THE Royal Society’s September report, Climate Change: A Summary of the Science, has brought into the open the widening difference of views about how the science of climate change should be assessed. It comes after a prominent resignation from the American Physical Society (the top body of US physicists) for the refusal of the society’s executive to undertake a similar review despite requests from a large number of members.

In Australia, too, an examination of the Inter-Academy Council’s review of the processes and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that, although the council’s chairman claims the IPCC’s findings stand, the review itself exposes serious flaws in the panel’s information and analysis. The examination by this group, which is a follow-up to its recent publication in the British journal Energy & Environment, is now being widely distributed in Australia.

All three assessments reflect the revelations provided by the exchanges between scientists actively involved in climate research – now known as Climategate – that some research results appear to have been falsified. These reports have spread widely in science circles in Australia. However, apart from The Australian, there has been almost no reference to these revelations in the Australian media. The Age, which had not bothered to cover the Royal Society’s report, was quick to report that the Royal Society’s vice-president John Pethica (who chaired the report committee) had rejected suggestions that the society had changed its position on climate change.

What Pethica said in responding to coverage in The Australian was: “There is no greater uncertainty about future temperature increases now than . . . previously indicated [and] the science remains the same, as do the uncertainties”. He also refers to the report’s conclusion that “There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the main cause of the global warming that has taken place over the past half-century”.

What Pethica did not mention, however, is the report’s statement that climate change “continues to be the subject of intensive scientific research and public debate” and that it divides the existing state of knowledge into three parts: science that is well established, where there is wide consensus but continuing debate, and where there remains substantial uncertainty. In fact it also states that “some uncertainties are unlikely ever to be significantly reduced”. Beyond this, the report acknowledges “it is not possible to determine exactly how much the Earth will warm or exactly how the climate will change in the future”.

Other important attitudinal changes reflected in the report include the absence of any explanations of why, despite CO2 concentrations increasing over the course of the century, temperatures increased during only two periods: from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to about 2000; of why the report suggests projected increases in sea levels by 2100 that are lower than the upper estimate of the IPCC, 20cm compared with 59cm; and of why the report accords greater uncertainty to the causes of warming than does the IPCC in its 2007 report, where it is claimed as “very likely” due to human activity (which suggests a 90 per cent certainty). In fact, the Royal Society report offers no temperature ranges, no tipping point beyond which temperature increases are (supposedly) irreversible and (as noted) is uncertain about the possible extent of increases in temperatures.

Any careful reader of the report will acknowledge that it reflects the views of both sides of the debate on the science of climate change. Indeed, within the Royal Society a group of scientists during the past two years or so has been complaining to the executive that the society’s claim of a consensus was untenable and contrary to science itself. The executive was eventually persuaded to undertake a review of the Royal Society’s public position and representatives of the dissenting group were involved in the review.

Those representatives drew on exchanges with scientists in Australia and other parts of the world, and these are reflected in various parts of the report.

The challenge to the executive of the American Physical Society is to rescind its 2007 declaration that global warming represents “a dire international emergency”. The large dissenting group there circulated a letter saying Climategate has revealed “an international fraud, the worst any of us have seen” and asking for the society’s position to be put on ice until the extent of concern expressed at the Climategate revelations is clarified.

This dispute displays every sign of being ongoing.

With the increased problems with interpreting the science, it is not surprising that reports indicate the slow progress of climate change discussions in China and a dismal outlook for next month’s international leaders’ meeting at Cancun. This poses a serious risk that essential electricity investment here will not occur in time to prevent further precautionary price rises (on top of the already very large recent increases) and possible blackouts. In these circumstances, Australian governments need to provide a guarantee that investors in electricity generation will be compensated if generators or retailers are forced in the future to increase their prices because of carbon pricing policies. This is a matter that requires a decision at the Council of Australian Governments before the Gillard committee reports at the end of next year.

