I don't understand the title of this submission. The author is speaking as if he was a shock-jock himself.

How could anybody believe that shock-jocks present factual arguments about anything, let alone AGW?

The bottom line is they need to appear controversial in order to win listener market share and their job is simply to sell stuff on behalf of their advertisers.

They deliberately antagonise to heighten listener emotions because angry people are easier to sell things to.

The book "Emperors of the Airwaves" exposes their strategies and the ultimate phoniness they build their reputations upon.

Like everything else they pump up out of proportion, this is just another thing to project the fear and anger of ill-informed listeners to - as one insider once admitted, talkback is "radio for the unemployed and the unemployable".

If you believe everything you read in the tabloid press and get all your opinions from these "commentators" then you really can't know what's happening.

This article too is another typical rant - opinionated and littered with unsubstantiated statements.

Is the notion of AGW the real problem or is it simply the financial aspect?

What a depressing series of comments.

It would be nice if Carter were to prove correct, but not very probable. Carter's climate science is unconvincing, to say the least. If Carter were scientifically credible, he would be published in the scientific literature, rather than OLO or (!)Quadrant.

There's also the political angle. If Carter were an avowed Marxist (for example), intent on changing the nature of society, we would quite reasonably be suspicious of his statements about climate change.

Carter is not a communist - but he certainly is avowedly political. He is associated with the IPA and the Lavoisier Group in Australia, and the Heartland Institute in the USA. These are overtly political organisations which have openly political goals.

This doesn't make them (or Carter) right or wrong, but it is a strong indicator that we should treat their statements with caution.

Bob Carter is either a very poor scientist or a charlatan.

This is obvious from his opening claim of no warming in the past decade, which is based on blatant cherry picking. For a long time he and others used 1998 from the Hadley data (the most favourable to their case) to argue there was global cooling since then. But if you take 1997 or 1999 as your starting year you get rapid warming - 4 degrees per century. Neither claim is statistically valid.

What is obvious when you look at the whole record is that for the past three or four decades is that there is a warming trend of about 2 degrees per century. There is no clearly discernible departure from that trend, because the recent fluctuations about the trend are not significantly larger than in previous decades.
See http://betternature.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/2010-equal-hottest-ever/

Any undergraduate, and any lay person with a bit of common sense, can see through Carter's flimsy claim if they are given the whole data set rather than his cherry-picked version.

I think many are missing the point of this whole AGW argument.

Anyone with an IQ over 100 and some experience in data analysis knows that you can generally fashion data to support your own argument. Hence, one man's hero is another man's charlatan, and visa versa. This is why there will be no resolution to this discussion.

The IPCC was set up to prove man caused global warming and got a Nobel Prize. The Heartland Institute and others work to prove that man didn't cause global warming and are vilified (by many) as being in the pay of greedy Big Business who are only concerned with profits at the expense of our children's future.

It's a funny old world, isn't it?

Peter Mac,
You seem to another one of those who believe the concept of global warming was somehow discovered by Al Gore. I suppose David Attenborough discovered all those animals he presents on his wildlife documentaries too.

The IPCC was set up in 1988, about 19 years before Gore's documentary, because they knew about the concept and finally established formalised guidelines to assess how it could be measured.

The idea has been around since the the sixties and even right wing conservatives like George Bush Snr acknowledged it and Ronald Reagan took legislative steps to minimise its possible effects.

The theory about carbon trapping atmospheric heat has been around since 1850 and the idea of it affecting the climate was proposed in 1900. All that's happened is the reporting of the result of decades of monitoring.

The negative response (as it was for acid rain, DDT, ozone hole and tobacco) has been funded and coordinated by certain corporate interest groups who feel threatened by government regulation and restrictions on the free market.

Do you really believe this is some sort of international global conspiracy that has been decades in the making?

Do you think that politicians are willing to threaten their own elected positions by imposing unneccessary social and financial restrictions on voters for no reason?

Geoff Davies,"Bob Carter is either a poor scientist or a charlatan." More ad hominem from people who consider sceptics a being holocaust deniers.Who pays your salary Geoff?

I would rather listen to retired scientists like Prof Tim Ball from Canada who have no axe to grind in terms of power or monetary gain.Why was the Sun excluded from the IPCC's investigation on climate change? Why have the stats been doctored,excluding the heat island effect of our cities today as apposed to the lesser effects of this 50 yrs ago?

Sorry Geoff Davies,the scam of AGW is being revealled.We don't believe it anymore.How would you,"Hide the decline?"