for Geoff Davies:

What a lofty tone! One does not need to do scientific work oneself in order to be able to critically assess the work of those who have done so. All scientific papers are blends of argument, inference and data, and those who judge proposals for funding, for example, have to use their intellectual acumen to see what this or that proposal is about. This happens all round the world, all the time.

As I have suggested elsewhere (and probably also on OLO) what is at the heart of this issue is the capacity of those who uphold the AGW orthodoxy to show how the AGW argument must explain whatever current warming has occurred, when there is abundant evidence that the world has undergone periods of warming and cooling in the past, at times when human beings can hardly have been responsible. How much of the present warming, cooling or stasis is due to natural forces (ie those we can point to but can't wholly explain), and how much is due to the burning of fossil fuels? GCM models do not and cannot do this, because they involve far too many assumptions. These are central questions, and they are simply avoided.

And your claim that papers are routinely sent to those who disagree is breathtaking! Jones et al made it quite clear that they were prepared to denounce editors and editorial boards who dared either to send their papers to critics, or to not let them (Jones et al) rule on the worth of their critics. You will have to better than this. If what happened at CRU, and by inference, what happened in the design of the IPCC reports was not conspiratorial, then, in terms of good science, it was simply scandalous.

Someone please correct me if I've got it wrong:

* the CSIRO/BOM says that temperatures have gone up across Australia by an average of 0.7 degrees C in fifty years. In some parts, they have risen by as much as 2 degrees C, which suggests that in other parts, they have risen by something less than 0.7 degrees C;

* sea-levels have risen by 5 cm (2 inches) in the south-east, and by 10 cm (4 inches) in the north and west, in the last fifty years, half due to glacier/Antarctic/Greenland meltwater, half due to ocean-water thermal expansion.

Not exactly catastrophic.

Meanwhile, clear-felling in Queensland continues, as does felling of Indonesian, Brazilian etc. rain-forests, removing some of the means to take CO2 out of the atmosphere.

I'll be handing election material out for the Greens on Saturday here in Adelaide, but I'm more concerned about air pollution, water pollution and misuse, environmental degradation generally, the slowness/non-existence of any infrastructural programs to mass-plant plantations of non-firewood trees, especially in the north now that there is more rainfall up there, and to develop renewable alternative energy sources, including hot rocks and algal farms. So there is a hell of a lot that can be done instead of getting one's rocks off by proclaiming imminent doom and retreating to a high-ground cave, just yet. So I guess I'm a Green Sceptic :)

Oh yes, and Professor Jones has suggested that world temperatures have not risen for fifteen years. Yes ? No ?

By the way (and perhaps I've got this wrong too) the annual amount of melt-water from Greenland is about as much as the water coming down from Queensland to its rightful place in South Australia at the moment. Are there any data on how much Greenland melt-water would have run-off in a 'normal' year - because presumably there would always be some, otherwise Greenland would keep growing out to Iceland.

Did anyone watch Q&A this week?

Of those that did, do you have any comments about Waleed Aly’s explanation for ‘climate change’ pseudo-scepticism in terms of neo-conservatism or neo-liberalism?

Indeed, the debate “becomes an ideological contest for people who are of that persuasion, because the minute they accept the reality of (human induced) climate change, it destroys the idea that the market is our guiding philosophy ... so they are forced, essentially, to start from a position that says, well, we need to deny this ...”

Waleed Aly (Quarterly Essay 37: On the Future of Conservatism: Where the Right Went Wrong) suggests that neoconservative foreign policies and neoliberal economics have been discredited, and are split on climate change.

The “debate” is not about the science, despite rambunctious claims to the contrary. Rather, it is a bun-fight about political ideology - demonstrated at Copenhagen and being witnessed here between Tony Abbott's 'old school', Rudd's centrists, the Green hardliners, and Senator Fielding's faith.

In other words - no matter how well the science is communicated, there will always be intransigence to accept it.

Why do we still have articles like this, attempting to back long discredited views on this topic, and asserting that Kyoto was anything but a flawed, baseless protocol from its very inception?

While superficially the contest is about PR, the underlying basis, the corruption of scientists and the media, to sell the baseless AGW scam, is executed by the experts in corruption, the UN.

Corruption, as practised by that body, is a highly developed art.

The media has been almost totally corrupted. Until recently, the deniers of science, the IPCC, and Gore, were winning. The realists could not gain traction.

One public example of UN activity was the hot air fest at Bali in 2007. All realists were excluded, apart from Lord Monckton, who gained access with great difficulty, and 12,500 people were wined dined and lied to by the UN, to gain their unwitting support of AGW, the greatest attempted fraud in history.

Ban Ki-moon’s speech was based on predictions made in 2003, by the IPCC, already proven wrong in the real world.

The corruptees were given prepackaged press releases, full of nonsense which they could spread with no effort.

They did not know that they had been corrupted, and it has probably only recently dawned on the Climategate scientists, like Phil Jones.

Even the mendacious IPCC does not assert that global warming is the result of human emissions. Its pathetic, weasel, assertion is that it is “very likely”.

The truth is that there is no scientific backing for assertion of AGW, despite billions spent on research, in futile attempts to prove it.

Don Aitkin,

First you admit that you do not do scientific work yourself, then say "Nature is peer-reviewed, but....without all the usual apparatus". Have you any experience publishing in this journal or anywhere else? Please explain to us your understanding of 'usual apparatus' you speak of?

Second, Geoff Davies is correct in stating that "It is normal, if annoying, in science peer review, for papers to be sent to those who disagree". This is my experience with the review process. To state one example and suggest that this is common thought the peer-review process is inaccurate.