Oh Come All Ye Faithful

*



All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there's no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don't seem to matter very much anymore.
All the lies we were told,
All the lies of the people running round,
They're castles have burned.
Now I see change,
But inside we're the same as we ever were.
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Living this way, each day is a dream.
What am I, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Now another century nearly gone,
What are we gonna leave for the young?
What we couldn't do, what we wouldn't do,
It's a crime, but does it matter?
Does it matter much, does it matter much to you?
Does it ever really matter?
Yes, it really, really matters.
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Now another leader says
Break their hearts and break some heads.
Is there nothing we can say or do?
Blame the future on the past,
Always lost in blood and guts.
And when they're gone, it's me and you.
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line.

Dave Davies.



There were moments that came flapping out of the dark past and threw his life sideways, predilections reborn, bad habits re-ignited, soft rhythm and blues not the answer. The television, a screen flickering in the corner of all our lives, chanted the subtext. Our inner cores were no longer centred, but the subject of continuous assault. There was a deliberate dumbing down of the population. Mass advertising campaigns replaced genuine, serious debate. Ordinary people withdrew. They were considered eccentrics, those who sipped their chamomile tea and genuinely talked about the issues of the day.

For no one cared any more. There had been too many betrayals. The worst of our kind had triumphed, repeatedly, while hard work, common sense, decency, all of these things were derided as being nothing but old fashioned ways of life for the fools who could not get into gear. Everything was superficial, but beyond superficial in its unbearable lightness, skin deep and exploiting all the worst aspects of the pack mentality. Witness global warming. Dare to suggest that the case is not in, or that these issues should be properly debated, and you are derided as the spawn of satan, or an old fool, or in the grip of the propagada of big oil.

The same is true of so many other things of fundamental import to the way we live, child support, domestic violence, propaganda, Blind Freddy could tell you all these arenas are full of lies, hysteria, corrupt practice. But does any one reach up and bell the cat, shout out: none of this is true. Think for yourselves, for God sake think for yourselves. Instead the television flickers in the corner, buzzing, a white screen, transmission ceased. What is transmission really did cease? Would they run around like headless chooks, bewildered and hysterical.

Oh come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. He wanted to reach out and wring their collective necks. He wanted to shout out: it's not true, it's not true, for God's sake think for yourselves. But these things weren't happening. Nothing came close to the field of disturbance, or the level of disturbance that had existed in the past. There was no reasoned debate. There was no educated populace. For all the benefits of the modern world, the masses were as pig ignorant as ever, as profoundly misled. You've had the wool pulled over your eyes, he wanted to say, yanked into darkness, pig ignorant because you've allowed yourselves to be fooled.

If only the paths were less clear, the shows less entertaining. Trash dominates our every breathing hour. The giant yellow signs that have come to dominate Sydney's skyline, Want Longer Lasting Sex, the Sex lettered out in bold letters three times the height of an ordinary person, have finally been banned as breaching the advertising code. The government had been besieged with complaints from parents sick of having to explain to their young children what it all meant, or sitting in what seemed like eternal discomfort, frozen moments when the word SEX seemed to reach into every corner of the car and there was nowhere you could ook without being affronted, confronted, with it.

Banned but they're still there. There seems to have been no diligent effort to pull them down. Where were our politicians when all this appalling visual pollution was taking place. Where was the hapless Morris Iemma. Or his replacement, our latest Premier, Nathan Rees. Ross Nielsen has just been appointed his chief of staff. I knew him when he was a surfer who worked as a cleaner to make ends meet. Now he's one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the state. He has left a trail of dissatisfied staff behind in his other appointments, including police media. Iemma has retired on a tax payer funded pension around $150,000 a year. What will you do now? a journalist asked Iemma. There are four people at home in Lakemba who will be happy to see me, and at the end of the day that will do me. The spoilt only son of Italian immigrants, his father a former communist, he got his position by revitalising the branches by stacking them full of Lebanese muslims, and the state as a whole continues to be mired in fiasco after fiasco. Thirty six-year-old Police Minister Matt Brown has been forced to retire after dancing in his underpants on a green Chesterfield couch, and insanity rules. The left is a mess in this state, the right gormless and gutless.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/26/2346336.htm

Prominent billboards promising longer lasting sex are to be removed from all capital cities across Australia.

The yellow billboards advertise medication for sexual dysfunction.

But the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) says it has received between five to 15 complaints a week over the ads and yesterday announced they will be removed.

The move is a reversal of the Bureau's 2007 decision that the advertisements were acceptable.

The Advanced Medical Institute (AMI) today said it would comply with the ASB's ruling.

"Our ads have been very successful in reaching men with sexual health issues to explain that help is available," AMI CEO Jack Vaisman said in a released statement

"We need to be direct in our advertising because we've found men don't respond to the message otherwise.

"More than 7,000 men call the Advanced Medical Institute every week for assistance. However, we are sensitive to community attitudes and if we're deemed to be out of step, then we'll change.

"What's concerning is that the ASB has done a complete about-face on community standards - last year the word 'sex' was OK, today it's not.

"We're not out to offend anyone, the purpose of our direct advertising approach is to let men know that help is available."

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/back-off-warns-costello/2008/09/12/1220857835002.html

Back off, Turnbull warned, as the arguments begin

Phillip Coorey Chief Political Correspondent
September 13, 2008


PETER COSTELLO has warned he has no intention of leaving Parliament any time soon and will fight any push by Malcolm Turnbull to replace Brendan Nelson as Opposition Leader.

As the former treasurer began a round of radio interviews to spruik his memoirs - extracted in today's Herald - the backlash against the book began.

The Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce hit back at Mr Costello's attacks on him, calling the long-term leadership aspirant a disloyal hypocrite who had undermined Dr Nelson with his self-promotion.

With Parliament to resume next week, senior party figures, including supporters of Mr Turnbull, played down the prospect of any move against Dr Nelson in coming weeks.

Mr Turnbull, who returns from a week-long holiday in Italy tomorrow, believes Dr Nelson should be given at least another month, and probably more, to show he can turn the polls round.

But the Turnbull camp believes Dr Nelson will fail. This would make a subsequent challenge less divisive than one launched within the next fortnight.

The other scenario being canvassed is that Dr Nelson could be convinced to stand down if the polls did not improve after several months.

"The only X-factor is someone going off half-cocked and forcing a spill next week," said one powerbroker trying to choreograph events. "We need to make sure it's unambiguous."

Mr Costello left some colleagues nervous yesterday by refusing to rule out categorically ever wanting the leadership and saying he was in no hurry to leave his Melbourne seat of Higgins.

"To be frank with you there's quite a bit to be done. There are still some things I want to do as an MP," he said.

But Mr Costello has confided to some colleagues that he feels he needs to stay on for a few more months because to leave now, so soon after his book was published, would appear opportunistic.

Mr Costello has taken selected swipes at John Howard, Tony Abbott and Mr Turnbull, among others, in The Costello Memoirs. In further revelations published in the Herald today, Mr Costello accuses Mr Howard of downgrading the role of the governor-general over the years and assuming many of the duties himself.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24327383-7582,00.html

RUPERT Murdoch is the last, best hope for quality newspapers, ABC managing director Mark Scott has declared.

Describing the Australian print media industry as a "pageant of distrust, misery and dashed hopes" in a speech to the National Press Club yesterday, Mr Scott said the growth of digital services was placing a bomb under the traditional commercial media business model.

"Through all the turmoil within the Australian media industry, there is only one print mogul who has diversified his portfolio enough to offset the costs of quality journalism against profits made elsewhere in his business," said Mr Scott, a former editorial director at Fairfax.

"And yes -- that last, best hope for newspapers is Rupert Murdoch."

Quoting Vanity Fair media commentator Michael Wolff, he said the head of News Corporation, the publisher of The Australian, "may be the last person to love newspapers". Mr Scott described as "danger all round" a question asking whether "running newspapers is better left to newspaper men and women rather than accountants and ex-rugby halfbacks", a gibe at his beleaguered former employer, Fairfax, and its chief executive David Kirk.

