Foreign Affairs begin at home. As a former state secretary of the Labor Party, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has an understandable interest in election campaigning but flitting around the world on the country’s behalf severely limits his ability to engage in the task of vote getting. This week, however, will be an exception with Mr Smith having lured the US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to Perth on Thursday and Friday as a guest of the Government. The press statement announcing the impending arrival did not concern itself with important matters of world affairs that may or may not be discussed. This visit is being sold at the parish pump level with the Foreign Minister saying Secretary Rice’s visit is an opportunity “to share with her the pride Western Australians have for John Curtin’s foresight in securing our post World War II economic and strategic security” and to provide the opportunity to “highlight Western Australia’s significant economic, social, intellectual and sporting contribution to Australia over the past few decades.”
Determined to be a climate optimist. As the special pleading for exemptions from planned curbs on green house gas emissions begins in earnest I am determined to become a climate change optimist, but the difficulties in getting a world wide consensus just look harder every day. Hence I am ignoring the upward slope in this graph below showing mean world temperature anomalies over the last 20 years as measured by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies; It is just too depressing to contemplate when even our government, which was elected at least partly because it showed concern about a world getting warmer, unveils a policy that will reduce nothing for a decade. I prefer to notice the dramatic decline in temperature in the year just ended and to draw a trend line that starts in 2002 and has the world getting cooler.
A new government for India? A vote in the Indian Parliament tomorrow will determine if the world’s largest democracy has an early election. A confidence motion will be debated following the decision of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to go ahead with a nuclear accord with the United States. If Mr Singh’s shaky coalition survives, the parliamentary vote the election will not be held until next May. Indian bookmakers assess the prospects as a 70% chance of the Government winning the vote.
What about jobs for our boys? Conservative is not even the right word for it when Kevin Rudd goes and appoints a National Party man to a delightfully soft cop as Ambassador to the Holy See in Rome! The Labor Party lads and lasses might not come out and say it in public but there will be considerable resentment within the Party that Tim Fischer as a former Deputy Prime Minister in the dreaded Howard Government has been appointed.
Global Warming and THATgraph: For God’s sake Dick if you did a curve fit for the first five points of the graph you can prove that in the few years before 1994 the climate was also cooling. Trouble was the termperatures rose again and continued to rise. I don’t know what you are qualified in, but I don’t think it is climate analysis or modelling. If you want to be a real climate skeptic with some street cred. Go back to school take some units in physics, mathematics probability and statistics, numerical modelling, hydrology and the earth scientists. Practice these with equally or even better educated people in this field, for twenty or thirty years and do some original research. Have it peer reviewed and then publish. I read Crikey because I am sick of reading this sort of misrepresentation in the mainstream media. You are starting to remind me of a sort of Andrew Bolt think alike.
Organisations doing the science on Climate Change include, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA), “they put a man on the moon”, the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, (British Met), le Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique du CNRS and and the Colorado State Dept of Atmospheric Science. Are they all simpletons or simply misguided fools desperate to keep their government funding going? Perhaps, and I think this is more likely, they are some of the best minds in the world of the calibre of Eistein, Dirac, Hawking and Darwin.
The debate about whether the planet is warming is more of a 1980’s one and is simply not the issue. The issue is whether warming is being caused by mankind and whether anything we do will make any difference. Clearly what Australia does or doesn’t do will have almost no affect on global warming. It may clean up our own back yard so rich Australians can feel good about having solar panels to run their LCDs while we expect poor Chinese and Indians to not aspire to having electric lights. The real debate is whether the amazingly expensive solutions posed by western economies are the most effective way of tackling global warming. Economists like Bjorn Lomberg author of Cool It queries current massive expenditures on solutions which may prove useless and poses cheaper alternatives which may be more quantifiably successful
You’re wrong about the Fischer posting. K07 made huge inroads into the Nats regional base last year and this can only help consolidate that vote. Tim has conducted himself impeccably since leaving politics, played an important role in the 2020 Summit and is well regarded by all but the most one-dimensional partisans in the ALP. Ideologically he is probably closer to the ALP Right than he would care to admit and he was far from comfortable with the post-Tampa extremes of the Howard era. No doubt he and Amanda Vanstone will have a bit to catch up on in Rome.
Liked the happy interpretation of the global mean temperature graph. The depressing thing is that when Andrew Bolt did exactly the same thing with figures on temperature, ice cover and so on for the recent decade in the Herald-Sun last week, he actually believed he was on to something. Nor could any of the talking head journos on Barry Cassidy’s Insiders program convince him that this was not the case; in fact, they seemed incapable even of demonstrating what a complete idiot he is on this subject. In the simplest possible language (in case Bolt is reading): 10 years of data, when applied to the huge and complicated subject of climate change, prove nothing. Not a little bit of something, Andrew; not a tiny chink in the majority scientific case on global warming. Nothing. Not enough observations, Andrew, to have any statistical significance at all. Why do you think scientists have invested such efforts in building very long series of climate change data? Find out what R-squared means Andrew; read a little of why statisticians know that snipping off a little piece of a very long data series, and then insisting that that short series has the same statsitical reliability as the long one, is just plain wrong. Good grief.