The Daily Suppository: Bend over and say "Ahhh"

The crazy makes me lol

2011-08-31T02:29:00.000-07:00

I love the meeting of psychology, climate science and the main stream media. Sometimes, the logic (if you wish to call it that) gets so convoluted I feel like I need a whiteboard and a flowchart. It's kind of reminiscent of arguing with my 10 year old, Thing-two, only I can't put and end to the ridiculousness by screaming "Because I damn well said so!" and then threatening to set fire to all the chocolate / gaming systems / trampolines in the house.

See if you can stay with me, and I will attempt to take you on a tandem water-slide ride of modern health research.

A new report from the Climate Institute has found that the recent drought was really bad for mental health in the bush. The researchers know, KNOW, that since the drought was "caused" by climate change, ergo climate change has negatively impacted mental health.

Still with me?

Good. Luckily, there are warning signs to look out for if you think that the mental health of someone you know has been negatively impacted by climate change:

such as changes in normal behaviour, flat moods, not enjoying things they enjoyed before, isolating themselves, not going to barbecues and social functions, and not keeping up with work.

Oh no. Add "lying on the couch refusing to move and watching several hours of really bad science fiction in protest at your life", then that pretty accurately describes medical school.

The reasoning behind the report was so overtly questionable that even Bjorn Lomberg commented on it.

When John Connor CEO of the Climate Institute, was questioned on "...the evidence for climate change not being believed in many rural areas", he ignored the fact that this then negated the entire presumption behind the report.

he says despite that the vast majority of Australia's do have concerns about climate change.

Adding also, that lots, LOTS of science-ey guys believed in climate change, too. So there. No news on how the drought affected those science-ey guys mental health.
Tim Flannery, however, seems to be doing just fine.

You've got to be f******g Sh*tting me.

2011-08-06T03:35:00.000-07:00

I just received a letter from someone claiming to be "my neighbour", spruiking the benefits of the carbon dioxide tax. This on a day when the global economy looks like it is finally going to take the belly flop off the cliff that I predicted a while back. What was most offensive, was that it was a letter template from SayYesAustralia, the organisation that Cate Blanchett did that ridiculous television ad for. I got cranky, and thought it only fair that I reply. Please consider the letter that follows to be a template that any of you out there who recieved a similar "my neighbour" letter can use in response.

Dear XXX, my “Neighbour”,

I just received your mail out today, and I have to say I was quite offended by the content therein. Firstly, the basic premise of you feeling that you need to tell me what to think about the Labour-Green Government’s carbon dioxide tax is offensive in the main, as I was raised with the firm etiquette that inquiring about how one votes, ones political affiliations and how much money one earns is the worst sort of crass.

Secondly, I find that the subject matter that was espoused in your missive represents the worst sort of dishonesty. For starters, the letter that you sent was not penned by you, which I would have accepted as an expression of your own viewpoint, however unwelcome. It was compiled by a consortium of politically motivated organisations, and amounts to propaganda of the worst kind. Not only that, but the issue which it sought to address was fundamentally misrepresented. Not once in that execrable piece of junk that you gleefully put your name to was the term “carbon dioxide” mentioned. It referred several times to “carbon” and a price on same, which is somewhat of a misnomer. Carbon, as most of us know it, is the stuff left over in a fireplace or on a burnt piece of toast, so one could be forgiven for thinking that “carbon pollution” refers to the worst kind of industrial effluent. Soot, if you will. Carbon dioxide on the other hand, which the subject tax of your letter refers to, is not a blackened by-product of industry, it is plant food, and essential to life.

To say that I was cranky upon receiving your letter probably undersells the eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head irritability that ensued. I was ropable in the extreme. In a bid to talk myself out of calling you at home and giving you a piece of my mind, I drank half a bottle of chardonnay (and I don’t even like chardonnay) and ate a three week old wheel of camembert I found in the bottom of the fridge that I suspect by all appearances my youngest child attempted to eat with their feet). At first I told myself that you were probably a teenager, feeling strongly about things you’re yet too young to understand, unfortunately, with the marvels of the internet, it took me only a matter of minutes to establish that not only are you an adult with school age children, but also your home ‘phone number, mobile number and street address. Whilst I commend your courage in placing your name so freely in the public domain, (after all, there wouldn’t be a ‘phone book without people like you) I must counsel caution. I myself am a fairly reasonable human being, I recognise your right to a difference of opinion and firmly recognise that it is impossible to legislate against stupidity, and had you not cluttered up my mailbox, I would have been happy to live and let live sans reply of this nature. However, given that a recent Galaxy poll showed the stable figure of 55% of people being against the carbon tax versus 37% in favour, it would appear incumbent upon you to let discretion be the better part of valour on this highly politicised and emotive issue, especially given the fact that the global economy seems to be sliding into an abyss. Just a heads up that not everyone you letter-box dropped may be so reasonable in the upcoming financial and philosophical climate.

Not only am I a single parent living in a rental property that costs $18,000 per year, with gas-ducted heating and several mouths to feed at prices that are some of the highest in the developed world, I also work at the local public hospital. Guess what? Hospitals are not being compensated under the proposed Gillard government carbon dioxide tax. A hospital energy bill runs into the millions per annum, and under this proposed carbon dioxide tax, energy utility bills are set to rise by around 20%. How do you propose the hospital meet the extra costs? Should people such as I lose their jobs in a cost cutting exercise? Are you personally volunteering to wait longer in the Emergency Department for treatment? At present, key performance indicators at this hospital call for a Category 4 triage patient to be seen within about 3 hours of presentation, that’s a long time to be sitting around with a broken limb, and we don’t always meet it anyway. Are you seriously telling me that you will be OK with, for instance, a 6 hour wait to be seen if your little one breaks their arm on the jungle-gym? How about 8 hours? Or even 12? And that’s just to see the junior doctor who will inform you that, yes, indeed, the limb is broken. So this is not withstanding how long it takes the orthopaedic surgeon to get around to seeing you. Perhaps instead, we should have a garage sale and on-sell the new PET-CT machine that cost this community so dear? I’m sure that the next time you or someone else you know is investigated for cancer, you won’t mind a 2 hour drive to access the next available machine.

Finally, I note with interest, that at no stage do you, SayYesAustralia who authored your letter template, or the Gillard Government, actually quantify the exact amount of warming that will be averted by knee-capping our entire economy and beggaring our way of life, based on current (albeit essentially flawed) modelling. In case you haven’t pondered this yet, estimates run around 0.01 of a degree Celsius. That, to me, does not seem worth it, and I withhold my thanks at your misguided and somewhat rude attempt to change my mind.

Sincerely Yours,

Your Neighbour.

Paging Doctor Turnbull

2011-08-04T01:01:00.000-07:00

Opposition frontbencher Malcolm "it should have been me" Turnbull has been touted by the ABC as decrying "the war on climate science." Hey, I thought, thats what I do, isn't it?

He likened climate change denial to "ignoring your doctor's advice on the basis that someone down the pub told you his uncle Ernie lived to 95 and smoked a packet of cork-tipped cigarettes every day and drank a bottle of whisky".

Wait a minute, isn't medical advice what I do, too?! Luckily, I kind of disagree with Malcolm, or I'd be out of a job. Misuse of the word "denial" aside, I think that being somewhat skeptical of the current anthropogenic global warming meme based on a careful evaluation of the current evidence for and against, is not like the "uncle Ernie" example cited by Turnbull above. If anything, it's more like being skeptical of:

* Radioactive thorium toothpaste.
* Eugenics.
* Avoiding eggs from fear they will raise your cholesterol, and
* The perception of homosexuality as a mental illness.

Stick it in your backyard

2011-08-03T22:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, look. Apparently we're all going to die of climate. Again. "News at JAMA" have just reported on a recent "analysis" which found that extreme weather, infectious diseases and air pollution (air pollution?) due to climate change will pose a growing health risk, which will be most pronounced in the south-eastern United States. Quick, someone tell Jimmy Buffett.

Wondering what this "analysis" was, I clicked the link provided and was taken to the web site of some activist collective named the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and a page entitled "Climate Change Threatens Health." with the bi-line "Serious threats where you live and what to do about them". Which just didn't seem right. Clearly what was missing, apart from science and an actual analysis, was some of these !!!!!. There, thats better. Still unable to find an actual scientific study, it appears after further scrutiny that the analysis referred to is actually a map of the United States which allows you to see in handy image form exactly how threatened by Dengue you will be "in your own backyard."!!!!!! Emphasis mine.

Good 'ole Dengue. Its always getting trotted out as the next great climate thing. Sadly, it ain't all that. In fact, if you refer to great entomological minds, such as Dr. Paul "You're so hot, lets do a field study together on a beach in the Caribbean" Reiter, or a WHO publication from 1989 a.k.a "Before the world went completely mental", it turns out the mosquito most implicated in dengue spread is a big fan of human settlements:

The peri-domestic, highly anthropophilic Aedes aegypti is the principal vector of all the serotypes and the sole vector in the New World and Australia

In other words, it's expansion of the urban environment, not climate change, that increases the vector distribution. The same publication shows the dramatic decline in A. aegypti distribution between the years 1930 and 1980.*

Such a shame that much vaunted JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, is getting its breaking medical news from an NGO infomercial. I expect the next News at JAMA story will be on a recent analysis of exactly how many times its weight in water a Shamwow can actually absorb (!!!!!). Or maybe they could elect Dr. Ho to the editorial board. (Hes a "caring doctor".)

I'm not even sure how deep in the climate alarmism funding pie the NRDC has sunk its fingers, but it didn't take too long to work out they aren't exactly about balance in the scientific debate. Their founding director appears to also be the Pew Oceans commissioner. Enough said. Well, if "enough" means "partisan-extremist-behemoth-that-seeks-to-destroy-the-livelihoods-of-fishermen-across-the-globe-and-dictate-to-other-sovereign-nations-that-they-must-lock-up-their-marine-resources-in-green-zones-so-a-few-rich-nobs-from-the-US-can-feel-better-about-their-oil-inheritances." Gasp. Then enough said.

*Many people assume the reduction in mosquito borne disease during that time was probably due to DDT, but thats because they haven't seen this:

Tofurkey of the week

2011-07-28T02:46:00.000-07:00

I have met sputum samples I like better than some of the folks over at Doctors for the Environment Australia (abbreviation DEA, not to be confused with the more police-type DEA who have a history of harshing the mellow of people like the enviro doctors).

Apart from the stupid name (Rival to my own NGO that I think I will call DR GRRRL -"Doctor Girls for Rum Reggae Rollerskating and Lurv"), they have at other times pushed for:

* An end to democracy as a cure for climate change. No sh1t.

* Advocating to patients that they stop eating meat to curb climate change.

* Population control and the payment of a "climate tax" for having children outside of the allotted quota. (As if we aren't paying already...)

* And most offensive of all, repeatedly spamming my work in-box with requests to bake cakes or shave my head to prevent climate change. For the record, I have shaved my head before, and not to raise money OR awareness for any cause. It was one more thing I can add to the list of "questionable stuff I have done to try and impress men". What it did was impress my lesbian flatmate, but thats another story.

The DEA are by and large not the type of people who embody the traits one would normally associate with the noble profession of medicine. They flagrantly disregard the principle of primum non nocere (first do no harm) and generally violate the bounds of good taste.* Just ask yourself if these are the sort of people you would want to invite to a dinner party or stick their fingers up your bottom fossicking for cancer? Which is why it is with great delight that I can report that they are now at least somewhat implicated in the Greenpeace GM wheat whipper-snippering fiasco.

Turns out an open letter protestiing the GM wheat trials was circulated (mostly via Greenpeace) from a group of concerned scientists and doctors. The inference being that they provided weight, urgency and grounds to Greenpeace's recent illegal bout of lawn-care activism.

That is, until one of the key signatories, Professor Dave Schubert, realised what Greenpeace had done and quickly moved to denounce their actions and distance himself from the organisation. Two of the eight signatories were Australian medical doctors from our old friends over at Doctors for the Environment. "No comment", they explained, making them at least slightly smarter than Shane Rattenberry.

It has also been pointed out that the open letter is eerily similar to one circulated previously by Greenpeace, with some of the same co-signatories, which protested Golden Rice trials in 2009, and cites the same evidence for concern. After corresponding with Prof. Schubert, one GM pundit came to the conclusion that not only did this signatory not even know the stated reason for the proposed wheat trial in the first place, but also did not write the letter he "signed", nor knew who the co-signatories were. The reasonable assumption being that Greenpeace itself authored the letter, and not very well, if their cut-and-paste job are anything to go by. Read further here. Nice to know they are keeping up to date with the latest evidence base.

* Thinking further on this, they also defy the Declaration of Geneva, one of the more widespread medical oaths that most graduating medical school adhere to, wherein the medical graduate swears they "...will not permit considerations of...party politics...to intervene between my duty..."

Sea Shepherd and their trouble with the ladies

2011-07-27T19:15:00.000-07:00

In recent developments for Sea Shepherd, a few legal chickens (perhaps even a Tofurkey or two) have come home to roost. The flagship Steve Irwin, captained by Paul Watson, has been detained in Scotland against an approx. USD $1.4 million bond, while a Maltese fishing company launches a civil suit claiming damages after being attacked by Sea Shepherd last year.

My personal dislike of Paul Watson and relative fondness for sailors (hello boys!) aside, I do know a thing or three about ancient and modern maritime conventions. While much of how Sea Shepherd comports itself bothers me, something that really bothers me is their profligate renaming of their vessels. Do they even have a vessel that they haven't renamed?!

Originally named Westra, Sea Shepherd renamed it on purchase to Robert Hunter and then to My Steve Irwin, after the Australian conservationist's untimely death. The Farley Mowat, which had various names before Sea Shepherd taking possession, was then Sea Shepherd and then Ocean Warrior before its current handle was bestowed.

One of their trimarans was variously named things ending in Adventurer, before being re-named Gojira then My Bridgitte Bardot.

Then of course there was the ill-fated trimaran Earthrace, which was renamed Ady Gil before being deliberately scuttled by Sea Shepherd after they ran it into a Japanese whaling vessel.

Thats alot of renaming. Renaming a vessel is not something to be done lightly. Its generally regarded as bad luck to rename a ship, for two reasons of un-contestable superstition: A vessel is, firstly, and always, female, so some of us tend to look fairly dimly on masculine names, although it is a widely accepted practice. Like any woman, a ship does not appreciate being renamed, and a lady won't necessarily respond to whatever you decided to arbitrarily change her name to. (As I discovered after bestowing the nickname "Dr. Boobzilla" on a particularly irksome intern.) Secondly, the belief was that in Neptune's ledger of the deep is recorded the name of every vessel to sail, so to change a vessel's name requires convincing the Big Guy to go back over his paperwork. If he's anything like me, that makes him cranky.

Additionally, changing a vessel's name to something that could be construed as a challenge (E.g. "Unsinkable", "Best Boat Ever" or "Liquid Asset" all spring to mind as particularly unwise choices) would positively invite disaster.

If you have the misfortune of buying a boat with a particularly loathsome name*, renaming it once is O.K. The maritime superstition police over here at the Daily Suppository will consider that acceptable, as long as the proper formalities are adhered to. However, to continuously rename a vessel you have already renamed since taking possession, is insulting. To the ship, obviously, not to the rich person you are sucking up to by doing so.

If I was the Steve Irwin I would be pretty pissed at someone right now.

* Including, but not limited to, medical names such as "Biopsea", "Boatox", "Bow Movement" or for the budding pathologists out there "Autopsea".

I feel safer already

2011-07-22T17:01:00.000-07:00

I just came across this article decrying the, and I quote, "parlous" state of safety and quality research in the medical field. The solution? Take a lesson from climate change science!

The Daily Suppository is feeling somewhat worse for wear this morning, and hasn't quite finished with the requisite bucket of coffee to kickstart brain processing, so some confusion was resulting.

CLIMATE SCIENCE AS AN EXEMPLAR FOR SAFETY AND QUALITY

In a number of respects, the parlous state of the quality and safety of medical care resembles the problem of climate change. Both constitute a profoundly serious and growing man-made threat to the public good that has until recently been both ignored and denied.

Huh?

Their idea: Medicine needs multidisciplinary centres for safety, quality and policy study based on the model of those dedicated to Climate Change research. To which The Daily Suppository would like to giggle immaturely and say "What, like I need a second butt hole?" or alternatively, like that bastion of multidisciplinary research, the CRU?

Even given the relative risk of having a Junior Dr. McStabstab screw up your drug chart, I would probably err on the side of wanting an existing medical education or health care body run the safety show. Just sayin'.

I looked into the article author bios, and they all seemed fair enough. Extensive research backgrounds, nothing overtly flakey. One of them has taken money from the Pew Charitable Trust in the past, and we all know my thoughts on them, but hey, money is money. I'll suspend my disbelief for now. So, why would three learned guys say something so, well, thick?

...lack of sustained funding bedevils quality and safety improvement...
...Centres will need core funding from a variety of sources...
...In time, further funding would be secured from...

Ohhhh. At first I didn't understand your angle, but now I get that you just want to fund about the funding you funded about earlier in the funding-funding. Fair enough, why should climate change science get all the funding fun? Healthcare safety researchers with University tenure can haz buckets of cash thrown at them, too.

My favourite bit is the last paragraph, for the best-worst use of the word "sustainable", ever:

They will also, as the climate change centres do, reach out to patients and citizens to foster a wider engagement and support for safe, high-quality healthcare as part of the wider quest for living a life that is both healthy and sustainable.

Hands up who doesn't generally want their life to be sustained?

Climate Doctor Cat contemplates the oxymoron

Planning the revolution...

2011-07-20T03:41:00.000-07:00

Excuse me if I have been a bit low on the posting. I made the mistake of calculating how much of my weekly take home pay will go to the Australian Tax Office when I have a job next year. After calculating sliding tax brackets, student supplement loan repayments, deferred university fees (HECS debt) and flood and medicare levies, I worked out I will have about the same amount of money I get right now. All for the honour of working excessively long hours and never seeing my children. And I don't even get a car park at the hospital!

By tomorrow I will have painted my toe-nails and pulled myself up by my knee-high boot laces, but right now I am feeling cranky. Well, when I say "cranky", I may or may not have requested that someone arm me so I can plan the revolution. I think I would look good in camo.

If I was French I would be marching with hundreds of my colleagues and setting fire to cars or something, but alas I am Australian, so I drink beer and mutter under my breath instead.

Tofurkey Two-fer

2011-07-17T03:44:00.001-07:00

The Tofurkeys keep coming thick and fast this week. I meant to post this earlier but was having trouble prying various children and my mother (she discovered the facebook chat function) off of my PC long enough to post. I suppose I could have fired up any of my collection of vintage laptops and / or painstakingly tip-tapped this out on a smart 'phone, but got distracted by beer, shiny things and a new pair of high heels, which I happily combined into a past-time I think I will call "extreme vacuuming".

Anyway, Big Al is going to have to share the podium with ACT Greens MLA Shane Rattenberry this week, following his on-the-record comments in regards to Greenpeace Australia's latest criminal escapade.

Three Greenpeace "activists" broke into a CSIRO facility and whippersnippered (a.k.a. "Weedwacked", "Strimmered" or "Line trimmed" depending on how you're feeling) an experimental crop of GM wheat. "What was this foul monster of genetically modified cereal being grown for in the first place?!" You may ask, if feeling dramatic. The clearly malevolent scientists at the CSIRO report the purpose of the experiment was to lower the glycaemic index and increase the fibre content of the wheat to aid in the prevention of diabetes and bowel cancer. What utter bastards.

Greenpeace then publicised this escapade, to which Shane Rattenberry MLA had this to say:

Mr Rattenbury says Greenpeace has a track record of breaking the law to highlight problems.
"I've certainly been involved in action in the past where Greenpeace has broken the law and that has been necessary to highlight what we've considered at the time to be a greater issue than perhaps a simple trespass," he said.

Clearly he missed the politics 101 tutorial on plausible deniability.

The Daily Suppository thinks that any politician who would not only speak out in favour of criminal activity, but also take the opportunity to happily confess to his own past criminal activity, all without realising that he had done so, deserves a Tofurkey.

And will someone puh-lease go and arrest them all now?!

Tofurkey of the week

2011-07-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

Since I'm back to blogging, it must be time for a Tofurkey, the Daily Suppository's own faux-poultry plinth celebrating all those who act like a complete turkey in the name of the environment, climate or the oft-misused clarion of "sustainability". This week's inedible enviro-fail award goes to none other than Al Gore himself.

Al has embarassed himself by using footage of the recent Brisbane floods to spruik the dangers of anthropogenic global warming on youtube, when even Julia Gillard's own pet climate commission populated by alarmists conceded they were not.

A predictable unintended consequence

2011-07-13T00:13:00.000-07:00

Right now I have no love lost for the proposed carbon tax, and not for all the usually cited reasons. Nope, right now, I'm annoyed because it made me do math. I hate math.

Faced with the news that hospitals are not going to be compensated for the increase to their costs under a carbon tax, I had no choice but to gird my mathematic loins and join the fray, so as to put this into some kind of perspective. (Albeit with a quick call to good ol' Dad to translate some of the more technical terms. "Hey Dad, whats this thing..its an EM.DoubleYEW.Haich or something?") So if any of my more learned readers think I have gone astray with my calculations, please consider yourself volunteered. Do you have a calculator? I'll make the tea.

This is what I worked out. Hospitals are very expensive places energy wise. Operating theatres run around the clock, we have expensive kitchens, food bills, heating and cooling, expensive equipment, lots of fun drugs and kit made out of petroleum products and aluminium, linens, the list is endless. Oh, and we leave the lights on all the time. (Except when an enviro-bully has used the bathroom last and insists on turning the lights out when they leave, thus leaving the next user (i.e. Me) to stumble around in the dark groping blindly for where the switch should be if the facility wasn't designed for achondroplasic amputees, and hoping not to encounter bodily fluids / rapists / dead people. When I find you, you will pay.)

Hospital electricity bills alone run into the millions per annum, so just times that by anywhere between 10-20% to factor in a carbon tax, and it works out to be a lot of extra dosh the hospital administration is going to have to pull out of their backsides. Somehow I don't think they are going to voluntarily sacrifice large parts of their pay packets to compensate, and I sincerely hope they don't "find" the extra money in the junior doctor's salaries, either. Worse case scenario: we may have to treat less people, less well.

Let us look at one single, important facet of hospital medicine: The MRI scanner. They are really nifty, they have big-arse magnets and are super cooled with liquid helium*, reliably cost over a million dollars AUD to buy and we don't have enough of them to meet demand. The average wait time in the west of Sydney for a medicare funded, elective MRI is anywhere between 1-8 weeks. MRI is also funky because it doesn't deliver the radiation dose of CT.

They also use a fairly hefty wack of power to run. According to an analysis of the Magnetom Avanto MRI system from 2007, it looks a little something like this:

Just to make the things creates a massive carbon dioxide footprint. A fun MRI fact is that they are often shipped by air to prevent the helium that cools the superconducting magnet from evaporating in the absence of a power source (in which case it needs to be recooled at substantial cost and energy expenditure). If the length of time it took me to ship a box of my posessions from California to Sydney by surface mail is anything to go by, I dont think we can ship them by sea in a timely manner. (Even taking into account the length of time needed for customs to open my stuff and steal my CD's). As far as I know, neither marine or air transport will be compensated under this tax, anyway.

The running costs in terms of energy work out to over 600 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year (at least according to the fine print on the back of my last electricity bill). Thats over AUD $14K a year extra just in terms of the price the government plans to put on carbon dioxide emissions, and not even including the other knock-on effects and existing predicted electricity price hikes. Just for one MRI machine!

So I have a question: What do we do to absorb the cost? Considering the existing waiting times for MRI scans, I'm not sure we can churn more people through. Are the medicare rebates for MRI scans going to be increased? At the moment, say a ball park figure for the rebate amount is around $400 (or you can peruse the list here, if you're feeling particularly masochistic). Thats not very much when you factor in the cost of the technicians needed to run a scan, the cost of purchasing and running the scanner and the cost of keeping a radiologist in luxury yachts and European cars. (I would tell you what a consultant interventional radiologist makes, but you might vomit.)

* For further information on the technological wonder that is the MRI machine, please ask someone more learned. Most of what I know about MRI can be summed up by the phrase "Big magnet = ferromagnetic metal bad" ** or watching the below clip. Warning: People upset by the gratuitous slaughter of melons should turn away now.

** UPDATE: That should probably be "Big Magnet + Ferromagnetic metal = Bad". I told you I was bad at math.

Take that, watermelon

I propose a motion...

2011-07-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

If we must have this ridiculous carbon dioxide tax thing which is going to bugger up our nation, I would like to derive some secondary gain from it. Fair is fair, if I can't afford to heat my house anymore, that makes me cranky, I'm a candy-arse when it comes to being cold. At the very least, I want to make someone else suffer more.