But he said it was clear that the media sector most affected by audience fragmentation as new digital services appeared had been newspapers.

"The newspaper groups that are surviving well internationally are those that have kept some newspaper products and diversified significantly into other areas as well. That's what Rupert Murdoch has done. Rupert Murdoch has diversified significantly away from newspapers.

"That allows his newspapers, particularly in Australia, to operate under a different model and different fiscal pressures than those companies where newspapers dominate the earnings of the company."

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24331854-7583,00.html

Stewart Franks | September 12, 2008

IS the ongoing drought in the Murray-Darling Basin affected by climate change? The simple answer is that there is no evidence that CO2 has had any significant role. Like it or not, that is the science.

In fact, the drought was caused by an entirely natural phenomenon: the 2002 El Nino event. This led to particularly low rainfalls across eastern Australia. The subsequent years were either neutral or weak El Nino conditions. Significantly, neutral conditions are not sufficient to break a drought. In 2006, we had a return to El Nino conditions which further exacerbated the drought. What we didn't have was a strong La Nina.

Last year finally brought a La Nina event but it was relatively weak. It produced a number of major storm events in coastal areas and some useful rainfall in the Murray-Darling basin and elsewhere. Approximately half of NSW drought-declared areas were lifted out of drought (albeit into "marginal" status) and Sydney's water supply doubled in the space of a few months.

This was the first rain-bearing La Nina since 1999 but proved insufficient to break the drought. In short, the drought was initiated by El Nino, protracted by further El Nino events and perhaps more importantly, the absence of substantial La Nina events.

Despite the known causes of the drought, many have claimed that CO2 emissions are to blame. There have been arguments put forward to justify this claim, all eagerly adopted by various groups, but none of which have serious merit.

A key claim is that the multiple occurrence of El Nino is a sign of climate change. This is speculative at best. Recent analysis showed the nine-year absence of La Nina was not unusual. In fact long-term records demonstrate alternating periods of 20-40 years where El Nino is dominant, followed by similarly extended periods where La Nina dominates. Ominously, the data demonstrates that it is possible to go 14-15 years without any La Nina events. The consequent drought would be devastating but entirely natural.

The observation that El Nino and La Nina events cluster on 20-40 year, multi-decadal timescales is an important one. It demonstrates that Australia should always expect major changes in climate as a function of natural variability. When viewed in this light, the drought is most likely a recurring feature of the Australian climate.

A more recent claim is that higher temperatures are leading to increased evaporation of moisture. The weather bureau acknowledges that rainfall from September 2001 until now has not been the lowest recorded, however much has been made of the fact that consequent inflows have been the lowest. It has been claimed increased evaporation, driven by climate change, can make up this discrepancy. Indeed, Wendy Craik, the chief executive of the Murray Darling Basin Commission has stated that temperatures were warmer, leading to more evaporation and drier catchments.

This is disturbing to hear from the head of the MDBC, as it is completely at odds with the known physics of evaporation. While it sounds intuitively correct, it is wrong.

When soil contains high moisture content, much of the sun's energy is used in evaporation. Consequently, there is limited heating of the surface. When soil moisture content is low (as occurs during drought) nearly all of that energy is converted into heating the surface, and air temperatures rise significantly. Consequently, higher temperatures are due to the lack of evaporation, not a cause of significantly higher evaporation.

Cloud cover also provides a major control on air temperatures. El Nino delivers less rainfall but also less cloud cover. This has a major impact on the amount of the sun's energy reaching land; far greater than the trivial increase in radiant energy caused by increased CO2. Again, in the absence of soil moisture, air temperatures increase.

These are known and accepted processes of environmental physics and are not contentious. They are ignored because they detract from the simple message that we should sign up to the concept of "dangerous climate change" and an emissions trading scheme. After all, who would pay for carbon emissions if they were not proven to be detrimental? Who would provide extra funds for climate change science if it wasn't a proven significant factor compared to natural climatic variability?



Mural near Redfern sation, Sydney, Australia.

The Kindness Of Strangers

*



REV. ELI JENKINS

Dear Gwalia! I know there are
Towns lovelier than ours,
And fairer hills and loftier far,
And groves more full of flowers,

And boskier woods more blithe with spring
And bright with birds' adorning,
And sweeter bards than I to sing
Their praise this beauteous morning.

By Cader Idris, tempest-torn,
Or Moel y Wyddfa's glory,
Carnedd Llewelyn beauty born,
Plinlimmon old in story,

By mountains where King Arthur dreams,
By Penmaen Mawr defiant,
Llareggub Hill a molehill seems,
A pygmy to a giant.

By Sawdde, Senny, Dovey, Dee,
Edw, Eden, Aled, all,
Taff and Towy broad and free,
Llyfnant with its waterfall,

Claerwen, Cleddau, Dulais, Daw,
Ely, Gwili, Ogwr, Nedd,
Small is our River Dewi, Lord,
A baby on a rushy bed.

By Carreg Cennen, King of time,
Our Heron Head is only
A bit of stone with seaweed spread
Where gulls come to be lonely.

A tiny dingle is Milk Wood
By golden Grove 'neath Grongar,
But let me choose and oh! I should
Love all my life and longer

To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.

[ Slow bell notes ]

FIRST VOICE

Now frying-pans spit, kettles and cats purr in the kitchens. The town smells of seaweed and breakfast all the way down from Bay View, where Mrs Ogmore-Pritchard, in smock and turban, big-besomed to engage the dust, picks at her starchless bread and sips lemon-rind tea, to Bottom Cottage, where Mr Waldo, in bowler and bib, gobbles his bubble-and-squeak and kippers and swigs from the saucebottle.

FIRST VOICE

There's the clip clop of horses on the sunhoneyed cobbles of the humming streets, hammering of horse-shoes, gobble quack and cackle, tomtit twitter from the bird-ounced boughs, braying on Donkey Down. Bread is baking, pigs are grunting, chop goes the butcher, milk-churns bell, tills ring, sheep cough, dogs shout, saws sing. Oh, the Spring whinny and morning moo from the clog dancing farms, the gulls' gab and rabble on the boat-bobbing river and sea and the cockles bubbling in the sand, scamper of sanderlings, curlew cry, crow caw, pigeon coo, clock strike, bull bellow, and the ragged gabble of the beargarden school as the women scratch and babble in Mrs Organ Morgan's general shop where everything is sold: custard, buckets, henna, rat-traps, shrimp nets, sugar, stamps, confetti, paraffin, hatchets, whistles.

MOG EDWARDS

I love you until Death do us part and then we shall be together for ever and ever. A new parcel of ribbons has come from Carmarthen today, all the colours in the rainbow. I wish I could tie a ribbon in your hair a white one but it cannot be. I dreamed last night you were all dripping wet and you sat on my lap as the Reverend Jenkins went down the street. I see you got a mermaid in your lap he said and he lifted his hat. He is a proper Christian. Not like Cherry Owen who said you should have thrown her back he said. Business is very poorly. Polly Garter bought two garters with roses but she never got stockings so what is the use I say. Mr Waldo tried to sell me a woman's nightie outsize he said he found it and we know where. I sold a packet of pins to Sinbad Sailors to pick his teeth. If this goes on I shall be in the poorhouse. My heart is in your bosom and yours is in mine. God be with you always Myfanwy Price and keep you lovely for me in His Heavenly Mansion. I must stop now and remain, Your Eternal, Mog Edwards.

