Aboriginal Facts

 The weekend Australian 1stJuly2023

BEFORE WE VOTE, LET’S GET ALL OUR FACTS IN ORDER

 GEOFFREY BLAINEY 

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a vulnerable document. It is sometimes silent when Aboriginal failures are visible, but vocal in condemning Australian people for misdeeds that never happened.

 Without doubt, the Indigenous people have had many legitimate grievances about their sufferings and slights ever since British convicts and marines arrived in 1788. Hosts of Aboriginal people were killed in frontier conflict, though the historians’ statistics of death tend to contradict each other. Most Indigenous people died from diseases to which they had no immunity, and such deaths far exceed those suffered in warfare since 1788. 

Countless Aboriginal people died from the excessive consumption of alcohol: rum and brandy rather than beer and wine were their temptation. Moreover, most Aboriginal people preferred novel foods such as sugar, flour and mutton rather than the plants they had skilfully gathered during an ingenious way of life that also kept them fit. The sight of so many overweight Aboriginal people today would confound their lean ancestors, if by chance still alive. 

The loss of their lands, their “dispossession”, of course created resentment. But Aboriginal leaders tend to think they were the world’s only such sufferers. In fact, the ancestors of most mainstream Australians painfully lost their lands in some faraway era and received no compensation. 

Thus in 1066 the Norman Conquest of England and the actual killing or enslavement of so many people, and the raping or castration of others, was probably as devastating as the British conquest of Australia. In contrast, no Aboriginal people were turned into slaves. English people who suffered severely from the consequences of the Norman invasion in 1066 must have outnumbered the Aboriginal people who suffered severely from the conquest of Australia in, say, the 70 years after 1788. 

Likewise, ancient Aboriginal people themselves were champions at dispossessing their neighbours, and one day that fact should be taught in Australian schools. In every known part of the world the semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers had been deadly in their tribal warfare. 

Inside the Uluru statement, two major accusations are expressed in one pithy sentence: “In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard.” The Aboriginal leaders who met at Uluru believed their kinsfolk were not even deemed worthy of being counted – until the referendum of 1967 raised their political status. Anthony Albanese himself, while understandably basking in his political honeymoon, affirmed this accusation, and continues to do so in parliament. If true, the accusation is a serious blemish on the Australian nation during the past century and a half. 

But it is not true. In his many overseas trips Albanese has performed calmly and courteously. But at home, on the question that is now his very first priority, he seems sometimes to be at sea. It is fair to say he went overboard when in the Marrickville town hall on October 14 last year he told a packed gathering that Australia since 1788 had a “brutal” history, full stop. We all make unwise or sweeping statements from time to time. 

Albanese’s favourite message is that Australia is “the world’s oldest living culture”. But New Guinea was occupied by human beings at about the same time as – or earlier than – Australia, and accordingly it also might be the world’s oldest living culture. Aboriginal people on the whole now have the higher quality of life, but wide is the gap between most city and big-town residents and that minority struggling in the outback communities. Closing the Gap has several meanings. 

We learned how determined Albanese was when he affirmed, alongside the Uluru statement, that Aboriginal people were crippled by “powerlessness”. Now he is scaling the Mount Everest of Australian politics by seeking a drastic change to Australia’s Constitution. Thereby he will empower Indigenous people and simultaneously reduce the power of the great majority of Australians. But what if the Uluru statement, with its errors and omissions, does not justify an upheaval in Australia’s democratic system? 

The Uluru statement is militant. It offers no sentence of respect or gratitude to the Australian people. Yet it is hailed by Albanese as warm hearted and generous. He even announced in a memorial lecture in Adelaide recently that it was an invitation extended “to every single Australian in love and grace and patience”. 

A disciple of Bruce Pascoe, Albanese admires his nonsensical Dark Emu theory. Pascoe believes Aboriginal Australia was the first real democracy in the world and for 80,000 years a haven of peace and prosperity. Albanese believes this utopia – in fact, it never existed – can in some ways be honoured if Indigenous people are compensated with special powers and rights. 

Parliament in its recent debate did nothing to validate the Uluru accusation that mainstream Australians had refused for generations even to count Aboriginal people. In fact, these proud people were being counted before any one of us was born. 

