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.