‘GNS study’ story lacks all credibility

### NZ Herald Sun, 21 May 2017 at 8:55 AM
Higher seas may force New Zealand towns to retreat inland: GNS Science study to investigate
By Jamie Morton
Researchers have begun investigating how some New Zealand communities could be pulled back from hazard zones in the face of flooding driven by climate change and sea level rise. A new study, to be led by GNS Science as part of a near million-dollar wider research programme, will look at ways authorities and communities can plan for homes to be moved to safer ground. It is estimated two thirds of Kiwis live in areas prone to flooding. At least 43,000 homes lie within 1.5 metres of the present average spring high tide, and nearly 9000 within 50cm. The most optimistic emissions scenario has global average sea levels likely to rise between 44cm and 55cm by 2100. One way to meet this threat is with what’s called “managed retreat” – shifting back houses and infrastructure and allowing the shoreline to move inland. “In New Zealand, there have always been communities in hazard areas, particularly on the coast, and this is something that’s always been an option,” said GNS researcher Emily Grace, who is leading the study. “But it’s definitely had more prominence in the last few years with people becoming more aware of sea level rise and the effects of global warming.” While there were measures within the Resource Management Act that authorities could use to help plan for shifting homes or roads, the issue was fraught with complexity. There were conflicts between what actions regional and district councils could take, and private property rights also posed barriers for planners, Ms Grace said. “It’s the kind of thing that goes in the too-hard basket, really – and part of the point of the research is to find out why it has not been carried out by councils in New Zealand and what could help change that.” With the exception of Christchurch’s post-quake red zone, she could cite just a few examples of such moves being taken. NZME.
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[The propaganda]
NZ and climate change (via NZ Herald)
• Under present projections, the sea level around New Zealand is expected to rise between 50cm and 100cm this century, while temperatures could also increase by several degrees by 2100.
• Climate change would bring more floods (about two-thirds of Kiwis live in areas prone to flooding); make our freshwater problems worse and put more pressure on rivers and lakes; acidify our oceans; put even more species at risk and bring problems from the rest of the world.
• Climate change is also expected to result in more large storms, compounding the effects of sea level rise.
• New Zealand, which reported a 23% increase in greenhouse gas emissions between 1990 and 2014, has pledged to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% from 2005 levels and 11% from 1990 levels by 2030.

12.5.17 ODT: Higher floor levels for some houses
From today, floors in houses to be built in low-lying areas of Dunedin could be up to 1m off the ground following the introduction of new “interim” minimum floor levels.

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Interesting opinion piece in the ODT today: ‘Left showed the Right the way’ by Andrew Waterworth. He says:

Postmodernism’s critique of science has paved the way for a broader questioning of whether empirical truths established through scientific method can be trusted. This has created fertile ground for the far Right to assert that science is a matter of opinion, to challenge scientific evidence for climate change, for example and to propose “alternative facts”. (ODT 22.5.17)

Instead, I would have said ‘this has created fertile ground for right thinking people to assert that computer-modelled science on climate change is just a box of fluffy ducks’. Because the ‘righters’ been stung by the evil tentacles, oh so many tentacles.

Obviously, the whole point is that the climate changers, vast numbers of them, ie millions of lemmings, have been riding high on false data for too long; false data initiated and supported by global corporates hand in hand with scrumpy academics, who both create and clip the tickets to gobble up Your Money and Assets. See too, what numbing expectations Central Government and the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment are placing on local authorities across New Zealand – and how those ‘with power’ around us are swallowing the cc distortions whole, applying mandates with fuzzy zeal in the complete absence of scientifically factual critical contest.

I think Mr Waterworth reads Dellers at Breitbart.

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Donald Trump | Pope Francis [salon.com]

### breitbart.com 18 May 2017
Delingpole: Pope Will Convert Trump on Climate Change, Claims Bishop
By James Delingpole
When President Trump visits the Vatican next week, he will be transformed by the radiant wisdom of His Holiness, the Pope, into a fully fledged climate change believer. Or so – somewhat optimistically – the bishop in charge of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academies of Science and Social Sciences has claimed. Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, the Academies’ chancellor, said in an interview:

They will come to an agreement, since the president claims to be a Christian, and so he [Trump] will listen to him [the Pope].

