All I know about climate change is that we will be harangued about it more than ever by Turnbull, Julie Bishop-Rudd and Greg Hunt. We will be signed up to ridiculous agreements in Paris, and our cost of living will soar as our money is siphoned off to the Third World for wacky ideas and schemes that will never eventuate; and the climate will continue to do what it will, no matter what.

hottest year on record! How else do you keep the funding going. And the Greens want all tax breaks for religion axed whiloe pushing this fairytale. Certainly rationality has dimished as secular dogmas take hold. Thank God Tony was able to educate Turnbull on the stupidity of sucking up to the UN.

Of course the climate debate is political! And it's precisely because the protagonists have divided along political lines that we need to be careful. In political debates we exaggerate, to make a point, to win support, to vent our fervour. Exaggeration is certainly a feature of public discussion of climate. Environmentalists, to use a shorthand term, exaggerate the impact of climate change and they exaggerate how readily fossil fuels can be replaced by renewable energy. They lose credibility as a result of their exaggerations. So why do we need to be careful? Because the physics of the atmosphere tells us that all that extra carbon dioxide we are generating is very likely to affect our climate. It's pretty old science and it remains respectable. Just because it has probably been exaggerated ought not lead us to discard it completely. I am genuinely concerned that exaggeration and alarmism have actually created a risk of long term apathy regarding climate change. I don't wish to exaggerate that risk or the effect it might have but one day it may need to be dealt with.

Yet another article about climate change from someone who doesn't understand it!

When people say they want to stop climate change, it doesn't mean they want to stop the climate from changing; it means they want to stop global warming. But the fossil fuel industry successfully campaigned to get everyone to refer to global warming as "climate change" because it sounded less alarming. Part of the reason they succeeded is that global warming is expected to (by altering ocean currents) cause cooling in some areas, so in many cases "climate change" is the more accurate term. But not in this case.

Computer modelling shows that global warming will cause an increase in the frequency and severity of El Niño events.

And yes, way back in geological time our planet has been hotter. And that is thought to have been the cause of mass extinction events. We want to avoid causing another one.

Ice melt is accelerating and ocean temperature continue to rise and all the time there is a side that dismiss any of it as not happening. Another lot say man is not responsible for global change. At least they recognize change, just not caused by man.

All it is doing is delaying any useful attempts at changing our ways, and acting against scientific proof of to much Co2 in the atmosphere.

The longer it is delayed the more permafrost is thawing and adding to the amount of Co2 escaping to the atmosphere.

Personally I think the world had been compromised with the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere 20 years ago. I doubt if it can ever be subdued enough to cause a normalization of weather, before the world has been disrupted enough to cause un-repairable damage on millions of fronts at the same time. I don’t believe it will take hundreds of years to come about either. Another 30-40 years will see big big changes happening.

Ice melt in Greenland is enough to raise sea level’s by 6 meters. The melt is bigger every year.

Thank you, Don for another most informative article.
Aidan’s boorish comment that the article is from someone who does not understand climate change is rich, coming from someone who has demonstrated their ignorance by expressing a belief in “acidification of oceans”. Remember, Aiden, when I picked you up on that, you tried to defend it. As a proven dunce, you now cast aspersions on the ability of someone who has, time and again, demonstrated his understanding of the murky depths of climate fraud.
doog seems to be unaware that there is no science to show any measurable human effect on climate, making his post unsupported nonsense.