Last night Israel managed to bomb three hospitals and the UN headquarters in Gaza. Three hospitals! That’s way beyond accident or incompetence and almost certainly means that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure with no qualms about killing innocent civilians either.

Israel will, no doubt, harp on about how it has a right to defend itself from rocket attack, and that’s true, it does have that right. But it also has a responsibility, as a recognised state, to act in an appropriate manner, and most importantly, to obey the Geneva Conventions and not target civilians.

And no, it doesn’t matter what Hamas does, it can’t be used as justification for Israel’s behaviour. As Israel loves to point out, Hamas is a terrorist organisation and Palestine isn’t a state - therefore Hamas isn’t subject to the Geneva Conventions. It’s always claimed that ‘Hamas had fighters in the hospital’, or in whatever other buildings, such as schools, that Israel had just bombed, yet, even if that were true (and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest it’s usually not), it still doesn’t change the fact that someone on the Israeli side gave an order to attack, knowing full well that the majority of the casualties would be innocent civilians. I’m pretty sure that’s a war crime.

Pretty sad state of affairs.

On Monday, the Climate Change minister, Penny Wong, announced that Australia will aim to cut emissions by 5-15% over 2000 levels. This was widely greeted by derision and a complete cop-out on what many see as one of the central reasons for Labor’s election last year.

The Government’s cuts of between 5 and 15 per cent below 2000 emissions levels are an admission it has given up on an ambitious global climate change agreement coming out of the UN talks next year. Figures in the Garnaut review clearly show that Australia, along with other developed countries, would have to take on cuts of at least 25 per cent to get an agreement in Copenhagen that might have a chance of saving the Great Barrier Reef.

The UN’s scientific body believes the 2020 target for developed countries should be cuts in the range of 25 and 40 per cent below 1990 emissions to keep the global temperature rising above two degrees and avoid dangerous climate change. This, along with slowing the emissions from developing countries, is required to keep global greenhouse gas concentrations at about 450 parts per million and achieve an ambitious climate agreement.

As mentioned previously, the UN’s 25-40% targets are almost certainly too low to remain under 450ppm, so Australia’s 5-15% effort really is pathetic.

Rudd repeatedly said that he wanted Australia to be a leader in climate negotiations, in stark contrast to his predecessor, Howard, who wanted nothing to do with climate change at all. Rudd’s first act as prime minister was to ratify Kyoto, leading many to hope that finally we had someone in charge who was going to take the threat seriously. Unfortunately, it seems that this is no longer the case, and Australia will most definitely not be a leader on the global stage.

Our only hope now is that Obama comes forward with an aggressive US target and that Rudd then feels comfortable in raising Australia’s game. In a nice change from the orthodox, Obama has appointed a Nobel physics laureate as his energy secretary. No more oil/coal guys in charge!

So my semi-serious post on how I think we’re screwed when it comes to climate change may not be so wide of the mark after all. The latest information coming out of the Poznan Conference, reported by both The Guardian and Nature, makes the point that the latest IPCC report is based on scientific information from 2005 at the latest, and that all the published papers since 2005 have shown that climate change is proceeding much faster than the IPCC report suggests.

The cream of the UK climate science community sat in stunned silence as [Kevin] Anderson [an expert at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University] pointed out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst.

In the jargon used to count the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s thin layer of atmosphere, he said it was “improbable” that levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm).

All our current efforts are based on trying to stabilise at 450ppm and even that’s proving “too hard”. Now it seems that we’ve almost no chance of staying under 650ppm, virtually guaranteeing a 4C rise in global temperatures.

What’s worse is that calculations seem to indicate that for every decade we delay CO₂ reductions result in higher temperatures:

Each decade that the global peak [of CO₂emissions] is delayed, the temperature increase goes up by .4 to .5 degrees. According to this model, an eighty percent reduction by mid-century delivers 1.4 degree of warming with a peak in 2015; 1.8 degrees if the peak is in 2025; and 2.4 degrees with a peak in 2035. In other words, there is a penalty for delayed action.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet have managed to convince people they are inside another person’s body, showing both how our sense of self is an emergent property of the brain, and also how tenuous it really is.

