Wanted: Remedial education for museum curators

by Tony Thomas

September 13, 2013

Tony Thomas entered this essay “Science museums hotbeds of climate activism” for the 2013 Matt Ridley Prize of £5000 for exposing environmental pseudoscience. It made the short-list of ten out of 86 entries worldwide. The organisers commented, “The standard of entries at the top was very high, and there was lively debate among the judges while selecting a winner . The prize was eventually awarded to Michael Ware, for an essay on electric cars.”

Brainwashing of school children about climate change normally goes on out of sight, in the school systems. But you can see it happening publicly by visiting science museums’ displays for students.

The Field Museum in Chicago, for example, is visited by 100,000 students on school tours each year. Other science museums I’ve sampled in the past two years include Te Papa, New Zealand; The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Washington; and the Vienna Museum of Natural History. Same story all over: activism targeted at vulnerable students.

I dropped in to NZ’s premier science museum, Te Papa, Wellington in November 2011. Its climate message was that dangerous global warming is upon us. The proof: a blow-up of Michael Mann’s long-discredited Hockey Stick graph, purporting to reveal millennially-unprecedented warming in the 20th Century.

The Hockey Stick was the poster-child of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie. But the stick was “busted” in 2003 by the forensic analysis of the McIntyre and McKitrick skeptic duo. In its 2007 report, the IPCC tagged the hockey stick with “uncertainty”.[i]

My complaints to Te Papa got a response from scientist Dr Hamish Campbell, who doubled as a Te Papa geologist and curator:

You are perfectly correct: Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ has indeed been substantively discredited.

I remember at the time [of helping to design the exhibit] that I was very uncomfortable with so-called predictions based on models of an inherently chaotic system that surely were a far cry from any representative simulation of nature.

However, part of Te Papa’s role/function is to provoke or stimulate thought. I let it go with the proviso that the graph was properly referenced…and it is.

… We shall revisit this exhibit in the next few weeks and see what we can do.”

Lovely! But ten months later, I found the “Stick” was still up there. The museum’s PR lady wrote me:

“Te Papa is currently planning a refreshment of it’s long-term exhibitions and the use of the Mann Hockey Stick Graph will be addressed as part of that process.

We appreciate you raising this issue with us as it will provide valuable insight on the future content for this exhibition.”

I pestered Te Papa again in August, 2013, nearly another year later, to see if the Hockey Stick was still on display. It was. Museum assistant director Heather Church replied:

“I can confirm that we have a Mann graph on display, that shows the past 1000 years of temperature variations and the dramatic increase in the surface temperature since the 1850s.

“There are plans to refresh the Awesome Forces display at Te Papa but no details of content have yet been decided.

“We would be happy to consider any information you can provide as part of our review.”

So Te Papa has been “educating” schoolchildren for well over two years with a graph that at least one of its experts knows to be a dud. A Hockey Stick review which was supposed to take two weeks (per Dr Campbell) has taken two years with still no end in sight.

IN JUNE last year, I checked Washington DC’s Smithsonian Natural History Museum, so illustrious it gets 7m visitors a year. Its special climate-and-environment show involved errors, exaggerations, activism, and stuff that was just plain dumb.

I first realized something was amiss at the placard, “Changing the World – Great Moments in Food Technology.”

It read:

1928: Sliced bread.
1791: Artificial teeth.
63 BCE: Water-powered grist mill.
500 BCE: Iron plow.
9500 BCE: Grain storehouse.

Was this a joke? Was inventing sliced bread more noteworthy than, say, Norm Borlaug’s work on high-yield wheat and rice in the 1950s, which has fed billions?

I stopped to play an environmental “simulation” game for kids:

“The small countries of ULandia and QLandia have developed their own nuclear bombs – and are threatening to use them on each other! You urge them to give up their weapons, but they both said they only would if everyone else does. What do you do?”

I chose option “b” and got this screen:

“It’s war! Disarmament talks between the nations fail when ZLandia and YLandia refuse to give up its (sic) nuclear weapons. Soon QLandia and ULandia get into a nuclear war! Fallout from the bombs spreads quickly, causing harm.”

Yes, I guess nuclear warfare does cause “harm”. Nota bene, kids!

Numerous scenarios had ‘global warming’ as an equivalent threat, including “20ft” sea rises.

Further along, a caption to a warming graph read:

“Our Survival Challenge: During the period in which humans evolved, earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere fluctuated together. Higher CO2 levels are associated with a warmer planet …”

In fact, improved ice-core data by 2003 clarified that temperature, inconveniently, led CO2 changes by 800 years or so.[ii]

Nearby is another placard saying:

Rising CO2 levels: The projected increase over the next century is more than twice that of any time in the past 6 million years and suggests a long term sea level rise of 6.4 meters (21 ft).

The mid-point of IPCC sea-rise projections for 2100 (itself a wild extrapolation), in the 2007 report is only about 60cm (2 ft).[iii] “Long term” at this museum must be very long term, though kids aren’t told that.