Actually, you can bet your bottom dollar that this won’t happen, not least because the Pope’s views on climate change are in many ways profoundly unChristian. This was why the Pope’s 2015 encyclical on environmental issues Laudato Si was so controversial. It bought into the extreme environmentalist view which sees mankind as a blight on the planet rather than a blessing, and sees the industrial progress which brings jobs and prosperity as a curse.
Here is a sample of the encyclical.

But a sober look at our world shows that the degree of human intervention, often in the service of business interests and consumerism, is actually making our earth less rich and beautiful, ever more limited and grey, even as technological advances and consumer goods continue to abound limitlessly. We seem to think that we can substitute an irreplaceable and irretrievable beauty with something which we have created ourselves.

It also took at face value all the climate scaremongering which alarmists have been dishonestly propagating these last few decades, against all scientific evidence.

The melting in the polar ice caps and in high altitude plains can lead to the dangerous release of methane gas, while the decomposition of frozen organic material can further increase the emission of carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide pollution increases the acidification of the oceans and compromises the marine food chain.

One U.S. Congressman – Rep Paul Gozar – complained it made the Pope sound like a “leftist politician”.
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elevating climate change [freakingnews.com via pinterest]

### breitbart.com 20 May 2017
Delingpole: ‘Penises Cause Climate Change’; Progressives Fooled by Peer-Reviewed Hoax Study
By James Delingpole
Gender studies is a fake academic industry populated by charlatans, deranged activists and gullible idiots. Now, a pair of enterprising hoaxers has proved it scientifically by persuading an academic journal to peer-review and publish their paper claiming that the penis is not really a male genital organ but a social construct. The paper, published by Cogent Social Sciences – “a multidisciplinary open access journal offering high quality peer review across the social sciences” – also claims that penises are responsible for causing climate change.
The two hoaxers are Peter Boghossian, a full-time faculty member in the Philosophy department at Portland State University, and James Lindsay, who has a doctorate in math and a background in physics.
They were hoping to emulate probably the most famous academic hoax in recent years: the Sokal Hoax – named after NYU and UCL physics professor Alan Sokal – who in 1996 persuaded an academic journal called Social Text to accept a paper titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”.
Sokal’s paper – comprising pages of impressive-sounding but meaningless pseudo-academic jargon – was written in part to demonstrate that humanities journals will publish pretty much anything so long as it sounds like “proper leftist thought;” and partly in order to send up the absurdity of so much post-modernist social science. So, for this new spoof, Boghossian and Lindsay were careful to throw in lots of signifier phrases to indicate fashionable anti-male bias:

We intended to test the hypothesis that flattery of the academic Left’s moral architecture in general, and of the moral orthodoxy in gender studies in particular, is the overwhelming determiner of publication in an academic journal in the field. That is, we sought to demonstrate that a desire for a certain moral view of the world to be validated could overcome the critical assessment required for legitimate scholarship. Particularly, we suspected that gender studies is crippled academically by an overriding almost-religious belief that maleness is the root of all evil. On the evidence, our suspicion was justified.

They also took care to make it completely incomprehensible.

We didn’t try to make the paper coherent; instead, we stuffed it full of jargon (like “discursive” and “isomorphism”), nonsense (like arguing that hypermasculine men are both inside and outside of certain discourses at the same time), red-flag phrases (like “pre-post-patriarchal society”), lewd references to slang terms for the penis, insulting phrasing regarding men (including referring to some men who choose not to have children as being “unable to coerce a mate”), and allusions to rape (we stated that “manspreading,” a complaint levied against men for sitting with their legs spread wide, is “akin to raping the empty space around him”). After completing the paper, we read it carefully to ensure it didn’t say anything meaningful, and as neither one of us could determine what it is actually about, we deemed it a success.