To create the illusion of occupying the dummy’s body, the team stroked the abdomen of the subject and the dummy at the same time while the subject watched the stroking via the cameras on the dummy’s head. As a result, subjects reported a strong feeling that the dummy’s body was their own. The technique is similar to the “rubber hand illusion”, in which a subject can be convinced that a rubber hand is his or her own, but this is the first time the illusion has been extended to a whole body.

The illusion was so convincing that when the researchers threatened the dummy with a knife they recorded an increase in the subject’s skin conductance response - the indicator of stress that polygraph lie detector tests rely on. “This shows how easy it is to change the brain’s perception of the physical self,” said Ehrsson, who led the project. “By manipulating sensory impressions, it’s possible to fool the self not only out of its body but into other bodies too.”

Things got even weirder when the researchers dispensed with the dummy and put the cameras on the head of another person. After carrying out the same double stroking routine the subjects were convinced that they were occupying another person’s body. The illusion persisted even when the other person came over and shook the subject’s hand, producing the sensation of the subject feeling as if they were shaking hands with themselves.

So Hank Paulson travelled to China to tell the Chinese not to devalue the yuan against the dollar. China’s response: we own you, and we’d appreciate it if you’d start looking after our investments.

But Mr Paulson also found himself facing calls for the US to address its own economic problems. Wang Qishan, a vice-premier and leader of the Chinese delegation at the two-day talks, called on the US to take swift action to address the crisis.

“We hope the US side will take the necessary measures to stabilise the economy and financial markets as well as guarantee the safety of China’s assets and investments in the US,” he said.

The dialogue was dominated by the global crisis. Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the Chinese central bank, urged the US to rebalance its economy. “Over-consumption and a high reliance on credit is the cause of the US financial crisis,” he said. “As the largest and most important economy in the world, the US should take the initiative to adjust its policies, raise its savings ratio appropriately and reduce its trade and fiscal deficits.”

On Tuesday evening I watched a two-part Frontline documentary called HEAT, looking at whether we are capable of dealing with the issue of global warming. As part of the documentary, they showed a clip from a 1958 science show which talked about global warming, and said essentially the same things that we’re hearing about now.

50 YEARS! That’s how long we’ve been talking about this and doing absolutely nothing about it. That’s why I think we’ll never be able to deal with it, and if by some miracle we do address the problem, rather than talking about it, it will only be when the environment is a hell of a lot worse off than it is now.

Both myself and Jacqui have been considering getting new laptops for a while - her because her iBook G4 is ancient and she has worn all the letters off the keys, and me because the maximum 2GB RAM my Macbook Pro just isn’t enough when I’m working.

I had planned to buy a few months ago, but knew Apple were doing an update, so decided to wait until the new versions came out to see what was on offer. Unfortunately, a week or two before the new machines were announced, the Aussie dollar started a slide from US0.98 to US0.63, so the new machines ended up being priced a few hundred dollars more expensive than the old ones. I’d now need $4300 for a new laptop, and Jacqui would need another $1800 for hers. Given that we’re saving for an apartment, $6100 was a bit too much to shell out, so upgrade plans went on the back-burner.

Late last week I realised that since I work from home while Jacqui’s in the office, we could get an iMac between us, and I could keep my laptop for those occasions when Jacqui needs to work at home as well. She agreed, so it was onto the Apple Store to get a 24” 2.8GHz iMac. I noticed also that Apple had a refurbished version for $1979, so I went for that instead. I ordered it at 6:35am yesterday morning, got an email at 2:27pm saying it had shipped, and it arrived on my doorstep at 10am this morning.

I’d also ordered 2 x 2GB DIMMs from epowermac.com to upgrade the RAM to 4GB and they arrived this morning shortly after the iMac. It’s midday now and I’m typing this on the new machine, having already migrated all my data and installed the new RAM, all for a bargain price of $2145.50, saving nearly $4000. Gotta be happy with that!

The Guardian has a really interesting article on organ donation which interviews everyone involved in the donor trail, from the mother who chose to donate her son’s organs, to the recipient, the transplant surgeon and on up to the top transplant person in the Department of Health.

It’s an enlightening read, revealing all sides of the debate on increasing the availability of organs for transplant, which is currently going on in the UK. The government is in favour of an opt-out system where you are assumed by default to be an organ donor unless you specifically choose not to be, though that has the potential to be extremely hard on grieving family members.

A preferable system, which gets a mention in the article, is the one employed here in Australia. When you apply for, or renew, a driving licence, you are given the option of ticking a box assenting to the donation of your organs. You’re also given the option of choosing to only donate certain organs.

