Absolutely, or Abbott's personal shift is exposed for what it in all likelihood, most certainly, imo, was .. a purely political and most cynical move .. the integrity of Abbot's attitude toward woan's/man's/human's (grin) contribution to climate change is surely severely compromised as long as Maurice Newman maintains his influential position in Abbot's 'Teabagger if American?' mind ..
lol, i have had this one on tab for some days ..
Nation's very foundation built on right to choose own god
"The framers of the Australian Constitution were steeped in the Christian tradition, yet chose to create a nation that could accommodate religious diversity." Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Frontbencher Ed Husic's swearing-in on the Koran was celebrated by some, yet was the source of vitriol from others.
A common theme in many of the negative reactions was Husic had breached something fundamental in Australia's system of government. One person commented: ''How dare you disregard Australia's constitution like that. Absolutely sickening. Do we begin the push for sharia law now?''
Such concern is surprisingly prevalent. An email with a wide circulation is urging a ''no'' vote in the referendum because, ''by local government areas being recognised, sharia law can then be demanded in the local area, based on the [percentage] of Muslim people in that local area''.
The notion that permitting the Commonwealth to fund local government directly would open the door to sharia is ridiculous. Nevertheless, the charge has gained currency not because of its accuracy, but because it strikes a chord with those intolerant of the Muslim faith. When it comes to the vitriol extended to Husic, it shows a misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the basis of Australian government. This is done by asserting that, constitutionally speaking, Australia is a Christian nation.
There is evidence that can be marshalled to support this. The British law that introduced the constitution states that the people, ''humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God'', agreed to unite in one nation. Australia's monarch and head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, is head of the Church of England. Federal Parliament begins each sitting with the Lord's Prayer.
These examples fall a long way short of demonstrating that Australia was created as a Christian nation. In fact, the text of the constitution points decisively to the contrary. It shows up things such as the use of the Lord's Prayer in Parliament as an anachronism.
The framers of Australia's constitution were steeped in the Christian tradition, yet chose to create a nation that could accommodate religious diversity. This is reflected in one of the very few human rights protections in the document.
Section 116 prohibits Australia from having a state religion, including Christianity. It also guarantees the right of every person under federal law to exercise the religion of their choice, and says that a person's religion cannot be used to determine their suitability for federal office. It provides the clearest illustration of why, as a matter of law, Husic was entitled to maintain his religion on taking his oath of office.
In any event, people seem to have forgotten Husic had already taken a like oath. When he was elected to Parliament in 2010 he was sworn in with a hand on the Koran. At the same time, Jewish MPs Josh Frydenberg and Michael Danby were sworn in on the Torah. Their right to do so is implicit in the constitution, which says members can take an oath, without specifying to which god the oath is taken.
Australian law establishes a separation between church and state, and provides for religious choice. However, the regime is not complete. The constitutional protections say nothing about the states, which remain free to prefer one religion over another, and can ban the employment of people based upon their beliefs.
All this goes to show, even though Husic was entitled to swear an oath to the god of his choice, there is still much work to do. A greater effort must be undertaken to educate the community and to strengthen our laws and practices. Both need to better reflect that Australia is built upon the right of each person to adhere to whichever religion (or not) they choose.
George Williams is the Anthony Mason Professor of law at the University of NSW.
Heat on Abbott as US pushes G20 climate change action
PUBLISHED: 07 Mar 2014 09:19:00 | UPDATED: 08 Mar 2014 02:53:55
The latest US comments on climate change highlight a potential elephant in the room for Australia as G20 chair in 2014 and suggest a rare policy divide between Australia and its close US ally. Photo: Andrew Meares
John Kehoe
Key points * The Coalition is committed to cutting emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. * Mr Abbott said he didn’t want to ‘clutter’ the G20 agenda with worthy causes.
The United States is pushing for climate change to be an important agenda item when Australia hosts world leaders at the Group of 20 meeting this year, placing Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a potentially awkward position that conflicts with his domestic political agenda.
US President Barack Obama’s G20 emissary, Caroline Atkinson, said “addressing climate change” was an important issue for leaders in addition to Australia’s priorities of promoting stronger economic growth and employment outcomes.
International pressure is mounting on Mr Abbott to take climate change more seriously.
International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde last month made a veiled criticism about the government’s retreat on carbon pricing, urging Australia to remain a “pioneer” on climate change policy.
The latest US comments highlight a potential elephant in the room for Australia as G20 chair in 2014 and suggest a rare policy divide between Australia and its close US ally.
