According to anti-green, if we adopt the precautionary principle by taking collective action to forestall the worst effects of global warming in the hope of leaving our grandchildren a better and safer world, we will undermine capitalism, free trade and liberal democracy. All you generous souls who have contributed to the tsunami appeals, and all those medicos, engineers and others who are freely donating their skills in the trouble-spots overseas, you know not what you do. By acting collectively to forestall the onset of disease and further deaths, which are only "theoretical" possibilites after all, you are undermining civilisation as we know it, and playing right into the hands of the Howard/Bush hatters. Best to let it all alone, until we are really absolutely sure that more people actually will die. Let's just wait and watch. By the way, it snowed in Thredbo last week....

Sorry Grace, you miss the point. The so-called threats from global warning are just theory (climate models with "fudge factors"). The tsunami damage is in the real world. The possibility of major epidemic disease is founded on the base of solid empirical evidence.

No anti-green, you have. Here's a few theories: the sun will rise tomorrow morning, a giant asteroid will crash into Western Australia, nuclear warfare will blow us all up, global climate patterns will change catastrophically, a baby will die in Aceh next week because of the tsunami. You can order these statements according to how possible and probable you think they are, on the basis of empirical evidence derived from past experience, but they are all still only theories about the future.

Alan Oxley’s argument that PM Howard’s policies on global warming have been vindicated contains some unsubstantiated and extraordinary assertions. Oxley is well known as a critic of Kyoto and an advocate of “free trade”. The website RealClimate (http://www.realclimate.org) promotes itself as “a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary.” The site contains substantial refutation of nonsensical assertions of persons seeking to discredit the arguments of climate scientists. Did Mr Oxley consult this site?

Oxley claims that "The science used in the UN studies to justify global warming has been steadily unwinding over the last two years". What is the evidence for that? Which scientists who once supported the proposition that CO2 and other gases resulting from human activity were significantly affecting the environment have changed their mind or been shown to be wrong? What reports have dealt with this? The US Environment Protection Agency doesn’t refer to them. Is Oxley aware that huge numbers of the most reputable scientists in the US have signed petitions complaining about the misuse of science by the Bush administration?

Michael Crichton, whose book is given great weight in Oxley's article, is a techno-thriller writer and movie-maker. (And yes, he is a qualified anthropologist and medico and yes he graduated from Harvard and has held positions at the Jonas Salk Institute and Cambridge, etc, etc but that doesn’t make him a qualified atmospheric scientist.) To quote "The Day After Tomorrow" and its use by some people debating global warming and the Kyoto protocol and to compare that with Crichton’s book is to wholly trivialize the issues involved. It’s like a Creation Science blog!

And the assertion that the US at the Buenos Aires conference made the EU and others look foolish and reset the agenda through "the Bush administration [and its] artful multilateral diplomacy" is simply ridiculous! Any observer of current affairs knows full well that the US under Bush has systematically rejected every multilateral treaty and agreement that does not strictly benefit its own global business interests and foolish ideological beliefs. These range from nuclear disarmament to small arms control, from population control to human rights. And if existing treaties get in the way they are ignored unless they suit the US! Consider the Convention intended to protect cultural material in times of war. That the phrase “artful multilateral diplomacy” should be used to describe any international policy of the present US administration is an absolute outrage! It goes beyond global warming and the Kyoto protocol and represents no more than disinformation. Can we use that phrase to describe US relations with Iran and Syria, with Spain and France? To involvement with oil rich countries in Africa? To countries through which oil pipelines will run in northwestern Asia?

Mr Oxley is well known for his advocacy of world trade and globalization. His arguments seem to ignore a very large amount of what is going on locally and internationally. At the local level there are more equitable improvements than are delivered by so-called "free trade": assistance to people as in the Grameen Bank situation and agricultural developments in Africa reported recently in the Guardian Weekly. Globalization has not contributed to the improvement of the former colonial economies of Africa and the agricultural policies which are part of globalization and free trade do no more than continue to emphasize monoculture and dependency on multinational chemical companies and seed providers. Internationally we see the driving into poverty of South American farmers by giant retailers such as Walmart who also pay most of their own employees in the USA wages below the poverty level. If free trade is of benefit, why are farmers in Canada finding their earnings decreasing rapidly as reported in personal interviews on "The National Interest" (ABC RN) a couple of months ago? If free trade is to be of such benefit why are Pharmaceutical companies with their rampaging false assertions about their need for high prices for their medicines so they can conduct the much needed R&D so much in favour of it? (Most of the R&D is funded by government!)

