupt climate change. An extinction rate that is occuring even faster than what we’re currently observing with up to two hundred species a day, maybe more, going extinct already. And then, because of the absence of gloabal dimming, because of the ionising radiation triggered by all the nuclear power facilities melting down, by perhaps nuclear weapons being used to attempt to cool the planet, all that paints a very distopian future for us and other life on Earth.
It’s difficult for me to imagine… in fact I predict that there won’t be a human being on the planet in twenty twenty-six (2026) – less than eight (8) years from now – because all these events have culminated in a.. in an imperfect catastrophic storm that will take out our species and nearly every other species on the planet over a very short period of time. Ultimately I suspect will lead to a lifeless planet or at the very least, at the very best, a planet that is reduced to microbes and fungi and bacteria and a few other small things for several million years after 2026.” – 13:13min…
15:37 – “Final words. What can we do to stop or slow down what’s coming? We as individuals can do nothing. We’re in the midst of abrupt irreversible climate change. That doesn’t mean slow, and it doesn’t mean we can turn it around. That means we’re in the midst of abrupt irreversible climate change. There is nothing we can do as individuals, in fact if the whole house of cards comes down the abruptness and the irreversibility are accelerated, and yet civilisation itself is a heat engine that is already overheating the planet. There is nothing we can do to slow or stop what’s coming.
All we can do is personal. All we can do is individual. All we can do is gather the people around us we love and act as if we’re in our final days, weeks, months, because we are… because we are. So we can take that to heart and we can live accordingly. We can live with urgency, or not. We can live as if ‘some day’ means that we’ll be here for a very long time – or not. There’s an advertisement in the Belize City airport, it says: “There are seven days in the week. Some day is not one of them.” Lets live like that, let’s live like we’re dying, because we are. Let’s live with urgency, because the situation is urgent. Let’s live as if we’re pursuing excellence in a culture of mediocrity, as if we’re pursuing love in a culture of indifference, because those things matter. They don’t matter in terms of turning the ship around. The notion of love being able to turn around a system that has been rooted in indifference for my entire life, and yours too, and for generations back is ludicrous. We’re not gonna be able to, quote, fix this. All we can do is what we can do as individuals, as individuals within a tribe. Let’s act like the tribe matters. Let’s act as if our own lives matter, and treat ourselves with respect, and treat others with respect. At the edge of extinction only love remains.” – 18:04 min
Guy McPherson: Interview with Canadian Prepper, Part I
guymcpherson.com/2018/04/interview-with-canadian-prepper/#more-16536
robertscribbler.com/2018/03/20/the-great-totten-glacier-is-floating-on-more-warming-water-than-we-thought/#comment-140092
Mark Behrend / April 7, 2018
“There seems to be a conscious attempt to bury the news that we are fast approaching a global Pearl Harbor of the environment. Last week’s UN report predicting hundreds of millions of starvation refugees by mid-century, for instance, got 3 minutes on BBC, a belated, oblique reference on France 24, and not a word on NPR or Yahoo News. The reason, I suggest, is that the powers that be have no answers, and fear that the truth would trigger worldwide panic today, instead of 30 years from now, when the monster at our doorstep. Acting now, when we might do something, you see, might disrupt the economy, which lives by the current fiscal year. The future is the our grandchildren’s problem.”
@Smith
cart before horse, and so backwards.
@Smith
“The Victorian Trades Hall wants employers who underpay their workers to be subject to criminal penalties including up to 10 years prison time.”
The union movement will be much better off if bad unionists go to jail.
As the Fair Work Ombudsman has pointed out, some bosses under investigation shake off their unpaid employee entitlements by declaring bankruptcy then establishing another corporate entity and continuing to deliberately underpay workers. In the worst cases, where ~ $100,000 or more is involved and the workers are award covered, a prison sentence should be an option.
@Hugo
Since when has theft been “underpayment”?
Malcolm’s problems are obvious.
They are not helped by the likes of his minister Tudge [of the famous Yarra 3] whom I was just watching on Q and A talking about young people not respecting Police!
I won’t analyse the disgraceful Victorian police officers beating and humiliating of the mentally ill man so evidenced last week.
This coming from Tudge a professed lawyer who was found to have been in serious contempt of the Victorian Court of Appeal. This may still be actionable by his profession’s administering body.
