Give me a billion dollars and a couple of years and I guarantee to have a dozen peer-reviewed papers in respectable journals supporting any crackpot theory you care to name. If they are forced to choose between integrity and having a job this time next year, most scientists will make the same decision as the rest of us. The AGW movement is a government power grab inspired by apocalyptic fear: unfortunately for them, fear has a short shelf-life.

'Now Gillard and her henchmen want to inflict a ‘carbon tax’ on us, oblivious it seems to the evidently corrupted processes on which the notion is based.'

Thanks Alex for summarizing it so nicely. Its time for Turnbull to resign and join the Greens/Labour.

Alex - I agree with the article but its always best to adopt neutral language in these things. Greenhousers are the ones who get emotive.

As for the sums cited, one of the more bizarre aspects of this bizarre debate is the way that greenhouse advocates point to $1 million here or $2 million there given by energy companies to convservative organisations, and overlook billions flowing into the greenhouse camp. Apart from the research funds cited, there are any number of well funded NGOs.

This flood of money has (almost)washed away all competing points of view in major institutions, yet activists still somehow manage to so completely ignore this reality that they publish whole books complaining that really the energy companies are driving the debate.

Excellent article, clarifying the damage done world wide by politics, since the fringe lunatics discovered how to be so effective in it, followed by the frauds who see how to profit from it.

There is a new type of fraud, against which there is no legislative protection to make it actionable.

Lies like the assertion that carbon dioxide is pollution do immense damage to the community, and their propogation needs to be punishable by prosecution.

If it is a crime to call a black man a "boong", how much more so is it a crime to call a beneficial gas like carbon dioxide a pollutant, with a reflection not just on one person, but on the many who produce this benefit to life, in their daily activities, by branding us all polluters.

Any one who joins in this AGW fraud is damaging their community. Juliar Dillard and Malcolm Turncoat are in the vanguard.

How could a government, any government, let go of such a precious resource, such a treasure as far as they are concerned: THE FEAR OF NATURE.

Governments' existence and their ongoing power to control and exploit depends on their ability to scare people into believing that the danger is somewhere "outside", that not only they are not the problem, but even that they are the solution, our "saviours" so to speak (which we supposedly ourselves "elected", to add insult to injury).

Alex, thanks for a small glimmer of sanity in the midst of this march of folly.

Unfortunately I feel you offer far too little and far too late. Skeptical science has been asleep at the wheel, a case of too many rational skeptics doing nothing.

Not only has skeptical science failed to reject the single orthodoxy in any meaningful way, it has lost its voice in the wider community. It can no longer get a hearing in the MSM or with our public broadcasters.

There certainly exists an astonishing volume of contrary science however; the “advocacy block” will go nowhere near any of it. In fact the advocacy block has recently ramped up the rhetoric to astonishing levels.

In the last few weeks we have had Garnaut, Karoly, Flim Flamery, Gillard and Combet, make public statements that are vigorously challenged as everything from “falsities” to outright “lies”. Everything these eminent people have made public is not only contestable, but they refuse to even respond to being challenged.

Meanwhile, the Australian public is about to be fined heavily for the crime of pollution.

You need to stop writing about it, get together and get public exposure against the travesty about to befall all of us. Do something.