What we’ve got here …

Cool Hand Luke is one of my Dad’s favourite movies. My Mum may have taught me how to read when I was a toddler, but I loved watching Saturday matinee movies with my Dad when I was a kid. That and being allowed to stay up for the Hawaii Five-O credits, and putting David Carradine Kung Fu-style moves on my Dad & brother while my Mum was studying at night. My Dad didn’t have many opportunities as a child, & while we were far from spoilt, if there was a way for our lives to be better – whether it was as exchange students, going to university, beach holidays – my Dad worked hard, bloody hard, to ensure his four children had every door opened to them. All we had to do was walk through & succeed.

I just found out my Dad is in hospital again. I’m scared, but not surprised. On a recent visit home. I found my 65 year-old Dad – for so long a larger than life character, 6’2″ tall, athletic, teller-of-tall-tales & tamer of tigers, diminished by the heart operation he had in February; his spirit as wasted as his body. He shuffles around the house in slippers & forgets to take his medication unless my Mum reminds him. It’s as though something from above swooped down on him after the angiogram revealed a heart valve leaking in several places & took 20 years from his life. The worst part of watching this unfold is that he knows it’s happening. My memory is shot, he told me, flatly, as he set off for his hour-long walk on Wednesday morning. I told him he was pushing himself too hard; he’s not putting on any weight by exercising so much. It seemed to be his way of fighting back, & I couldn’t bring myself to argue with him.

My Dad and I have never had the easiest relationship; from the baby he nicknamed the ‘Pride of the Pacific’, time & trauma have seen years pass with a fierce love that neither of us seems able to put into words or express physically. My brother can at least shake his hand. I think the last time my father & I hugged was a decade ago. ‘Thanks, Kimberley’, he said, eyes looking down when I gave him his Father’s Day present. When he set it aside on the kitchen dresser. I walked away, gutted. He couldn’t even open a card from me; a card where the words flowed so easily, the card which told this man who gave me life how much I loved him, how lucky I am that he is my Dad.

How similar we are, Dad. My memories of you standing in the doorway of your parents’ home, unable to talk to your own father’; forever the little boy who followed him everywhere until, when you were five, he stopped being your best mate and started belting you instead. You, the one who stayed with him as death refused to take him quickly or mercifully. I want to be with you, Pete, I want to be by your side & tell you it’s going to be all right. I want to hold your hand & question your doctors & fight this infection for you.  I know you won’t die, Dad; I just want you to look at me again & see a woman with a heart as big & brave as yours – not a damaged, fearful child.

Back to Cool Hand Luke and the two variations of its most famous line. I saw it again a few months ago, and the delivery of those lines sits sharp in my mind this evening. Firstly, The Captain, who utters a warning to the entire chain gang after striking Luke, Paul Newman’s defiant inmate:

What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate. Some men you just can’t reach.

Finally, Luke takes the words and owns them. Sheltering and shouting, making his final stand but not before railing at whatever it was that made him what he is:

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.

Tonight, I feel part the character of the Captain, partly Luke. I want to scream at my Dad, I don’t want him to be someone who stays out of reach; & like Luke, I want to rant at the ghosts of our past for making us the people we are. Two mighty hearts, unable and unwilling to yield.

So … I’m not a climate scientist

Writing this with a fair amount of trepidation, but in the firm belief that real stupidity arises from not asking questions.

On Saturday morning, I thought about the Say Yes Australia rallies in support of the so-called ‘carbon tax’. (Aside: why is it beyond the ALP to give anything a simple name? Half the battle of political will is lost when the Opposition’s label sticks).

I thought about the pros & cons of the policy formerly known as the Emissions Trading Scheme. I don’t there are many cons; NSW has had a carbon credit scheme in place for years, but few people probably realise it, and while it was a Labor policy, the Gillard Government is not pointing to it as a handy example that its idea is hardly a first. I think polluters should ‘pay’ for carbon emissions, but recognise that it will come at an economic cost, firstly to industry & secondly to consumers. Fears of unaffordable power bills are something I recuse myself from commenting on as I don’t struggle. Then again, I believe that compensating people for existing behaviours is a self-defeating proposition. There are many ways people can save on their power bills; simple old rules that my Mum drilled into us: switching off appliances at the plug so you don’t pay for stand-by power; washing in cold water & knowing peak & off-peak periods. Maybe it’s time for a savings-based approach, which would recognise cuts in household consumption on an account basis, so that larger families are not disadvantaged or treated in the same way as single people like me.

What troubled me on Saturday is not the economic argument for pricing carbon emissions. I get that. This is where the trepidation comes in. I cannot, for the life of me, explain climate change. I cannot articulate to a skeptic why action is required. I resort to a string of words; polar ice caps melting, rising sea levels, Tuvalu sinking, longer and more frequent droughts … and even then, I don’t know why.

My whole being is wired toward being able to answer questions. I am a curious person by nature – and if I don’t understand something, I ask questions, read from a variety of sources and listen to various points of view until I am able to draw my own conclusion. I like to know things. I like to be ready to be able to discuss things, not as an expert, but at least as an interested party. Here, sadly, is where climate change and I part ways. Climate science bores me rigid. I skip articles, ignore interviews – I define apathetic. I’m supposedly bright and engaged with the world – and I am ignorant. I didn’t even watch “An Inconvenient Truth”.

I accept that while some of it is me, not you, as someone who has spent a working life trying to communicate the why, I have to give climate science communication a fail. As a political adviser, I worked in many land use portfolios – I have seen, understand and can clearly articulate the problems caused by deforestation, salinity, beach erosion, even weeds. Maybe the climate change window passed me by, but now I feel like the dope at the back of the class, almost afraid of asking the question for fear of being laughed at by the other kids. Increasingly, I am disquieted when someone expresses anything less than full-throated support in public. I feel a sharp intake of collective breath and slogans, not reason, spewed forth. I don’t want a 140 character answer – but I want to be enticed by the subject. I don’t disbelieve the science, I just don’t understand it – and I’m not prepared to rely on, ‘well, 1,400 scientists and Tim Flannery can’t be wrong’ as an answer if I’m asked about it.

So … I’m not a climate scientist. Would one of you put your hand up and point me to some readable information from a range of credible sources that will help me. Otherwise I will continue to take Abraham Lincoln’s advice:

It is better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.