1881-1885
2003-2007
NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies animated mapping here and supporting data here.
Have you seen Sam? 
Clarence Valley thunderstorm on 8 December
from The Daily Examiner 10 December 2009
Is this amatuerish Twitter page legitimate or not?
Why is there no link in the first bald tweet announcing the new Keneally Government cabinet?
Who is the "KS" who signed the second tweet?
How on earth did this page acquire 2,757 followers in its first couple of days and only 24 followers since?
And what happened to those two original Keneally tweets which were removed?
Oh, and while I'm at it, if this Twitter account is a government endorsed site for the NSW Premier why were all former Premier Ree's tweets removed? A bent for revisionist history? Spite?
Well when a friend phoned the Premier's minsterial office to check she was assured that Ms. Keneally did have a Twitter account and premierofnsw was probably it, though there was nobody around at that moment who could actually confirm or deny.
19. Substantially scaled up financial resources will be needed to address mitigation, adaptation, technology and capacity building. It is essential to strengthen the international financial architecture for assisting the developing countries in dealing with climate change and to improve access to financial support. Resources will derive from multiple sources and flow through multiple bilateral and multilateral channels.
20. The Parties share the view that the strengthened financial architecture should be able to handle gradually scaled up international public support. International public finance support to developing countries [should/shall] reach the order of [X] billion USD in 2020 on the basis of appropriate increases in mitigation and adaptation efforts by developing countries.
21. The Parties confirm climate financing committed under this agreement as new and additional resources that supplement existing international public financial flows otherwise available for developing countries in support of poverty alleviation and the continued progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. In this regard:
- Developed country parties commit to deliver upfront public financing for 2010-201[2] corresponding on average to [10] billion USD annually for early action, capacity building, technology and strengthening adaptation and mitigation readiness in developing countries as set forth in Attachment C;
- From [2013] The Parties commit to regularly review appropriateness of contributions and the circle of contributors against indicators of fairness based on GDP and emissions levels and taking into account the level of development as set forth in Attachment C.
22. Recalling article 4 of the Convention, Parties decide that a Climate Fund be established as an operating entity of the Financial Mechanism of the Convention, which should function under the guidance of and be accountable to the COP as set forth in article 11 of the Convention. The Fund should be operated by a board with balanced representation, which will develop the operational guidelines for the Fund and decide on specific allocation to programmes and projects. The COP will formally elect members of the Fund Board and endorse the operational guidelines and modalities for the Fund. The Fund should complement and maximise global efforts to fight climate change through up-scaled support for climate efforts in the developing countries, including mitigation, adaptation, technology and capacitybuilding. Support from the Fund may be channeled through multilateral institutions or directly to national entities based on agreed criteria. Parties commit to allocate an initial amount of [$x] to the Fund as part of their international public climate support. Medium term funding should be based on a share of no less than [y%] of the overall international public support. Parties decide to operationalise the work of the Fund following the modalities set forth inannex/decision [Y].
23. In the context of the commitment in paragraph [14] Parties commit to global financing contributions from international aviation and international maritime transport generated through instruments developed and implemented by the ICAO and IMO respectively should be channeled through the Climate Fund from [2013], [mainly for adaption purposes], taking into account the principle of common but differentiated responsibility.
24. To enhance transparency and overview The Parties decide to establish an International Climate Financing Board under the UNFCCC to monitor and review international financing for climate action and in this context identify any gaps and imbalances in the international financing for mitigation and adaptation actions that may arise. The Board will consist of [x] representatives from developed countries and [y] representatives from developing countries.
[Z] Representatives from international institutions will participate in the Board as permanent observers. Decision making will be by consensus. [If all efforts to reach a compromise have been exhausted and no agreement has been reached, decisions shall be taken by a two-thirds majority]. The UNFCCC Secretariat will serve as secretariat for the International Climate Financing Board. Parties endorse the further guidelines as set out in attachment D and decision X7/CP.15.