This is why I propose taxing cyclists on the basis that their exercising leads to an increase in carbon dioxide exhalation above the baseline of the rest of our sedentary, expanding-girth population. Just to clarify, I mean those sports cyclists who go out in gaggles of lycra cladding on weekends and then clip-clop around coffee shops in those expensive riding shoes. I really have no beef with kids on bikes, mountain bikers, or even cool twenty-somethings with moustaches on fixie-bikes. No, I just have an unreasonable, bigoted, knee-jerk reaction to anyone who takes it seriously. I suck like that.

I have to confess I didn't think of this idea, and it pains me to say that it was actually the Ex-Mr. Paua who came up with it. This is a man who used to have a subscription to New Internationalist, and jealously guarded his box of back issues when the subscription ran out. I would like to point out, that as I am what is known in Australia as a "top chick", I resisted the temptation to "lose" them with extreme prejudice during any of our successive house moves. I have never been the sort of woman who disappeared hated wardrobe items of a spouse either, and its worth pointing out here that the Ex-Mr. Paua owned both leather trousers AND a woolen cloak. Who wears a f#$%ing cloak for f&*$s sake?!

Anyway, I really, really dislike cyclists in a completely unfair and unreasonable way. They sh!t me to tears. I think its the flourescent lycra and their flagrant disregard for road rules. Cycling is reaching epidemic proportions, and there is nothing as terrifying as coming over a hill on a country road doing 100 kph to suddenly find a freaking pellaton of weekend city cyclists in front of you. If they want to be treated as any other vehicle on the road, then that is fine, but then I should be allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road so that I can chat to the driver of the car next to me. In the interest of fairness, they should also be subject to the road rule which says that a motorist cannot do more than a certain amount below the posted limit. A polynesian relative of mine discovered this little known road rule when he was booked by police for doing 30 kilometres under the posted limit. He was so tired after a hard nights work as a nightclub bouncer that he was driving with the door open so he could follow the white line, and it was 4am on a deserted country road, so he figured he better play it safe. A law is a law, however, and he broke it.

Perhaps my visceral dislike stems from my skateboarding days when a fat cyclist in flourescent lycra picked on me at a set of traffic lights to vent some of his cyclist angst, presumably because I represented a fairly soft target. That was the day that a cyclist learnt that the reason why a young woman would skateboard through the inner city at night is because it's an excuse to carry what is essentially a plank of wood covered in grip tape.

Anyway, fair is fair. If they are going to pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, they should be taxed accordingly. Kind of like how Greens dislike feral camels on the basis of their farting, and just remember what they proposed doing to camels.

Cycling: You're doing it right

I have a theory

2011-07-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

I'm on holidays, and unbelievably for a medico stuck at home with a gaggle of kids in winter, was on some kind of perverse sober health kick. Until yesterday. Happily, I didn't do the usual and get stuck into a bottle of Barbados' finest as a gesture of protest at the carbon tax announcement, instead limiting myself to a bottle or three of sauvignon blanc. I am nothing if not a creature of moderation and rectitude.

Somewhere between tripping over the cat and psychologically profiling Prime Minister Gillard's motivations and likely I.Q. level, I had a sudden revelation:

This carbon tax thing is on purpose! No, wait, still hungover, let me clarify. She doesn't really need The Greens the way everyone has being bleating on about. The Greens are never going to back a conservative government, she doesn't need them the way an obligate intracellular organism needs its host, or even as much as I need a coffee. She could have called their bluff.

Ergo, she must have some deeper motivations, and among the more obvious theories are:

* She actually has deep seated convictions that this carbon dioxide tax thingy is going to do something for the environment and isn't particularly bright. This theory has a certain attractiveness.

* She screwed the pooch so badly on the minerals resources tax thingy that was needed to get the Labour budget out of deficit, that this carbon dioxide tax is a way to recoup the funds, by taxing the same industries that slipped the noose in the last tax-go-round and exempting everyone else.

However, none of the above explains why she would insist on committing political seppuku in such an epic manner. I mean, she's going down faster than a B-grade starlet at Charlie Sheen's house. Then it occurred to me:

* It's all a calculated move to destroy The Greens! She is nobly sacrificing her own continued leadership aspirations, and the future of her own political party, to make sure that The Greens go the way of One Nation and the Democrats! Think about it! Calls have already gone out from both sides of politics to limit their preference flows and sideline them the way One Nation was. Crafty Julia is giving Bob Brown enough rope to hang himself. Just the other day he got so over-excited he started talking about one world government, y'see, it's working already. All those gen-Y knobs who voted for them because they thought they were warm and fuzzy are starting to wise up, and are not about to hand back the keys to the hotted up commodore. Its brilliant.

Julia "KFC"* Gillard, for your noble sacrifice on behalf of the Australian people, the Daily Suppository salutes you!

* Two small breasts, two large thighs and a red box.

Cry. Scream. Vomit.

2011-07-09T01:06:00.000-07:00

First of all, a dietary plain language statement from moi: I was vegetarian for a several years there in my teens and early twenties. It wasn't for animal rights, although I did listen to The Smiths a bit, and as a generation X-er I can at least attest to the fact it wasn't for reasons of "sustainability". No. It started as a way to impress a guy. He now runs a grass-roots record label specialising in Jamaican music, has a collection of questionable tattoos, and yes, I would probably still sleep with him given half a chance. In fact, he pursued me for a time there, many years ago, and as part of my cunning plan of reciprocal seduction, I plied him with a particularly lethal home-made ~~dope~~ "chocolate" cake before inviting him into my bed. He passed out on the couch. I guess you could say he's the one that got away.
Thankfully, before I could become a complete wanker, a questionably tattooed lesbian flatmate coaxed me off the vegetarian wagon a fews years later with rump steak, after a particularly bad hangover. Then several successive pregnancies were the last nail in that dietary coffin. In fact, I am cooking a lamb roast as we speak. I also grew up in the beef cattle country of Australia. I, unlike many people in this country, have seen (in real life) cattle being slaughtered, and then eaten their meat.

Now let us examine the recent live-export cattle ban.

For those who have been living under a rock in Australia, or are American and haven't followed the latest Gillard government S.N.A.F.U., the abridged version runs along these lines: Two blonde women from an animal rights group filmed horrendous cruelty to Brahman cattle in a couple of abattoirs in Indonesia prior to their slaughter and a news story was aired. It was horrible. The cattle were live exports from nothern Australia. This apparently made it our fault. The viewing public freaked the fuq out. The government freaked the fuq out. Overnight all live exports were suspended. Beef cattle farmers freaked the fuq out (being several million dollars in the hole overnight will do that to a person). Indonesia freaked the fuq out (losing a big whack of your national dietary protein overnight will do that to a person). Everyone was freaking the fuq out.
To cut a long story short, the Government realised they had, ahem, porked the poodle on this one and backflipped, however the economic effects of this aren't over by a long shot.

Now, on to some hypocrisy worse than my past case of vegetarianism:

There are better ways to slaughter animals. Just ask Temple Grandin if you want a pragmatic approach. However, insisting that the worlds most populous majority muslim nation adhere to the principal of stunning prior to slaughter, when we allow exemptions for Halal and Kosher slaughter here in Australia, is somewhat hypocritical.

It gets better. Not only do we allow exemptions to be granted for ritual slaughter here in Australia, we also allow for wholesale extermination of animals that we deem to be "pest" species. Apparently, poisoning foxes, shooting feral cats, fumigating fluffy bunny babies in their nests and unleashing biological agents of death on same, are OK. Even The Greens think that's OK, in fact, its part of their platform, right under the bits about banning live exports and circus animals, they just say it should be done more "humanely":

5.the most humane and effective means available to be used in the control of introduced and pest species, including humane population management methods.

So what does the Department of Primary Industries say about about animal welfare in relation to a "Pest Animal Strategy"?:

In general, the National Consultative Committee on Animal Welfare has advocated the use of techniques that result in high level and long lasting control, therefore reducing the need to frequently apply controls.

Oh, well thats alright then. Pass the myxomatosis

We also do not require stunning to be performed on wild game prior to slaughter, which means Skippy can get shot in the head from the back of a truck while being chased by dogs, and the little Joey in its pouch "humanely" terminated, all in the interests of supplying the pet meat trade.
And bright sparks, yes, even in government ministries concerned with climate change, have at various times advocated the shooting of everything from wild buffalo to camels to stop them farting. Seriously. Considering that part of the complaint in relation to the Indonesian abbattoirs was that the footage showed animals being slaughtered in front of the other animals, I find it hypocritical in the extreme that the same people wouldn't bat an eyelid about shooting a camel from a helicopter, in front of its mates. Like we do regularly with wild horses and pigs. The link supplied mentions that the RSPCA even monitors the aerial shooting cull of the horses to ensure they are shot "humanely", yet puts spokespeople on national television to state their position on mandatory stunning of cattle prior to slaughter for other sovereign nations.

I will now finish with the most blatent hypocrisy of all. So much uproar over the treatment of Australian animals in Indonesia, leading to the (temporary) suspension of live exports, and yet this is a country that executes Australian citizens by firing squad. I don't see the federal government immediately suspending package tours to Bali.

Hi all

2011-07-08T19:58:00.000-07:00

Wow. Its been a while. Sorry 'bout that (to the, oh, one person left who will notice this post since I lost my entire readership while away from blogging).
I had this medical degree thing to finish, and kids to wrangle. I had this horrible moment recently during exams, where I became very cranky at the Medical School's seeming expectation that as a final year medical student I was somehow expected to know ALL of medicine. Then I realised I was. Am. In other words, I've been busy trying to learn how not to kill people accidentally.

So, what a couple of months we've had here in the antipodes! Here was me thinking post climate-gate that the alarmism bandwagon had lost momentum. That an eventual collapse of the global mass delusion was imminent. That we were all going to wake up hungover after some massive "end of the IPCC" do, with sketchy memories, torn fishnets, between James Delingpole and Adam Baldwin on a coral atoll somewhere. (Maybe that last bit is just me). Instead, I'm sober, and woke up to Julia Gillard's wide-load arse preparing to announce a climate tax. Seriously, world, WTF?!

So much WTF-ery, so little blog space. I feel to do current events justice I need to probably triage them somewhat and arrange my thoughts into some kind of coherent snark, else this turn into some kind of rambling manifesto. Speaking of which, I realised that my facebook friends list is getting somewhat unwieldy. I mean, I have facebook friends who I went to high school with who are now militant union, labour lawyers with political aspirations. Just ugh, frankly. The things they clutter up my news feed with, honestly. I have another friend who actually ran as a Green's candidate, and shares thoughts bemoaning the cumulative radiation dose of air travel. Another one was spruiking her idea for a liberal, left-wing, angry emo blog. Pfftt. I need to cull. So I was thinking of "outing" myself, and letting them drop by the wayside naturally. Something along the lines of this:

It's time I came clean. Many of you who think you know me, really don't, and I can't live this lie anymore. In a political sense, in many ways, I'm conservative. I mean, I'm slightly to the right of Genghis Khan. In fact, some of those Mongol policies smacked of socialism to my mind. I think P.J. O'Rourke is hilarious, (albeit a trifle catholic) and James Delingpole is hot. I even think Andrew Bolt is a good guy, although I disagree with his assertion that women can't be Navy clearance divers (You're wrong Andrew, I can prove it). I wish we had a flat (low!) taxation rate for everyone, regardless of income, instead of tax brackets, and a simplified taxation system. I also think that Government subsidies are rarely, if ever a good idea.
Sure, I'm all for access to education and health care, my kids go to a Government school and I'm to too broke to have private health cover. I'm also pro-choice and have a past checquered with questionable recreational past-times involving mind altering substances, loud music and occasional episodes of nudity. However, I went and grew the hell up, abandoned a particularly embarassing bout of vegetarianism in favour of rump steak, took out the nose ring (it was too mainstream) and went back to my red-neck roots. Which were never very far away, anyhow. At no stage did I think that MORE regulation and MORE government was ever going to solve any of my problems, and even with my elementary mathematical ability I could do the sums of beaurocracy and come up with a zero. Or a negative. So please, stop sending me text messages inviting me to a rally against red-meat/live-exports/carbon dioxide/poverty and / or economic summits or instructing me how to vote during the next election.
I'm sorry if this means we can't be friends.

Thoughts?

Back again!

2011-01-14T16:36:00.000-08:00

Sorry 'bout closing the blog for awhile there, but with my unerring ability to mistime holidays I have been in Queensland for the last 4 weeks visiting family. During that time it was brought to my attention that a company was rather profitably copyright-trolling blogs and litigating accordingly (see: I'm too poor to sue!) thing was brought to my attention, and in a fit of paranoia I just closed the blog until I could get home and do the necessary, tedious searches of my old posts.

Anyone interested in donating to the Queensland flood relief see here. Or alternatively, if you have a high-pressure hose, a pair of gumboots* and live within driving distance of south-east Queensland, they need YOU. (My family has a rich relationship with hurricanes, cyclones and floods ripping through the house. Its messy, to say the least, the mud is quite unbelievable. And as I discovered at the age of 11, if you dont wear shoes in the aftermath of a flood, its quite possible to do something like punch the broad side of a nail covered in mud through the bottom of your foot. Several weeks of crutches and the scar still twinges in cold weather.)

Oh, and for those not of a technological bent, if your house was flooded and you have a solar electricity system, it IS STILL GENERATING ELECTRICITY even though the mains power is out, and if the inverter has been immersed, there can be arcing. Please be careful, some systems can deliver enough DC volts to be fatal.

* Galoshes or wellingtons, depending on where you live.

Waking up is hard to do

2010-12-04T13:41:00.000-08:00

Just when you thought funding for ridiculous climate studies was on the wane, Professor Ole John Nielsen of Copenhagen has discovered that gases used in anaesthesia are up to 1600 times more potent as greenhouse gases than CO2. Happily, he reassures us that he won't call for them to be banned. Yet.
Nielsen, who got the idea while his wife was having a baby (whereupon the Daily Suppository will restrain herself from defamatory comments against the male persuasion...its been a rough few weeks) has written in the British Journal of Anaesthesia that the global impact of inhalation anaesthesia is comparative to a million cars. This sounds exciting, until you work out that that is the same as one coal fired power plant. Lets not freak out prematurely or anything.
Prof. "Not a medical doctor" Nielsen, has advised anaethetists that they should "sit up and take notice" of this, and since of the three anaesthetic gases analysed, one is more potent as a greenhouse gas than the other two:

If all three compounds have equal therapeutic work, there is every reason to use the one with the lowest global warming potential.

A statement so cute in its over-simplicity and mis-identification of significance. Just hazarding a guess here, but from what I know of anaesthetics (which isnt much, and Im not looking it up because Im on holidays) Im going to go right ahead and guess that the complex physiological and pharmaceutical science that is anaesthetics takes into account more factors in selecting an agent than its "therapeutic work". Thats because the "therapeutic work" of an inhalation anaesthetic is usually "knocking you out", and they all do that. Amazingly though, the pharmacokinetics of the agent, and dare I say it, the patient's individual physiology, plays a part, too. Not to mention the availability and cost of the agent itself.
Thinking of the anesthetists I know, I'm somehow not too worried that this is going to radically change the profession. Perhaps Prof. Nielsen should have investigated the climate impact of runnning just one hospital laundry, instead.

EDIT: Anthony Watts just debunked the paper's claims in a particularly educated and erudite fasion. His rebuttal is based on science-y stuff, mine on hanging out with anaesthetists at three in the morning on a labour ward, or watching one napping against a wall while I helped put a rubber hose up an unconscious patient's bum. Probably go with what Watts says, Im thinking.

Weather update

2010-11-25T17:06:00.001-08:00

Hi All,
Usually I get the irrits with all these medical students who constantly update their facebook pages with comments about how many lives they've saved. Go and notch your stethoscope, or something. Seriously, who saves lives? I certainly dont. I'll be happy if I can just get through the next few years without accidentally killing anyone.
Until two nights ago that is, when I saved a life! It was actually my own. Good for me.
Yes, folks, I had "thunderstorm asthma", and it really sucked. I had never even heard the term before, nor ever had asthma, but realised something was wrong when I couldn't breathe. I find thats usually a diagnostic giveaway. Reasoning that it seemed to be occurring in line with a rainstorm, I thought perhaps pollen could be implicated (in your face all those people who said that being a science nerd is a bad thing, knowing how pollen behaves in the rain is useful after all!) and rummaged around until I found some old antihistamines and a bottle of prednisone left over from the last time the kids had croup. Then I sat around wheezing heavily until they kicked in. This is the point in the story where people are probably wondering: a) Wheres the weather / climate angle? and b) Why didnt you go to a hospital, you retard?
The answers are as follows: a) I'm getting to it. b) Medicos make terrible patients and usually dont go to an ED until they are unconscious, whereupon someone else takes them. Also, the kids were asleep and I didnt want to wake them.
Now, on to the weather angle. Australia is one of the worst places in the world for asthma and hayfever. I could provide links, but cant be bothered, just google it if you dont believe me. Interestingly, when people move to Australia from overseas, they run the risk of developing asthma and hayfever that is a function of how long they have been here for. 2-4 years seems to the magic number, then you get a bunch of expats suddenly presenting to their doctors with their heads exploding, saying things like "I've NEVER had this before." Lets just say our environmental conditions can be tough on the atopic.
Anyhoo, this is one of the wettest, coolest summers in southern Australian since around 1996. All of those bastard pollinating thingies are going apeshit. Then you get a couple of hot days where they pollinate themselves into a frenzy, followed by a thunderstorm, which bursts the pollen grains in the air. So instead of getting stuck in your nose and causing hayfever, you breathe all these antigenic particles down into your lungs and suddenly find it difficult to breathe.
Melbourne has been hardest hit and had 300+ people calling for an ambulance due to thunderstorm asthma in one night, which doesnt count those people who presented to ED themselves (or sat at home in Sydney self-medicating with kiddy prednisone and Phenergan). The Alfred hospital has had to open another wing to deal with the number of cases. Apparantly this hasn't happened on such a scale since the 1970's.
Television news are running stories warning people with hayfever to go straight to a hospital if they start wheezing. Fun times.
Global warming has clearly foresaken us. Bring back the drought.

Update...

2010-11-23T18:50:00.000-08:00

Hi all,
I realise I kind of went AWOL for awhile there, so I thought I would put up a quick note to explain that I am around and will return to blogging in another 2 weeks or so. Lets just say that a perfect storm of hospital work, the obligatory hospital acquired illness, end of year exams and Mr. Paua going FUBAR in the head and disappearing on me in the midst of all this has put The Daily Suppository on a backburner for awhile. (BTW Mr. Paua, they have pills for that. Oh, thats right, you stopped taking them...)
I have been reduced to yelling at ABC news 24 stories instead, (which FYI would have made their way into the blogosphere had there been a Daily Suppository intern with a dictaphone and mad typing skills on hand. Just a thought, people.) And listening to angry nerd music about recalcitrant boyfriends.
Whatever gets you through.
See you in a couple of weeks.

Its funny 'cause my nickname for him really is "bitch":

I heart the Gore-acle

2010-10-23T03:32:00.000-07:00

Like fading A-list celebs the world over, Al Gore has taken to paid appearances in Asia and the Subcontinent to boost his bottom line. Most of his contemporaries end up lending their services to wierd advertisements for Japanese whiskey or toilet paper, or in the case of Al Pacino, spruiking a C grade coffee in Australia. In Al G's case, he recently jetted in to address a selected crowd of Indian cardiovascular specialists in Chennai.
After picking up his check, he immediately flew out again, avoiding any contact with the media. Even the event organisers thought that was a little wierd:

"His lecture was meant to be a private address to delegates at the congress" the media was told by members of the organising committee. But they themselves found it incongrous that "a man interested in creating global awareness on climate change and other environmental issues should have himself restricted the reach of his message."

Not so surprising when you hear the content of his speech. Al clearly struggled for common ground, and, dare I say it, relevancy when catering to cardiologists and cardio-thoracic surgeons, so went with comparing the human heart with the Earth's hydrological cycle. Clearly because he knows so much about both. I believe the word he was looking for instead was "plumbing". (Sorry, little doctor joke there.)
Also touched upon was the challenges faced by a rising global population, perhaps somewhat impolitic of him considering he was in one of the world's most populous nations.
Now, I've been to India, and I find it seriously hard to believe that the most entertaining thing anyone could come up with was Al Gore? Even the German's do a better line in weird conferecne entertainment. I once had described to me in great detail a German pharmaceutical conference where the entertainment consisted of a middle aged German guy jumping out of a large cake and attaching two toilet plungers to his chest, complete with song. And I probably saw wierder things in India just catching a suburban train through down-town Mumbai.
I certainly hope those doctors were on an all expenses paid junket, because if it was me and I was picking up the tab, I would vote for the Bahamas and Lady Ga Ga next time.

Everything you ever suspected about psychiatrists confirmed

2010-10-23T01:17:00.001-07:00

So hands up who saw the "hilarious" 10:10 fest promotional video? I was one of those people who watched it and was completely appalled, and I get splatter humour. Seriously, if you didn't cry with laughter during the lawn mower scene in Peter Jackson's Brain Dead*, theres something wrong with you. The 10:10 promotional video, on the other hand, just wasn't funny.
The predictable fall-out of 10:10's epic own-goal fail, was that all of their corporate sponsors suddenly went the way of Pierce Brosnan's Remington Steele era chest hair in the 1990's, and just disappeared. Which kind of makes one wonder why on freakin' earth 4 of the major UK medical societies suddenly signed up to their campaign after the 10:10 splatter video?

And just like that....it was gone....

Seriously. I don't mean to sound indelicate, but f*ck me drunk and bury me pregnant, what were they thinking?! According to the Royal College of Psychiatrist's own website:

The Royal College of Psychiatrists (RCPsych), Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP), the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) and the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), have all joined 10:10, mindful of the threat posed by climate change.

The president of the RCPsych, Dinesh Bughra (is his last name really pronounced the way I think its pronounced?), even goes so far to say that living a low carbon life style will cheer you up. On the one hand, he may be right - apparently people in developing nations have historically rated their general happiness as being better than whingeing princesses in developed nations, but they tend to die quicker of really gross things like TB, and childbirth. Its also been put forward that peopled rated their happiness as higher during the world wars due to factors like a united sense of purpose, but in the long run I would counsel against invading Poland as a means of cheering everyone up.
A more recent compilations of studies into mental wellbeing created a global "happiness map", that showed a differing picture, and fairly clearly highlighted that the main predictors of happiness were access to health care, followed by wealth and education.

In Australia, there are longstanding media agreements to not report certain types of suicides and violent crime. It is well known that publicising suicides off of bridges, in front of trains and knife assaults (unless particularly extreme events) increases the number of similar events in the community. Due to this, most people here are happily unaware of the weekly parade of knifings and jumpers unless they work in a health care field, or, like I did 10 years ago, live next door to a train bridge. So if the media would voluntarily censor itself in the name of the greater good, this begs the question of why a national body of Psychiatrists would back an organisation that normalises blowing up innocents, including children, that show deviation from an arbitrary, political party-line.
Physician, for f*cks sake, heal thyself.

* And to think, this man went on to make Lord of the Rings and is now a knight of the realm.

If you have a job, the Greens don’t like you

2010-09-13T20:40:00.000-07:00

How many people who voted Green at the last election have any idea what their actual policies are? Originally the Greens represented a protest vote, and as such were essentially a protest party. It didn’t really matter what their policies were, they were just assumed to be warm, fuzzy and had something to do with lesser spotted quolls or numbats or something. “Maybe”, people said hopefully, “they might legalise pot”. What wasn’t to love, right? Now, however, they have a member in the lower house and the resulting power-broking alliance with the minority Labour government, plus holding the balance of power in the senate. They would have us believe they could be a party of governance. So in the spirit of this, let’s have a little look-see at what they actually want to do with our country.

I started looking at their economic policies first, just because. Most Green’s voters could tell you that they want a price on carbon, but few probably realise that they want to tax you up the whazoo, redistribute your wealth and (probably) send you to the country side for re-education.

First off, let me preface this with a personal position statement: I’m poor. Really poor. However, given that I can get an education with little cash up front, eat pretty damn well and don’t have to bash my clothes on a rock down by the river to get them clean, I figure I have little to complain about. One day, though, I wouldn’t mind being better off, and so I’m a little bothered that the Greens want to:

• Increase the maximum tax bracket to 50% for high income earners, impose a minimum income tax obligation in your bracket so there is no way to reduce your personal tax burden and do away with concessions for capital gains tax. “That’s alright”, you say, “I can put it in a trust for my kids or post a loss on those dodgy soy-burger stocks that never broke even”.

• Au contraire. They want to tax your family trust as a company (whilst mentioning elsewhere that they will increase the company tax rate to 33%) and reckon you can only post a loss on an investment against income from that same investment. (This is kind of missing the point, if you ask me.) “Fine”, you say. “I’ll salary sacrifice and get as many fringe benefits out of my employer as I can”.