FIRST VOICE

And the shrill girls giggle and master around him and squeal as they clutch and thrash, and he blubbers away downhill with his patched pants falling, and his tear-splashed blush burns all the way as the triumphant bird-like sisters scream with buttons in their claws and the bully brothers hoot after him his little nickname and his mother's shame and his father's wickedness with the loose wild barefoot women of the hovels of the hills. It all means nothing at all, and, howling for his milky mum, for her cawl and buttermilk and cowbreath and Welshcakes and the fat birth-smelling bed and moonlit kitchen of her arms, he'll never forget as he paddles blind home through the weeping end of the world. Then his tormentors tussle and run to the Cockle Street sweet-shop, their pennies sticky as honey, to buy from Miss Myfanwy Price, who is cocky and neat as a puff-bosomed robin and her small round buttocks tight as ticks, gobstoppers big as wens that rainbow as you suck, brandyballs, wine-gums, hundreds and thousands, liquorice sweet as sick, nugget to tug and ribbon out like another red rubbery tongue, gum to glue in girls' curls, crimson coughdrops to spit blood, ice-cream cornets, dandelion-and-burdock, raspberry and cherryade, pop goes the weasel and the wind.

From Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas.



If on a winter's night, or even in the winter of discontent, his head filled with contrary images, they basked in pleasure, time eroded their instincts. All was not lost. Oddly, the sound of birds began to surround him with the rising dawn. He felt, for the first time since the previous day, that there was some chance after all that he might survive. He was collapsed inside. He was still cold. His clothes were still dank. But now the chambers of hte heart began to sing, and his always boundless imagination, the enthusiasms of his heart, began to take hold. The ruins of the church grew louder and his stomach ached, it had been a long time since he had eaten.

He had always assumed his final years would be ones of eccentricity and wealth; that the extravagant gestures of his youth would translate into material success. Before the second depression. Before global warming hysterics destroyed the economy, and warring ethnic groups destroyed the cities. Before the plague came. Far off behind him, he saw a car on the road. It could be a source of danger or escape, more likely danger, as the hooray Henrys went splashing by, ignoring beggars such as himself. It was cruel what had happened. He had lost all control of his life. The books had failed, the jobs fallen apart, and his disease wracked body had expelled him from his once comfortable home.

Oh halleluyah, he thought, but he didn't know whether to hide behind a bank or stand in the middle of the road, pull up the car and beg for help. The chance of compassion was just about zero. Perhaps if he had been younger, better looking, he might have had something physical to offer, but those days were long gone. In the end common sense prevailed, and he hid behind one of the larger mounds of garbage, an old washing machine, a refrigerator, unidentifiable, twisting pieces of medal. He sat quietly as the car approached and then roared past. It was indeed the Hooray Henry's, in a giant open Rolls Royce convertable, a guard riding shotgun on the rear, his gun cocked and ready for anything.

They would have shot him without hesitation, and he breathed a sigh of relief that he had chosen a sensible course of action. Catastrophe had overtaken his life, but he was still alive, there was still a chance he could build some sort of life. Perhaps it lay in the ruins of the old church, perhaps there he could build a garden, have some hens, perhaps, one day, even find a wife to share his final days, a gap toothed fellow beggar as ugly as sin, a woman who would be as gratefui as he for comfort and warmth during the long long nights.

He approached the ruins with trepidation. His mind had been doing overtime, as always, and his hunger had mounted to the point where he was worried he would faint. The clothes were drying, but he knew they stank, he knew he had to do something. And oh what delight, he saw a wisp of smoke, he saw, as he came within the last 100 yards, a garden. He heard the crowing of a rooster. His heart quickened and his steps grew longer, and before he knew it he was there, standing in the ruins, trying to make sense of the haphazard building that had been built along one outside wall.

There was no sound and no one approached him. There were no dogs. The landscape stretched into an infinity of garbage mounds, and the colours grew more concrete as the sun rose in the sky. He stood and stared at the front door of the shack, wondering whether to knock, when it opened of its own accord and a woman dressed in filthy clothes, indeed gap toothed, just as he imagined, stared at him in a mixture of shock and fear. No doubt strangers were not a source of comfort.

What da ya want? she asked in a rough voice.
He smiled and tried to look non-threatening.
I mean you no harm, he said.
I've heard that before, she snarled.
It's true. I mean you no harm. I've walked all the way from Qxaty.

She looked at him then with something almost approaching interest, taking in his thin, shivering frame, his wretched clothes. She seeemed to decide, it was as if he could see the thoughts moving across her brain, that indeed he posed no danger.
I suppose you want something to eat...
He nodded in agreement.
Sit there, she said, gesturing at an upturned pale.

And so he eased his tired frame down, and sat quietly, as she went back inside and banged things in what must be a makeshift kitchen, and his stomach turned again. He hadn't eaten in three days, and then he hadn't eaten much.

An old phrase, from his educated past, from a different world and a different era, sprang to mind: "the kindness of strangers".



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24225835-16741,00.html

August 23, 2008

Getting too far ahead on an ETS is bad economic policy

IT is neither desirable nor remotely feasible, Ross Garnaut wrote in his interim report in June, "to seek to lower the climate change risk by substantially slowing the rise in living standards anywhere, least of all in developing countries." As Professor Garnaut noted, Australians would not accept such an approach. This is why the Business Council of Australia's "real world" analysis of the economic consequences of the Rudd Government's proposed emissions trading scheme is so effective and devastating.

It reveals that even with the Government's proposed compensation, three firms of the 14 companies that opened their books to Port Jackson Partners for the analysis would face a carbon cost so high they would close. Four others would be forced to review operations to remain viable after losing between 32 per cent and 63 per cent of pre-tax earnings. Many potential investments would be canned.

The companies, with annual revenues ranging from $90 million to more than $3 billion, are in cement manufacturing, petroleum refining, steel making, sugar milling and zinc and nickel refining. On average, the ETS would reduce their pre-tax earnings by 22 per cent, with the worst-affected suffering a 136 per cent reduction. The ETS will apply to 1000 Australian companies, each producing more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon pollution ayear.

The ramifications of the BCA analysis are clear. Giving more compensation to trade-exposed high-emitters to stop them going broke or taking their businesses and jobs off shore would reduce the amount of compensation available to others. But without it, new investment and business growth would be decimated and unless remedied, growth in living standards would be substantially slowed - precisely the scenario Professor Garnaut acknowledged was unacceptable.

The analysis for the electricity generating sector, too, is sobering, warning that a 10 per cent emissions reduction target by 2020 involves a "major risk" to power supply and a lift in retail prices of 25 to 40 per cent.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24182333-7583,00.html

Xenophon put his finger on the Government's problem of balancing perception and reality when he said: "I just don't think it's going to do what it's meant to do."

This is at the heart of some of the Government's biggest challenges: how to manage the gap between expectation, perception and reality, and how to avoid simply pandering to illogical and misplaced public fears instead of pursuing reform and defending good policy.

There are misunderstandings about high petrol prices, rising grocery prices, interest rate rises outside Reserve Bank movements, labour market reform, water shortages and an emissions trading scheme that must be challenged instead of simply being assuaged or even encouraged.

A climate of confusion, ignorance and disappointment does not help government and undermines the development of good policy in the public interest. How can there be an informed public debate and a sensible political dialogue on an emissions trading scheme when 32 per cent of Australians believe "climate change is entirely caused by human activity", according to a Newspoll survey last month?

That means one in three of those surveyed, and 40 per cent of those surveyed aged 18 to 34, are unaware of climate changes before human existence or of dramatic changes - ice ages - since humans were but a pinprick on the Earth's surface.

Not even Al Gore suggests that humans are entirely responsible for climate change. Yet the Rudd Government is planning the most momentous reform for the Australian economy with one-third of the voting and tax-paying population completely misinformed.

Unfortunately for poor old Bowen, FuelWatch and GroceryChoice (universally and incorrectly referred to as Grocery Watch) are the political vanguard in the battle to match political perceptions.

Both schemes bear the hallmarks of ill-prepared, rushed responses shaped by public relations consultants and graphic designers with a fetish for capitals.

Before the Howard government had even worked out the legislation for its last round of industrial relations changes, it started a public campaign for what was to become Work Choices.