Full text here courtesy of Wikileaks.
Click on image to enlarge
MySpace also has a Law Enforcement Investigators Guide, now available on Wikileaks along with Microsoft's Computer Online Forensics Evidence Extractor.
MOST of us make mistakes and survive. We pick the wrong car to get into, go to the wrong party, kiss the wrong boy or girl, drive when we should have walked, walk when we should have caught a cab, say yes when we should have said no, try things not worth trying, trust someone not worth trusting, wake up in dumb places.
Most of us make mistakes and get away with it. We survive with no awful, lifelong consequences. Not wrapped around a tree at high speed. Not overdosed on the bathroom floor. No fatal outcome.
Robbie Edgar didn't get away with his mistakes. He paid for them. He died recently because of them.
No one publishes obituaries for junkies. That's what his sister Rosey wrote to me. You usually have to be a fine upstanding citizen, sportsman, businessman, dedicated Rotarian or notable academic.
Junkies, really, don't rate. Once we see the word junkie, it sort of makes all the other words in our head disappear. "Junkie" negates everything else. It makes a big, complex, sometimes beautiful, life disappear into one small judgmental word.
"What of someone who did not rise high above his demons, from whom others might feel entitled to withhold their respect? Who will speak to keep his name alive? I will," writes Rosey.
"I will write of Robert Edgar, born 17 May, 1954, to Thomas and Eileen Edgar in Brisbane, precociously interested in the sciences, with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a sharply detailed memory."
He left school early, started an apprenticeship with an optician, but threw that in to come to northern NSW for the Aquarius Festival and the blossoming of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual freedoms promised in the counter-culture.
Robbie embraced transcendental meditation, became vegan, practised yoga, grew organic vegetables, his evenings glowed under kerosene light, he rose early, was fit from long walks, swam with platypus, found glow-worm caves, sought enlightenment.
"He created food gardens at each place: Nimbin, Tuntable Valley and Jiggi," writes Rosey. "He lived by his belief in karma. He did not steal; neither did he drink alcohol nor smoke. He abhorred hard drugs.
"His passions were for food, knowledge meditation and women.
"With the smooth golden skin, a ponytail of long wavy black hair to his waist and a beautiful face, he was a hippie heart-throb."
So what went wrong? One morning Robbie was arrested for possession and supply of drugs – LSD. By his standard, these were not hard drugs. His logic differed from the court's. He was jailed. By the time he was released, he smoked cigarettes, he ate meat and had developed a bad habit that he never came clean of – heroin.
Around this time, he acquired the hepatitis C virus. He continued to live in northern NSW, a junkie. His health suffered from his lifestyle.
But, says Rosey, his humour was resilient and as dry as the dust that swept over Lismore the afternoon of his death. Wicked sarcasm, misquotes, deliberate Spoonerisms: "Time wounds all heals" – were things Rosey loved about her brother. And always pertinent facts, a snippet of history. "Did you know that Pope Leo VIII died of a stroke while committing adultery?" he'd ask.
He made his mark in the community, with well-written and wry articles and letters to various magazines and newspapers.
"He would decimate prejudice with logic and facts," writes Rosey, "and lambast and enlighten with irony and history and humour."
His last article was published posthumously in The Northern Rivers Echo. He wrote, in part: "Greedy people smugglers . . . sneaking unwashed, unwanted aliens with a very different and foreign religion, with superstitious dietary rules and modes of dress . . . incapable of assimilation and as part of a world-wide creed bent on the destruction of our way of life. None but a soft-headed government or left-wing intellectuals would hesitate to intern, in the remotest possible location. Welcoming these illegals and queue-jumpers would open the floodgates to millions of their brethren . . . Ideally, they could all be returned immediately to where they should be waiting, in an orderly manner to be properly and legally processed.
"From a press release from the Swedish Nazi Party, late 1941, in response to the arrival of 90 per cent of Denmark's Jewish population on Sweden's shores, aboard Denmark's fishing fleet.