• Ha. Sorry. They’re gonna end fringe benefit tax concessions (and remember that fringe benefits tax is paid at the maximum income tax bracket which will then be 50%. Try selling your boss on that.) Purportedly, this is because fringe benefits tax concessions encourages people to drive more in company cars, confirming that, indeed, all Green policy seems to come out of the inner city. Seriously, just look at a map of this country sometime. Some people have to drive for 4 hours just to get to a shop. “Instead of driving the company car, why not just catch public transport?” the Greens say. (It’s the long distance coach that stops past twice a week, you can’t miss it.)

• “Alright then, I can give my hard-earned to my spouse or kids, or failing that, they can have it when I’m gone”. Nope again, if the Greens have it their way, they’re going to end capital gains tax concessions, too, and introduce an additional death duty that would be imposed on estates over a certain amount. Don’t worry, though, Bob Brown has made an unspecified promise he’ll help protect the family farm when you die (which is what I thought family trusts were for). An unfortunate shame when you won’t be able to operate that family farm anymore because of its environmental impact.

“Wow. That’s scary.” You say. But wait, there’s more, let’s have a little look at some of their foreign policies:

• They want to cancel the ANZUS treaty. You know, the one usually touted as “the only reason we aren’t all speaking Japanese or Indonesian right now”. Perhaps it’s time to send a memo to the Greens that the treaty is an agreement to be allies, not best buddies? We can have a treaty and still bitch about the US behind their back when they have a bad hair day, dress tres slutty or want us to cancel our national pharmaceutical benefits scheme.
If you think dropping ANZUS would be bad for Australia, consider what could happen to New Zealand if we dropped the treaty. Since New Zealand took the high ground, and themselves, out of the treaty with the US over their nuclear stance, they enjoyed treaty-by-proxy because we were allied with the US and they were still allied with us. In the event we drop ANZUS, hopefully that would mean their little nuclear-free, small population idyll would be invaded first. Sorry NZ.

• Hidden in the environmental section, I also discovered another gem. The Greens would like to limit our maritime Economic Exclusion Zone to only a 200 (presumably nautical) mile limit. At the moment our EEZ is 200 nautical miles OR the limit of the continental shelf. This was ratified by the UN under the Convention on the Law of the Sea. If we limit ourselves to 200 nautical miles (or the equidistant line between two countries less than 400 NM apart), East Timor may pick up a couple of natural gas rigs, but we would lose rights to 2.5 million square kilometres of seabed. Count them. Not that it matters, because they would lock up most of the oceans in Marine Protected Areas with a minimum 30% of that “no take” zones and oppose any new non-renewable resource drilling operations, anyway.

East Timor picks up a couple of gas rigs that they are already getting royalties from with line C, we lose 2.5 million Sq Km of seabed.
If you think that’s a worry, have a read up on their “Peace and Security” section:

• Among other things, they want to “close all existing foreign bases in Australian territory and end foreign troop deployment, training and hosting on Australian territory” (sorry America, we don’t want any of your high tech communications and satellite equipment anymore, we want to pay for it all ourselves and get a (Greens designated publically owned) Telstra to run it) and “end training and joint exercises by the ADF with the armed forces known to have committed human rights abuses”. Which would kind of rule out, ummm, everyone except the Swiss, who are famously neutral and lay claim to the second most boring city in Europe.

• Now for my favourite: “support the development of an Australian Coastguard to replace military personnel and equipment in coastal policing.” Ba ha ha ha. Just ask the US (while we’re still on speaking terms) how their hooligan’s navy is working out for them. A coastguard isn’t a police force, it’s a repackaged defence force for alcoholics, generally with the primary objective of dealing with illegal immigrants among other things, but with the unintended consequence of harassing recreational boaters trying to get their beer on. This amounts to an expensive marketing ploy, but what scares me is they probably think its solving some kind of imaginary problem. (I have been advised that the US coastguard isnt quite the same as it used to be, and has been known to do scary rescues in huge seas in places like Oregon, but the basic ridiculousness of the Australian proposal still stands.)

There’s more, but halfway through the blatant hypocrisy of their indigenous policy I suddenly needed to go and have a drink, and don’t worry, they’re going to tax that, too, based on the alcohol content of your beverage. I see a Green led future, and it involves light beer.

Tofurkey of the week

2010-09-01T22:48:00.000-07:00

The faux-poultry environmental idiocy awards just keep coming. This week, Alain Robert, the French "Spiderman", has been arrested for climbing a Sydney skyscraper in a bid to ~~raise awareness about climate change~~ advertise a web site. (The web site is great (not), BTW, its a ticker that says how many months we have before greenhouse gases kill us all. At the moment its going with 75 months.) Anyway, his efforts weren't widely reported, and he got arrested as a result, so we figure this probably deserves a Tofurkey, since Brad Pitt appears to have gone back to being pretty for the time being.
The Daily Suppository would also like to point out that dubbing Robert a "Spiderman" does not a hero make. For starters, he's fallen off very tall things at least twice, and in addition, he's up against true heroes in Spidey suits. Like, um... SPIDERMAN for one. Or failing that, the Thai fireman who just "happened" to have a spiderman suit in his work locker one day and was able to don it in a hurry to coax a young autistic boy from a third floor window ledge in downtown Bangkok. Sonchai Yoosabai, the Daily Suppository salutes you!

Is that piloerection, or are you just unhappy to see me?

2010-08-27T18:00:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering, piloerection is one of those medical terms, like formication, that sounds rude, but actually isn't. It merely refers to having your body hair stand on end. Which is always a nice introduction to anything to do with Clive Hamilton, Green's candidate, "public intellectual", internet censor, anti-semite, climate hysteric and all round 'freakin wierdo.

This morning your beloved author was busy trying to read her weekly horoscope and Jeremy Clarkson's auto review in the Weekend Australian, when she was distracted by Clive Hamilton's "advice" to the three incumbent MP's who currently hold the balance of power in our newly elected hung parliament. (I really wish I was blogging about the Sex Party right now, because at least they appreciate a well-hung parliament. Snicker.)

Anyway, Clive "it should have been me" Hamilton would like the three (fairly conservative and rural) independents to know that should they back a conservative coalition government chaired by a climate skeptic, that they will be responsible for the worst death of the entire planet, evah, it will rain fire and locusts will eat their babies. Or something. For pure, bizarre vitriol bordering on the libellous, it really has to be read to be believed. Really, he brings in everything from Monckton to the Tea Party movement and with liberal sprinklings of the word "denier".
Even the title of his piece: "MPs' obligations to the planet" sort of misses the point of a democratic election, which in my opinion would put their obligations rather firmly with their local electorates rather than "the planet". Which FYI, would like to see their MPs back a coalition government, and largely have major issues with most Green's policies.

Sensing that his views wouldn't hold much sway with skeptical independent Bob Katter in a bar room brawl, Clive took a swing in print:

Bob Katter is a lost cause, another climate denier from the bush who reinforces every urban stereotype about rural backwardness.

Thanks, Clive. Suspicions about the Greens confirmed. Does it not seem incongrous to you that you and your party seek to speak for the people of rural and remote Australia, whilst holding them in utter contempt and with power based solely on votes from the inner-city? Not just the city, but the inner-inner city?!

A little known fact about this author is that as a very young woman, starting at the age of about 15, my only available mode of transport for many years was via hitch-hiking in rural and remote parts of Australia. I largely avoided any trouble of the "fork it or walk it" kind and emerged from this experience unscathed, but in the process developed a finely tuned psycho-meter. On the hitchiking-teenage-girl-psycho-meter, I can tell you now which out of Bob Katter and Clive Hamilton I would be most concerned about being alone in a car with on a deserted country road.
Bob Katter is exactly the type of guy to yell and bluster alot about politics close to his heart, let out an occasional "yeehaw" when overtaking and take it upon himself to lecture you about anything stupid he thinks you're doing at the present time. However, he would probably drive out of his way to take you to where you were going and stand you a counter-lunch at the pub on the way. Clive Hamilton, on the other hand, is exactly the sort of guy to keep an old tarpaulin and cable-ties in the boot of his car and to think you were "asking for it".

A double-dip Tofurkey

2010-08-27T17:43:00.000-07:00

Heres something to go with the impending double-dip recession: Two notable Tofurkey awards for the same week! For those just joining us, the Tofurkey of the Week Award is a faux-poultry plinth awarded to those who have acted like a complete turkey in the name of the environment. This weeks shared prize goes to University of Virginia activist Ryan McElveen and hollywierd star Brad Pitt.

McElveen has been nominated for a Tofurkey for his services in arranging a mass protest against Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's continued efforts to formally inquire into Mike "Dodgy Tree Ring" Mann's climate research.

The 2008 UVA graduate had been hoping that at least 50 people would appear for the protest he launched with some emails and flyers. He chose Friday, August 20, because that was the day that a judge, just a mile away, was hearing arguments on whether Cuccinelli’s inquest could move forward. Turns out that’s also the eve of move-in for the fall semester at UVA.
“Bad timing,” McElveen admitted as just two students and two professors rallied with him on the marble steps of the UVA Rotunda.

Meanwhile, Brad Pitt has been nominated for his bizarre on-camera rant against BP, calling for the death penalty for those involved in the gulf oil spill. Slightly excessive, you say? If having an accident by definition attracted punishment by death, we would probably be having difficulty keeping the globe populated. Shhhh, don't tell PopOffSets. Personally, this reader is of the opinion that the death penalty has its place, but should probably be reserved for those people who leave dirty dishwater in the sink for hours under the guise of "soaking stuff" and LEAVE THE SPONGE IN THE WATER, TOO.

I knew carbon trading was a scam...

2010-08-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

So anyway, a family member just got a phone call from a telemarketer with a subcontinental accent, who said he was calling on behalf of Microsoft because they had identified a virus on his computer. Apparently, for the low-low price of AUD $59 they could remove this for him, but first they just had to go to this web site and...
Behold! The "your computer has a virus" phishing scam is now available via telephone.
Anyway, in the process of convincing my relative that it was, indeed, a scam, I was checking out the SCAMwatch website, which is where I saw this:

WesternField Holdings Inc. carbon credit investment scams

WesternField Holdings Inc., a bogus overseas based telemarketing business, offering so called ‘investment opportunities’.

SCAMwatch understands that overseas telemarketers are making unsolicited calls to Australian consumers and businesses. Recipients are asked about their views on current environmental concerns and whether they would consider investing in environmental projects.

Recipients who express an interest in the environment or indicate that they are interested in investing are then contacted by a representative from WesternField Holdings.

WesternField Holdings has gone to great lengths to convince investors that it is a legitimate investment opportunity. It has a genuine looking website (www.western-field.com) and assures potential investors that they can review their ‘investment certificates’ online through a supposed independent website registered to CTR Limited (http://carbontrustregistry.com).

Green on black

2010-08-16T20:39:00.000-07:00

One thing that has been bugging me for along time, but seemed to get relatively little media play, is the rather overwhelming evidence that the Green party, who bang on about cultural diversity, are racist against indigenous Australians.
Apparently, they care more for beleagured boat people than they do for our first people. Alright, I'll go right ahead and say it: The Greens don't like Aborigines.
Or, to put it another way, they like them as long as they stay suitably poor and nobly savage. How else can you explain the Wild Rivers Legislation?
I dont tend to get too excited over current events, but when the Wild Rivers legislation came in, I was almost apoplectic with horror. I grew up with Eddie Koiki Mabo's fight for basic recognition of his people rights. I still get tears in my eyes thinking of what red-neck cocksuckers did to his grave in Townsville, and this felt far, far worse.
Contrast that with the attitudes of most of our white, urban population, who really think that eco-salvation ranks above economic and cultural autonomy for Indigenous Australians on their own land. Most people either haven't heard of it or think its probably a good idea. The vast majority of people would have no inkling of the true implications for indigenous Australia.
Read more here.
Rather strangely, the conservative opposition leader was so aware of the travesty of this he entered a private members bill to overturn the legislation (which was subsequently quashed). Somewhat not in keeping with the traditional Coalition, and with Labour happy to sell out Indigenous Australia for Green preferences.
Lately, Tony Abbott has even been quoted as saying that on many of his policies, he has been "channelling Noel Pearson". When was the last time a would-be Prime Minister recieved policy advice on non-indigenous affairs from an indigenous Australian?
How bizarre that I still don't particularly like the man, he is just another politician (and I'm not quick to forgive on his Catholic anti-abortion drug stance during the mefipristone block), and I'm convinced that Noel Pearson and Abbott will have wefare recipients on food stamps before this is done, but on the other hand: hes sworn to overturn Wild Rivers, suspend the ridiculous Marine Protected Areas that were once again brought in at the behest of the Pew Conservation Trust and the Greens and is going to stop the ridiculous GP superclinic idea.
He had me at "climate change science is utter crap", anyway.

We're gonna need a bigger flow chart

2010-08-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

Hows this for a beauty of a left-wing circle-jerk:

Picture this. A government department hands out cash to community activist groups, who in turn use the money to run a campaign to pressure political parties to devote more money to the department. At minimum, it seems to be a conflict of interest. Foolish, more like it. A betrayal of public trust even. But that's exactly what Australia's overseas aid agency, AusAID, has done

Turns out that under a Labour government grant scheme, AusAID has handed out AUD $1.5 Million in local grants to raise public awareness of global poverty, so that we all donate more money to AusAID. In particular, multiple grants were given under several guises to the Make Poverty History campaign, who seem to spend most of it on plastic armbands.

And the No. 1 goal for Make Poverty History is to "accelerate growth in the aid program" - to push the government to devote a larger share of national income to foreign aid. In other words, boost the AusAID budget.

Noice one, mate.

Where's the love?

2010-08-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

Its not that I don't love you guys anymore, I'm just in the process of moving house and was stupid enough to sign up to a Telstra bundle because it was actually the best one going at the time (normally I get a bit twitchy around our national telco). However, true to form, they are moving my connection ahead at the speed of a geriatric snail, and all I have in the meantime is a mobile-broadband USB dongle that is *possibly* faster than dial-up and an LG phone that is begging to be thrown against a wall everytime I try and access the internet. (I never wanted to be a Mac-whore, but after this bloody phone I might treat myself to an i-phone for no other reason than you can get a free medical eponym app that goes over well at trivia nights down the pub.)
At least telstra managed to get my home phone connected eventually, but not before they managed to connect me on an extension to the house next door, and when I say "house", I actually mean "church". A telecommunications factoid I only discovered after the Vicar's wife rang up looking for her husband and got me instead, much to both of our suprise.
Stick with me, and before long I'll be back in full snark, but it does blow my election coverage somewhat. Sorry 'bout that, so in the meantime, here is my take-home federal election coverage boiled down to one pithy statement:

"In the upper house, if you can't be bothered voting below the line and are feeling a bit vote-freaky a la diversity in the senate, read the preference flow cards for every party and vote for one that preferences everyone, including, but not limited to, the Australian Sex Party before they preference the Greens."

Hell, I would preference the Australian Socialist Alliance before the Greens at the moment. I could tell you why at great length, but my internet is going to max out and make me poor (er), so you will have to wait a few days.

New post at the Daily Bayonet...

2010-07-25T16:22:00.000-07:00

G'awn. Take a look.

The day I lost the snark...

2010-07-19T17:25:00.000-07:00

It used to be so easy to snark away here on my blog, but lately I have found it hard going in terms of subject matter. Im not sure if this is because the media is pulling their head in when it comes to alarmist reporting post-Climate Gate, or whether Im easily distractable. In truth, I think it could be a bit of both, there seems to be less blatent idiocy popping up in my news feed (and I do love an easy target), and I keep getting sidetracked by involuntarily picturing my male colleagues sans accoutrements.
Its not my fault, I can't help it. I am attracted to intelligence and self-confidence, which is oft-times in short supply, but seems to be a pre-requisite for doctors. As a medical student, my job is to generally follow along behind the other doctors on ward-rounds, and well, the end result of this is that I seem to find myself looking speculatively at a lot of bums. Even that short Scottish guy. Sorry Mr. Paua.
Anyhoo, about the only thing I could find to talk about is a recent study that worked out that if you frame climate change in terms of a public health risk, it seems to have more of an impact. Researchers discovered that linking climate change with asthma tends to increase the "positive" response from readers, more so than linking it with more remote issues, such as polar bears and the arctic.
Halfway though reading this, I realised that this isn't a health study, this is market research. I should know, because for one brief, poor stage of my life I worked for a market research company doing telephone interviews. (Sorry. To everyone. I'm really sorry. I was scarily good at it, BTW).
This "study" isn't interested in unbiased research into what peoples attitudes are to climate change, you would do that with a focus group or a survey, this study is trying to work out how best to sell us something we may otherwise be reluctant to buy.
Just ewww, frankly.
This will probably annoy the crap out of me for just so long as it takes for me to get distracted by a pathologists abs.
Sorry, what were you saying?

Winter Sundays...

2010-07-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

Some of my cronies in the blogosphere have been posting about the glory of a hot saturday in summer, complete with soundtrack. Well, some of us live in the southern hemisphere, and its been a pretty cold winter. I even had to scrape ice off my car a couple of times (only an Australian can understand the deep and abiding horror of this), so I feel an alternative soundtrack may be in order:

You're welcome.

Living proof that you can't legislate against stupidity....

2010-07-09T18:42:00.000-07:00

Professor David Shearman has been at it again. When not busy doing secretarial things over at Doctors for the Environment, he can be found publishing books calling for the end of democracy as a solution to impending climate doom. Seriously, is this the guy you want to perform a rectal exam on you?
He also has his own website, the address of which is his own name with the designation .org. Cute. If you listen closely, you can almost feel the hysteria.
Anyway, he's managed to publish a poorly disguised propaganda piece / self-advertorial over at The Australian calling for the end of coal power due to its alleged deleterious health effects in first world nations. He doesn't actually cite anything, just some "studies" that apparently show that coal particulate is bad for you, but then gets confused between pollution in the form of particulate matter and "pollution" in the form of carbon dioxide that, yawn, will kill us all via climate (but forgets to mention the offshoot of bigger tomatoes). He does a particularly poor job of seperating out the sources and impact of coal pollution, and manages to generate a big cloud of poorly thought out hysteria. For example:

The health burden of coal in Australia is estimated conservatively at $2.6 billion a year. There are also economic losses due to land pollution and degradation and the open mining of good agricultural land in the face of the projected world food crisis.
The main health impact of coal is caused through climate change. The World Health Organisation ranks climate change as one of the greatest threats to public health.
Morbidity and mortality are increasing in the developing world as the effects of climate change take hold of the environment. As the world's fourth largest producer of hard coal and the world's biggest exporter, from which we garner $20bn each year, our contribution to this pollution is far greater than our culpability as the world's greatest domestic per capita producer of greenhouse emissions.

Etc. Etc.
Im not sure exactly what Dr. David lectured in to make him an emeritus professor of medicine, but I somehow think it wasn't epidemiology or public health, at least not in the conventional sense, and begs the question of why he is no longer a professor?
For starters, yes, coal fire particulate is definitely bad for you, but it is particularly bad for you if you are burning it in your loungeroom, which is what people without central, coal-powered (or nuclear) electricity plants do. A quick read through the WHO publication "The health effects of indoor air pollution in developing countries" may prove informative for him. If he doesn't have the time, or finds that reading about babies dying of pulmonary disease or women with premature cataracts makes him go soft, I could probably sum up the entire booklet with just one of their diagrams:

Oh, look. Electricity is better for you. Who'd have thunk it.
I would also hazard a guess that his emeritus status didn't stem from a career in health economics, either. To wit:

Renewable energy industries create more jobs than coalmining; they are generally safer and much healthier for workers and communities. They will offer sustainable economic development in an area where Australia already trails other developed nations. The federal government's proposed resource super-profits tax -- now recast and rebadged as the minerals resource rent tax -- will aid this transition.

Ha ha ha. Thats hysterical in the freaking funny sense. Just ask Spain or New Zealand how their green jobs and their ETS are working out for them.
Once upon a time we had religion for guys like this to feel bad about. Instead of worrying about saving the planet from a trace gas that is, frankly, the least of our worries right now, he would have been wearing a hair shirt in a cave somewhere. Unfortunately, if he gets his way, he'll have all of us doing just that.

Laissez les bon temps rouler

2010-07-08T00:49:00.000-07:00

I remember on one occasion during my childhood a lady from Louisiana attempting to teach me how to Cajun dance one night while my parents were out drinking at a folk club. For an eleven year old, it was excruciating. Through the haze of tween-age embarassment, though, I do remember learning the Cajun maxim of "Laissez les bon temps rouler", or "Let the good times roll". Keep this in mind while you read the following.
I haven't been posting as much as usual because to be honest its a slow news month for my usual climate change related ranting, I think the globe has largely started to lose interest in climate hysteria, and I will have to branch out more in my topic matter if this keeps up. Added to which I have been going through the "just-shoot-me-now-and-be-done-with-it" agony of having to find a rental property in today's ghastly, overinflated Australian property market. For those of you who havent had to find a 3+ bedroom house in an Australian capital city lately, they actually bid on rental properties now. Which has led me to really, really dislike real estate agents. More than I usually do. In fact, I can honestly say there is only one real estate agent I've met that I haven't wanted to hand a photograph of and a sum of cash to a large tattooed Polynesian named "Sione", and mention that I don't want the agent's legs to look that way anymore. The real estate agent I liked rented me a commercial property some years ago, was a raging alcoholic named Kevin, and would conduct business in thongs (the footwear) when his gout played up. I liked Kevin.
The Australian housing bubble is running at the level of property values up to 8 times the annual family income. The global standard is from 2 to 3 times the average family income. This bubble is going to burst, and how. Although the vast majority of people here refuse to believe its possible, in fact, even with property analysts finally being forced to admit the bubble can't always keep getting bigger, they still would prefer to believe that the outcome of all of this is that property prices may just stay on hold for a decade until they readjust, like they did in Japan a while ago. Excuse me while I laugh bitterly and take a swig from a port bottle in a brown paper bag. Forgetting for a moment that Japanese interest rates for housing loans are set at something like 1%, I could list you a host of reasons why this is unlikely here, from variable interest rate hikes, the Chinese commodity market problem, to where Australian banks source their finance from (i.e. Overseas). For my US readers ,its also worth pointing out that when you default on a mortgage in this country, you continue to owe the bank the money into posterity, even while they sell the property at the market value. The only way out is bankruptcy, and that isn't so easy to do, here.
Meanwhile, in Europe.....Oh, never mind. Too depressing. Well, in the States.....Oh, don't worry. In short, things aren't looking too rosy in the global financial sphere at the moment, and in other news, Japan let Pete Bethune off on a suspended sentence which allowed him to immediately run back to the welcoming arms of that idiot with the white beard and the black boat.
Then, just to top off my sorry news week, the Climategate whitewash review finally replied to allegations of fudging data. "Shut up." They explained.
Finally, I discovered that even brothels have been forced to close due to an economic slump. When the world's oldest professional, traditionally considered recession-proof, becomes insolvent, then surely the end-times are upon us.
It could be worse, though. I could own a large dog. Or live in California. Which is why, while the world seems to get closer to teetering on an economic precipice, I am reminded of the Cajun directive to Let the good times roll. For instructions on how its done, I refer you to Louis Jordan:

Pikinini bilong rot boskru bilong Sea Shepherd gone bagarup

2010-07-01T00:15:00.000-07:00

I love Pidgin English, so forgive my attempt in the title at expressing my thoughts on the functionality and moral character of the Sea Shepherd crew. I thought Pidgin might give this rant a bit of panache. FYI, "pikanini bilong rot" is an illegitmate child. You can work out what I meant by that.

Prior to, oh, about one week ago, I just really disliked Paul Watson (or "Kapten Kok" as I like to think of him in Pidgin. Yes, it means exactly what it sounds like it means. Its not swearing if its in Pidgin.) Then he decided to go to war on Tuna fishermen in the Mediterranean. Thats when it got personal. Now, I hate him. First of all, I like fishermen. Actually, I like sailors in general, but it sounds a bit questionable when I say it out loud like that. Secondly, I like tuna. Alot. And I'm not buying into the hysteria about the species' tenuous hold on the land of the living.

For starters, forgetting for a moment that marine science is as plagued by hysteria as that of climate science, common sense would dictate that since its impossible to actually fish up all the tuna that are out there with our current fishing technology, that one would expect to see a realistic (I stress this) decline in fisheries production should the stocks be getting low, to the point where the industry is no longer economically viable. One has not seen this yet, has one.

To add to this, the actual taxonomy of the "endangered" northern blue-fin is a little hazy, to say the least. Part of a CITES listing for an endangered animal requires that inspectors be able to correctly identify them, which is problematic with bluefin tuna, as even taxonomists have trouble differentiating the northen bluefin from the pacific one, they don't taste any different, and as the kicker, their DNA isn't different enough to tell them apart that way, either.

