Apocalypse Never

Over the last nine months or so I have been spending a lot of time and energy trying to get some intellectual clarity on what is patently the most overwhelming issue of our time - climate change. 

I have read 13 books, two Quarterly Essays and numerous articles, watched half a dozen videos and visited three or four well-regarded web sites on a regular basis. I have explored the scientific, environmental, social, political and economic dimensions of this complex issue.

I have tried to be open-minded, and valiantly tried to come to grips with the science behind it all. I've been like a dog with a bone, trying to pin it down until even the most abstruse stuff became reasonably clear to me. That's how I've always worked. I don't sleep too well unless issues I'm wrestling with are sort of resolved.

Most importantly I have read both sides of the issue in roughly equal measure - the consensus view and that of the sceptics.

Previously in this blog I wrote about sceptic Ian Plimer's Heaven+Earth and how good I thought it was. Having read much more now, including a good sprinkling of very negative and dismissive reviews of this book, I have to agree that Plimer got a lot wrong, mainly in the details, due to a general sloppiness that should simply have been avoided. Hopefully, if he produces a second edition, which he should, a lot of this will be corrected. His basic vision however, the reach and depth of it, is overwhelmingly persuasive.

Three books I've read over the last few weeks (all published just prior to Xmas) are also essential reads: James Hansen's Storms of My Grandchildren; Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster; and Peter Taylor's Chill.

Hansen is universally recognised as perhaps the world's leading climate scientist. He is certainly the most well known, having been a key player in bringing global warming to the world's attention since the 1980's. He was instrumental, for instance, in bringing Al Gore into the frame. Storms of My Grandchildren is, remarkably, his first book, and I say remarkably because it is so well written. Literate, passionate and very persuasive, Hansen has that rare and natural talent for making difficult scientific concepts very clear and digestible for the non-specialist reader. 

Christopher Booker is on the other side of the argument well and truly. He originally founded the satirical magazine Private Eye and has in recent years, through his weekly Sunday Telegraph column, become the most conspicuous global warming sceptic in Britain. It would be fairly easy to dismiss Booker as a right wing nutcase, as many critics have (that is the usual fate of sceptics unfortunately), but that would be a profound mistake. His book, in my humble view, in the way it marshalls an enormous amount of detail and constructs its absorbing narrative, is one of the best of the bunch. Like in the Naked City, there are many stories about the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) and how it goes about its business of constructing consensus, and this is just one of them. For the history, politics and economics side of this debate you couldn't do any better than Booker.

Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory by Peter Taylor, is the one book I would advise you to read if you had no time to read anything else. Taylor is a highly regarded science analyst and has been an advisor to European governments on environmental issues for over 30 years. The beauty about Taylor's book is it reviews the scientific literature that has gained prominence over the last five years or so (post the IPCC reports), and that presents a new and critical perspective on the consensus view articulated by the IPCC. Whereas sceptics traditionally assault that view with claims of conspiracy, corruption and politicisation, Taylor allows the emerging and confounding new science of solar and ocean cycles to effectively demolish the 'establishment' naturally. Not that the world should be complacent. But we should be focussed on the real environmental problems not the illusory ones.

If a side has to be taken, then I've certainly ended up a sceptic. But, hopefully, an intelligent and well-informed one.

We are all familiar with the ancient and medieval literary device known as 'Deus ex Machina', which referred to the common practice of dramatists and poets of introducing a new character or event into the plot that magically resolved the story and brought things happily to an end. 

I am persuaded that we are seeing a similar syndrome today, in our modern story of climate change. It could be better termed 'Homo ex Machina'. The complex threads of Nature's story can't easily or satisfactorily be identified, so Man has been thrust onto the stage to bring resolution. 

So our modern story might be an ancient one after all. What a happy thought!

   

Flags and Republics - oh no, not again!

Two age-old Australian debates seem to be stuttering into life yet again, returning like the whiff of ancient and annoying farts.

I am passionately in favor of Australia becoming a republic and getting a new flag, but even if I live to be 250 years old I'll never see either come to pass.

Regarding the republic, of course most Australians would prefer it if the country sloughed off its colonial remnants, stopped borrowing the convenient constitutional machinery of another, older and more mature country, and got on with its own governance affairs like a proper, independent grown-up.