Voters – already paying well over the odds for their power, and with the price of electricity continuing to soar as Labor state governments attempt to buy the votes of inner-urban leftists – will be slugged with rising food prices as environmentalists demand the destruction of the Murray-Darling food bowl, in line with the recommendations of a report released on Friday by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.

Communities and regional economies built up over the years along the banks of the Murray and its tributaries will be destroyed to comply with the authority’s environmental demands and meet Labor’s desire to address the stipulations of the political class that runs the party.

Like the flawed climate-change reasoning that is driving the price of electricity sharply upwards, the thinking behind the Murray-Darling report is equally dodgy.

Murray-Darling Basin Authority chairman Michael Taylor has already crab-walked away from his own report’s estimate that only 800 to 1200 jobs would be lost, saying “a lot more work” should be encouraged.

This reflects another failure by the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments to manage policy over the past three years.

When the Howard government appointed the authority in 2007, it budgeted $10 billion for the process but the Labor states, notably Victoria, played politics and thwarted progress.

When the Rudd government took office, however, nothing was done for a further 18 months to get the project back on track.

Then the Rudd government, followed by the Gillard government, delayed the release of this report to ensure that its findings would not be known before the recent election.

Like the Rudd government’s grandiose $43 billion NBN – Not Bloody Necessary – broadband policy, there has been no cost-benefit analysis performed on the proposals.

Opposition spokesman on the Murray Senator Simon Birmingham told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday the authority’s report was a “lightweight document”.

“Penny Wong and company wasted time before appointing a chairman and a committee,” he said.

“Labor spent more on buying water and less on providing water-saving infrastructure, and now the communities are going to pay the price for this approach.

“It has done nothing to ensure the safety of the nation’s food-production capacity.”

Birmingham said he was concerned at the lack of any breakdown of figures behind the vague economic claims made in the report.

“This report is based on sums done by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE), but the ABARE report has not been released for scrutiny,” he said.

More secrecy from a Labor government that promised a new regime of openness and transparency.

Birmingham said the lack of back-up data made it almost impossible for people in the communities immediately affected to assess with any precision the flow-on effect from the authority’s report.

He was equally scathing of the report’s coverage of environmental issues, noting that it dealt only with the Murray and ignored dozens of other environmental assets intric- ately linked to the watercourse.

“At a minimum, given the time this draft has been in preparation, the Government should have had a response prepared that would have addressed the effect on food production,” Birmingham said.

Next week, the authority will have to face those who have the most to lose: front-line food producers in communities such as Shepparton, Deniliquin, Griffith and Renmark.

These families, a long way from the environmentalists in Newtown or Richmond, will want to know why the Government has done so little to provide the food basket of the nation with the sort of economic security that $10 billion of infrastructure might have bought.

They will want to know why the Rudd-Gillard government has not considered building a single dam, or embracing a single water-harvesting project, that might have saved some of the water that is now flowing down the Murray to evaporate in the Lower Lakes or run out to sea.

They will ask why the Government has failed to understand that all the water in the Murray begins as rain, and that when it rains, as it has done this year, there is sufficient surplus rainwater to secure the nation’s food-producing regions for many years – if it is harvested and stored for the drought years.

Simon Birmingham says the Government’s priorities have been wrong, and he’s correct.

Splashing out money on buybacks at the expense of delivering water-saving efficiencies makes no sense whatsoever.

It’s short-sighted in the extreme to force Australians to import foodstuffs when we have the land and we have the water resources – if they are sensibly husbanded – to grow what we need here.

The Rudd-Gillard government’s handling of the Murray-Darling water issue is yet another example of Labor’s inability to manage policy.

Just as Julia Gillard’s new climate-change committee has only one focus – the introduction of a tax based on fixing a price for carbon emissions – so, too, has the Murray-Darling Basin Authority come up with the only option.

The common thread linking both is the Labor government’s passion for crawling to the Greens and obsequiously opting to give its political partners the driver’s wheel in these policy areas.

The authority explicitly put the environmental demands of the Murray before any other goal in the preparation of its report.

In doing so, it chose to take the dark-Green view that human activity should take second place to an idealistic dream of how the world would be without pesky people.

