While there is no doubt that global temperature has been rising for more than a hundred years there have been issues with the accuracy of the temperature measurements. In particular the siting of weather stations in areas subject to urban heat, choice of sites represented in the data, and the way individual temperature databases have been adjusted.

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project was designed to check these issues, using a database of 30,000 land-based thermometers.

Last week Richard Muller, the head of the project, released the results, prior to their peer review and publication. In releasing them he said that they proved that global warming was real and substantially manmade [see discussion with Jennifer Marohasy in comment thread]. He also said that there is no evidence of a plateauing of temperature over the last decade or so.

The second claim seemed to me to be over-reach in that a dataset can only tell you what has happened, not why, and I was curious to see how the last claim was justified by his data.

Now we know that the last claim is not justified by the data. Following links from Jennifer Marohasy’s blog I came to the graphs below on the Mail Online. While the top graph, which uses 10 year rolling averages, clearly shows that temperature has been increasing since 1800, the bottom shows not only that there has been no trend from the beginning of the decade, but that last year was in fact unusually cold.

While the last 10 years is not unusual and doesn’t necessarily mean that global warming has stopped, last year certainly demands explanation as we have been told that it was either the “warmest year ever” or “equal warmest year ever”. On this dataset that does not look even remotely possible.

The BEST project is commendably transparent, unlike the shonky work carried out by some other scientific teams in the area of paleaoclimate reconstruction, for example, and you can download the data from here as well as the code from here.  It’s bound to be a treasure trove of statistical argument.

If the NBN is going to make money then it needs a lot of customers taking the high speed packages, but how likely is that to happen?

I was canvassed earlier this week by TPG who offering me a 10 mbs broadband upload and download package for $199 per month. I said “No”.

If it had cost no more than my current package I might have said “Yes”, but then, who wouldn’t? The real question is how much extra I might pay for it. I suspect the answer to that is  “Nothing”, although in the absence of a real offer I can’t be completely sure.

While Internet Thinking, our webdesign business, is obviously a technology business and therefore in the segment of the economy supposed to benefit from much higher broadband speeds, there is no reason we need any speeds better than what we have at the moment, unless we decide to run a server from our own office, but why would we do that?

With budgets tight and tightening there is zero appeal in increasing an existing overhead by even a small fraction.

But something I might do is take-up Telstra’s offer of 4G when my Optus mobile contract runs out. It might not be as technically good as ADSL, but I can see myself using it and getting a benefit. And once I’ve blown the non-existent budget on that I’ll be even less likely to want higher landline speeds.

It seems to me that Telstra has done a very good deal with the government with the sale of their copper network. They’ve sold a major risk of technological obsolescence to taxpayers in return for $11 bn of net present value over 30 years and they get to take the money and plough it into growth areas like mobile, while still being able to retail using the legacy technology.

At one stage I was describing the NBN as a plan to put a Ferrari in everyone’s garage to drive the information superhighway, when all most needed was a scooter. Now I am beginning to think it is like giving everyone a Leyland P76.

Does anyone else feel the way that I do about candidates standing at the side of the road waving at traffic? To me it looks to be about the dopiest thing you could do in a day.

I know politicians are expected to do some things to get elected that most professionals in other occupations would find unacceptable – for example walking around the neighbourhood knocking on doors and accosting people like a JW – but I understand why and have been prepared to do it myself in the past.

However I would draw the line at standing by the side of the road in the early morning waving at traffic on its way to work.

It seems to me to be a poor use  of a candidate’s time. At a time of the day when they could be talking to people at bus stops and train stations why stand by the side of the road merely waving at them.

I’ve asked a couple of candidates and they’ve told me it’s about name recognition. My response is to ask what sort of name recognition they’re getting and why they couldn’t get just as much by buying a billboard on the roadside.

Better still they could do what I used to do. We used to deck a big flat tray light truck out with signs, and one of my friends would drop me off at bus stops where I’d spend ten minutes talking to commuters, and then hop back on-board and we’d head off for the next stop. When you weren’t using the truck for anything else you’d park the truck somewhere high visibility for the rest of the day.

It’s hard to front-up to a bus stop and talk to total strangers, but after a week or so, you start striking-up friendships and relationships, which is exactly what a budding politician should be trying to do. At the same time your truck is not only visible on the main road, but gives commuters the message that you’re actually out and working engaging with people, and it’s engagement that people want from politicians more than anything else (apart from perhaps empathy).

