Global Warming
ZALI Grace claims that climate change is real, (The Examiner, November 25) and in this she is correct. Climate change has always been present on this planet, and always will be, with mankind powerless to influence it to any significant degree.
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Scientific method has a requirement that after a hypothesis has been established it must then withstand all possible efforts to disprove it, before it becomes scientific fact. In the current discussions over climate change/global warming, massive amounts have been spent to verify the hypothesis and nothing spent to disprove it, so the science is anything but established.
Zali Grace claims that over the past five years, half of the Antarctic ice has melted. The heavily biased, pro-climate change organization, National Snow and Ice Data Center publishes photos of the Antarctic ice each day and currently the amount of ice present is slightly above the average for the period 1978 to now. But the average used is meaningless and obviously much too high, excluding, as it does, the 400-year period of the Maunder Minimum. To have any meaning average global temperatures would need to be taken over a few centuries at a minimum.
The major factor in global warming/climate change is solar activity, as shown by the Maunder Minimum in the past and by current NASA reports that the polar ice caps on Mars are also melting. These facts are invariably ignored by promoters of the global warming hoax.
M. Chugg, Prospect.
Wood Industry
ONE OF Tasmania’s major woodchip exporters has urged the state government to reconsider opening up 357,000 hectares of future potential production forests (The Examiner, November 19). You mean to say they actually want to woodchip high conservation forests for fast buck? Limit woodchipping to plantation timber only. Resources Minister Guy Barnett said that without the extra supply Forestry Tasmania could not meet the industry’s woodchip supply. Stop cutting off small sawmillers livelihood. Stop axing jobs.
A. R. Trounson, Needles.
Euthanasia
MICK Leppard dismisses the idea of palliative care as an alternative to euthanasia because our Liberal state government can’t operate ordinary hospitals successfully (The Examiner, November 23).
Both sides of politics have not provided adequate palliative care services. Back in 2004, a University of Wollongong report into palliative care in Tasmania concluded that palliative care service was currently servicing about 52 per cent of estimated need.
This must mean that some terminally ill people are suffering unnecessarily. Their symptoms could have been treated if the government had provided more palliative care funding. Mick Leppard seems to be arguing that we should just accept this and have voluntary euthanasia.
But if terminally ill people do not have the option of palliative care because our politicians are too stingy, and the only way they can alleviate their suffering is through euthanasia, they do not really have a choice.
The euthanasia debate needs to distinguish between untreatable suffering and unnecessary suffering. Whenever I read about someone still dying in pain, I wonder if this was really a legitimate case for euthanasia, where no amount of palliative care and pain control could have alleviated their suffering, or were they actually victims of government policy.
If euthanasia supporters are truly motivated by compassion and dignity, they should insist that all terminally ill people deserve access to palliative care before the drastic and potentially socially risky option of euthanasia is considered. I wonder how many terminally ill Tasmanians suffered because of inadequate palliative care funding while Lara Giddings was health minister.