The very incorrect Pauline Hanson gives Muslim warning



Pauline Hanson will urge major political parties to stop the flow of Muslim immigrants into Australia when she launches her bid to become a senator this year. Warning Australia could go down the same road as some European countries, where she says racial tension are "out of control", Ms Hanson says federal politicians will eventually have to decide on Muslim numbers in Australia. "We have to decide now whether we want to go the way Britain, France and the Netherlands have gone," she says in an exclusive interview in today's print edition of the Herald Sun. "England's being lost. It's losing its identity and its way of life."

Ms Hanson also denies she is re-entering politics for financial gain, claiming the major political parties need a shake-up. She says the Muslim way of life is totally opposite to the Australian way, citing instances of multiple marriages, the forcing of women to wear the burqa, closure of pools to males and shopping centre bans on Christmas decorations. "The fact is they're Muslim first and Australian second," Ms Hanson says.

She is also releasing her life story, entitled Untamed and Unashamed, which is to be launched this month by Sydney broadcaster Alan Jones.

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Poor teacher training recognized

State Education Minister Rod Welford has called a meeting of the heads of university teacher training departments to plan an overhaul of teacher training in Queensland. The meeting follows the release of a joint survey by the principals of state, Catholic and independent schools showing that teaching graduates wanted courses overhauled to give them the skills to teach and manage students. Almost a quarter of beginning teachers plan to leave the profession within five years because of the pressures they face.

Mr Welford met with 70 principals in the Cairns area yesterday, and said they were deeply concerned about the levels of practical training given to students. "It's far too little," he said. Some students undertaking four-year degree courses spent less time prac teaching than those undertaking 12-month postgraduate teaching courses, which had struck a better balance.

Mr Welford said as well as discussing the report, the meeting with the deans of education was essential as new national guidelines for teacher training were being drawn up and the Queensland College of Teachers was reviewing teacher training in Queensland. Mr Welford said the report had shown that Queensland schools and principals were the best in Australia at inducting new teachers into schools. "They deserve a big tick for this," he said.

The Minister's view was supported by first and second year teachers at St Rita's College Clayfield, Monya Duplessis, 23, Anna Sayers, 36, John Mundell, 29. The three beginning teachers said they were being mentored and supported by their department heads and were guided in how to handle issues such as parent-teacher interviews. Even with strong support, however, they find their 7.30am to 5pm days a challenge. "You have to be constantly on the ball and there is very little down time," Mr Mundell, a University of Queensland graduate said. He spent 26 weeks of his 18 month Bachelor of Education degree prac teaching and found the experience invaluable.

Ms Duplessis, a QUT graduate, said her lecturers prepared her well for the challenges of prac teaching in schools at Shailer Park and Woodridge. "If you are equipped with the skills and if you are prepared it is not too much of a problem."

Ms Sayers, a former marketing and business executive who completed her teacher training part-time at the Australian Catholic University said life would be much harder for teachers in smaller rural and remote schools with fewer resources. Principal Sister Elvera was concerned by the report's revelation that 27 per cent of beginning teachers are asked to teach subjects in which they are not trained. "I think it would be very very difficult and the students would soon be aware of the fact," she said.

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Sun findings energize climate skeptics

The science of how global warming occurs has become crucial to our economy. So why are dissenting explanations of the sun's influence on our fate being pushed aside, asks Matthew Warren, environment writer for "The Australian"

It says a lot about the complexity of climate science that we can put a man on the moon but we still can't predict the weather beyond the next few days. The warming of the planet, and man's contribution to this phenomenon, has become the top scientific issue of this generation.

Science by its very nature is an argument. But apparently not this one any more. Yet a minority of scientists are still lining up to challenge the accepted wisdom with their claim that global warming is being principally driven by the sun, not by human activity. The mainstream view is that an accumulation of greenhouse gases, mostly due to human activity, is trapping too much of the sun's heat within our atmosphere. But the rebels against this dominant view suggest massive variations in the sun's heat radiation are far more influential in warming than accumulating greenhouse gases.

The UN-linked Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the executive summary of the science of its fourth assessment report in February. It reported "90 per cent" certainty among consulted scientists that the 0.6C average temperature increase measured during the 20th century was largely caused by the release of greenhouse gases, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels by industrialised economies. In other words, by humans.

Although the scale of warming predictions had altered little during the preceding six years of research, politicians and mainstream climate-change scientists queued up to declare the argument about human-caused climate change was officially over. Despite such confidence, hundreds of blogs across the world continue to run charged claims and counterclaims on the internet about the various positions adopted by climate scientists. The scale of the argument is unprecedented and reflects considerable uncertainty. By comparison, there are no blogs debating the validity of the periodic table of elements, for example.

Despite these claims, the minority of scientists who disagree with the mainstream view are still at large and remain unmoved by the latest IPCC report. Their views have recently been exhumed by two equally contentious, polar opposite documentaries profiling them on British and Canadian television. Last month, the ABC's Four Corners screened the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program The Denial Machine, which claimed the campaign for caution about human-caused climate change was conceived by spin doctors and driven and funded by oil and coal companies. Produced last November, the program compared scientific scepticism on climate change to the tobacco industry's much publicised one-time campaign to discredit links between smoking and lung cancer.