Up and down the Murray, and in the aisles of grocery stores across the nation, those pesky people should tell Labor they will not sit in the cold dark or pay through the nose for their food, merely so Greens can sleep comfortably at night.

Before the last election, voters were warned that a vote for the Greens was a vote for Labor. Now the nation is paying a truly punishing price for those votes.

Solar scientists, not to be confused with climate scientists, study the most important heat engine driving our planet’s temperatures – the Sun.

Matthew Penn and William Livingston, solar astronomers with the National Solar Observatory (NSO) in Tucson, Arizona, have been following a marked decrease in sunspot activity recently.

Reputable studies link a prolonged drop in sunspot activity to a cooling epoch or even a potential new ice age as more sunspots correlate with more global warming, while fewer sunspots are proven to match episodes of long-term cooling.

Since the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 the talk has been about global warming. But 22 years on the evidence has grown to raise fears of a catastrophic climate switch in the opposite direction.

Backing up the claims is Australian Geophysicist, Phil Chapman, a former NASA astronaut. Chapman confirms the historic correlation of sunspots to global temperatures and points to the dearth of sunspots since 2007 as the reason why the world has since cooled by about 0.7C.

Writer, Alan Caruba (September 21, 2010) probes the story further after a June 14 article published in the New Scientist by Stuart Clark.
Caruba reports that Clark, “raised the question of why and where the sunspots have gone. Noting that they ebb and flow in cycles lasting about eleven years, Stuart said, “But for the last two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged in nearly 100 years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise.”

The last time sunspots disappeared altogether, during the Maunder Minimum (about 1645 to 1715), our planet descended into a lengthy period of cooling known as the Little Ice Age.

The last major ice age, known as the Younger Dryas happened 12,000 years ago. That sudden event plunged temperatures in the North Atlantic region to about 5°C colder with a 1000-year duration.

Today Californians just had the coldest summer in decades.

Last year in the northern hemisphere, Britain suffered one of the worst winters in 100 years.

While in the U.S. the National Weather Service (NWS) reported that the bitterly cold winter broke numerous temperature and snow extent records with the 4th coldest February on record.

New York and much of the U.S. Northeast was pumelled by record snow falls that deposited about 60cm (2 feet) of snow in NYC alone. While in New Zealand tens of thousands of lambs have perished in bitter winter snows.

Are we now seeing the specter of a return to the fears of the 1970s, when climatologists warned of ‘The Cooling World’ (Newsweek, April 28, 1975)?

Anna Petherick reporting for Nature.com (August 27, 2010) recently reported on the brutal northern winter that was quickly followed in the southern hemisphere by a viciously cold winter and Antarctic chills killing millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon.

So will these latest changes in the sun’s behavior finally force a more balanced look at the whole question of climate change, without the hysterical emphasis on CO2 levels and predictions of catastrophic warming?

Ref: http://www.suite101.com/content/evidence-of-solar-scientists-raise-fears-of-imminent-ice-age-a288855

A 19-page guide prepared by leading international scientists, including society fellows, is an honest account of where climate change science is clear and where it is less certain, such as the impact of energy emitted by the sun.

The ragged intersection between science and politics is the point at which much of the climate debate has been derailed. Politics demands certainty to make a convincing case for co-ordinated action. Science, on the other hand, is driven by scepticism. Each hypothesis formulated from empirical evidence needs to be challenged and tested to within an inch of its life before its veracity can be assumed. The 43 society members now believe the society’s previous position was too strident and implied a greater degree of certainty than was justified.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports should have been seen for what they were, political documents. They were designed, quite reasonably, as a basis on which to build a political solution. The mistake was to elevate them to the status of divine prophecy. When the IPCC recommended in 2007 that nations reduce global emissions by 50 to 85 per cent by 2050 to have a reasonable chance of averting warming beyond 2C and “catastrophic” consequences, it was clear to those with a sophisticated view of science that the targets were based on assumptions fed into computer models. As the debate unfolded, those who exaggerated the evidence or presented only worst-case projections did much more to set back the cause of carbon restraint than the commentators they derided as deniers. Scare tactics have not worked, and will not work.