It's not the monarchists who will forever hold us back, with their insipid but dying sentimental attachments and the insidious insulting of our intelligence by implying Australians haven't got the wit to devise their own safe, secure constitution with all our current checks and balances embedded. No it's the republicans themselves who will forever hold us back with their tiresome and vitriolic debates about how the President should be chosen and what powers such a head of state should have. In 1999 the republican referendum was lost not just because John Howard corrupted the process from the word go by his framing of the question, but because a large clutch of dopey, populist, direct election republicans effectively derailed it. I see no sign of this passion abating - ever.

Walking the city streets today on Austalia Day I saw countless numbers of Aussie flags draped over the shoulders of young people, and, frankly, it made me sick in the pit of my stomach. Unlike the great majority of other countries, Australia has a flag that privileges its Anglo-Saxon, British heritage. And whenever I see young people, especially hoons and yobs, parading it about, almost thrusting it down your throat, I'm sensing the subtle but visceral message of white supremacy and Anglo superiority. It's in stark contrast to the Canadian flag for instance, which every non-Anglo immigrant could celebrate and flourish with the pride of belonging.

Once again we'll never get rid of the Union Jack in the corner, as when the rubber hits the road on these sorts of things in this country, our basest instincts unthinkingly prevail. Racism is very very subtle, which is why it is so powerful and entrenched. 

I remember about 20 years ago when I was responsible for editorial and production operations in Wiley a cover and blurb for a book about some feature of Australia came across my desk for approval, and the author was described as a 'seventh generation Australian'. I demanded that tag be deleted, much to the surprise and chagrin of the editor. She had no idea what I was talking about.

Enough said.

New movies worth seeing

The Lovely Bones is the new movie from Lord of the Ring's director Peter Jackson, and it's definitely worth seeing. It combines an absorbing, all too real world story with a rather tepid supernatural one. This worked in Alice Sebold's novel but it's irritating on film. The visualisation of the mystical, between heaven and earth, state inhabited by the murdered 14 year old girl until her plight is resolved on earth reminded me of those scenes from the Qantas commercial where the white coated kids from the choir go frolicking around beauty spots of the world singing 'I Still Call Australia Home'! Sweeping landscapes of fields, grasses, sand and sea, and nary a bitey nasty in sight. Boring as batshit. See this movie for the earthy story and the performances. Susan Sarandon as the alcoholic grannie is terrific.


With Avatar you're in typical James Cameron blockbuster territory and you'll debate with yourself whether you should really bother seeing it. If you do, go for the 3D version. It showcases the incredible technology underpinning so much modern film making. The storyline is a succession of cliches, frequently bordering on the ridiculous, eg the mineral under the sacred site where the natives live, and which the vulgar earthlings want, is called 'Unobtainable'!! The special effects are all pretty derivative and you've seen them all before, but...you'll have to admit it's all been superbly well put together into an exciting blockbuster package. Holiday stuff for sure!


Bright Star is Australian director Jane Campion's new one, focussing on the love affair between poet John Keats and his neighbour's daughter Fanny Brawn. The impossibly gorgeous Abbie Cornish plays Fanny. She's obviously, and for some unkown reason, been plumped up a bit for the role - by 5k at least - but the loveliness of her face, her eyes and nose particularly, which the camera adores, is mesmerising. Cornish brings alive the unbearable suffering of love and longing, and finally intense grief. The final scene where she hears the news of Keats' death in Italy, and her expression of profound grief, is rivetting, and the stuff of oscar nominations. Well worth seeing, and another triumph for Campion.


Spanish director Pedro Almodovar's obsession with Penelope Cruz is once again obvious in Broken Embraces. But having seen her in 2009 in Woody's Christina, Barcelona, Isabel Coixet's magnificent Elegy, and now this one, I have become an obsessive fan as well. She has to be, in my humble view, perhaps the most stikingly beautiful woman on the planet today! This is an enthralling movie that slowly unravels a complex story of relationships, from the comic to the tragic, and grips you all the way. Lovely in every way.

Great Holiday Reads!

The best books I've read in recent weeks are pictured above. If you're looking for a quality read or two for the upcoming holiday period you could do yourself a favor and read one or more or even all of these.

