I couldn't have said it better myself GYM-FISH. I thought the original opinion flippant to say the least. If everyone had that attitude there would be absolutely no leadership in this world of ours. So many people say "what difference can Australia make" I have a friend in England that says exactly the same thing about the UK. Doing the right thing, at least gives a moral imperative. Doing nothing encourages the opposite and then nothing will get done. The United Nations might be somewhat ineffective, but it does give us a forum for debate and world opinion will eventually create change if enough countries stand up to be counted. No one wants sactions placed on them.

This article is a waste of space and an insult to OLO publishers and readers and simply not worth further comment

Thank you Mark.

It's so unusual to see some commonsense and an ability to critically examine the IPCC's claims. Most people simply repeat the opinions of others regardless of how unsubstantiated they might be.

Are you aware of the research into solar activity that appears to be finding quite good correlations with the earth's temperature? The IPCC's latest report couldn't even manage a page of comment about it.

Are you also aware that tropospheric temperature is showing a quite different trend after the influences of volcanic activity and El Nino (and La Nina) events are removed? The IPCC ignored the qualification made by Gray in a paper last year in "Energy & Environment" and claimed that research showed similar trends.

The IPCC reports are biased and the summaries are political documents with the nuances of uncertainties played down or removed. Even the panel's name is a distortion - it should be Intergovernmental Panel on man-made Climate Change because its charter requires that it unvestigate any human influence on climate and the risk that such influence imposes.

I'm pleased to see that someone has the testicular apparatus to critically review the situation.

Well done Mark and Snowman.

Its about time people paid more attention to what the IPCC documents are portraying. How anyone can take it seriously when the IPCC authers themselves publish a graph with such large elements of the climate science being described by them, as having such a low rate of LOSU just beggars belief.

But to use this lack of knowledge to try and credibly say what the predicted temperatures are likely to be in 100 years time, based upon computer based models is fairy land stuff.

To try and stiffen it up with a whole pile of instances where they can observe the effects of warming ( caused by whatever) and not include all the other data where there is contrary evidence is fraud.

We are of course left with the data from places like the River Tornio in Finland, and not to mention how the Modtrans 3 model behaves at the top of the atmosphere when increasing levels of CO2 are injected

I have been very concerned about Global Warming for a while now.
But here's the thing. Global warming might be one reason to invest in renewables... but the other reason might be far, far more sinister and urgent.

We are running out of everything!
Not just "peak oil" which is basically the last oil crisis, which the ABC is basically announcing in 3 weeks (Thursday 25 May, 8:30... "Crude").

Not just "peak gas" which is running out of the world's cheap, easy to get to gas and starting to draw down on the harder to get to gas... a few years after peak oil. (Makes sense, kind of the similar fields and processes and reserves.)

But more evidence is coming out of the scandalous misrepresentation of the state of King Coal. We are running out of the cheap coal!

2 reports have just in the last month highlighted some VERY nasty reporting errors on coal. People keep quoting 600 years of coal, without counting how old those studies were and what exponential growth has done to coal consumption in the meantime. Peak coal could be here in about 20 years, and we are not ready.

http://globalpublicmedia.com/heinberg_coals_future_in_doubt

Solar thermal power offers the prospect of continuous electricity at a competitive cost with coal, as well as fresh water as a byproduct. Biomass which is currently discarded could meet much of our needs were technology developed to convert it to a usable form. Numerous pyrolytic and enzymatic processes are being investigated currently.

Were Australia to make technological progress in these areas the impact would be world wide. Mark Lawson chooses to see action on climate change as a pointless economic impediment. The reality is that climate change presents technical challenges which hold the prospect for considerably advancing humanity.