Another chart graphs CO2 against temperature, getting the “right” result by a style that muddies the 1940-70 cooling, and cutting off the chart at 2000, so the current flattening of temperature is not apparent.

One placard, pushing the Green shtick, actually sets out the benefits and costs of civilization. Benefits, we learn, are food, shelter, science and leisure, but costs are that we get waste, epidemics, and loss of nature and wild species. Civilization’s cost/benefit ratio thus hangs in the balance.

Displays tout messages from ginger groups, like the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), warning about amphibian-, bird- and mammal-species extinction rates up to 1000 times greater this century than normal. I looked up the IUCN study and it is speculation piled on hypothesis, extrapolated.[iv] (The IPCC’s 2007 take, that 20-30% of species are at risk of extinction, has been well fisked).v]

The IUCN includes scores of activist bodies as members. Australian members include the Wilderness Society, WWF and Australian Conservation Foundation.vi]

The display was pre-occupied with over-population (as per Malthus and the Club of Rome) and “pandemics” creating health crises. Pandemics outside the African dictatorships are in fact rare and minor, apart from AIDS (1.7m deaths in 2011) which failed to get a mention here, although adult AIDS rates in Washington DC are as bad as Rwanda’s.[vii]

The Vienna Museum of Natural History, which I visited in June 2013, has a display headed (in both German and English), “Climate models show the expected global warming for the next decades.” The illustration, titled “The world 4degC warmer”, is a color-coded map of the continents.

I paused. Four degrees warmer within decades? Like, 2030, 2050? I thought there’d been no statistically significant warming for 17 years? The display seemed already a decade old, referring to incidents in 2002. That could bring the heat apocalypse forward to, say, 2029, when I’m settling into my high-care retirement home.

In this imminent hot world, the illustrated continents are shaded green for habitable areas, fawn for “Uninhabitable – Deserts”, grey for “Uninhabitable – flood, droughts and extreme weather”, and red for “Land loss, 2m sea level rise.”

What? Two metres? Within decades?

Poor Perth, my temperate birthplace in Western Australia! Our whole fertile south-west is shown as fawn, “Uninhabitable – Deserts”. My daughter has just bought a Perth house. Should I buy her a camel for Christmas?

Look further north to South-East Asia, and the whole of Indonesia – oh no! – is flooded and/or uninhabitable, except for Borneo which has turned into desert. Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, forget them all, uninhabitable!

A cursory look at Africa, uh oh! All uninhabitable except for a mysterious green swath from about Senegal/Mauritania east to Niger-Chad.

South America: a wasteland of deserts and cyclonic storms, apart from the deep south of Argentina and Chile (or what’s left of Chile after two metre high coastal flooding).

Farewell to India south of Mumbai, with India’s lowest 200km flooded and the rest uninhabitable, along with Sri Lanka.

You might as well kiss the southern hemisphere goodbye. It’s sad… although when temperatures 150m years ago really were four degrees hotter, the dinosaurs were contentedly nibbling palms, ferns and each other in the rainforests.

I LIMPED from the Vienna Museum feeling sad for Austria’s distinguished traditions of science; Mach, Doppler, Pauli, Schroedinger — that lot.

In Chicago’s Field Museum, which I visited in July 2013, the Restoring Earth display was headed by a quote from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: “Spring now comes unheralded … the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.” Ominous. The display says nothing about the dubious science cited in Carson’s book nor how the consequent ban on DDT in aid programs killed countless children, mainly African, via malarial mosquitos and typhus lice. The World Health Organisation and malaria-wracked countries like Tanzania lifted bans from 2006, ending a tragic episode in health science.

The Field Museum is thrilled with Ms Carson because its historic collection of peregrine falcon eggs was used to measure a thinning of eggs in modern times, attributed to DDT. The falcon thrived after the ban. Deeper research has found that only limited classes of birds, mainly raptors, suffered from the DDT effect. Nothing of the DDT/malaria controversy gets a mention at the Field Museum.[viii]

The kids’ displays show the customary activism: CO2 is causing storms and floods; ditch petrol lawnmowers and push a manual one; global warming is forcing the Koopman’s Mouse to higher cooler elevations “as climate change worsens” (but little warming for 17 years?). Dramatic artworks show kids that global warming has “acidified” oceans, killing pretty coral.

There is even an “Extinction Clock” ticking over, with a red digital counter showing how many species have died out since 8am that morning – “22”, the clock told me.

That’s spin. The clock is based on claims by Harvard professor and environmental activist Dr E.O Wilson 25 years ago that 30,000 species were going extinct per year. That was just his mathematical modeling. As paleontologist Niles Eldridge of the American Museum of Natural History put it, “I’m going to more or less assume that Ed Wilson is largely accurate — how accurate I really couldn’t say.”[ix]

Pick a number, any number. The normally-wrong Paul Ehrlich put the extinction rate at up to 130,000.[x] A Harvard website about Wilson says there are anywhere from 10m to 100m species, so keep it all in perspective.[xi]

I wish these museums would give kids a break: more science, less activism please. Corrupting the young used to be a crime, as Socrates discovered.

