The Sour City

*

I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can’t get out
to be real or present
phone and videophone
are almost worse
we don’t see a journey
but stay in our space
just talking and joking
with those we reach
but can never touch
the nothing that can hurt us
how lovely and terrible
and lonely is this

Les Murray

His career was a shocking request for action, for love, to restore old memories, embrace young faces, to regret and move forward. He wasn't ashamed, just bewildered. The mark of the devil had been upon him. All was not lost, but he was shattered by the changes that had occurred, not just in his own physical form but in the way people related to him, for the activity that was being discouraged, for the shattered flints that made up each waking moment. The traffic jam was 20 miles long, he swore. Thankfully they were heading the other way, in a taxi coming back from an inquest. He was talking animatedly to a very beautiful woman who, to make her more exotic, had grown up in Hong Kong of hippy parents. The shadows were fleeting, now that they were moving at 110 ks an hour, the legal limit.

And on the other side they weren't moving at all. They had the same conversation he had been having for days. Something has gone wrong. With this city. With the fabric of things. This sour city. If he mentioned it, people immediately knew what he was talking about. What is it? They would ask. It's just too difficult to live here anymore; we're grossly over-regulated and making a living in this place is becoming more and more impossible. There were shadows everywhere; fleeting in the trees, running away from them as they sped past. Imagine being stuck in that, he said to her? pointing to the traffic queue which stretched as far as they could see, literally. They had already passed the accident; there were ambulances and police and crushed cars, but he didn't see any bodies.

Astonishingly, as they continued to soar down the highway at 110ks an hour, the queue on the other side remained locked. All the way from the outskirts to the city's core. It would take any of them hours to get home. They had all paid their toll for the honour of sitting in the queue. Shadows were everywhere, glancing in the air. Cold, cold, he felt like reaching out and touching her, until she mentioned her partner and the conversation veered off into raising children and mad exes, vindictive women and appalling behaviour. It was all correct. The driver remained immune. Minute after minute passed, and still the line of traffic on the other side of the highway did not move. He shuddered but there was nowhere to go with it. Peace was not an option.

He felt like reaching out and touching her and felt like a thousand things could crush him. He was shocked by the rate of the spread of the disease. Someone had warned him, long ago. How very beautiful she was, suddenly, in the back of that taxi, the mind blowing traffic jam on the other side of the highway still stretching into infinity. The inquest into the death of the boy in the Blue Mountains, the apparent staggering indifference of the 000 operators to the repeatedly desperate calls of the severely dehydrated David Iredale, the emotion of it was so gripping, so draining, the parents sitting in the court room, the mother quietly weeping as the horrific details of multiple incompetencies continued to pour out. We were always going to be there. We were always going to be witnesses to this tragedy.

Their conversation spread rapidly across multiple topics, the inquest, of course, work, of course, other journalists, their copy, their determination, their quirks, as we struggled with the logistics of our own tight deadlines. Hers were looser than his, and she was happy to engage. They talked about her partner's two year old boy, who he had majority of custody of. The multiple sick tactics from multiple angles. They talked about life in Hong Kong; cities which were coming to a standstill because of traffic like that beside them, of the increasing impossibility of living in this sour city. How cut throat, how angry it had become. She told me the story of the people in her Camperdown Streets after she got out of the cab the previous evening; angry, violent, out of it. The city was crumbling, that was how everyone felt. There was no end to it.

There were people all around him descending into the quagmire, yet every day brought brighter lights. On the corner each evening in recent days a fight breaking out on the corner, the aboriginal women screaming. First thing in the morning as he walks out the door he sees this scene unfold: a white man is being bundled into the back of a police van. Nearby an aboriginal woman is screaming at the police. She is joined by two of her friends, who are shouting both at the police and each other. Groups of ten or more police had combed the suburb the previous evening with sniffer dogs. Their secret places were all busted. He sipped lemon squash in the beer garden of the local hotel and listened to outrageous stories. The pain of his infected tooth kept returning, making him irritable, even confused, exhausted by the antibiotics. But in moments in the back of taxis, with someone beautiful and intelligent and highly entertaining, every shadow vanished and in his destiny lay happiness. At the end of the journey, when the 20 mile long traffic queue merged with the city gridlock, they shared cigarettes in embarrassment that they hadn't quite given up altogether yet, neither of them should have smoked; and the twirls of stories they had been telling each other vanished into the asphalt and the night ahead, the story ahead.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/04/25/2552504.htm?section=justin

Tens of thousands of people have lined the streets of Australian towns and cities to cheer on veterans and their families taking part in this year's Anzac Day march.

Umbrellas decorated the parade ground at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra as war veterans and current servicemen and women marched past the Stone of Remembrance.

Governor-General Quentin Bryce delivered the commemorative address, saying the day was about coming together to pay respects and give thanks.

