An essential article, Viv. Needed to be said. Well done.

And it highlights the sophistry of industry and politicians. Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull alway come to mind in that context.

thanks Viv. You summed it up well.

The only things dumb and on display as such, are the article and it's numbskull Author!

Who gives a rats about what the mining companies want or (The Greens, be sure to wash them thoroughly first) mine?

What's important, is what we the people want!

Cheap power, job security, irrigated blooming deserts and a viable future for our kids!

Yet here he is, focusing on tax avoiding, profit repatriating mining companies, almost as if he believed we couldn't manage much without them and their (too clever by half) counterproductive practises!
Alan B.

Viv's other articles read like a Who's who? of denialist myths. These are regurgitated memes, not science, and do the rounds in all the standard, run-of-the-mill denier echo-chambers.

EG:
Cosmic cycles, not carbon dioxide, control climate

D'uh!

The sun has been in a cooling phase since the 1980's yet the Earth keeps getting hotter
https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm

Then Viv is entirely disingenous by debunking Al Gore's 'apparent' claim that CO2 caused the ice-age cycle. But any good climatologist will tell you his graphic was an over-simplification. Climatologists KNOW about Milankovitch cycles and their role in TRIGGERING an "ice-age", but because the general public don't know much climate science Denialist's trot out Milankovitch cycles and try to impress the general public with their vast knowledge. The lie here is that climatologists are less informed than the denialist!

1. Climate scientists have always known this! Al Gore over-simplified a rather complex scientific story, but any good climate journal knows about Milankovitch cycles
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles

Watch fantastic animations of them at 'Climate Crock of the Week'.
[MEDIA=youtube]8nrvrkVBt24[/MEDIA]

2. Climate science was *never* based on *just* that graph, but on the demonstrable physics of CO2 as a heat-trapper. Physicists measure CO2's heat trapping properties with a Fourier device. It's the same result, every time. It's an established fact, like the boiling point of water or melting point of various metals. It's old science, something you look up in a book rather than bothering to test again and again, reinventing the wheel. The rest is maths. Calculate how much CO2 was in the air before the Industrial Revolution, and then measure how much extra we've dumped into the atmosphere now, and the difference shows how much extra heat is trapped. The next bit is the tricky part of measuring where that heat *goes* and how it interacts with other systems on the earth (but that's another story)

.... continued....

3. But there's a problem with Milankovitch cycles: they don't account for all the temperature changes we observe in the ice-core records! It turns out that if Milankovitch cycles are the 'trigger' that starts an ice-age, the expanding ice-sheets lock CO2 underground cooling the world further, creating a cooling feedback. The final result? Trapped CO2 causes 40% of the temperature drop in an ice age. (See the 2nd paragraph, column 2 of page 144).
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1990/1990_Lorius_etal.pdf

The 'wobbles' start it, but CO2 feedbacks kick it along even further. In other words, the ice ages DO illustrate what a powerful forcing CO2 is, even though the 'trigger' was something else. Our fossil-fuel based lifestyle is the 'trigger' in this case, and CO2 is rising, trapping heat according to its demonstrable Radiative Forcing effect, demonstrated in any good physics lab on the planet. Heck, even Mythbusters has proved what CO2 can do in practical experiments!

Mythbusters: 3 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPRd5GT0v0I

Watch the candle at 90 seconds in! The candle heat demonstration only goes for a minute. (The rest of the video is great, and demonstrates the accuracy of today's climate models).
http://climatecrocks.com/2009/07/25/this-years-model/

4. Milankovitch cycles are not going to do cool the planet again for the next 50,000 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#/media/File:InsolationSummerSolstice65N.png
The blue dot in the middle is where we are, and each box represents 100,000 years.

From this more detailed perspective Al Gore was almost right! The CO2 *did* account for the *eventual* extremes of temperature we see at the depths of a bad Ice Age, and the release of the CO2 accounts for the much warmer temperatures between Ice Ages. But a Denialist will never tell you all this. They just ask "How can CO2 affect climate when it RESPONDS to changes in temperature!" They leave out half the story. As always.