Will victory really help? The can-do Prime Minister Julia Gillard appears happy enough to have got her mining tax legislation through the Parliament but it by no means marks the end of the problems involved in actually getting the planned for money.

The Liberal controlled state governments of Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and, after Saturday, Queensland are clearly going to be obstructionist by not agreeing to keep their mining royalties at their existing level.

We look set for another of those old fashioned states rights battles as the Commonwealth threatens to reduce GST payments by the same amount as anything the states raise from increased royalties.

Changing the graph. A key feature of the argument by the climate sceptics that the world has not really got warmer since 1998 has been the data provided by the UK Met Office’s Hadley/CRU (Climatic Research Unit) with its Temperature dataset (HadCRUT). The figures showed that in no year was the 1998 temperature exceeded.

Now things have changed with the Climatic Research Unit releasing new estimates of the world’s temperatures that adjusts the global temperature to put a greater emphasis on temperatures from the Arctic. No longer is 1998 the hottest year on record. It has been (slightly) edged out by 2010 and 2005.

As the UK Telegraph reports:

Between 1998 and 2010, temperatures rose by 0.11C, 0.04C more than previously estimated.

The new data set also shifts around the hottest years on record, so that the new temperature series, known as HadCRUT4, is more in line with other global records held by NASA and NOAA in the US. The American series had already added Arctic temperatures from extrapolated information.

Before it was thought the hottest years were 1998 followed by 2010, 2005, 2003 and 2002. The updated series puts 2010 as the hottest year on record followed by 2005, 1998, 2003 and 2006.

The main conclusions of the new temperature series remains the same – thatoverall warming since 1850 has been around 0.75C and the 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the last 14 year

In line with the market. The Crikey Queensland election indicator this morning givers the Liberal National Party a 94% chance of winning on Saturday and the entrants in our Election Tipping contests are pretty much in agreement. Those predicting a Labor win number just seven per cent with the LNP winning outright favoured by 85% and the remaining 8% of predictions having the LNP as the largest party but short of an absolute majority.

When it comes to the seat of who will win the seat of Ashgrove, the ALP’s Kate Jones is still fancied to beat Campbell Newman but entries yesterday went strongly to Campbell Newman.
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Some news and views noted along the way.