Peter Temple is an Australian crime novelist who is simply a must read. Five years ago he released The Broken Shore, a truly exhilarating novel which deservedly won a host of local and international awards. He writes literature, which distinguishes him from the great majority of hacks in the crime genre. He also has a incredibly fine ear for the richness and comedy of Australian dialogue. Everybody loved Shore and we were all desperate for another dose.

Along comes Truth. It's not a sequel, so Joe Cashin, the original lead character, a country cop, is barely there. But Villani, a jaded Melbourne senior detective, is an extraordinary and marvellous creation. I never thought I'd say this, but Truth is even better than Shore. The characters are so grounded and interesting, the dialogue is pure pleasure, and the Melbourne-based, multi-layered story, is rich and textured and extremely satisfying.

Much to my shame, I'd never read any Alex Miller before his new one, Lovesong. Miller has won the Miles Franklin twice, with Journey to the Stone Country and The Ancestor Game. Lovesong is simply one of the best books I've read this year (and I'm up to 73 so far!). It's a subtle, deceptively simple, but profound and disturbing story of a marriage and other close relationships. It stayed with me for weeks afterwards. I'm certainly intending to read more Miller and really looking forward to it.

Madeleine St John wrote The Women in Black way back in 1993 and it's just been re-released in Australia by Text. The women of the title all work in ladies wear in a Sydney department store in the repressive late 50's. It's a hugely enjoyable, insightful and comic exploration of their lives and loves, and well worth reading. It's become a bit of a classic and I can see why. Read this and you'll well and truly understand why the 60's was such a necessary revolution.

I picked up David Nicholl's One Day, not really knowing what to expect. (Why do we chose the books we do? I get so conflicted in bookshops when I'm browsing, looking for something that will absorb, satisfy and enlighten. If you pick one you don't pick another. These things take time to read, and making the wrong choice is really annoying, not to say expensive). Anyway, I got lucky with One Day. It's fantastic. It follows two students in London from their graduation to 20 years later, visiting them at the same time each year. They are simply wonderfully drawn characters, very different, whose lives go in totally different directions, but they are inexplicably drawn to each other. Our whole recent history - fashion, music, food, politics, society, etc - is the backdrop to these ordinary yet extraordinary lives. You'll get utterly absorbed in this book, I promise you.

I approached Nick Hornby's Juliet Naked with a fair bit of trepidation as I had a really bad experience a few years ago when I valiantly struggled to get beyond the first 50 pages of How To Be Good but ended up throwing it in the closest rubbish bin! It was dreadful. Juliet Naked however, his latest, is really quite excellent. A nice and sympathetic portrait of a woman who finally realises the man she's been living with for fifteen years or so is a total and ridiculous dick! Hugely enjoyable.

Emily Maguire is a young Australian writer who seems to be everywhere. I picked up her latest, Smoke in the Room, not really knowing what to expect other than a bit of inner city grunge which was fashionable fifteen years ago (what ever happened to Justine Ettler, who wrote the marvellous The River Ophelia?). Smoke in the River's starkly original central character is a 23 year old young woman who is a highly articulate, intelligent but depressed loser. She's a wonderful creation, and it would be marvellous if we could see more of her in Maguire's future works.

Two Great Political Tomes

For the last two weeks I've been thoroughly immersed in these two huge, heavy but wonderful political books. I can wholeheartedly recommend both of them to anybody who loves to luxuriate in the rich details of our contemporary political history.

Ted Kennedy's Memoir is a reflective and beautifully written story of his life and career as a Kennedy and as a member of the US Senate for nearly forty years. The whole rich family saga is here, as well as fascinating behind-the-scenes narratives of all the great legislative battles Kennedy was associated with during the Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Shrub administrations.

What a huge family! Ted was the last of nine children, and his brother Bobby and his wife Ethel had eleven for god's sake. Seemingly, hundreds (well...four) of the family were wiped out in small plane crashes, and disasters of one kind or another overtook many of the rest. You'd have thought they would have learnt not to go out! Still, there's so much love in this book, for family, friends, colleagues and even occasional foes, that makes it so warm and involving, and, frankly, absorbing.

