“The coronavirus story is unfathomably large. We must get the reporting right,” tweeted, on 11 April, the Guardian’s media reporter Amanda Meade. But as often happens with big, complex issues, Covid-19 experts took a pounding yesterday when it was revealed that modelling had grossly overestimated the disease’s incidence. At 9.25am Australian Eastern Standard Time, the story’s author, Liam Mannix, tweeted, “New official government modelling suggests we're on the course to *eliminating* COVID-19 in Australia. A month ago models forecast 110,00 [sic] daily infections. 2 weeks ago epidemiologists said elimination was very unlikely.” How the landscape changes as a speculative line of theory converges upon reality!
Others had, it became clear, picked up on the same threads. “Climate Science Deniers Turn to Attacking Coronavirus Models,” tweeted, the same morning, Professor Christopher Wright of the University of Sydney (my alma mater), including with the headline a link to a story on Scientific American’s website.
My story, for what it’s worth, also risks being tendentious but for a different reason than applies to those pessimistic medical scientists. I don’t want to disassemble the consensus on global warming, I just want to point out how fickle are humans.
We follow trends. There’s something about us that makes us do so. We are social animals; we like to share and so we can rally together when our survival is threatened, as East Gippsland blogger Peter Gardner noted on the morning of 21 March. His tweet included the headline of a story on the website of news provider The Conversation, which ran: “Coronavirus response proves the world can act on climate change.” Western Bonime, a resident of California, reprised Gardner’s theme, tweeting, “COVID proves that it is possible to mobilize the entire population of the Earth in days. The key to creating that same level of collaborative overnight pivot for climate change may lay in creating that same levels of personal fear of death from the loss of our planet.” This was dated 6 April but was put into my feed on 10 April by the president of WWF, Pavan Sukhdev.
And indeed: what about climate change? “Emissions are likely to plummet in the first half of 2020. But we’ve already emitted so much the ice sheets won’t notice,” tweeted UK journalist Patrick Galey on 24 March at 6.30am Australian Eastern Daylight Time. With operations of the airline industry severely hampered and people mostly staying inside their homes to work (online) and to converse (online), the rate of carbon emissions had slowed globally, but polar ice sheets, as Galey pointed out, still shrink.
My story has its origins three months earlier – on Saturday, 21 December – when French journalist Francois Rigot DM’d me on Twitter asking if I’d be interested in being the fixer for a documentary about the bushfires for which he was visiting Sydney to shoot footage. A fixer organises interviews, helps with navigation, books hotels, and does other miscellaneous tasks that often require some local knowledge to complete easily.
I don’t know why he contacted me but from time to time people do this if they want to find a journalist. My personal website has been up on a server with my ISP since 2007, so I have a public presence in addition to the blog. There’s also the LinkedIn profile. On the website are stories I have published, including many with an environmental theme.
After Rigot contacted me I made an ad on a Facebook group that freelancers use, and a woman named Ashley – marvellous how fate lends us of her bounty – expressed interest, so I put her in touch with the man and they organised things between themselves.
On the same Saturday an artist whose work I have bought before, named Zuza Zochowski, advertised a work on her Facebook timeline, saying she would give it away if someone would donate money to the NSW Rural Fire Service. I asked for a link, which she posted in a comment, and then I went to the organisation’s website and got the account details I needed. Using my internet banking interface I completed a transaction and grabbed a screenshot of the receipt, which I saved to hard disc. Then I loaded the JPG to the artist’s post in a comment. I gave her my street address in a PM and she posted the painting, which arrived at the post office near me in the first week of January.
I never heard from Rigot again but I did hear from Ash, who not only thanked me but included in her email information about the difficulty of the task she had accepted, which included travel in addition to some tricky personnel issues. She had used contacts of mine that I had detailed in an email to the videographer.
The oil painting of African violets shall be sent, this year, to my framers so they can get it ready to hang on a wall.
On 9 January an auction started in the social media feeds of artist Craig Waddell, who I follow on Facebook. He put up an image of one of his paintings – a green and mauve landscape in his signature gestural impasto style – inviting bids from people and promising that the person whose offer was highest, and who made a donation to the Wildlife Information, Rescue and Information Service in the same amount, providing a screenshot of the transfer as proof, would have delivered it to his or her home. There was a deadline and I was, regrettably, pipped at the post.
On the final day of December I put up a post that, among other things, chronicled changes in the Sydney sky, and now here are some photos of my TV. They were taken with a Canon PowerShot SX620 HS compact digital camera I bought in early January at Officeworks. It’s not as good as the other digital cameras I own because it’s not easy, using it, to blur images; the logic driving the camera’s focus function is too perfect.
In the second week of January I took a pair of old cameras to be fixed. They are a Canon PowerShot A530 bought in 2006 and a Canon PowerShot SX130 bought in 2012. On the 24th of the same month I phoned the camera shop and agreed to prices to have the devices fixed, then at the end of February once they had been fixed I went to the shopping centre to pick up the cameras.