The Royal Society sets out a strong case for pursuing the cautionary, responsible approach long advocated by The Weekend Australian. The society cites strong evidence that increases in greenhouse gases due to human activity are the dominant cause of global warming. It is all the more convincing for its honesty and avoidance of doomsday scenarios pedalled by alarmists, whose proposals would wreak economic devastation. After a long, needlessly polarised debate, the guide is a welcome new start to help restore the credibility of climate science and civility to the discussion.

IS this the year that China’s leadership lets us all know that it is determined not to abide by routine international norms but will use raw power to take whatever it wants?

That is too strong a conclusion just yet, but it has certainly been a year of rugged behaviour from Beijing, behaviour that we should study closely.

Consider, first, the contrasting cases of Stern Hu and Zan Qixiong.

Hu, you’ll recall, is the Australian former No 2 for giant miner Rio Tinto. In July last year he was arrested, initially on charges of espionage. Later he was convicted of bribery and corruption charges. At the start the Chinese government wouldn’t communicate with the Australian government over the matter. Later it barely conformed to the minimum requirements of the consular agreement between the two nations.

We will never know if Hu was remotely guilty of anything. We do know that corruption is rife in China and Hu was the only foreign executive singled out by the Chinese authorities this way.

We also know the context. The Chinese were annoyed by the prices they were paying for Australian minerals and deeply furious that their bid for a big equity stake in Rio Tinto had failed.

Within Australia the reliable pro-China gang, centred on the Australian National University, but well represented in business as well, told us in effect to keep quiet and not protest against Hu’s punishment. We were to protect the Chinese legal system, as though that were not among the most corrupt and politicised legal systems in the world.

Now consider Zan’s case. Zan is a Chinese fishing boat captain. He was plying his trade in the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Japan considers these islands to be part of Japan and exercises normal control over them. China also claims the islands, as it does much of the maritime domain of northeast and Southeast Asia.

Zan’s boat was approached by the Japanese navy. Now, all over the world, what does an illegal fisherman do if approached by a national coastguard? Universally, the fisherman runs away.

But in Zan’s case, according to the Japanese navy, he rammed the Japanese vessel. That is akin to piracy and is certainly equivalent to criminal damage.

Zan was taken into Japanese custody. He was not charged with being in Japanese waters illegally but with offences arising out of ramming the Japanese ship. Many analysts believe the fisherman’s actions were directed by the Chinese government as a deliberate way of testing the Japanese.

The Chinese reaction could not have been more different from the Australian response to Hu. There were no significant voices within China urging that Japanese legal processes be allowed to unfold.

Instead, the Chinese reaction was brutal and effective. Beijing cancelled high-level meetings with Japanese officials, including with the Japanese Prime Minister. Groups of Chinese tourists were prevented from visiting Japan. Four Japanese in China were suddenly arrested in what looked like preposterous charges of photographing Chinese military establishments. A high-level torrent of abuse was directed at Japan from Chinese government and media sources.

It was alleged that China banned temporarily the export of rare earth metals — vital in much hi-tech gadgetry — to Japan, though this was later denied.

Eventually the Japanese gave in and let Zan go, at which point the Chinese demanded apologies and compensation. Outraged public opinion finally forced Tokyo to reject this.

The Zan episode needs to be seen in the context of three other episodes this year where the Chinese have flouted well-established international norms.

One was the sinking of South Korean naval ship the Cheonan by North Korea, with dozens killed.

No serious analyst in the world doubts that the North Koreans torpedoed the Cheonan. Yet the Chinese refused, at the UN or anywhere else, to acknowledge Pyongyang’s responsibility for the attack. Beijing’s continued political investment in the Stalinist regime remains strong.