Of course, Rudd has public sympathy for wanting to do something about petrol and grocery prices and interest rate rises as well as climate change, but policies and schemes that are rushed through despite a lack of public understanding of their consequences and without solid preparation are likelier to be bad policies and bad politics.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24316293-2702,00.html

THE majority of Australians continue to endorse the Rudd Government's approach to a carbon emissions trading scheme - even if it means higher costs for them.

Most people also endorse the plan to go ahead with an Australian trading scheme regardless of what other nations do, including the big greenhouse gas emitters India and China. But a majority of Coalition supporters believe there should not be any trading scheme, or at least that Australia should wait until other countries introduce similar measures.

The Reserve Bank said yesterday that a preparedness by the public to accept a "one-off" increase in prices because of a carbon trading scheme would help contain inflation.
According to the latest Newspoll survey - conducted exclusively for The Australian last weekend and after the release of Ross Garnaut's detailed climate change report, which suggested a $20-a-tonne tax for carbon emissions - there was no change in support for the major parties.

But while the primary vote for Labor and the Coalition was stable, support for the Greens went back to double figures - 11per cent - on a weekend when environmental issues played a part in various elections.

Labor continued to dominate the Coalition on a two-party-preferred basis, 56 to 44 per cent, based on preference flows at the last election. But Kevin Rudd's personal support fell as Brendan Nelson's rose slightly. Satisfaction with the Prime Minister fell three points to 54 per cent, while the Opposition Leader's satisfaction rose from 31 to 35 per cent and his dissatisfaction level fell six points to 42 per cent.

On preferred prime minister, Mr Rudd's support fell from 65 to 62 per cent - his second-lowest rating since the election - and Dr Nelson's rose two points to 16per cent, his second-highest since the election.

On the issue of carbon trading, 88 per cent of those surveyed saidAustralia should introduce acarbon reduction scheme, with 61 per cent saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did.


A mural on the side of a terrace, Glebe, Sydney, Australia.

He Had Survived The Night

*



Abruptly, Thomas collapsed in New York from exhaustion and excessive drinking while on his third tour in the U.S. in 1953. Shortly after his collapse he slid into a coma, and died on November 9 in St. Vincent's Hospital, New York, consumed by alcoholic poisoning and an injection of morphine. He was aged 39. The poet's body was brought home to Wales, and a simple white cross marks his grave in St. Martin's Cemetery in his beloved Laugharne. The Wales which had offered him such inspiration, but from which he had also, at times, felt the need to escape, finally claimed him. A white cross marks his grave: a surprisingly simple tribute to a poet who lived an undeniably colorful life.

http://www.undermilkwood.net/

To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.

Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed, to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.

Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dew fall, star fall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.

Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning, in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman's loft like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread's bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy.

It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.

Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.

Time passes. Listen. Time passes.

Come closer now.

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

From where you are, you can hear their dreams.

Dylan Thomas Under Milk Wood




Oh if only, if only thing had gone differently. The yellow rain disintegrated, the sun came up on a new landscape after a freezing night, but even so he felt devastated, his thin frame shivering in the early morning cold. Oh rescue me, rescue me, he chanted inside, not knowing who he was praying to, to whom he begged. Catastrophic was the name of the game, and it kept coming to him in his waves as his teeth rattled inside his head. He had been young once. He had been a person once. with standing in the community, friends, a place to go, a warm hearth at night, a love in his house.

All that had gone and he could not even remember now what had triggered the series of calamitous events that had led him to walking down this long road. The sulphurous rains had stopped, indeed there was a preternatural sparkle to the air, so cold and clear he could almost bite it, its clear freshness biting into his lungs. The ruined church seemed no closer than when he had lost consciousness the previous evening, falling asleep in a shallow alcove beside a mound of garbage. The mound had provided little protection from the wind and the sleet, and he had truly thought this could be his last day on earth.

But here he was. Not just alive, but moving again. His body was still wracked, he was still worried he would not survive, but there was a fresh dawn, a fresh day. The wind had dropped sometime during the evening. He seemed to remember the loss of the sound, the wind whipping cold across this terrible landscape. And the rain stopping, although his wet clothes would never dry. Instead, the sun now glinted off broken bottles and household wreckage as far as the eye could see. He would have to be careful not to catch pneumonia; it had been such an ordeal.

His clothes still clung to him, dank and smelly. Most of all he needed new clothes. One foot went in front of the other, and slowly he tried to pick up his pace. The first sun hit his parchment flesh and although still cold, he felt a wonderful relief. All was not lost. While there's life there's hope. All those corny old sayings now resonated in his enfeebled brain. He looked behind him, and marvelled at the distance he had covered, the grim landscape possessing its own beauty as the wintry sun lit up puddles from the acrid rain, show cased a terrible, alien beauty.

There had to be a village somewhere. There had to be a kind person somewhere. One after the other his feet crunched forward. All was not lost now, and with each step forward his heart lifted. Thin, hungry dogs emerged from the mounds, watching him pass down the road. If he showed too much weakness, they would attack. One step, another step, his frame in agony. It had been a very fitful night in the cold and the wet; but even then he had gained an hour or two of piece, or at least oblivion.

The human spirit, it's very tough, a voice said, and he looked up almost startled, although accustomed to voices now. An hour of endurance, and he was halfway to the church. He could only hope there was someone there, a kindly priest, a nun who still believed in caring. It was unlikely, he already knew that, but he couldn't stop now. To stop was to die. The sun became warmer with each step, his skin dried, his hair no longer dribbled water down his back, and his clothes began to move away from his body, as they, too, began to dry. He had survived the night, and that in itself was an astonishing achievement.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/why-i-wont-be-leader-but-ill-go-in-my-own-time/2008/09/10/1220857637764.html

PETER COSTELLO has declared that he is not interested in leading the Liberal Party, freeing the party to sort out its leadership woes in the coming weeks.

In an interview with the Herald, the former federal treasurer said he was pursuing options outside politics and would leave Parliament when it suited him.

He said that his position had not changed since the day after the election when he renounced any claim to the party's leadership and signalled that he was planning to leave politics.

In the interview, which presages the publication of the first extracts from his memoir exclusively in the Herald from Saturday, Mr Costello expressed frustration at the speculation that has dogged his every step since.

"I think I've made it clear," he said. "I'm not seeking the Liberal Party leadership.

"They say, 'Oh, we've had a bad week, better bring Costello back.' I think that's basically what happened. And I said, 'No, I'm not seeking the leadership, I don't want the leadership'.

"Which proves that there must be some huge plot. I'm not going to go out and say it every day because the febrile state they're all in, the more I say it, the more they speculate."

He said he supported the leader, Brendan Nelson, and had told him so.

Mr Costello said that he was considering some options outside politics: "I've got a few things that I'm working on but my position as a backbencher is quite separate from any return to the leadership.

"I'll continue to serve my constituents and if I get to the point where I feel I'm no longer able to do that as well as I want, I'll make an announcement then. But at the moment I'm very happy serving my constituency. But I'm just a backbencher."

The Liberal Party has retained Dr Nelson in the leadership, despite dismal polling figures, because it has been hoping that Mr Costello might be persuaded to take the leadership.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24327202-662,00.html

PETER Costello has blasted ex-Coalition leader John Hewson for being incompetent and called for a Liberal Party makeover to allow it to more easily refresh leaders.

In his 400-page memoir, the former treasurer also takes a shot at John Howard for blocking his participation in the 2000 Walk for Reconciliation as he tried to display a more "humanist" side.

He will also claim credit "holus-bolus" for the big economic reforms undertaken by the Coalition government, according to sources familiar with his book.

The Herald Sun yesterday revealed the key details of the Costello memoir.

Senior shadow minister and close Howard ally Tony Abbott said changes such as the GST were a "joint effort" between the Coalition's two most senior figures.

Mr Costello will return to Australia today from the US.

He will be under intense pressure to answer questions over his future.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson yesterday conceded the continuing speculation was unhelpful.

Mr Costello is set to challenge suggestions the former PM drove the Coalition's economic agenda, instead claiming the credit for big changes, including the GST and balancing the Budget.