“There is [a lot of] high-level focus on the issue of climate and energy efficiency,” Ms Atkinson said at a G20 discussion at a Washington think tank on Wednesday.
“In the G20 – whether it’s Beijing where there are issues of air quality, other countries where there have been extreme weather events or impending water shortages – I think there is a growing understanding of the importance in addressing that.
“The G20 being a political body where leaders can come together is sometimes able to make a breakthrough.”
Abbott’s stance questioned
Mr Abbott has pledged to repeal Labor’s carbon tax. After winning last year’s federal election, he closed down the Department of Climate Change and subsumed its operations into the Department of Environment, to remove “duplication with costly bureaucracies”.
“World leaders are lining up to question Tony Abbott’s climate policy stance. I doubt Joe Hockey even had climate change as an agenda item at the G20 meeting, but each day Tony Abbott is being reminded that his position is taking Australia backwards while the rest of the world is moving forwards,” Labor’s climate spokesman Mark Butler said.
The government remains committed to meeting Australia’s goal of cutting emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, through paying big polluters billions of dollars to reduce their pollution.
However, European countries and Mr Obama are perceived to be more committed to addressing climate change. The US President’s proposed 2015 budget announced this week offered more than $US1 billion ($1.1 billion) in new funding for technologies to help communities prepare for climate change.
Countries such as Germany, led by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel, have privately expressed disappointment in Australia unwinding its carbon price.
Sources in Washington say that when foreign governments and stakeholders have broached climate change in G20 lead-up meetings, Australian government officials have told them the issue is not a priority and suggested that other topics be discussed.
Focus on economic growth
Mr Abbott said at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in January that the focus of the G20 would be to boost economic growth through freer trade, less regulation, infrastructure investment, better banking regulation and more effective tax systems.
“We do not want to clutter up the G20 agenda with every worthy and important cause because if we do, we will squander the opportunity to make a difference in the vital area of economic growth,” Mr Abbott said.“As leader he can allow it to be discussed, but does not have to be identified with it himself.”
Finance ministers and central bank governors who met in Sydney last month agreed to develop policies with the aim to lift world gross domestic product by more than 2 per cent above the current trajectory over the next five years.
Ms Atkinson, who is also the White House’s national security adviser for international economics, strongly endorsed these agenda items, before adding that climate change was an important issue for world leaders.
She made the comments in a discussion at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, alongside Australia’s G20 sherpa, Heather Smith.
Ms Smith did not mention climate change during her presentation and instead stuck to the Australian government’s script.
“The key thing that is on our mind is the concern about the pace of global growth .?.?. and how do we increase growth potential,” Ms Smith said.
Dedicated climate change section
Last year’s G20 leaders’ declaration signed in St Petersburg, Russia, dedicated a section to climate change.
“We underscore our commitment to work together to address climate change and environment protection, which is a global problem that requires a global solution,” the statement said.
Mr Abbott may come under pressure from other countries to mention climate change in the official communique when he hosts world leaders, including Mr Obama, on November 15-16 in Brisbane.
Australia has listed energy as a priority agenda item but has not mentioned climate change on its G20 website, preferring to focus on well-functioning energy markets, reliable supply to households and business and “energy efficiency”.
Colin Bradford, a G20 expert and senior fellow at Washington think tank the Brookings Institution, said Mr Abbott may be able to “fudge” the climate change issue by incorporating it into the energy discussion.
“The most damaging issue for Abbott would be trying to put this issue aside and ignore it,” Mr Bradford said.
Maurice Newman Maurice Newman believes Australia has become ‘hostage to climate-change madness’. Photograph: Julian Smith/AAP
Tony Abbott’s top business adviser, Maurice Newman, has been invited to meet climate scientists following his assertion that the world is in fact in danger of cooling, rather than warming.
On Friday Tim Flannery, head of the Climate Council .. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/ , told Guardian Australia he was keen for Newman to meet him and other scientists.
“I’d be happy to meet with him to explain the facts, we’ve made the offer and we await with baited breath,” he said.
“But there are deeper issues to this. Maurice Newman is a business adviser to the prime minister; you’d expect him to be representing the interests of the business community.
“But what he’s saying fundamentally misrepresents the interests of business, which faces a huge risk, along with the rest of us, from climate change. He’s using his position for a personal crusade in what, I think, is a serious dereliction of duty.”