Many of Kennedy's great speeches are liberally quoted, which gives the book a special, literary power as well. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Paul Kelly's The March of Patriots is also an enthralling read. If you want a superb, sympathetic and politically astute overview of Australian politics over the last thirty years you couldn't do any better than this book. And Kelly has a special gift for bringing even the most mundane and complex issues to vivid life. He brings a strong sense of story as well as a wealth of juicy detail to all the great policy initiatives and stoushes that have made the last few decades of our history so fascinating. Keating and Howard are the main protagonists, but there are many more.

He's a bit too fond of 'ism's', like nationalism, regionalism, exceptionalism, globalism, etc, which he uses to give his narrative a dramatic lift and nobler purpose, but nevertheless he remains pretty grounded throughout, and invests the story with plenty of energy and drive.

Huge structural shifts and policy reforms have (thankfully) been unleashed on Australia over the years encompassed by this book, and Keating and Howard have driven them with passion. Kelly's superb chronicling of these events is a must read.

Celebrate these new Australian films!

Blessed opened today around Australia and I rushed to see it because two members of its ensemble cast are simply my favorite female actors alive today: Frances O'Connor and Miranda Otto.

It's become quite fashionable in critical circles to denigrate Australian films of the last few years for being too dark and depressing and decidedly noncommercial. They've become too consciously indie and worthy, luxuriating in being labelled 'gritty'.

There's truth to that, but there's also untruth. See Balibo, Beautiful Kate and Blessed for fine recent examples of excellent local productions that are powerful and emotionally wrenching and worth all the investment that time, money and talent can make in them.

Blessed is simply amazingly good. See it for Frances O'Connor's performance alone. It's not a large role, but it's stunningly raw and harrowing. You don't so much see this film as subject yourself to it, but it's worth every bit of uncomfortableness you'll feel. I simply bawled at the end for at least five minutes. Thank god the credits kept the lights off!

It's directed and co-written by Ana Kokkinos, who wrote the superb Lantana. One of the other co-writers was Christos Tsiolkas, he of Slap fame, that extraordinary novel of modern Australian working class life, which I enthused over in this blog.

There've been plenty of wonderful Australian films released this year. Don't believe all you read.

The Genius of Paul Krugman

For years now I've been an enthusiastic reader of the Nobel Prize winning US economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

For so many reasons this guy is one of my all-time heroes! He's the scourge of the wingnut Republican conservatives in the US, particularly the neocons of recent times. He gives no quarter and lets them get away with nothing.

What makes him so powerful are two very formidable talents: the lucidity of his writing, and his exquisite intelligence.

Virtually singlehandedly he brought an end to Bush's crazy push to privatise social security in his second term, a proposal that would have savaged the entitlements and savings of tens of millions of Americans, but that was being sold as a way of rescuing funds from the dead hand of government bureaucracy so as to generate higher levels of returns on the market for individual citizens. Krugman's relentless and forensic critique of the proposal eventually sank it. Imagine the state those privatised funds would be in now after the financial crisis.

Krugman has written a number of books, but the latest and possibly best is The Conscience of a Liberal. There could be no better introduction to American politics and society than this magnificent and engrossing tome. The chapter on the rotten US health system and why it so desperately needs wholesale reform is one of the best things you could ever read on the subject.

But for a shorter intro to how good this guy is read his recent article in the New York Times called How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

Krugman got his Nobel Prize for his seminal work on trade theory. He challenged the long held belief that countries traded with one another because of the notion of 'comparative advantage'. Country A is good at making cheese and Country B isn't, so B imports the cheese it needs from A and sells stuff it's good at making to A in return. (Australia sells coal to China and buys cheap manufactured goods from China).

But, wait a minute...how about all those countries in Europe who make cars and import them as well? Italy, Germany, France and Sweden all export and import cars at the same time. So in fact does Australia, not to mention the US. Krugman blew the notion of comparative advantage right away. He looked at what was actually happening in the real world and then tried to construct a theory around it, rather than the reverse. Countries export as a way of reaching out to new markets, as a way of growing. And they import what they need and whatever takes their fancy.

This bias towards real world immersion is what has made Krugman such a compelling commentator on the current global financial crisis. He is a strong supporter of the stimulus packages implemented by so many governments around the world (in fact he considers they didn't go far enough) and a fierce denouncer of the 'debt is bad' mantra of wooden-headed conservatives.

Reading Krugman is a tonic, simply invigorating. His columns appear twice a week in the New York Times. I urge you to indulge!