Hear Hear Perseus. The amount of ridicule the two West Australian Noble Prize winners had to put up with from the "consensus" view of the hidebound medical profession, and their own peer group was unreal; how much suffering might have been alleviated by a more open minded attitude. I do not know how many people have actually died from "global warming" so far, but about 600,000 Australian Hospital patients a year will develop an infection from their visit. About 18,000 a year die from them, that is about 36 747aircraft loads a year. How long would we put up with an Airline Industry with that sort of track record? Surely this is something the climate wonkers could have a go at right now?

Richard 42

BOAZ smiles.....as the words 'SCIENCE IS OBJECTIVE' float as a bubble around the room..only to explode under the pin prick of Richard42's opening sentence :)

onya Richard.

*Boaz wanders off for his quiet time with his Bible* :)

Thanks Ho Hum - while reading the piece by "Melbourne writer" Richard Castles, I immediately wondered about his affiliations. IPA again, eh? aren't the mining companies big donors to IPA? If not they soon will be no doubt.

With 32 bushfires raging in NSW before summer has even begun, and the drought biting ever deeper, I read in yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald that marine researchers in the UK have reported significant ocean warming over the last seven years, which may lead to a rise in atmospheric temperature of 9%, while New Zealand scientists working in Antarctica predict the collapse of an ice shelf the size of France. But no doubt all this is just scaremongering. Go to sleep little kiddies

Sensible measures need to be taken to reduce greenhouse pollution but sensible measures also need to apply to dealing with potential pandemics. The problem in this debate is one of extremes, those that deny cause and effect and those that want to create a doomsday scenario.

The question I have however is one of logic. What is the difference between a green telling us the end of the world will occur in 100 years and the prophecies of Nostradamus? It sounds like another doomsday cult to me...

"There is a corresponding psychological behaviour that could be pertinent to climate alarmism, namely compliance."

There's another behaviour that i think the psychologists should look into: "Labelism".
This describes a devastating need to categorise and label every nuance of human behaviour in order to have some nice sciency words to condescend with.

Perhaps Richard Castles might care to explain why his article is not "fundamentalism" of exactly the sort he decries in environmentalists.

Replete with cliches, this article sets up a straw dummy of environmentalism, which Castles then knocks down. For a real sample of where the extremes of the climate debate are, you might check http://www.climateaudit.org and compare to http://www.realclimate.org . Not being a scientist myself, I'll confine myself to saying that the glaciers are in retreat in many areas. Warming appears to be real, the argument is whether it is anthropocentric and global, or part of the natural fluctuations of climate.

Unwittingly, Richard Castles demonstrates exacly the kind of fundamentalism that the IPA is noted for. "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"