Newman, who does not have a scientific background, has written a number of articles on climate change, as well as appearing on the ABC .. http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2014/s3990190.htm .. to discuss the topic, since his appointment as chairman of the prime minister’s business advisory council.
He has said that Australia has become “hostage to climate-change madness” and has also attacked the renewable energy industry.
Flannery said: “[Newman] is just demonstrably wrong. This is a fundamental problem for the prime minister, who needs to make him do his job. Anyone would be deeply embarrassed by this kind of performance. I have no idea where this idea of global cooling has come from.”
Gerry Hueston, former head of BP Australasia and member of the Climate Council, said: “Newman holds views that are out of step with those held by serious energy businesses globally and mainstream business in general.
“His views are scientifically wrong and completely ignore the economic and business risks that climate change presents. It is worrying that he is providing this sort of ill-informed advice on energy policy and climate risk to the highest levels of government.”
On Thursday, Labor called Newman’s comments “terrifying”, while Greens deputy leader Adam Bandt called on Abbott to fire Newman. The prime minister’s office has yet to respond to questions put to it by Guardian Australia on Newman’s repeated pronouncements on climate change.
A spokeswoman for Newman said he was not aware of an invitation to meet Flannery or other scientists.
Maurice Newman, Tony Abbott’s top business advisor, claims the world should prepare for global cooling. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Reuters/REUTERS
Maybe Maurice Newman was hoping nobody would check.
In an opinion column yesterday, the climate science denying (yes, I just said it right up front) former ABC chairman and head of the Prime Minister’s business advisory council launched into another of his embarrassing attacks on climate science and the laws of physics.
Newman’s central claim is that the activity of the sun and cosmic rays are probably driving climate change and that the world should probably prepare for global cooling.
When you start to test Maurice Newman’s claims you find the whole case is about as sturdy as a house made of playing cards placed on a poorly constructed raft made of rolled up copies of The Australian floating on the ocean... in a tropical cyclone.
And he doesn’t even use decent quality playing cards.
I apologise for the length of this post by the way and some of the overly technical stuff, but every once in a while I think it’s worth picking at the claims made by people in influential positions.
Let’s have a pick. Actually, let’s have several picks.
The problem with this statement is that the journal article in question did not even consider the interactions between the sun and long-term climate change.
Even one of the climate sceptic websites .. http://www.co2science.org/articles/V17/N32/C1.php .. that recently featured this research, said: “Unfortunately, it was beyond the scope of this paper to address the potential impact of solar activity on climate.”
Professor Steve Sherwood, director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, explains:
--- Evidence that the sun influences climate has decreased, not increased. About a decade ago calculations showed the sun caused about 10 per cent of the warming observed since the late 1800s, but it is now estimated to be only about 5 per cent. This new paper does not change these estimates at all, it is only an attempt to extend the sunspot record back to times before direct observations began a few hundred years ago. The paper makes no mention of climate, because it does not have any new implications for climate.
Since 1980, during which time we have seen strong warming, solar output has if anything declined slightly. In fact, it is looking increasingly doubtful that the sun even had much to do with the so-called “little ice age”, which most mainstream scientists used to attribute to the minimum in sunspot activity at roughly the same time, but now looks to have been caused mainly by volcanic eruptions. ---
Newman tells his readers that experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe had “validated” a hypothesis from Danish physicist Professor Henrik Svensmark that “the sun alters the climate” by interacting with cosmic rays.
The former ASX chairman makes it sound like a done deal. But what did the lead author of that research actually think? Did it “confirm the hypothesis” that the sun alters the climate “by influencing cosmic ray influx and cloud formation” as Newman had claimed?
Professor Jasper Kirby, who led the research, said at the time .. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.504.html .. “it actually says nothing about a possible cosmic-ray effect on clouds and climate, but it’s a very important first step”.
So that’s a no, then (minor nit, as Nature .. http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.504.html#B1 .. also explained, the experiment didn’t use the LHC, as Newman had claimed, but rather the same bit of kit – a particle accelerator - that feeds the LHC).
Newman and the IPCC
Newman wrote that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “and its acolytes” tend to “pay scant attention” to science that might “relegate human causes” as the driver of climate change.
