When are people going to wake up to the scam of AGW and realise that a CO2 tax is about another derivative scam and financing the UN for their Wold Government.

There are many scientists now that do not get the media attention who say that the evidence stopped supporting the theory back in 1996.Too many people now have their noses in the trough and don't want the truth to be revealed.

"As the distinguished climate advisor, Ross Garnaut warned, climate science uncertainty says things may turn out better or worse than expected but it is naïve to think things will be better."

There is no credible evidence that things are going to get worse.

There is the evidence of three hundred years of economic growth to show us that things are probably going to get better without a carbon tax.

There is the fact that every doomsayer in the last five thousand years has been proved wrong to show us that the global warming doomsayers will probably be proved wrong.

The carbon tax is futile and unnecessary. It is an ideological sop thrown to the Green movement for their continued support. But the Greens will soon abandon any party which continues to work for Australia's economic growth, and when that happens the rest of Australia will abandon the Greens. Then perhaps we can get back to rational government.

Nicole, you have a lot more reading to do. I hear your distress at what you see as our missing the point of the global warming issue, but after four years of close study of the issue, I have to say that I am quite unpersuaded either that disaster awaits us or that the carbon tax is necessary. Ross Garnaut is not 'a distinguished climate advisor', but an economist who simply accepts the IPCC as the fountain of wisdom. It isn't, and 'the consensus of thousands of their scientists' is a great exaggeration. Do some more study. There are hundreds of peer-reviewed articles that do not support the alleged consensus (Google 'NIPCC' and go on from there).

There is nothing special about this issue. What you are seeing is what happens whenever any government proposes to do something for which the evidential base is weak. Our entry into the war in Iraq was much the same.

Nicole should return to the shallow end of the pool, & concentrate on her film making.

Fantasy works better there.

Some people have missed the point, they can-not see the bigger picture. All they want to see is CO2. The world has got to get off oil and coal.
AU has no reason not to move in that direction. Sooner or later it has got to happen, and it will not happen without incentive.
For their own political reasons some think it will happen without any encouragement at all.

"As we saw with the $22 million anti-mining tax campaign, whoever can afford the best advertising agency and largest media buy, will win the debate. "

Rubbish, the government has spent hundreds of millions on AGW advocacy. Advertising, awards, research schemes, reports, studies, commissions, conferences, flying Al Gore down and other lunaries of the AGW world .. all with our money.

Yet it has not won support .. and so many believers think it is a travesty that this is so.

More than 60% of Australians are now skeptical of AGW and the effects of a great big new carbon tax being of any benefit, except to help Swannies "surplus" in 2012/2013.

There is no "debate", the government believer forces simply refuse to come to the table and prefer to post YouTube videos, saturate the ABC and Fairfax with articles in favor and generally berate and lambast anyone who does not agree.

that is not debate

The skeptics would love the opportunity to debate, but alas, the believers prefer to throw stones and pick up grants and cosy jobs while hurling abuse on opinion sites.

I love the ABC debates, where everyone is a believer and agrees with each other .. what scaliwags they are!

If you want to turn this around, have an election and get a mandate, we're a democracy and will wear it .. but the last election was deliberately deceitful on this point.

Maybe we just do not like tricky governments and once gone, trust, in everything is hard to get back for a deceitful government.