Unfortunately, saving tuna is the latest hippy cause du jour, and Sea Shepherd and their ilk need to justify their drain on society somehow, so off they went to the Med to harass legitimate and hard-working fishermen during the very brief tuna fishing season. How they managed to fit this into their busy schedule in between selling erstwhile poster-boy Pete Bethune down the river, while he awaits sentencing in Japan, is anyones guess. Poor old Patsy Pete found out the hard way who his mates were when Sea Shepherd threw him out of the organisation and severed all ties with him when it was revealed Pete had taken a bow and arrows on board. Being a supposedly non-violent organisation and all, someone had to go down for it in order to keep their "never convicted" record clean. Which makes me wonder who is going to carry the can for the rubber bullets they have been packing lately? Which brings me to their latest escapade...

Following on from the Greenpeace fail attempt at sabotaging legitimate tuna fishermen in the Med, Sea Shepherd decided to ram a Maltese fishing enterprise. One poor Maltese diver was injured, and another said he was hit repeatedly with rubber bullets. Malta is not impressed.

Luckily for Malta, Japan has just succeeded in getting Interpol to issue a blue notice for Kapten Kok himself. Paul Watson has shrugged it off, since a blue notice does not compel Interpol associated nations to arrest him, but rather that they pass on information about his whereabouts and activities. However, methinks some of Sea Shepherd's overworked lawyers should point out that any country can detain the subject of a blue notice if they feel like it, even if no valid national arrest warrant exists. Which is what they recommend doing for certain Yemeni terrorists, who are also subject to a blue notice.

Things are going to get interesting for Watson now, as Japan has many friends, and Watson is rapidly gathering enemies. A brief check of Japanese foreign aid recipients in the Pacific should put things into perspective for him, if Paul Watson isn't careful, he might find himself, as they say in pidgin, "lookem closeup hallelujah time" at one of his refuelling spots. Et tu, Tuvalu?

SBS want me for a sunbeam

2010-06-12T16:23:00.000-07:00

Hi all,
This comment turned up at my blog the other day:

Kyle said...
Hi Paua,

Nice blog! I'm interested in getting in touch with you for a TV program I'm doing. We need lots of articulate climate change skeptics like yourself! Could I send you an email with some of the details? Cheers, Kyle - my email is kylet@sbs.com.au if you want to touch base.
(I have left the email address as is, because they posted it in a public comments box that I cant edit due to the way Blogger works, and because I am fairly unconcerned by the thought of SBS recieving spam.)

Kyle from Insight then went on to explain in an email that they are going to have a panel of climate scientists (no politicians) and allow an audience of people who aren't climate scientists, but are skeptical or "confused" by climate science, to ask questions of the panel, which they then get to rebut. Nothing like a bit of balance in the media, don't you think?

I will hereby post my reply as follows:

Dear Kyle from Insight,
Thanks for your kind offer, which I must respectfully decline. I don't often talk about several years of my life spent around the documentary film industry, as I like to think I've, y'know, Changed. However, apart from acquainting me with a level of bitchiness not often seen outside of teen movies of the 1980's, I also learnt how to recognise a media set-up when I see one. Given that prior life experience, a passing acquaintance with the program you represent and a clearly stated desire for anonymity, I think you must be out of your cotton-picking mind.
When I first saw your comment on my blog, I must confess I did for a second entertain the notion that you might be working on a novel project out of keeping with the general level of SBS alarmist hysteria. Wishful thinking, and all that. Luckily, gifted with an uncanny ability to use an internet search engine, I soon discovered you were just another petty-echelon research schmo from Insight. I even noticed that you had invited the boys over at a footy lover's forum to contribute to the same show you invited me to contribute to. I thought I was special, Kyle. I also noticed that they invited you, in return, to "suck" their "big, fat hairy balls." Given that I am unencumbered by testicular tissue, I will have to proffer something else instead*.
Sadly, I will be unavailable to contribute to the program described on your web site as being for people "confused by climate science" and will not be able to play the straight-man to your panel of Tim Flannery-esque comedic talent. I think I'm washing my hair that night.
Good luck with the program.
Paua.

* "Something else" is not what I initially said, but I'm trying very hard to keep my potty mouth in check these days.

Now, in a bid to suspend my utter disbelief, I will consider for a nano-second that the upcoming Insight program may be a great expose of the problems inherent in climate science, but somehow I doubt it. History will show whether I was right or not. If the skeptics come off looking great, then I will heartily apologise to Kyle, and he will be well within his rights to ask me to suck something of his. We're all adults here.
I just have a bad feeling about this, and unfortunately in a bid to get me to contribute, they mentioned someone who has already agreed to appear on the show as a skeptic, I won't say who it is, but I wish them well, and hope to hell they aren't going to end up being an ersatz patsy for the edification of the Flannery's of Australia.

Like Lazarus, only with a worse attitude and better dress sense...

2010-06-03T20:34:00.001-07:00

Hi All,
Im back, but probably will only have intermittent posts for the next few weeks because I found myself on the wrong end of a colorectal surgery rotation. Which wasn't meant to be a joke, but the pun was pretty good, now that I read it. I will describe the joys of long, long days, a permanent line across my forehead from a surgical cap and exactly how you stick you finger up someones whotsit in an investigative sense another time.
Right now, I just wanted to poke fun (once again, no pun intended) at the interestingly named "Code Pink" activist group of ~~wimmin~~..ummm...~~feminists~~...sheilas. Apart from possibly breaking a raft of laws that prohibit excessive use of a colour reminiscent of a baboon's arse, they also smack slightly of misinformed opportunisim.
This they did by protesting the latest hippy-horror-de-jour, the Gulf oil spill, by marching on BP's headquarters wearing not much more than strategically placed packing tape (be careful when you take it off, BTW) and the aforementioned simian pink. Whereupon they chanted "BP, what do you say? How many fish did you kill today?". To which I would like to reply, ummm, not as many as you'd think. Y'see, oil often floats, fish don't. Unless they're dead, and thats the thing, if there were millions of dead fish, you would see them from the air, everywhere, because they would be doing the dead-fish putrefactive bob on the surface. Now, some of the oil has probably been emulsified (hence the reports of an alleged underwater plume) but it doesn't take long for it to re-coalesce on the surface, and most larger fish can move quickly enough to get away from the oil, anyway. So there may be some sprat sized fish that get offed by the oil, especially in coastal areas, but it wont represent that much of the total number of the fish that are out there.
The CodePink founder, Madea Benjamin, then went on to state:

“This is the crude awakening that our country is on the wrong track and that we need an energy system that doesn't kill workers, that doesn't destroy our ocean and that works with nature, not against nature,”

That would be nice, and I have seen something like this in action before, but I don't think Madea would like it. Probably because the options available to us down that track seem to wind up with women slaving over wood stoves or spending their days engaged in such career edifying past-times as hauling water. Oh, and puh-lease, dont even begin to talk to me about solar power either, because as anyone who has ever had to live with a 12-volt solar system would know (and I have), its probably less hassle to burn tallow-rush lamps and beat your laundry on a rock by the river.
The BP oil spill is immensely regrettable, for everyone concerned, but somehow I don't think its going to singlehandedly destroy our oceans, or even the bit of ocean that its occurred in. At the end of the day, we either accept the fact that we go without oil and the attendant consequences, or stop the pity-party and deal with the occasional oopsy. It might also reassure readers to know that oil gushers are much like bleeding, and all bleeding stops. Eventually. Even if we did nothing, the oil would lose pressure after awhile and stop. The fish will be fine, a few seabirds and otters will die tragically, much to the continued erections of news photographers and environental activists everywhere, and before long the oil will have mostly broken down and that part of the planet will be back to business as usual. If you dont believe me, then I invite you to read about the Mina Al Ahmadi oil spill during the Gulf War, which remains the biggest oil spill in history, where transects of the affected coral reefs only a few short years later revealed that they had escaped "remarkedly unscathed".
I strap myself in and await your hate mail.

Whats the opposite of Tofurkey?

2010-05-07T15:40:00.001-07:00

When I heard a story, (possibly an urban myth) about nurses showering an obese patient and finding a TV remote under a fat roll that the patient reported losing nine months before, I thought, "Now, Ive heard everything." I was wrong.

Stop press! Hippies are coming out as climate skeptics!

Maleny in south-eastern Queensland has just had one of their local, prominent environmentalist "come out" as a climate skeptic. For those of you not acquainted with Maleny and the Sunshine coast hinterland, they are well known for organic produce, a rockin' folk festival (is that an oxymoron?), tenancies in common, craft markets and all-round hippy goodness.

Jon Woodlands has top-notch green credentials, and is probably one of those people who would see me as slightly to the right of Genghis Khan. He doesnt like uranium mining, logging rainforests, large corporations opening supermarkets in his town or things that endanger platypii. Good for him. I come from a town full of people just like him, and the yearly tradition of "special" christmas cakes certainly made for fun teenage years.

Then one day he decided to write an article for the local paper describing how he became skeptical of climate change alarmism, and the proverbial cow-pat hit the windmill.

''I've had people go off the Richter scale even if you suggest there's any doubt [about climate change science],'' the former TAFE teacher says. ''It's like a religion.''

Which was reported (with a fair amount of poorly concealed distate, by an SMH article bemoaning increasing climate skepticism.)
You know what they say, "Swings and roundabouts". As I understand it, after being dumped by his local alarmist friends, Jon found himself embraced by the skeptic community, which FYI are more fun at parties.

The Daily Suppository would like to say "Welcome Aboard, Jon!"
For more on Jon's views, see here.

Look! Over there!

2010-05-04T00:45:00.001-07:00

If you've been wondering about the lack of posts lately, I have managed to put a couple up at the Daily Bayonet. G'awn, take a look. I will try and keep all the medical related ones here at the Daily Suppository in future, and will go over there for ranting and obligatory "hotties".

Well, spank me and call me a deluded, disinterested denier.

2010-04-29T20:41:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, Doctors for the Environment Australia. Deludedly Eager Arses. Dickheads for Energy Abuse. However you choose to think of them, have struck again in the name of pulic health idiocy. This time, they have gone all Mad Men on us and decided that its the language of the climate change debate that is backwards, so since we are talking all arse-about-face, try this on for size:

Peter Tait, proud banner-waving member of DEA (The Australian no-fun-doctors, not the arm of US law-enforcement more commonly known as "narcs"), has decided that if we all just stopped dignifying the climate skeptic crowd with the term "skeptic", then the public would stop being so regrettably disinterested in ~~crippling our economy~~ fighting climate change. Instead, he proposes the following:

Deniers: believe that there is no climate change, or deny it is anthropogenic. (see distressed and doubt sowers)

Disinterested: don’t care one way or another.

Distressed: recognise climate change and some may be responding appropriately. Others if using psychological defence may appear as disinterested or deniers. They may need help to engage and act.

Doubt sowers: may or may not accept the reality of climate change but publicly deny its reality or effects in order to avoid or delay responses as they are protecting vested interests. Their action needs to be publicly named.

Deluded: accept the reality of climate change but argue that it will be beneficial, effects are overstated, action is too costly and the time is not right. They also need to be publicly named.

To which one droll, liberated and no-doubt devastatingly handsome commentator with the handle "Gederts Skerstens", replied with the following comment on the Croakey blog that published Tait's BS:

Man-made climate change is disappearing as a serious issue because those that support it are now revealed as falling into these unappealing categories:

THE HUMBLY OBEDIENT
A large group of very wise men were paid to assemble and tell the ignorant what to do. Lots of trailing letters after their names, lots of acronyms for all the groupings. Best do as they say. Stumble around muttering “Must-Save-Planet, Must-Save-Planet…”

GOERS WITH THE FLOW
The Green petition sheet circulating the dinner table gets signed because everyone else signed it.

AGENDA OPPORTUNISTS
The noisiest portion of the set. The science is irrelevant. Setting up disaster Aversion Mechanisms is the objective. An easy method to establish unelected, publicly funded,
autonomous clusters of Lefties to run pretty much any social engineering they want.

DELUDED APOCALYPTICS
The most easily dismissed. They believe The End Is Nigh and then some. And when the winters are the coldest on record and the sea level doesn’t rise at all, they go from revered prophets to clowns within two or three years.

It’s Over.

I'm still here!

2010-04-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry 'bout that. I AM still here, and haven't completely dropped off the map, or fallen off the perch, or whatever your metaphor of choice may happen to be.
I've just had a busy few weeks with my current hospital rotation, and had some family issues crop up that needed some sorting.
There will be posting in the near future, I assure you!
Just give me a couple of days and I'll be back.
Cheers,
Paua.

Climate change good for your health. If you're English.

2010-04-05T22:03:00.000-07:00

Finally, a research team has pointed out the blindingly obvious: that Britain can only be improved by climate change.

A recent study published in the UK in the last week has examined the possible effects of climate change on human health in the West Midlands, and worked out that it could save thousands of lives over the next 70 years. Of course, after that, the researchers warn, things could get a bit hairy for the locals with all those nice warm summers, so they caution against any wild parties celebrating the fact just yet.

The researchers then go on to add, in a fairly predictable display of British weather-pessimism, that whilst less cloud cover resulting from climate change sounds good, it could cause more skin cancers and cataracts. Kind of like retiring to the med, I guess. No mention of the fact that nicer weather in the West Midlands would completely change the meaning of the phrase "to be sent to Coventry", too.

Just in case the reseachers were going to be accused of being climate-disaster apologists, they ignore major advances in refrigeration technology i.e. the invention of the 'fridge (which owes much to an Australian penchant for keeping beer cold), and further caution that warmer weather will cause more food poisoning. Kind of like retiring to the med...

Is this love?

2010-04-01T23:08:00.000-07:00

I just came across a columnist for the Santa Monica Daily Press by the name of Steve Breen, and its like hes me, only with better verbiage and a paying job. (And presumably, with a name like Steve, obligatory man-tackle.)

I give you exhibit A:

one could only reasonably conclude that environmentalism's intellectual life or death is dependent on earlier entangling random events such as the leaked Climategate e-mails, the IPCC's retreat from several of their key global warming positions and Greenpeace leader, Gerd Leipold, admitting that Greenpeace has lied and exaggerated about global warming and melting polar ice caps regardless of Milankovitch's spank-me-Daddy solar calculations to the contrary.

Oh, stop, you naughty thing. He even mentions Tofurkey in that article. I was an instant fan.

Then I perused some more of his articles and discovered this:

...allow me to introduce the first annual Golden Gobbler Award for 2009. This accolade is bountifully bestowed, by me, to any person, place, thing, organization or focus group that has, by its merit, demonstrated a complete and utterly inarguable talent for being as smart as the dumbest animal on the chopping block, the classic Thanksgiving turkey.

And he gave it to Al Gore and the AGW, environmentalist crowd.

Huh, says I, thats kind of familiar. Maybe he is me. Don't I bestow a poultry-esque award for something similar? In fact, my first ever Tofurkey Award predates his Golden Gobbler by one week. Coincidence?
With further perusal I have discovered he seems to have a problem with publically funded abortions. Damn. I was prepared to get past the similarity to my own work, but why can't you find a funny, misanthropic conservative guy who keeps his mind in his own pants, and not mine? Wait, that didn't come out right....You know what I mean. This is like that time I discovered P.J. O'Rourke had a problem with stem-cell research. Sigh.

Anyway, Steve. If you're not busy later, lets have a few drinks and discuss my royalties...

Tofurkey of the Week # 8

2010-03-31T21:44:00.000-07:00

Yay for Tofurkeys, the award for those found acting like a total turkey, albeit sustainably.

This week the Daily Suppository was put in a difficult position, on the basis that the Tofurkey really should go out to anyone who switched off their lights for Earth Hour. In the end, since it was problematic to award this virtual mock-fowl to so many, and technically that would have meant awarding it to North Korea, we went with the environmental group Rising Tide instead.

The protest group Rising Tide are a bit concerned about Australia's coal mining industry. Even though Australia's coal reserves make us energy secure for at least the next 150 years, essentially float our economy and make China vewy vewy happy to call us mates, they don't like it. No, sir, not one bit. So they decided they were going to put a stop to all this carbon nefariousness by attempting to block coal-transport freighters entering Newcastle harbour, with....wait for it....kayaks.

No news on how successfull they were at stopping several hundred feet of dry-bulk carrier with one of those itty-bitty yellow plastic paddles. Ouch.

Not surprisingly:

Newcastle Port Corporation says the six hour protest did not interrupt ship movements, with several ships loaded during the day.

But Rising Tide spokeswoman Naomi Hodgson insists the protest did have an impact.

"Usually the shipping movements are publicly available online and the only time they ever take it down is when we're holding one of these protests and sure enough five days ago they took the schedule down," she said. Source here.

I'm sure the Newcastle Ship-Spotter's Club will rethink their carbon footprint immediately.

So many double entendres, so little time...

2010-03-31T21:24:00.000-07:00

Just stopping by to tell y'all about some amusing green-on-green action thats set to get any hippy Mac-whores out there (you know who you are) all riled up. Which is fun for everyone involved.

Greenpeace has just put their birkenstock-clad foot into the side of the new i-pad touch, claiming that whilst they look schweet, they are causing climate change. Oh, dearie me, where's the app for that?

Naturally, this has annoyed several of Greenpeace's erstwhile supporters, who have quickly moved to defend the gadgets, claiming that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages (which interestingly, isn't seen to be a good enough reason not to cripple our economies in the name of carbon reduction):

"If Greenpeace really wants to get up in people's grill about something that needs to change, it should start with their cars," says Steffen, a self-described Greenpeace supporter. He also argues mobile devices like the iPad can ultimately save energy by allowing people to work and shop from home.
Jonathan Hiskes of Grist, another eco-minded blog, agrees. He writes: "These technologies bring far more promise than peril for engineering sustainable societies."

Quoted from this source.

Reefgate update

2010-03-30T21:30:00.001-07:00

I recently blogged about an unfolding drama that is (naturally) being referred to as Reefgate, involving academic malfeasance and misrepresentation by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, particularly in reference to a recently published study that appeared in the well known scientific journal PNAS.

The marine scientist at the centre of exposing this mess. Walter Starck, has written to PNAS with his concerns. A full copy of his letter has been reproduced over at OmniClimate, with the author's permission.

Read it here. This is going to get interesting, so stay tuned.

Don't be a joiner

2010-03-28T21:10:00.001-07:00

The University of Tasmania is recruiting for a new study they are conducting into the health effects of climate change on chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Reasons you should be concerned:

* What they are actually researching is the health effects of "extreme temperatures". That means the effect of extreme temperatures on you, the sick volunteer. Whats wierd is that global warming isn't expected to make Tasmania have extremes of temperatures. If anything it would make it nicer there. Why aren't they researching the health effects of a sub-tropical holiday on people with chronic health then?

* Their hypothesis is that the health of chronically ill people will suffer from subjecting them to extremes of temperature. (Once again, let me point out they mean you.)

* Somehow, presumably, this got ethical approval.

Reefgate

2010-03-28T17:03:00.000-07:00

There is a story brewing here in Australia that is rather major. Its a big deal, and the Australian population at-large, let alone the world, doesn't seem to realise what is happening. Many people would be aware of the Great Barrier Reef, and most have a nebulous, erroneous idea that it needs to be "saved".

Marine scientist Walter Starck has just outlined some of the mismanagement issues of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), as well as an emerging issue of gross academic misconduct, and has published these over at Quadrant Online. Rather than copying and pasting the story from Quadrant, I would recommend people go there and read the whole thing, which is available in pdf.

In a very simple nutshell: GBRMPA has just been outed for some major academic malfeasance, which they had perpetrated in the hopes of turning the entire Coral Sea off of the north eastern coast of Australia into a Marine Protected Area (which they would then get to "manage" - leading to a massive increase in the size, power and funding of their organisation.) They are acting in concert with NGO's such as the Pew Trust which is slinging around major funding dollars behind the scenes. Given GBRMPA's and the Pew trust's track record, this can only be a bad thing.

There is a huge backstory to all of this that is desperately at odds with much of the public's (generally wrongful) perception of the reef,which I will try and outline in upcoming posts.

Suffice it to say this story has everything:

* Beaurocratic bungling.
* Misrepresentation of research.
* Failure to declare major conflicts of interest.
* A major US scientific journal.
* Huge and poorly concealed hidden agendas.
* Destruction of people's livelihoods and an entire, almost extinct fishing industry.
* Collusion between politicians and NGO's such as the Pew Trust (aka "The Face of Evil"). (Which is so poorly concealed its scary. When you look at the story on Quadrant, cast your eye to the google ads on the page - a frequent one to appear based on the key words in the article is one inviting you to sign a petition to make 100% of the Coral Sea a reserve. If you go to the site, it is maintained by a bunch of conservation societies, including the Pew Trust. Which is such a perfect illustration of their presence in all of this.)

Edit: After pointing out the google ads from the Pew Trust over at Quadrant, it appears they have disabled them on that page. Update me if you find something different!

Yeh, what he said.

2010-03-25T22:27:00.000-07:00

I have noticed that my posts tend to be preaching to the choir these days. I figure I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, Im writing to my skeptic buddies who are on the same page as I am. So for this reason I dont often bother refuting issues scientifically or otherwise fleshing out issues that seem pretty much self-apparent to me.
I missed the testimony of Princeton Physicist William Happer to the US senate at the time it was made (February last year), but watching it now, I just want to say that damn, its good:

Not least because it garnered a fairly hysterical reaction from some people at the time.

Mirth Hour

2010-03-23T02:17:00.000-07:00

Im having a crap week and am mourning some close family members. This makes me quite cranky, and its bound to show somewhere. Like this blog. Believe it or not, my regular posts actually represent a restrained version of what I am actually thinking, with much less swearing. In everyday life I swear like a sailor with tourettes, just ask my children. I know this is terribly uncouth (unless you're turned on by pretty young women using the words "c*nt" "m*therf*cker" and "c*cksucker" as the second word in every sentence. I don't know, there may be some of you.) So please, I will try and reign back the worst of it, but every now and again I may need to unleash the cranky. You have been warned.

I really, REALLY dislike frickin' earth hour. (That doesn't count as swearing). The whole idea stinks. Not only is switching your lights off for an hour completely pointless and tokenistic, it encourages hippies to feel good about themselves, which should be avoided at all costs. Smug bastards. (OK. That was technically swearing, but its better than the word I was thinking.)

So in honour of Earth Hour, I plan to do a little bit of celebrating, Daily Suppository style, join me if you wish:

* Tyres. Burn them. I plan on having a backyard luau around a merry bonfire of Bob Jane All-Rounders. If I pull this one off right, you should be able to see my own little private ecological disaster from space. Call Red Adair and pass the matches, 'cause Mamma's making a barbeque tonight.

* Don't tell Mr. Paua, but I know all about his little private incandescent light bulb stash that he bought in a panic after the government planned to bring in those toxic mercury bombs that flicker in a visible range of hertz. Old school lightbulbs are just the ticket for building my very own redneck chandelier:

This puppy makes my electricity meter spin faster than an ecologically friendly front-load washing machine on a spin cycle.
Optional extras include a safety switch (if you're of a nervous disposition. Pussy. Whats a little house fire if it helps the cause?) Or red bulbs and a prominent position in a window facing the street, for that authentic "late night in the Reeperbahn" feel.

* If these little festive options don't appeal, you could always drive to your closest airport in an SUV and fly to an exotic destination very, very far away from where you live. (Or next door, just be sure to fly there the long way around.) Make sure when you get there you take a long hot bath and wrap everything you purchase in double layers of plastic bags, just to be safe. Then make sure you call some friends who are sitting in front of their Mac tweeting by candle-light, and tell them all about it. I recommend India and China, as this way you can support their carbon emitting economies by spending your money there and irritate annoying hippy friends with your profligate air travel and cool ethnic purchases.

* Or better yet, maximize your carbon output and take a holiday on a cruise ship, making sure to leave the lights on in keeping with conventional maritime law.

In your face, Al Gore!

Counting the carbon cost of cancer

2010-03-22T23:37:00.000-07:00

Doctors in the United Kingdom have once again exceeded my expectations on wierd climate alarmism by agreeing that they need to cut the carbon cost of cancer treatment, and make cancer treatment more "environmentally sustainable".

Which is just odd.

At a recent summit, a group of doctors representing key organisations in the field agreed to:

• developing a carbon reduction strategy,
• signing up to the 10:10 climate change campaign, and
• supporting the research, dialogue and action necessary to create environmentally sustainable cancer services.

Whats a bit of a worry is that "treating" cancer isn't envrionmentally sustainable at all, if you want to make cancer therapy environmentally sustainable, then it probably makes more sense to not treat it.

Its not a real stretch to get to this point, once they build more "sustainable" buildings to give treatment in, they really have nowhere else to go with this campaign to cut the carbon footprint of cancer care, other than reducing services.

The other option is to reduce cancer rates so there is less to treat, unfortunately, this group has thought of that already:

“High-carbon lifestyles are a cause of cancer and chronic disease and, indeed, many preventative measures for cancer encourage low-carbon lifestyles. Moreover, lower carbon cancer care can, in itself, contribute to prevention,” Frances Mortimer, medical director of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, said.