We can appreciate the sense of hurt in young, politically active Aboriginal people when they hear the myth that they, their parents and grandparents had not been deemed worthy of being counted in a census. More insulting, the young are led to believe that the sheep had been counted regularly – as undoubtedly they were – but not the Aboriginal people. 

In parliament last month Tanya Plibersek mistakenly announced, in an otherwise informative address, that in 1901 the “Aboriginal people weren’t counted in the census or commonly allowed to vote”. Her ministerial colleague Catherine King told parliament that Aboriginal people – in the words of one informant – were powerless “simply because we were never identified as humans”. That can’t be true.

 Day by day, all shoppers at Coles supermarkets receive on their printed receipts a highly selective message based on Uluru. The directors of Coles Group do not seem to realise that, through the years, their own executives – in recommending places where the next dozen stores might or might not be opened – must have known where most Aboriginal people lived. 

Linda Burney, born in a small Riverina township, is deservedly praised for making her way from a humble Aboriginal home to become a cabinet minister in Sydney and now in Canberra. But she has mistakenly insisted that as a young girl she was never in a census. “The notion that you weren’t worthy of being counted was very painful,” she exclaimed in July 2017. She once misinformed parliament that until the age of 10 she was not even a citizen. Instead, she claimed she was merely ranked under “the flora and fauna act” of NSW. Such a policy did not exist. 

The first census to be conducted by commonwealth officers was in 1911, and the federal attorney-general instructed them to count “full-blood Aboriginals”. Understandably, the officers had to retreat when they reached remote areas where local inhabitants had seen no white person or heard a word of English. But tens of thousands of Aboriginal people were actually counted, often with enormous effort, in the accessible regions. 

For a logical but slightly complicated reason, they were not – after the actual counting – included in the final tally of population. For instance, in apportioning a share of the federal customs revenue to each state, the smallish Aboriginal populations were not “reckoned” when finalising the payments to each state. Helen Irving’s book To Constitute a Nation neatly explains the reasons and the practice. 

Today, visitors to the National Museum in Canberra are informed that not until 1971 were “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples counted in the Australian census”. On the contrary, they had been counted in every federal census since 1901, and counted moreover in the face of obstacles confronted by few other national statisticians. Thus the state officials then in charge of that 1901 census specifically counted them. They set up a special category that comprised “full blood Aboriginals” and those “nomadic half castes” who were living with them. In the five mainland states they totalled 41,389. An even larger number could not be counted, being nomadic and too far distant. 

There were precise censuses even before 1901, thus contradicting Albanese and the Uluru leaders. For example, South Australia, holding a census on Sunday, April 2, 1871, recorded the exact districts and towns where more than 5000 Aboriginal men and women lived. 

Eye-opening was the census held on the same Sunday in gold-rich Victoria, where 731,528 people of all races were counted. Conducted by Henry Hayter, the census commanded respect from leading overseas statisticians. The main results were in the hands of parliamentarians barely two months later – a feat that is unimaginable in the age of fast computers.

 Of those Victorian officials who took part in the detailed census, 918 went on horseback and 650 on foot. They investigated remote townships, huts and tents where only one or two Aboriginal people could be found. That the tally of these people had fallen since Victoria’s previous census in 1861 was evident, and it would continue to fall. 

Four out of every 10 of the Victorian Aboriginal men said they were following a paid occupation; and that was a higher proportion than can be found in many remote Aboriginal settlements today. In Victoria, two of every five Aboriginal children of school age could read but fewer could write. Five Aboriginal adults were recorded as blind, and seven were over the age of 70, according to the census teams. 

Hayter was meticulous. In the big printed edition of the census report he added a minor correction to the tally of 61,000 “Chinese and Aborigines” who had been separately counted: please “take 1 from the males and add 1 to the females”. Generally, the Aboriginal populations had considerably more males than females. 

Across the globe most people alive in 1871 had not yet been counted officially. It is therefore remarkable that Aboriginal people in various towns and regions of Australia were systematically counted. 

Other of our censuses were held before 1871, the year Albanese’s own ancestral land of Italy held its first nationwide census. One generation later, in 1897, the initial census in Russia’s vast empire at last enumerated famous individuals such as Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. 