"It was no one else's credit but his. Howard was sort of second-guessing him, and taking credit," said one source familiar with the memoir.

The man dubbed by his father-in-law as the best prime minister we never had will call for reforms to the Liberal Party.

He argues that there is virtually no difference in policy between the Nationals and his party, but stops short of calling for a merger.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/09/10/2361197.htm?site=science&topic=latest

Three decades after it was conceived, the world's most powerful physics experiment has begun on the outskirts of Geneva.

Scientists have started up a huge particle-smashing machine and are aiming to re-enact the conditions of the Big Bang that created the universe.

But an Australian scientist says he would be quite happy not to find what has been called the holy grail of cosmic science, the Higgs boson, in the mega-experiment in Switzerland.

Dr Aldo Saavedra, a particle physicist at the University of Sydney, made the comments as colleagues at European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), near Geneva, switched on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

"I'm hoping for something completely different," Dr Saavedra said.

"It would be really nice if nature actually provided some very puzzling thing that theories haven't actually thought of."

For decades scientists have theorised the existence of a particle, called the Higgs boson, that explains how other particles acquire mass.

The Higgs boson is believed to produce a field that interacts with particles and gives them a property we interpret as mass, explains Dr Kevin Varvell, also of the University of Sydney.

"In the absence of something like the Higgs boson, particles would all travel at the speed of light and be unretarded as they went through space," he said.

But Dr Saavedra does not care much for Higgs bosons.

"It's not much fun if you actually go and look for something that theories have been predicting for the last 10 years," he said.

Renowned British astrophysicist Professor Stephen Hawking this week bet $US100 that the LHC experiment would not find the Higgs boson.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again," Professor Hawking said.



Mural on a wall, Glebe, Sydney, Australia.

Once Caught There Was No Escape

*



And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion, Dylan Thomas.


Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they've told you what you think it is you want to hear.

Alan Corenk




The book is both a memoir and a meditation on the changing nature of journalism. He has been working as a general news reporter on the country's two leading broadsheet newspapers, for almost a quarter of a century, since the mid 1980s to the present. During that time journalism and the newspapers themselves have changed dramatically. Once reporters had to hunt for a working phone booth before filing their copy, sometimes in the pouring rain with wind whipping through the booth. Now the only problem is whether the signal drops out on your mobile phone.

He was in his 30s when he joined the staff of The Sydney Morning Herald. He had already been working as a freelance journalist for many years, writing for publications including The Bulletin and The Financial Review and had lived and often colourful and bohemian life. In the first, faltering years, it seemed that every magazine he wrote for collapsed and died the minute they published him; and he appeared in the last editions of such august publications as Ash and The Metallic Tadpole.

He has been involved either directly as a reporter or on the outskirts of many of the country's major events over those years; in more recent times with the boy in the suitcase story of Dean Shillingsworth, the two year old who's body was found stuffed into a suitcase floating on a western Sydney pond. And the Macquarie Fields riots. Those riots, triggered by the deaths of two housing estate boys during a police car chase, exemplified problems afflicting Australia's welfare dependent under-class.

They were crying, they were caught beside the road, they were in darkness and in hell and there was no way out, no way the could resume a normal life. Once in mourning, once in night, we were entirely fragmented. The typewriter hummed and he was caught in many broken passages, but once caught there was no escape. It was there, in London, working as a cleaner for a mad queen with a silver wig and an Airdale sitting in the front seat of his red BMW that he finally made the decision that he would live or die by the typewriter, come what may.

Brian Flowers, if that was his real name, was picked up by immigration and deported back to Australia, straight to Pentridge Jail, where he was serving time for a complex financial scam - for complex read, something he did not understand. There were other ways out. But at his age, doing bum jobs simply lacked dignity. Picking up glasses in The Bell hotel at Kings Cross in London for a pound an hour while interviewing famous authors as a sideline. Running through buildings holding a spray in either hand, drenching the place with a fresh smell that almost made him gag, but at least made the residents think the cleaner had been there.

While he had made small dribs of money out of freelancing, doing these sorts of bum jobs at 30 entirely lacked the dignity and sense of adventure they had held when he was younger. His life was slipping away. The books, wild, meandering, senseless things, remained unpublished. There was only one path left, to do what came relatively easily and what he was interested in, writing and journalism, the twin forks, fantasy and truth, or a meditation on the truth. In retrospect, he often thought it had been good for him to be forced to write about the real world, rather than retreat into obscure fantasy, drinking and smoking too much as he destroyed himself in order to produce ever greater, more convincing images.

Thus it was that he began to write for magazines. At first it was music magazines, poor payers always desperate for copy, that he wrote for. It was the era of XTC and The Pretenders, and he ate them up in a world consumed. There was always more to do. The record albums mounted up. He hired a space in the middle of a giant inner-city warehouse, and pounded away through the long nights, the building creaking around him. Money was always short. He always felt as if he was surrounded by darkness, a hostile world. He hated having to sell himself, but soon worked out an old idea with editors; always offer them three different ideas; it's easy to say no to one idea, but three forces them to pick. And once they've picked it's their project.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://business.smh.com.au/business/time-to-aim-high-on-climate-change-20080909-4cyj.html

Time to aim high on climate change

Ross Gittins

The latest report on climate change by the economics professor Ross Garnaut is the most disheartening government report I've read. It tells us how hugely destructive climate change is likely to be, but doubts that the world's governments will be able to agree on effective action to halt it. Now you know why economics is called the dismal science.

Garnaut quotes an authoritative American study of the consequences if nothing is done to fight climate change and average temperatures rise by 5 or 6 degrees by the end of this century.

Such a change would be "catastrophic", posing "almost inconceivable challenges as human society struggled to adapt". "The collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilise virtually every aspect of modern life," the study concluded.

Among the destruction would be the extinction of more than half the world's species. The Great Barrier Reef and other coral formations would almost certainly be killed and much Australian farmland rendered useless.

Worse, the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica would be highly likely to melt, greatly raising the sea level and inundating coastal areas in Australia and many other countries. These changes would be irreversible.

Garnaut says that to reduce these risks to acceptable levels, we need agreement and action by all the major countries to stabilise the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million - although 400 would be better.

(Note that we've already reached 455 parts per million, so we'd go well above the 450 target before eventually getting back down to it.)

But Garnaut doubts that any comprehensive agreement will be forthcoming from the post-Kyoto negotiations at Copenhagen in December next year or in negotiations soon after.

Summoning all the optimism at a dismal scientist's disposal, however, he says "there is a chance, just a chance, that humanity will act in time and in ways that reduce the risks of climate change to acceptable levels".


http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24321608-5000117,00.html

Relax, truth has surfaced

KEVIN Rudd's global warming guru has finally - and reluctantly - exposed the con. Ignore everything the Government has told you.

The truth, conceded Professor Ross Garnaut last week, is that it really is cheaper for Australians to do nothing about global warming.

And, no, it's not immoral to figure there's no point spending big money to "stop" this warming when it won't make a blind bit of difference.

No wonder the Rudd Government refuses to comment on Garnaut's latest report, released on Friday. Much of the argument for its grand plan to make us slash emissions from 2010 has just been destroyed.

I guess it's just hoping no journalists, most of whom are warming believers, will care to notice what Garnaut has just admitted through gritted teeth. As far as I can tell, only the Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman has drawn the unmistakable conclusions.

Let's assume just for now that man's carbon dioxide emissions really are heating the world. Let's also assume that heating would be bad, and wouldn't actually help crops grow. Let's also ignore that the world has in fact cooled since 2002.

Even given all that, it's bizarre to think Australia should lead the world in slashing emissions, losing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs.

What difference to the world could Australia make, when we pump out less than 1.5 per cent of all man's greenhouse gases? Why make such sacrifices when giants such as China and India are stamping on the growth pedal, getting gassier by the week, and have vowed not to stop until they're rich? It's brainless, of course.

And to that argument, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has had one glib response: panic now or pay later.

