As I said, Ozandy, if you want to follow the money trail, you'll find that the amount of money directed towards skepticism is paltry compared with the money spent on alarmism.

So Exxon-Mobil spent $23,000,000? And not all of that on climate skepticism, either. Meanwhile, Phil Jones alone received almost that much funding.

The US government has meanwhile spent some $79,000,000,000 funding climate change policies. The UK is set to spend an astonishing $28,000,000,000 on Ed Milliband's Climate Change Act - the most expensive piece of legislation ever put through the British parliament.

In the meantime, the value of carbon trading in 2008 was $126,000,000,000.

Cui Bono? Certainly not the skeptics.

Does anyone expect the Coalition to have a genuine commitment to emissions reduction? Abbott won his leadership largely on his climate non-policy. Not that I think Labor is all that serious about anything but holding power and if that requires appearing to be serious they will make an effort to appear to be serious. Real, serious action awaits across the board agreement that the problem matters enough and I suppose that waits on the extreme and damaging events that can overwhelm the complacency and narrow short-term focus of many Australians.

We've had drought breaking rains in the East that ease, perhaps for an electoral cycle or two, the worries of a long term drying trend. The risks of catastrophic fires are temporarily eased as well. Climate change doesn't seem so close and personal at the moment. Temporary of course; there will be drought and heatwaves that make what we've had to date seem mild but present conditions allow the public the illusion it may not happen.

The voices of Denial, Doubt and Delay appear to be having lots of success at undermining public confidence in the conclusions of leading scientists and institutions that study climate. Their successes are to our long term detriment.

Labor will be as painfully slow and reluctant to commit to policy as they can without totally alienating the Greens and the Coalition will believe their no-action stance is an election winner and continue to avoid aligning themselves with the best available scientific advice. What we'll get - it looks most likely to me - is much too little much too late.

So, Ken, let us imagine that Australia somehow magically reduces its emissions to zero, tomorrow (we can conveniently ignore the economic and social consequences of doing so, although a most entertaining vision of 'Mad Max' currently springs to mind).

Exactly how much difference to global temperatures will this make?

The policies of the world's biggest exporter of coal is irrelevant to climate change? We can't do it all so don't bother? I think we (Australia) should be doing the most we are capable of rather than the least we can get away with.

In which Ken conveniently avoids giving an actual answer ...

Ken
Please answer the question: how much difference to global temperatures will it make if Australia reduces its emissions to zero? Show your workings.

If you can't do it, please admit that you can't do it.