FYI, a "high-carbon lifestyle" is the one you are enjoying now. The one with cars, mains electricity, pop-tarts, steak and out-of-season produce shipped in from afar. The "low-carbon lifestyle" they are talking about is the one that many of the recent immigrants to your developed nation of residence can tell you all about. They probably wouldn't recommend it on an ongoing basis, though.

You say potato...

2010-03-22T00:31:00.001-07:00

Clearly the days of having some young media lacky check for continuity are finished. Over at the Daily Telegraph, in their dedicated climate change news section (which Im having a bit of trouble even believing they have) they are running two stories side by side.
One story is about how marine biologists are desperately trumpeting that waters are warming on the east coast of Australia, with predictably catastrophic predictions ensuing. (did y'see what I did there?)
The other is an article about how the 3km open water swim at the World Master's Games was cancelled in Sydney because the water was too cold.

Tofurkey of the week # 7

2010-03-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

I think we are up to our seventh Tofurkey award now, I'll double check later. The latest environmentally sensitive turkey(s) to garner the kudos of our favourite faux-poultry plinth, is a bunch of Australian Greenpeace protestors. Cunningly dressed as ninjas to conceal their identity (beware of future arse-whoopings from the real shadow-warriors when they find out about this), the protestors scaled the Sydney Opera House to unfurl a banner that said something unimaginative about, yawn, climate change.

In the process they managed to create a safety hazard to the public, drain untold amounts of taxpayer funding in the form of police time, helicopters etc, and risk the lives of actual police men and women who had to work out how to get them down.

The Tofurkey is thusly handed out on the following basis:

* They got arrested for trespass. (Yay!)
* The accoutrements of a ninja warrior should not EVER be co-opted by any outfit as lame as Greenpeace.
* The police who had to respond to this were dragged away from actual real police work, and were rightfully pissed about it. Somewhere a granny got rolled for her pension money, a junky stole a car stereo and some twit smashed my car window even though a 12 year old could pick the lock with a coat-hanger and I dont even have a stereo, and its all Greenpeace's fault.
* This protest has been done to death. I mean, cliched, much. (In 2003 protestors painted "No War" on the opera house in red house paint and had to pay compensation for "willfully marking a building without consent".)
* Their protest slogan and cause de jour was lamer than the organisation they represent. "Stop the politics climate treaty now"?! Awww. C'mon. Really?! You climbed the opera house for that?
* And finally, they used the same slogan in december last year, and got arrested that time, too.

Fat people: apparently not just annoying on 'planes...

2010-03-14T18:57:00.001-07:00

According to an excessive amount of Australian doctors, fat people are at fault for climate change. Or climate change is causing obesity. No. Wait, obesity and climate change are both caused by rampant consumerism funded by the tobacco lobby. No, thats not right....hang on, I'll get it in a minute....

Oh! Rampant consumerism is causing climate change and obesity and we are all going to die horribly and climate skeptics are acting just like tobacco companies to obstruct anyone trying to fix it. Thats it!

Over 300 Australian doctors published (another) open letter (which you probably can't read because its not open in the sense that you don't have to pay to see it) in the Medical Journal of Australia, explaining the above position. According to the climate doctor in-crowd:

“We are now seeing the emergence of health risks caused by excesses in market driven consumerism (including the consumption of energy dense processed foods), energy subsidised exertion-free living, an over-arching pre-occupation with gross domestic product and ... population growth."

According to a Herald Sun Article (which you actually can read):

“As health professionals, we urge Australian politicians (and the public) to recognise the overlap in the underlying cause of two great health threats that our population now faces,'' the experts wrote.
''... the rise of obesity and its life-threatening disease consequences and the great threats to health from global climate change.

I also particularly like that they didn't hold back from not-so-subtly lumping climate skeptics in with tobacco companies, which they described as an example of:

“the well financed, doubt-fostering opposition of vested interests'"

There they go with that "well financed" crap again. Or maybe Im doing this skeptic thing wrong, and I really needed to go to tobacco giant Philip Morris for funding (after all, what could be more Australian than Philip Morris? They own Kraft, which owns Vegemite.)

The many and varied authors of the abysmal piece of catastrophising excresence that parodies an open missive, also didn't hold back from blaming impending, hypothetical climate woe on a growing population. Clearly they don't read my blog, or they'd know that our actual birth rate is below replacement value, and the only reason our population is increasing is immigration. Sure, its something to bear in mind, but lets face it, Australia hasn't exactly thrown open the gates Corey-style and said "house party, and you're all invited".

What I would like to know, is where in the rolling, bucolic hills of their imaginations did this group representative of one of the highest earning professions in the country, not see the blatent hypocrisy of a political stance that smacks of socialism? Seriously, some of these people have stethoscopes that are worth more than my car (I'm not kidding, although mind you, some people have electric tea kettles that are worth more than my car). Especially considering that its actually POOR people in this country who are more likely to be obese. (If you don't believe me, I invite you to conduct your own literature review. Or alternatively you could go to your local McDonalds.)

I realise that I have strayed far into unexplored victriolic territory today, but I am on the wrong end of too many early mornings, sick kids, cranky husbands and chlorhexidine hand-rub, and it was a given that the next person(s) who messed with me were gonna get torn a new one. Much to an entire teaching hospital's continued relief, it turned out to be a bunch of histrionic, hypocritical alarmist doctors that irked me first, and in a virtual sense.

Sadly, I know some of the people who put their name to this, and all I can do is shake my head in a rueful, slightly sad kind of way, and say: "Y'all are gonna be REAL embarassed about this some day, and the internet (and a certain under paid and overworked blogger) never forgets..."

Tofurkey of the Week # 6

2010-03-12T21:43:00.000-08:00

Ahh, the Tofurkey. The Daily Suppository's award for all those found acting like a total turkey in an environmentally sensitive manner. This award has become somewhat of a fixture around here, athough everyone has been very kind to not point out that it hasn't been as weekly as the name would indicate.

Regardless, I have found another candidate for the award, and this week it goes out to the wife of fellow Tofurkey alumni, Pete Bethune.

Pete Bethune, erstwhile "Captain" of the doomed Ady Gil Trimaran and all 'round danger to the public, has just landed in Japan, where all his, um...tofurkeys, have come home to roost in the form of an arrest for tresspass. This charge is for his ill-advised boarding of the whaler Shonan Maru II, and may attract a sentence of up to three years or a hefty fine. Pete can console himself with the fact that it could have been worse, he could have been charged with piracy.

Sharyn Bethune, Pete's wife, has earned herself a tofurkey for expressing "shock" at his arrest.

Sharyn was quoted as saying:

“You can't just shrug it off. It's a long way for his kids to go and see him - a Japanese jail.”

Which came as a bit of a shock to me, too, as I assumed given the way Pete has been gallivanting around the southern ocean throwing butyric acid missiles around and generally having a, forgive me, whale of a time, that he mustn't have any kids.

Blind Freddy could have seen this arrest coming, so the Tofurkey is also awarded on the basis that people with dependent children should not knowingly put themselves in such a compromising situation and then plead for sympathy when the inevitable happens.

The New Zealand foreign minister has also stated that he is not going to intervene on Pete's behalf, and is happy to leave him to the tender mercies of the Japanese judicial system. Which, as mentioned previously, has a track record of a 98% + conviction rate.

Xena, princess stupid

2010-03-05T16:16:00.001-08:00

Just caught an interview with Lucy Lawless, best known for her role as "Xena, Princess Warrior", and was intrigued by this bit:

Q: After Climategate and other reports questioning climate change science, many people worldwide are still skeptical about global warming. What would you say to disbelievers to get them to change their minds?
A: I think the people running climate change denial campaigns are sociopaths. They don't want you to get off the grid in any sense because then you'd be autonomous and they couldn't make you buy their poison.

The stupid, its hurting me. FYI Lucy, I don't own a utility company and Im not peddling poison. Im just a discerning, skeptical individual.
And just so you know, you sucked in Battlestar Galactica. There, I've said it.

NB: The link in the original interview (from Mother Nature Network of all places) actually really did link to climategate.com. Big ups to the lads over there!

Harvard medical, how could you?

2010-03-04T15:30:00.000-08:00

Medical students in Australia would like to have you believe that there are a few medical schools that somehow have some additional kudos. There are a few "Sandstone" universities, such as the University of Melbourne, University of Sydney etc. that are as close to venerable as you get in this young country. Generally I find this rather laughable, "After all", I would say "its not like its Harvard or anything."
Even here in Australia, Harvard has a mystique. Oooh, Harvard, the best and the brightest, the pinnacle of medicine.

Then I recieved a flyer advertising a series of speaking engagements here in Australia by one Harvard Medical faculty member, Aaron Bernstein MD, who is speaking about the health effects of climate change and biodiversity loss. He seemed familiar somehow, then I realised he had annoyed me before. I had previously encountered the work of Dr. Bernstein, who is a paediatrician, when he was recommending that we tell the parents of sick children that they need to reduce their carbon footprint. Given my time-poor lifestyle at the moment, it turned out that I had missed the deeper significance of his work and his status in the climate change alarmism sphere. That was remiss of me, so allow me to address it now.

Bernstein is speaking at a few engagements in Australia, including the upcoming "Healthy Parks, Healthy People" congress in Melbourne, where he keynotes with other famous faces such as Tim Flannery (who clearly wasn't embarassed enough by chairing the Copenhagen Climate Council to go away on sabbatical indefinitely, as we had hoped).

Turns out Dr. Bernstein is a best selling co-author of 'Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity', which earned praise from Al The Gore-acle himself. In Dr. Bernstein's words "...we are living at a time of rapid depletion of biodiversity, one of the most extreme in Earth's history." Which is interesting, because I always thought that the biggest mass extinction we know about in Earth's history was the Permian-Triassic extinction 250 million years ago, where 90% of life went bosoms up. Closely followed by the end-Cretaceous extinction where around 85% of all species died (bye bye T Rex).

Anyway, Bernstein is also the course director of the Harvard medical program Human Health and Global Environmental Change, which "...examines the human health consequences of global environmental change, with an emphasis on climate change and biodiversity loss". And here was me thinking I had to learn a whole bunch of useless stuff in my public health class.

Apparently its OK to turn out cohorts of medical students who can't confidently auscultate a heart murmur or perform a pap smear, but who have been tutored extensively in fisheries management by such "luminaries" as Carl Safina from the Blue Ocean Institute. Just in case you were confused by the words "fisheries management", Carl Safina doesn't really want fisheries "managed", he would prefer that they were stopped altogether and locked up in Marine Protected Areas. To prove this, I discovered that he is also a fellow of the Pew Environmental Group, who are well known for eradicating coastal economies and fishermen's livelihoods and now want to lock-up Australia's virtually un-utilised fisheries (see Jenifer Marohassy's article on the topic here)

If that wasn't enough to make you dubious about Carl Safina, perhaps I should also note that he wrote a new Forward to Rachel "Silent Spring" Carson's book The Sea Around Us. The Blue Ocean Institue is also responsible for FishPhone, which is apparently a "sustainable seafood text messaging service", and they also run a novel program combatting the effects of climate change called the Friendship Collaborative, which "brings together scientists and evangelical Christian leaders in face-to-face conversations about climate change and our collective moral responsibility to care for creation." No news yet on how thats working out for them or creation.

In any case, why are medical students sitting through a series of lectures in topics such as this? Do they honestly have that much time on their hands over at Harvard that they cant think of something else they should probably be doing instead? Like seeing patients?

Tofurkey of the week # 5

2010-02-27T03:53:00.000-08:00

This weeks Tofurkey (for acting like a turkey in an environmentally sensitive manner), goes out to Massachusetts college student Christopher Potter.
Young Mr. Potter has been sleeping outside the University of Massachusetts in a tent for over 120 days to protest the use of fossil fuels for energy. Responses to this demonstration range from:

1) A distinct lack of concern from an unnamed Boston utility company.
2) A slightly more concerned mother. (Did you pack your long underwear, Chris?)
3) A presumably happy college room mate, who may or may not have reported being "stoked" with having the dorm room to themselves.

The police response to this protest was to do the only reasonable thing and took the protestors tent when he wasn't looking, forcing young Christopher to schlepp down to the police station to re-claim it. (I love this, in other parts of the world this guy would have been introduced to the wack-wack stick, but the Boston constabulary contented themselves with just pinching his tent for a bit of a giggle.)

Christopher has limits to his high-mindedness, however, and has allowed himself leeway when it comes to charging his i-pod:

Though he doesn’t live inside, he says he charges his electronics with “dirty fossil fuels,” because “right now there’s no escaping them, and it makes us all contribute to climate change, unfortunately.”

Yes son, they "made" you do it. Damn those evil Mac bastards.

When asked what he wants to do for a career, Potter says he wants to continue pushing for clean electricity.

Good for you, son. We'll keep a spot under a highway overpass warm for you.

WHO and NHS sittin' in a tree....

2010-02-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

Further to my last post, which decried my general reluctance to resuscitate patients by the light of a cell phone in the event of a power blackout, I discovered that the NHS must get their dose of stupid via suckling at the teat of big mamma WHO. Why? Because:
WHO urges hospitals to join climate change battle

Hospitals should use alternative forms of energy such as solar panels and wind turbines, install energy-efficient lightbulbs as well as buy organic food from local suppliers and make ambulances more environmentally friendly, the WHO said

Awesome, says I. Can we also dance around naked in the (presumably empty) parking lot singing Kumbaya?
So, when we install these inefficient and intermittent forms of energy production, who is gonna be first to volunteer to be hooked up to the solar powered ventilators? Or the wind powered dialysis unit?
Might I also suggest that we install the energy-efficient lightbulbs in the paediatric ward, because sick kids won't care about mercury vapour, and given the strange health problems that might result from wind turbines producing infrasound in a really nutty range of hertz, maybe they should go on top of the psychiatric ward.
As far as "buying organic produce from local suppliers" goes, this is definitely do-able, but since the food budget of your average hospital doesn't extend much further than powdered scrambled eggs, we might have to cut down on other expenses. Like soap. Or medicine.
I am also definitely interested in the green ambulance concept, after all, it worked so well in Spain, didn't it?
Or maybe we could just scrap the idea of these new fandangled hospitals all together. After all, back in my day, we didn't have no hospitals, just some bloke down t'pub named Frank, who'd cut off your leg for a fiver. It wasn't ideal, but Frank-based care has a small carbon footprint, and thats what counts.

Exempt hospitals from carbon stupidity, because I am not going to resusc a baby by the light of my mobile phone...

2010-02-25T20:09:00.000-08:00

Not content to just drag themselves down, the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS) thinks Australia needs to follow them over the carbon reduction cliff.

I blogged about the NHS carbon reduction scheme last year (Yet another reason to be glad you're not English), and now the head of their Environmental Sustainability Unit, Dr. Pencheon, has co-authored a recent paper suggesting that Australian health services need a centralised and systematic approach to reducing their carbon emissions, a la the NHS.

So what has Dr. Pencheon done for Britons lately? Among his many triumphs was reducing the NHS carbon footprint by taking meat and dairy off the menu in UK hospitals. (Because clearly hospital food is so great you can afford to reduce the nutrition content even further.)

Another suggestion from Pencheon (same source) was:

for surgeons to travel to GP surgeries for follow-up consultations, to reduce the need for many patients to travel to outpatients departments.

Which, if you spend any time with surgeons, is so funny for SO many reasons. I'm sure the surgeons will go for that suggestion in droves. Not.
Other bright ideas from the NHS include reducing parking around the hospital so staff are forced to ~~get mugged or raped at 3am~~ walk.

David Pencheon then goes on to say:

"If you're going to get me radical I say the default place for health is in the home, and the person who delivers it is yourself: that's the ultimate low-carbon health service," he said

In other words, "if you malingerers just stopped going to hospital, we wouldn't have this problem." Self treatment aside, I actually agree that in an ideal world with more doctors than patients, we would treat everyone in their own homes. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the most effective way to allocate health resources, especially for high dependency care, is to cluster them together and funnel the patients through as per need.

Medicine is particularly resource intensive, and in some cases there really isn't much that can be done about it. Whether you use single use only equipment or have to re-sterilize, you're looking at a huge energy expenditure. We can't just reuse items without serious thought going into the consequences (infection control, anyone?). A trip to a hospital laundry facility (thanks very much touchy-feely-new-age medical school faculty) is a real eye opener in terms of energy and water expenditure, but the fact remains that you need clean linens, scrubs and towels, and you need sterile drapes, and it takes energy resources to do that.

In terms of electricity supply and heating and cooling, hospitals need vast amounts of reliable energy, carbon footprint be damned. If they don't get it, Bad Things Happen. Energy efficiency is laudable, but it should be pursued seperately to a carbon reduction agenda. According to Pencheon et al, carbon reduction is necessary because:

There is strong international scientific consensus about the consequences of the warming of the world's climate system, with a recent Lancet editorial arguing that "climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century".

However, if you ask me, basic triage would dictate that the health and safety of the people in our hospitals now is more important than some ephemereal public health of the future informed by shonky pseudo-science and a mis-interpretation of the precautionary principle.

If you don't believe me, then you can watch some particularly disturbing footage of what happens in a neonatal intensive care unit during a power blackout when the backup generators fail. (Don't watch it, just take my word for it. Seriously, you don't want to see it.) The Egyptian doctors who tried unsuccessfully to save those babies had to work by the light of their mobile phones, and one used their phone to film the scene in a bid to stop the hospital covering up the blackout related deaths. (NB: Another reason to not watch the footage (as if you didn't have enough) is that this breach of confidentiality contravenes pretty much every medical ethic I can think of.)

Hospital blackouts aren't just limited to countries like Egypt, either. The NHS has it's share. As does Australia.

So if we can't assure ourselves that the power in our hospitals isn't going to go on the fritz right now, then why on earth would we rush into dodgy renewable sources with intermittent supply? Or maybe they just mean we should get Peter Garret to insulate the hospital ceilings? Even better.

Farmers are smart

2010-02-21T22:41:00.001-08:00

The ABC has just published a story that a poll of Victorian farmers show that more than half of them don't think humans are responsible for climate change.
Contrary to the common belief of inner city intellectuals, many people from rural areas are better informed on alot of issues than their urban counterparts. Partly I think this is due to the fact that when you live in a remote or rural area you are aware of your isolation, and seek to compensate by self education, whereas city folk have a tendency to just assume that a postcode makes them well informed by default.
Naturally, the spin put on this result was that this shows that farmers are "confused" (read: stupid). Ha! I think it shows just the opposite.

Is this a joke? This is a joke, right?

2010-02-21T20:48:00.000-08:00

I've introduced you to the "public intellectual" (aka: useless leech) Clive Hamilton before. The not-even-close Green's candidate in the Higgins by-election takes the word "creep" to whole new levels. Way creepier than white shoes and hair gel. Creepier than ageing bachelors volunteering for scout-camp. (Hey, they might be nice people). Creepier than...creepier than....Oh, f*ck it. I honestly can't think of anyone who creeps me out more. Not even Matt Damon. Just having to look at his picture while researching this makes me want to bleach my eyeballs.

Fresh from writing an open letter to the children of skeptics, outlining how their Mummies and Daddies are killing the planet, poor little Clivey is feeling a bit down. Apparently our skeptic overlord and dark master, Lord Monckton is spurring climate skeptics into cyber bullying champions of global warming such as Clive. So its lucky that Clive Hamilton is a proponent of mandatory internet censorship then, isn't it?
This from the man who has gone on record stating that climate deniers are worse than holocaust deniers. I hate to break it to you Clive, but if you are getting flaming dog poo shoved through your letterbox, its got far more to do with your winsome personality than your views on climate science. Clive isn't sure, but he thinks it might be a conspiracy:

Although he is yet to identify the individuals or organisations behind the cyber attacks, Dr Hamilton says anyone who is involved in arguing for climate change appears to be a recipient of the bullying.
"I've got some ideas but I don't have any evidence," he said

Clivey is so put out by it he's writing a five (five?!) part series on this evidenceless cyber bullying, which is being hosted by our public broadcaster. (This is ridiculous. Seriously, time to tell the ABC to drop people like Hamilton and bring back The Goodies or I want my money back.)

Amazing that someone can be so alarmingly (get it?) egomaniacal that they have missed the bullying that climate skeptics have experienced for almost decades now. Ian Plimer has related how his favourite ever fan letter said "Dear Sir, drop dead." Ask yourself this, why would so many skeptical bloggers who obviously have such "mad skillz" with writing, choose to blog anonymously? Could it be because we have this funny thing about wanting to hang onto our jobs? I will bet you money that folk such as myself, the Englishman, Simon, TWAWKI or that Kiwi guy either have to work for a company or institution where alarmism is the norm and breaking ranks swiftly punished, or if self-employed, have to work with a customer demographic that is similarly afflicted. Or they have to live in California or something. Same thing. Either way, I can assure you we don't stay anonymous simply because we are worried about getting mobbed by teenaged groupies.

Its astounding that someone can have such staggeringly little self awareness that they cannot relate their own actions (re: holocaust denial comparison and letters to our children) to the "bullying" that they are decrying everywhere else.
What a d*ck.

Time to tell the kids about climategate and droughtgate...

2010-02-20T21:27:00.000-08:00

Here a-gate, there a-gate, everywhere a-gate gate.
My mother always told me (generally at top volume) "The first rule of the country is always leave a gate as you found it." Not any more mother, time we left them wide open.

I just came across a recently published study: Mental health impact for adolescents living with prolonged drought (Aust. J. Rural Health (2010) 18, 32–37), which was a fairly simple survey of adolescents living in the Riverina area of rural New South Wales. During an initial survey in 2004, the researchers discovered that adolescents in the region, although drought affected, did not rate their anxiety or distress as being higher than adolescents from other urban areas, and it was proposed that a rural lifestyle somehow bred mental resilience.

The researchers then went back 4 years later and resurveyed adolescents in the area to discover how they were feeling about it now, and discovered that kids are now rating their emotional distress as being significantly higher than the previous study:

Thematic analysis showed consistency with the previous study as well as new
themes of grief, loss and the impacts of global climate change.

So why the increasing loss of adolescent mental wellbeing in the area? On the one hand there are the cumulative effects of a prolonged drought, and on the other hand there is the increasing emphasis on climate change related anxiety that was not necessarily present in the earlier study. Take this example from a focus group held with the kids:

Issues that might relate to climate change:

‘Global warming could be having an effect’ ‘People are wondering if it is climate change – starting to think it is – everybody talks about it’

The authors note that this was an emerging area of anxiety for the kids, and one wonders how much the global catastrophising about impending climate doom may have compounded the kids ability to cope.

Also worthy of note is that the authors mention that less children participated in the follow-up study than took part in the initial study due to parental reluctance. The authors hypothesise this to be due to increasing family pressures from the drought, but given my rather polarised view, I suspect that a plain language statement re: research into "the mental health effects of climate change" would serve as a turn-off for pragmatic and generally well-informed country folk. It would have been to me, thats for sure.

Maybe the researchers were unaware of the fact that as early as 2008, the CSIRO were blaming the media for talking up climate-change induced drought in the area, even though the:

CSIRO does not believe the current drought in southern New South Wales is here to stay as part of climate change.

Andrew Bolt recently published extensively on the misrepresentation of drought in the Riverina being due to climate change, quoting a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters. Read all about it here.

And to end with some good news, its well and truly p*ssing down in the Riverina now, mate.
(NB: Thats a colloquialism for "raining very hard", if anyone from overseas is confused by my sudden descent into vernacular.)

Pete Bethune: serial idiot

2010-02-18T17:09:00.000-08:00

I just came across something that was omitted from reporting around the time that the Ady Gil collided with the Shonen Maru II, scuttling the incredibly expensive wave piercing tri-maran.

Turns out that Ady Gil skipper Pete Bethune has a history of crashing into other boats, only the last time it happened someone actually died.

The tragedy happened while the Ady Gil, then known as "Earthrace" was making it's circumnavigation attempt. Just off the coast of Guatemala they ran right over the top of a fibreglass skiff full of Guatemalen fishermen. One was lost at sea, presumed dead, and two were picked up by Earthrace, with one almost bleeding out during the process.
The Earthrace crew were detained in Guatemala, until Pete Bethune's insurance company settled with the dead man's family for damages. Pete protested "it wasn't his fault" because he was in his bunk at the time, then promptly sold the Earthrace engineer down the river, as he was the one at the helm.

Sorry Pete, that's not how it works when you're the skipper. Anything that happens under your watch is your responsibility. I know what its like, I'm training to be a doctor. When a mistake happens under a doctors care, it doesnt matter whether it was personally the doctors fault or the fault of a team member working under them. The doctor is responsible. Its the way it works. If you don't like it, don't be a skipper or a doctor. If you like boats or medicine but don't want to take responsibility, then be a crewman or a nurse or a theatre technician, or whatever. The top job just isn't for you.

The excuse given was that the fishing boat wasn't running under lights, but Pete Bethune's own blog entry (which can be read at the first link supplied above) states that the fishing skiff was 26 feet long. Given that it wasn't a submarine they hit, surely you would have some warning of an object that size on radar? Especially given that Pete himself describes the conditions at the time of the collision as being flat calm, and Earthrace was doing 15 knots (around 28 km / hr), not their top speed.