Unfortunately, the allegation – “a people not worth counting” – is now endorsed by some of the biggest business houses, by the football leagues and even by universities that are world-ranked for their research. 

The leaders at Uluru insisted that their people had been powerless for generations This lament is also far-fetched. 

In stressing the “torment of our powerlessness”, they did not know that in the late 1850s, in the three populous Australian colonies, most Aboriginal men were allowed to vote. This was a momentous event: most of Europe’s tens of millions of men had not yet won the right to vote. Indeed, a forgotten man of Aboriginal and convict ancestry won the rural seat of Young in NSW in 1889. 

Another landmark – unknown to Uluru – was a general election held in 1896 in South Australia. This was probably the first government in the world to allow women not only to vote but also to stand for parliament. New Zealand women already had the first right but not the second. 

In this same 1896 election in South Australia, even more revolutionary was the sight of Aboriginal women attending the polling booth. Martin Luther King might well have shaken his head in surprise if he had known of it. 

Just pause and ponder for one minute: South Australia’s innovation occurred when 99 per cent of the women in the world did not have a vote. In renowned cities such as Paris, Berlin, London, New York, St Petersburg, Tokyo and Beijing, not one woman had the privilege now exercised by female Aboriginal voters in South Australia. Five years later in the first federal election various Aboriginal women must have voted – an election in which no white woman in the four eastern states was entitled to vote. These triumphs contradict the Uluru manifesto. 

Indigenous people hope to gain a major say in shaping a beneficial treaty with the Australian nation; they demand a truth-telling tribunal dominated by the Indigenous; and they call for the right at times to influence vital spheres such as foreign policy. They will also break the golden rule of democracy: one person, one vote. 

Meanwhile, their cry of “powerlessness” is a kind of crocodile tear. In the past half-century Aboriginal groups have been handsomely recognised by their acquisition – under the Fraser and Keating governments – of ownership or certain rights and interests in 55 per cent of the Australian land mass. Few Australian voters know this fact. It constitutes one of the largest peaceful transfers of land in the history of the modern world.

 Historian Geoffrey Blainey is the author of more than 40 books. His recent memoir is called Before I Forget (Penguin).

StayingConservative

The Weekend Australian 24thJune2023

STAY CENTRE-RIGHT COURSE TO WIN POLITICAL ARGUMENT

TONY ABBOTT

What has gone wrong with centre-right politics: is it our leaders, or our beliefs, or has the world changed? It’s a bit of each, as I will try to show, but there’s no reason it can’t be fixed.

Consider the Reagan, Thatcher and Howard governments. They each had a point, a program and a purpose. There was a fundamental point that each was trying to achieve, a clear program to bring it about and a moral purpose to what they were trying to do.

The Reagan administration’s objective was to erase the humiliations of the Carter years, by restoring the economy, rebuilding the military and staring down the old Soviet Union, because America was a “shining city on a hill”, the “last best hope of mankind”.

The Thatcher government’s objective was to overcome decades of decline, to stop subsidising businesses going broke, to turn renters into owners and to lift the dead hand of the union movement, because the country that had given the world its common language, the mother of parliaments, the industrial revolution and the emancipation of minorities had become the sick man of Europe.

The Howard government’s objective was to end its predecessor’s culture wars, to reform the tax system to reward earning over spending, to end the something-fornothing mindset via work for the dole and to privatise inefficient government businesses so that it could truly be

said that anyone with the right to live in Australia had won the lottery of life.

Contrast the Anglosphere’s more recent centre-right governments. All of them have had their successes and strengths but in all three countries it has been hard to sustain the centre-right’s traditional claim to be better economic managers given the political turmoil, or to discern the centre-right’s traditional commitment to sound finances and personal and economic freedom amid the lockdowns and the spending sprees. In Australia, and even more so in Britain, the centre-right’s usual scepticism about utopian schemes degenerated into ruinously expensive and technically dubious measures to achieve net-zero emissions.

