bushbred "Certainly what matters with too many success stories, is making personal fortunes only to be used in raping the earth rather than tending it"

Who appointed you an authority to judge the actions of others?

"Fortunes, however, so much hungered for in today's world are mostly only made from ruining such beauty with quarry economies, such investors not daring to believe that such money-making might run out."

Yes, lithium is a resource... darn lucky our forefathers did not have a use for it... ah well.. at least there is still a bit of lapis lazuli left too.

Of course, the smart money is in recycling these days....Smorgens seem to be surviving off "scraps"

Mr Aitkin
The most recent study reported on this week ,and thus very post climate gate (i.e very meticulous in methodology) is that the climate is warming.
The long term oscillation between warmer /wetter and cooler/dry periods is real enough and might to some degree ameliorate the effects of increased CO2.
We do seem to be at the end of a few thousand years of a relatively warm and wet period in Australia's history. Whilst Australia 20 thousand years ago was mostly desert it was also cold/dry -there were glaciers in the Australian alps.

Personally I doubt that effective action is possible , and thus we perhaps should be building 'life boats'. Food supplies in a world as populous as is projected could become a very real problem even if the effects are relatively mild.
As to percentages I would have to look that up- I have no claim to be an 'data base'.

“Fatefully, as it would turn out, Minchin does not believe in human induced climate change.”

If that is supposed to mean that Minchin has been proved wrong, it doesn’t work; the global warming hysterics haven’t managed to prove that climate-change is human induced – they just say it is.

I am very sorry that Minchin is leaving politics; there are far too few genuine conservatives like him in the Liberal party to provide a healthy alternative to the ALP/union Red Flag. I am even sorrier that Turnbull changed his mind and is staying on: the man is in the wrong party, as shown by his approval of Rudd’s silly sorry business, and his total sell-out on the Rudd carbon tax that now has been dropped by Rudd’s successor. Getting kicked out by one vote has the same effect as being unanimously dumped, and the Liberals now have a leader with some backbone – something they didn’t have with Turnbull, and would not have had with the other weak wet who thought he would get the job eventually, Joe Hockey.

David Donovan needs to get a hobby or something to fill in his time. It’s hard to know why he would write 3 pages commentating on a totally uninteresting fight between two politicians; unless, of course, he is getting in on the very tail end of the pathetic attempts by so many commentators to excuse the Gillard/Union coup against Rudd by saying “the others (the Liberals) do it too, nah nah na nah nah!”

Bumph like this is taking our minds off what we should really contemplating - the horrendous situation we will face over the next 3 years if Liberal or Labor voters give their second preferences to the Greens. Irrespective of who forms a government, they will be stymied by the Greens if they get the balance of power in the Senate. And, given that many voters are now talking about venting their rage against both major parties, we could be in for some nasty suprises in the lower house as well.

Pedestrian,

"The most recent study reported on this week...", eh? All of the old reports said the same thing, and the actual climatic events proved them wrong.

Food supplies are already a problem, but not because of climate change. There are simply too many people on the planet.

And, in Australia, we have people talking about climate change, as you are, but they are still plumping for larger populations.

Climate change is the least of our worries. Population increase is the 'big one' that will see huge numbers of people starving to death well before this century is over.

Leigh -
It Is supposed to be a Liberal/conservative party ; Nick was too clever by half. Whilst the leadership of the Greens are truly awful airheads; Conrads phrase: 'the exasperated vanity of ignorance' sums them up perfectly.
A lot of the growth in the green vote is coming from disaffected liberals.
If John Howard had won the last election we would by now have a carbon scheme in place.

Mr Atkin - 'go for it'. The actual events don't, to my eye, look too promising, time will tell.

Humans are often little more than very clever and very destructive monkeys