Biggest sell-out of the eighties award

2010-02-18T01:20:00.001-08:00

Has to go to the honourable Peter Garrett, federal minister for the environment and cadaverous-looking lapdog of Penny Wong, the federal automoton for climate change.
First it was the ~~pink batts~~ housing insulation debacle, the score card reading something like this:

* 4 dead.
* 86 fires.
* An estimated 1000 houses with potentially electrified ceilings.
* A possible 400,000 with useless substandard insulation.
* Countless rorting and rip-offs.

And now:

Thousands of homes could be at risk of electrical fires from faulty installation of solar panels. Which is interesting because when a house with solar power is burning down, you can't turn the electricity off at the mains, and the set-up can remain electrified. A real bitch if you're a fireman.

I'm sorry, but I have to do this (and I am SO suprised nobody else seems to have yet). For those of you from overseas or who were literally born yesterday, Peter Garrett used to be in a rock band back in the days when he was slightly less loathsome. Peter, how can you sleep.....when your bed is burning (bahahahaha):

Tofurkey of the week # 4

2010-02-17T19:51:00.001-08:00

Its been awhile since the award for being a turkey in an environmentally sensitive manner has been bestowed. Thankfully, The Daily Suppository can count on the antics of ~~idiots~~ "conservationists" such as Pete Bethune, erstwhile captain of the Ady Gil, to deliver the goods. I had previously considered bestowing a Tofurkey on the Ady Gil crew for crashing the equivalent of a water-borne sports car into the maritime equivalent of a tractor, but so much was written on it at the time that I just statisfied myself with bitching about it privately. Luckily for me, Pete Bethune gave me another chance when he decided that illegally bording the Shonan Maru II and attempting to make a citizens arrest (aka unlawfull detention) of the Shonan Maru II captain, then demanding $3 million dollars, or thereabouts, was a good idea.

Apart from being really stupid, his actions could also be construed as piracy. Being a maritime person (or so he would have us believe) 'ol Capt'n Pete should be aware that in many parts of the world, they haven't changed the maritime piracy laws in a good long while, hence the punishment for piracy in sovereign waters is sometimes something like "hanging till dead in the public square." (FYI: Piracy in Japanese waters can get you 5 years to life, or death if you killed someone during the act of piracy.)

The event occurred in international waters and Japan has a bit of a sticky issue here, due to their defence force caveats prohibiting use of force for anything other than national self defence. Fortunately for Japan, Pete made this easy for them by boarding a vessel that cannot be construed as anything other than Japanese, demanding money from what effectively amounts to the Japanese state, and interfering with Japan's national interests. Additionally, Im no expert on international law, but according to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, if the act of piracy occurs on the high seas, then ANY nation can seize said pirates and / or vessels and then try them subject to the laws of that country. Which brings us back to the 5 years to life. I think they have a solid case to try him at their leisure. If the piracy thing sticks, they also now have an argument for mobilising their "self-defence" force to protect their interests on the high seas.
And FYI: Japan's legal system has a 98% + conviction rate
Good one, Pete.

[epithet of choice] is like climate denial

2010-02-12T20:26:00.000-08:00

There is nothing hateful that some alarmist isn't prepared to liken to "Climate Change Denial". The inference being that there is nothing more evil than climate change denial. Yep, lock your doors alarmists, because when deniers get a belly full of liquor and a head full of hate there is nothing we wont do. We're exactly the sort of people who will rape your grandma and steal your hubcaps. We call it "When skeptics attack". (Yes, sarcasm. That was all sarcasm.)

I mean really, what am I meant to make of this: What do vaccine sceptics have in common with climate change deniers? From the Crikey health blog. Where climate skeptics are likened to Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who started the whole MMR - autism controversy and was recently soundly spanked, and not in a good way, for his part in the fiasco. They say:

As predicted, the folly of MMR vaccine rejection is reaping its unhappy results. Similarly, with the climate change debate, the majority look on in dismay as the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions is delayed by the views of a minority.

I can't seem to find the name of who wrote this, though. COWARD. Sure, I blog anonymously, but I'm an independent blogger, not writing under the auspices of a larger publication. I don't get paid. In my previous guise as a freelance health / medical journalist, I always had to publish under my own name, which certainly helps your motivation in getting the facts straight.

Then I saw another recent headline: Is Denying Abstinence News Any Different From Denying Climate Change? (Not going to link it, its boring.)

It seems like if people are casting around for a suitable epithet for something they don't like, they just reach for the "climate denial" tarbrush.

Climate denial has been compared to everything from belief in a flat earth, creationism to even zionism. It has been similarly described as a contagion and a mental illness.

It seems to be a litte bit too late to start jumping onto the alarmist bandwagon now, I suggest that these people cast around for a new bogeyman. The IPCC or the CRU may be a good place to start. Alternatively, they could just bite me.

Update: How could I forget the epithet attributed to UN climate chief Pachauri? I believe he said something like climate change denial is like denying the link between smoking and cancer and that we should powder our butts with asbestos. Or something.

Arse over whotsit

2010-02-11T14:40:00.000-08:00

Former candidate for the PM and new Australian Ambassador designate to the USA, Kim Beazley, has had a winter related mishap:

Mr Beazley, who only arrived in the country last week, fell heavily on ice at the ambassador's residence in Washington.

The accident happened two days ago and an embassy spokesman says he now needs keyhole surgery on both knees.

Welcome to the States, Mr. Beazley, watch that global warming, it can be slippery.

Apology for crappy content...

2010-02-09T02:59:00.001-08:00

Just to let everyone know that I realise that my posts haven't been quite up to scratch lately. Its my busy season, and I am on a rotation that has me getting up at 5 o'clock in the f****ing am (thats daylight saving time, too...so technically 4 am, not that I'm counting.)

By the time I drag myself home 12-15 hours later, pretend to study, pat my kids on the head, do the laundry, burn dinner and crawl into bed to watch Battlestar Galactica on my laptop, I have about 10 minutes to make some bad puns on this blog.

I'm trying to get something better out there on weekends, but until I miraculously find myself on, say, a psychiatry rotation (preferably from the doctoring side)with the attendant spare time, there may be alot of truncated posts and titles that don't really make sense when you think about them.

Stick with me on this. The spirit is willing, but the mind wants to drink beer and watch something really stoopid and non-challenging instead.(ABC news, anyone?)

For you guys, though, I will muster my few remaining brain cells, trawl the internet, and try to post some higher quality victriol.

Promise.

Pink Batts: Even worse than we thought...

2010-02-07T13:47:00.000-08:00

Following on from a previous post about the mounting casualty list from the Roof Insulation Scheme. The Australian has reported as front page news that:

HUNDREDS of homes that have been fitted with foil insulation under the Rudd government's stimulus program have been turned into potential death traps because installers have laid the insulation over live wires or used metal fasteners, causing it to become electrified.
An audit of almost 1000 homes in Queensland has found that in about 2 per cent of cases, foil insulation was installed inappropriately, causing the roof to become "live". This means that if home owners enter their roof space and touch the insulation, they could be shocked or electrocuted.

If the foil touches metal frames or pipes, it could cause other parts of houses, including taps, to become electrified.

More than 37,000 homes have received foil insulation under the government's program.

Everything old is new again...

2010-02-06T16:45:00.001-08:00

If you ever needed proof that belief in AGW leads to a poor grasp of history, here it is: I have just discovered a company (and they even have the ear of the British P.M.) who are developing cutting-edge technology to make cargo shipping carbon neutral, in their words:

B9 Shipping has developed 100% renewable powered cargo ships bringing proven technologies together in an innovative way to address the growing problem of emissions in shipping.

Guess what their new fangled technomonology is?

Sails!

I love it. They are so full of themselves that they have even pledged to "give" this new technology they are developing to small island states at risk of climate change related sea level rise.

I hate to break it to the folks at B9 shipping, but I think that at least some of those small island nations probably have that technology already. In fact, they practically invented it. The polynesians were zipping across the Pacific ocean in out-riggers when the Brits were still working out that ~~floating potties~~ coracles weren't such a great idea.

Admittedly, those Europeans made up for it later with the age of sail, took over half the world and made those great clipper ships, which weren't too shabby at hauling freight, either, if memory serves.

If any of you get falling-down drunk at the docks and find yourself press-ganged into the world of carbon-netral freight, don't say I didn't warn you.

Additionally, if you ever find yourself playing poker against a denizen of a small island nation and they say "I've never played before, you'll have to show me how", hold onto your wallets, you're about to get fleeced.

The Lancet, not so pointed these days...

2010-02-06T16:06:00.001-08:00

When the journal Science went to the dark side of knee-jerk alarmism, I took it with aplomb. When National Geographic changed their entire board of trustees, pissed in the face of countless decades of global respect and went as commercial as a suburban disco, I'll admit that stung a little. However, when I realised the depth of depravity at that bastion of all things British Commonwealth and medical, The Lancet, well, that hurt like a bitch.

Just to add insult to injury, in november of 2009, they launched an entire series of papers on the subject of "Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions". Yes, every paper in the series starts with that title, (no agenda there) and cover such topics as food and agriculture, land transport and low carbon fuel production to name a few. Refreshingly medical, isn't it? One feels that an alternatie appellation for the series could have been "Our underwear flies off at the slightest hint of funding: Is it getting warmer in here?"

Funding for the series came from a veritable galaxy of sources: The Wellcome Trust, Royal College of Physicians, Economic and Social Research Council, Department of Health, National Institute for Health Research, US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and the Academy of Medical Sciences, with support from the World Health Organization.

If you're going to whore yourself to public and political advantage, you might as well go high-class, I suppose.

The pink batts strike again...

2010-02-04T00:08:00.000-08:00

The labour government's ill-concieved economic stimulus / climate initiative has struck again, with the electrocution death of a young contractor in far north Queensland. According to The Australian, four contractors have died on the job since the introduction of the ceiling insulation scheme last year.
P.J. O'Rouke said it best:

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid.

Prior to this, the government home-insulation scheme was criticized due to the almost instant rorting of the scheme.

Bill Gates is my homeboy

2010-01-30T23:47:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the modern world, where the successful alpha males are computer nerds who always look a bit like they had to walk through a wind-tunnel to get to wherever they are.
If I was a smart female, I would have glommed onto someone like Bill, rather than the football loving, beer drinking Chewbacca I wound up with. (Hi, dear!)

I have a grudging appreciation of Bill Gates though, mostly because he contributes more financially to global health than the entire budget of the WHO (true!), and he used his geek laser-vision to actually cut through all the highly politicised health issues that generally take up funding, in favour of funding health interventions for the major global killers, such as malaria and TB.

He has also recently pointed out that:

spending by rich countries aimed at combating climate change in developing nations could mean a dangerous cut in aid for health issues.

Rich nations at the Copenhagen summit pledged to funnel US $100 Billion to developing nations per year by 2020 to combat climate change.

Gates said that amount represents more than three quarters of foreign aid currently given by the richest countries per year.
"I am concerned that some of this money will come from reducing other categories of foreign aid, especially health," Gates wrote in a letter, released late on Sunday, describing the work of his foundation.
"If just 1 percent of the $100 billion goal came from vaccine funding, then 700,000 more children could die from preventable diseases," Gates added.
Taking the focus away from health aid could be bad for the environment in the long run, said Gates, "because improvements in health, including voluntary family planning, lead people to have smaller families, which in turn reduces the strain on the environment."

Source can be found here.

Saibai under water, but not due to sea level rise.

2010-01-30T16:01:00.000-08:00

Saibai Island is one of our northernmost islands in the Torres Strait, its a low lying mud-flat island closer to New Guinea than the Australian mainland. When Australia relinquished it's administration of Papua New Guinea, the inhabitants of Saibai were given the choice of which country they would like to be a part of, and rather unaminously voted to be a part of Australia.

Saibai has been recently inundated by king tides, which naturally is being attributed to rising sea levels due to climate change. Theres just a couple of problems with this:

One is that pacific sea levels aren't really rising anymore than they ever have.

The other is that this has happened to Saibai before. King tides happen yearly, and in the 1940's a combination of king tides and storm surges inundated Saibai and contaminated the water supply, forcing many of the islanders to relocate to mainland Australia. Hence the Cape York communities of Bamaga and Seisia, which are ethnically Torres Strait Islander, rather than Aboriginal.

Saibai suddenly being inundated tends to be a combination of factors, including annual king tides, heavy rainfall and strong winds, for example from cyclones and strong tropical low pressure systems. To have a look at the current cyclone season, look here. If you looking at this at the time of posting, you can see tropical cyclone Olga has been busy dumping rain on most of far north Queensland and the cape, and she is currently reforming in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Saibai had the misfortune of having this storm activity accompany the annual king tides.

The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in action...

2010-01-29T20:13:00.001-08:00

This one took a little bit of time to get my head around the convoluted logic, so bear with me on this.

Australia is being heralded as coming up with an alternative way to mitigate climate change by reducing carbon emissions via paying indigenous Australians to practice traditional fire management practices. (Controlled burn-offs at particular locations and times of year, which then prevent out of control late-season fires.)

Traditional Owners from West Arnhem have agreed to generate 100,000 tonnes of carbon credits annually through traditional fire management employing Indigenous Rangers, to offset greenhouse gas emissions from ConocoPhillips' liquefied natural gas plant in Darwin Harbour.
For its part, ConocoPhillips agreed to pay A$1 million per year into the project over 17 years. The offsets will be recognised under the proposed Australian Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Building on the WALFA pilot, the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA) has raised $7.8 million from the Australian government towards $30 million required to develop and administer four additional projects using Indigenous land managers with the goal of creating over 1 million tonnes of carbon credits annually.

According to UN under-secretary general Konrad Osterwalder:

"This experience is the best example in the world of indigenous and local communities using the emerging carbon market to develop culturally appropriate livelihoods. The lessons learnt from this experience are invaluable, especially now that there are billions of dollars available to local communities worldwide to help them take climate change mitigation and adaptation measures."

Im somewhat speechless. How does this even work as an offset? Why are we paying people millions of dollars to do a sensible thing that they have always done, and then say its a carbon credit, because if they didn't do what they had always done then there would be more fire, so by making fire, they are reducing it. Im sorry, what?

At the risk of sounding like my grandfather, if something isn't sustainably producing an income, then it ain't a good investment. Wheres the actual income production here? This is trading in make-believe. Traditional fire management was done for a variety of reasons, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't to offset white-fella carbon emissions. If you don't follow through on the action, it negates the purpose of doing it in the first place.

Wouldn't it be better to let indigenous people "develop culturally appropriate livelihoods" by giving them their land and letting them actually use it? Maybe then they could continue traditional practices alongside a shiny new $30 million fish farm, fruit tree plantation or even, stay with me on this, a shiny new liquid gas plant of their own.

As opposed to this bullshit, which seems to be some feel-good, white-fella circle jerk. Even the department of environment notes that:

Ultimately burning gave people control of the landscape, whereby they would not be surprised by unplanned fire and could do particular burning activities as a matter of choice. They were in charge and burning probably came to symbolise being in control.

Wheres the choice here? Wheres the control? This is turning aboriginality into an industry for, well, industry.

For a recent article on a related subject, Noel Pearson has alot to say on the topic here.

Well, f...k me dead and bury me pregnant...

2010-01-27T01:08:00.000-08:00

The unthinkable has happened. The ABC newsbreakfast show on ABC2, famed for biased reporting and rude on-air gestures at climate-skeptic politicians when they think they're not looking, just attempted to ask some "difficult" questions of a leading proponent of AGW.

Presenter Joe O'Brien interviewed Clem Davis this morning, convener of the upcoming AMOS conference in Canberra (read: warmist junket). Clem Davis, who is more accustomed to presenting his backside to the ABC for the kissing thereof, actually found himself being asked about such matters as the IPCC glacier swindle, Lord Monckton, the fact we have been in a cooling trend for a decade or so, and the mainstream media bias in reporting climate change. I can't work out which is more unprecedented, the ABC showing a bizarre amount of balance, or the suprise on Clem Davis' face.

Clem Davis refused to answer any of the difficult questions put to him, citing that it's not his area of expertise to answer such things. Given that he is a meteorologist, to my mind this is tantamount to pleading the fifth. (If he was in court and this was another country. Whatever.)

No matter, though, just the fact the presenter asked the questions in the first place is indicative of the shifting tides of public opinion.

Doctors for the what now?

2010-01-22T16:37:00.000-08:00

I onced blogged about the inane self-conceit of organisations that have the appelation of "Doctors for..." in the title. It was called "Strippers for industrialisation, and other types of stupid" and still garners alot of misdirected google traffic. (Suckers).

So far, along with my favourite lumps of ca-ca to kick over at Doctors for the Environment (nope, still won't link them), I have found Doctors for Native Forests (they have the ENTIRE text of Dr. Seuss' "The Lorax" on their site), Doctors for Global Health (which makes sense for a change), Clown Doctors for Kids (acceptable), Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (OK), Doctors for Human Rights (meh) and Doctors for Life (Eew. I'm not even going there...)

But wait, whats this? Enter: Doctors for a Sustainable Population. Somewhere in the back of my head I started hearing that music that always played when Darth Vader entered the room. Then I noticed that they used to be called "Medical Association for Planetary Survival" (Why would you change that?)

I'll also give you a dollar and a big sloppy kiss if you can guess who they list as their "associated organisations". Oh, alright, I'll tell you. Its Sustainable Population Australia and, yep, pucker up, Doctors for the Environment Australia.

Doctors for a Sustainable Population are, interestingly, not too worked up about climate change, but are pretty freaked by peak oil. Unfortunately, they think they are just the guys to solve the problem, only because they are doctors, they think what they need to do is implement:

sustainable population targets by family planning and population reduction in the most socially acceptable way.

First, define which is the most socially acceptable way to enforce a reduction in population? I would be interested to hear it. And why is this a doctor's job, anyway? They say:

DSP believes that doctors, a relatively large group trained in science, are the most likely to realise the danger to the future to us and our descendants, and to be effective in explaining this to society.

Wow, this type of thing could never get out of hand, could it?

Also, referring to doctors as trained in science is kind of cute, because I can tell you this for free: The degree I'm studying does NOT give any training in the key basis of the methodology that is science. We are being trained as technicians. Its vocational training of a fairly ad hoc nature. Scientific methodology is assumed knowledge because once upon a time it had already been acquired by this stage. These days, though, you can even get through a PhD without ever having to comes to terms with the P for Philosophy. As a second-generation scientist, I was somewhat appalled to discover that most of my peers actually confuse science with a belief system, and wouldn't notice an Aristotelian logical fallacy if it put on a fruity hat and did the macarena.

Why do these types of people immediately jump to the conclusion that we have to MAKE people have less children? Clearly they have never had a 10 pound incontinence-making device exit a sensitive area of their anatomy. Most of the evidence from the developed world would indicate that if you give women access to birth-control and the choice between buying shoes and having so many children their uteri fall out, they tend to go with 1.8 offspring* and the sexy, faux-leather strappy numbers that show off some toe-cleavage.**

* Yes, thats right. Australia's total fertility rate has been below replacement level since 1976, hence immigration. Even developed Catholic countries like Spain have very low fertility rates. Spain's is lower than Australia's at around 1.3. Italy's is around the same as Spain's, probably because of all those fabulous shoes.
** I actually loathe shoe-shopping. The whole retail industry seems to be full of terrible, ill fitting shoes, and the only ones I like either never have my size, or are only available in white (white!) or cost in excess of $300 (which should be illegal). I was merely trying to make a point. Insert favoured retail item of your choice. e.g. an education or a new set of Makita power drills.

Harden the f#@& up!

2010-01-21T19:56:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been thinking about shifting tides in global psychiatry. For instance the Americanisation of mental illness is becoming increasingly evident, as is the overwhelming propensity for people to pathologise everything that is not neurotypical. Indeed, there is also a growing temptation to diagnose away bad behaviour, or attempt to find some reason why people might just be A-holes. Look at Tiger Woods, after being busted repeatedly burying his iron in the rough, does he man-up and acknowledge that hes a guy-whore with more money than sense? Does he hell...he books himself into rehab for his "sex addiction".

Now other poor sods are finding that after the demise of the Hope and Change Hoe-Down in Copenhagen, their impending demise is making them, well, a bit teary:

Brought to the brink by climate change

Mardi Tindal, the newly elected moderator of the United Church of Canada, returned from last month's climate change summit in Copenhagen with a deep malaise. Not a true clinical depression, but an anxious despair that reduced her to weeping.
"The difference between depression and what I was experiencing is that I wasn't suppressing or finding myself in a place of isolation," she said in an interview about her "lament," and how it helped her to see "the truth about the condition of my own soul."
She was so disappointed by the meeting's failure to reach a binding deal that she broke down in the car one day as her husband drove toward their home church in Brantford, Ont.

The article then trots out a U.K. psychiatrist, Lisa Page:

Dr. Page cites "preliminary evidence" of more extreme possibilities: that suicide increases above a certain temperature threshold; that schizophrenia increases as populations become more urban; and that "impulsivity and aggression could be triggered during periods of hot weather."

One minute we're talking about someone having a bit of a cry, and the next its suicide and schizophrenia?! I certainly hope Dr. Page has to defend those findings, because we already know that linking suicide with temperature is a rather tenuous association, and that in fact suicides rates tend to be highest in northern Europe. The top five countries for suicide according to the WHO are:
1. Lithuania.
2. Belarus.
3. Russia.
4. Kazakhstan.
5. Hungary.

Which would indicate to me that this might have just as much to do with a socio-politico-economic climate than a meteorological one.

Presumably, Dr. Page is referring to a recent article that examined suicide data from Italy over the last few decades and came to a rather zig-zaggy conclusion that Italian men were more likely to suicide when it was warmer. (But not Italian women. Go figure.) The authors themselves even note that:

It is worth mentioning the somehow speculative character of our interpretation of results, to be weighted against other possible contributing mechanisms

.
Really? You think?

Swiss researchers also set out to look at the relationship of seasonality to suicide, thinking that they would find evidence supporting the classical hypothesis that suicides peak when its warmer. Probably because they didn't think to hook this study up to climate change, they discoverered something completely different instead:

To summarize, the results show unexpected associations between monthly suicide and temperature data. Contrary to overall seasonality, the associations based on monthly residuals emerge mainly during the winter months. In analogy to the overall seasonality, suicides that are performed outdoors appear to play again a major role. The results suggest that temperature and similar meteorologic variables contribute little to our understanding of the overall seasonality in suicide, even though the meteorologic variables are involved indirectly in various ways.

Translation: Instead of finding that suicides are higher when its warmer, they discovered that most suicides correspond with winter, with a secondary peak during summer when people are more likely to suicide in the great outdoors.

We also know already that rates of schizophrenia are higher in people who are born in winter in climates with low levels of winter sunlight exposure. The most striking epidemiology came from the high level of schizophrenia in second generation Afro-Carribean migrants to the United Kingdom. Schizophrenia has thus been linked with a low level of maternal vitamin D during the third trimester. (To joint the long list of other diseases that seem to be linked with inadequate vitamin D levels: Heart disease, diabetes, cognitive impairment, cancer...theres more, but I have a short attention span and got bored listing them.)

If I met an individual in person who was feeling really down about the fact we are all going to die of climate by tuesday because Copenhagen went bosoms up, I would be very sympathetic to them. I'm not a bitch or anything. You can't go around making judgements about other peoples feelings. Feelings are personal and trying to negate someone else's is futility on the level of pushing manure up a hill with a pointy stick. However, on a population level, I would like to request that everyone feeling climate angst of this nature watch this delightfully educational clip (warning: Very foul language included. Don't watch if you are F-word phobic):

The weekly vector-borne WTF?

2010-01-18T19:13:00.000-08:00

How could the "international peer-reviewed journal" called Global Health Action have escaped my notice for so long? (I like that they use the word ACTION, but they had me at "Global", anyway). Their home page is decorated with pictures of mosquitoes and polar bears, so I instantly knew I was on the right track.

Just recently they published an Australian article: Climate change could threaten blood supply by altering the distribution of vector-borne disease: an Australian case-study, (available here) which is basically concerned with the fact that during a recent dengue outbreak in far north Queensland, regional blood supplies ran low due to transfusion service bans on collecting from people who were in, or had been to, the dengue prone area.

I've discussed before this the many reasons why climate change is not linked to an increase in vector-borne diseases so much as public health is. You can find stuff on the topic here, here and here. No need to rehash. So on to a discussion of dengue in Australia.

