I think a major issue here is that, by using a political stage to lobby for sainthood, Rudd is cheapening the very thing he is lobbying for. If a saint becomes a saint because a politician asked for that to happen, then surely that saint's position is tainted? Then, if saints are used as badges of honour (after all, why else would the PM be so concerned to have an Australian saint?), then every other country's saint would be better than ours.

If the Catholic Church ever makes Mary Mackillop a saint, she won't be connected with Australia, but with the church. She may not even be our patron saint - we already have enough of them (and she was born overseas, anyway). Perhaps it's best just to let the church do what the church does. If it sees fit to canonise Mary M, good for them. If not, it doesn't change the fact that she did some good stuff and is an Australian to be proud of.

Protagoras, I'd rather not get bogged down in a global warming argument, but just a couple of points. The graph you have chosen, which is associated with the institute run by James Hansen, who is hysterical on these issues, shows cooling over the last 10 years. The other datasets tend to show more of it, including the best temperature data set which is from the satellites, but has only been in existence for a much shorter period of time.

Why shouldn't we choose 1998, the El Nino year, as the point at which it started to turn-down? My memory is that in 1998 we were being told by the warming enthusiasts that it proved everything was accelerating, now we're told if we use it we are cherry-picking. It seems to me that turning-points, whether lows or highs, are always to some extent outliers, but it seems illogical not to pick the highest or the lowest point to map warming or cooling from.

It's certainly the highest point on the graph. Or are you suggesting that it should really be a different number as though it hadn't been an El Nino year?

Graham

I understand fully why you say you “don’t want to be bogged down in a global warming argument,” however, it was you who raised it in your original post.

The following anomaly chart for the ten hottest years on record is provided by the NCDC and not from the “hysterical” James Hansen at NASA. Alas, I have arrived at a conclusion as to why you would distort the previous figures I provided:

Global Top 10 Warm Years (Jan-Dec)
...Anomaly °C Anomaly °F

2005..... 0.61..... 1.10
1998..... 0.58..... 1.04
2002..... 0.56..... 1.01
2003..... 0.56..... 1.01
2006..... 0.55..... 0.99
2007..... 0.55..... 0.99
2004..... 0.53..... 0.95
2001..... 0.49..... 0.88
2008..... 0.49..... 0.88
1997..... 0.46..... 0.83

You ask “Why shouldn't we choose 1998?” Well your peer, Mr Plimer did advise that “one swallow does not make a summer,” did he not? Therefore, may I ask you why one La Nina year would make a winter?

Unfortunately for you, Graham the two thousand climate change researchers, attending the Copenhagen Conference in March this year, appear to disagree with your claims also, as does every reputable climate institute on the planet:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/03/12/irreversible.climate/index.html

Protagoras, there isn't an argument here. If you look at any of the various analyses of the various datasets you see a cooling over recent years. If you look at a graph of those temperatures you have in that table you will find that it has been cooling since around 1998.

You seem to have chosen an analysis which says that 1998 was the second hottest, but it doesn't really matter because even on that dataset there has been cooling since 2005. If you look at the other graphs on the page which measure temperature different ways and at different levels in the atmosphere the same cooling is even more obvious.

We also know that ocean temperature has been cooling for the last 3 to 6 years.

I'm not particularly concerned about the views of the thousands of science lobbyists that went to Copenhagen. It's the facts that matter, not how many people assert fantasy. I read a lot of the press from Copenhagen, and I don't think I saw a single piece of new evidence.

You'll find the smart AGW money is hedging its bets and talking about possible cooling for anywhere up to the next 20 years, and people like Hansen are now talking about the heat having been taken up in the ocean and that it will reappear later.

So you're a bit on your own on this point. Everyone else appears to have recognised that it has cooled a little and are trying to take account of it, one way or another.

I also don't rely on Ian Plimer to read graphs for me. He makes a lot of good points but he's not infallible, which is a way of sequing back to the pope.

"So you're a bit on your own on this point. Everyone else appears to have recognised that it has cooled a little and are trying to take account of it, one way or another......We also know that ocean temperature has been cooling for the last 3 to 6 years."

No I'm not on my own at all Graham. The "little bit of cooling has been acknowledged by the climate institutes before you latched onto that information to use as ammunition:

http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/sep/HQ_06318_Ocean_Cooling.html

Sadly for you Graham, you don't have the potential to perform miracles by altering the science or the official global temperature records which state that eight out of ten of the hottest years on record, over 150 years, occurred in the 21st century.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2009/jun/global.html

And isn't it about time that you provided some evidence to support your claims? After all, I have and if I told you that Ian Plimer is a director of some 5 mining companies, thereby having a conflict of interest, or that Exxon lied when they said they had ceased funding climate skeptics, or that the IPA campaigned against the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, promoted the use of genetically engineered crops and defended the logging of native forests, wouldn't you expect me to provide some evidence?

Protagoras, the page you link to has any number of graphs showing cooling. I don't have to show cooling because you've done it for me. And if you're not prepared to acknowledge that then there is no point in discussing the issue with you because you aren't prepared to do it rationally.

This is not something I just "latched" onto, I've known about it for years, but it didn't seem very significant 3 or 4 years ago, but it is now because of the length of time over which it has occurred.

It also seems significant because it may help to confirm or otherwise that solar activity has a more profound influence on global temperature than the IPCC thinks. We've had less solar activity in the last 12 months than for decades. I'm an interested spectator, as others should be. It's plain from the geological record that CO2 is not the primary driver of climate, and there are so many things we don't understand. We should be looking for the clues as to how these things might manifest themselves and work.

The hottest years argument doesn't hold up. I'm not saying that it has been as cool this decade as it was in the previous one, just that the direction of temperature has been down when the models said it should be up. To fall back on what is effectively an average, which has no bearing on whether temperature has dropped since 1998 or 2005 (pick your year depending on your data), is not logical. Those that use it are normally in denial about the temperature decline we've seen.