The second incident arose from the Cheonan sinking. The US and South Korea planned to hold joint naval exercises involving a US aircraft carrier off the coast of South Korea in the Yellow Sea. The Chinese demanded that these be moved, claiming, absurdly, that there would be a danger of US ships colliding with Chinese ships.

The implication is that Beijing can decide where international ships can sail, even if they are in indisputably international waters. The Americans, not wanting to take the focus off North Korea, moved the exercises to the east side of the Korean peninsula, away from China. But the Americans also promised they would be back in the Yellow Sea later this year.

Finally, there is the South China Sea. Beijing claims sovereignty over virtually all of the South China Sea. Various Southeast Asian nations claim the parts close to them. I urge you to look at a map to see just how preposterous Beijing’s claim is, how far the South China Sea is from China.

At an ASEAN meeting this year, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi furiously told the ASEANs that they were small nations while China was a big nation, and they should do as theywere told.

All this doesn’t prove that China will behave with consistent aggression in the years ahead, but it sure doesn’t prove the opposite, either.

Three prudent responses are obvious. One is to engage China in multilateral institutions so it is enveloped in a web of rules and customs. Another is for nations to have a clear idea of their individual bottom lines, beyond which they will not retreat.

And the third is for everyone to attend to their armed forces, so that a stable balance of power and deterrence are maintained.

Then the risk of fateful Chinese miscalculation is diminished. Pre-emptive capitulation, as some are now counselling, would be the worst policy for everyone.

In normal times, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott would already take the prize for double-dealing, having gone back on a deal he struck with the independents just weeks ago, before they announced which party they’d back.

One minute he’d agree to give the Speaker a “pair” – an offsetting vote from the Opposition – so the Government doesn’t lose a crucial vote.

The next he’d torn up the agreement he freely signed because independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor decided the party they’d put in power to enjoy this new “reform” was … Labor.

What, Labor? No deal, then.

(Dumbly, the Coalition didn’t realise these independents weren’t negotiating in good faith and would never put the Coalition in power.)

As I said, give that man the prize for promise-breaking.

But these are not normal times and this prize is won hands-down by Labor, which seems determined to drive more voters into the arms of the Greens out of sheer disgust with the alternatives.

Again, in normal times, yesterday’s revelations of Labor’s latest Greens-pleasing fraud on the voters would be scandalous. Long before the election, Labor opposed the Greens’ plan for fast trains between our biggest cities.

But that was before it realised it badly needed Greens preferences. So – surprise! – just before the election Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese found $20 million for a study to check whether the fast trains the Greens wanted made economic sense. But what did we learn yesterday? That Labor was spending this $20 million to find out exactly what Albanese’s department had told him before the election – that we don’t have the population to make fast trains worth the money: “This analysis highlights that currently in Australia high-speed rail will not be viable.”

Which means Labor is spending $20 million just to pretend to examine a dud scheme proposed by the Greens, just to please the Greens.

But again, these are not normal times and even that idiocy pales next to the grotesque fraud Gillard pulled on Monday when she announced a committee to to put a “price on carbon” – in fact, carbon dioxide.

What, another committee on how to cut our emissions? But wasn’t that exactly what economist Ross Garnaut’s committee did for Labor before the last election, opting after months of investigation for an ETS rather than a carbon tax?

Spot on. But now Garnaut is back, living groundhog day as an expert member of Gillard’s committee to decide the same thing all over again.

Smell a con? A device to buy Labor time as it dithers and evades? In fact, smell a fix, too?

Start by noting the membership of Gillard’s committee: Gillard herself as chair, Climate Change Minister Greg Combet and Greens climate spokeswoman Christine Milne as co-deputy chairs, and Greens leader Bob Brown, Treasurer Wayne Swan and independent Tony Windsor as the remaining members.

What a coincidence. Every one of them is not just a warming believer but a believer in the need to Do Something about it immediately – in the form of a “price on carbon”. Same deal with the four experts Gillard said would advise it. Every one a believer.

Gillard on Monday made clear that only believers could join: “Parliamentary members of the committee will be drawn from those who are committed to tackling climate change and who acknowledge that effectively reducing carbon pollution by 2020 will require a carbon price.”