Or as he put it on June 23, and again on June 26: "The economic cost

of inaction on climate change is

far greater than the economic cost

of action."

One government minister, from Treasurer Wayne Swan to Environment Minister Peter Garrett, after another repeated the mantra -- that we must pay now or pay more later.

Here, for instance, is Climate Change Minister Penny Wong on June 24: "The economic costs of inaction are far greater than the costs of responsible action now."

But is all this actually true?

As Akerman has pointed out, Garnaut in his draft report in July calculated the cost if we did nothing about "climate change" and just adapted to whatever turned up.

The cost by 2020, he estimated then, would be a cut of 0.7 per cent in the GDP we'd normally expect.

Now compare that claimed cost with what we'd pay if we actually tried to stop global warming.

In his report last week, Garnaut says if we cut our emissions by 25 per cent by 2020, and the rest of the world somehow agreed to do likewise, our GDP would fall 1.6 per cent.

If we cut emissions by 10 per cent, we'd lose 1.1 per cent.

And if we simply adopted the weakest version of the Government's planned emissions trading scheme, even without actually cutting gases, we'd still lose 0.9 per cent.

That is: doing nothing about global warming turns out to be cheaper than "doing something" every single time.

So Rudd is exactly wrong: the economic costs of action are far greater than the economic costs of inaction.

That's according to Garnaut's own reports, which, incidentally, point out that whatever happens, we're still likely to be seven times richer in 2100 than we are today. That's assuming that any reliance can be placed on his models, which haven't been checked by anyone outside the loop.

Now before you dismiss Garnaut as just another evil sceptic, consider this. He's actually the deepest believer in the theory that man is heating the world to hell. In fact, he even asked the City of Yarra Council for permission to build a steel roof on his home on the grounds that global warming would cause "severe and more frequent hailstorms".

And, like so many devout believers

in global warming, Garnaut skips

over inconvenient truths -- such as

the fact that even the alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's four assessment reports admit that "decreases in hail frequency are simulated for Melbourne".

So Garnaut is a believer and confirmed catastrophist, but even he is now wondering how sane it is to slash our emissions when we're so irrelevant on our own.

He now recommends that the Rudd Government promise only to cut our emissions by 10 per cent by 2020, a target that has horrified the green movement and warming scientists. Greens leader Bob Brown in particular is apoplectic, saying cuts of at least 40 per cent are needed to save us from Armageddon.

Labor itself was thought to be toying with promising cuts of 20 per cent.

But now Garnaut says just 10 per cent is the most we can realistically hope to cut without sending jobs overseas for no real gain to the climate.

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24304472-5001030,00.html

By Piers Akerman

September 07, 2008 12:00am

NO SINGLE issue better illustrates the Rudd Government's gross incompetence than its blindly ideological approach to the question of climate change.

Fortunately, and perhaps accidentally, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's own hand-picked climate change guru, Professor Ross Garnaut, has now driven a truck through its principal argument.

In the 10 months since Rudd, Treasurer Wayne Swan, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong and Environment Minister Peter Garrett have held office, the Government has constantly decried and denigrated as ``irresponsible climate-change deniers'' all who question their views .

The snide use of the word "denier'' to link sceptics with those who deny the actuality of the Holocaust is so obvious it hardly deserves mention.

But its repeated usage is indicative of the gutter nature of the massive propaganda campaign waged by Rudd and his colleagues as they attempt to capitalise on their symbolic signing of the politically correct Kyoto Protocol.

Fixated with the flawed reports prepared by the totally partisan Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and falsely claiming there is a "consensus'' among climate scientists that human activity is responsible for global warming, Rudd has pushed a warped agenda based on extraordinarily dubious modelling.

And such an agenda can, in all reality, have no effect on the planet, let alone the behaviour of other nations.

For the whole of their period in office, federal Labor's mantra has been simple: the cost of doing nothing about climate change will be greater than the cost of doing something.

Now, however, former foreign affairs mentor Professor Garnaut has revealed that mantra is false.

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/

What fear campaign? What emotional blackmail? What wild exaggerations?

From the Victorian Education Department’s Classroom Energy Monitor Checklist:

Turn off the following:

Lights
Computers
Heaters
Fans
Air Conditioners
Printers

What happens if you don’t do it?

The Mountain Pygmy Possum is so cute! It’s also not happy! Heating up the earth with greenhouse gases will melt all the snow where it likes to live.

Hmm. Either these preachers are stretching the truth or a lot of scared energy monitors are turning off a lot of lights, because in the real world…
r> The state has had its coldest winter in 10 years and snow is expected to continue to fall in alpine areas this week as spring begins. Snow was falling on Mt Buller yesterday afternoon and was expected to continue in the evening.... The snow season has been extended to October 5 on the mountain.

One day a lot of former students will match what they were taught with what they can actually see, and then their lesson will at last be complete.

(Thanks to reader Stephen. No link to class monitor guide.)

UPDATE

Al Gore warned of catastrophic sea level rises in the near future of 6 metres. ABC science guru Robyn Williams predicted even worse - apocalyptic rises of as much as 100 metres by 2100.

Jennifer Marohasy brings reassurance to those stupid enough to believe either:

A study of sea level rise from ice melt in Greenland and western Antarctica has just been published in Science and concludes that a rise of 0.8 metres is possible by 2100, but even 2 metres ”physically untenable”.

Research scientists W.T. Pfeffer, J.T. Harper and S.O’Neel calculated how much ice and water would need to be lost from Greenland and Antarctica for a two metre rise, then how fast contributing glaciers would need to move in order to dump that much ice, and concluded that a two meter rise in sea level by 2100 would require significantly faster ice velocities than had ever been reported before.

To reach even 0.8 metre rise would, the study says, require “accelerated conditions”.
>
(Thanks to reader Neville.)



A mural on the side of some innere-city terraces, Glebe, Sydney, Australia.

A Big, Rambling, Indian House

*



http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/salmanrushdie.bookerprize

One day in 1976 - I'm no longer certain of the date - a young, unsuccessful writer wrestling with an enormous and still intractable story decided to start again, this time using a first-person narrator. On that day, much of what is now the beginning of Midnight's Children was written. "I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time." "Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came." "Handcuffed to history." "Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon." I can still summon up the feeling of exhilaration that came over me as I discovered Saleem Sinai's voice, and in doing so discovered my own. I have always thought of that day as the moment I really became a writer, after a decade of false starts. "My clock-ridden, crime-stained birth."

By the end of 1979 I had a completed manuscript, and the book had publishers, the best there were in those days, Jonathan Cape in London and Alfred Knopf in New York. Their support encouraged me to think that I might at last have written a good book, but after the long years of unsuccess I was still plagued by doubts. I managed to set them aside and plunge into another novel, Shame, and thank goodness I did, because it meant that when Midnight's Children had its first, extraordinary success I did not have to wonder how on earth to "follow that". I had already written a first draft of Shame by the night of the Booker, and so I had work to do.

Midnight's Children took an unusually long time to be published, because of a series of unfortunate events. Cape and Knopf had agreed to print jointly in the United States to save money, and then a printers' strike began. When that ended, and the book was finally printed, a transport strike meant that copies could not be shipped to London. When the copies finally arrived, a dock-workers' strike meant they could not be unloaded. And so the publication date slipped and slipped, and I chewed my fingernails. I had other worries, too. The Knopf dust jacket was a livid shade of salmon pink, inaugurating the salmon/Salman problem that would plague me for ever after, and I didn't like it. I didn't much care for the Cape cover either, but when I timidly asked if I could see some alternatives I was told grandly that I could not, because that would delay the publication even further. (Publishers have since become more receptive to my concerns.) It was easy to see the pre-publication gremlins and uncertainties as harbingers of a catastrophe to come.

