Doomsday talk on Barrier Reef angers tourism operators

I have been reading Australian newspapers for 50 years and cannot remember a time when the reef was NOT "endangered" from something or other. But, with the internet, publicity for the panics is much more extensive now. I suppose I have to mention again the basic fact that corals flourish best where the climate is WARMEST (generally speaking, coral reefs are more diverse the closer they get to the equator), so any global warming would be GOOD for the reef. It is COLD that kills coral, which is why there is little coral in Australian waters South of Bundaberg.

The barefaced lies about all this are an absolute wonder. And should I mention again that corals have been found flourishing in a (warm) place that received a direct hit from a thermonuclear device? A thermonuclear explosion is pretty toasty! It shows that corals are extremely resilient if they are adversely impacted

TOURISM operators reliant on the Great Barrier Reef are battling a new menace they say is as damaging to their businesses as crown of thorns starfish. The north Queensland businesses claim publicity about climate change threatening the health of the Reef system could have an adverse impact on tourism numbers. Peter Wright, owner of Port Douglas-based Poseidon Cruises and director of the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators (AMPTO), said that if environmental research continued to dwell on the demise of the Reef, tourism operators might resort to a "come now or it will be too late" advertising campaign. "We've talked about it in the industry but it is a very doomsday thing to say," he said.

Professor Ross Garnaut, the Federal Government's chief climate-change adviser, brought the issue to the fore again last week when he said "the odds are not great for the Great Barrier Reef." Calling for a cut to greenhouse pollution by 10 per cent by 2020, Professor Garnaut said the Government needed to work harder to ensure the longevity of the Reef in the near future.

Mr Wright said while tourism operators were worried about the impact climate change would have on the Reef, they were not convinced it would ultimately be destroyed by greenhouse pollution. "We are absolutely concerned if the predictions are true, because obviously it would damage the Reef experience," Mr Wright said. "But at the moment, where we are, the Reef is not looking damaged at all. The reefs that we go to are in excellent condition."

Mr Wright said media attention given to the starfish outbreaks over the past two decades had often resulted in international tourists contacting Poseidon to see if it was still worthwhile visiting the Reef.

Tony Baker, AMPTO chair and managing director of the Quicksilver Group which owns a range of Great Barrier Reef-based businesses, said that as the world's most well-known reef system, the Reef was open to constant scrutiny and operators had to endure both positive and negative publicity. "There are a lot of people out there who are making comments about the Reef," Mr Baker said. "The reality is there are areas of the Reef that are in outstanding condition and there are areas of the Reef that are affected by things, like the crown of thorns."

Stephen Olle, chairman of Tourism Tropical North Queensland, said tourism operators were currently having to deal with a range of negative issues that were impacting their business, including high fuel costs and the global economic downturn.

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IPCC report the product of a small clique, not a broad consensus

ROSS Garnaut made it clear in his interim report that his climate change review takes as a starting point - not as a belief but on the balance of probabilities - that the claims made in the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are correct. Had he made even a cursory examination of the integrity of those IPCC claims he would have found a very troubling picture.

The IPCC encourages us to believe that about 2500 climate scientists supported the claim of a significant human influence on climate. It fails to clarify that the claim was made in chapter nine of the working group one contribution and that the contributions of working groups two and three were based on the assumption that the claim was correct. The first eight chapters of the WG1 contribution were mainly concerned with climatic observations and the authors expressed no opinion about the claim made in chapter nine, and chapters 10 and 11 assumed the claim to be correct. The entire IPCC thesis therefore stands or falls on the claims of just one chapter.

We are also led to believe that chapter nine was widely supported by hundreds of reviewers, but just 62 IPCC reviewers commented on its penultimate draft. Only five of those reviewers endorsed it but four of the five appear to have vested interests and the other made just one comment for the entire 11-chapter WG1 contribution.

As is the normal IPCC practice, chapter nine has co-ordinating lead authors, who are responsible for the chapter as a whole; lead authors, who are responsible for sections of the chapter; and contributing authors, who provide their thoughts to the lead authors but take no active part in thewriting. The IPCC procedures state that the authors at each level should reflect a wide range of views, but this is not true of chapter nine.

The expansion of the full list of authors of each paper cited by this chapter reveals that 37 of 53 chapter authors form a network of people who have previously co-authored scientific papers with each other: or make that 38 if we include a review editor. The two co-ordinating lead authors are members of this network. So are five of the seven lead authors. Thirty of 44 contributing authors are in the network and two other pairs of contributing authors have likewise co-authored scientific papers.

In other words, the supposedly 53 independent voices are in fact one dominant voice with 37 people behind it, two voices each with two people behind them, and perhaps 12 single voices. A closer check reveals that many of those 12 were academic or work colleagues of members of that larger network. One lead author was from the University of Michigan, as were three contributing authors, two of whom were not members of the network. Another lead author was associated with Britain's Hadley Centre, along with eight contributing authors, one of whom was not included in that network of co-authors.

All up, the 53 authors of this chapter came from just 31 establishments and there are worrying indications that certain lead authors were the superiors of contributing authors from the same organisation. The very few viewpoints in this chapter might be alleviated if it drew on a wide range of references, but among the co-authors of 40 per cent of the cited material are at least one chapter author. Scientists associated with the development and use of climate models dominate the clique of chapter nine authors and by extension the views expressed in that chapter.