This blatant hypocrisy goes uncommented upon by the so-called media.
@Svante
Not paying an entitlement or more particularly taking property like a chose in action [eg. wages due] may constitute either stealing or dishonest application of property under the Qld. Criminal Code – even an employees.
@Svante
Let me make it real simple for you.
If an employee helps himself to $10,000 worth of his employer’s merchandise, it is theft. Similarly, if the employer pockets $10,000 that he should have put into his employee’s superannuation account, it is theft.
The term commonly applied to the latter practice is “wage theft”.
If you still find the concept of wage theft intellectually challenging, let me know.
@Hugo
What? Thanks anyway, but apparently I didn’t make it simple enough for you. Wage theft, car theft, art theft, armed theft, land theft, child theft, and so on and on, are all theft. Spade, shovel. “Underpayment” in the context of employment is an employer/corporate/ruling class spin term deliberately employed to minimise the seriousness and extent of the crimes, and to deflect attention.
@david
Thanks David. How many such cases of wage stealing are investigated and prosecuted by the QPS annually? How many such cases compared to workplace theft? Theft as a servant? Does another term, “class traitors”, enter the picture here?
This might be peak Trump.
@Svante
Thanks appreciate your comment.
I am not an expert on the statistics re particular prosecutions BUT from my too lengthy experience of police prosecutions I would suspect the direction would be given to police effectively this type of matter is civil and maybe a Fair Work matter. It is still a CRIME.
It is often a political decision eg. Craig Thomson’s $500,00 worth of charges which he beat all bar $5,000 worth – these being not taking choses in action of the HSU but money he gained upon using an HSU credit card which the bank was not contractually bound to honour to the HSU!
Don’t forget the AFP pursuit of Peter Slipper which failed totally. The real investigation need here is into the AFP. including the Slipper/ Ashby/Brough/Abbott/ Wyatt Roy/ Pyne etc. Affair. This involves serious jail time .
Reading F A Hayek s unnecessarily long ‘The Road to Serfdom’ ,only half way thru but so far it clearly does not justify today’s brand of extreme Libertarianism. He hedges his bets alot, and is aiming mainly at totalitarian command and control dictatorships when he speaks of Socialists. Wikipedia gives a rundown of Libertarianism that makes sense to me ,it is explained in terms of Right and Left Libertarianism. I am untrained in economics and can easily see that modern Libertarianism is just a bastardised version aimed at protecting the current wealth distribution. What a surprise (not!) . Why do I have to read books like that ? Well ,a while ago I felt I needed to learn a bit about Economics after it it had started being used as a political weapon to take from the needy.
@Svante
My inner Prepper is becoming increasingly worried. Recently two only coincidentally related things have disproportionately affected my normally hopeful mood 1/ melbournes curbside recycling scam 2/ micro plastics are in everything and everyone. – Now I’m worried about the (plastic tainted or not) water supply post apocalypse .
@sunshine Property rights and personal freedom don’t make for comfortable bedfellows and historically, to establish the rights of a property someone had to lose their right to their freedom.
Property rights are enforced by the laws of the Crown and often enough, it was the Crown that originally acquired that property – often by direct or indirect force, or the threat of.
Personal freedoms, even laissez-faire economics, are conditional on support of the Crown.
@sunshine
> water supply post apocalypse
I’ve not been a prepper, but perhaps that should change. Food apparently presents a more immediate problem than water. IIRC, the numbers for Australia are something like three days supply of oil, and three weeks of food in total at various stages of the supply chain. That supply chain is heavily dependent on that fuel oil… and resupply more so.
Acting on several other coincidental motivations, two of which are personal bio and the ALP’s latest on dividend franking credits, I’ve been looking at rehousing to the FNQ Innisfail region. There are some interesting propositions high up the Johnstone or South Johnstone river valleys complete with high rainfall, tanks, and bores – not to mention the rivers, some of the best water in Oz. The high rainfall throughout the year is a product of the mountainous topography backing the coast and the moist south east trade winds. The rainforest ecosystem there, that once covered much of Australia, is the last holdout of it’s kind and has survived global climate extremes over a very long period. The trouble is that it is all dependent now on those south east trade winds continuing. however, they as likely will not do so for long as weather systems world-wide are disrupted. Another issue there is that without oil and other conventional industrial agricultural inputs growing adequate food there is a problem even if a wet local climate holds – there are good reasons why the indigenous forest people there were so much smaller in size than the rest of the Australian population of the time… Maybe west Tasmania for the water then? Will the roaring forties hold for long?