"We come to pay our respects and give our thanks to reflect deeply on what their offering means," she said.

Ms Bryce then joined Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and other dignitaries in the laying of wreaths.

The RSL says more than 20,000 veterans turned out for today's march in Sydney.

While the ranks of some units are thin, they say the descendants of some veterans are marching at the back of the group.

Many of the World War Two veterans, now in their 80s and 90s, are unable to walk, but are travelling in taxis and jeeps along the route of the march.

One of them, 84-year-old Stilton Woodhouse, says it is a day to remember those who never came home from war.

"It's not an occasion of celebrating war but of thinking of those that we lost during the bad times, when things were really bad," he said.

At the end of the march a commemoration service will be held at the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park.

Thousands also lined the streets of central Melbourne to watch the march through the city.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world/asia/24pstan.html?bl&ex=1240804800&en=00c6c1fd04ee13be&ei=5087%0A

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — As the Taliban tightened their hold over newly won territory, Pakistani politicians and American officials on Thursday sharply questioned the government’s willingness to deal with the insurgents and the Pakistani military’s decision to remain on the sidelines.

In Pakistan’s Buner district on Thursday, a barber looked at the “Shave is forbidden” warning that the Taliban wrote on the window of his shop. The Taliban now control the region.
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Some 400 to 500 insurgents consolidated control of their new prize, a strategic district called Buner, just 70 miles from the capital, Islamabad, setting up checkpoints and negotiating a truce similar to the one that allowed the Taliban to impose Islamic law in the neighboring Swat Valley.

As they did, Taliban contingents were seen Thursday in at least two other districts and areas still closer to the capital, according to Pakistani government officials and residents.

Yet Pakistani authorities deployed just several hundred poorly paid and equipped constabulary forces to Buner, who were repelled in a clash with the insurgents, leaving one police officer dead.

The limited response set off fresh scrutiny of Pakistan’s military, a force with 500,000 soldiers and a similar number of reservists. The army receives $1 billion in American military aid each year but has repeatedly declined to confront the Taliban-led insurgency, even as it has bled out of Pakistan’s self-governed tribal areas into Pakistan proper in recent months.

The military remains fixated on training and deploying its soldiers to fight the country’s archenemy, India. It remains ill equipped for counterinsurgency, analysts say, and top officers are deeply reluctant to be pressed into action against insurgents who enjoy family, ethnic and religious ties with many Pakistanis.

In the limited engagements in which regular army troops have fought the Taliban in the tribal areas and sections of the Swat Valley, they not only failed to dislodge the Taliban, but also convinced many Pakistanis that their own military was as much of a menace as the Islamic radicals it sought to repel, residents and analysts say.

http://www.independentweekly.com.au/news/local/news/general/ian-plimer-a-question-of-faith/1495699.aspx

History is littered with grand mistakes. Columbus thought the West Indies looked distinctly oriental, Hitler and Napoleon believed the Russian winter would defrost like a fridge held open, and IBM chairman Tom Watson was convinced there’d be a world market for about five computers.

Then there’s the question of faith: that is, the belief in gods and deities. The world once had thousands of religions, and to challenge these beliefs meant death. Ancient Greeks built temples which started at Aphrodite and ended at Zeus, animists believed that plants had souls, and ancient hunter-gatherers held that rivers and mountains were created by giant crocodiles or snakes.

A giant cod did not dig the River Murray, and we know that because of the work of geologists and geographers. Since the beginnings of religion 300,000 years ago, science has challenged faith. Science is evidence, not belief, and scientists don’t burn other scientists at the stake because they disagree with each other. But the belief in human-caused global warming, says one scientist, has become the new religion.

“The history of the world is written in the rocks,” says Adelaide University geologist Professor Ian Plimer. “We can tell when the earth was born, when the atmosphere developed and the gases which comprised it. We know that continents drift and mountains uplift and erode. If you know the alphabet, if you can read the rocks, you can go back 4.567 billion years to the formation of the world itself.”

Plimer is a genial man, 62 years old and with the energy of a new-born gazelle. He’s rushing from television interviews to appointments on radio. He’s been to his printers and publishers and he’s in Adelaide between trips to Broken Hill and Wagga Wagga. It’s a busy schedule.

In the boot of his Mercedes he has a box of books, his new opus Heaven and Earth. He parks the car on a steep hill in Beaumont, hands a copy of the book to his passenger while he meets his wife Jill and a real estate agent. As he inspects the house for sale, the real estate agent’s parked car rolls down the hill and stops with a crunching noise at the first solid obstacle, which the rear of Jill’s car. The professor is unfazed.

“There’s space in that house for a library,” he says gleefully. “I’ve got 75 linear metres of books and Jill has the same. We need a house with space. The cars should have been parked with their wheels turned into the gutter on a slope like that but - there’s space for a library.”