Then last week Channel 4 in Britain screened a program called The Great Global Warming Swindle, in which many of the same scientists from the CBC program were interviewed to put the dissenting sceptics' sun-driven case on human-caused climate change. Yet to be screened in Australia, and unlikely to make its way on to Four Corners, the program argued the warming measured during the 20th century was the result of changes in solar activity, not increases in carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. It also took issue with what it described as a multibillion-dollar global warming industry that continued to play up the threat to support research, funding and relevance.

The debate over climate change has become increasingly stifling and intolerant to dissenting voices as the mainstream position has become more secure. Some argue it is appropriate, indeed necessary, to censor such dissent for fear it will delay action on the increasingly urgent policy response needed to make deep cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

Unsurprisingly, the program sparked considerable controversy. One of the scientists interviewed claims he was misrepresented not so much by what he said on air, but by being associated with the thesis of such a one-sided polemic. Main British media outlets subsequently committed considerable space to attack what they claimed were the half-truths and discredited facts, as well as the credibility of the dissenting scientists who made them. While not interviewed for Channel 4, hydro-climatologist Stewart Franks at Newcastle University in NSW is one such scientist. Like all other scientists quoted in this article, he says he has never received any funding from any industry, but is increasingly uneasy about the dangerous path the debate is taking, where alternative views are discouraged and reputations attacked and discredited.

Franks says our understanding of the physics of climate is still so limited, we cannot explain natural variability or predict when droughts will break, or the when and why clouds form, which makes him wary of mainstream claims projecting temperature changes over the next century. He argues that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere account for only about 2 per cent to 3 per cent of the overall warming effect, meaning even major increases in gases lead to only slight shifts in temperature: between 0.5C and 1C. He is less certain than other dissenting scientists that variation in solar activity is the cause, but doubts that greenhouse gases are the main driver of temperature changes. "It's clear that we don't understand enough of the physics of climate to understand natural variability but I don't expect climate change from CO2 to be particularly significant at any point in the future," he says.

Franks points to new modelling which has measured changes in the Earth's albedo or reflectance, driven mainly by cloud formation. The paper by a team of geophysicists reported an unexplained decline in cloud cover until 1998, which caused the Earth to absorb more heat from the atmosphere. This resulted in increases in incoming solar radiation more than 10 times bigger than the same effect attributed to greenhouse gases. Franks says the current IPCC models assume albedo is constant but such research should be added to the body of knowledge, not excluded or rejected. "It's reached the point that anyone who offers an open mind publicly is basically criticised and put down," he says.

New Zealand climatologist Associate Professor Chris de Freitas says it is generally agreed greenhouse gases are having a warming effect on the radiation balance of the Earth, but there is disagreement on the extent of positive feedbacks. The IPCC models claim the warming caused by the release of carbon dioxide encourages accelerated warming, with the system spiralling slowly but insiduously upwards. The IPCC models predict a range of temperature increases from 1.1C to 6.4C by 2100. So much for certainty.

De Freitas, unlike the IPCC, thinks the warming effect of carbon dioxide decreases over time as it becomes more saturated in the atmosphere. "There is so much scope for disagreement because there is so much uncertainty. This was one of the most outrageous implications of the first IPCC report - claiming that the science was settled," he says. "The big problem is the feedbacks warming accelerates itself . We don't still understand the very complex climate system. None of the models have proved to be accurate at all. So using the outputs of models is fallacious because they're not evidence of anything, they're just hypotheses. "The IPCC started it in their first report by calling it a 'consensus view' to shut down debate. By calling their critics deniers, they are saying, 'look these guys are arguing against the impossible'."

The IPCC is the scientific and political engine room of the climate-change debate. It's "consensus view" is based on 19 different computer models to project temperature changes based on known increases in greenhouse gases. At least one of the 1500 "leading scientists" it quotes as its underpinning authority is also one of its staunchest critics, Richard Lindzen, who is Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a contributing author to this year's fourth IPCC assessment report but remains highly critical of how the panel operates, claiming it is largely a political process underpinned by science, which carefully stage-manages the release of its reports to maximise political impact.

The IPCC made headlines across the world in February with the release of the executive summary of its assessment report, which Lindzen says was severely modified by the political session that writes it and which is now modifying the full scientific report to fit for release in May. "That's a very funny procedure by most standards," he said. "You don't appeal to consensus if you have a scientific argument. "Very few of the models are independent and they all share certain profound difficulties. They all get clouds hugely wrong and a small change in clouds has a much bigger effect than doubling CO2."

Bob Carter, who is a research professor in marine geology at James Cook University, says there are some excellent scientists involved in the IPCC process and the actual report is likely to be both sound and useful science. But he is even more scathing of the process. "I think it is probably without precedent in any Western democratic process, the idea that you would publish an executive summary before the report and then openly say that 'we need a few more weeks to work on the report to make sure it is consistent with the executive summary'," he says. "I don't know how anybody can take them seriously. It's become a religion. I have no doubt that a number of the IPCC supporters genuinely believe. Others know very well that the evidence isn't there, but it suits them to believe. "I'm agnostic. And when the evidence is there I shall be perfectly happy to believe the hypothesis. But the evidence is not there."