"Signed Robert Edgar, Lismore."
When Robbie wasn't being Robbie the junkie, he sounds like a bit of a ratbag. Back a couple of years violinist Richard Tognetti, director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, spoke on ratbags and why we need them in society. "The ratbag is one of the essential bacteria in our culture . . . By breathing in ratbaggery, we become less likely to fall to the illness of moral hypocrisy. Ratbags have no moral agenda; they have a hyperactive bullshit detector; they cannot be entrusted with money, for if they are given money, they will use it on valueless things, such as adventures and storytelling; and the ratbag should confound, astonish, query and disrupt, rather than confirm and soothe."
I think of this reading Rosey's words about her brother. "So much knowledge, such a beautiful, perverse, sharp, contradictory mind. Such a placid nature. He was not demonstrative; he never yelled or lost his temper (except that one time when the Nolan's cow gorged on his vegie patch). His laughter was a chuckle, his rage was a scowl, and his retaliation was a roll of the eyes. And grief did not fall in tears but was breathed as a sigh. Except for that one time, two weeks ago when told that he had terminal liver cancer."
Robbie died on September 22 aged 55. I spoke to Rosey the day after she and her father Tom had seen his body for the last time. Grief threatened to shipwreck her. She spoke of the waste of her whip-smart brother and the care the doctors, nurses and other staff of the Lismore Base Hospital and community nurses who cared for him with non-judgmental respect and loving kindness.
Coming home late the other night, I turn the corner near South Bank and there's a young man near the train station, too drunk or off his tree on something to be a threat. He's thin, that dry, papery Yellow Pages-thin of the addicted. I watch him shuffle off through a dirt-filled empty block, his feet breathing dust in the moonrise.
Many families have a Robbie, someone who makes mistakes and doesn't get away with them.
They don't publish obituaries for junkies. Rosey, you're right. They – we – don't usually see past the word "junkie". It's like the moon blocking out the sun in an eclipse. Everything else they are and they have done in their lives is hidden by the dark side. So let's make the exception. Just because we got away with our mistakes, doesn't make us better than anyone. Because we all make mistakes and we are more than our mistakes.
AND ANOTHER THING
Noonan had this piece in her column the following week:
Last week's obituary for Robbie brought such a strong response from readers, who emailed, wrote and phoned, stopped me in cafes and in the street to say thanks to Rosey and her family for sharing his life. Which makes you think that in this crazy world, there are deep pockets of tolerance and gentleness and open-mindedness. "It made me believe a little more," wrote Ben, who spent a year in jail for something stupid when he was 19 and is now a fine upstanding citizen, putting his kids and two foster kids through uni.Source: The Courier Mail
To rectify in some measure this doubtful call by these newspapers here is an excerpt from that editorial of 7 December 2009:
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.
Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.
The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based...........
Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".
It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.
KENEALLY MUST NOT OVERTURN GOOD NATIONAL PARK DECISION
Click image to enlargeThe Sydney Morning Herald from August last year:
Linda Scott, who is No. 2 on Meredith Burgmann's Labor ticket for the September 13 council election, was standing as a Labor candidate for the state seat of Sydney last year when she received $20,000 from Kristina Keneally, the state member for Heffron, to pay for printing. The donation was made days after Ms Keneally's campaign was given $19,955 in six separate donations by the Frank Sartor for Rockdale campaign.
Ms Scott ran on a campaign promising donation transparency and not receiving money from property developers. But the Frank Sartor for Rockdale campaign had received tens of thousands of dollars in property developer donations for a war chest that was disbursed to other Labor candidates.
Documents lodged with the Election Funding Authority show Ms Keneally received the $19,955 from Mr Sartor's campaign in six instalments between March 10 and 19 last year.
On March 20, banking documents show Ms Keneally's campaign paid $20,000 to Jeffries Printing Services to pay for Ms Scott's direct mail expenses.