The main dengue vector, Aedes aegypti is apparently an introduced species to Australia, but has been here long enough that it's probably not useful drawing the distinction, except to point out that its highly likely they haven't reached the limit of their possible distribution across the country. There are other mozzies that can be dengue vectors in Australia, but the thing about Ae. aegypti, is that its an urban mozzie. According to the UNSW mosquito nerds:

It is assumed that Ae. aegypti is the vector of greatest concern because of its distribution and close association with humans. Ae. aegypti is predominantly a day-biting mosquito whose larvae may be found almost exclusively in clean water in man-made containers such as water-barrels, rainwater tanks, wells, vases, tyres, bottles, tins, and most other water-holding containers found in the domestic environment. Although the species is currently restricted to Queensland, there are past records of Ae. aegypti being found in NSW, the NT and WA.

Interestingly, the UNSW crew also note that:

Ae. albopictus, poses a threat to Australia. It is an important vector that has been introduced from Asia to many countries, as eggs or larvae transported in artificial container habitats such as used motor vehicle tyres, and water barrels on ships. If it was introduced to Australia it is likely it could readily establish and present a threat for dengue transmission.

This cute little stripey bugger was made famous (if you hang out in the right cirlces and don't get out much) by turning up unannounced many years ago in Houston in the USA, after hitchiking from Asia in used car tyres or such. A past-time that is distinctly unrelated to climate change. (If we wind up with ae. albopictus immigrating from Asia, we can console ourselves with the fact that we have already shipped red-back spiders to Japan).

The fact that Ae. albopictus made its way all the way from Asia to the US would make it seem likely it could handle the little tootle across from New Guinea (where it is already) to the Torres Strait. Especially considering our northernmost island of Saibai is something like, 4 or 5 km away from the New Guinea mainland. Oh, wait, too late. Given that it is native to territory as far north as Beijing, there is no reason why it needs the help of global warming to colonise our southern states.

I'm thinking that when it comes to the spread of dengue vectors in this country, climate change is the least worrying possibility. We've got more immediate problems when it comes to vector borne disease knocking on our doors.

A part of the premise of this article is vaguely sound. Yes, I agree, more dengue outbreaks would put a strain on regional blood supplies. They could have written the whole article on this topic, and just omitted all the bits about extrapolating poorly considered "climate change scenarios". Although admittedly that would have buggered up their conclusion a bit, which was:

Unless there is strong intergovernmental action on greenhouse gas reduction, there could be an eight-fold increase in the number of people living in dengue prone regions in Australia by the end of the century.

I think a far better conclusion would be to go away and remember exactly how we went about eradicating dengue from mainland Australia by the 1950's, and which holes in the public health system lined up to allow it to come back in the 1980's.

A paediatrician who needs to be spanked. Do it for the children.

2010-01-16T03:38:00.000-08:00

I have often blogged about the fact of my incidental motherhood. Recently one of my skeptic-spawn has come down with what I am convinced is a bout of giardiasis, sans diarrhea. We just spent christmas in my childhood home in the tropics where the little blobby parasites in question are endemic, and it has been going around the local paediatric population. The only problem is, my dear little infected sproglet doesn't have diarrhea, just all the upper abdominal symptoms, and the local general practice population here in more temperate climes seem pig-ignorant of what a protozoan hoe-down actually looks like clinically. I tried to explain to them that giardiasis often present without diarrhea. Then in desperation I even explained that many other children my kid had been playing with have presented with the tell-tale diarrhea (actually, the way it was relayed to me was that a certain child "vomited mayonnaise out of his arse".)

The fact that some people only get upper abdominal symptoms with giardia infection isn't exactly new, I have a prehistoric parisitology textbook from the 1950s that even makes note of it, and that matches my own clinical and personal experience. After doing a rather puzzled internet search, I uncovered an amazing thing: There is something like 30 giardia fact sheets from around the world that have exactly, and I mean verbatim, the same true, but clinically misleading information on them. The CDC and the New South Wales health department among them. Whereas my ancient parisitology textbook was written by a boffin who based his information purely on what he saw himself down a microscope and in the people who he presumably chased for stool samples.

We are becoming a profession of gullible rubes. Its so easy to go and google something that nobody stops to think about what they actually see in front of them. Or what that crotchety old GP spent fifty years seeing in front of him, and then told you about. I'll admit tropical medicine is my schtick, I wouldn't know a chillblain if I found one on my arse, but I found it disturbing that if you got all of the GPs together that I have had to see in the last week, you would probably get one knowledgable doctor in the aggregate.

So I'm sitting here nursing a good head of hate for other peoples' willfull ignorance, when all of a sudden I come across a JAMA article called "Cimate Change Puts Children In Jeopardy" by Rebecca Voelker. Yawn. Whatever. Heard it all before. I must have been feeling masochistic, though, 'cause I kept reading. Mostly it was all the same tired old crap about how children are going to be hurt most by climate because they are the future. Or the future was going to hurt them because of the climate. Something like that. Then I see this:

When pediatrician Aaron Bernstein, MD, sees young patients with Lyme disease at Children’s Hospital Boston, in Massachusetts, his advice to parents often goes beyond the obvious of protecting their children against infectious ticks with insect repellant, long pants, and long sleeves on trips to the woods.

I think I knew where this was going, and I didn't like it. I had to read all the way to the end of the article, past the bit where they recommend saving the children by replacing wholesome incandescent bulbs with toxic mercury bombs, to get the second bit of the Lyme disease story.

Back in Boston, Bernstein makes an effort to give his patients’ parents a quick rundown on how such vectorborne illnesses as Lyme disease that make their children sick are linked with climate change and its influence on ecosystems.

Oh. Sweet. Lord. Of. Crap. Fire this man immediately. IMMEDIATELY!!!!! At the very least make him do some remedial undergraduate pre-med biology classes. Or medical ethics. Or maybe we could explain to HIM, with his kids present, how his children are all doomed and its all his fault.

How does he even vaguely think this is going to help the parents of a child who has FRICKIN' LYME DISEASE?!!! This man obviously cares about his patients above and beyond the call of duty, does he also espouse paediatric bubble-wrapping? Microchipping? (Actually, I have considered microchipping my children, but thats different.)

OK. Breathe, Paua. Breathe. Think of a happy place. You're on a beach somewhere. A polynesian David Thewlis has just shown up with a jug of mojitos...

Its going to be alright...

Don't get them wet, they multiply

2010-01-14T17:02:00.001-08:00

Following on from my last post about Irukandji syndrome from a tiny jellyfish, which I naively thought was one of my rare "non-AGW" posts, I predictably found this execrable piece of bad-science merde in the Cairns Post (which explains its publication, but doesn't pardon it), where "researchers" (I use the term loosely) are now claiming that Irukandji jellyfish are increasing in numbers due to, you guessed it, climate change. Sigh. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water:

James Cook University researchers have gathered historical data from reports of irukandji stings occurring in the Cairns region during the past 60 years and concluded the season has grown from two months every year in the 1950s to a current season that lasts six months.

I'm sorry, what was that you just said? The last sixty years? They didn't even find a jellyfish responsible until the early 1960s, so exactly how are you assessing historical reports from the 1950s?

A north Queensland doctor named Jack Barnes was the first to discover the causative organism and then describe it in the landmark, and rather bizarre, 1964 MJA article "Cause and Effect of Irukandji Stingings". The intrepid doc spent countless hours looking for a likely offender, and then when he thought he might have a suspect, eschewed testing it on animal models in favour of testing it on himself. When that subsequently hurt a bit, he tested it on a male lifeguard and his own 9 year old son. They all wound up in hospital and in honour of his efforts, the jellyfish he had found was named Carukia barnesi in his honour. (Which to my mind stands as a fine example of the Australian penchant for taking the piss.)

Prior to this stellar proof that "they don't make science like they used to", there was such a thing as Irukandji Syndrome that had been recognised in divers and waders in northern Australian waters. However, extrapolating from suspected case reports is problematic even to this day, as there is often diagnostic confusion between decompression sickness (the bends) and myocardial infarcts (good ol' fashion heart attack). The first reported case of a diver even remembering SEEING a jellyfish around the time they got sick was in 1997, and often the onset of the symptoms follows sometime after when exposure is thought to have occurred.

Couple all this with the fact that we know almost nothing about the jellyfish ecology, or even how many species worldwide are capable of producing an Irukandji syndrome. Oh, and the fact that reef water temperatures aren't as far removed from the average as hysterics would have you believe, AND the fact that the human population of the state has increased almost threefold since 1961.

I'm thinking they shouldn't be so quick to extrapolate the population size of a species with a virtually unknown ecology from the number of presumed case presentations. I would say its far more likely that any trend you're looking at relates more to 1) the growing popularity of scuba diving and snorkelling as a recreational past-time and 2) cheap air travel resulting in swimming in stinger season contrary to all common sense because you're "on holiday".

I would also question how they even accessed historical medical records? Theres alot of Australian hospitals that are only making the move to digital records in the last year or so, and old hospital paper records don't get kept that long. The last time I had to find some personal records, and this is just from the eighties, they literally sent some bloke out to check the garden shed and then got back on the line to report that unfortunately they had been "archived" (with extreme prejudice), i.e. in a furnace.

Even in 2006 doctors were writing to the Editor of QJM to say:

We know little about the lifecycle of these jellyfish, and currently there is no antivenom. We hope that the recognition that Irukandji syndrome is due to many jellyfish worldwide, will spur further research into identifying the ecology of the jellyfish and the venom components responsible, and hopefully produce an effective treatment.

Its kind of amazing that one of the "researchers" involved in this study is a PhD candidate. Sigh. They really don't make science like they used to.

And from the "True to God" department...

2010-01-11T21:12:00.000-08:00

This has nothing to do with anthropogenic climate change or the lack thereof. This is just plain freaky. A man has been stung by a thimble-sized Irukandji jellyfish 25 metres above the ocean while fishing from a bulk carrier, and needed to be airlifted back to the mainland for treatment. The resuce helicopter paramedics took awhile to work it out, but put together his symptoms and signs with the fact he reported getting sprayed with water while fishing off the deck of the cargo ship, and decided it must have been an Irukandji sting.

Australians are born with the knowledge that there is an all-pervading tacit agreement amongst the populace to maintain certain globally held beliefs about our country, for example: We all rode to school on kangaroos (this one is not negotiable, even first generation Vietnamese-Australians and Sudanese refugees know not to cock this one up when talking to foreigners), and any variation on the theme of "everything is poisonous and will kill you".

So there you go, Irukandji are tiny, translucent and essentially invisible, they are enormously venomous, hurt like a bastard and can make your blood-pressure do tumbleturns anywhere between 40 and 200+ mmHg. Thats when they're not killing you. And now THEY CAN FLY.

If this doesn't freak you out, then consider the young girl in Point Lonsdale who yesterday took home some shells from the beach and was cleaning them in the bathtub, only to have a blue-ringed octopus fall out. This one even freaks me out. Blue-ringed octopi are quite literally deadly, and they're tiny, and just to really scare the crap out of everyone, don't even display their distinctive blue rings until you piss them off.

Welcome to Australia. Its hotter than hell and everything is poisonous and will kill you, but at least we're good at sport.

Strewth, mate.

2010-01-10T21:31:00.000-08:00

Its quite hot today where I happen to be visiting. Around 44 degrees celsius (note the bit on the screen dump above that says "feels like 47C"). Thats not unusual for this time of year. It happens. I don't even have airconditioning where I am, so I have the kids sitting in front of a makeshift Coolgardie safe constructed from a fan and a laundry rack covered in wet towels. Its not too bad inside the house, because I closed it up this morning when I knew there was a scorcher coming. I'll open the windows again later when the inevitable cool change comes from the south and antarctica.

The reason I'm reporting on this is because this is normal for this part of the world, and yet if a bushfire breaks out, which has happened not infrequently in the past, all of a sudden people start screaming about climate change. Note the next screen grab that shows the highest recorded temperature for january in this region was in 1939, the same year as the Black Friday bushfires.

I call it living in Australia.

Artist more confused than hermaphrodite polar bear

2010-01-10T15:01:00.001-08:00

In my internet ramblings I somehow found the Cape Farewell mob, who appear to sell carbon credits to suckers and then use the proceeds (and donations, of course) to take artists and "scientists" on "expeditions" to such ecologically perishable places as the arctic and the Andes. Presumably for purposes of inspiration. They looked kind of familiar, then I worked out they are the people who took intrepid freeloader Alex Hartley to the arctic, where he immediately "discovered" a lump of rock, christened it "Nowhere Island" and then promptly stole it.

From their trips to the arctic they produced a travelling expedition called "The art and climate change exhibition", which has the rather odd inclusion of a painting called "Hermaphrodite Polar Bear":

A few things immediately leap to mind, one of which is exactly how he managed to gain that unique perspective of a polar bears nether regions, and the other is how pseudohermaphroditism in polar bears has a relation to climate change? Last time I checked we were all getting freaked out by endocrine disruptors condensing over the poles then concentrating up the food chain. We can't decide on exactly which endocrine disrupting chemical pollutant is the big nasty (it depends on whats trendy in the research community at a given time)and don't exactly have comparative data going back very far, but no matter! Either way I'm pretty sure that only the truly die-hard hysterics have somehow tried to pin this on climate change.

See what happens when you invite artists to comment on science? Give me Damien Hirst, any day. If you could just ignore the ginormously obscene pricetags for a second, you could at least be impressed by the fact he managed to get a whole tiger shark into a perspex tank.

So an Irishman walks into a salt mine and...

2010-01-10T02:29:00.001-08:00

Many years ago, while I was studying my second undergraduate degree and generally mispending my youth, I shared a house with two guys from Cork and another from Donnegal. To this day I can still remember how to score pot in Irish Gaelic (although in a fit of Clinton-esque arse-coverage I would like to officially state that "I didn't inhale") and exactly why the name of Irish band "The Pogues" is funny. (It was reportedly meant to be The Pogue Mahones, but they shortened it.)

I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this, except that the ~~climate~~ ~~weather~~ snow has hit Ireland hard, with the government ordering Irish embassy staff in Europe to get chummy with any industry contacts they have to source rock salt and grit, which they are desperately low on. (And no, unfortunately I don't know the Irish for "can you score me a tanker of salt").

This approach actually worked, and they have cut a deal for 25, 000 tons of salt with Poland. A nation that obviously has a soft spot for Ireland after Irish traffic cops inadvertently let Polish drivers in Ireland rack up fines under the singular identity of someone called Prawo Jazdy, or "Drivers Licence" as he prefers to be called at home.

In some areas they have sent the army in to help, and hospitals are also feeling the strain:

Hospitals across the country remained busy, with many reporting a 70% increase in the number of patients presenting themselves at accident and emergency units with fractures requiring treatment. Emergency medicine consultants are reporting that a high percentage of these fractures are complex and require surgery. Doctors in Cork reported treating 1,000 fractures since the cold snap began.

The population of county Cork is only 480, 000. To put this into some kind of perspective, every year approx. 1% of the Australian population suffers injury from a fall. Of that 1%, 15% of those people sustained a fracture as a result of the fall. Thats over the course of a year. Now, its late at night and I get a little innumerate after a hot day and a couple of beers, but I just worked out that gives us a rate of around 32,061 people suffering fall-related fractures a year. Thats like 1 in 666 (gotta love that number) of the entire population of Australia. The population of Cork had about 1 in 480 of its population fractured in a matter of weeks. Ouch.

Urban campers beware

2010-01-09T01:05:00.000-08:00

From what I gather, the northern hemisphere is really freakin' cold at the moment. Which is why I found it somewhat surreal to read a journal article from 2009 entitled "Health of the homeless and climate change" proudly published in the Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. 86, No. 4.

The authors (who are from Toronto, Canada - which makes me think they must not look outside their windows very often) cast around for a highly vulnerable population, and presumably because ethnic migrants, indigenous Canadians, GLBTQ and disabled feminists were already taken, hit upon the homeless to champion against global warming. They actually seemed quite excited that no-one else had quantified the effects of climate change on the homeless. Ground floor score!

Not ones to mess around, they focused on four main areas of concern:

1. Increased heat waves. (Of course. Howhever, whats fantastic is how they cite the urban heat island effect to posit that MORE people are going to die in cities due to global warming. What, you can't have an urban heat island effect when analysing surface station temperature measurements, but you can have one when calculating the death toll? Double standards much.)

2. Increased air pollution. (This bit has to be read to be believed, I mean increased surface ozone? Seriously? Pick me some cherries while you're out on that limb.)

3. Increased severity of floods and storms. (They used Hurricane Katrina as a case study. High five for bad taste and shamelessly cashing in on other peoples misery.)

4. The changing distribution of West Nile Virus. (Kind of niche, is rabies in the homeless passe these days or something? Someone tell the writers of House. The authors grudgingly noted that malaria was unlikely in Canada unless there was a catastrophic public health fail, so any mosquito borne disease will do, right?)

Heat wave induced deaths tends to be the mainstay of predicted global warming mortality. The authors note with horror that:

the number of days per year above 30°C has almost doubled in the city of Toronto from the period 1961–1990 to the period 1995–2005

As an Australian, I would beg forgiveness for a moment while I double over in laughter and sarcastically yell "Oh, My GOD! We're all going to die!!!". Over 30°C?! When I was a kid they didn't even have to think about letting you go home from school until the mercury topped 40°C, and even then they often didn't bother. I used to have to play compulsory touch RUGBY when it was 35°C on sports day. Several times in my life I can remember summer heat reaching over 46°C in major capital cities. Welcome to Oz. Last time I checked, we don't all expire every summer. In fact, more people die here in winter, which isn't exactly blizzard material. (I remember the first time I saw snow. I was a teenager and it was in New Zealand.)

Undeterred, the authors of the paper state that:

In New York City, summer heat-related mortality could more than double by the 2050s, and more than triple by the 2080s. Similar projections are made for four large Canadian cities: Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and Windsor.

Go tell that to a dead homeless guy who froze to death under a bridge near you. And didn't Toronto just issue an extreme cold weather alert?

"The City of Toronto recognized that extreme cold weather can be life-threatening to homeless people or individuals who spend a lot of time outdoors. That's why we issued the alert," said Patricia Trott, a spokesperson for the City of Toronto.

The authors of the homeless v. climate change paper do note that the possibility of balmy nights isn't all doom and gloom:

In Canada, cold-related mortality may decline by as much as 45–60% by 2050. Furthermore, respiratory illnesses such as influenza may be reduced slightly by warmer winters.

But then, just in case you were mentally firing up the bbq and putting a six pack on ice, they deep six any positives almost immediately:

Most research has suggested that while there will be health gains, they will be minor and will be outweighed by the adverse health impacts of climate change.

Because climate change is bad, M'kay, but just in case, lets have a look at the figures.

(After banging my head against the portal that is Statistics Canada for a while looking for seasonal mortality rates, I shamefacedly found exactly what I was looking for at Wattsupwiththat), the following figures are for Canada:

Which looks to me like a bit of a seasonal trend. The Wattsupwiththat article then shows figures that calculate the average excess deaths above the mean for Canada as being in the order of 5, 600 per year. How many lives are they expecting to lose if the temperature increases by a measly 2 or so average degrees that would negate saving the lives of what they say could be up to 60% of 5, 600?

Oft cited as a case study (and referenced by the Canadian authors) for the potential mortality in a heat wave was the European heat wave of 2001. However, when Russian researchers analysed the excess deaths in Moscow of the 2001 heatwave versus winter excess deaths during cold spells in 2006 (bearing in mind what constitutes a cold snap to a Russian), they worked out up to 40% of the excess heat wave deaths were brought forward by only a matter of days, which brought down the real tally substantially. (They called it "Harvesting, or short-term mortality displacement", which I fully intend to randomly drop into future conversations. "I didn't screw up the meds, the patient just suffered a short-term mortality displacement.") The overall excess deaths during the cold snaps remained higher, although primarily in an over 75 year old age bracket.

Now if I was naked and drunk, and someone said I had a choice between being dropped off in Minnesota or Barbados in January, I know which one I would pick. (Psst. For the unusually dense, I'd choose the tropical one with the rum.) If you have trouble deciding, then congratulations! You, too, could be the author of a peer reviewed paper such as this.

Elephantiasis: Why have the alarmists overlooked it?

2010-01-07T16:43:00.001-08:00

Somehow I got to thinking about elephantiasis*, or lymphatic filariasis as its also known. Surely everyone has that defining moment when they first saw a photo of an unfortunate sufferer dragging his nuts around in a wheelbarrow, or is that just me?

It occurred to me the other day that the filarial parasite is spread by mosquitoes, and yet not once have I heard an alarmist warn that cimate change was going to lead to an increase in elephantiasis. Huh. Even a few quick literature searches hasn't led to much of anything specifically trumpeting the link. (Although I have discovered that November the 11th is National Filaria Day in India. Mark it on your calendar.)

Even the WHO managed to get all the way through a lymphatic filariasis fact sheet without once mentioning climate change or global warming. In fact, in an almost scary display of rationality, they mention in the first paragraph that:

In tropical and subtropical areas where lymphatic filariasis is well-established, the prevalence of infection is continuing to increase. A primary cause of this increase is the rapid and unplanned growth of cities, which creates numerous breeding sites for the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.

Double huh. To tell you the truth I am somewhat surprised. Doesn't elephantiasis have enough tropical freaky Ewww value to appeal to the warmists? Is malaria or dengue somehow sexier because it brings to mind pallid, febrile englishmen in pith helmets and white cotton shirts, artfully unbuttoned to expose chests bedewed with fever sweat? Or is that just me again? (Ahh, Paul, you can be the colonial overlord and I'll be the dusky, south seas maid.**)

I'm offended on behalf of the filarial parasite and elephantiasis sufferers everywhere. Were they disinvited from the climate and health gravy-train ride for fear they would take up too much space? What gives?

* Also considered as a title was "Is that elephantiasis, or are you just happy to see me?".
** My initial thought was to say "Lets play sahibs and dhobi wallahs", but decided that was possibly too wierd. Although not as wierd as the time a friend of mine, on his way to a fancy dress party, got into a lift dressed as an English officer of the Raj, only to discover the only other occupant of the lift was a middle-aged Sikh. When they reached the ground floor, the Sikh gentleman turned to him and said "Under the circumstances, sir, I think I should go first."

Cold weather breaks records, legs.

2010-01-07T14:51:00.000-08:00

Its summer here in the antipodes, and while I soak up ultra violet that may or may not be good for me, our colonial British overlords* are in the grip of one of the coldest winters for almost thirty years.

At least one hospital has seen a sudden rash of cold weather related trauma presentations to its ED, King's College Hospital isn't sure if all its outpatients services will be running or even if all its staff will turn up, and one young doctor wound up ~~freezing her tits off~~ using skis to get to work:

Not to worry, though. The NHS (aka "Captain Obvious") has helpfully noted on their web site that:

One of the best ways of keeping yourself well during winter is to stay warm.

Interestingly, they then go on to note that:

Every winter in the UK, 25–30,000 deaths are linked to the cold weather. Currently, more than three million households in the UK are in fuel poverty. This is when a household spends more than 10% of its income to keep warm.

Huh. Thats wierd, just two years ago the Department of Health commissioned a report that predicted:

more summer deaths are expected, fewer people will die in Britain as a result of cold winter weather, as the world warms up because of rising carbon emissions from human activity.

and that:

more than 3,000 people could die in an intense summer hot spell...
...The report, an update of a 2002 study, was re-issued on the same day London's mayor said owners of the most polluting cars will have to pay 25 pounds a day to drive them in the city centre in a measure to cut down on carbon emissions.

25 pounds is alot of money. I don't want to stir up trouble (heh), but I'd be a bit cranky about that if it was my hard-earned that was contributing to a net loss of around 22, 000 - 27, 000 lives by preventing some life saving global warming.

* Possibly one of the last true colonies they have left, although we're still a bit put out by the whole Breaker Morant, Gallipoli thing. Every school I went to as a child (and all government buildings) had a picture of Her Maj, the Queen, and for one memorable period in the late 1970's, early '80's a particularly corrupt state premier made all of the school kiddies line up and sing God Save the Queen instead of Advance Australia Fair. (And No, Waltzing Matilda is NOT the national anthem of Australia, although we do seem to have unofficially jettisoned the second verse of the real national anthem. I think it was the line about "for those who've come from across the seas we've boundless lands to share". Apparently it was sending all the wrong messages to illegal immigrants.)
The Queen also appears to own the local prison near here, which has H.M. in front of the name. Odd, unless you consider our convict past.

More to Peter Spencer's story?

2010-01-07T14:50:00.001-08:00

The front page of The Australian has reported that there may be more background to Peter Spencer's reasons for hunger striking.

Read it here.

According to Peter Spencer's brother, there were family financial issues at play that may or may not have bearing on what he is doing now. However, attempts by The Australian to muddy the waters by bringing up an armed stand off he had with police 40 years ago after a marriage breakdown seems a bit ridiculous. It arguably makes for a better story, but I am wary of taking one crazy episode from someones youth as an explanation for something they are doing 40 years later. In fact, I am probably more wary of people who haven't done anything a bit questionable in their lives.

Always with these types of causes I bear in mind that we could all have egg on our faces at the end of the day. That natural caution is why I am generally not a joiner and how I wound up a climate skeptic. It occurred to me early on that Peter Spencer may be a bit nutty or snacking on the odd power-bar along the way (I certainly hope so), but at the end of the day it doesnt really matter, as he has publicised a little known government con-job perpetrated in the name of global warming, and that can only be a good thing.