Ticking this box results in your licence stating that you are an organ donor, and is legally binding in the event of your death, overriding the wishes of your family. It seems a far more sensible solution as the wishes of the deceased are upheld, which is infinitely preferable than having a bureaucratic decision foist upon a grieving family.

I ticked the box. Might as well, I certainly won’t be needing my organs after death.

Australia has switched its position and voted against Israel on two resolutions which it had previously supported. Howard spent his term voting in lockstep with the US, but some common sense has now prevailed and we are starting to take a more principled stand.

In the weekend vote in New York, Australia supported a resolution calling on Israel to stop establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories and a resolution calling for the Geneva Conventions to apply in the Palestinian territories.

The resolutions on the Middle East peace process are held annually and the Howard government had backed both from 1996 to 2002 but in 2003 began to vote against or abstain. It was a move that aligned Australia with only the US, Israel, the US Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Micronesia and put the country at odds with Britain, Canada, New Zealand and France.

Australian officials told the UN the Government had changed its position because it supported a two-state resolution of the conflict to deliver a secure Israel living beside a viable Palestinian state and that Australia believed both sides should abide by their obligations under the Road Map for Peace.

The Guardian has a piece on Seymour Hersh in which he intimates that there’s a whole can of worms waiting to be exposed once Bush leaves office…

A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might ‘jinx it’. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president’s inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] “You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.” So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.’ He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won’t change anything - ‘They’ve got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves’ - it will reveal how the White House ‘set out to sabotage the system… It wasn’t that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.’

Should be interesting.

This morning I headed out the door at 6:30 for my weekly long run and 17.5km later I was finished. The sole aim of the run was to put miles into my legs, to get them used to longer distances, and most definitely not to run fast, so with that in mind I kep to a very conservative pace, ensuring that I never felt out of breath the whole way, and my only discomfort was my quads getting a bit tired in the final 2-3km or so.

I ran the 17.5km in 1:33:21 at an average HR of 144 which I was pretty happy with. I’ve since looked up my old training records and realised that that’s the third-longest run I’ve ever done, with the longest ever being the time I did a half-marathon. I looked at my HR data from the half-marathon and noted that while my time was 1:51:59, my average HR was 169.

Doing a quick bit of maths on this morning’s run reveals that this I was running at a pace which would have yielded a 1:52:30 half-marathon, i.e: only 30secs slower than my best, yet my HR was a full 24bpm slower!

Looks like the training is paying off.

Following on from yesterday’s post, The Institute of Physics has a paper summarising the results of various CO₂ reduction schemes based on running the scenarios through all of the best climate models around. The results are pretty interesting:

Using a scheme to emulate the range of state-of-the-art model results for climate feedback strength, including the modelled range of climate sensitivity and other key uncertainties, we analyse recent global targets. The G8 target of a 50% cut in emissions by 2050 leaves CO₂ concentrations rising rapidly, approaching 1000 ppm by 2300. The Stern Review’s proposed 25% cut in emissions by 2050, continuing to an 80% cut, does in fact approach stabilization of CO₂ concentration on a policy-relevant (century) timescale, with most models projecting concentrations between 500 and 600 ppm by 2100. However concentrations continue to rise gradually. Long-term stabilization at 550 ppm CO₂ requires cuts in emissions of 81 to 90% by 2300, and more beyond as a portion of the CO₂ emitted persists for centuries to millennia. Reductions of other greenhouse gases cannot compensate for the long-term effects of emitting CO₂.

So if we want to avoid trashing the place, we need to reduce to less than 10% of today’s emissions! That’s more than most people realise. Thankfully we’ve got more than two hundred years to get there, which should be doable.

Yesterday saw a flurry of news regarding climate change, dominated by Treasury’s assessment of the costs of implementing a carbon tax in Australia. Serious news outlets like SBS and the SMH reported the cost to the average household as $1/day, whereas the tabloid news on Ten went for the sensationalist approach with tag lines like “see how the carbon tax could cost you hundreds of dollars!”

