Looking at the paper itself.. it rests entirely on an allegedly strong correlation between "annual growth anomaly" (which is the absolute deviation from a cubic spline fitted to the entire data set) and annual cosmic ray flux. So far so good although the choice of a cubic spline is "interesting" (it has a very good fit to the tree ring data, well no shit Sherlock that's the whole point of a cubic spline isn't it).

The resulting 45-year record has a superficial resemblance to cosmic ray data over the same period although I rather suspect that this is dependent on the degree of smoothing specified for the cubic spline.

But now the good bit - the fit between the growth anomaly and cosmic ray flux has a correlation coefficient of 0.39, or if you prefer an "r^2" of 0.15, from 45 points. Alternatively you can (and the authors do) specify it as a probability of fit,which gets a mighty 0.8% (i.e. there is a less than 1% chance that the cosmic rays explain the growth ring data).

Of course the usual suspects that complain the entire field of anthropogenic global change is "junk science" will doubtless be all over this one like a rash. Different standards apply to research claiming an extraterrestrial effect, you see..

Sure, a lot of self-appointed experts are saying "there wasn't enough fuel reduction", plus a few real ones with barrows to push. We'll have to wait for the results of the formal investigation, but so far its looking awfully like those firestorms went straight through absolutely everything: bush that hadn't been burned for years, bush that had had recent fuel reduction, bush that had had recent summer fires, managed plantations, and even farmland with scattered trees. When it hasn't rained for weeks, the temperature has been between 35 and 45 degrees C for much of that time, and then you get 46 to 48 deg C with gale-force winds, EVERYTHING burns. You'll get little argument that fuel reduction burning reduces the impact of wildfire under "normal" summer conditions. But when the gale force winds blow at over 45 deg C (that's over 110 deg F), all bets are off regardless of prior burning.

My biggest gripe was the small incompatibilities between .ppt and ooimpress; when presenting to an audience of hundreds you can't all of a sudden have text flowing off the slide or the .bmp come up black. If I wanted to share something (most everybody else still runs Powerpoint) I had to doublecheck the whole thing prior to doing the slideshow.

Few things irritate me more than a meeting that insists on .ppt, and which won't let you plug your own laptop into the projection system. But there is a solution for this: export your talk to .pdf using a mechanism of your choice (embedding all fonts of course), and display it full-screen in Adobe Viewer. I've seen the occasional startled-looking convention centre IT drone when I've made this request, but even the most blinkered of them are able to accommodate it.

OK so you don't get to use any movies this way, or animated builds, but you can at least build text in by using multiple pages which differ only by a single bullet point if you are that way inclined (Apple's Keynote can build a .pdf in this form automatically, presumably other presentation applications can as well). And on the plus side you get, pure, guaranteed cross-platform compatibility - something powerpoint has never been able to do even between different versions of MS windows.