The following photos were taken on Sunday 5 January between 2.17pm and 2.25pm. There are 16 photos in this selection but on the day I took more than this, with most of what I made being unsuitable because it was too sharp.
Others had, it became clear, picked up on the same threads. “Climate Science Deniers Turn to Attacking Coronavirus Models,” tweeted, the same morning, Professor Christopher Wright of the University of Sydney (my alma mater), including with the headline a link to a story on Scientific American’s website.
My story, for what it’s worth, also risks being tendentious but for a different reason than applies to those pessimistic medical scientists. I don’t want to disassemble the consensus on global warming, I just want to point out how fickle are humans.
We follow trends. There’s something about us that makes us do so. We are social animals; we like to share and so we can rally together when our survival is threatened, as East Gippsland blogger Peter Gardner noted on the morning of 21 March. His tweet included the headline of a story on the website of news provider The Conversation, which ran: “Coronavirus response proves the world can act on climate change.” Western Bonime, a resident of California, reprised Gardner’s theme, tweeting, “COVID proves that it is possible to mobilize the entire population of the Earth in days. The key to creating that same level of collaborative overnight pivot for climate change may lay in creating that same levels of personal fear of death from the loss of our planet.” This was dated 6 April but was put into my feed on 10 April by the president of WWF, Pavan Sukhdev.
And indeed: what about climate change? “Emissions are likely to plummet in the first half of 2020. But we’ve already emitted so much the ice sheets won’t notice,” tweeted UK journalist Patrick Galey on 24 March at 6.30am Australian Eastern Daylight Time. With operations of the airline industry severely hampered and people mostly staying inside their homes to work (online) and to converse (online), the rate of carbon emissions had slowed globally, but polar ice sheets, as Galey pointed out, still shrink.
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My story has its origins three months earlier – on Saturday, 21 December – when French journalist Francois Rigot DM’d me on Twitter asking if I’d be interested in being the fixer for a documentary about the bushfires for which he was visiting Sydney to shoot footage. A fixer organises interviews, helps with navigation, books hotels, and does other miscellaneous tasks that often require some local knowledge to complete easily.
I don’t know why he contacted me but from time to time people do this if they want to find a journalist. My personal website has been up on a server with my ISP since 2007, so I have a public presence in addition to the blog. There’s also the LinkedIn profile. On the website are stories I have published, including many with an environmental theme.
After Rigot contacted me I made an ad on a Facebook group that freelancers use, and a woman named Ashley – marvellous how fate lends us of her bounty – expressed interest, so I put her in touch with the man and they organised things between themselves.
On the same Saturday an artist whose work I have bought before, named Zuza Zochowski, advertised a work on her Facebook timeline, saying she would give it away if someone would donate money to the NSW Rural Fire Service. I asked for a link, which she posted in a comment, and then I went to the organisation’s website and got the account details I needed. Using my internet banking interface I completed a transaction and grabbed a screenshot of the receipt, which I saved to hard disc. Then I loaded the JPG to the artist’s post in a comment. I gave her my street address in a PM and she posted the painting, which arrived at the post office near me in the first week of January.
I never heard from Rigot again but I did hear from Ash, who not only thanked me but included in her email information about the difficulty of the task she had accepted, which included travel in addition to some tricky personnel issues. She had used contacts of mine that I had detailed in an email to the videographer.
The oil painting of African violets shall be sent, this year, to my framers so they can get it ready to hang on a wall.
On 9 January an auction started in the social media feeds of artist Craig Waddell, who I follow on Facebook. He put up an image of one of his paintings – a green and mauve landscape in his signature gestural impasto style – inviting bids from people and promising that the person whose offer was highest, and who made a donation to the Wildlife Information, Rescue and Information Service in the same amount, providing a screenshot of the transfer as proof, would have delivered it to his or her home. There was a deadline and I was, regrettably, pipped at the post.
----------------------
On the final day of December I put up a post that, among other things, chronicled changes in the Sydney sky, and now here are some photos of my TV. They were taken with a Canon PowerShot SX620 HS compact digital camera I bought in early January at Officeworks. It’s not as good as the other digital cameras I own because it’s not easy, using it, to blur images; the logic driving the camera’s focus function is too perfect.
In the second week of January I took a pair of old cameras to be fixed. They are a Canon PowerShot A530 bought in 2006 and a Canon PowerShot SX130 bought in 2012. On the 24th of the same month I phoned the camera shop and agreed to prices to have the devices fixed, then at the end of February once they had been fixed I went to the shopping centre to pick up the cameras.
The following photos were taken on Sunday 5 January between 2.17pm and 2.25pm. There are 16 photos in this selection but on the day I took more than this, with most of what I made being unsuitable because it was too sharp.
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