I want a more dynamic title for this forum. We are having a tremendous time, fuelled by a great deal of coffee and an even greater deal of conversation and all we have is a title that sounds as if I invented it on one of my Lesser Public Servant Days. There are between 20 and 24 of us jurors, and we come from five shires and the Australian Capital Territory. The organisers and speakers all have trouble pronouncing Palerang, which has given us much merriment.
This morning was mainly organisational. It's a very well balanced group of citizen jurors, though a couple more young people would have been nice. The occupation and education mix is is brilliant, as is the gender mix. Not sure about culturo-religious.
I'm sitting next to an ex-army bod who is setting up a sustainable farm. He has done some fascinating things with his life and I have heard some great anecdotes about life in the peacekeeping forces. I spent morning tea talking to a really cool grazier who has an even cooler daughter who is in publishing. And then there is the Latin scholar, the mechanical engineer, the aviation safety expert, the caterer, the nurse, a couple of educators, a robotics engineer, a public servant or two, a real estate agent, more farmers and a potter. Some of us are city, some semi-rural, some very rural.
Our first vote was to rearrange the tables so they look less lovely but are easier to work with. Then we worked out we call all speakers by their first names, including the bishop. Then we decided we might need cricket updates at appropriate times.
And then we got to work.
Our afternoon was spent listening to speakers and cross-questioning them, and we get to do the same to nine innocents tomorrow. On Sunday we attack our massed evidence and turn it into amazing stuff. Already the back wall is lined with papers and thoughts and burning ideas - five colours of sticky notes reminding us that we aren't permitted to stop thinking. My table has already decimated a full sticky-note pad, so full of burning issues and brilliant thoughts are we. Or are they. I get one big thought to every two the others have. When this turned me disconsolate, my neighbour said that I was contributing very nicely by helping us work out the priorities.
In terms of content, our first speaker was the best of the day, though all were good. Bryson Bates from CSIRO gave us solid handouts about the scientific background to global warming and talked through them quickly. One member of our table wanted more from this presentation. My feeling was that Bryson needed an extra half hour, but that there wasn't a half hour to give him. And that I had to stop misreading the legends on the tables and figures and graphs he gave out. You don't want to know what I misread. Well, you probably do, but I'm not going to say :).
Mark Howden - also from CSIRO - was good, but light on detail until pressed.
Steve Whan (NSW MP for Monaro) was the government official who did the welcoming, since the Forum is part financed by the NSW Government. No support from the Federal Government, we asked? No.
Steve did the nice-guy-politician thing and shook hands with us firmly and read our name tags as if they mattered. He spoke passionately and knowledgeably for about 15 minutes without notes. He knew what he was talking about, so much so that the speaker after him had to cut *his* speech by ten minutes because he had been beaten to the data. What I liked was the clarity in Steve's mind between individual very bad things and the increase in frequency of such happenings.
He was very much the government spokesman, but he was honest about it. He was very, very clear that it isn't the vote for the political party that will change things, but the voting patterns within the major political parties (except, Gillian notes, we had just worked out that the Federal Government isn't involved in this initiative and that Bega Valley has a stronger interest in meeting the Kyoto Protocol aims than does the Federal Government).
He encouraged us all to create a groundswell in election years and to get these issues on the wider agenda and to get them on the wider agenda in a form we are comfortable with. He reminded us not to accept policies that are less than concrete in the lead-up to the next election and to ask and ask and keep asking till we get them. A juror asked him a question round then, prefacing it with "Sorry, I've forgotten your name."
Clinton White from the Capital Region Development Board spoke, and so did Sue Robb from the Cooma-Monaro Shire. It was pretty clear that they are working solidly on greenhouse issues, but it was also pretty clear that they were congratulating themselves on their work. We heard a great deal about the paper trail. That trail may well lead to really brilliant outcomes, but I will need to see those outcomes.
I have a bunch of handouts. The most extensive of these is Bryson Bates' science of climate change. I've scribbled all over them, but anyone who can get to my place is welcome to take a look. He suggests seeing Gore's movie, though he did explain the bits where Gore chose one scenario above another. He has also published quite a few of his findings in IPCC documents (some of which are free downloads on the IPCC website) and there will be a new IPCC report next year. So you can get rather more information than he gave us by checking the IPCC site.
I've got a lot more science in my skull than I had 24 hours ago. It's all terrifyingly understandable. By terrifyingly, I mean that there have been a ton of studies. For some of the graphs there were eight studies combined, showing different trends, and each and every one of those trends were worrying. Someone asked Bryson about the best case scenario from all the academic research, and he said a 2 degree rise in temperature before the century is out. We're starting to contemplate what this means in terms of change in oceans and currents and winds and rain.
Jurors are already sounding out possible policy solutions. I keep on mentally tallying consequences of this and that and one big flow-on effect I can see is that poverty is going to be scarier as the globe warms. That's going to have to be factored in without hurting our capacity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And that particular combination could be a political killer.
On that cheerful note, I'm going to sleep. Well, maybe just to doze. I guess there is an underlying logic in it being hot tonight, but that sort of irony is much over-rated.
PS I can't remember how to do a lj-cut. If this post is too long (and it probably is) then if someone can email me the code, I'll fix it tomorrow night.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
