May I suggest to any of you who still believe in the worst crisis ever, that being climate change, to act like you believe it is real. Shouldn't you be screaming as scientists are silent when Obama fails to mention the crisis in his state of the union speech? Shouldn't you AND the scientists be screaming after all American IPCC research funding was pulled? Shouldn’t you as a climate crisis believer be the least bit concerned you can no longer expect voters to vote yes to taxing the air to make the weather colder? The new denier is someone who doesn’t know that the majority vote now is “former believer”. Not planet haters, just responsible former believers who want responsible stewardship of the planet, not threatening our children with climate death threats. We are above is fear mongering. Leave the fear mongering and lying to the neocons.
You can condemn your own kids to a CO2 death but how spineless is that compared to acting like it's a real danger to all of us and march in the streets with your SAVE THE PLANET sign like a real planet lover.

Thanks Bob, when are we going to see you in a public debate with the Climate Change Committee? Please.

I keep seeing the reference to announcements by Cameron in the UK (also mentioned in Bob’s article) and his raising the stakes in the race for emissions cuts. Other than The Australian this week, no other reports seem to mention the most important part of this policy announcement. Cameron’s policy has a “sunset clause” through a review in 2014. In the event that the EU members have failed to match the UK’s emissions cuts, Cameron will pull down the EU’s house of carbon.

This satisfies Clegg’s support base on the one hand, leaves Cameron with his exit plan from both the CO2 debacle and possibly from EU sovereignty. It also puts the real “acid” on the EU in general and Germany in particular. All Merkel has to do now is replace 22% of her energy from nuclear with clean base load energy and top that all up to Cameron’s target by 2014. Best of luck.

I think Merkel has just put the finishing touches to Cameron’s exit plan and potentially ended Germany’s supremacy as an industrial giant. What was it we speculated, emissions taxes are taxes on democracy and capitalism?

And Australia is trying to jump in when the rest are jumping out. I guess someone can make sense of this but I can’t.

Keep up the good work Bob.

When will we see the paid flacks of the big polluters, holding up a piece of paper and saying” Peace in our time”?
The rest of us are supposed to ignore the fact that you cannot appease Global warming and hope it will go away.

Bob Carter throws plenty of attractive bait for the sceptical reader. His doubts about job creation via ‘green’ energy, about the general economic impact of carbon pricing, about the timing of Australian entry into carbon taxing, about the reliability of peer review; his criticisms of loose or smart marketing language (carbon dioxide dubbed a ‘pollutant’, ‘carbon’ as shorthand for carbon dioxide); even his opinion that we are just seeing the normal ebb and flow of climate over geological time. These each might have merit as debating points. I know they help Bob in his own certainty that carbon dioxide is not going to create climate problems. I wish he was right. I am far from convinced.

Bob makes some bad blunders. Primarily he ignores the starting point for any scientific scepticism, which is the unequivocal knowledge that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and its concentration is increasing. My high school chemistry textbook (Partington’s Inorganic Chemistry if you must know) warned me about this 60 years ago. Carbon dioxide is rising; the temperature is rising; if it quacks like a duck.…. Bob doesn’t even bother to try to dissociate the absolutely certain rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fossil fuel combustion, as some shock jocks seem to be doing.

Of course carbon dioxide is essential to life. Of course we breathe it out as a product of our biological energy processes. Of course it’s the building block of all plant life. These facts are irrelevant to the issue of whether its increasing concentration could affect climate.

As for the apparent flattening in rate of global temperature increase since 1998, isn’t this exactly what someone who understands what a randomly fluctuating parameter superimposed on a steady change would expect to see? And if that’s not what Bob would expect then he falls short as a scientist.

I repeat, I wish Bob was right, because cutting carbon dioxide emissions is not going to be as easy and cheap as most Australians seem to believe. But he’ll need a lot better arguments to convince me

"carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Rather, it is an environmentally beneficial trace gas that underpins plant photosynthesis, and therefore most planetary food chains"

This author is presumably unable to accept that two things could possibly both be true, ie
(1) CO2 underpins plant photosynthesis etc, as he says
(2) it has a "greenhouse" effect, and thus warms the earth, and too much of it warms the earth too much

Is his brain too small to fit both of these concepts side-by-side?

Or does he have a different idea of the meaning of "pollutant" from the rest of us? (In which case, he should say so).

Tombee - come now, surely you've been in the debate long enough to repeat this sort of stuff.

"Primarily he ignores the starting point for any scientific scepticism, which is the unequivocal knowledge that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and its concentration is increasing."

Yes, that's completely right, but as you should know by now its mostly irrelevent. The actual warming CO2 causes in the atmosphere is well known. If concentrations double then its a tad over 1 degree - if the atmosphere is treated a pile of air. I've repeated the reference in the journal Nature until I'm tired of it. The argument has always been over the FEEDBACKS caused by that initial warming.

So you understand, CO2 warming + feedbacks = forecast warming. There have been strong suggestions that the feedback is negative, rather than strongly positive as the IPCC suggests. However, there is, in fact, very little direct evidence on the feedback one way or another.

You also face the problem that the point at which CO2 concentrations were originally forecast to double, 2100, may well be out by many decades..

Time to update.