Good article Peter,

My 2cents worth:

- GW is a secondary / tilting factor that can be attributed (or not to many natural disasters).
- Like everything with risks comes opportunities. GW in essence means there is more room for us to plant more trees and fight desertation. GW is actually the lowest cost problem to solve per country per person.
- Prosperity does not mean the abuse of natural resources. I was in the US last month on holidays and to many being prosperous means 2 x 5.7 Liter SVUs in the garage. There is a room for education on the correct defintion of prosperity as to being smart about how you consume what you need and not as much as you can.

Food for thoughts,

This whole gloom and doom thing will run out of steam like the start of a new Ice Age prediction that came out in the 1970's. Have a read of Andrew Bolt's article in the Herald on May 10th.

Sniggid, your "whole gloom and doom thing" will never "run out of steam" (did you mean "run out of fuel"?) when people make hilarious suggestions like, "Have a read of Andrew Bolt's article in the Herald on May 10th".

Global Warming is neither real nor a massive conspiracy, it is a coalition of self interests that feed on each other's biases for their own ends in much the same way that the IT industry gave us Y2K.

Y2K was not a conspiracy but it was most certainly backed by a strong majority consensus of experts. Skeptics were regarded with derision right up to about 15 minutes past midnight on the 31st December 1999. Of course, only two days later polite people didn't mention out of caution that the person they were talking to may have contributed to the mass delusion. Not a single senior executive appears to have been sacked for wasting millions of dollars.

The author claims that ocean acidity is a topic that Global Warming Skeptics never mention. Well, this particular Skeptic certainly will for the author said;

"The other parameter that affects the health of the oceans is acidity. Ocean acidity gives an objective measurement that is directly related to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and thus human activity, which is why people who argue that global warming is a scam never mention acidity. Atmospheric carbon dioxide combines with water to give carbonic acid, a “weak” acid that in turn initiates further acidification pathways. We are familiar with this from acid-rain scenarios".

For the record, the UK Royal Society's paper on ocean acidity assumes that CO2 only mixes in the top 100 metres (2.5%) of the average ocean depth of 4,000 metres. And they then tally up all the CO2 for a number of centuries to get some numbers that will really scare the kids. It is pure bunkum.

For a start, the mighty Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic is 500 metres deep and it routinely forms eddies that are over 1.2km deep. Furthermore, moving bodies of water tend to twist due to the rotation of the earth, producing meanders in rivers and currents.
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More importantly, the assumption ignores thermohaline circulation, the massive vertical circulation of ocean volumes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation And this, for a nation like Australia who's climate is so dependent on fluctuations in El Nino is no minor omission. For the Southern Oscillation is derived from variations in the temperatures of ocean currents off the Pacific Coast of South America.

The research on "thermohaline circulation" is Atlanticentric, with Europeans and North Americans viewing their local systems as driving most of the world’s ocean currents. But the by far the greatest volumes are driven by Antarctic ice and the Southern Ocean. Less is known about exactly where most of the upwelling takes place but there is general agreement that huge volumes of dense, saline and CO2 laden water sink at the poles.

And given the volumes involved, it simply beggars belief that this massive circulation will not, over the decades and centuries in the acidity model, make a mockery of the 100 metre CO2 circulation assumption.

The same applies in the Northern Hemisphere. The Atlantic Conveyor would have to stop, completely, before any serious acidification of the upper 100 metres could begin. But of course, it has not. The European Ice-Age doom story is still just that. So the Royal Society has been modeling a phenomena that has not even begun but which has been presented as something that is already in train.

Some will recall the Oslo Statement of 7 Decenber 2001 (after 9/11) signed by 108 Nobel Laureates (Chairman Arafat didn't sign). This said that "global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few" was causing the "poor and disenfranchised", the majority of whom live a marginal existence in equatorial climates, to become the most profound danger to world peace in the coming years. The Laureates didn't tell us that global climate has fluctuated about a 300-year warming trend since the "Quiet Sun" of the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715). They didn't tell us that Earth does not journey in an empty Universe, but is a prisoner of solar, planetary and galactic influences. Ours is not a self-contained climate; and its primary driver is via the variable Sun-Earth connection. Doing the right thing about fossil-fuel use, cannot stabilise our ever-changing climate - unless we first stabilise the Sun. Variable solar activity can be predicted. Looking after the future needs to include predicting climatic events (next Little Ice Age cold period, next Indian Monsoon failure, for instance) and planning so that death and misery can be prevented and mitigated. So far, the words of Laureates are lacking in this crucial area.