Can there be anything so stupid as to deny mankind's contribution and effect upon climate change ... will be a sad day if and when finally (no doubt too late)skeptics have to say "Oh well, we all make mistakes", just as I will if I actually Do front up to the Pearly Gates .. only difference is that my skepticism will not hurt others, indeed mankind's very existence!

Why does this debate continue ... what IS the point given the consequences of being wrong if indeed, the 97% of science specifically involved in the science of climate change ARE right!

As for a carbon tax and as for compensating households ... nonsense ... it is households of the western world in particular that are responsible for consuming the energy of fossil fuels, of choosing CH4 producing products etc that cause ghg emissions to be approaching runaway unstoppable levels.

The answer is ... cut consumption drastically at household levels, in so doing reduce your cost of living but you will need to suffer the consequences of the economic dip the country, indeed all of western society in particular needs to suffer to achieve this end.

At the same time, demand electricity generators go renewable and major polluters such as mining companies either raise the price of their product or reduce their extraordinary profit margins and pay for clean energy and water they gobble up like free entry pigs at the trough while 97% of the worlds people pay the price for this gluttony!

Is it possible to change the settings so that you don't see certain people's posts? There's a lot of gumph here and it obscures the interesting stuff.

"Can there be anything so stupid as to deny mankind's contribution and effect upon climate change"

Sure, if that were true .. no one denies that we change the climate, what with land clearing and all, just for starters.

But it really is stupid, incredibly stupid to think we're going to fix it all by taxing CO2, using a scheme that does not even stop people at some levels of society backing off, in fact they are cheering for a tax, since the government has told them they will be better off! Go figure.

So, demand suppliers go renewable, like Nuclear? Or the really stupid renewables that don't work at night or when the wind is not blowing.

Somedays you can smell the stupid on AGW and it's minions.

nicco, I give up, you don't see it or want to .. the article was printed in the WSJ because these days you cannot get a decent peer review if you don't subscribe to AGW .. get it? Probability is not "scientific" reasoning for effect OK, it is interesting, but does not in itself become "proof" of anything. If you want to gamble, go to a casino, don't gamble with my or our future if you don't mind. The IPCC is playing silly buggers is the point I was making. You want probability here, but not there is that it? So probability is OK to beat me around the ears, but it doesn't apply to the IPCC? What?

The response by certain well-informed critics to the Government's recent misadvised claims in support of AGW, make interesting reading. See

http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2011/04/government-misadvised/page:printable

That is a very serious allegation from rpg: that "these days you cannot get a decent peer-review unless you subscribe to AGW". This is suggesting that the whole scientific literature has been nobbled, an improbable possibility. Or else, a more likely possibility, the theory of human-influenced climate change has been so widely accepted, by so many branches of science,that a research paper refuting it or some element of it has become a very rare thing indeed. Perhaps rpg is aware of such research?

It's not just climatologists who broadly accept the theory: it's biologists, geologists (see the Geological Society of London for their position statement), phenologists, physicists, and on and on.

A small political rump of the Royal Society led by Lord Lawson objected, so that body changed its position statement, sightly, but their view still supports the general scientific consensus. The recent RS statement concludes: "There is strong evidence that changes in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activity are the dominant cause of the global warming that has taken place over the last half century. This warming trend is expected to continue as are changes in precipitation over the long term in many regions. Further and more rapid increases in sea level are likely which will have profound implications for coastal communities and ecosystems."

Other major scientific institutions have also had (a very few) "sceptics" making public statements, but there is no scientific institution which does not support the theory. As for raycom's "well-informed critics" we're back with the same little group of politically-motivated non-climatologists, led by Bob Carter, publishing in Quadrant. Hardly a credible team ...

And rpg, I echo your statement: don't gamble with our future. If there's a 90% probability - or even a 50% probability - that our activities can lead to unwanted climatic effects, that's good enough odds for me to say that we should take appropriate steps - the first one being to try and understand the science.

The "group of politically-motivated non-climatologists" ( as Nicco describes them), methodically has applied scientific method to review all the literature on AGW, and found that it contains no scientific evidence to prove the AGW hypothesis.

It is the politically-motivated climate scientists and science bodies that continue to promote the AGW ideology and act contrary to national and international interests