Some of it was written with the help of the Postmodern Generator – “a website coded in the 1990s by Andrew Bulhak featuring an algorithm, based on NYU physicist Alan Sokal’s method of hoaxing a cultural studies journal called Social Text, that returns a different fake postmodern ‘paper’ every time the page is reloaded.” […] None of it should have survived more than a moment’s scrutiny by serious academics. But it was peer-reviewed by two experts in the field who, after suggesting only a few changes, passed it for publication.
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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

This post is offered in the public interest.

Infrastructure ‘open to facile misinterpretation’…. or local ignore

Academic Paper/Article via Academia.edu
December 24, 2015

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruin, Retrofit and Risk
Cymene Howe – Rice University, Anthropology, Faculty Member
Corresponding Author

Co-Authors: Cymene Howe, Jessica Lockrem, Hannah Appel, Edward Hackett, Dominic Boyer, Randal Hall, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Albert Pope, Akhil Gupta, Elizabeth Rodwell, Andrea Ballestero, Trevor Durbin, Farès el-Dahdah, Elizabeth Long, and Cyrus Mody

ABSTRACT
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

Introduction
Breakdowns and blackouts, pipeline politics, and new demands upon energy and resources have surfaced infrastructure in surprising ways, igniting conversation about social and material arrangements that are often left submerged, invisible, and assumed. In recent years, we have witnessed a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. While the popular imagination might recognize infrastructure as the mundane mechanisms within, beneath, and supporting the maintenance of quotidian life, many scholars have foregrounded the agency, performativity, and dynamism of infrastructure.

Infrastructure is not inert but rather infused with social meanings and reflective of larger priorities and attentions. To further engage these novel lines of inquiry, a group of scholars gathered at Rice University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences for an extended roundtable discussion. We came from a variety of academic institutions and positions in the academy (ranging from senior scholars to PhD candidates), and our group reflected a diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds (American studies, anthropology, architecture, history, science and technology studies, and sociology). Our objective was to break down some of the scaffolding that upholds disciplinary boundaries. To embrace a starkly infrastructural metaphor, we were interested in “bridgework”, not just to move from point A to point B, but to hold us in suspension for a time so that we might inspect the mechanisms that drive our intellectual work and scholarship.

Infrastructure, which epitomizes the conjunction of material forms, expertise, social priorities, cultural expectations, aesthetics, and economic investments, seemed to us to be the ideal rubric through which to enrich our thinking, as well as a social object that necessitates a multidisciplinary approach. A collaborative conversation would help us to disentangle theories, concepts, and methods from their usual paradigms, permitting them to “recombine” in novel ways (Hackett and Parker 2014, 12). Our conversation was animated, in part, by other “turns” in the humanities and social sciences, including new materialisms, posthumanisms, and ontological approaches. Walking through the dynamic scholarship on infrastructure that is being published in the human sciences, we were struck with the definitional capacity of the term itself. Infrastructure is material (roads, pipes, sewers, and grids); it is social (institutions, economic systems, and media forms); and it is philosophical (intellectual trajectories: dreamt up by human ingenuity and nailed down in concrete forms).

Infrastructure has a capaciousness and scope that makes it both an infinitely useful concept and a concept that is open to facile misinterpretation or to being encumbered by overuse.

Our purpose was not to produce yet another definition of infrastructure (although at the end of this essay we do offer a few potential classifications). Instead we gave our attention to questions such as “What is generative about thinking with and through infrastructures at this historical juncture?” And “How can the multiple and diverse understandings of infrastructure across the human sciences mutually inform and enhance one another?” Simply put, we wanted to unravel “why now?” and “where do we go from here?” Our hope was to work toward “explication” (Latour 1993; Sloterdijk 2009), knowing that infrastructure has moved from the background to the foreground, while remaining intent on questioning why that is so. This collective essay gathers the themes and insights that echoed throughour conversation. These issues were resonant points of return because they revealed the relational and ambiguous elements of infrastructure to produce contradictions and unevenly felt consequences in the lives and places they contact. We have codified these apparent paradoxes, broadly, into topical domains of ruins, retrofit, and risk.

To read this article and other academic papers subscribe to Academia.edu (Weekly Digest).

[floodofideas.org.au]

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Posted by Elizabeth Kerr

*Image (top): openspaceconsult.com – infrastructure development [tweaked by whatifdunedin]