We cannot discount any possibilities,nor should we just listen to the doom sayers.This type of change can gather it's own momentum [ie ice melting and not reflecting the sun's energy into space]and accelerate out of control.Our largest nuclear power plant is the sun.Just in the western parts of NSW in arid areas there is enough energy to support 2 billion people to our present living standards.We need to put much more effort into solar technologies and energy storage either through batteries or through hydrogen.

The other positive side of of solar energy is that it turns stores heat energy that can be converted to kinetic energy.If we produce too many solar panels ,we could actually cool the planet and bring on an ice age.Then we would have to burn more fossil fuels to heat up the planet again,"doh".

Perhaps we should save our fossil fuels as an antidote to those future ravenous solar panels that will starve the planet of vital energy.

The world was warned in 1992 when 1,600 eminent scientists half of them Nobel Prize winners in their respective fields sent a joint report to the U.N. predicting this would happen. What is beginning NOW is the price the world's wealthy make the rest of us pay for their ignorance of this warning.

As usual the almighty U.S.A. dollar is the basic reason, the grandchildren of these enormously wealthy people will be on a space flight to an inhabitable planet, while our granchildren will be left with a world reminisent of the Mad Max movie

Why do we worship the rich? They do nothing but evil to us!

Of course Dr Pittock is talking nonsense, and the CSIRO is well known to be a hotbed of islamists and North Korean spies (led by, err, Rupert Murdoch) dedicated to destroying us for our freedums.. tho they'd better hurry or Ruddock & the High Court (that Howard stacked) will beat them to it.

Thank goodness we have failed lawyers and teachers like John Howard and Alan Jones to do our science for us. Just one question: when will Johnnie make it rain?
[/hysterical laughter]

The last paragraph “Australia urgently needs a national plan for coping with inevitable climate change in all sectors of industry, the community and daily life”

If something is inevitable, we can do nothing. The best way of dealing with that is to allow market economics to rebalance the values, which has been found to be the best way in the past and will remain the best for the future.

However, if these scientists are so right and climate change is a matter of human produced green house gases, then the continued production of such gases is not “inevitable” it is “optional”.

Now, if something is “optional” or “avoidable” we can work at changing the occurance of that thing to reflect its considered significance..
This, in a sentence, is what Kyoto attempts to do but not on a level playing field, on a game skewed against Australia (hence the prudent and responsible response of the current federal government, a prudence and responsibility absent in the populist offerings of the federal opposition).

The challenge here is; how do you decide how to measure and account for those economic impacts?

I do not accept the conjuring trick being proposed to supposedly measure CO2 emissions and then using the result as a basis for transfer of significant wealth between nations.

The EEC ended up with wine lakes of tasteless french plonk and mountians of butter, which it sold at a discount to Russia, to maintain an uneconomic price to EU members.

It is the same school of tossers who are promoting this carbon credit trading scheme.

To me it sounds like giving an alien authority right to suck the marrow out of our economy, that is the economy we hold in trust for our children and grand children etc.

I am seriously discomforted by committing our descendents to a corrupt plan simply because a lot of people have got it wrong and signed up to Brussels expedient.

I wonder how much Al Gore will make out of his investment and options portfolio from all his blatant spruiking.

It seems to me that on web sites such as this, some people are poised to rush in and discredit any evidence/article trying to warn us about global warming. How quickly they jump to the attack ! I wonder who they are exactly. Excuse my cynicism. The coal industry has so much dough. For example, it's just been revealed that one company gave a cheap "loan" of a mere $300,000 to a former Minister. But, anyway, to those "attackers" who are in fact genuine climate change sceptics, I can only say that I would prefer to err on the side of caution. Let's get on with massive funding of research into renewables and any and every alternative to fossil fuel. If we can afford billions for an immoral and illegal war we can surely afford the same for the sake of the planet and future generations.

It never ceases to amaze me how many armchair critics are prepared to snipe from the sidelines on issues peripheral to the topic at hand. Whilst I cannot claim to have the intimate personal misgivings about the author this article (that some have expressed) I do recognise the basic commonsense of his views. Also my technical training does not include me into the club encompassing the specific scientific field of atmospheric modelling so I am limited to reading opinions of (and occasionally talking to) the various experts and researchers around the world. My meandering readings and chance discussions with such qualified people all seem to be indicate there is big trouble ahead. What really clinches it for me though are my own observations. I have been involved in aviation from the age of 10 and 35 years later I have noticed big changes over that time. As a child sitting in the backseat of light aircraft the main discernable atmospheric pollution was located as a brown smear above Sydney and Melbourne at around 5000’. This line of demarcation between clean and polluted air has been gradually climbing and widening. It is now Australia wide and currently lying at around 18,000’. In Europe it lies at over 30,0000’. At 18,000’ over half the atmosphere (density) lies below, at 30,000’ two thirds lie below, its pretty easy to see what’s happening really. Casting my eye downwards on Australia I marvel at how little of the original vegetation remains. The Great Dividing range is the only saviour of the East Coast, whilst only small pockets of National Park remain over the rest of the continent. In Europe it is not so much the lack of vegetation , but the size and extent of urban development that stands out. I then project the emerging industrial economies of India and China into the equation and begin to have an uneasy feeling of what the term ‘unsustainable’ really means.