In his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore's central claim in his description of the science was his correlation of 650,000 years of temperature changes with atmospheric carbon concentrations using polar ice-core samples. Gore described the relationship as complex, but made the most of the theatre, climbing up on a crane to accentuate the scale of the increases in greenhouse gas. But the sceptics point to a paper published in Nature and Science magazines showing the historical relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature has the gas lagging, not leading. That is, greenhouse gas rises occurred about 800 years later than allegedly matching temperature change, as the warming seas released more gas into the atmosphere and trapped it when cooling.

This doesn't discredit the mainstream theory that present levels of greenhouse gases are still well above historical levels, but it is one of several areas where even mainstream scientists believe Gore appears loose with the science to make his film more dramatic. The CBC documentary referred to predictions of sea-level rises of up to 24m as a result of climate change. The IPCC predicts rises at worst of about 50cm by 2100. If it's not OK to mislead the public in criticising climate-change science, why is it OK to mislead people in selling it?

Recently Prime Minister John Howard was effectively forced to recant a comment made in parliament that the science was uncertain. Clean Up Australia boss Ian Kiernan recently accused federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin of being an "unscientific looney" because he expressed some doubts about the validity of the climate-change science. Suddenly it's not just unfashionable to hold some doubts or keep an open mind on the science of climate change.

Having accepted the risk flagged by the mainstream science that the planet is warming, by developing an appropriate policy response, the debate in Australia has effectively decoupled the science from the policy response. We have agreed the issue is too important to wait for more conclusive answers, that we are prepared to act comprehensively on climate change, possibly at considerable cost, on the trust that most respected, credible scientists are deeply concerned about the seriousness of this threat. Greenpeace played an important role in its formative years by challenging companies, and governments developed economies. Why was that OK then, but this is not now?

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Cowardly Cowdery in trouble

About time. Cowdery has never seen a criminal that he was not dubious about prosecuting

NSW Attorney-General Bob Debus has launched a blistering attack on his Director of Public Prosecutions, accusing him of making "unwarranted and insulting" remarks about his fellow public servants. Writing in The Australian today, Mr Debus accuses Nicholas Cowdery QC of engaging in "the kind of politicking he might otherwise decry" by suggesting last week that the state's top public servants had been bullied out of providing frank and fearless advice to their political masters.

And in a revelation that will embarrass the DPP, Mr Debus has released a dismissive email Mr Cowdery sent last December in response to an invitation to provide input into NSW Premier Morris Iemma's state plan.

In his speech last week, Mr Cowdery attacked the plan - which sets 50 performance benchmarks to be met by 2016, including several in the area of crime and justice - as "ludicrous" and "a political manifesto". But in the email, Mr Cowdery wrote that the plan had "nothing to do" with his office and that he had "no stake" in it. He added, "This is my preliminary view and, if one is needed, my final view", and closed the email with, "Merry Christmas!"

Mr Debus's attack on Mr Cowdery is all the more pointed coming at the beginning of the final week of his 16-year ministerial career. The Iemma Labor Government's longest-serving minister, Mr Debus will retire from his Blue Mountains electorate at the March24 state poll and is considering a tilt at the federal seat ofMacquarie. Mr Debus told The Australian last night that he had been unable to remain silent when Mr Cowdery had called into question the integrity of senior public servants who were unable to defend themselves. He said several of those involved had told him they were "quite peeved" by Mr Cowdery's assertions, which they regarded as "a kind of disloyalty".

"I reckon I've defended Nick's independence a dozen times over the past six years, in the parliament and in the media, and I've felt it my proper responsibility to doso," Mr Debus said. "But suddenly I find he's using the independence that has been given to him to prosecute criminals instead to cast completely gratuitous aspersions on the role and integrity of other department heads." Mr Debus said Mr Cowdery's message on the state plan was "the kind of email life tenure and guaranteed independence can easily encourage somebody to write", and pointed out that at the time the DPP was at a conference in Paris while his fellow officials were taking part in public meetings on the plan. "He was there with my permission and he was attending meetings of international prosecutors, but nevertheless he was on the Champs Elysee when his colleagues were in High Street, Penrith, consulting on theplan."

The stoush between Mr Debus and Mr Cowdery is the latest chapter in the DPP's long history of upsetting both political parties by suggesting their law-and-order policies are driven more by the search for headlines than a real desire to address the root causes of crime. Opposition legal affairs spokesman Chris Hartcher said last night: "Debus hasprotected Cowdery for the past six years, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. "It's a falling-out among the soft Left who have sought to dominate the criminal justice system with an attitude which has been to put the defendant ahead of the victim. It's no surprise Debus's swan song is more like a death-bed repentance."

Mr Cowdery had no comment last night, but a spokesman said Mr Debus had twice rejected the DPP's advice on whether to appeal a case - not once, as stated in his opinion article. "On both occasions the attorney was unsuccessful," the spokesman said.

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