Why is this a cheat? First, the committee skips what should be the start of any discussion. As in: is a carbon price actually worth the pain? Will cutting our emissions achieve anything? Is a rise in global temperatures actually good for us?

And, most importantly, isn’t it reckless to slash our tiny emissions before the rest of the world does likewise?

After all, only this week President Barack Obama’s plans for a form of emissions trading all but melted away.

“I don’t see a comprehensive Bill going anywhere in the next two years,” said one Democrat.

Second, the PM’s committee is a con because it’s sold as a way to achieve “community consensus” on a carbon price.

This is the “consensus” Gillard has claimed is missing for now, forcing Labor to renege on its 2007 ETS promise.

But what a cheat’s way to achieve “consensus” – by excluding everyone who disagrees. This is not a committee to get a consensus between differing views, but a device to dodge debate. And even that does not exhaust the ways this committee plays voters for suckers.

On the committee’s agenda will be the carbon “levy” – or tax – that Gillard ruled out before the election, when there were nervous voters to fool.

Here she is just six weeks ago: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”

Yet here she is on Monday: “The committee will consider mechanisms for introducing a carbon price, including a broad-based emissions trading scheme, carbon levy, or a hybrid of both.”

This carbon levy is actually a demand of the Greens, who now seem in charge of Labor’s global warming agenda. Nothing better illustrates that the Government is in fact a Greens-Labor Coalition, with a green tail wagging the pink dog.

Incidentally, observe one critical difference of magnitude here between Gillard’s broken promise and that of Abbott, which has attracted far more criticism from the media.

Abbott’s promise was to the independents, not to voters, and was broken before there were any consequences. Gillard’s promise was to voters and was broken the instant they’d been tricked into voting for her.

So how does Gillard excuse it? With another deceit. By claiming her hand was forced by the election result, which left her Government dependent on the support of Greens and left-leaning independents.

“Obviously, during the election campaign, I was announcing the Government’s position,” she said.

“Of course, the Government has its policies and plans. We also have a House of Representatives where we can’t just go to the House of Representatives and say here is the Government’s position and five minutes later it’s passed by the House.”

But there are two kinds of broken promises Gillard now confronts. There are those she can’t implement because the numbers are just against her – and those are forgivable.

Then there are promises she can indeed keep but breaks just to keep sweet with the Greens. These are not forgivable.

In this case, both Labor and the Coalition promised voters no carbon tax and between them they can ensure no such tax will be passed in this Parliament. Yet thanks to Gillard, we may end up with a tax only the minority Greens party campaigned for.

What a contemptible start to the “new paradigm” of politics. And to think the first real working day of this new Parliament starts only today.

 His colleagues seemed to agree with this judgment, denying him even the opportunity which Whitlam — and indeed all previous prime ministers — had to defend his/their first election victory. True, their judgment was more that Rudd would be worse than Whitlam for them personally. The damage he could continue to wreak on the nation was an entirely secondary consideration. White cars and other perks always trump the national interest.

Now, before she has even entered the Lodge, his successor Julia Gillard has embarked on challenging that new “Rudd benchmark” by picking up precisely from where he, so to speak, left off.

Two things among many cemented Rudd’s grasp of the prime ministerial dunce’s cap. The Emissions Trading Scheme and the $43 billion National Broadband Network. The first constituted a direct and utterly pointless attack on the foundation of not just this nation’s prosperity but its very existence. Our vast resources of coal in general and its use for power generation in particular.

The second constituted — constitutes — perhaps the greatest waste of resources in our history. It at least equals the great railway building binge of the closing decades of the 19th century, which it most closely and disturbingly matches. Indeed, with politicians across the eastern states now also “feeling a fast train coming on”, the NBN might well be a return to that sort of 19th century hard-wired waste in the 21st century.