Tony Thomas blogs at tthomas061.wordpress.com

[i] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch6s6-6.html

[ii] http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming/ice-core-graph/

[iii] http://www.google.com.au/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=ipcc+best+estimate+sea+level+rise+2100+60cm&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=EagGUOmCHuWXiQfH6JnECA

[iv] http://data.iucn.org/dbtw-wpd/html/Red%20List%202004/completed/Section3.html

[v] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BwKfjKsXaxaGYjNhYzM0ZDAtZWU5NC00MjllLTk4ZDQtNjg0NGU4OGRkYjg2/edit?pli=1

[vi] http://www.iucn.org/about/union/secretariat/offices/oceania/oro_getinvolved/oro_members/oro_ausmem/

[vii] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19887408.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa#Kenya

[viii] http://dwb.unl.edu/Teacher/NSF/C06/C06Links/www.altgreen.com.au/Chemicals/ddt.html

[ix] http://www.amnh.org/science/biodiversity/extinction/Day1/bytes/EldredgePres.html

[x] http://www.whole-systems.org/extinctions.html

[xi] http://athome.harvard.edu/programs/chvs/chvs_video/chvs1_3.html

Scaring kids for a greener world

by Tony Thomas

August 17, 2013

“…Some of the octopuses in the ocean can’t breathe from gas pollution … I started off my poster design of drawing the octopus first and wanted to make it look as if he was dying. Then I drew dead coral coming and surrounding him like there’s no escape from the acid ocean…”
— entry in a Victorian schools contest for “ocean acidification” art

Brainwashing of Australian children and teens about climate catastrophism is a normal part of the education landscape. But here’s a new twist. Could green lobby groups pay students and enlist teachers with handsome cash awards for spruiking the alarmist credo?

Yes they indeed can, and have.

I was strolling out of the Ian Potter Gallery in Federation Square, Melbourne, on August 15 and noticed a display of student art and essays in the foyer. This was the fruit of a “$50,000 Ocean Acidification Art Challenge” to Year 9-12 Victorian students, organized by the Ocean Ark Alliance. The Alliance is planning to take this awards exercise national and international.

The best alarmist entry won $20,000 for Melbourne Girls College for school environmental projects, and the student won a $5000 study grant. The second prize was $12,500/$2500, to MLC, and the third prize of $8500/$1500 went to to Laverton P-12 College.

I do not, of course, begrudge the students their prizes for their talented art efforts. My complaints concern their elders, who see nothing wrong in indoctrinating kids with CO2 doomsterism. Student entrants were required to do an artwork on The Impact of Ocean Acidification and pen 100-word essays about their “inspiration”. It’s vicious, however well-meant, to blight kids’ optimism, as The Alliance’s does with its slogan, “Imagine losing all this colour and life”.

The idea that a student should objectively survey the scientific controversies on this topic was unthinkable. Imagine an entry headed: “Probably not much CO2 impact”. The desired apocalyptic tone is captured in these briefing notes from the Alliance:

“The world’s leading marine scientists are warning us that our current rates of carbon emissions are making our oceans more acidic. This is happening so fast that it poses a serious threat to biodiversity and marine life.

“Left unchecked, Ocean Acidification could destroy all our coral reefs by as early as 2050. It also has the potential to disrupt other ocean ecosystems, fisheries, habitats, and even entire oceanic food chains.,,

There are approximately 10,000 Coral Reefs and we are destroying one every other day…Left unchecked Ocean Acidification could trigger a Great Mass Extinction Event…

Greenhouse Gas Emissions must be cut dramatically by 2050 if Coral Reefs are to have any chance of surviving the next 50 years…”

OK, a lot of scientists believe this and have published learned pieces on it. And a lot of scientists with equally good publication records say it’s bunk. A moderate summary of the two views is in Bob Carter and John Spooner’s new book Taxing Air (p143-145), an; some recent peer-reviewed papers debunking the scare are available at Jo Nova’s blog.

Behind Ocean Ark Alliance as a scientific adviser is Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Founding Director of the Global Change Institute at Queensland University. The professor has been making dud predictions about a horrid and imminent fate for the Great Barrier Reef since 2000.

In fact, the reef continues to thrive. The extra CO2 may even be good for corals. This area of ocean science is in its infancy. If coral reefs are now being damaged, you can bet it’s not through climate change, but from direct human causes like over-fishing, over-population of atolls, coral mining, and effluent. Students who google “parrot fish + coral” may actually learn something useful.

However, the professor thinks otherwise, declaring on the Alliance site:

“As a marine biologist who has studied coral reefs for more than 20 years, I’ve recently begun to worry that these complex, spectacular global ecosystems may completely disappear within a couple of decades. Unfortunately, my concern is based on hard evidence.”

