qanda, please .. stop the whining, Climate Science gets buckets of funding, and entire government media organization at its disposal, the ABC on all its outlets as well as SBS, both of which pump any AGW news breathlessly and call all skeptics "deniers" and continually lambast them

Then there's the government propaganda advertising as well as their "team" led by the Flannery person who can never remember what he said int he past.

Add to that lashings of studies, reviews and grants on top of donations to the likes of the Youth Climate club and you have wall to wall government sponsored climate .. all of it paid for with taxpayer funds.

Aditionally the universities like Melbourne host climate conferences, with believers only agenda.

So your problem is perceived bias in a "mogul" led media .. gosh, who could it be?

Is it the ABC, no they are on board as believers.

Is it Fairfax, no they never mention the "others", but happily print catastrophobia's output.

Is it, is it, News Ltd? Of course it is, they actually report in an unbiased way, giving both sides of things, when you would just prefer censorship.

The Galileo comparison, you have backwards, Galileo railed against the orthodoxy of "accepted science", there was a "consensus" and he went against it .. sound familiar?

Don't try to claim underdog status, it is a tragedy that with so many resources and so much wealth, you cannot convince the climate to change to disaster to suit.

The temperature has changed less than 0.8 degrees in 150 years, outstanding stability, unwelcome of course to alarmists.

Your post and saltpetre's are naturally evangelistic, no surprise, to find you agree it was never about the science and always about the belief.

How are your shares in hot rocks going, is belief sustaining them for you? Hard to pick winners based on hype, isn't it? Or did you think subsidies would "sustain" it for you?

Ok, let's forget what I said about forgetting the science - meaning it's so complex we amateurs might as well forget trying to understand it. The science is not just important, but absolutely essential to our future.

We are in an inter-glacial, with possibility we should already be heading for an ice-age (on normal cycle). If so, something we have been doing (in conjunction with natural Earth systems) may be staving off that predicted (supposedly) ice-age, and that 'something' may be the burning of fossil fuels, etc, adding various 'pollutants' to the atmosphere - CO2, sulphur dioxide, methane, nitric oxide, etc. This might provide an argument for keeping on what we've been doing - in coordination with natural Earth systems, volcanoes, etc - to maintain this inter-glacial. However, we may only be able to confirm this, and have any chance of actually maintaining the status quo, if we have the best and most detailed science available on the many factors involved.

AGW (but without dangerous pollutants) may be a good thing - unless there could be some benefit deriving from the Earth going into an ice-age? Of course there remains possibility we may already have gone a bit too far with our 'climate optimising'.

So, where to from here? Do we have access to all the factors involved? Could some contradictory measurements be possibly due to some Earth factors (as yet unidentified) pushing for an ice-age, against our pushing for maintenance of our inter-glacial? Can we maintain the environment, ecosystems, even humankind, whilst possibly burning more and more coal industrialising the globe?

On a number of bases, human population is at a critical point. If we continue population and industrial growth at current rates - including deforestation and polluting with toxic waste - we may well reach a point where shortage of both oxygen and food will become hyper-critical - since forests, agriculture and the oceans are critical suppliers of both oxygen and food.

Conclusion: Climate science will have to expand to encompass all relevant systems, as Earth BioScience, to provide the necessary answers.

saltpetre "Ok, let's forget what I said about forgetting the science - meaning it's so complex we amateurs might as well forget trying to understand it. The science is not just important, but absolutely essential to our future."

Agreed, but to use AGW as a prop to justify financial redistribution or a pulpit for preaching original sin, is just not acceptable.

I do not have any guilt about where we are or what we do, clearly unlike some others who do. Sure, we could pollute less, and we try to.

Climate is poorly understood, but you wouldn't think so to listen to the spin from climate scientists, who have enjoyed the attention, without the requisite skills to extract them selves when it went too far.

Playing with people's lives, is what we don't like and to wave it off arrogantly dismissing those who disagree, is not forgotten.

Where do we go from here, indeed.

We get climate scientists to apologise for misleading the people of the world, beg their forgiveness and commit to never exaggerating again (hah!)

Then we look at what you need to do without the conflicting interests and excessive funding which has clouded good people's thinking.

The climate will do what it does, and as it goes against all the predictions of the IPCC and scientists, they lose all credibility, which appears to be the way it is going .. what then?

The big gamble that models were useful to predict climate was taken up by activists and scientists went along with it, such is the glamor of attention.

It amazes me that people usually so conservative have bet their careers and an entire area of science, on what they thought was a winner .. fools.

Always remember what has been put at stake through the greed and dishonesty of the AGW backers.

Public Service Superannuation funds have been invested up to the hilt in these pie-in- the- sky projects, which are ultimately dependent on ripping off taxpayers to show a return, as the projects are economically unproductive. The Public Service is locked into supporting the scam, or see its super become worhless.

There is no sound base for the green projects, just a confident anticipation that taxpayers can be looted to make them appear productive.

The Archbishop of Canterbury invested $300 million of Church funds with Al Gore’s companies, so guess which Church supports the global warming scam? They will be very reluctant to see the truth; that they are the victims of the greatest fraud in history,

Gore will be OK. He recently divorced his wife of 40 years, and put their important assets in her name. When the chickens come home to roost, he will remain in comfortable circumstances as a bankrupt. Shame is not within his capacity, so he will be relatively untouched by this disaster which he has done so much to create.

Ian Plimer’s book has been one of the great turning points in this sorry saga, and he has suffered tremendous vitriol from the alarmists, because he has cut through their spin, and exposed the truth. His book covers a huge field, in a clear and concise manner, and is deservedly a best seller in three countries.

Steven’s attack on Plimer is a low level effort, even considering the depths plumbed by some of the warmists we have seen here on OLO.

So rpg is afraid of what NASA and NOAA are turning up, so much so he agrees that their climate research funding be severely curtailed. Rpg also thinks it ok that the US media censor science.

Rpg, you have it backwards … Svante Arrenhius over 100 years ago went against science orthodoxy to advance the idea that increasing GHG’s can impact world temperature. If anyone can be compared to Galileo, it would be he. Nice try at spin though.

Rpg also fails to understand the concept of ‘mean global temperature’. Average temperatures in some regions of the planet have soared to over 10 times the mean global rate. Rpg prefers to bury his head in the sand when it comes to increasing average temperatures in the Antarctic Peninsula, or the tundra of Siberia, or to Greenland, or to regions of Australia, or to areas of the US and Africa.

Hard to pick winners rpg? No, not that hard - you're right, some years ago I bought a block of shares in a ‘hot-rock’ company for cents, and sold them later for dollars – ROI near to 10 times the initial cost. Moreover, just before the announcement of the carbon tax, I bought another swathe, again at cents. Who knows, I may even want to hang on to these a while longer for succeeding generations, given there is more certainty in the renewable energy industry now.

Hi Qanda, you're back. Completely shameless aren't you? Now you are claiming to be a gun investor. I guess you have forgotten about your investment in Geodynamics. In a previous post on another thread you claimed to have bought shares every time the share had made a low. That is the statistical fingerprint of someone who is, to use a technical term, gilding the lily.

So what is your position now that they are worth one-third the last dip you claimed to be buying at?

And can you point me to some literature where they have found the tropospheric hotspot? Might be more profitable than your share trading.

Stephen, this is a bit different from not being able to detect neturinos. We do a pretty good job of measuring atmospheric temperature vertically. It's only when it doesn't suit the IPCC political agenda that measurement becomes an issue. It's not there, the models have faulty inputs. End of story.