The business associations are trying to get the Government to hold off on implementing the carbon tax now that the global economy is in freefall, spreading fear and doubt about loss of jobs, but Treasury’s analysis correctly points out that there’s massive opportunities for job creation in alternative energy fields and other areas which would be projected to grow significantly once polluters have to pay. The delayers also fail to realise that the longer we wait to start, the sharper the emissions drops we’ll have to implement and therefore the greater the impact on the economy as a whole. Long, gradual change is going to do less damage to the economy than a short, sharp shock.

Elsewhere on TV, probably SBS again, I saw a news item about the increase in atmospheric methane levels which has recently been detected. Methane is 20 times more effective as an insulator than CO₂, and one of the side effects of a temperature increase is predicted to be that as permafrost melts, massive amounts of methane will be released. The scientists interviewed seemed to think that this year’s increase was due to the record low in the extent of Arctic sea ice last year.

The final item was an interview with a professor who studies the Great Barrier Reef, specifically coral bleaching and its relationship to sea temperature and acidity. He claimed that if we continue at our current pace, the reef will be dead in 30 years. Given that our rate of CO₂ pollution is only increasing, that timeframe will probably prove optimistic.

That’s just sad.

This week i finally got around to getting my triathlon life sorted out. I joined up with BRAT again, then got my TriNSW licence and finally entered the Canberra Half-Ironman which is on in eight weeks. A Half-Ironman is a 1.9km swim, then a 90km bike ride followed by a half-marathon, so I’ll have my work cut out for me.

I entered this race in 2005 at the last minute, but I was only doing the swim that time as I was part of a team. The atmosphere was great and I decided there and then that one day I’d come back and do the whole thing. Given that my longest bike recent bike ride is 45km and my longest recent run is 12km I might have over-estimated my abilities, but my only aim is to finish so, with that in mind, I’ll be sticking to a relatively easy pace. Still, a relatively easy pace for almost 6 hours will still leave me exhausted!

Ideally I’d like to finish as far under six hours as possible, but it all depends on the bike leg. Canberra is a hilly course as triathlons go, so there’s a risk that my legs will be destroyed despite taking it relatively easy. The last triathlon I did was also in Canberra and, although its course omitted the hilly section, the 10km run after that ride was probably the worst physical thing I’ve done as my legs just never got into it and it was just pain the whole way.

My very tentative goals are:

• Swim: <30mins
• Bike: 3hrs
• Run: 2hrs

The swim is an easy target, but the others are just “pick a number” at this stage. I’ll revise those closer to the event.

The New Yorker has an opinion piece wondering how anyone could still be undecided in the American election, which uses a wonderful analogy to point out the bleeding obvious.

Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked. I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

Funny though it is, the time to be concerned about shit sandwiches was four years ago. If common sense had prevailed then, perhaps we could have avoided this:

The US government was today accused of “farce” after dropping all charges against a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay…

He was accused of planning an attack that included the use of radioactive material and chemical weapons.

But Mohamed insists he admitted to plotting the dirty bomb attack only after being tortured, which included having his penis cut with a razor.

Mr Stafford Smith said: “The Bush Administration will not even admit in public that they rendered Mr Mohamed to face torture in Morocco, let alone allow him a fair trial…

The US government has been accused of using a strategy of delay to avoid having to disclose the evidence that could support the torture allegations [until after the elections].

I’m pretty sure any man would confess to whatever you want once you start slicing his tackle with a razor blade.

Truth, Justice and The American Way!

Looks like Cuba has discovered oil, quite a bit of it in fact.

Friends and foes have called Cuba many things - a progressive beacon, a quixotic underdog, an oppressive tyranny - but no one has called it lucky, until now .

Mother nature, it emerged this week, appears to have blessed the island with enough oil reserves to vault it into the ranks of energy powers. The government announced there may be more than 20bn barrels of recoverable oil in offshore fields in Cuba’s share of the Gulf of Mexico, more than twice the previous estimate.

If confirmed, it puts Cuba’s reserves on par with those of the US and into the world’s top 20. Drilling is expected to start next year by Cuba’s state oil company Cubapetroleo, or Cupet.

I wonder how long it will be before the US normalises trade relations, or perhaps they’ll just invade now.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to buying myself a new road bike. I’d sold my last one before we headed off to Canada two years ago, and my return to triathlons was going to be seriously undermined by the lack of a road bike.

In a bid for frugality, I decided to forego the heights I’d attained the last time and focus on something a little lower down the bicycling chain. Malvern Star are an Aussie brand, renowned for making kids bikes, who’d lost their way over the last few years when it came to road bikes. However, their new 2009 range has been getting rave reviews for putting decent frames together with good component packages at excellent prices. Just what I was after.

