Abbott: We'll help, Julia, but only if you ask nicely

That seems a fair request -- but is a Leftist capable of civility in politics?

TONY Abbott is demanding Prime Minister Julia Gillard personally say "please" if the Government wants Opposition support for off-shore processing of asylum seekers.

The Opposition Leader is fed up with what he sees as "bile" from Ms Gillard and a lack of information from the Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, sources told news.com.au today.

And he's furious that last week Mr Bowen's office briefed reporters on what Mr Abbott was to have been briefed on later that day.

At hand is legislation the Government will introduce next week to amend the Migration Act to get around a High Court ruling which wrecked the Malaysian deal to swap asylum seekers for refugees, and put in serious doubt all off-shore processing of boat people.

The Opposition hasn't declared where it stands on the issue, but Mr Abbott is likely to back it to ensure a future Coalition government could send asylum seekers to third countries such as Nauru.

Any agreement would come with heavy criticism of the Malaysian solution, which would be reflected in proposed Opposition amendments.

However, Mr Abbott won't reveal his plans to the Government until he gets what he considers a full briefing on the legislation, and a personal appeal for support from the PM.

He'll receive a briefing on the bills in Melbourne at 5pm tomorrow and today Opposition sources said it must include all the legal advice the Government received following the High Court ruling.

"We've asked for it and haven't even had a 'thank you for writing' letter in reply," said one Liberal source.

Earlier this week, Ms Gillard and Mr Abbott clashed over the table during Question time with the Opposition Leader complaining, "I get nothing but bile from you, Julia".

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Paramedics vent anger against QLD Health on Facebook page

QUEENSLAND paramedics are so frustrated with having to ramp their ambulances for hours outside public hospitals, they have set up a Facebook protest page to highlight the problem.

But Queensland Health has hit back, disputing many of the claims on the "Ramping QAS at QLD Hospitals" social networking site.

The Facebook page contains photos and video, and at last count had almost 400 "likes".

Several damning photos posted on the page show ambulances crowded outside the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane on August 16, after three other southside hospitals went on bypass. A paramedic said he counted 23 ambulances in the queue outside the hospital as he waited more than five hours with a patient, who went home before being treated.

The scene is a repeat of a similar one outside the hospital reported in The Courier-Mail in May.

Union organiser John Webb, of the ambulance section of United Voice, said the problem was getting worse.

"It's just not going away," he said. "At the end of the day, while our ladies and gentlemen are on hospital ramps, they can't respond to other jobs, they can't get their meal breaks, they can't finish on time."

Mr Webb stressed that the most critical patients, such as those with a cardiac arrest, were taken straight into hospital emergency departments. But he said less serious patients, including elderly people in pain, were sometimes languishing inside the back of ambulances for hours. "It's morally and ethically wrong," Mr Webb said. "This is 2011, not 1911."

Queensland Health acting director-general Tony O'Connell said emergency department staff had debunked "several of the photos and claims" made on the Facebook site. "For example, one photo depicts ambulances parked while not in use with no patient inside them," Dr O'Connell said.

"Misleading people with fraudulent claims only serves to scare them unfairly, and does nothing whatsoever to help our staff or patients. No patient is ever turned away from a public hospital ED, and no patient waits in an ambulance unless a professional triage nurse or doctor has assessed their condition and determined that it is safe for the patient to remain under observation while more urgent patients are treated. "That is entirely appropriate."

Opposition health spokesman Mark McArdle called on the Government to "stop the spin" and fix the ramping, unacceptable waits and access block at emergency departments.

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The hubris of an Australian Warmist professor: "We put the physics in and then the answer pops out"

The Australian global warming lobby is desperately trying to convince an increasingly sceptical audience about the blessings of their climate models Dr. Dave Griggs, from the Monash Sustainability Institute and Dr. John Church of the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research made the following claims at an online briefing organised by the Australian Science Media Centre:

"models were getting more accurate as scientists incorporated data from more areas. Scientists were often surprised by their results because the climate system was so complicated, Prof Griggs said. "We don't tune these models to get the answer we want. "We put the physics in and then the answer pops out - so yes, you can be surprised."

The Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research's John Church says virtually all climate data is shared among scientists worldwide. While there is a variety of models in his study area of sea levels all show the same trend

Reality check:

There is a multitude of evidence about the total failure of the warmist climate change models. The fact is that the warmists are doing exactly what Dr. Griggs says they are not doing. Warren Myer, writing in Forbes magazine, summarizes what´s wrong with the models:

"a lot climate experimentation occurs within computers, rather than via direct observation of natural phenomena. For example, in the last IPCC report, their conclusion that most of the recent warming had probably been man-made was based mainly on computer study of the period between 1978 and 1998. They ran their models for this period both with and without manmade CO2, and determined that they could only replicate the temperature rise in this period with by including manmade CO2 in their models.

Believe it or not, that is the main evidence that global warming catastrophism is based on. Yes, I am sure you can raise all the concerns I have — what if the computer models don’t adequately model the climate? What if they leave out key factors or over-emphasize certain dynamics? Drawing firm conclusions from these models is like assuming you can be a rock star after winning a game of Guitar Hero.