The medico in me has been concerned from the get-go with his mental and physical health, given the extreme situation he has felt driven to. I hope there is some kind of resolution to the situation that allows him an out with his health and dignity intact, at the very least.

It would be a shame if the government was let off the hook on their policy decisions through media attempts at marginalising this poor bloke. Regardless of any background story on Peter Spencer, the issues he is protesting still stand.

Peter Spencer on 46th day of hunger strike

2010-01-06T16:01:00.001-08:00

Warning: Lack of humour alert!!!

It has taken over a month for the main stream media to cover the hunger strike of Australian sheep farmer Peter Spencer, and predictably, now that the situation has reached an extreme, they are starting to report on it. At this rate, he may even break a record, but I, for one, hope he is back on the ground and tucking into a bowel of broth before then.

For background on his reasons for the hunger strike, this article from the financial times is quite good.

In essence, the government placed land clearing bans on farmer's properties to meet carbon emission reduction targets, reducing the economic viability of the affected farms and virtually destroying the property value. Pretty much without compensating them accordingly.

Contrary to the rugged outback Aussie stereotype, Australias largely urban population are far removed from the plight of primary industry. Food miraculously appears on their tables with no thought of where it comes from, and even the fact that Australian food prices are the second highest in the OECD hasn't given the populace a much needed heads-up.

Given that Peter Spencer is a sheep farmer, I will use the rather topical example of lamb prices. Lamb used to be poverty food in this country, even in my (not too distant, alright) childhood, we were forced to eat lamb chops three nights a week at least, and sausages the other. It was one of the cheapest ways to feed a family. In the last ten years lamb prices have doubled in price, and if the trend remains the same, lamb cutlets could retail for $100 / kilo by 2016.

Rising overseas demand and falling production have been credited with the record highs in lamb price.

Call me selfish, but being able to eat well tops my list of quality of life issues. We need Peter Spencer down from that tree, nursed back to health and herding sheep for our table. Stat.

The christmas list

2009-12-17T19:37:00.001-08:00

Happy holidays everyone. I will be somewhere tropical for the duration, and won't have access to the internet. Well, I mean, there is internet in the area, but my relatives who I will be staying with cancelled theirs after maxing it out 30 gbs over their limit downloading movies at dial-up speed. Now thats dedication, if only they could apply that attitude to gainful employment. Then, after a few constructive hours pinging around the call-centres of Mumbai, during which time my children built a fort, set fire to it, drew on the walls, went through puberty and left for college, I established that my mobile-internet service provider doesn't operate in the boonies. (i.e. anywhere outside the western suburbs of Sydney.)
I'm sure everyone is off having fun anyway. I hope so. But if you need something to do, heres some interesting reading:

A hunger strike with a difference, and you KNOW it's important because the mainstream media doesn't want to cover it. Farmer Peter Spencer protesting the government screw-job of his farm in the name of meeting Kyoto provisions.

The EU destroys a regional fishing industry due to sheer retardness. What a suprise. Depressed about that? Don't worry, you will be.

Clive James makes me giggle in an unseemly fashion. Read it here.

That'll do ya. So I'm now off to an Aussie christmas, complete with barbeques, humidity and pavlova. (In this country, real men eat pavlova, generally while dressed in a wife-beater and budgie-smugglers.)

The whole egg-nog, white christmas thing doesn't make much sense here in the southern hemisphere. (Nor, for that matter, does the commonly used appellation of "biggest / tallest / oldest / whatever in the southern hemisphere." Yeh, we really gave Uruguay a run for their money.)

So I'm planning on drinking beer on the verandah and watching lightening crack over cane fields. Yep, this is Australia....

Paul! Paul! Over here Paul!

2009-12-17T03:21:00.000-08:00

For those of you who have been following my blog (and I really hope there are actually some of you), you will be familiar with the fact that my personal, teeth-grittingly-annoying bug-bear is misrepresentation of vector borne disease. Stupidity around malaria and the arbo-viruses just makes my blood boil, it led me down the climate skeptic path, and, well, here I am. Hi.

Thats why I have a bit of a crush on the medical entomologist Paul Reiter, hes so sensible and smart and has one of those quack-quack English accents that makes the laydeez swoon. He is still declining to let me have his babies, but undaunted, I will keep on ~~stalking~~ working on it.

If his impeccable qualifications and the fact that he told the IPCC to go jump aren't enough, he also has it in for everyone's favourite armchair ~~entomologist~~ ~~climatologist~~ ~~president~~ gravy-train ridin' hobo, Al Gore, and took the opportunity in The Spectator to once again put the boot in. (Fight! Fight! Fight!)

Instead of quoting it, I'll give you the link here, because it's worth reading it all.

Fat people to the rescue

2009-12-14T18:15:00.001-08:00

In the "I wish I'd thought of this myself" category, according to "The Green Game", fat people are doing their bit to save the planet. It's really those long-lived skinny people who aren't sustainable. Bastards.

PS: Note the bit above the highlighted answer that recommends you not flush used medications down the loo because its "turning some fish into addicts". I've gotta get me a fillet of junky fish. ("It tastes just like horse!")

And to your left, an epic fail...

2009-12-14T15:11:00.001-08:00

The AMA (Australian Medical Association) reacted to the recent Climategate scandal (and the impending demise of a treasured funding cash cow) with the balanced approach it is well known for and released a statement entitled:

The evidence is in - climate change is a serious threat to human health

Yep, no agenda there. Dr. Pesce, the AMA president then goes on to explain (whilst apparently clinging to Kevin Rudd's ankles and pleading as the PM boards the plane to Copenhagen) that:

“While the Copenhagen talks will be about carbon emissions and targets and helping developing countries, equal emphasis must be directed to equipping the health systems of the world to cope with the extra health burden created by climate change. Plans to deal with that burden should be put in place immediately, and Copenhagen is the perfect place to implement the strategies. "

This is nothing new, because the AMA has had a position statement on climate change since 2004 (updated 2008) that along with all the usual alarmist screamies also prominently displays their "get-out-of-jail-free" clause:

...because climate change involves potentially serious or irreversible harm to the environment and to human health, it is essential to adopt mitigation strategies that reflect a precautionary approach even where uncertainties may exist in relation to scientific evidence.

Ahh, the good 'ole precautionary principle. This is where it's OK to act in response to an uncertain future event, as long as you think the risk of not acting is greater than that of acting. This worked out pretty good for John Snow, the father of modern epidemiology, when he traced a cholera epidemic to a water pump on Broad Street and famously removed the pump handle to quell the outbreak even though the causative organism had not been identified. (It was thought that cholera was caused by "miasms" of bad air generated from grave yards and swamps, Dr. Snow thought otherwise, although he was pilloried for many years for going against the accepted scientific consensus. You see, John Snow was a skeptic.) Making a bunch of people schlepp a few blocks to another water pump for a week is one thing, crippling national economies for the entire foreseeable future is entirely another.

Generally, when applying the precautionary principle it was always customary to perform some sort of risk-benefit analysis. This is why we don't use amniocentesis for population screening of pregnancy. The number of miscarriages caused by population wide amnio would approach the number of abnormal pregnancies picked up, so precautionary principle be damned, its not worth it. Its also why CT scans, with their attendent higher dose of radiation, are used only when the risk of not doing the scan outweighs the cumulative lifetime risk of radiation induced cancer (although in certain unscrupulous parts of the world *cough* USA *cough* this isn't strictly adhered to as often as it should be). Apparently though, climate change somehow negates this important caveat, which the AMA ably demonstrates in it's position statement when it lists as health impacts of extreme climate events the following:

dietary changes due to cost and availability of food,
possible impact of chemical exposures (resulting from spills from damaged pipes,
industrial storage, etc.).
impact of changes to infrastructure and essential services
lapsed chronic disease management
stress from loss of income and assets.

Which is wierd, because I would have thought that all of these events are far more likely to occur as a result of financial factors resulting from implementation of their beloved precautionary principle. Unless "extreme climate events" is referring to a poverty tsunami, I'm definitely thinking I could come up with some much more feasible and immediate reasons why these impacts on health could occur. ETS, anyone? Global Financial Crisis 2.0? Bad policy decisions? Massive slush funds being siphoned off to developing nations? I'm not sure, let me think about it.

I've never really liked the AMA anyway. A quick scroll through the references included in their climate change position statement reveal they even reference my favourite nut-jobs over at Doctor's for the Environment, which highlights some of the backroom circle jerks that go on in the alarmist milieu (and no, I won't link it, 'cause I hates them).

They also ditched the Hippocratic Oath and make you swear to the Declaration of Geneva, which is mostly OK, but I'm a bit worried by the bits where you promise:

I will give to my teachers the respect and gratitude that is their due;
My colleagues will be my sisters and brothers;

Do I have to? Really? What if their due is a (hypothetical) dose of Sennocot in their tea for that time they made you fetch them coffee all day and then asked you to disempact a pensioner's bowel, when you were clearly rostered on to another, more exciting rotation?

I was sort of fond of the Hippocratic Oath, even though it made you promise to share your wordly goods with your teachers, I kind of liked the bit where you promised not to have sex with slaves. Couldn't we combine the best bits of the two?

NB: A note on spelling: Whilst I will vigorously defend my right to use the antiquated Queen's Own English spelling of aetiology, oesophagus, centre and colour to name a few, I like spelling skeptic with a K instead of a C. Just because.

Tofurkey of the week # 3

2009-12-13T20:22:00.001-08:00

Tofurkey - the award for those people who have been a complete turkey, but in an environmentally sensitive manner.

I'm not sure if this really rates as a Tofurkey, due to the name of the award being a foodstuff, but given the relative inedibility of faux-poultry, and the fact that many people would probably rather starve than eat it, I argue that the award stands.

A CARLTON student 38 days into a hunger strike has shrugged off the threat of death and vowed to continue. Paul Connor has been fasting on the lawns outside Parliament House in Canberra since November 6 in protest at government inaction on climate change.

He initially was fasting with a mate, 61 year old Michael Morphett, who pulled out of the fast last tuesday when doctor's advised him he might come down with a serious case of death if he didn't eat something. I don't know about you, but when I hang out with my friends we prefer to do fun stuff, involving drinking, smoking, loud rock 'n' roll and strippers. (Or sipping cups of earl grey and watching The Bill, which is almost the same.) Generally, though, we don't suddenly decide to sleep in a tent in front of parliament house and starve ourselves to death for a bit o' a laff.

Paul Connor has vowed to continue at least until the end of the Copenhagen climate summit, which would bring his total fast to 42 days.

Dr Alan Barclay from the Australian Dietitians Association last month said Mr Connor would be tempting fate by following through on his plan to fast for 42 days. “I think, based on the research, they’re definitely playing with death so I hope they’re very well supervised,” Dr Barclay said...

...He said doctors had made him aware of the risks associated with continuing fasting. Mr Connor disputed comments by Dr Barclay that 50 days was as long as the body could cope without food. “The IRA guys in 1981, their average (survival time) was about 60 days but one of them carked it at 46 (days),” he said.

Oh. Dear. Somebody point out to him that those IRA guys, apart from presumably being Irish (which it has been my experience comes with quite an inherited constitution for physical hardship), probably ate meat and three veg every night for their entire lives up until that point. I'm thinking that they probably had a couple of weeks on a generation Y, vegetarian liberal arts student from Carlton.

I'm not going to bet on this, that would be bad taste. However I bet that the young man in question is betting on the health care profession to nurse him out of this should things go pear shaped. And we will. Because thats what we do.

Bringing the tone of the neighbourhood down: A bit of personal background

2009-12-11T17:00:00.000-08:00

The most common catch-cry in the climate debate tends to be "but you're not a climate scientist". Without even going into the recent, artificial emergence of this arbitrary discipline which makes the whole field somewhat questionable, I have acknowledged this by trying to keep most of these blog posts within my field of expertise. Or at least within the ball-park I feel comfortable commenting on. At first I was a bit worried that a "medical-climate-skeptic" blog would be too topical to keep coming up with material, but so far the damn thing seems to be writing itself. People outside the profession of medicine wouldn't think that climate alarmism would be impacting too much on the health professions, before I started this degree, I had no idea either. And yet you can't ignore it, and information that defies logic and accepted science and / or history is presented to you as gospel on almost a daily basis. It gave me the irrits so badly over the last couple of years that it polarised me politically, and led to my first ever blog post.

I used to operate under the delusion that I was so far left that I was right, so to speak. I recently commented to my father that I thought I was one of those rare birds: A leftist climate skeptic. He laughed his arse off at me and said "Honey, to most of the left, you're slightly to the right of Genghis Khan". This came as somewhat of a suprise to me. Words can hurt, Dad. Words can hurt. I kind of thought because I had been a welfare mum and had a bit of a penchant for nationalised health care and cheap education that I was over next to the trade unions, leaning on the lefternmost wall. Noel Pearson, an indigenous leader from Cape York, recently wrote an excellent piece on this issue of where people sit in relation to "the climate wars", and notes that:

Once-mild sceptics on the centre-right are being pushed further right, recoiling from the righteousness and the moral posturing of the zealots on the left.

I s'pose thats me then.

People might also be thinking that I might be over-reacting a bit with my anonymous stance, but when I weighed up the fact that a medical student and junior doctor's career is largely predicated on the good will of superiors, I couldn't take the risk. The new, green religion is too all-pervasive and socially acceptable, and the common reaction to skepticism too extreme.

I once had to sit an exam where I had to write an essay length explanation of how climate change related coral bleaching (questionable in itself) was going to negatively impact on human health. I shit you not. This exam was a hurdle requirement. If I failed it I would have had to re-sit the entire year, science subjects included. I bent over and took it like a, well, bitch. I had to. It didn't stop there either, but to outline anymore of the bullshit I have been expected to spout would probably give away the institution I attend (theres not that many graduate medical schools in New South Wales). One of my classmates who was woefully unprepared for our public health exam said he just put "global warming" every time he couldn't think of the answer. He passed with flying colours.

On one occasion a group of my peers wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister begging him to halve carbon emissions on the basis that Australian farmers are "suiciding because of global warming". They explained to the PM that since they were doing their bit by car-pooling and composting it was therefore reasonable to financially cripple all the primary and heavy industry employees of our nation. Then, they put MY name on it (and every other students, too.) I had to put my hand up in front of the entire year level and "come out" as a skeptic to get my name taken off of it. They had just assumed they were speaking for everyone. Later several people came up and quietly thanked me because they hadn't felt comfortable signing it, but none of them would have spoken out personally. Unfortunately, there are still a handful of people who have refused to speak to me since then, and amazingly, thats without me even telling them what I really think. For the most part since I have to hang out with these people every day, I try and let discretion be the better part of valour, however I draw the line at telling KRudd about my composting habits or lack thereof.

Just recently I have been barred from other medical blogs after they have had a look at mine. All I was trying to do was hang out and talk medico, not climate. Honest. One medical blog actually went to an invitational subscriber basis (of which I obviously wasn't one) and let me know it was because they were so horrified by The Daily Suppository. Awesome.

Maybe its because I don't write self important "look at me, I'm a doctor, I intubated 56 people yesterday" type posts. So just in case my fledgling readership has been disappointed about this, I will riff on some of the popular themes of most medical blogs (and then never do this again) :

Why become a doctor?

I had encountered enough idiot doctors mixed in with the good ones over the years (like the one who misdiagnosed a classic case of glandular fever as pregnancy. WTF?) that I figured I must be able to do a better job than some of them.

What is medical school like?

A bad case of Stockholm syndrome. You get tortured for 42 weeks of the year until eventually you start identifying with your captors.

What did I learn at medical school so far?

Don't order prosciutto after anatomy labs (it looks unnervingly like a slice of embalmed cadaver) and nurses get pissed off if you call them "nursie".

What do you want to do after graduation?

Getting paid would have novelty value.

How many lives have you saved?

I'm not trying to save lives, I'm just trying not to accidentally kill people.

Righto. Hopefully I have now cleared the air a little bit as to why I am doing what I am doing here in blog-land, and why I post under a nom-de-blog.
I would also like to stress that comments are welcome (although flaming will be heavily squelched). Let me know what you think!

Less meat = less heat: A bum steer

2009-12-10T17:29:00.001-08:00

You'll have to excuse the paucity of posts lately. I have had a disgustingly grotty 'flu, and like most people even vaguely associated with the health care profession, make a crap patient. I tend to get irascible and cranky and self medicate with every over-the-counter remedy I can get my hands on. (Oh, and while we're on the subject, I would like to extend a big "f_ck you" to the backyard speed cooks of Australia. You know who you are. Why? For making it impossible to get pseudoephidrine for legitimate sinus complaints unless its mixed with a bunch of unpronouncable antihistamines that no-ones ever heard of before, which then means you can't take a proper therapeutic dose of the pharmaceutical you actually want. And no, I don't want phenylephrine, I'd be better off going home and washing some sugar pills down with rum. Cheers.)

Anyhoo, pardon the segue, I will now return to the title of this post. It turns out that what many of us suspected for a long time is true: Vegetarianism for "sustainability" reasons really is as dumb as it sounds.

UC Davis Associate Professor Frank Mitloehner has challenged the scientific basis of Paul McCartney's and Rajendra Pauchari's "Less meat=Less heat" campaign.

Mitloehner traces much of the public confusion over meat and milk’s role in climate change to two sentences in a 2006 United Nations report, titled "Livestock's Long Shadow." Printed only in the report's executive summary and nowhere in the body of the report, the sentences read: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.”
These statements are not accurate, yet their wide distribution through news media have put us on the wrong path toward solutions, Mitloehner says.

Amazingly, (or not so much, depending on your level of cynicism) most people who thought to themselves "Oh, look! Is that a bandwagon?!" and clamboured right up on board the sustainable vegetarian bus, just seemed to be propagating ad infinitum a bit of poorly calculated conjecture.

What I would like to see (and I have been looking through the literature - if anyone knows of a study, let me know) is research into the carbon footprint of a "balanced" vegetarian diet versus eating the bit of dead animal occasionally. Its one thing to just cut meat out of your diet, but the goal of a balanced vegetarian diet is to bring your nutritional intake back up to a level commensurate with eating meat. (Which, if done for "health reasons" begs the question of why bother in the first place.) So the balanced vegetarian diet is pretty resource intensive. I'm guessing bang for your buck, it would probably make more sense to eat meat occasionally. No-ones saying you have to choke down a steak everynight. I mean, if you're not vegetarian for valid reasons of conscientious objection, then why the teetotaller stance? What are you, an alcoholic?

As Ambrose Bierce once said:

ABSTAINER, n.
A weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure. A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Mitloehner's analysis is presented in a recent study titled "Clearing the Air: Livestock’s Contributions to Climate Change," published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Agronomy. Co-authors of the paper are UC Davis researchers Maurice Piteskey and Kimberly Stackhouse.

Epidemiology and biostatistics 101

2009-12-08T16:12:00.000-08:00

Normally I will happily concede that most doctors aren't very good at getting their head around certain aspects of scientific methodology, but when climate scientists start using medical analogies, I feel entitled to have a little bit of a scoff.
I was just over at Watts up with that watching Michael Oppenheimer and Steve McIntyre on CNN, and note with the interest the part in the second clip, here:

Where Michael Oppenheimer states that the link between greenhouse gases and climate change is as proven as "the link between smoking and lung cancer".
I'm not going to comment on greenhouse gases, but I feel it may be useful to point out that whilst smoking is a highly significant risk factor, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause bronchogenic lung cancer. i.e. Smoking does not always cause lung cancer, nor does lung cancer only occur in the setting of cigarette smoking.
If I am going to be made to suffer the pain that is epidemiology and biostats, then everyone else is going to share my suffering.
I'm just sayin', thats all.

Ecologists helpfully point out that doctors are crap at science

2009-12-07T19:38:00.000-08:00

In a stellar example of how I am prepared to take one for the team in preparing these blog posts, I just sat down and read a series of articles presented in the April 2009 edition of Ecology.
It seems to have taken ecologists a little while to notice what the health professionals were running around saying about climate change invariably increasing infectious diseases and how vector borne diseases are already on the rampage. Possibly because, as Kevin Lafferty, the author of the paper that sparked the recent debate notes:

"For many ecologists, interest stops at the surface of the organism they study."

Now that they have noticed some of the highly questionable things that have been said, ecologists have weighed in on all sides of the debate in an Ecology forum. Even though there was some disagreement in the ranks about the extent that climate will drive infectious diseases, they all seemed to be in agreement that its not as simple as everyone has been making out, and it is often very hard to pinpoint where the effects of climate on disease begins and ends when taken into consideration with all the other inter-related variables. Also interesting to note was the fact that in most of the articles, the inference was that climate change was being discussed from the perspective of climatic variabilities, and not so much from a purely anthropogenic perspective.

Kevin Lafferty, from the U.S. Geological Survey's Western Ecological Research Center, notes in his article The ecology of climate change and infectious diseases, that:

although the globe is significantly warmer than it was a century ago, there is little evidence that climate change has already favored infectious diseases. While initial projections suggested dramatic future increases in the geographic range of infectious diseases, recent models predict range shifts in disease distributions, with little net increase in area. Many factors can affect infectious disease, and some may overshadow the effects of climate.

Richard Ostfield, from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem studies then weighs in with an article entitled Climate change and the distribution and intensity of infectious disease, in which he notes:

...unequivocal demonstrations of a causal link between climate change and human infectious diseases are rare (albeit increasing). Some diseases are likely to decrease in incidence and range with climate warming (Harvell et al. 2002), and others are likely to respond to precipitation or humidity more than to temperature, leading to poor predictive power under warming scenarios. Many diseases are strongly influenced by other ecological, sociological, economic, and evolutionary factors besides climate change.

In his concluding thoughts, he summises that "clear effects of climate change have now been established for several human infectious diseases" but then follows it up with the caveat:

Hay et al. (2002) close their critique of climate drivers of highland malaria by asserting, ‘‘The more certain climatologists become that humans are affecting global climates, the more critical epidemiologists should be of the evidence indicating that these changes affect malaria’’ (Hay et al. 2002:909). Good science demands that skepticism be applied equally to evidence for and against climatic effects on disease.

Mercedes Pascual and Menno Bouma then disagree on the basis that disease range shifts due to temperature are important (Do rising temperatures matter?) and that even if you think temperatures don't matter, then human activities such as changes in land use may increase infectious diseases anyway.

Harvell et al then use diseases in coral (these are ecologists remember) to point out that they think there is evidence of climate as a disease driver (Climate change and wildlife diseases: When does the host matter the most?), but then acknowledges that its complicated and host reactions and immune response may be important, too.

Then Andy Dobson from Princeton does a whole bunch of complicated things with numbers in
Climate variability, global change, immunity,and the dynamics of infectious diseases but seems to work out, among other things that:

Ultimately, the observed increase in malaria cases represent a complex interaction between climate change, human population expansion, the evolution of drug resistance, and the rapid expansion of the AIDS epidemic.
Teasing out the relative importance of each requires careful analyses of nonstationary time-series data where long term trends in global change, and annual seasonal variation in external forcing, interact with the intrinsic tendency of epidemic systems to cycle; this can produce very complex dynamics that defy simple statistical analysis.

Then reassures the reader that if you can give him lots of money he'll be happy to work it out for you.

My absolute favourite response comes from Sarah Randolph, a zoologist from Oxford, who points out in Perspectives on climate change impacts on infectious diseases, that over the last 450 million years so many species have become extinct that we really shouldn't get so worked up about a few climate related shifts in species distribution. She points out that the only reason we are getting so hysterical is that those species shifts might be pathogens that directly or indirectly affect homo sapiens. In summary, she says:

The complexity within each disease system emphasizes that any expectation of a simple consistent response to climate change, i.e., a universal worsening of the situation, is ill founded.
Hitherto, there is no single infectious disease whose increased incidence over recent decades can be reliably attributed to climate change. The often-repeated statistic, that climate change is currently causing approximately 150 000 extra deaths per annum, may be stamped with the authority of the World Health Organization (Campbell-Lendrum et al. 2003), but is, in the opinion of many practicing disease ecologists, inestimable. Furthermore, large as this number is in terms of bereavements, it represents only ;0.15% of all-cause deaths (as a first approximation, assuming a global population of 6.7 3109 and mean life expectancy of 67 years). Other, more avoidable, causes of premature deaths from infectious diseases deserve more attention than climate change.

So, in general, even though they seemed to be quibbling about which bit goes where (remind me never to get a bunch of ecologists to put together an Ikea cot), they all seem to be in agreement that:

1. Its complicated.
2. We don't know much and need to learn more.
3. Nobody should have left the public health mob, the sociologists and the climate scientists unsupervised for so long.
4. Scientific debate and skepticism is a really good thing.

If you made it to the end of this post with me, congratulations! Now as a reward, you can go to my last post and watch the models strip off in the name of carbon reduction.