Brian, like any behaviourist knows, the best way to make a point to unwilling people is by example. For Australia to tell those countries what to do without doing it we as a country would be hypocrisy.

We will have a perpetual stalemate if we play this came if "I won't do it before HE does it" and so on. China, India and Russia parrot the same thing back to the world. "We won't do it before America and Australia does it" and then they have the trump card in victim politics of "poor bloody us, we were never rich and lucky, unlike them": pointing to us.

On and on and on it goes.

"Environment worship" lol. Well, that's a new one on me. What crazy rhetoric will they come up with next? My eyes roll so much; I could go into catatonic epilepsy.

Interesting article. Noteworthy that environmentalism didn't really kick off in the west until we had attained high economic growth & high gdp/capita. And not surprising that enviro concerns aren't on Africa's list of priorities.

The surprise about notions of 'fake morality' is that the author seems surprised. Maybe what he is writing about is also a reflection of himself & he doesn't even know it, or he does and it depresses him?

I have no positive view of humanity per se. For me, the human being as an organism (as with all organisms) is TOTALLY selfish (I can't emphasise that enough). Not inherently bad or good. That's just the way life is designed - "twas always thus, & thus twill always be". When the human being is channelled in the right direction, however, we can be a force for good (and also one for evil). But we do have to be channelled. It won't happen on it's own.

If we can get people to see win-win, rather than win-lose, then that's about as good as we can hope for. Lose-win is the stuff of pipe-dreams.

I often wonder if the authors of these articles read the comments and modify their knowlege/views accordingly. It appears that ideas created illogically can never be displaced by logic.

So many well thought out replies to an article which places religion where it belongs, in the bin. I said RELIGION, not belief in a God or higher authority which is a personal thing which some people need to function.

We are custodians of this small planet. What gives us the right to destroy 'Gods' creations or the environment that supports it.

Religous texts state "man has dominion over all....." which most religous adherants take to mean we can do what we like with our bountiful resources. Well wake up and look around. The countries run by fanatics, religous or singular self serving autocrats, are deserts completely devoid of life except those things directly required to support millions of aimless,hungry, argry people waiting to emmigrate to Australia/America/Europe where a secular more humanistic form of society works. Unfortunately this is polluted by a few who drive the 'ecomomic' model which supports their habit at the expense of everyone elses quality of life.

I hope a few disillusioned god botherers read the words in these replies and take a good hard look at what they believe.

Julatron betrays his intellectual limitations when he refers to "the science" as if it was one, homogenous entity that supports his opinions. It is not a case of the science but rather which science.

Some of the so-called science supporting gullible warming has been a complete shocker. Like the now completely discredited collapse of the Atlantic Conveyor due to Greenland Ice melt which would have needed to completely melt in just a few decades to have any impact on the salinity of descending water in the North Atlantic. The guys who first raised the scare now have confirmed funding for the next decade to monitor sub-ocean flows so they are set for life.

Meanwhile, we still find plodders in the blogosphere who still think Greenland is about to slip away when, at current melt rates, it will take 11,000 years for the entire sheet to melt. But to maintain the scam the climate cretins are now talking about some imaginary "tipping event" that will prompt an increase in melt rate but, curiously, can point to no logical reason why such a tipping point would occur in the next 100 years when ice volume will still be 99.1% of current volume.

So run along now, Julatron, you are totally out of your depth.

Brian2:
Where on earth did you come up with this wildly ridiculous (and heinously wrong) statistic?
"It seems as though this argument in general misses the main point and that is that we as a nation are responsible for only 0.04% of world pollution."

try about 50 times that amount! Australia, depsite having 0.5 of the world population, omits 2% of the worlds CO2 - our per capita rate being second only to the US; 6 times that of china and nearly 16 times that of india (both much poorer countries who cannot so readily afford the technologies that can reduce emissions).

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2-emissions.html

get your facts straight

Having watched the arguement grow over 20 years, piece by piece from having to prove the that the earth warming to having to prove that it was not I have come to the conclusion that there are 3 kinds of global warming denyers. The ignorant, the fearful and the greedy. The ignorant because they are ill informed. The fearful because they don't want to know and greedy because thay are doing well out of the statis quo. As ever the prophets of the status quo are those that profit from the status quo.
Mankind has been in the freezer several times but this will be our first time in the oven. We have been however, drowned at the end of the last ice age. Dramatic sea level rise drowned coastal areas with prime farm land and perhaps protocities. Unfortunatly this happen just before writting or they forgot writting. Flood myths and the coming vengful gods replacing the Mothers tell us it was not a heart warming exprience. Probery better that we avoid it happening again if possible.