But there’s a further difficulty here. For Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the big task was to defeat the Marxism embodied in the old Soviet Union. For today’s centre-right leaders, the big task is to counter the cultural Marxism that permeates vast swaths of our institutions and makes good government more difficult than ever; in some ways a more dangerous foe because it’s internal.

When Reagan famously said government was not the solution, government was the problem, many people believed him, after several decades of higher spending, more bureaucracy and crushing rates of tax. But what if “postmaterial” voters’ concerns are less insufficient family income than a supposedly imminent climate catastrophe; and less to protect the democratic way of life than to atone for intergenerational racism and colonialism? To such voters, more government is indeed the solution rather than the problem.

How do political parties whose program has been to advance freedom, to protect institutions and to strengthen the country flourish then, when more and more of their onetime voters think economic growth hurts the environment and that the country is fundamentally shamed by the dispossession of its original inhabitants?

Having it so good for so long hasn’t made us spiritually content, just sent us down the burrows of trying to solve ever more First World problems. While the Marxist left failed to persuade voters that unfairness meant the state had to control the economy to promote equality, it has never abandoned its goal to destroy liberal-capitalism, just changed tactics, trying to subvert the culture via a long march through the institutions.

The neo-Marxist left has turned out to be much better at persuading people the planet needs to be saved than that the economy needs to be nationalised. So now it’s not socialism but environmentalism that requires vast government controls over how our electricity is produced and how we warm our houses, and soon how we feed ourselves and how we move around, to combat climate change.

Likewise, the left has been good at exploiting our humane instincts to undermine our cultural practices so that ending discrimination no longer just means treating everyone the same, it means taking coercive measures against white privilege and male privilege. It’s no longer enough to treat minorities with respect; there have to be pride weeks, and the pretence that biological men are really women if that’s what they say they are. And the societies that were the first to abolish slavery and to empower minorities, and to become essentially colour blind, are now thought to be those that are the most guilty of racism and oppression. Naturally, the further people are from having to deal with real disadvantage and real injustice, the stronger are these misconceptions.

So along with patient reiteration of the economic facts of life, that lower taxes and less regulation are the key to economic growth and greater prosperity, there’s now this further key challenge for the centre-right: to counter the climate and identity obsessions that are weakening our economies and sapping our societies, and that our strategic competitors – such as communist China, imperialist Russia and Islamist Iran – occasionally may pay lip service to but don’t share. Indeed, their cyber propaganda units cynically

whip them up, knowing that it makes the West more polarised, fragmented and divided.

There’s no conspiracy here, just generations of students, fed a pervasive diet of leftist propaganda, that because Anglosphere societies were once somewhat exploitative and prejudiced they’re basically illegitimate, even though they’ve also pioneered human freedom and social justice.

At least in the Anglosphere, higher education once correlated with voting right. Now it’s the opposite. Richer voters have been shifting left while poorer voters have gone in the other direction; hence the Republicans’ success in the flyover states, and the Tories’ success in the red wall, and the Australian Liberal Party’s sudden loss of its up-market, socalled teal seats to pseudo-greens.

Australia’s most successful living leader, John Howard, often characterised the centre-right in our country as “economically liberal and socially conservative”.

But in this new era, it’s said, we should stop being economically liberal to win poorer seats and stop being socially conservative to hold richer seats. Even though repeated experience teaches that governments can’t create wealth, although they can redistribute it; and there’s a point at which redistributing wealth away from the individuals and the businesses that have generated it just starts to make everyone poorer. And even though repeated experience is that evolution is far better than revolution at bringing about lasting beneficial change.

In Australia, nominally Liberal-Nationals governments and oppositions – defying the Howard dictum – have lately tried to be economically conservative and socially liberal, only to end up aping the centre-left, usually disastrously, because why would voters go for the fake left rather than the real one? Instead of shifting to the left, where they can’t credibly compete, on the grounds that it’s needed to win elections, centre-right leaders need to understand the roots of this

leftward drift, often fostered by their own unwillingness to call it out.

As someone who brought our party out of opposition in record time, I know something about creating a contest and winning a political argument by turning climate change from a moral issue about saving the planet to an economic one about soaring power prices, and by insisting that the most humane action was to end the deadly people-smuggling trade.