It took me a while to find a dealer stocking the road bikes, but once that was done, and $1100 later, I was back to being a cyclist again. A few hundred more for pedals and a decent helmet and I was ready to burn up the tarmac.

Imagine my surprise when I headed out at 6:30am one morning to find that, despite lots of running over the previous few months, and despite a resting heart rate hovering around 40bpm, my legs still felt shite on the bike. I guess that proves the specificity principle - that being fit in one sport doesn’t necessarily translate to being fit in another.

No doubt perseverance will prevail, as it almost always does, and as I slowly build my weekly mileage things will start feeling better. There’s a lot to be said for riding down to La Perouse in the early morning, though so far I’ve avoided travelling in the other direction to Watsons Bay. I still hate going uphill!

Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ousted Prime Minister, has given an interview to an Israeli newspaper in which he admits that, in order for there to be a lasting peace with Palestinians, Israel will have to withdraw from almost all the Occupied Territories, and will have to concede to a split of Jerusalem.

We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories,” Olmert said. “We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace.”

Contrast this with a report from a group of leading NGOs claiming that no progress is being made despite the involvement of the US, the EU, the UN and Russia.

The report says that despite the Quartet saying in June that such progress was vital to building confidence in the negotiating process, it has failed to press home its own calls on Israel for a freeze on settlement building, an improvement in the movement of Palestinian people and goods, and a revival of the collapsed economy in Gaza.

On settlements it says there has been a “marked failure to hold the Israeli authorities to their obligation under the [internationally agreed] road map and international law”. It urges the Quartet to go “beyond rhetoric” and take “concrete steps” in the face of a “marked acceleration” in settlement building since Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were kick-started by the Annapolis summit last year.

So Olmert recognises that Israel will have to give back occupied territory, but while in power he accelerated the building of illegal settlements on the same land.

Good Math, Bad Math has a post entitled Economic Disasters and Stupid Evil People which provides a nice summary of how the US financial system got to be in such a mess.

What we’ve been seeing over the last couple of weeks is the same basic scam as the mortgage mess, but on an even larger scale. Lending money is a profitable business. Bundling loans into investment vehicles is an incredibly profitable business for producing what appear to be high-yield, low-risk investments.

Naturally, when there’s a big opportunity to make lots of money, there’s a ton of people looking to get in on it. Of course, just like with the mortgages, there’s a limit. Realistically, there’s only a certain amount of money that can be loaned at any time to people who can pay it back. But there was so much money to be made that as the high-quality loans ran out, they started looking for other things that they could wrap up as investments. Of course, since people who buy these kinds of investments are typically looking for something really safe, that means that they can’t just give money out any-which-way; they need to have some plausible way of saying “This is really safe”.

And here’s where the stupidity really started kicking in.

How do you take a bunch of loans that might not be repaid, and turn them into something that’s safe? Well, what do you do if you had a lot of money tied up in a piece of property that you could lose in an accident? Like, say, a car or a house? You’d buy insurance!

That’s basically what the investment firms did. They gave out shit loans that any sane person should have known couldn’t be repaid, and then they bough insurance on them to guarantee that at least the principal would be safe.

So who did they buy insurance from? Mostly each other.

The whole article is worth a read, as are his earlier pieces on the Subprime Crisis: Part 1 & Part 2

Looks to me like the Republicans are acknowledging that Sarah Palin isn’t fit for the job. The Independent covers their attempts to change the format of the VP debate to minimise the chance of her being made to look foolish by Joe Biden.

Under pressure from Republicans, the organisers of the debates have tweaked the format of the vice-presidential debate between Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin set for St Louis on 2 October to limit significantly the time available for free-flow debate and direct challenges to one another. Because of Ms Palin’s star power, that debate may be at least as big an audience draw as the presidential clashes.

Aides to Mr McCain had insisted on the more structured format because of concern that Mrs Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, might be put on the back foot too easily by the more seasoned Senator Biden. Advisors to Mr Biden gave no indication that they objected to the change, however, possibly a reflection of concern on their side about their candidate’s famous capacity for loquaciousness and gaffes.

You’d think that the last thing anyone would want would be a VP who’s unable to argue her position and restricted to pre-canned answers!