One alone would have won the “accolade” for Rudd; the two together rendered certain his position in the pantheon of prime ministerial disasters. Now they were both bad enough when committed to by a nascent Rudd government. First a prime minister setting out to directly attack his own country through the ETS. None dared call it treason, for it was, to misquote either Ovid or John Harington, more simply stupidity.

And second, the biggest infrastructure project in the nation’s history, which was completely uncosted initially — the billions probably didn’t even get the courtesy of an envelope’s back, just a prime ministerial enthusiasm. Neither then nor now has there been any rigorous analysis to identify the claimed benefits against the very real costs.

How much worse is it now to persist with the NBN and to go back to an attack on our greatest national asset, this time via a carbon tax, when we know so much more about the context for each?

Rudd’s insistence that the ETS be adopted before Copenhagen was bad enough. Now we know Copenhagen turned into Hoppenfloppen. Any move towards a unilateral carbon tax is that much the more irresponsible and stupid.

Similarly and even more so with the NBN. Back when the enthusiasm for the fixed NBN took hold, the iPad was barely a gleam in the eye of Steve Jobs. It was certainly not the, ahem, apple of his eye, as it didn’t exist. Why the iPad? Because it captures the rapid, unpredicted and unpredictable shift to broadband mobility. Yet the government, and now Gillard as PM, is mandating the immobility of a fixed broadband network.

The 19th century railway splurge is a telling and — should be — uncomfortable precursor. For in the space of two generations most of those fixed lines were rendered obsolete by the car and its pervasive adoption, as a matter of deliberate choice because of its flexibility, by every family in Australia.

Now the railway builders did not and could not anticipate the car. Apart from the more basic reason for many of the lines — pure political pork — rail networks made sense in their context. But imagine if they had known the car was not just coming but was already here? How much worse would a decision to nevertheless pour billions into fixed rail networks have been.

That is exactly the position with PM Gillard. She now knows the iPad exists. Rudd didn’t. Because two years ago, it didn’t. Further, in Ziggy Switkowski’s warp-speed world, we won’t be waiting two generations.

To persist with the fixed NBN with that knowledge of the iPad and what it portends, is beyond folly. Indeed further, the way its birth and subsequent explosive growth should tell us there is a myriad of known unknowns, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, jostling to the surface behind it.

Of course we remain on pretty safe ground to argue that we need a fixed fibre core. But probably of much more limited extent than we might have thought when FTTN (fibre-to-the-node) was “the solution”. That might mean wiring up the nation to regional centres. Funny about that: much like we still have with railways.

But then the continuing communication capillaries to the homes should be some mix of wireless and the good old telephone cable. And the Foxtel and Optus cable in the capital cities. The telephone cable because it’s there and works perfectly well for what most consumer need and want. To stress, what they want now. Wireless because it’s cheap and either upgradeable or disposable, and what consumers want.

There were actually two reasons for the enthusiasm for the Rolls-Royce upgrade to the $43bn FTTH (fibre-to-the-home). It was the second which brought competition tsar Graeme Samuel inappropriately into the government’s tent. An attempt to break Telstra. More specifically, it’s monopoly hold on the nation’s infrastructure. So we saw Samuel move on from his job of regulating competition and applying the rules, to trying to mandate the very structure in which competition would occur.

Now the real point is not whether this is desirable or appropriate; simply that it’s become irrelevant and unnecessary. Telstra’s monopoly hold on our telecoms core is eroding as rapidly and as surely as its share price. And it’s doing so mostly because of that switch from fixed to wireless. We don’t need to build a pervasive fixed NBN to get greater competition. So, we have a Gillard government proposing to plough-on, bullheadedly building the most expensive white elephant in our history; and also embarking on a direct attack on our nation’s prosperity, knowing that the first is silly and the second crazy. Do we have to wait three years to pass the accolade from her predecessor?

Last week, the Japanese coast guard arrested the captain of a Chinese fishing trawler after it twice collided with patrol boats in disputed waters controlled by Tokyo. Japan has chosen this moment to take a belated stand against what it sees as a pattern of Chinese bullying at sea.