The Australian Government under Howard has blindly followed along word for word, step for step, every policy move by the Bush administration, even down to agreeing to jointly sponsor a resolution in the UN General Assembly proposing a worldwide ban on therapeutic cloning (TC). TC, according to Professor Irv Weissman of Stanford University, would allow diseases to be studied in ways never possible before: yet ideology and fundamentalism – of the same kind that has been used to oppose abortion and prohibit funding of population programs in other countries - will allow hundreds of thousands of people to die who would have otherwise lived. (ABC RN “Health Report” of 29 November 2004.) The Australian Government doesn’t have a policy on global warming and energy and the environment. It has Bush’s policy. Next to nothing on renewable energy unlike European countries. Instead we are being fed sequestration advocated by a science adviser mostly employed by a mining firm.

A few scientists like a few historians like a few economists, can get a few things wrong. But how about whole national scientific academies and international committees of scientists? Or should we prefer to believe skeptical environmentalists and techno thriller writers? By the way, quite a large number of economists, including Nobel Prize winners, find serious fault with globalization and object to the basis of economic rationalism and its propositions on which free trade rest. What is the difference between this stuff and creation science?

It doesn't matter who said what or which reports or what cadre of scientists or which Nobelians dictate what. At the end of the day we have to stop prolonged droughts and increasingly violent weather. We are going to have to deal with 'in your face' climate changes. It will not take long to realise that abating greenhouse emissions is only a minor part of the picture.

There is only one way to stop climate change. STOP POLLUTING COASTAL SEAS.The thermodynamic inertia throughout the Biosphere is in the oceans and NOT the air.
By polluting coastal oceans we are drying out landmasses faster than anything nature has ever known. We are creating thermodynamic SINKS off our coasts that are
1. attracting every last bit of moist air from deserts to coasts in low latitudes, causing prolonged droughts.
2. attracting tropical storm cells to urban centres rather than directly to the poles in warmer latitudes, causing cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons.

Do we have to wait 10 years of economic retardation to find out that abating greenhouse gases will do 'jack' while polluted seas continue to destroy marine life and possibly our very civilisation.

And to all the pro-greenhouse gas scientists and Nobels out there:
since when do you propose dynamic solutions (greenhouse warming) to global problems without looking at the total energy heirachies involved? That climb on the bandwagon science will be the end of us all. As scientists we have an obligation to rigor and that rigor must commence with a detailed understanding of ENERGY flows and storage, according to the second law of thermodynamics, on this planet.

Contrary to the assertions of climate alarmists, present day atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are NOT significantly above pre-industrial levels. According to testimony by Prof Zbigniew Jaworowski before a US Senate committee hearing last year, the average for the 19th century was 335ppm by direct measurement, not the widely quoted 280ppm derived from ice core measurements, which are prone to gross experimental errors. The picture gets worse for the alarmists .

Current CO2 levels are low by historical standards. Only the Upper Carboniferous/Lower Permian geological periods and the Quaternary, including the present day, show CO2 levels below 400ppm over the last 550 million years. Ironically, to the chagrin of the alarmists, the Late Ordovician saw extensive glaciation, when CO2 levels were nearly 12 times higher than today's at 4400ppm. According to greenhouse theory, this period should have been a hothouse! It wasn't. Average temperatures were no higher than they are today.

The major greenhouse gas is water vapour, not CO2 as the alarmists would have us believe, and accounts for approximately 95% of the total greenhouse effect. The contribution of anthropogenic CO2 is a trifling 0.12%.

To ignore evidence from the earth's long history, and to be mesmerised by computer generated fantasies, is to be deliberately obtuse.