"They include: appealing to authority rather than explaining or discussing the science; false claims of consensus among scientists; cherry picking research and opinions which support a desired world view; and guilt-by-association smearing and vilification of those who hold alternative views."

Sorry, but isn’t that exactly what this sorry excuse for a paper is?

doo gooders? mother earthers? to paraphrase maggs Thatcher (courtesy of col rouge), I smile when an attack is particularly wounding, because when they result to personal attacks it means they have run out of scientific arguments.

Actually this is quite interesting, it seems bob carter has stopped telling us that co2 emissions are not warming the atmosphere, and is instead telling us......it won’t be so bad. You just need to take that jumper off.

"The Earth's comfortable (for us) average temperature of about 15C is maintained by the atmosphere, without which the average would fall to a chilly -18C. The presence of small amounts of water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - the "greenhouse gases" which absorb Earth's outgoing heat radiation and re-emit some of it downwards - causes the warming."

Now I know he is trying to tell us that we need all that greenhouse and that things would get chilly without it (a little bit of scare mongering?), but "atmosphere, without which the average would fall to a chilly -18C"? Well, I guess if you take the average of 107c (daytime) and -153c (nightime) from the surface of the moon (the nearest body external to our atmosphere) you might get -18c, but it would still be hostile to life.

So basically what we have if bob carters own cherry picking and bending of research and opinion (in a remarkably similar vein to Andrew Fraser), to support his own personal, Exxon mobile sponsored, opinion.

'Compare these tiny changes with the experience of an Australian citizen who moves from Hobart to Darwin to live.'

These are the kinds of strategies used to appeal to the general publics lack of knowledge on the subject as a way to change public opinion. It also shows a severe ignorance of the real dangers global warming poses.

The influence humans have had on global warming is of course subtle - but subtlety is all you need to drastically damage the environment, which has always existed on a very delicate balance. People claiming global warming is a myth back up their conclusion with 'because some studies say it's inconclusive.'

To that I say: even if there is only a tiny chance this is happening (and there is much more than a tiny chance), shouldn't we be as worried as hell? A small chance is still way too much.

What is conclusive is that the world is warmer, on average, than it used to be. That's a fact, and there's no other explanation for it but human influence. That should be enough to take the threat of global warming very, very seriously. To dismiss it as something like 'mother-earthism' is reckless at best.

There is a small chance that a bus will hit me tomorrow. However I am not as worried as all hell.

I could be killed by a bus or killed by global warming. Either way I will be dead

Lame comparison.

Try raising the stakes by 6 billion, because in the bus scenario it's only you that dies, not the whole world.

Also, you use the bus example as if both situations are that which we have no control over. This is very untrue for global warming.

Thanks Bob, totally agree. The earth is warming but the alarmists' theories are creating panic which may be unwarranted. I have studied and worked in the air science field and a common scientific theory amongst my colleageus (not sponsored by exxon) was that global temperatures are dynamic and a cyclic phenomenon, irrespective of human behaviour/intervention. CO2 from core samples of ice taken from deep down within the arctic and antarctic ice caps showed atmospheric CO2 levels have been fluctuating since aeons ago. However I still think policies aimed at reducing CO2 and other air pollutants are justified

Ironically, this current gem from Bob Carter only serves to comfort me further. It appears those who still believe either
a) anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not impacting global atmospheric temperatures, or
b) if it is, it doesn’t matter anyway
are really now getting desperate, clinging to such absurd polemics as this.

The ‘cool rationality’ that Bob mostly failed to deliver in his last post, seems to have completely failed him here. The fewer the sceptics, the more fanatical the rear guard action becomes. I wonder if Minister Campbell’s rumoured inoculation will also cure us of our misguided belief that the more we impact on the biosphere, the less it will affect us? Public money spent on killing-off dissension sounds remarkably more like an appeal to authority than challenging the assumption that we can carry-on business as usual. I hope Bob’s grandchildren are NOT administered this inoculation against critical thought.

Keep it up, as a work of fiction, this ranks next to State of Fear.