Perhaps the increase in the processing power of their computers has increased their confidence in the software they have been nurturing for years. Imagine, though, the consequences were they to imply that the accuracy of the models had not improved despite the extra funding. These models are said to require a human component to reasonably match historical temperatures and the modellers claim that this proves a human influence on climate, but the human factor is an input so a corresponding output is no surprise. A more plausible reason for the mismatch without this influence is that the models are incomplete and contain errors, but of course chapter nine could never admit this.

Garnaut didn't need to evaluate the science behind the IPCC's claim to find that its integrity is questionable and that the report's key findings are the product of scientific cronyism. The IPCC has misled us into believing the primary claims were widely endorsed by authors and reviewers but in fact they received little support and came from a narrow self-interested coterie of climate modellers. We should now ask what else the IPCC has misled us about and why Garnaut, a skilled academic, so blithely accepted its claims.

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Parents 'are neglecting manners'

But those parents are themselves the product of a Left-dominated educational system which told them that there is no such thing as right and wrong! Teachers have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind

ANGRY teachers are sick of lazy parents who leave it to them to educate their kids everythying from manners and morals to eating habits and hygiene. They say they are fed up with playing "mum and dad" in the classroom and have told families to lift their game by devoting more time and effort to teaching their children on social issues. Teachers told a survey they were now expected to take responsibility for educating children on a host of subjects parents no longer bothered with - including respect, good behaviour and punctuality.

Even the etiquette of mobile phone use is listed in a new six-step guide prepared for parents by an elite teacher group fed up with the rising burden imposed on classrooms. The new guide, Parent-Teacher Partnerships, has been produced by the Australian Scholarships Group and the National Excellence in Teaching Awards organisation. Its key message is, "Education doesn't only happen in the classroom". The guide provides tips to parents to take up some of the slack for teachers whose desks are piled with extra programs on road safety, personal health, obesity, safe foods, civic pride, values, drugs and alcohol, multi-culturalism, child protection, life skills, bullying and anti-homophobia.

Most surveyed teachers said that despite being overloaded with extra curriculum work and other duties, they were under pressure from the increasing load imposed by having responsibility for issues no longer taught at home. The teachers' concerns follow suspension data in NSW showing students as young as five are being sent home at a rate of 1682 a week for misconduct including disobedience and bad behaviour.

Mother-of-three Kim Soldo from Minto in Sydney's south-west agreed yesterday teachers needed more help from their students' families. "I think teachers are getting too much lumped on them," she said. "Education starts at home - if you don't pack the child a healthy lunch you can't expect a teacher to solve it. "There are too many things a teacher has to juggle and it is distracting them so much from the curriculum."

Principal of Sarah Redfern Public School at Minto Cheryl McBride said parents ideally should shoulder responsibility for teaching their kids about punctuality, healthy foods and the benefits of exercise. "Any time there is a popular issue there is a mentality that teachers can cover it," Ms McBride said. "The curriculum gets stretched and the result is you dilute the effectiveness of the things you are supposed to be teaching."

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Protection for tell-all bureaucrats in new whistleblower laws

Long overdue

The Rudd Government will today unveil a plan for a national overhaul of whistleblower laws, which would abolish criminal penalties for public servants who reveal crime and misconduct to the media. Instead of penalising whistleblowers for unauthorised disclosures, the scheme would protect them from liability and give them the right to legal redress and financial compensation if they suffer reprisals. By protecting whistleblowers from criminal sanctions, the scheme would reduce the risk of journalists being threatened with prison for refusing to identify their bureaucratic sources. The plan is outlined in a report to be launched this morning by Special Minister of State John Faulkner, who is overseeing the Government's promised introduction of whistleblower laws.

The plan was welcomed yesterday by former Customs officer Allan Kessing who was convicted last year of revealing to The Australian airport security flaws - a charge he denies. "I fully endorse it. It is less about protecting the individual and more about protecting the public interest," Mr Kessing said.

The report, by a team of academics led by AJBrown of Griffith University, calls for an extensive overhaul of public service management systems aimed at forcing the bureaucracy to be more responsive to internal complaints about maladministration. Dr Brown said that if the scheme had been in force last year it would have given Mr Kessing a powerful defence. "If Kessing did what he is alleged to have done, this scheme would have given him a fair day in court to argue that what happened was a public interest disclosure," he said.

The scheme drawn up by Dr Brown's team is intended to provide the framework for a network of laws throughout the nation that would recognise the legitimacy of public interest disclosures. It would protect public servants who tell the media about a broad range of misconduct including crime, corruption, abuse of power, breach of trust, conflict of interest, negligence, incompetence, financial waste and anything that endangers public health, safety or the environment. Even if their disclosures turned out to be wrong, whistleblowers would still be protected from liability so long as they had acted in the honest and reasonable belief that they were revealing wrongdoing.

The scheme aims to encourage government agencies to deal with maladministration internally by holding out the threat of public disclosure in the media if they fail to act. Agencies that fail to address internal complaints about maladministration would risk intervention by a powerful agency that would be responsible for administering the scheme. This oversight role could be vested in an existing organisation rather than a new institution, Dr Brown said.

The report, Whistleblowing in the Australian Public Sector, is expected to influence the outcome of a separate inquiry into whistleblower laws by the House of Representatives committee on legal and constitutional affairs. Labor's Mark Dreyfus QC, who chairs that committee, said last month that the Brown report was "very, very convenient". "They have conducted a whole range of research that we will be able to make use of," Mr Dreyfus said.

Dr Brown, who has led a three-year research project on reforming whistleblower laws, is the son of the late Wallace Brown, who worked in the Canberra press gallery from 1961 to1995.

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