Laughable article. My personal favorite
"Pittock is a scientist one listens to with respect. Twenty-five years ago he was an influential figure in a group that persuaded the superpowers - the US and USSR - there would be no survivors of an atomic war, because of the nuclear winter it would unleash. Thus one of the first uses of climate modelling was to save the human race."

You mean the nuclear winter myth?
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp.html

The myth that was used to try and scare people into doing what the scientists wanted? How appropriate.

And these darn incredibly cold days in Australia? All caused by global warming I guess. rofl

Yes I laughed when I read this piece in the paper. Where is the evidence that the Antarctic is melting. See "Apocalypse cancelled" by Christopher Monckton in the last two editions of the Sunday Telegraph in the UK www.telegraph.co.uk, download and read the discussion, calculations and references in the .pdf in the first article.

I quote him: "Antarctica contains 90% of the world's ice, Greenland another 4%, all other glaciers and ice sheets account for only 6%..... There has been local warming in the Antarctic peninsula...but much of the interior has cooled...sea ice has increased (references) the trend is increasing...The Antarctic sea-ice season is three weeks longer today than in 1979...Side-looking radar interferometry shows that the ice mass in the West Antarctic is growing at a rate estimated at 26.8 gigatons per year, reversing a melting trend that has persisted for 6000 years(reference)"
Methinks we need to take a much closer look at the Antarctic, after all it is much closer to home, particularly as this trend since 1979 has coincided (I think) with the increase in the ozone hole, which I recall this year is the biggest ever.
Richard 42

What an absolute joke. The climate models are built around the grossly overstated scenarios,which them selves can't properly model the way clouds are formed and the effect they have on climate, cant take account of local topography, can't model things like the Freemantle doctor, and are put togther by the same people who think Gores film was absolutely wonderful, and the science behind it was correct.

Anytime there is a value judgement to be made about a variable these clowns can be predicted to always take the most extreme, to further exaggerate their case.

Very few of their predictions are supported by the available evidence. They cant even separate out correlation and causation, because the former is easy to do, the latter is critical and more difficult to establish.

Its as about the best example of fraud on the public purse anyone could imagine

Ooops. Thought this was meant to discuss the findings of the latest research. Instead it's a forum for the remaining 10%.

Who gets shocked remains to be seen, but I'm putting my money on the precautionary principal. A bit of context wrt the above scepticism:

(1) Lord Monckton was (according to other posts on onlineopinion) Maggie Thatcher's science advisor. His arguments strike me as brilliant and compelling in their logic, a bit like the affirmative in a debate at the aeronautical engineering society, on "The Bumblebee Cannot Fly"

(2) Brian Martin probably drew, for his "mythology", on a long-running debate in the open, peer-(not as in peerage) reviewed literature. A summary from 1990 is pasted below for those who want to carry forward. My understanding is that nuclear war strategists allowed that discretion is the better part of valour, after the MAD strategy revealed this potential complication.

12 January 1990
This Week in SCIENCE [AAAS Science Magazine]
RUTH LEVY GUYER

Nuclear winter update

"IN the early 1980s, the first nuclear winter scenanos were proposed.

"Since then, mathematical simulations,global cimate models, laboratory experiments, studies of fires and natural dust clouds, and various other analyses have provided new information critical to our understanding of how nudear war could alter dimate and life on the earth.

"A review of the nudear winter scenano is provided in this issue by Turco et al. (page 166). After a nudear exchange, urban fires would generate soot, ash, dust, oily droplets, and other products. (Different flammable materials - lumber, fossil fuels, plastics, vegetation - generate different combinations of these.)

"The most important combustion product for producing the nuclear winter conditions is black sooty
smoke. Studies ofthe optical and physical properties ofsoot have made predictions more accurate of soot's effects on surface temperatures, atmospheric temperatures, circulation patterns, precipitation, and insolation.

"There remain a number of uncertainties in the nudear winter equation, but the basic physics ofthe phenomenon has remained essentialy as originally formulated.

The seminal article is available at a library near you:

Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions
R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan
Science 23 December 1983 222: 1283-1292

Even as a social scientist, the above rhetoric from the Posts so far makes one feel like a dumb outsider looking in.

Seeing you are all mostly lining up peace-makers against scientists, surely the peace-makers are not that bad they could have the world down tools, with any sensible scientist in agreement with the peace-makers, except with the odd queer Jekyll turned Hyde.

What we are facing by the time our great great grandkids grow up, is an end to dangerous fossil fuels, anyhow, so why not Mr Howard and Mr Bush join Kyoto Mark 1 and get along with it, because you can bet your life, that China and India will then join up too.

Can give praise about your research, but aren't most of you just wasting precious time?