And then the professor moves heaven and earth, literally and figuratively. The book, 500 pages of literature, is an argument against the belief or the faith, as Plimer sees it, that human activity causes global warming. A posse of critics from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, environmental groups and scientists from other disciplines are now out to lynch him. The mild-mannered professor’s Heaven and Earth is figuratively tearing his world apart.

“Start with science,” Plimer says. “Ignore faith. Science is evidence, not belief.” And then he starts with his history of the planet, beginning at the beginning and ending far into the future.

“The world’s climate has always changed and always will,” he says. “The speed and amount of modern climate change is neither unprecedented nor dangerous. The temperature range observed in the 20th century is in the range of normal variability.”

This sounds heretical. Don’t the world’s eminent scientists agree that humans are burning fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate, that this combustion is releasing carbon dioxide at a similarly unprecedented rate, and that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas? Won’t human-made global warming cause wild and unpredictable weather, melt polar icecaps and fry polar bears? Aren’t Pacific Islanders going to be flooded out of house and home? Won’t there be malarial mosquitoes up and down the high latitudes? Aren’t we doomed?

Plimer weaves the Mercedes through the traffic on the way to his next appointment. “Methane is the most potent greenhouse gas,” he says before answering. “The effect of driving a diesel car 10,000 kilometres is equivalent to the amount of methane a cow produces in a day.”

Yes, but what about polar bears? They don’t drive and they don’t chew cud.

Plimer stares through the windscreen, wondering where to begin. A starting point may be his previous book, A Short History of Planet Earth, published by ABC Books before the climate change debate really heated up. It talks about earth’s encounters with the killer asteroids, the rise and spread of the continents, the appearance of life, mass extinctions and really major climate changes that shaped the life and look of earth.

It even makes a passing reference to some minor animals known as hominids.

“For 80 per cent of the earth’s 4600 million years, our planet has been a warm, wet greenhouse planet. Greenhouse conditions are normal. Polar ice caps are abnormal,” he says.

“Even 2000 years ago the earth was considerably warmer than now. The Romans were scantily clad, and growing oranges and grapes in northern England.”

In Plimer’s geological timeframe, 2000 years is less than a modern meteorologist’s mini-second. Plimer sees the climate change much as we see changes in daily weather; it can be freezing in the morning, warming up towards noon with an afternoon thunderstorm, then rain and hail followed by a starry night with another frost.

To a man whose scientific discipline measures millions of years, the world’s climate is always changeable and variable. The reason we don’t notice is our incredibly short lifespan as a species and our incredibly short lives as individuals. If we’d been around as long as algal mats called stromatolites, like those at Shark Bay in West Australia which haven’t changed in 2724 million years, we’d have a truer perspective.

“The Dark Ages between 535 and 900 AD were a terrible time to be alive,” he writes in Heaven and Earth. “Sudden cooling took place. It was cold, there were famines, war, changes of empires and stressed humans succumbed to plague. Around 540 AD it was so cold trees almost stopped growing. This was a global event because it is also recorded in tree rings from Ireland, England, Siberia and North and South America.”

The Black Sea froze. Ice formed on the Nile. South America was gripped by drought; the Mayan civilisation collapsed.

The Dark Ages ended as quickly as they began and the world began to warm. This was the Medieval Warming from 900 to 1300 AD.

“The amount of land devoted to agriculture increased and fields crept up to higher altitudes where farming had not previously taken place. Europe was warm and rainfall was higher. New cities were built and the population increased from 30 million to 80 million. At the same time the thousands of temples at Angkor Wat in SE Asia were built. In China these warmer conditions led to a doubling of the population in 100 years. The Medieval Warming was the zenith of Muslim imperialism, culture and science. Economies boomed.”

And then came the Little Ice Age, and it all went wrong again. As Plimer tells it, the world warms and cools as quickly as a steaming hot bath goes tepid. He writes of giant undersea volcanoes spitting out more carbon dioxide than people have released since the start of the industrial revolution, of terrestrial volcanoes like the Toba eruption on Sumatra a mere 74,000 years ago which threw so much acid aerosols and dust into the atmosphere that the human population was reduced to as few as 4000 individuals. We were nearly wiped out, just like 99.99 per cent of all the world’s species have since life began. Becoming extinct is something most plants and animals do, and which the rest are still practising.

Unlike the ancient Greeks or the Stone Age hunters, Plimer doesn’t believe that gods or beasts created the earth or its life. Nevertheless there’s something of a missionary zeal about the man; he’d love to convert the listener. He talks of glaciers reaching down to the shores of the Mediterranean, of their retreat and the spread of hominids to the very north, of Viking settlements on a lush and pleasant Greenland. All these changes, hot and cold, happened well before Man started his lawn mower, before the internal combustion engine, before the Industrial Revolution or Emissions Trading.

