Ludwig
You mention risk. There may be doubt about global warming but why don't we do something anyway to be on the safe side? Sorry, but its not an insurance situation. Its not possible to take out an insurance policy with a low cost premium. Whether or not the problem is real, doing anything effective about it is proving just so costly and difficult that adaptation is really the only option.

The best policy repsonse is then to appoint a group of non-lunatics to watch climate trends to see what might or might not happen, and recommend policies.

This is why the climate commission is so dangerous. Not only are they refusing to acknowledge the reality that concerted international action to reduce emissions is not happening, they are producing propaganda to try to convince people of the exact opposite.

An illustration of this can easily be found in country-by-country analysis in the report. In the item for Canada, for example, the commission neglects to mention that Canada formally dropped about of the Kyoto protocol last year. There are many more such ommissions.

Curmudgeon raises a good point, which is the cost of risk; that is, even if you believe in AGW, IN THE FACE OF CONSIDERABLE CONTRARY EVIDENCE, is the cost of damage from AGW in excess of the cost of stopping that damage.

This is the classic insurance equation: if the potential damage to your house from a source is $10,000 do you spend $20,000 to stop it, or spend $5000 on adaptation.

There have been plenty of these cost/benefit analyses which include the obvious but always overlooked by the likes of Flannery aspect of AGW, which is, it has BENEFITS.

People like Lomborg, Nordhaus and Monckton have all done cost/benefit analyses of AGW and found the most cost effective way of dealing with it is to adapt and enjoy; see Nordhaus:

http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/dice_mss_072407_all.pdf

On page 218 at Table V-3 it is plain, as I described above, that all abatement programs have higher costs than benefits.

Hi all,

I see the regular alley cats are here getting themselves in group hissy fits.

As the author is an A-grade denier of the first order with his egregious misrepresenting or ignoring of the facts it is a bit of a chore hopping on the horse again to even begin to dissect another offering.

But to his credit he has been a bit more forthcoming with links than in the past.

Let's look at the first statement that caught my eye.

“Flannery's fellow commissioner, Robert Beale compounds Flannery's erroneous statements by saying that Australia is the "developed" world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide "by quite a way". This is true but neglects to mention that compared to all nations, Australia ranks 11th per capita.”

So who are these 10 other 'countries'? Well included as one of them is the Falkland Islands with a population of just 3,140. There is Aruba with just over 100,000 and the Netherlands Antilles with just over 175,000. In fact half of these 'nations' have less than a million residents and the combined population of all ten is less than 75% of Australia's. Pretty shameless effort really.

Ah but it does look good on paper doesn't it.

Given the author's past efforts I'm not sure I'm inclined to bother with the rest of the article so just to put things in perspective; Australia gets 5.2% of its energy from renewables. The figure for China is 17%, over three times ours. In most people's book that would have them doing 'hugely well' in comparison.

Skeptics have shut the gate. AGW does not exist at any cost.
The cyclics say it's all happened before. 7 billion people and fossil fuel.
Others want more evidence. How drastic a evidence.
Some have noticed climate becoming increasingly volatile. Caution is needed.
Nature is in a compromised position.
Ice melt in Greenland and antarctic, are gaining momentum. There is no cure.
An ocean temp; rise of just one degree, is causing great change.
What caused the ocean temp to rise.

Back again, csteele, and still no science to back your assertions.

Human emissions have no measurable effect on climate.

You need some science which says otherwise, before anything you say has credibility.

Why would you worry about lack of credibility, when all you are capable of doing is pointless smearing and making baseless assertions?

Forget AGW, there is now published science to show that we are in a global cooling trend:

"For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years.“

Published: J. Esper et al., Orbital forcing of tree-ring data, Nature Climate Change, 8 July 2012

http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/15491.php

There is no science to back what you support, csteele, and plenty to show that you are wrong.

No doubt the number one criteria to be selected for a job by the Gillard Government is shameless. It seems our climate change commissioner fits the role well.