How well did the brainwashing of impressionable teenagers go? Here are some samples from the kids’ essays on display in Fed Square. Again, I don’t denigrate the kids, only their mentors:

“The coral is dead and a fish is hiding – too scared to go out. The fish has lost all of his friends and possibly his soul mate. He has no food and no protective shelter from what will eventually bring his life to an end…”

“The painting shows the family of fish, with (fish) parents telling their offspring about how rich and colorful their life and environment once was. Now it has only been ‘saved’ and possible to see on the high technology gadgets such as iPad..”

“A quarter of our precious marine species are now left without a habitat. We are losing our exquisite coral reefs and marine life and this picture is all I will have left.”

“I painted the sea turning into oil, the production of which is one of the main causes of carbon dioxide emissions in our world. The black mist in the background of my painting is a representation of smoke and the burning of fossil fuels.”

“Barrier Grief: If Ocean Acidification is left unaddressed, by the year 2050, it could completely destroy the ocean food chains and coral reefs…Future generations will have to rely on documentation…in a museum to teach them what marine life and ecologies were like prior to the damage.”

What is this Ocean Ark Alliance all about? It’s an international not-for-profit and there are plenty of well-credentialed ocean scientists involved. Equally, it is populated with film-makers, media specialists and “community” (read green-tinged) groups. The Alliance recently allied with MESA (Marine Education Society of Australasia), which wants this lop-sided science “education” exercise embedded in schools’ 2014 curriculum.

The $50,000 prize money this year was from Alliance co-founder Peter Hannan, a passionate, Melbourne-born underwater photographer with the sincere but loony belief that “soon” the beauty of underwater life may exist merely on film. Meanwhile he was whooping it up in Las Vegas on New Years Eve, en route to Iceland, enjoying huge fireworks displays while downing a few Margaritas to soothe his excitement.

Some might consider that shrinking the carbon footprint of his global jet-setting would be a worthwhile sacrifice for the cause.

I wouldn’t take such cheap shots, except that, for a Green group, the Alliance mixes in fast company. One Alliance “partner” is mega-million luxury yacht maker Sea King Freedom, “the birthplace of the greatest super yachts in the world”. A 90-metre, 2600-tonne yacht it is advertising has five decks, a helicopter, 280,000 litres of fuel to power 4600 horsepower engines, and, of course, babes in bikinis.

Mel Brooks in History of the World had the immortal albeit saucy line, “It’s good to be the king.”

Today’s version: “It’s good to be Green.”

Another Alliance partner is Unboxed Media, a Sydney production company currently working on – can you guess it? — The Tipping Points Crisis, which is ‘a major international TV series on Climate Change’. Unboxed Media? Should it be Unhinged Media? It uses ‘captivating characters that support our understanding of our changing climate system’.

Broadly, the Alliance seems to be a media group catering to elites who enjoy classy underwater art photos. The feel-good “I care” element is premised on ocean conservation. Commercially, the business would fall apart if the “acidification” scare were to be debunked. Hence money spent “educating” the younger generation at school is a good investment.

All involved are undoubtedly and rabidly sincere. I’m sure they believe the “facts” on their “Fact Sheet” for students, such as 500 million people about to lose their “daily food and income” as coral reefs turn turtle. Although the fact sheet ends rather lamely: “Our polar seas are already so acidic” — sorry, guys, they’re still alkaline — “that they are starting to dissolve some shells.”

Tony Thomas would like kids to have a carefree childhood, they’ll meet quite enough ugly stuff later on, like he did. He blogs at tthomas061.wordpress.com, and recently wrote on the brainwashing of English-learning migrants

Alarmism’s Austrian accent

Vienna’s rootin’ Teuton travesty of science

by Tony Thomas

August 9, 2013

Austria is justly proud of its scientists – Schroedinger, Mach, Doppler, and Pauli, to name a few. Hence I was excited to be visiting the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, or Vienna Museum of Natural History. It’s a stately pile in the city’s famed museum district.

The science there was great. But the global warming exhibits weren’t science, they were alarmist rubbish.

OK, I’m biased, but let me explain: One display is headed, “Climate models show the expected global warming for the next decades.” The illustration, headed “The world 4degC warmer”, is a color-coded map of the continents.

I paused. Four degrees warmer within decades? Like, 2030, 2040, 2050? Considering there’s been no warming for 17 years, the forecast seems a stretch. I wondered if the English translation had gone awry, but the label alongside said the same thing in German.

What’s more, the display seemed already a decade old, judging by references I noticed to incidents in 2002. Museums canbe pretty slack about updating their displays. So that might bring the heat apocalypse forward to, say, 2029, when I’m just settling into my high-care retirement home.

Was this display the work of some rogue activist curator? Nah. All around were fantastically alarmist efforts such as “The climate bomb in the oceans” (“Global warming could destabilise these deposits [of frozen methane]. Subsequently, the emission of huge amounts of greenhouse gases would heat up the atmosphere even more”). Sure, maybe 20,000 or 200,000 years from now. And the Arctic? “The Arctic could be ice-free in summer from 2060 on.” Whatev’, as our PM likes to say.

In this imminent oh-so-hot world, the illustrated continents are shaded green for habitable areas, fawn for “Uninhabitable – Deserts”, grey for “Uninhabitable – flood, droughts and extreme weather”, and red for “Land loss, 2m sea level rise.”