Because that’s what political parties need to succeed: a purpose to sustain them and a credible program to advance it. For a centre-right party it’s not enough to be slightly less spendthrift, slightly less overbearing and slightly less politically correct than our opponents because it’s impossible to win where there’s hardly any fight. No one knew this better than Thatcher, who declared “I am not a consensus politician; I’m a conviction politician” because she knew it was conviction and courage that created leaders’ political character.

For the centre-right, a way to win would be refusing to close down any fossil-fuelled power stations until there’s a reliable alternative; and getting to net zero (if we must), without putting the lights out and killing heavy industry, via emissions-free, proven, reliable nuclear power.

It would be reducing the regulatory burden on business, especially small business, because that’s the best way to boost productivity, wages and people’s ability to pay their bills.

It would be giving young people more chance to own a home of their own, via tax advantaged savings schemes, because there’s a moral quality to owning something rather than just occupying it.

It would be giving parents more control of their children’s education, in schools that have better teachers and more academically rigorous teaching, savouring the great books as much as critique-ing them.

But it’s one thing to win government, it’s another to hold it and to make something of it.

Thanks to the left’s long march through the institutions, centre-right governments, despite winning elections and having mandates, must expect sabotage at every turn.

The established media will be hostile; the bureaucracy will be sullen; the legislature will be obstructive; and the unions will be bolshie; so the internals will be difficult too. Hence the importance of strong leadership, which sees politics as a calling rather than a career or a vanity project, to draw likeminded people into our parties and our governments.

A party that hopes to win an election must be a broad church, but not to the point of being endlessly elastic about its beliefs. Labor-lite Liberals, for instance, those who want the Liberal Party to be Labor without the unions, might even be better off in another party, working to make that better rather than the Liberals worse.

There are lots of people who have every right to be in public life but no entitlement to identify as centre-right; yet paradoxically, at least in Australia, the only people conservative parties ever seem to expel are the conservatives!

When the migrants who flood into Western countries are much more positive about them than their own leaders, and when the cultural heritage that created the West is neglected and even derided by those who should be its guardians, it’s easy to be glum and to fear our civilisation might have entered the decadence prefiguring its collapse.

Yet we’ve been here before and always come back.

As Thatcher once observed, the facts are conservative. Come the next serious recession, people will rediscover the importance of wealth creation. Faced with military aggression, they’ll realise our society is not quite so unjust after all. When the lights start to go out, they’ll realise having reliable power is more important than cutting emissions. And when the lawsuits proliferate, they’ll realise

telling young people they’re trapped in the wrong body wasn’t such a smart idea.

My sense is that peak insanity on climate and identity already may have passed. I have no doubt that our best days are yet to come if we can but fight the good fight, stay the course and keep the faith.

This is an edited version of a speech former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott delivered to the Danube Institute in London on Thursday night.