In April, a large Chinese naval force ventured into waters close to Japan and a Chinese helicopter buzzed Japanese ships at a range of just 90m.

China, too, is standing firm, warning of repercussions if Japan prosecutes the captain under domestic law. Already, Beijing has called off scheduled talks about contested energy deposits in the East China Sea.

The immediate spat may be about sovereignty over the uninhabited Senkaku or, in Chinese, Diaoyu islands.

But there is much more at stake than fish and face.

This is the latest in a series of disturbances in Asian waters this year, in which the changing balance of strength and interests among the region’s naval powers points to heightened risks of miscalculation and even conflict.

It is no surprise that Asia’s key security interactions are at sea, given this maritime region’s vast and growing reliance on seaborne commerce, especially energy imports. What is alarming is the new degree of risk that some powers, notably China, seem willing to incur in this Indo-Pacific commons.

This year’s first sea of troubles was off the coast of the divided Korean peninsula.

In March, a North Korean torpedo sank the small South Korean warship Cheonan, killing 46 crewmen in an action Beijing refused to condemn. When the US and South Korea responded with massive naval wargames, Beijing objected, and the exercises were shifted to waters far from China. Beijing then held firepower exercises of its own.

Now Washington and Seoul are planning new drills, possibly bringing a US aircraft carrier into the Yellow Sea in defiance of China’s protests. In a separate move, American, South Korean and Australian forces plan to hold a small-scale re-enactment today of the historic Incheon landings that turned the tide of the Korean War in 1950. This commemoration was long scheduled, but symbolises that South Korea is far from friendless in the face of continued provocations from the North.

Much of the wider regional tension involves China. Beijing is pursuing assertive deployments and uncompromising diplomacy in several maritime theatres. Beijing has declared the entire South China Sea “a core interest”, on a par with Tibet and Taiwan. Recently a Chinese submarine reportedly planted a flag on the seabed. This suggests a new willingness to confront nations, such as Vietnam, in disputed waters.

In the Indian Ocean, the potential for confrontation between Beijing and New Delhi is gradually growing. On the bright side, there has been some welcome co-ordination between China’s and some of the other naval taskforces patrolling against Somali pirates.

And New Delhi, rattled in 2008 by the speed of Beijing’s deployment to an ocean India had long considered its own, has proposed limited maritime security co-operation with China.

But this idea may fall victim to wider differences between two rising giants, including recent arguments over their land border.

Broadly, Beijing’s naval modernisation is the understandable response of a vast trading power to anxiety about its vulnerable energy supplies. It was inconceivable that China would forever outsource sea-lane security to the US.

At this time of unprecedented Chinese naval power, modernisation and audacity, it is troubling that diplomatic mechanisms for communication and preventing strife at sea remain weak to non-existent. This is as bad for China as it is for everyone else.

The increasingly crowded maritime highways of the Indo-Pacific lack even the basic code that helped keep the Cold War cool. In the early 1970s, the Americans and Soviets crafted a detailed agreement and operating rules to stop incidents at sea from escalating to war. Today, no such understanding exists between China and the other powers its navy is increasingly brushing up against.

And while Beijing, New Delhi and Japan are finally talking about setting up leadership hotlines to help cope with their security tensions, there remains much confusion about how these might work in practice. Beijing and Tokyo cannot so far even agree if their proposed military hotline would simply give warning of defence exercises or serve to manage crises in real time.

Earlier this year, China cited US arms sales to Taiwan as its reason to suspend precisely the kind of military-military dialogues with the US that both powers need to minimise accidental encounters at sea. While Beijing and Tokyo joust verbally over fishermen and islands, Chinese and American officials have been meeting to steer their own rocky relationship back on course and have hinted that defence talks might at last be restored.

For now, though, Asia’s maritime leviathans are not communicating properly with each other over keeping the peace at sea, at the very time when the risks of confrontation in the region’s waters are growing.

With little near-term chance of smaller countries or regional diplomatic forums having much say, the stability of Australia’s wider region is at the mercy of the strong and the reckless.