Even to a casual observer it must seem that weather dynamics are changing. On New Year's day I drove through a snow flurry when a cloudless 35C might have been more likely. The 'system' has other unpredictable turns such as the economy which only a year ago was supposed to be on a runaway boom. Therefore intuitively a climate flip seems quite plausible. If the current cool spell continues it might lead to calls for more coal burning not less. In effect that is what we have got since Australia is building more coal export capacity and brown coal fired electricity producers have been been granted immunity from serious emissions cuts. I think we may have to be traumatised before seriously thinking of genuine action by which time the climate horse may have bolted. Happily the world is running out of fossil fuels and Australia will be leaned on to share its reserves with others. Whether that will arrive too late is something we will find out.

It is 2009 and the flat earth society are still preaching doom and gloom when it comes to climate change. A change in climate will come when/if Israel is nuked by its enemies. Many of the professional protesters are now giving climate change a rest while they protest in favour of the terrorist (Hamas). The whole gw crap was a hoax from the start. It is a pity so many scientist took the bait fearing that any sensible debate might affect their funding and jobs. They seem as credible as the economist who insisted we were in for a 50 year boom and then seeing people's superannuation halved in 6 weeks. Sooner or later people will stop listening to the earth worshipers.

Runner, why do you continually defy God?

You keep telling us the planet is His creation and deny that humanity is adversely impacting it. Sorry, but you just appear to be a misinformed hypocrite.

"Denial" of AGW is now "defying god"?

AGW as a religion - right here on OLO.

Ah Q&A “Runner, why do you continually defy God?”

Of course, when it comes to God and Science, one cannot go past Galileo and the Papists demand he denounce his theory of the earth orbiting the sun.

Now here is Q&A denouncing someones "heresy" for not worshipping AGW.

From the Article “The events I have described may not happen. The weather system may not flip over to a dead sea system. In which case there will be an economic cost in avoiding an event that was not going to happen anyway.”

And then came the conceited deception

“The up side to that is that we will all live in a cleaner healthier world and we will never know if it would have happened or not. If it does flip it will not take years, it will happen as an event.”

At what price?

Well

“It comes down to risk management. What is the risk against the cost?”

“My vote is that the risks are far too high to worry about the cost,"

And my vote is otherwise.

“Risk management” is like any other form of “insurance”, there becomes a point at which the insurance premium outweighs the insurable risk and when governments are supposedly managing the risk on our behalf, I am even more suspicious of the real reason for the level of premiums being paid, look at any other government monopoly to see how likely corruption is going to occur.

Only when we start to talk about “probable’s”, should we start to consider “premiums”

Until then, all things are possible, including the view that the whole thing is a huge scam

And just because huge scams (like Divine Right of Kings and the Authority of the Pope) have successfully been pulled off before, it makes no sense to sign up to this one now.

Leaving people with the right to exercise their own discretion is the better way to proceed, rather than thinking that any benefit is ever going to come from governments or worse the UN (the governments supposed government)

it is simply

Socialism by Stealth

An excellent article David. I believe nature has a track record of making dramatic changes to reach a new equilibrium. Two alarming trends are the rapid rate of polar ice erosion threatening the movement of major ocean currents and the huge areas of melting tundra permafrost that is releasing billions of tons of methane. I anticipate the weather flip will occur within 20 years unless substantial cuts occur to greenhouse gasses in the next 10 years.

Whilst the majority of Australians would share your views on good risk management to avoid catestrophic consequences of climate change, the leaders of our major political parties continue to serve powerful sectional interests which have locked us into increased coal exports, excessively generous assistance to gross polluters and little more than token support for renewables.

It's a certainty that if other countries took the same approach as Rudd, our planet will accellerate to 550ppm CO2, and a 3 degree plus in warming that will eventually trigger several disasterous feed-back loops leading to mass extinctions and a decimation of human kind.

The right risk management in 2009 may come in the environmental and public investment decisions of President Obama and with the strong support from other intelligent and couragous leaders who appreciate the urgency of quick action to re-engineer the way we use energy.
Rudd and Turnbull are clearly not up to the diabolical challenges and should be replaced with leaders that we can be proud of.