What? Two metres? Within decades? Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change only rabbits on about a 0.6 metre rise by 2100, and latest data in fact shows sea rises slowing, not accelerating.

Anyway, I took a camera snap of the hypothesised Australian continent, but doltishly managed to catch only the western half (left). Even so, poor Perth! The whole fertile south-west is shown as fawn, “Uninhabitable – Deserts”. That’s a shame because my daughter just bought a house in Claremont. Maybe I should buy her a camel for Christmas.

The whole north-western coast is projected to be under water for many kilometres inland, but here’s a surprise: About half way between Perth and Geraldton to the north, a big blodge of lush fertile countryside appears, extending northward to about Port Hedland and inland to about Wiluna, taking in Mt Newman and Paraburdoo. Iron ore? Forget that! Lang Hancock’s mountains will be terraced into rice paddies.

For some reason the rice paddies fade into continued desert from Port Hedland to the top of WA, but there’s another splodge of inhabitable green from there east to Darwin, ideally suited to boat people from Indonesia. Why?

Because when I cast my eyes further north to South-East Asia, the whole of Indonesia – oh no! – was flooded and/or uninhabitable, except for Borneo which has turned into desert. Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, forget them all, uninhabitable!

A cursory look at Africa, uh oh! All uninhabitable except for a mysterious green swath from about Senegal/Mauritania east to Niger-Chad.

South America: wow, that mass has become a wasteland of deserts and cyclonic storms, apart from the deep south of Argentina and Chile (or what’s left of Chile after two-metre coastal flooding).

Kiss goodbye to India south of Mumbai, with India’s southernmost 200km flooded and the rest uninhabitable, along with Sri Lanka. Yeeps, that will really get the boat people going, or coming.

Apart from the green exceptions I’ve mentioned, kiss the whole southern hemisphere goodbye. It’s all very depressing, even though when temperatures really were four degrees or more hotter 150m years ago, the dinosaurs had a great old time nibbling palms, ferns and each other in the lush rainforests.

The Vienna Museum of Natural History then throws science holus-bolus under the bus and gets to work in full activist mode. We (the OECD group, that is) must cut our energy consumption using new, gentle and renewable technologies to save the planet, correcting the errors of the 20th century and fighting off George W Bush’s axis of evil with the US petroleum industry, as at 2002.

I limped from the Vienna Museum of Natural History, nursing my hard-worked Canon IXUS Powershot and feeling sad for Austria’s distinguished traditions of science. The displays are targeted at schoolkids and corrupting the young is a crime, as Socrates would attest.

Tony Thomas wrote previously of his adventures in Washington’s Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and at Te Papa, Wellington, NZ. After Vienna, he went on to visit Chicago’s famed Field Museum of Natural History, where he was again cheesed off. He blogs at tthomas061.wordpress.com

The Naughty Nation of Nauru

THE PACIFIC
The Naughty Nation of Nauru
Tony Thomas

In the film The Mouse that Roared (1959), the fictitious Duchy of Grand Fenwick, in the Alps, declares war on the United States. The Duchy wants to lose and then enjoy American postwar largesse. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but the Duchy stuffs up by winning.

Turn now to the nation of Nauru (population 9400), at 21 square kilometres the area of Perth’s Rottnest Island. Nauru has in real life defeated Australia (population 23 million). President Sprent Dabwido continues to dictate the surrender terms to Prime Minister Julia Gillard. When I last checked, Nauru was demanding a visa fee of $1000 per asylum seeker per month. That will cost us $90 million or so to 2017, a windfall of about $9500 per Nauruan.

Australia has propped up Nauru for a decade, thanks to asylum-seeker politics. One would expect Ms Gillard to offset the new visa fees against our $32 million annual aid. But because her surrender to Nauru was unconditional, the visa fees will be extras.

One word sums up Nauruan affairs: bizarre. It is the world’s equal-second-smallest state by population (Vatican City, population 800, is smallest, and Nauru’s fellow UN member Tuvalu is comparable). Nauru has the same clout in the UN General Assembly as China or India, hence has a valuable vote on offer.

In 1998, during the plundering of Russia’s assets, the St Petersburg mafia washed US$70 billion (plus kickbacks) through banks in Nauru. There were 450 banks, including the Panacea Bank, domiciled in the same two-room shack, staffed by a woman with a broom. From 2000 to 2003 the USA classified Nauru as a rogue state for money laundering and indiscriminate sale of passports—Nauru had sold about a thousand for a reported $1500 each, including at least a couple to Al Qaeda operatives.

Nauru today receives aid at one of the highest rates per capita ($3500 plus) in the world. GDP per capita, surprisingly, is more than $7000 per capita (equal to the Ukraine), although this seems to include the aid. Nauruans pay neither business nor personal tax, which is nice for any politicians who put aside some lazy millions somewhere during the good old days. The Australian economist Helen Hughes estimated in 2004 that Nauru from 1968 to 2002 could and should have invested $1.8 billion (in 2000 dollars) from phosphate surpluses. Instead, most Nauruans now live in near-destitution: a quarter of the children are stunted from malnutrition and half those under five are anaemic. Half the men, and more than half the women, smoke. Life expectancy is only fifty-six for men and sixty-five for women. Alcohol-fuelled violence against women is rife.

