Only a sad sack would give a damn about what the idiot Latham thinks about anything.

At least both leaders had the common sense to refrain from commenting on what the buffoon had to say.

Howard's "less comfortable for some" comments should be sufficient for any reasonable person to vote against him. We, collectively, cannot afford to have a Prime Minister with this lack of awareness.

For those who don't know the effects, degree by degree, of climate change the following is an excellent summary.

http://www.marklynas.org/2007/4/23/six-steps-to-hell-summary-of-six-degrees-as-published-in-the-guardian

Oh, and check the full page ads that will appear in the Sydney papers tomorrow...

The level of paternalism displayed by both major parties mean that reasonable people could not possibly vote for them.

Latham was right on that one.

Sorry David but Latham has got it exactly right.

Labor are so desperate to get back in power that they have happily punted virtually all the traditional values that differentiated them from the Libs. It has got so weird that yesterday we had the bizzare sight of a room full of Labor "true believers" cheering wildly as their fearless leader put the knife through social spending. This morning the shadow minister for ageing told the ABC that she was "deeply concerned" about the inadequacy of the single pension. "Will you be increasing it if you get into power"? ... "No - you must understand that we have to be fiscally conservative"

This is the party which has just offered up 31 billion in tax cuts and will give every school child a laptop. How many school kids don't have access to a computer these days? How many people would not pass up some or all of their tax cuts to raise pensioners living standards? WorkChoices is evil and Labor will get rid of it ... by 2012!! We'll sign Kyoto and global warming will stop!!

Vote for whoever you like, nothings going to be different this time next year.

Except, JA, that the Kyoto Protocol will be signed, the troops will be home from Iraq and we won't have to put up with AWAs.

So there's three big differences at least..

You contend that “The key economic and moral issue of today is climate change.” The climate issue is far from settled. For example, the IPCC “consensus” is challenged by John R Christy, Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama. It’s hard to discount his view, as he has contributed to all four major IPCC assessments, including acting as a Lead Author in 2001 and a Contributing Author in 2007.

Christy notes in an article on BBC News Online, 13/11, that the IPCC is a political rather than scientific process, which affects both the choice of and conduct of the scientists involved. He says that this politicisation fosters a herd mentality in which it is difficult for opposing evidence and views to be heard, leading to an overstatement of confidence in the published findings and to a ready acceptance of the views of anointed authorities. Scepticism, a hallmark of science, is frowned upon.

Christy says that “the signature statement of the 2007 IPCC report may be paraphrased as this: ‘We are 90% confident that most of the warming in the past 50 years is due to humans.’ We are not told here that this assertion is based on computer model output, not direct observation. The simple fact is we don't have thermometers marked with ‘this much is human-caused’ and ‘this much is natural’.

“So, I would have written this conclusion as ’Our climate models are incapable of reproducing the last 50 years of surface temperatures without a push from how we think greenhouse gases influence the climate. Other processes may also account for much of this change.’"

Christy contends that the IPCC has erred in treating climate models as definitive tools for prediction, and that the results owe more to clever software engineering than deep understanding of the climatic processes at work. They do not adopt the proper and objective experiment of testing model output against quantities not known ahead of time. By contrast, Christy’s group builds a variety of climate datasets from scratch for tests just like this. (more)