The catastrophe didn't happen. The things I remember most vividly about that wonderful moment of first success are a small lunch in Bertorelli's restaurant in Charlotte Street at which my editor Liz Calder, the book's early reader Susannah Clapp, a couple of other friends and I celebrated the book's critical reception, and a nervous, superstitious moment, just before I entered the Stationers' Hall for the Booker dinner, when Carmen Callil, then the publisher of Virago, told me I was going to win, which immediately convinced me I would not. Oddly, I remember very little about the UK reviews. The three I have never forgotten were written by Anita Desai in the Washington Post, by Clark Blaise in the New York Times, and by Robert Towers in the New York Review of Books. There was also one memorable bad review. The BBC radio programme Kaleidoscope had devoted a great deal of time to my novel, and given it the works: Indian music to introduce it, a reading, a sympathetic interview with me, and then it was over to their critic . . . who unreservedly hated the book. The programme's presenter, Sheridan Morley, kept asking this critic (whose name I've forgotten) to find some little thing to praise. "But didn't you think . . . Wouldn't you at least agree that . . ." and so on. The critic was implacable. No, no, there was nothing he had liked at all. After the magnificent build-up, this negative intransigence was delightfully, bathetically funny.

Midnight's Children, a book which repeatedly uses images of land reclamation, because Bombay is a city built upon reclaimed land, was itself an act of such reclamation, my attempt to reclaim my Indian origins and heritage from my eyrie in Kentish Town, and by far the best thing that happened to it, and to its author, was its reception in India, where people responded not to the magic but the realism; where Saleem's narrative voice felt to many readers - as it had to its author - like their own; and where the book was so heavily and successfully pirated that the anonymous pirates started sending me greetings cards. "Happy Birthday from the Pirates." "Happy New Year. Best wishes, the Pirates." These, perhaps, were the ultimate compliments.

With the passage of time there have inevitably been some revisionist assessments. Such critics as DJ Taylor in England and Amit Chaudhuri in India have deplored the book's influence - which, according to Taylor, has been "almost entirely malign", while for Chaudhuri my novel embodies "all that was most unserious about India - its loudness, its apparent lack of introspection and irony, its peculiar version of English grammar". I don't much care. I remember the day Saleem's voice first burst out of me, the joy and liberation of that day, and I'm proud of the way that young voice immediately attracted and still attracts a legion of younger readers - and that, I'm happy to say, will do.

Salman Rushdie.



He had interviewed Salman Rushdie in the room the same room where he had written Midnight's Children. It was before the Fatwah and his fame had spiralled out of all control. Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things. He had walked with Al Alvarez on Hampstead Heath, he had used his new found status as a freelance journalist to pursue all his literary idols, and had been successful to quite some degree. He met Anthony Burgess, Dirk Bogarde, Joseph Heller, all gone now, he interviewed Gore Vidal and hunted down Paul Bowles in Tangiers, he had dinner in Madrid with Ian Gibson, who had just written a biography of the Spanish poet Lorca, and he climbed and he twisted here about, the lonely voice from far off Australia.

The British, of course, treat Australians with something between amusement and contempt, or at least they did in those days, and it was relatively easy to inveigle his way into all sorts of situations. Salman was a special case. In those days, before time and age and numerous life pressures crowded out the days, he would always read the books before interviewing the author. He had particularly loved Midnight's Children, as had millions of other readers, and had read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it is now known, even chasing down some of the locations in the book, the sprawling, chaotic, wealthy areas of Bombay with its fading glamour and crumbling old temples.

The book had resonated with the chaos of India, and with his friend Martin they had embraced these days of chaos and charm. The house where Rushdie lived at that time, in Kent Town he remembered, was a large hushed house which would have required substantial wealth to have bought, even back then. He was living in squats at the time, and the wealth struck him as much as anything. Rushdie had come from a well off merchant Indian family, and this surprising wealth, here in London, at the centre of things, was impressive to an antipodean. Oh how he had valued that walk with Al Alvarez on Hampstead Heath, as they talked of Sylvia Plath and The Savage God. Oh how it all seemed to point to a glorious literary career, if only he kept writing, if only he kept on moving.

The house was hushed. A maid had opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing to him. A wife appeared briefly, very briefly, before disappearing into the bowels of the house. He was taken up to Rushdie's study. In those days, before his short hand and personal hieroglyphics were anything to write home about, he used a tape recorder, which he set up duly. His own life had been riddled with failure and dereliction, excessive drinking and bohemian friends, and he was quietly overawed, although he tried not to show it, at all that was being shown him, the windows that were opening up, this different world of wealth and influence and success.

Rushdie told him of his first science fiction novel - Grimus - which he utterly related to because his own first novels had been science fiction. And then Rushdie showed him a black and white photograph of the house that features in Midnight's Children, a big, rambling, Indian house where he had grown up. Outside, before he knocked on the door, he had frantically read the last pages of Shame, the book he was ostensibly interviewing him about, a sprawling, black work set in Pakistan, where few of the characters are admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. Rushdie seemed impressed that he had actually read the novel.

The interview went well. He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him with the phenomenal success of Midnight's Children. He showed him the desk where he had written it; and asked, if you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, sitting here, could you have possible imagined it would be a success? No, he answered, as if they were equals, as if he, too, would ultimately go on to have a famed career, for the beauty of the young is there is always hope, the disasters, the failures, the bites of reality, none of it has set in yet.

Afterwards, Rushdie had seen him graciously to the door, all the charm and magnificent courtesy of the wealthy Indian, all the vast diversity of their wealth and the complex, accepted wisdoms of their culture, and he walked back down the road into his own contrasting life in that overwhelming city. And he always followed, after that intimate hour with one of the world's greatest authors, his career with interest, the extravagances of Satanic Verses, the fatwah, the security, the changed wives, his increasing status into the literary stratosphere. While he went back to Australia and all his own books failed, and ultimately he became a journalist. The public relations person for Jonathan Cape told him Rushdie had told her it was the best interview he had ever done. That was a source of pride in a disintegrating life, as chaos after chaos proceeded to mount upon him.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/07/hurricanegustav.mediabusiness

Two big polls in America and Britain this summer told the same story - 45 per cent of Americans asked what caused global warming said 'natural causes' or 'case unproven'. In the UK, 60 per cent of respondents told Ipsos-Mori that scientists weren't sure what triggered climate change - and 40 per cent thought it might not be as bad as painted anyway. In short, you can have 2,500 scientists all signed up to the same grim hymn sheet - but still not commanding belief.

Who do you blame for that? Mediamen blame the media, naturally enough. George Monbiot of the Guardian finds Channel Four at the root of all evil, and affronted scientists join him in that charge. Yet the spectacle of Gus running out of gas raises a somewhat different hypothesis.

The entire weight of the White House, its scientific advisers and its climate service warned of impending tragedy. Every TV weather forecast had its red ball of destruction rolling in. A million souls rolled out of town. And yet, in essence, very little transpired.

'Gustav does its worst but New Orleans survives,' said an almost reproachful Guardian headline. Gustav's worst was simply not bad enough... And, in turn, that raises an awkward emotional hiatus. The god of science, speaking via assorted oracles, thinks it knows what cities will be under water by 2050, which lands will be burnt and arid by 3000 - but it can't tell us, here and now, where a hurricane will hit in five hours' time, or with what velocity. And the contrast opens wide. 'Phew!' - the blinking Bun is mopping its brow. Take your tablets of doom with a pinch of salt. Scientific prophesy, as my dad used to say, can be 'all wind and water'.

Now, I don't doubt the threat or reality of climate change. It's ominous that such a threat isn't widely believed - and widely thought to be exaggerated. But have we - the scientists, the politicians, the hacks - got our tone of voice right? Every step we take is complex, and pretty uncertain. (A press seminar I was at recently saw one distinguished green belabouring another for daring to link hurricane frequency to global warming.) Tracking Gustav's last offshore hours isn't like measuring polar ice caps, to be sure. Moving butts in a bind isn't like mapping rainforests.

But credibility is common to both, and crucial. It counts when the likes of Hanna and Ike threaten devastation - and when they don't. So it's time to ask, more deeply, why the public's scepticism about climate change is growing, not fading. And every assertion we make has to be argued in detail stripped of hysteria, not wrapped in the mother of all hyperbole.