Getting priorities right, Australian bureaucrats in 2008-09 busied themselves with what they called a “successful” pilot rollout of then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s one laptop per child program. Schooling in Nauru was then not even compulsory. It became so in 2010, when daily school time was also raised by two hours to whatever is normal in the Pacific. Heaven knows how few hours were worked by teachers previously, in structures officially described as health hazards and with children, if they turned up, too hungry to study.

Another Australian priority for Nauru is global warming, on which two local public servants work full-time “implementing measures to address climate change” (local salary item: $15,360) with a third change-fighter planned. The evidence for the climate threat: “The people of Nauru have noticed changes in their climate. Elders sense that these changes are not normal.”

By 2004, the island was not merely broke but enormously in debt. Today, according to the New Zealand government, Nauru’s public debt is around A$869 million, though lots of debt remains undocumented or disputed.

The Australian government emits streams of debt figures for Nauru that seldom make sense. In the 2008-09 Nauruan budget, external debt was put at more than $500 million. Last October (2012) AusAid said that Nauru’s external debt had reduced from $370 million to $70 million between 2007 and 2010, but added that internal debt had risen from $265 million to $480 million, thanks to belated recognition of debts to depositors owed by the Bank of Nauru, which failed in 1998 soon after the local elite had whipped their money out. Today Nauru has no bank and no insurance company: people use cash or bank online with Australia. (Nauru’s official currency is the Australian dollar.)

Squandering of aid seems to continue. In 2011 the nation of 9400 had more than 1200 public servants, which is an improvement on the days when it had (whether notionally or in reality) more than 3000. Other estimates of public service numbers put the peak lower, at 1600. The serious government work is done by what are politely called “in-line” officials, that is, aid-paid Australian expatriates. These include Nauru’s secretary for finance (who gets more than $190,000 tax-free in supplementary aid pay) and two deputy secretaries in the Finance Ministry. They have certainly improved the national book-keeping.

Nauruans have led a sedentary lifestyle for two generations, while snacking on trashy imported food. The result is that 82 per cent of them are overweight, possibly the world record. Nearly a quarter of adults have diabetes (among Nauruan women over fifty-five: 53 per cent). While it is possible to grow fruit and vegetables on the coastal strip, Nauruans are disinclined to do so.

How Nauru became one of the world’s least-functional societies is a moral fable. The Nauruans were originally part of the canoe-based dispersion of Polynesians through the Pacific, but their single island is particularly remote. The dozen clans of Nauruans managed by fishing, farming and coconut gathering in the forested uplands. Their main problem became lethal inter-clan warfare. Nauru was never a tropical paradise, no matter what hundreds of journalists have written.

In 1886 Germans took over the island, supposedly appalled by the warfare there but also attracted by copra prospects. Ten years later, a Henry Denson took what he thought was a rock of petrified wood back to his job in Sydney with a phosphate business. For the next three years the lump served as a laboratory doorstop. In 1900 a chemist named Albert Ellis arrived and decided to test it. The rock graded at a record-high phosphate content.

Nauru’s interior uplands were found to be marine phosphate, with bird droppings as the icing on the cake. Australia administered Nauru from 1920 as part of a “sacred trust” handed down by the League of Nations. The “sacred trust” in practice involved creating a British Phosphate Commission (BPC) to sell phosphate to Australia, Britain and New Zealand at a third of the world price, with royalties to Nauruans at a halfpenny a ton.

The mining work was actually done by imported labour, particularly Chinese. Fearing a communist takeover, the Nauru on-site administrator from 1949 to 1951 received 600 units of what he quaintly called “lachrymose generators” (tear gas grenades). Canberra also despatched twenty .303 rifles and bayonets to Nauru, labelled as “merchandise”. Eventually someone found an interpreter and the Chinese turned out to be supporters of Chiang Kai-Shek on Formosa. When the administrator in 1954 tested the grenades, they were found to include six of the lethal fragmentation variety.

Around that time Australia realised the phosphate would eventually run out and the Nauruans should be settled elsewhere, in the same way that the 700 Banabans of Ocean Island (Nauru’s distant phosphate-endowed neighbour) had been resettled, painfully, on the then-British-owned Fijian island of Rabi in 1946.

First, the Nauruans refused to be disappeared into the Australian community as integrated citizens. Next up for their new home was Fraser Island, but Queensland timber harvesters scotched the plan. (How interesting if the plan had succeeded!) Third choice was Curtis Island near Gladstone, but negotiations stumbled because the Nauruans wanted the island as their new sovereign state, a version of Cuba hanging off the USA. They also wanted continued sovereignty over Nauru’s phosphate—the last thing the Phosphate Commission had in mind.

