I love the way climate scientists like to make predictions rather than measurements. Halfway through this year I read a report in the Adelaide Advertiser that 2007 was going to be the hottest year ever. Now Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, one of the alarmists in the debate, has predicted in Oslo, which is about as far as you can get from Bali where the Son of Kyoto is starting to take shape, that 2007 will be a cooler year than 1998, and only the 6th hottest year ever.
I’m happy to wait until the figures are in to see what really has happened, but this looks like a pre-emptive strike. Get the prediction into the public sphere at a time when everyone is on pilgrimage to Bali, so no-one will notice. Then early next year, when the figure is actually known, you can say it is no big deal, and we were predicting this all along.
Bob Carter at JCU has been predicting that 1998 will be the peak of global warming for some years now. I reckon he’d have to be pretty lucky for this guess (because I don’t think it can really be more than a guess) to be true. So far his luck is holding.
He’s also got a YouTube hit on his hands. This video has so far had 41,735 views, and I gather there is interest from television stations in showing it as a documentary. Perhaps it could be retitled “Real inconvenient truths”?

It’s fascinating how lies infect one organ in the media, and then get transmitted on. Here’s one that first invaded The Courier Mail and then spread around both the mainstream and alternate media.
If you believe The Courier Mail, the current deadlock in the Queensland parliamentary Liberal party could have been avoided. In an article which does not appear to be online, it was claimed that there was a meeting two weeks out from the last state election when Michael Caltabiano could have been substituted for Bruce Flegg. Somehow this meant that the current leadership impasse would not have occurred.
The whole premise is wierd. Why would Michael Caltabiano accept the leadership two weeks out from an election? And if he had, he lost his seat in the election, so he wouldn’t be leader now. Someone else would have been, and it wouldn’t have been Tim Nicholls who was only elected at the last election. It therefore might have been someone else acceptable to the Santoro faction, but it could just as easily have been Flegg or McArdle.
You’d probably still have the same deadlock in the party. Whoever peddled this story to the journalist should have been dismissed as unreliable and possibly unstable, which is to put it very kindly.
I’ve spoken to a number of people who were involved in the meeting and the version I’m about to put seems much more realistic than the one accepted by The Courier Mail.
Apparently two of Flegg’s campaign workers, both prominent Liberals, were drawn into an ad hoc conversation with party director Geoff Greene when they went in to Liberal Party Headquarters to collect some campaign material. Greene was distraught because he had just received polling showing the Liberals only winning Surfers Paradise. He said that Flegg was the problem and had to be dumped for Caltabiano.
Greene was asked what Warwick Parer thought about this. While The Courier report represents this as an attempt to do a deal, it was portrayed to me as an attempt to talk Greene through what he was saying, who had “clearly lost it”. “I haven’t asked him,” was Greene’s reply. “Well shouldn’t you?” was the response, “This is a pretty major play you’re suggesting”.
Parer was contacted by phone by Greene and prevailed upon to come in to the office. Parer also contacted Caltabiano. The word from Catalbiano was that he wasn’t keen.
Any possibility of an arrangement completely unravelled after Parer made a phone call to Howard. The Prime Minister didn’t think it was a good idea either. It’s such a dumb idea that I wonder anyone even bothered him with it.
So, there was no deal, nor any possibility of a deal. This version seems more iikely to be right to me. The only thing that surprises me about it is to what degree Howard was micro-managing events in a state division.

We ratified the Kyoto protocol and received a standing ovation. If you’re into instant gratification it was a moment to savour for a couple of seconds. If you’re not, you should ask yourself what was actually achieved.
The Kyoto protocol is in tatters. Most of the signatories are in breach of their obligations, and some of those who have achieved their targets have only done so via economic recession, while the rest have done it by exporting their manufacturing industries to non-ratifying countries like China and India! The carbon trading markets meant to sustain the protocol targets are malfunctioning.
Instead of playing an honourable role where we acknowledged a responsibility to limit greenhouse emissions but were not prepared to ratify a flawed agreement, we’re now one of the maddening crowd. We’ve traded our influence for social warmth. While we were complying but refusing to sign we were simultaneously showing a good example and making a strong critique.
Ratifying Kyoto is meant to give us leverage, but in fact we had plenty when we weren’t a ratifying naton. More than we’ll have now we’ve given in. The leverage we had was on display when we got the Sydney declaration from the major greenhouse emitters at APEC.
One of the persistent rounds of the Hawke-Keating years was that we needed to be “respected” by the rest of the world. In reality this meant bowing to fashion. We had to pretend to be things we quite clearly weren’t, like an Asian nation, because being who we were wasn’t good enough. Every time a UN committee stacked full of the sorts of countries that bring up the long-tail of any international index criticised us, we had to import a load of hairshirts instead of telling them to take a running jump.
One of the legacies of Howard’s term in office is that we don’t care about those things too much anymore. We’re happy being who we are. Or we were. The left pilloried Howard for being a “suck hole” to the US. Their solution, it seems, is to do the same to any collection of international organisations that demand instant gratification. Rudd is playing ball on this issue. I hope Kyoto is where he draws the line.

One of the most striking things about the Queensland Liberal Party Parliamentary stand-off is the way that the organisational chieftain, Warwick Parer, has tried to assert superiority over the parliamentary leadership. He even wanted a casting vote in the parliamentary meeting.
But, unlike Flegg, Parer doesn’t even appear to be able to count on half of his relevant organisation because the position that the Liberals State Council came to does not give him any rights in the party room debate, and takes an advisory, rather than an executory, role at the highest.
They should have moved no confidence in Parer because his public interference was outside his powers, and worsened the public perception problems for the party.
The motion that was passed reads like this:

1. That in compliance with Section 54 of the Constitution of the Liberal Party of Australia, QLD Division, State Council confirms that the State Parliamentary Party has a right to determine it own leadership and govern its affairs according to its own rules; and
2. State Council calls on the State Parliamentary Party to:
(i) Enact rules to provide a mechanism for a secret ballot to be held on any occasion that a leadership challenge is called; and
(ii) Ensure such rules provide a mechanism to resolve a deadlock should such a ballot result be tied; and
(iii) Meet until it elects a leader who has the support of the majority of its members; and
(iv) Report to State Council on Saturday 8th December 2007 at which all Parliamentary Members are invited to attend.

The motion was moved by Gary Spence, who is Parer’s preferred replacement, and Michael Caltabiano, the most senior Santoro representative, apart from Parer, on the State Council.
There are elements of a compromise about this motion, indicating that neither side is confident of unquestioning support on State Council, but the primary clause in the motion is a complete rebuff to Parer, and recognises that Council can, and should, make no more than recommendations to the parliamentarians.
In fact the motion is a bit of a mess. It was obviously meant to be much more aggressive, before it was amended with the first clause and the two parts don’t hang together well.
Then, the second part isn’t internally consistent. For example, the motion fails to acknowledge that parts (ii) and (iii) essentially contradict each other. If you have a clear winner, then there is no deadlock to resolve. And this ignores the fact that there is already a mechanism to deal with a deadlock – the chairman has a casting vote.
The reporting function is also essentially superfluous as Councillors can read about it in the papers if the parliamentarians come to a solution in the party room. It makes sense as a deadline, but then, why not call it a deadline?
Other assertions that have been made in the media also appear to be contradicted, such as the suggestion that the State Council would change the constitution.
Parer continues to insist that Flegg has broken a convention by not allowing a spill motion. It’s not clear that he didn’t, but even if he did, it wouldn’t have got up, on his casting vote, so the whole issue is a distraction. I’m happy to be pointed to some acknowledge convention that proves me wrong, but to date no-one has.