Tech and News

Technology yet to thwart human quest for truth 

HENRY ERGAS

In 1677, German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz announced that he had laid the foundations for a “characteristica universalis” – a “universal symbolic system” able to “express all our thoughts” in formal terms. Leibniz’s primary objective, which led him to (among other things) develop the infinitesimal calculus, analyse Chinese ideograms and attempt to decipher the predictive algorithms of the I Ching and the Kabbalah, was not to create a universal language. It was to translate human information processing into a fully specified symbolic structure that could capture the logic underlying any proposition “as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometrical analysis expresses lines”. The capacity to manipulate the resulting formulations would make his system “the greatest instrument of reason”, so lucidly solving every possible problem that “when the project is accomplished, it will simply be up to humans to be happy”. That Leibniz’s goal was beyond his grasp hardly needs to be said; and despite the hullabaloo about ChatGPT, no one could seriously contend it will ever be achievable. But if it resonates today it is not just as a precursor to Artificial Intelligence’s utopian ambitions, nor because it reminds us of the intertwined splendour and arrogance of genius, especially when it believes it can cure humanity’s woes. Rather, it is because Leibniz, in seeking to untangle contemporary polemics, was trying to address the traumas of an era marked by a cacophony of claim and counterclaim that fatally blurred the lines separating truth from falsehood. And then, as now, new technologies of information and communication were blamed for the collapse of the boundary between fact and fiction. At the heart of those technologies was the print revolution and especially its impact on the news. Until 1600, people of all classes only became aware of developments slowly, sparsely and sporadically; by 1640, news from an extraordinary variety of sources was diffused with what was considered lightning speed, bewildering frequency and ever greater regularity. There had, in the 16th century, been news sheets, typically issued in single editions. But as the market expanded, their structure and shape changed, with the first regular newspaper appearing in Germany in 1609 and then being quickly imitated throughout Europe. Particularly in relatively literate urban centres, intense competition between publishers did the rest: within a few decades, nearly one Florentine in 12 saw a newspaper every week. Fuelled by, and fuelling, intense religious and ideological conflict, the emerging press’s partisan savagery would appal even today’s Twitteratti. The prequel to the lynching in 1672 of the powerful de Witt brothers in The Hague is a case in point, with published calls for their noses, ears and genitals to be cut off, as they were, prior to their remaining parts being dismembered, roasted and eaten by the jeering crowd. The English press, which boasted 350 news publications in the period from 1641 to 1659 alone, was less bloodthirsty; but if it looked moderate, that was only by comparison. To make things worse, as the press boomed, accuracy was abandoned in a mad rush to beat rival publications. Hard copy might have promised hard fact. Instead, said the great philosopher Pierre Bayle, the news explosion cast Europe into “an impenetrable chaos of incertitude”. Matters were not helped by governments that – following Machiavelli’s precept that “Everyone sees what you seem, few perceive what you are” – outdid each other in funding news outlets, both at home and abroad, to peddle convenient fictions. The overall result was aptly summarised by the anonymous Italian commentator who noted that “those too accustomed to lies will never believe the truth”. Against the backdrop of a bloody civil war in England, and the even bloodier Thirty Years War on the continent, the West descended into an unprecedented crisis of disbelief. Faced, in John Donne’s words (famously imitated, shortly after Germany’s invasion of Poland, by WH Auden), with a world “all in peeces, all cohaerance gone”, many thought the solution lay in re-establishing certainty, if necessary by force. It is thus no accident that the crisis spawned Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, with its brilliant justification of autocracy and its fulminations against freedom of expression. Nor is it an accident that Hobbes’ even more brilliant contemporary, Blaise Pascal – who was also a pioneer of computational logic – argued that because ascertaining the truth so far exceeded mankind’s capabilities, only a leap of faith, and the unquestioning acceptance of autocratic rule, could restore peace and good order. All that underpinned a swerve to stronger, more repressive states and tighter controls over information, often through statutes that prescribed terrifying punishments for spreading “false news”. At the same time, in an age in which people feared for their immortal soul, the theological constraints on what could be said tightened too. Where the rulers were Protestant, the established Protestant churches preached political passivity. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, having just introduced the distinction between “doctrines” and “dogmas”, moved to strictly enforce orthodoxy: Nicolaus Copernicus in the 1530s and 1540s did not suffer the rigid church discipline inflicted on Galileo Galilei a century later, despite his ideas being no less radical. Of the major powers, it was only in England, where both the monarchy and the established church were too weak to install absolutism, that some measure of press freedom survived. But confounding absolutism’s advocates, it did not precipitate a return to chaos. On the contrary, English publishers discovered that a reputation for not peddling lies boosted sales; printed news, it turned out, permitted competing accounts to be compared in a way never before possible, making falsehoods easier to discern; and governments learned that the truth will out, bringing new-found accountability. Together, those factors helped forge an environment in which commerce, science and scholarship could flourish, allowing Britain to overtake the continental powers. Now, history is not a morality tale, in which the past dispenses cheap lessons for the present and the future. But with ChatGPT fanning already widespread fears about “fake news” and unleashing a tsunami of regulation, notably in the European Union, it is worth remembering that every revolution in the technologies of information and communications has provoked similar outcries. And it is also worth remembering that regulation, whatever its merits, has never proven costless, much less a panacea. Yes, the late, lamented Cormac McCarthy had a point when he called man “A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make a machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it”. But even though Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” is not around the corner, the unhindered human quest for the truth remains very hard to beat – even by the smartest and most evil machine.

ClimateHealing

 Can the Climate Heal Itself?