See CSIRO soil scientist Chris Watson’s 3 Australian maps re agriculture: climate-rainfall, soil fertility, and the consequent tiny area of rich land overlay: australianpoet.com/boundless.html
(Mark O’Connor – Australian Poet – Environmentalist > Overloading Australia > Boundless Plains
australianpoet.com/ australianpoet.com/overloading.html )
Shipping. The IMO has finally got onboard the climate revolution (*****climatechangenews.com/2018/04/13/shipping-halve-carbon-footprint-2050-first-sector-wide-climate-strategy/). The targets are of course inadequate, but recognizing the principle of responsibility for emissions was a breakthrough. The shipping industry now knows it has to change. The technology will show up, and prove cheaper than they fear.
The governance structure for shipping is weird. Most ships are registered under flags of convenience in tiny and powerless countries (Liberia, Panama, Marshall Islands). The shipowners are in rich countries. So are half the ports, that can enforce rules unilaterally if the flags of convenience don’t do anything – this was the crucial and credible threat from the EU.
SFIK the USA played next to no role in the IMO shindig. Trump has exiled the USA to the touchlines, but the rest of the world carries on.
The latest good estimate of the total excess deaths due to the Second Gulf War and esuing internal conflict in Iraq (2003-2011) is 405,000 (***washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/20/15-years-after-it-began-the-death-toll-from-the-iraq-war-is-still-murky/?utm_term=.6f1971488079). The split is 240,000 from violence and 160,000 indirect but war-related (breakdowns in water supply, health services etc). This total leaves out the more recent ISIS insurrection. Over the last seven years, the conservative Iraq Body Count has added at least 82,000 civilian deaths. We should not be citing the dodgy initial Lancet study any more.
Add to your total at least another half million. Half a million infants who died of disease and the stringent economic sanctions placed on pharmaceuticals. Your so called “Second Gulf War” began immediately following the first with, for example, incessant bombing of water treatment, sanitation, and power infrastructure, and sanctions on spare parts for such infrastructure. 500,000 kids. That figure for only the first four years following 1991. WW2 may be seen as round two of WW1, but there was no second gulf war as there was no pause in the atrocities carried out by the victors of the “first”. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War#Australia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_661#The_661_Committee
Madeleine Albright. ‘”I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.” Stated on CBS’s 60 Minutes (May 12, 1996) in reply to Lesley Stahl’s question “We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” Albright was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time.’ – wikiquote.org/wiki/Madeleine_Albright
One murder being part of one million others is equally punishable.
The real game here is the prosecution of the perpetrators including our own lying rodent.
To illegally invade another country and bomb near civilians leads to the foreseeable consequence of civil deaths and hence in law their murder.
AS a good starting point I suggest reading our own High Court case “The War Crimes Case”
to give an insight into creating a jurisdictional base for prosecutions in Australia.
The basic figures of the death of so many innocents is upsetting as indeed its the political prosecution of their murderers.
sorry “political protection”.
#19 > The real game here is the prosecution of the perpetrators including our own lying rodent.
David, Hawke and Keating also happily collaborated with Bush (snr) and Clinton in the mass killing of Iraqi infants by sanction, blockade, and bombing crimes following the Kuwaiti set up (Kuwait is an adept old hand at this western imperial game, eg., nineteen-teens and twenties). During the years after the 1991 100 day ‘Desert Storm’ what’s the difference behind the treatment of Irish and Iraqis by these imperial crims? Is it skin color alone, or religion, or culture, or just oil reserves? The modern time Irish ‘Troubles’ began 1968 and the Clinton led imperium ended it 1998, but the West has been bombing Arab civilians some place since 1911 without pause.
Professor Quiggin,
Did you mean to delete my post which has been ‘awaiting moderation’ since Friday? a copy is included below:
@Svante
agree if the evidence is there prosecute any offender. My point is the evidence against the rodent is obvious and compounded by the evidence of his guilty conduct in his relying falsely on the weapons of mass destruction justification [ let’s hear Andrew Wilkie on this]. Royal Commission is needed.