Advancing Hysteria by Editing Skeptical Views of Global Warming
Photo of Noel Sheppard.
By Noel Sheppard (Bio | Archive)
August 18, 2008 - 12:32 ET

Remember back in November when Nobel Laureate Al Gore actually told NBC's Meredith Vieira that trying to cover global warming from a fair and balanced perspective was wrong, and only climate alarmists should be given any attention in pieces concerning this controversial subject?

Well, a Stanford social psychologist has recently done a study of how people's opinions about global warming change if skeptical views are edited out of news stories, and the results, though not surprising, should scare the heck out of free thinkers around the country.

As reported by USA Today on August 13 (h/t NBer nofate, emphasis added):
Story Continues Below Ad ↓

Armed with new research into what makes some people environmentally conscious and others less so, the 148,000-member American Psychological Association is stepping up efforts to foster a broader sense of eco-sensitivity that the group believes will translate into more public action to protect the planet.

"We know how to change behavior and attitudes. That is what we do," says Yale University psychologist Alan Kazdin, association president. "We know what messages will work and what will not."

During a four-day meeting that begins today in Boston, an expected 16,000 attendees will hear presentations, including studies that explore how people experience the environment, their attitudes about climate change and what social barriers prevent conservation of resources. [...]

News stories that provided a balanced view of climate change reduced people's beliefs that humans are at fault and also reduced the number of people who thought climate change would be bad, according to research by Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick. [...]

By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.

American Psychological Association leaders say they want to launch a national initiative specifically targeting behavior changes, including developing media messages that will help people reduce their carbon footprint and pay more attention to ways they can conserve. They want to work with other organizations and enlist congressional support to help fund the effort.

Wow. So, the APA wants to work with media to brainwash citizens, and it's going to ask Congress to fund their efforts.

No Global Warming Since 1998 As Planet Cools Off
UN scientists admit that natural weather occurrences more powerful than CO2 emissions


Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet

Top UN scientists have been forced to admit that natural weather occurrences are having a far greater effect on climate change than CO2 emissions as a continued cooling trend means there has been no global warming since 1998.

But despite overwhelming signs of global cooling - China's coldest winter for 100 years and record snow levels across Northeast America - allied with temperature records showing a decline - global warming advocates still cling to the notion that the world is cooling because of global warming!

"Global temperatures will drop slightly this year as a result of the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said," reports the BBC.

"The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer."

"This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory."

The report admits that La Nina and its counterpart, El Nino, are "two great natural Pacific currents whose effects are so huge they resonate round the world."

Wait a minute.

According to man-made global warming advocates, CO2 emissions are the main driver of climate change and natural weather patterns caused by sun activity and other native contributors play second fiddle.

But here we have UN climate scientists admitting that natural climate change contributors have eclipsed the effect of CO2 emissions for the past 10 years, even as carbon belchers like China and India have increased CO2 output at record levels!

Global temperatures have remained reasonably flat since a decline in 1998 and cooling trends are now being observed despite the fact that carbon dioxide levels have increased in the atmosphere.

Following the accelerated industrialization period of 1940-1970, when carbon emissions reached a crescendo, global temperatures plummeted, prompting an international fearmongering campaign about the deadly consequences of global cooling.

So-called experts were lavished with media platforms to tell us that all animal life in the sea would be extinct by 1979 and England would be underwater by the year 2000, amidst a myriad of other outlandish proclamations.

As the graph above shows, an expected downturn in global temperatures over the next 15 years will force climate change alarmists to become even more feverish.

Al Gore's army are going to have to get more creative and blame any weather event whatsoever, be it hurricanes, tsunamis, or floods that have battered the planet for eons, and yes even global cooling, on their favorite justification to tax, regulate and control every aspect of our life - global warming.
http://www.easttexasreview.com/story.htm?StoryID=5726

Texans do not fall for green schemes
by Peggy Venable / Contributing Writer

Traveling to West Texas recently, I marveled at the wind farms that appear to have sprung up between Sterling City and San Angelo. It is a sign of the times.

Many states are clamoring to be green, and though Texas has programs in place to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, it has refused to jump on the global warming regulatory bandwagon.

It appears that whatever Texas is doing, we are doing it right.

While a number of states have created climate change commissions with action plans relying on regulations, mandates and taxes, Texas has considered, and rejected, the need to regulate greenhouse gases, instead embracing a free-market approach.

Global warming schemes increase energy costs. Affordable and plentiful energy is the cornerstone of a good economy. And Texans are enjoying a relatively good economy.

If Texas were a separate nation, it would have the 10th largest economy in the world. It has consistently been ranked one of the best states in the nation for doing business.

While many states are facing budget shortfalls, Texas is experiencing another huge budget surplus.

Yep, Texas is doing something right.

As the Legislature convenes in January 2009, Texas will likely have a budget surplus of over $14 million. This is at a time when 29 states face budget shortfalls totaling $48 billion in 2009.

The state facing the most critical shortfall is California with a whopping $22.2 billion deficit, over 21 percent of the current budget. California also has aggressively embraced global warming policies, which can be a major drag on economic growth.

Texans aren’t eager for their state to be like California – or to be the green policy laboratory for what have proven to be very costly taxes, regulations and freedom-limiting policies.

Most experts believe that the United States can’t do anything that would make a noticeable difference to global average temperatures because of rapidly growing emissions in the developing world. If the whole country can’t make a difference, individual state policies create a lot of economic pain for truly zero environmental gain.

Despite this obvious flaw, environmentalists have been successful at encouraging some states to do what they have been unable to get the national or international community to fully embrace. Implementing climate change schemes incrementally may be part of the radical environmentalists’ game plan for taking control of our lives; but if so, Texas isn’t suiting up.

Texas has some unique challenges. We provide 60 percent of the nation’s petrochemicals and about 30 percent of its gasoline and diesel fuel.

We have our own power grid, and produce 10 percent of the electricity generated in the country.

Around 70 percent of our electric capacity comes from natural gas-fired generation, and although natural gas prices have gone up 252 percent since the end of 2001, electricity prices have risen about 27 percent.

The Governor’s Competitiveness Council recently reported that Texas’ deregulated power market has helped shield consumers from some volatility in natural gas prices. But our growing population and economy require more energy, which means more coal, nuclear generation, natural gas, and wind power.

Gov. Rick Perry has flung down the gauntlet. Texas will lead the nation in becoming more energy independent. But we will solve this problem the Texas way, which precludes spending money on global warming schemes and dictating citizens’ behavior.

Railroad Commission Chairman Michael Williams contends that Texans will not settle for the proposition that a healthy environment has to come at the expense of a healthy economy. He, too, has worked to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit to address both challenges.

Texans believe in incentives, not penalties, to fuel efficiency. But Texans need more information.

Americans for Prosperity launched a hot air education tour, and has traveled to 20 states and 32 cities across the country including Houston and Dallas. The 70-foot tall hot air balloon reading “Global Warming Alarmism: Lost Jobs, Higher Taxes, Less Freedom.”

According to Phil Kerpen, AFP policy director, the numerous energy taxes and regulatory schemes being proposed internationally, federally, and locally in the name of fighting global warming are the most immediate threat to freedom and prosperity. The costs associated with some of these proposals — both in dollars and lost liberty — are staggering.

The Lieberman-Warner federal legislation proposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would directly hit Texans’ pocketbooks. Approximately 100,000 jobs would be lost by 2020, disposable household income would drop as much as $3,384; and gasoline prices would increase between 76 percent to 147 percent, with electricity and natural gas prices increasing as much as 145 percent, according to a study by the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Council for Capital Formation. Low- income families would be hit hardest.

And while climate alarmists have bombarded citizens with apocalyptic scenarios and pressured some states into environmental political correctness, Texas has just said “no”.

Spending money on global warming schemes and dictating citizens’ behavior is not the Texas way.




Outside Wilcannia, far western NSW, Australia.