By Andy Kessler

Dissenters from the catastrophe consensus on warming are worth listening to.

Stop with all the existential- crisis talk. President Biden said, “Climate change is literally an ex i s te n t i a l threat to our nation and to the world.” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin also talks about the “existential threat” of climate change. National security adviser Jake Sullivan identifies an “accelerating climate crisis” as one reason for a “new consensus” for government picking winners and losers in the economy. Be wary of those touting consensus.

But what if the entire premise is wrong? What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years— living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in a mechanism to regulate heat, or we wouldn’t still be here to worry about it.

The theory of climate change is that excess carbon dioxide and methane trap the sun’s radiation in the atmosphere, and these man-made greenhouse gases reflect more of that heat back to Earth, warming the planet. Pretty simple. Eventually, we reach a tipping point when positive feedback loops form—less ice to reflect sunlight, warm oceans that can no longer absorb carbon dioxide—and then we fry, existentially. So lose those gas stoves and carbon-spewing Suburbans.

But nothing is simple. What about negative feedback loops? Examples: human sweat and its cooling condensation or our irises dilating or constricting based on the amount of light coming in. Clouds, which can block the sun or trap its radiation, are rarely mentioned in climate talk.

Why? Because clouds are notoriously difficult to model in climate simulations. Steven Koonin, a New York University professor and author of “Unsettled,” tells me that today’s computing power can typically model the Earth’s atmosphere in grids 60 miles on a side. Pretty coarse. So, Mr. Koonin says, “the properties of clouds in climate models are often adjusted or ‘tuned’ to match observations.” Tuned!

Last month the coddling modelers at the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization stated that “warming El Niño” and “ human- induced climate change” mean there is a “66% likelihood that annual average global temperatures will exceed the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2027.” Notice that El Niño is mentioned first.

Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of an early Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told me, “Temperatures in the tropics remain relatively constant compared with changes in the tropics-to-pole temperatures. The tropics-polar difference is about 40 degrees Celsius today but was 20 degrees during the warm Eocene Epoch and 60 degrees during Ice Ages.” This difference has more to do with changes in the Earth’s rotation, like wobbling, than anything else. According to Mr. Lindzen, this effect is some 70 times as great as human- made greenhouse gases.

OK, back to clouds. Cumulus clouds, the puffy ones often called thunderclouds, are an important convection element, carrying heat from the Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere. Above them are high-altitude cirrus clouds, which can reflect heat back toward the surface. A 2001 Lindzen paper, however, suggests that high-level cirrus clouds in the tropics dissipate as temperatures rise. These thinning cirrus clouds allow more heat to escape. It’s called the Iris Effect, like a temperature- controlled vent opener for an actual greenhouse so you don’t (existentially) fry your plants. Yes, Earth has a safety valve.

Mr. Lindzen says, “This more than offsets the effect of greenhouse gases.” As you can imagine, theories debunking the climate consensus are met with rebuttals and more papers. Often, Mr. Lindzen points out, critics, “to maintain the warming narrative, adjust their models, especially coverage and reflection or albedo of clouds in the tropics.” More tuning.

A 2021 paper co-authored by Mr. Lindzen shows strong support for an Iris Effect. Maybe Earth really was built by an engineer. Proof? None other than astronomer Carl Sagan described the Faint Young Sun Paradox that, 2.5 billion years ago, the sun’s energy was 30% less, but Earth’s climate was basically the same as today. Cirrus clouds likely formed to trap heat—a closed Iris and a negative feedback loop at work.

In a 2015 Nature Geoscience paper, Thorsten Mauritsen and Bjorn Stephen at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology reran climate models using the Iris Effect and found them better at modeling historic observations. No need for tuning. Wouldn’t it be nice if the U.N. used realistic cloud and climate models?

Earth has warmed, but I’m convinced negative feedback loops will save us. Dismissing the Iris Effect or detuning it isn’t science. Sadly, climate science has morphed into climate rhetoric. And note, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen explained in April that green spending “is, at its core, about turning the climate crisis into an economic opportunity.” Hmmm. “Catastrophic,” “existential” and “crisis” are cloudy thinking. Negative feedback is welcome.