Climate crook claims Australia 'destroying life on Earth'

Hansen's hysteria never stops. He even fabricates climate data in aid of his scares. His temperature graphs are so edited that they are vastly different from the graphs produced by others. See here for one example

AUSTRALIA'S use of coal and carbon emissions policies are guaranteeing the "destruction of much of the life on the planet", a leading NASA scientist has written in a letter to Barack Obama. The head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Professor James Hansen, has written an open letter to Barack Obama calling for a moratorium on coal-fired power stations and the use of next-generation nuclear power.

In the letter he says: "Australia exports coal and sets atmospheric carbon dioxide goals so large as to guarantee destruction of much of the life on the planet." Prof Hansen said goals and caps on carbon emissions were practically worthless because of the long lifetime of carbon dioxide in the air. "Instead a large part of the total fossil fuels must be left in the ground. In practice, that means coal," he wrote. "Nobody realistically expects that the large readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the ground."

Prof Hansen said that emissions reduction targets, like Kevin Rudd's goal to cut emissions by a minimum of 5 per cent and up to 15 per cent by 2020, do not work. "This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat," he wrote of reduction plans. "It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity."

Professor Hansen also works in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and has given testimony on climate change to the US Congress. He said he wrote to Mr Obama as the incoming US president is in a position to instigate global change and "his presidency may be judged in good part on whether he was able to turn the tide (on climate change) - more important, the futures of young people and other life will depend on that".

He called for the end of coal plants that do not capture and store carbon dioxide and for funding for "fourth generation" nuclear power plants that could run on material now regarded as waste. Comment is being sought from Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong.

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The economy isn't that bad, finance survey finds

Greatly reduced interest rates seem to be a big help

MOST Australian households are meeting loan repayments despite the economic downturn, a new survey reveals. Surprisingly, given a wealth of bad economic news, more Australians feel financially better off now than they did in the first quarter of last year. There's also renewed interest in borrowing money, according to the survey conducted by the Mortgage and Finance Association of Australia.

More than three quarters of households surveyed said they were easily meeting their mortgage repayments. One in four households believe their financial situation had improved in the past 12 months. While that result did not compare favourably with the data compiled in November 2007 - when 43.3 per cent of respondents believed they were financially better off - it is an increase from six months previously.

The survey results indicated the financial situation of the average Australian was not as dire as portrayed, the association said. As interest rates dropped there was also increased interest in taking out loans, it said.

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Three deaths blamed on public hospital overcrowding

QUEENSLAND Health has linked three deaths of mental patients in the past two months to overcrowding at the crisis-ridden Logan Hospital . "Capacity management" issues have been blamed for the fatalities involving the hospital's mental health unit since late October. A leaked internal report prepared for Queensland Health hierarchy shows that the deaths were "potentially related" to overcrowding, with 16 patients waiting for a bed on December 4. "The number of presentations is consistently higher than the number of discharges," the report said.

The revelations come after a top Logan Hospital doctor enlisted by Premier Anna Bligh to advise her about health issues quit three months ago because the hospital was "too dangerous and dysfunctional".

Health Minister Stephen Robertson ordered independent coroner's and internal investigations into all three deaths. "I always feel very sad when I receive reports of mental health patients who, for one reason or another, treatment doesn't help," Mr Robertson said. "That's why I am keen to have these cases investigated."

The first patient absconded from the busy inpatient unit on October 28 and was later found dead at Brisbane's Fairfield Railway Station. Another patient escaped from the emergency department on November 11 during an assessment and was later found dead. The third on November 25 occurred shortly after a patient was sent to a motel due to "accommodation issues". The patient's family has lodged a complaint but Mr Robertson said his department went beyond what was required as the patient was homeless.

Opposition health spokesman Mark McArdle has questioned why the minister had not been transparent and told the public about the cases, given he had known about them for weeks. "These are people dying and it is this minister's and this Government's inability to plan and resource our public hospitals properly," Mr McArdle said.

Queensland Health has allocated an extra $6.6 million annually since 2007 to fund an extra 53 mental health staff across the southside of Brisbane. A 16-bed community care unit is also being planned.

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When is a smack just a smack?

A lawyer attempts a middling approach to the spanking debate below. Mirko Bagaric says that any harm in it needs to be proven before it is banned but that it is in principle bad -- so should be resorted to only when smacking clearly seems the lesser of two evils. I think that those comments come close to a justification of the status quo

To smack or not to smack children? The issue will continue to divide the community until a reasoned and informed policy is adopted. Is a zero-tolerance approach to child discipline the mother of all nanny laws, constituting an unreasonable incursion into family matters, or should the law step in to "save" children subjected to any degree of physical chastisement?

The strongest arguments against any type of smacking are that it leads to serious forms of abuse and teaches children that violence is acceptable. However, these arguments have not been empirically validated.

There is a vast difference between the occasional controlled, strategic disciplinary tap on the bottom and an uncontrolled violent assault. It is absurd to think that adults aren't morally sophisticated enough to recognise this difference. The law recognises that it is acceptable to use reasonable and moderate force to chastise children, and while there is no firm line between acceptable and excessive force, few parents are investigated, let alone convicted of child assault.

There is surprisingly little concrete information about how smacking affects children in the long term. There is strong evidence suggesting that violent criminals are disproportionately subjected to smacking as children. However, nearly all adults who were smacked as children don't grow up to be murderers, rapists or even road ragers.

About three-quarters of Australians were smacked as children and it is incontestable that we live in a society which strongly disapproves of demonstrably harmful violence.

The only way to sensibly deal with the smacking issue is to rationally look at the interests of all parties concerned against the backdrop of accepted moral principles and empirical data regarding the effects of smacking. We need reliable, wide-ranging objective data on the long-term effects on children of minor levels of chastisement. Data about the impact of serious assaults on children is useless (unless it shows that small taps lead to two big whacks). That is already illegal and will remain so. If the research shows that children who are subjected to mild levels of smacking do not disproportionately experience psychological or behavioural problems, then smacking should be permissible.

However, until such data is available the default position is that smacking is morally wrong. Smacking proponents have not rebutted the starting principles that we should avoid intentionally inflicting pain and that certain (physical) pain carries more weight than remoter forms of harm (in the form of the distress caused by out-of-control children to parents). Still, like all moral principles, the prohibition against smacking is not absolute. There are worse forms of physical harm than smacking and no kid is more important than the next. It follows that it is OK to smack where it is the only way to protect the child or another person from serious physical harm.

In the meantime, both sides of the smacking debate need to make sure that they stick to the facts and don't abuse the rest of us with their spin - for this, no amount of smacking would be too great.

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