So why is his voice seemingly the only one to argue that humans aren’t responsible for global warming? How can he be right and all the other scientists wrong?

If Plimer is irritated by the question he doesn’t show it. In fact, a smile spreads across his worldly face.

“Now that’s very interesting,” he says. “The media went into years of brouhaha about global warming and fellow travellers boarded the bandwagon at every opportunity. The cause became fashionable especially among climate experts such as Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Meryl Streep and numerous other show business folk. Al Gore went from strength to strength and even compared ‘true believers’ such as himself to Galileo. Those who had other scientific views were attacked.

“The international panel on climate change gathered many climatologists, meteorologists, environmentalists and political activists. Its first report was in 1990. Three working groups had authors who contributed to a series of chapters under the guidance of lead authors. These people are touted as the 2500 scientific experts who constitute a consensus. In the 1996 report on the impact of global warming on health, one contributing author was an expert on the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets. That author had also written on the health effects of mobile phones. Other authors were environmental activists, one of whom had written on the health effects of mercury poisoning from land mines. If a land mine explodes, the last thing one thinks about is the health effects of mercury poisoning.

“The IPCC process is related to environmental activism, politics and opportunism. It is unrelated to science.”

There is much in Plimer’s book which could make the blood boil, if not the oceans evaporate. According to the geologist, deniers of human-caused global warming have become the new sceptics, the distrusted, the heretical.

IN THE EARLY 1980s, a team of palaeontologists and archaeologists was excavating a cave on the banks of the Franklin River in Tasmania. They found there evidence of Stone Age man dating back 22,000 years, the most southerly people on the planet at that time.

“Tasmania then was much colder and drier,” explained ANU archaeologist Dr Rhys Jones during the dig. “People had walked across a flat plain from what’s now Victoria to what is now Tasmania. They arrived in the (Tasmanian) south-west and sheltered in this cave, using it for more than 7000 years.

“Then the climate became much wetter and warmer. The grasslands on which the people depended gave way to thick, impenetrable forest. The forest squeezed out the people, and they were forced to leave.

“The scale of that warming was very quick, and the flooding of Bass Strait incredibly rapid. It would have been possible for a grandfather to sit on the shore of Tasmania, point across the vast sea that’s now Bass Strait, and say to his grandson: ‘I walked across there.’ It flooded in a generation.”

Now that’s climate change. Archaeologists have found the remains of villages on the bed of what’s now the Black Sea before it was either black or sea. There are rock paintings of people herding cattle in what’s now the Sahara Desert. Just a few hours north-east of Adelaide is the Mungo Lakes national park, where there’s evidence of some of the earliest hominid occupation on Australia around what was once a huge inland sea. There was a time when Lake Eyre and Lake Torrens were fresh, when the Murray River flowed out to sea near Port Pirie. And if you really want to imagine climate change, think of the Himalayas as a boring flat plain or of South America smacking into North America and stopping equatorial currents between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

The story of climate change is the story of the earth itself, of life beginning and often ending, of asteroids and comets smacking into planets and wiping out up to 96 per cent of all marine genera. Were it not for climate change, we might still be shrews scurrying in the night to hide from carnivorous reptiles. Climate change, argues Plimer, is driven by the sun, by eccentricities in the earth’s orbit and rotation, by geological and astronomical forces so strong that humans’ influence is relatively puny.

But Plimer’s latest book, its kindest critic will acknowledge, stays away from sweeping adventures in geology. Desperate to avoid generalities, eager to explain every scientific nuance, it’s packed with 2311 footnotes, almost all of them scientific. Al Gore’s film is Muzak compared with Plimer’s symphony.

“Most scientists are anarchistic, bow to no authority and construct conclusions based on evidence,” he writes. “Matters of science cannot be solved by authority or consensus. Scientific evidence is unrelated to politics, ideology, popular paradigms, world views, fads, ethic, morality, religion and culture. If you are a Buddhist, Baha’i or Baptist, the speed of light is still about 299,792.5 kilometres per second. If it is dark, the speed of light is still about 299,792.5 kilometres per second.”

And that’s about the speed that human-caused climate change believers will respond to Professor Plimer’s tract. Few arguments ignite the passions as much as this. Religion comes close, and that too is a belief system where adherents of one faith are so convinced of their own god’s supremacy that they will go to war to win converts, is the most grievous mistake to litter history.

Just above Plimer’s own basement office at the University of Adelaide is more salubrious accommodation of Barry Brook, who sits in the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change. They argue, they disagree, and they are equally stimulated by the other’s debate.

After all, we now know that the world’s circumference is three times the size Columbus thought it was, and that a northern summer will be followed by a Russian winter.

And we know IBM’s Tom Watson was wrong. Five computers will never be enough, even just to do climate modelling.

Historic; function with the Australian cricket team and former Prime Minister John Howard at the Sydney Town Hall. Taken from the balcony.