When I wrote "that China and India are building 1400 coal-powered power stations in the 2000-3030 period" there was a typo, and now I've waited my 22 hours I can correct it. It should have read 2000-2030 of course.

Brian, you've touched on the really important issue here - it doesn't matter what people like Gore spruik about global warming, CO2 is going to continue to be pumped into the atmosphere because the rest of the world, not unreasonably, wants a standard of living like our own.

So for me the proper question is not "how do we stop it", but "how do we live with it." And further - what is the best application of the resources (including time and money) that we have now.

You need to manage the situation while leveraging your current position to introduce workable strategies. Kyoto isn't a solution. It was ad hoc and was never going to achieve anything, ignoring the future CO2 emitters. Some form of carbon tax, which replaced other indirect taxes, could work well in countries like Australia, without constraining economic growth, although there would be potential substitution issues with imports of energy intensive products from overseas countries.

GrahamY, the importance of Kyoto, in my view, was not in what it could achieve in reducing CO2, but what it represented as process of international cooperation. Paul Monk, who was one of the first who got me reading about climate change when this article (http://www.austhink.org/monk/global_cooling.htm) was published in the AFR a few years ago under the title 'Cold comfort for the clever creature' saw the challenge presented by climate change as developing new ways of thinking.

Looking back, he was probably too concerned about cooling rather than warming, and too focused on single cataclysmic events causing abrupt climate change rather than the interactive effects of lesser events to do with ice melting in the Arctic, melting in Greenland, bits falling off the Antarctic peninsula, methane burps in Siberia, drying and burning of the Amazon rainforest, melting of glaciers in the Swiss Alps and the eastern section of the Himalayas, increased severity of cyclones/hurricanes/typhoons and unusual weather events all around the world. (I disagree with Country Gal further up the thread. New weather records are being set, at an unusual rate, I’m told.) Each of them a worry, but an even bigger worry within the total earth system, making it difficult to identify a single tipping point.

But most of all Monk, I felt at the time, missed the point that we are going to have to find new ways of relating to each other, a level of international cooperation that goes far beyond anything we’ve achieved.

Yesterday we heard about a new report on the effects of sea-level rise in the Pacific (http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20548131-2,00.html). The report suggests that the sea might rise by 50cm by 2070 and points out that with a metre rise a 2002 calculation would see 2.3 million climate refugees from south and South-East Asia. Apparently since 2001, ”citizens of Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati and Tuvalu have been able to enter New Zealand as environmental refugees displaced by climate change.” Tim Costello’s commentary is here:

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,20546197-27197,00.html

So maybe an apology is due to Al Gore who said something of the kind in his film.

GrahamY

What was carbonari's point re Arctic temperatures in the 1930s? What is the significance of comparing warming of a small part of the globe with the global warming since the 1990s? Is this part of the misrepresentation of facts by denialists with the purpose of misleading the general public and slandering climate scientists?

Scepticism is an essential part of science, but there is nothing sceptical about making a misleading comparison of Arctic warming of the 1930s and the global warming of today.

Brian, there is no apology due to Gore - he said something that was straight-out incorrect, which he should have known was incorrect, and that's about as close to a lie as you can get without actually telling one.

What you've done with sea levels is cherry-pick the first study that comes along. The IPCC doesn't predict 50 cm by 2070, so what makes you think this new study is any better than the studies that disagree with the IPCC on the downside? Confirmation bias runs riot in this debate.

And Fester, I see you've now shifted your accusation beyond the scope of the study that you cited. It didn't say the 1930s Arctic warming was a "small part of the globe", it said it affected everything over latitutde 60. Check out a globe - that's a huge area. What it said was that the 90s warming came further down into Eurasia. But that doesn't mean that the whole world has warmed by anything near as much as the Arctic. In fact, the Antarctic has got colder.

All of which leads me to wonder why some of the commentators on this thread have such a desire to believe in catostrophic global warming and dismiss, in the case of Fester in fairly vitriolic terms (I'm apparently a "slanderer"), any reasonable criticism.

The Arctic is not a huge area. It is less than 7% of the area of the Earth's surface.