Standing by the side of the road and waving suggests to me that not only are you unimaginative, but it’s like using a megaphone with a flat battery to try and connect.

Perhaps I’m just biased because the first candidate I ever saw employ this technique was Michael Johnson, the disgraced former MHR for Ryan. It looked pretty dopey when I first saw it, but maybe I was just channelling my uneasiness with Johnson who distinguished himself by perpetrating the first ethnic branch stack in the Queensland Liberal Party, in the process doing the party a lot of damage in the blue ribbon seat of Ryan.

And perhaps not. What do you think? Are you more likely to vote for someone because they waved at you from the side of the road?

The most surprising thing about the LNP’s so-called dirt file is that they had to pay an outsider $3,075 to compile it. If their parliamentarians weren’t aware of just about all that was in the files then they aren’t doing their jobs properly.

They could have set-up an inhouse wiki and pooled their resources for a better and cheaper result and up-dated it in real time right up to and through the campaign.

The second most surprising thing is that anyone should be apologising for the files.

While the Courier Mail excised some parts of the files, if the files were not in fact largely relevant, why did the paper publish them today?

The issue isn’t whether the party researched the sexual habits of some of their opponents, but what they did with the information. It’s not as though sexual pecaddilloes are irrelevant.

Let’s not forget that two former Queensland Labor frontbenchers – Keith de Lacy Wright (my unreserved apologies to Mr de Lacy it was a slip of the fingers) and Bill d’Arcy – have done time for sex crimes committed in the 90s and before, and only last year a NSW Labor cabinet minister stood down after being sprung in a gay brothel. In the last case it was a newspaper that did the research.

Even if this is not information that you intend to use, it’s information you need to know how to react to if, or when, it comes out. In the case of the two Queenslanders, it would have been better if their own colleagues had paid more attention to the gossip – perhaps less harm would have been done.

If the Opposition wants to rule Queensland they need to toughen up. The episode demonstrates strongly that they are prepared to let the government and The Courier Mail  dictate the agenda rather than trying to run it themselves.

The Graham Perrett threat to quit parliament if Julia Gillard is rolled probably makes only a miniscule difference to whether we will get an early election, but it does strengthen the hand of Kevin Rudd in the tussle for the ALP leadership.

It’s really a non-story. and is only a story because it is a story. That last sentence doesn’t make any sense to you?

Put it like this. I wouldn’t be writing about it if the mainstream media hadn’t decided to report it. You get plenty of mad backbenchers who say ridiculous things. In a mature polity what they say would be ignored. They hardly speak for anyone, sometimes not even themselves.

Mr Perrett appears, at least for today, to be in that category, so I would have normally tended to ignore him.

On a day when there are important things, like the carbon tax and the Malaysian solution to be talking about, the ill-considered remarks of an obscure backbencher, which given a chance he would probably retract, only rate because the government hangs on a slender thread which could be cut by any number of barely-balanced MPs.

Even then his comments are barely substantial because they rest not on a matter of real principal, but on an imagined one – that at the last election each party was bound to stick with the leader that they took to the election – and on a hypothetical proposition – that Julia Gillard will be rolled.

But because of the media attention Mr Perrett’s outburst probably makes the latter proposition less hypothetical as it steals momentum from the government and contributes to the impression that Gillard can’t control anything, which all things being equal, will help to keep her poll rating down.

It also advances the cause of Kevin Rudd.

If Rudd were to succeed in his campaign to undermine the PM, he is likely to call an  election immediately. There would be no incentive to hang around because last time he was prime minister, the more people got to see him, the less they liked him. Why should this time be any different?

A successfully resurrected Rudd would need to go to the polls immediately before voters remembered why they turned-off last time, so Perrett’s threat, even if taken seriously, has no effect on Rudd’s prospects, and rather than causing a by-election Perrett will depart at a general one.

It does affect every other potential challengers prospects, however, because all of the other potential contenders, including Simon Crean, would need time to build up their profile as PM, and a Perrett resignation would deny them that opportunity.

So, whether he intended it or not, Perrett makes a Rudd rebirth just a little more likely, but only because he was reported and given significance that he didn’t deserve.

Australian motorists have had a charmed ride compared to those overseas because of the bouyancy of the Australian dollar. That ride seems to have come to an end with news reports that the price of fuel is set to hit a 3 year high.