Paul Sheehan, and yet another bout of incoherent thinking to start off the week ...

The spam in my mail box has taken an agreeably sophisticated turn:

Nouveau le médicament pour les hommes de n'importe quel âge - l'effet ferme sexuel et un agréable prix.
Intensifier les sensations sexuelles ? Un nouveau mélange végétal avec une influence puissante et effective.
Simplement, effectivement, la sécurité... Le vrai effet sexuel pour les gens réels.
Une nouvelle méthode de l'amélioration de la vie sexuelle, est contrôlé et il est très effectif.

Le Rêve sexuel on avoir facilement, une nouvelle formule végétale - le miracle l'effet

Well actually the "intensifier/influence/effective" pitch seemed a little off and franglaise - whatever happened to efficace? - but all the same it's nice to see French being used to seduce men into folly. Such a sensuous language ...

And yes of course reading spam is also a great way to avoid thinking about the scribbles of Captain Grumpy, aka Paul Sheehan, who always gets the week off to a bad start by sounding like a sour hysterical lemon or a doom laden fear monger in the Herald, and always in need of un noveau végétal avec une influence puissante et effective.

Ah yes, the influence puissante - potent, powerful, strong, thrusting, hefty, mighty, even tout puissante - whatever, take your pick - would really help us get through Floods steal precious topsoil - and future goes down drain, if we happened to find a masculinist echo of women stealing precious bodily fluids in that header ...

Feeble shrunken jokes aside, it's almost admirable - and always strangely compelling - the way Sheehan manages to cherry pick his sources and sustain a rigorous intellectual hypocrisy.

This week he turns environmentalist, concerned by the loss of topsoil washed away in the floods. Naturally being myopic, and only focussed on the most recent news story, he makes no mention of the epic 2009 Australian dust storm, which shifted an estimated 75,000 tonnes of dust per hour off the NSW coast north of Sydney into the ocean (and so earned its own wiki listing here).

That was done by wind, not water and floods, but there's nothing you can do to get a Sheehan to pause and think, not when it comes to him in full, flood-ravaged 'we'll be rooned, in accents most forlorn' mode (did John O'Brien write the most sustained insightful critique of chattering commentariat columnists almost a century ago, here?)

Sheehan spends much of his column pumping up the volume on the work of Peter Andrews (and Andrews has his own site here), and all this is well and good in its own way, but it's the insistent cherry picking that irritates, along with the insistent notion that only the hysterical Sheehan seems to have noticed that in a strong wind, or a rampaging flood, top soil is removed, and frequently lost to the farmer or agriculturalist - a process brooded about many decades ago in geography class when I attended primary school.

You see, here's Sheehan the denialist at work in his usual incidental way:

A few sages warned that the worst thing that could happen to Australia after a decade of drought was sustained rain.

That is what happened across much of the eastern food basket. The sequence of extremes was not global warming, nor was it bad luck. This was an Australian-made disaster that was a long time coming.

Notice the trick, the easy dismissal about it not being neither related to global warming, nor bad luck.

Now let's jump down the column to Sheehan citing his sources:

The history of Australians' ignorance in the management of water, and thus soil, can be found in The Water Dreamers (2009), by Dr Michael Cathcart, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne. He argues, compellingly, that Australia was settled amid ignorance of how the natural landscape conserved water, soil and vegetation. None of this would surprise anyone who paid attention to Professor Jared Diamond's visit to Australia a few years ago, or read his book, Collapse: How Societies Chose to Fail or Survive (2005), or listened to Australia's most famous science intellectual, Dr Tim Flannery.

By sheer coincidence, I picked up Diamond's Collapse last night, for a little depressing reading after watching Haneke's depressing vision of a repressed German village in The White Ribbon.

Towards the end of his book, in chapter 16, Diamond lists twelve points detailing environmental problems faced by humans:

1. At an accelerating rate, the destruction of natural habitats or their conversion to human-made habitats.

2. The depletion of wild foods, and the increasing reliance such substitutes as disease prone aquaculture.

3. Loss of genetic diversity.

4. Soils carried away by water and wind erosion at a much higher level than soil formation rates.

5. Reliance on fossil fuels.

6. Reliance on irrigation and depletion of natural aquifers.

7. A trend to reach a photosynthetic ceiling, whereby most energy fixed from sunlight will be used for human purposes, with little left over for the support of natural plant communities, such as natural forests.

8. Toxic chemicals released into the environment.

9. 'Alien species', most frequently transported by humans, and devastating to the new landscapes in which they flourish ...

10. Global warming.

11. and 12. The growing human population and its impact on the environment.

Diamond then makes the point:

I have described these 12 sets of problems as separate from each other. In fact, they are linked: one problem exacerbates another or makes its solution more difficult ...