But it is when these models are used to project catastrophic outcomes in the future that they are perhaps the most suspect. Scientists often act as if the projected warming from various CO2 forecasts is just an output of the models — in other words, “we built in a sophisticated understanding of how the climate works and out pops a lot of warming.” (exactly what Dr. Griggs is doing! NNoN) And in the details this is true. The timing and regional distribution of the warming tends to be a fairly unpredictable product of the model. But the approximate magnitude of the warming is virtually pre-determined. It turns out that climate sensitivity, the overall amount of warming we can expect from a certain rise in CO2 concentrations, is really an input to most models.

This means that the inputs of the model are set such that a climate sensitivity of, say, 4 degrees per doubling is inevitable. The model might come up with 4.1 or 3.9, but one could have performed a quick calculation on the inputs and found that, even without the model, the answer was already programmed to be close to 4. Rather than real science, the climate models are in some sense an elaborate methodology for disguising our uncertainty. They take guesses at the front-end and spit them out at the back-end with three-decimal precision. In this sense, the models are closer in function to the light and sound show the Wizard of Oz uses to make himself seem more impressive, and that he uses to hide from the audience his shortcomings.

And if you want the opinion of a real scientific heavyweight, here is what Dr. Freeman Dyson thinks about the climate models:

The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world we live in ...

John Church is partially right when he claims that virtually all climate data is shared among scientists worldwide. The truth is, of course, that all the warmists share the same false data (obtained from the false models) worldwide.

It may very well be true that all the warmist sea level models show the same trend , as Church claims, but studies based on real observations tell another story: Reality check:

AGAINST all the odds, a number of shape-shifting islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean are standing up to the effects of climate change.

For years, people have warned that the smallest nations on the planet - island states that barely rise out of the ocean - face being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite: most have remained stable over the last 60 years, while some have even grown.

Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji used historical aerial photos and high-resolution satellite images to study changes in the land surface of 27 Pacific islands over the last 60 years. During that time, local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres, or 2 millimetres per year on ...

Further:

Memorandum by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, Head of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden President, (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, Leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project:

It is true that sea level rose in the order of 10-11 cm from 1850 to 1940 as a function of Solar variability and related changes in global temperature and glacial volume. From 1940 to 1970, it stopped rising, maybe even fell a little. In the last 10-15 years, we see no true signs of any rise or, especially, accelerating rise (as claimed by IPCC), only a variability around zero. This is illustrated in Fig 3. ...

In conclusion; observational data do not support the sea level rise scenario. On the contrary, they seriously contradict it. Therefore, we should free the world from the condemnation of becoming extensively flooded in the near future.
There are more urgent natural problems to consider on Planet Earth like tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.

PS

It is not surprising that Dave Griggs and John Church are so busy promoting climate alarmism, when one considers their background:

in 1996 he was appointed Head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientific assessment unit. IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. In 2001 he became Deputy Chief Scientist and Director of the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, widely acknowledged as the world's leading centre for climate change research. After a brief spell as Met Office Director of Government Business, in September 2007 he moved to Australia to become Director of the Monash Sustainability Institute (MSI). Dave is also CEO of ClimateWorks Australia.

Dr Church has recently accepted a position as coordinating lead author of the Sea Level Change chapter for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, to be completed in 2013.
He was co-convening lead author for the Chapter on Sea Level in the IPCC Third Assessment Report.

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ANOTHER computerization failure! When will they ever learn?

New multi-million dollar police security card system an IT misery for Bligh Government

IN the latest IT misery for the Bligh Government, a new multimillion-dollar police security card system has flopped. Electronic smartcards, meant to improve building and computer security, are proving problematic for officers who have found themselves shut out of their workplace.

Police officers revealed the new contactless cards were "introduced with much fanfare early last year, but never really enforced". "They give you a blank one to stick behind your card at headquarters so you can get into the building. You're no chance with the smartcard," an officer said. "The pics rub off on them, too."

The Queensland Police Service was the first in Australia to adopt the new electronic ID cards, which were supposed to increase protection against external threats, such as hacking.

Queensland University of Technology's Emeritus Professor of Computer Science Bill Caelli said the problem appeared to be with the management and organisation of the system's software. "If the commands on the card are incompatible with those on the door, it won't work as it should," Prof Caelli said. "If the mastercard is working, then the problem lies with the messages between the individually assigned smartcards and the doors."

Opposition police spokesman John-Paul Langbroek said there were "serious questions that needed to be answered" about the security card failure. "We need to know how it's happened and why we've got another computer problem from a Government that's wasted millions of dollars on unreliable systems," Mr Langbroek said.

In another smartcard glitch, public transport go card users are finding information is being over-ridden by other cards, causing anxiety and confusion.

Brisbane commuter Dominic Cole experienced the problem himself when he swiped his go card in his wallet and it came up as being out of credit. He now believes interference from his gym card caused it to access another person's go card.

"When I scanned the card to check the balance, it came up with someone else's account history - where they had recently travelled and the balance on their account," Mr Cole said. "But it didn't come up with a card number or name."

The problem was solved by taking his go card out of his wallet and scanning it separately.

A TransLink spokesman said their user's guide recommended people "always remove their go card from their bag or wallet before touching the reader, to ensure there is no interference".

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