Meanwhile, the human population continues to grow rapidly and we as a species continue to get more and more out of balance with our life-support systems, to the great detriment of many other species and to our future wellbeing.

Where's the great debate or the great remediation effort on this great issue??

Why are we getting so hung up on climate change, which really is just one aspect of this greater problem?

How on earth can we still be worshipping a paradigm of rapid continuous growth and not be putting maximum effort into not only halting population growth but sending it into significant negative growth with great urgency, among other things.

Those who knock anthropogenic climate change have two great problems:

When faced with enormous uncertainty about something that has absolutely humungus potential consequences, we should be erring on the side of caution, and NOT spinning the silly line that we should do nothing until AGW is proven to be true and the consequences are proven to be significant.

And secondly, they are propping up the crazy business-as-usual continuous expansion paradigm, which is WAY past its use-by date.

Climate sceptics and denialists might gain a bit of credibility if they were seen to be addressing some of the other huge aspects of the global human imbalance with the environment and resource base. But they don't do this, do they. They just sit back and say; "she'll be right mate". Yeah, We'll be fine with 9 million people and a much greater rate of atmospheric carbon emissions, and all the rest of the huge and rapidly increasing human impacts on this planet's biosphere.

Just crackers!

Let's deal with climate change as though it is at the serious end of the spectrum of potential consequences. And for goodness sake, let's deal with the continuous human expansion issue with all the collective global effort that we can muster.

Funny how denialists keep repeating "no warming since 1998", when that (misleading) claim relies on the data set they love to hate, the global temperature estimates of the Hadley Centre of the BMO. See http://betternature.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/global-cooling-over/

The author needs to learn a bit more physics. A three-kilometer-thick ice sheet can lose a lot of ice from its interior because the entire ice sheet tends to spread and thin, even if it sits in a shallow basin. As the edges fall off, the resistance to interior spreading decreases. The only effect of the basin would be to slow the loss of the last 10-20% of the sheet.

For Greenland that means >80% of 7 meters = >5.6 meters of sea level rise, still far too much.

The West Antarctic sheet is not sitting in a basin, it is grounded below sea level. As it thins it would just float off. So all 7 meters of potential rise is fully available.

And you can't make conclusions about global effects by looking at a few locations.

Yes Ludwig I agree.

There was an essay titled Populate and Perish? in the OZ on Monday by Oliver Hartwich which trotted out the usual line re how those who argue for limits to growth of the human population, and everything else, are curmudgeonly anti-human.

Populate and Perish being the outcome of Oliver's "research" project into the top. As though anyone at the CIS would or could publish anything promoting a curb on human hubris.

Perhaps, you climate worriers should wonder why your movement needed to be so devious and deceitful (with manipulating and losing important data, hockey stick fiasco,the highly suspect CRU emails, adjusting weather station data in addition to hundreds of others instances),if the science was so straightforward?

It is clear that the constant fear mongering has backfired and the likes of Ian Plimer, who you berate as a 'denier', will be considered one of the few who could see the Science through the ideology.

Your arguments are directed toward generating an overwhelming fear of the 'world getting out of control' and that we westerners must pay vast amounts of money to fix it. Yet the Chinese are allowed to pour as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they like 'to catch up'?!
That's a smart idea,(not) it even contravenes your own theories.

Let's all sit back and watch as the 'greatest moral issue of the 21st century' is slowly consigned to the scrapheap of historical oddities and wait for the next bit of lunacy from the far Left and their financial backers.

"show no increase in hurricane activity in the last 40 years."

Finally someone has mentioned hurricanes or cyclones.

Very good, because the number of cyclones occurring per year have a significant impact on transportation of energy away from equatorial regions to other lattitudes.

Never heard hurricanes mentioned before.

Geoff Davies - your lecture about physics would carry a good deal more weight if you had understood the article.
The greenhouse scientists are not trying to claim that the Greenland ice sheet, for example, is actually melting as such. Its far too cold for that. It most certainly isn't hollowing out.

Instead, as the article says, they are claiming that the process of disintegration around the edges - the process that leads to ice bergs - is speeding up due to a slight increase in melt water at the bottom of the edges of the ice sheets. That's what Hanson was claiming when he came out here a few years back, and that's the pretext used for claiming the whole ice sheet would collapse, despite temperatures at the poles being far too cold for mass melting.

The author - and this is his field - points out that the greenland and west antartica ice cheets are in deep basins, so they ain't sliding anywhere.

Best to read the article.