Redstate

Posted at 7:06pm on Nov. 12, 2007 Election time in Australia

By pliny

There will be a Federal Election in Australia on Nov 24th, and a change of government is looking quite likely. There was a suggestion in another thread that I should write a diary on this, since I live there.

Firstly, a bit of background on the system here. Like the US, we have a federation with significant State governments, and a federal House (with districts) and Senate (states). But like the UK, the system is parliamentary, and party discipline is quite tight. It is even more two-party, with the conservatives called Liberals (sic) and the liberals called Labor (a party with strong union roots). There is a small rural National party which operates in a tight coalition with the Liberals. John Howard's Coalition government is now the only one in the country - the eight state and Territory governments are all Labor.

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Posted at 5:44pm on Feb. 8, 2007 Why I think Global Warming is for real

By pliny

Against the flow of recent diaries, this one sets out and defends the basic mechanism and observations of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). I've been chipping in to various discussions, and I wanted to gather the arguments and some basic references here.

I just want to discuss the basics - I don't want to take up space to go into consequences or remedies. So nothing here about glaciers, polar bears, SUV's or Kyoto.

The basic proposition can be summed up in one sentence:

We mine and burn fossil carbon - CO2 in air traps heat - the earth warms

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