On tonight’s show we look at censorship and police intimidation in Sydney. The decision by a Sydney Library to cancel the Friends of Hebron exhibition is critically examined.
We take a look at the government’s plan to create a new citizen database, and what this implies for our democracy.
We finish up with a discussion of global warming and climate change, including an appraisal of a recent critical study of NASA’s climate data.
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Exhibition axed after police visit
by Arjun Ramachandran
May 14, 2008
THE decision by a Sydney library to dump an exhibition about Palestinian refugees after a visit by counter-terrorism police the night before it opened has been criticised as an act of censorship.
Leichhardt municipal library was to launch the Al-Nakba pictorial exhibition last Friday. A local community group, Friends of Hebron, had developed the display of photos, poems and articles over eight months.
“We set up the exhibition at the library on Thursday night and the librarian … approved the exhibition, and said that it could be seen by children and other people who into the library,” said Carole Lawson, a Friends of Hebron member.
But that night, shortly before the library closed at 8pm, officers from the police counter-terrorism operations arrived at the library.
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Government plans central citizen database
by Mahesh Sharma
May 13, 2008
THE federal Government has moved to establish a centralised database to host and manage all Australian citizens’ personal details, so this information can be easily shared and accessed by any department.
The Australian Taxation Office, Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Customs, Centrelink, and other departments, are discussing the possibility of establishing a common registration process to improve information sharing.
The project was being led by the Australian Government Information Management “and it’s in respect of a common registration process,” ATO chief information officer Bill Gibson said.
“That’s exploratory at the moment. There’s nothing that exists right now that is a manifestation of this, but we are working with Centrelink, Customs, and other agencies, facilitated by AGIMO.
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Global Warming: The Hockey Stick
by John L. Daly
In 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 5-yearly report on climate change [10], in a blaze of publicity, which contained the now infamous phrase that there was “a discernible human influence on global climate”.
In their previous 1990 report [33], the IPCC illustrated their, then, understanding of how global climate had changed, not just during the previous 95 years, but also the past 1,000 years. In so doing they presented this graph (Fig 1.) of temperature change since 900 AD.
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Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler?
A tale of two thermometers
By Steven Goddard
2 May 2008
A paper published in scientific journal Nature this week has reignited the debate about Global Warming, by predicting that the earth won’t be getting any warmer until 2015. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences have factored in cyclical oceanic into their climate model, and produced a different forecast to the “consensus” models which don’t.
But how will we know whether the earth is warming or cooling? Today, it all depends on the data source.
Two authorities provide us with analysis of long-term surface temperature trends. Both agree on the global temperature trend until 1998, at which time a sharp divergence occurred. The UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Studies Had-Crut data shows worldwide temperatures declining since 1998. According to Hadley’s data, the earth is not much warmer now than it was than it was in 1878 or 1941.
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