Professor Sherwood was a Lead Author on the latest IPCC report chapter to look at these cosmic ray claims. He told me:
--- In writing the relevant section of the report, we examined Svensmark’s work along with many other relevant studies. It is quite clear that the evidence suggesting that cosmic rays influence cloud cover, does not hold up to scrutiny. The IPCC is quite comprehensive in assessing the scientific literature and making an overall assessment. If there is any cherry-picking going on, it is by the so-called skeptics, who typically focus on a tiny handful of papers and often draw unwarranted inferences from them not made by the authors themselves, as Newman has done in this case. ---
Sly misrepresentation
Newman name checks other organisations and scientists to try and bolster his argument.
He quotes work by “leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood, of Reading University” to try and convince readers that the sun might be the dominant driver of the climate.
But Newman doesn’t mention what Lockwood actually thinks about these claims of cosmic rays or the sun dictating global temperatures
--- So what do we think the effect of a return to Maunder minimum conditions on global mean temperatures would be? The answer is very little.
In a paper .. http://www.leif.org/EOS/2011JD017013.pdf .. with scientists from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, we used an energy balance model to show the slowing in anthropogenic global warming associated with decline in solar irradiance to Maunder minimum levels.
We found the likely reduction in warming by 2100 would be between 0.06 and 0.1 degrees Celsius, a very small fraction of the warming we’re due to experience as a result of human activity. ---
I sent Newman’s article to Lockwood to ask if he felt his work and his views were being fairly represented. Suffice to say he’s not too happy. He wrote:
--- The wording in the quote you sent me is a very sly misrepresentation. As a scientist I try to write sentences that are unambiguous ... but this is deliberately ambiguous to make it look like I am saying something that I certainly am not. I have never, ever written anything whatsoever about the “year without summer”, so I have never ever connected it to solar variability and the Dalton minimum. So if I trim the sentence down to “... Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, found 24 occasions in the past 10,000 years when the sun was declining as it is now, but could find none where the decline was as fast. He says a return of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830) is ‘more likely than not’” Then I would be happy - but the addition of the phrase which included “the year without summer” makes it look like I am connecting that year to the Dalton minimum which I certainly am not. There is absolutely no credible evidence whatsoever that the “year without summer” was either caused by low solar activity or was in any way significant as an indicator of global climate trend. [my emphasis in the quote] ---
I also asked Lockwood what he thought of Newman’s claim that there was “growing evidence that climate change is determined by the sun, not humans”. Lockwood said:
--- [This claim] is, frankly, scientifically ludicrous. There are a few papers that use inadequate statistical techniques to claim a link between global temperatures and solar activity. Proper significance testing against an appropriate noise model invariably shows that the probability that these sun-global climate connections are purely coincidental is extremely high and that they have been selected whilst a very large number of counter examples have been ignored. This is bad science: it’s equivalent to finding on albino rabbit and declaring all rabbits are albino.
There have been many studies, including ones that I have been involved in, that show the solar influence on global mean surface temperatures is extremely small. I personally think there is evidence for some interesting effects in winter (and only in winter, and there are compelling scientific reasons why only in winter) in locations that are strongly influenced by the northern hemisphere jet stream.
However these effects are re-distributions of temperature and so, for example, if Europe suffers a cold winter, Greenland has a warmer one. Hence these are regional and season climate changes and quite distinct from global climate changes. ---
That looks like one less Christmas card for Maurice Newman.
But there’s still more to go at here. Newman quotes a University of Pennsylvania professor of psychology Philip Tetlock as saying: “When journal reviewers, editors and funding agencies feel the same way about a course, they are less likely to detect and correct potential logical or methodological bias.”
The quote is actually a decade old and comes from an article published in the journal Political Psychology .. http://www.jstor.org/stable/i292692 .
Newman probably got it trawling the blogs of climate sceptics (an article discussing the paper was reposted on the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation .. http://www.thegwpf.org/is-the-road-to-scientific-hell-paved-with-good-moral-intentions/ .. website earlier this month), which is where, in my view, he probably gets most of his ideas about climate science.
You might think, given the context of the article, that Tetlock was talking about environmental science or climate change.
But no. The Tetlock article was discussing his concerns about the preservation of the discipline of “political psychology”. Most of the article is discussing issues around war and peace and racism.
Fair and balanced?
Earlier this month, the Australian Press Council updated its overarching principles to “ensure that factual material” is accurate and not misleading. The change extended the principles reach from just “news reports” to material “elsewhere” which has been taken to mean opinion columns.
In principle three on fairness and balance, the APC says even when a writer expresses an opinion, it should not be done “based on significantly inaccurate factual material or omission of key facts”.
The Australian has been hostile to the changes.
You have to wonder if Newman’s latest is a bit of a test run?
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