Being a synthesist, Diamond doesn't write nonsense like "this was not global warming". Nor, with all due respect to the work of Peter Andrews, is the current predicaments of humanity going to be sorted out by his work drought-proofing the property of luddite retailing squillionaire Gerry Harvey ...

And that's where Sheehan becomes a problem, what with his embrace of green proofing on a micro level, and his consistent denialism on a macro level, as you'll find if you can drought proof yourself against the tedium of reading the anti-green rants to hand in Green by name, flaky by nature, Ten debates the greens didn't want to have, Get your fracking facts right, In bed with the devil - a deal that has tainted Green policies, Wild rivers a cage for Aborigines, and the dooziest of them all, delivered just under a year ago, when Sheehan the gadfly was captivated by the deep thinking of Lord Monckton, and so delivered unto the Herald's readership Ten anti-anti-commandments and Lord Monckton's verbal bombs.

Back then, Sheehan didn't give a toss for Diamond's point 8:

Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "After DDT was virtually banned, deaths from Malaria went from 50,000 a year to one million a year. Over 40 years, until the ban was basically lifted, 40 million people died, and most of them were poor children."

Utter nonsense of course, but that's Sheehan the grumpy gadfly.

And how about this bon mot bomb toss?

Lord Monckton's Sydney bomb-toss: "Lord Stern [author of the Stern Review] is mad. That's the technical term for him… There are leading climate scientists, like Professor Richard Linzen of MIT, who do not believe a word of the [IPCC] global warming argument."

Now what technical term could we use for Sheehan recycling Monckton's bomb toss?

There are plenty of other celebratory moments of bomb tossing in that piece, but if you've stuck with Sheehan to this grumpy point, you'll be aware of an infinite almost Walt Whitman-esque capacity to embrace contradictory positions, and talk through a diverse range of completely incompatible hats.

As a result, reading Sheehan rabbiting on about the floods now, and then taking a tour back into the past to read about Sheehan rabbiting on about the drought makes for great fun, as the Gaia-loving 'brilliant' Tim Flannery caught his ear in Running out of water - and time:

"I'm personally more worried about Sydney than Perth," Flannery told me. "Where does Sydney go for more water? At least Perth has a buffer of underground water sources. Sydney doesn't have any backup. And while Perth is forging ahead with a desalination plant, Sydney doesn't have any major scheme in place to bolster water. It also has nowhere to put the vast infrastructure of a desalination plant."

Well yes, except now we worry about the uselessness of the vast infrastructure of the desalination plant down Cronulla way ...

Climate change is working against Sydney. "There's only two years' water supply in Warragamba Dam," says Flannery, "yet Frank Sartor [NSW Minister for Energy and Utilities] is talking about the situation being stable … If the computer models are right then drought conditions will become permanent in eastern Australia."

Except of course when there's the need for a flood of Paul Sheehan columns about the pernicious impact of flooding ...

"Water is going to be in short supply across the eastern states," says Flannery. Pumping water from catchment areas near Sydney is not going to be enough, and will create knock-on effects in those catchments. The water restrictions now in force in Sydney are never going to be lifted, except after a run of freak conditions, just as Warragamba Dam is never again going to be full unless there is a freak period of high rainfall unlikely to be sustained.

Which of course leads to the note that Warragamba dam is currently running at 74.% (as shown in a set of nifty graphs here). Such easy pickings for the likes of Tim Blair and Andrew the dolt.

So where is all this heading, where does the mish mash that constitutes Paul Sheehan's approach to the environment, get us? Well it gets us to this cheeky conclusion:

We changed the landscape, and so changed the weather. Then we blamed it on ''drought''. It wasn't drought. It was much worse.

It was ignorance.

Well I guess as an exemplification of ignorance over many years, there's nothing like Paul Sheehan scribbling a column to remind us of the many problems we face ... including Lord Monckton and global warming and Paul Sheehan ...

As for the rest? Well if I were Peter Andrews, I'd be wary about being celebrated by Paul Sheehan. Being blessed by him is almost like being given the mark of Cain, or the curse of Tutankhamen or the approval of Rasputin.

There is of course an upside.

Diamond's book is well worth the read, even though things have changed a little since 2005. But then he has a coherent, consistent, considered view of the world ...

Otherwise? Move along folks, nothing to read here, no insights to be gained.

Now back to some meaty cross cultural insights.

Thank the absent lord for spam, en Francaise, n'est-ce pas?

(Below: meanwhile, on another matter completely, when is a 'bullseye' icon a survey marker? Why, when it's a "bullseye" icon.

And it seems that Jared Lee Loughner believed in the gold standard. Just like Glenn Beck. But it doesn't matter where he fits in the currently crazed American environment of left and right, it's the level and quality of discourse in the United States going around at the moment, and for that the likes of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Rupert Murdoch score an inner ring bulls eye).