Nauruan delegations were invited to Queensland for a look-see but ran into overt racism, including insults to their wives. The exact words went mercifully unrecorded but an allied example was a Curtis Islander who talked of “punching on the nose the first n****r who comes ashore”.

Ensconced on Nauru, the Nauruans agitated instead for a better share of the phosphate earnings. The tri-nation trustees argued that their sacred trust involved giving the Nauruans what they “needed” rather than what Nauruans might expect commercially. In 1962 the Nauruans astutely recruited the Australian Council of Trade Unions and Helen Hughes to push their case, and got the phosphate price trebled to world level. Because the Phosphate Commission refused to open its books, the Nauruans’ goal switched to statehood. This was despite Nauru’s minuscule population, which even today is less than a tenth of my local municipality.

In 1968 the flags of Britain, Australia and New Zealand came down and the Nauruan flag went up. It’s a nice one symbolising the equator, the Pacific and a twelve-pointed star for the twelve clans, savouring a phosphate fortune. This revenue by 2002 totalled $3.6 billion (in 2000 dollars). The peak year was 1975 when phosphate earned $363 million, giving Nauruans a per capita GDP of $50,000, second only to Saudi Arabia.

Hughes in 2004 wrote that if the cost of production was 30 per cent and another 20 per cent was spent on private and public consumption, this left $1.8 billion (in 2000 dollars) for investment. Invested conservatively at 7 per cent a year, the capital would have grown to more than $8 billion or (assuming five persons per family) nearly $4 million per family. Instead, Nauru’s communal net assets appeared to be, at best, worth $30 million, she wrote, adding: “Some Nauruans, however, have accumulated considerable private fortunes.”

Things had started well, with investment advice from parties such as Australian consultants Philip Shrapnel & Co. However, the island became a magnet for carpetbaggers, offering get-richer-quick schemes that contrasted with the pathetic returns recommended by former colonialists.

The most famous scheme involved only petty cash, about $4 million. The Nauruans financed a musical in London’s West End, Leonardo [da Vinci], a Portrait of Love. The whole Nauruan cabinet flew up to enjoy it but it bombed in a month.

Hughes says that Nauru was advised to invest $60 million in dubious bank instruments through the law firm of Allen, Allen and Helmsley. One of Allen’s partners skipped with $6 million. The total losses were never established.

A police chief bought himself a yellow Lamborghini, although Nauru has only a few kilometres of road. When it arrived, he was too fat to get into it. The road became littered with wrecks of four-wheel-drives and Honda Goldwing bikes piled up by drunks and unskilled riders. Nauruans took to game fishing, and forgot the art of building canoes. Golf? The Bahamas beckoned.

Phosphate revenue became insufficient in the late 1990s to bankroll the Nauruan lifestyle. The politicians maintained their high life by borrowing against the trust assets. General Electric Capital Division consolidated the debt by lending $236 million against the property portfolio, and foreclosed on it in 2004. When the receivers inspected Nauru House’s penthouse in Melbourne, used as a home-away-from-home and occasional football field by Nauruan big-wigs, they found twelve crates of unopened Grange Hermitage dating from the 1970s.

Most bizarre of all was the 2003 invitation or ultimatum from the CIA to President Dowiyogo: if he wanted aid funds, could he please cease rogue state activities and help open a Nauruan embassy in Beijing? The CIA needed an embassy as a way-station for defecting North Korean generals and scientists. A Nauruan-flagged embassy car would assist the logistics. The operation’s code-name was Weasel. Dowiyogo tried to comply but Beijing smelt a rat and the embassy plan fell through. The CIA failed to deliver the promised money to Nauru, and when Nauru dunned the US government, the US government disowned its CIA negotiators. The Australian courts backed the US government.

Dowiyogo’s other foreign exchange plan, also abortive, was to saw the mined-out coral pinnacles into polished slabs and export them as coffee tables.

In waste, the daddy of them all was Air Nauru, which lost $40 million to $80 million annually until it collapsed in 2005. Nauru was also keen to buy its own ocean-freighter fleet but luckily this did not eventuate.

Air Nauru serviced twenty-nine destinations but often flew without passengers. At its peak, Nauru’s five Boeings could seat 10 per cent of the nation’s population. In Australia, that feat would require 11,500 equivalent jetliners. Sometimes fare-paid Air Nauru passengers were bumped when politicians commandeered the jets for shopping in Hong Kong. This made Nauru a chancy destination for tourists.

The airline had colourful misadventures. One of its B-737s arrived in Nauru one day in 1980 with the pilot’s face black, blue and bleeding. It had been waiting for take-off from Tarawa and a local resident invaded the plane and bashed the pilot. Why? Because during takeoffs, the 737s kept blowing the roof off the man’s grass hut.

Soon after, an Air Nauru B-727 was outbound for Kagoshima, Japan, with—as usual—no passengers, three Australian cockpit crew, a Japanese senior hostess and three indigenous hostesses, nursing hangovers. A brawl erupted when the Japanese told the team to make coffee for the cockpit. The pilot, unable to separate the combatants, dumped fuel and returned to Nauru, where two Nauruan hosties got first-aid. (The Japanese hostie practised taekwondo.)

