Squeers
/// I don't believe we will ever be or be in a position to make financial reparations ///

With Marxist (Ottmar Edenhofer) heading up the Working Group 3 at the Twenty-Ninth Session of the IPCC, and openly making statements like this :

“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy… One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy”

And every Tom Dick and Sophie trying to blame each downpour on AGW
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11528

I would have thought we were at least within cooee

/// The average westerner who consumes the equivalent of a hundred from starving countries.///
Haven’t you heard Squeers “ there's no such thing as average”
Of course, if you put it the way you do, you will confuse a lot of people a lot of the time--- and maybe even yourself.

But look at it this way :let’s take India as an example (no longer underdeveloped – but not one of those bad developed nations either – on average better behaved)

India has a middle class (mc) bigger than the whole population of Australia.
It has a mc bigger than the USAs. And if the truth be known their mc is even more extravagant .

The difference is, beneath all the conspicuous mc consumption there are hundreds of millions of ultra poor who conspicuously under consume.

The Indian mc is doing no less environmental damage that Ozs or the USAs –likely more,
But when you AVERAGE them off with the hundreds of millions of poor – they disappear off the radar.

And one more thing to remember, all those hundreds of millions of poor are just waiting for some enhanced spending power to move up to mc level , or, a pretext to flee to the west ( which has the same outcome) and people like Ottmar Edenhofer may give them both,

SPQR,
Quite true all that you're saying, but I don't get your point? The Indian disparities are no greater than ours were in our historically comparable times: Victorian England. Have you read what Engel's had to say about it, his first-hand account of Victorian England? Should be available online.
So the Indians are upwardly mobile, so are the Chinese; on an unprecedented scale of course but that's what capitalism is all about. So what? You wouldn't begrudge then their bite of the cherry would you? Anyway, think of the economic growth they'll generate! They'll certainly make us richer too, at least till we run out of resources and we're living on the rim of a bloody great ditch (it'll make an excellent dam!).
And why should the Indian MC care about the environment? We didn't, and still don't.
Looking back over your post.. you don't see a double standard in there?

<And every Tom Dick and Sophie trying to blame each downpour on AGW>

I'm not blaming every downpour on AGW, and neither is anybody else who's given it a moment's thought. That kind of line is just hyperbole, salivated over or invented by hysterical denialists.

Have you ever considered trying to see reality outside your myopic world view?

Squeers,

The point was that to talk of averages (or percapita for that matter) as measures of culpability can be very misleading.

With regard to:
"I'm not blaming every downpour on AGW, and neither is anybody else who's given it a moment's thought. That kind of line is just hyperbole, salivated over or invented by hysterical denialists."

Did you read the link I gave?

Here's a list I compiled--it took me less than two minutes:
1)http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=11528
2)http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=11513#196140
3)http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/coal-miners-to-blame-for-queensland-floods-says-australian-greens-leader-bob-brown/story-e6freoof-1225988809313

Three in as many days –all with the same blame AGW line.

You say: “ I'm not blaming every downpour on AGW, and neither is anybody else who's given it a moment's thought “

Perhaps that’s it, they didn’t give it--a moments thought!–it is by now a conditioned response–blame AGW.

Is it just me, or does SPQR sound an awful lot like ALGOREisRICH?

/// Is it just me, or does SPQR sound an awful lot like ALGOREisRICH? ///

Soooo..there must be something to that old idiom: “Great minds think alike” ...hmmm, I wonder if AGIR is also swarve and sophisticated and uber cool?

SPQR (AGIR?),
we've always had extreme weather events and so 'tis difficult to say whether the latest spate is due to global warming. What we can say, of course, is that heat is energy and that we are experiencing the warmest planet on record year after year. It's quite reasonable to conjecture that there's a connection: unprecedented high temperatures are likely to induce unprecedented weather. This is neither an item of faith nor denialism among reasonable people, none of whom is "trying to blame each downpour on AGW". Extreme weather events however predictable, if not pin-pointable, in a warming ecosphere.
Reasonable people are, as I say, not dogmatically ascribing all extreme weather events to global warming (though all weather events are ultimately part of the same dynamics), but they're not dogmatically denying mountains of evidence either--like you do, for instance..