rpg and others, try and get your information from reputable sources. You say "all the articles ... are doom laden, hysteric and predicting calamities ..." and suggest that this sort of material comes from one side only. In the first place, this is demonstrably not true. But even if it were true, it would suggest that you are getting your ideas from tabloid journalism and dodgy blogs.

If you actually want to learn something, and not just make "doom laden and hysterical" statements about Great Big New Taxes, you should go to the scientific literature. It's (mostly) freely available, online and in your local library. You can if you wish avoid any reference to the IPCC, or the CRU, or even Al Gore, and you will find hundreds of well-referenced research papers dealing with all aspects of climate change, from butterflies to geostatic rebound, from atmospheric gases to oceanic depths. And you will find that most researchers in the various fields of climate science have no doubt about what the evidence is telling them.

JonJ, your observation about having to adopt the prevailing orthodoxy is also demonstrably a nonsense. The scientific literature functions by accepting and examining (and sometimes refuting) heterodox views

I generally agree with the points that the author is making, and I would go on further to argue that what we really need is some kind of Australia-wide system that recognises the likelihood of further droughts, floods and bushfires, and prepares us for them. That's where resilience is to be found, it seems to me.

We have no way of preventing people building houses inside eucalypt forests, and presumably those who do so argue that the likelihood of disaster is small, and it won't happen to them. Presumably those who build houses on flood plains have the same philosophy. Our water utilities have got us to think about water conservation, and that is a great start. Why can't we have an Australian equivalent of New Zealand's GeoNet?

That seems to me the way to go, not down the 'carbon pollution' path. On the evidence currently available, the world has plenty of time to work out the real relationship of carbon dioxide accumulation to global temperature increase. What Australia needs is a serious study of our own climate and the forces which affect it, and us. That would be the right direction for the future expenditure of public money on climate research, which seems mostly to have gone to those who already accept the AGW orthodoxy.

Don Aitken:"What Australia needs is a serious study of our own climate and the forces which affect it, and us. That would be the right direction for the future expenditure of public money on climate research, which seems mostly to have gone to those who already accept the AGW orthodoxy."

The concepts expressed in these two sentences don't appear to be mutually exclusive, Don. Are you trying to say that the climate scientists accepting the AGW 'orthodoxy' are not seriously studying our own climate and the forces which affect it and us?

Doesn't sound right to me.

Don Aitken thinks that we have "plenty of time" to study the relationship of CO2 and climate. This is a familiar ploy by those who want us to do nothing, for whatever reason. It fails for the same reason as Curmudgeon's argument fails: probability. If most scientists think that most climate change is due to the greenhouse effect, it would be simply short-sighted of us not to take account of this. (If you can refute the theory, then please do so!)

And as for having "plenty of time", many quite reasonable researchers are not talking about future climate change, but about the probable effects of climate change which are being seen now, today. Such as: increased bushfire weather, observed plant and animal behaviour pattern changes, glacier and ice-sheet instability, and on and on. This isn't merely theoretical: it's observation and measurement.

And why does Don Aitken think that Australian climate researchers are not studying Australian climate? It is true that much of the work being done is in the northern hemisphere, but Australian research has made very important contributions, notably in the work done on the influence of the Southern Ocean and the Circumpolar Current on global climate patterns; also the international air quality benchmark established at Cape Grim after years of CSIRO research.

nicco "If most scientists think that most climate change is due to the greenhouse effect, it would be simply short-sighted of us not to take account of this. (If you can refute the theory, then please do so!) "

No, you misunderstand .. again, the onus is on you to prove it, not anyone to disprove it..

it's like some idiot claiming the sky is falling, it's up to them to prove it is, not for everyone to run around proving it isn't.

similar to claims of hair spray on rose bushes keeping away elephants .. and other too stupid for words "scientific truths" of the hysteric alarmist community

Amicus, you have been offered scientific material in the past, and you refuse to look at it. This allows you to say: "I have seen no evidence" without actually lying. Your simple-minded idea that the onus is on the scientists to prove their case demonstrates, again, that you have no idea how science operates. To spell it out for you: scientists advance a case, it is reviewed, and published. Other scientists then argue whether or no the case is worth pursuing - not whether it is "proved", or a "scientific fact", but whether it merits further research. This process has been applied to climate science, and specifically the theory of human influenced climate change, for some decades, in the scientific literature. At present, the great majority of climate scientists accept that the theory is 90% probably correct. If you have the means (measurement, observation, even a good hypothesis) to refute the theory, you should submit your research to a reputable journal.

What you call "the hysteric alarmist community" presumably includes the great international scientific institutions, who agree without exception that the theory of human influenced climate change is almost certainly correct, and in many cases (Royal Society, US National Academy of Sciences, Aust. Academy of Science, London Geological Society, American Institute of Physics, and many many more) have issued position statements to that effect. These statements are backed by a wealth of reference to experimental evidence.