Air Nauru by 2005 had only one plane and that was repossessed in December. This delighted Australian protocol people. Previously, Nauruan presidents (there were about twenty of them between 1968 and last year) had demanded red carpet treatment for visiting heads of state when they dropped into Melbourne by Air Nauru for indulgences.

Nauru was able to resume transport when it acquired a B-737 via Taiwanese funding as a payoff for diplomatic re-recognition. This must have galled Beijing, which had coaxed Nauru away from Taiwan only four years earlier. US diplomatic traffic leaked by Wikileaks said Taiwan had been giving Nauruan politicians $5000 a month, and other parliamentarians $2500 a month, to keep the recognition going.

By 2004 Nauru couldn’t pay its satellite phone bills, and lost contact with the world for a couple of months. Residents who, one local alleged, had used dollar notes for toilet paper, were now in shock.

The island however had turned the corner in September 2001, with Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard and his “Pacific Solution” for boat people. The Nauru solution, which began with a $20 million down payment, was so effective that the flow of incoming boat people dried up. Among the windfalls to Nauru were about $100 million in foreign aid and ad hoc largesse. Australia, for example, gave Nauru an emergency grant of $1.2 million in 2003 to pay the public servants’ Christmas wages.

Howard’s compassionate successor Kevin Rudd scrapped the Nauru solution from 2007. But because this destroyed 100 jobs for local cooks, guards and clerks, the Labor government ramped up aid to compensate.

In August 2012, the boat-beleaguered Gillard government decided that Nauru was not a suppurating hell-hole after all, and sought Nauru’s agreement to re-open the camps. As we have seen, Nauru could name its own price.

For respectability’s sake, Australia is supposed to be leading Nauru into viability, via a Nauru–Australia Partnership for Development towards Millennium Development Goals. On the ground, progress is minimal.

Nauruans have a high fertility rate of about 3.4 births per woman. I have been unable to detect any funding for official family planning initiatives—only a third of women use any contraceptives, since “they wanted as many children as possible”, and 85 per cent of female teenagers have not heard anything via the media about contraception. If health aid reduces the high death rate, the island’s population will become even less sustainable on the coastal strip.

AusAid rates “gender equality” there a fail on health, education, services and private-sector business, and only a bare pass in the public service. Child mortality, though improved, is still seven times worse than in Australia.

At the outset of independence, Nauru litigated for compensation for the degradation of its mined land. In 1993 Australia settled for the formidable sum of $57 million upfront and $50 million in instalments. In fact, rehabilitation of the porous coral uplands is virtually impossible, so heaven knows where that money went. AusAid and the politicians did design a five-year rehab program in 2007 to be run by the Nauru Rehabilitation Program. AusAid now says, without a blush, “The corporation’s focus has been on mining operations”, and concedes that mining revenue is more valuable to the islanders than land rehabilitation.

The country today is ridiculously over-governed. It has eighteen members of Parliament (no women), six cabinet ministers, and thirteen ministries. There is one parliamentarian per 500 citizens. Power in Nauru runs via personal alliances, hence the high presidential turnover.

Nauru has joined a host of international bureaucracies such as WHO and UNESCO. Those generate avalanches of unread papers but Nauru’s elite enjoy the junketing to world capitals. The forty-four-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is currently chaired by Nauru’s Ambassador Marlene Moses.

Nauru joined the fifty-four-nation Common­wealth in 1999 but found that this group, which includes similar basket-cases, is big on talk and small on handouts. When Nauru complained about its debt burden last October (2012), the secretary general Kamalesh Sharma offered some debt-management software.

In Nauru anti-corruption drives are often announced and never successful, partly because among any five Nauruans, two are relatives. No one has ever been convicted over the scattering of $1.8 billion to the four winds.

In 2010 a rare prosecution took place over an official’s alleged misappropriation of more than $200,000, a large sum in the context of Nauru’s low public service wages. Another recent case involved two local business men alleged to have exported $102,000 cash from the island without declaration. In 2010 the local police and the Australian Federal Police opened a case involving alleged foreign bribery of local politicians, which was dropped late in 2011.

Whither Nauru? At least it now has a thriving prison industry. Helen Hughes in her paper suggested that Nauruans end their mendicant stance and seek viability through basic agriculture, tourism, and sale of fishing, internet-domain and satellite rights. Secondary-mining of phosphate has become a further source of revenue.

Hughes concluded—and it still seems valid:

If Nauru does not adopt the economic, political and social reforms that will give it a decent and healthy standard of living, aid cannot help it. Donors that succumb to pleas for aid will be taking money out of their taxpayers’ pockets and throwing it away.

She suggested Nauruans could apply for dual citizenship with Australia or New Zealand, in effect selling their island in exchange for an Australasian living standard. My own solution: offer them sovereignty over Rottnest.

Tony Thomas was once Economics Writer for The Age.