I guess shelter, food and water are the three main pillars of survival, with a generous dollop of energy to add a veneer of civilisation. I dunno about you, but I prefer my rats cooked.

I worry that the stored reserves of food and water are smaller than I have always smugly imagined them to be. I suppose that our local supermarket would last about one day if it were to be rushed by determined shoppers for grub, waving increasingly useless dollars.

I suspect that the reserve of REAL necessities is about as thin as the screen of a plasma TV.

It's a caution.

War we had to have?

It's not a war. Only if you believe in radically extending the use of that word beyond the preposterous 'war on terror' usage can you claim that.

The second part of the title "we had to have" seems to actually summarize the situation more eloquently. The structural economic changes required for Climate Change will probably remind us of some basic structural changes to our national economic.

Carbon trading will look a bit like floating the dollar. There will be a shakeout in certain industry sectors but ultimately the economy will run more efficiently.

Extremist rhetoric about 'wars' only stalls the debate from moving onto the practical implementation stage.

Where do they find these nutters?

If combating climate change is a war then the truth, has indeed, become the first casualty. The latest IPCC output is nothing more than a brochure, a political summary. The factual report will not be released until May or June and they are busy editing it right now to ensure that the stated "facts" are consistent with the summary.

If a company director did that in a prospectus, anywhere in the OECD, he would be up for a serious criminal offence.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that the vocabulary of warfare is only one step short of the medical euphemism. "The war we had to have" soon gives way to "ethnic cleansing" and political "infection control", the very worst that humanity can stoop to.

So now these Gullible Warmers are at war, ostensibly with climate change but in reality with anyone who disagrees with them. We have already seen the persecution of emminent scientific dissenters and the villification of "sceptics". So how long before the scapegoating starts and the "greenshirts" are let loose on ordinary men and women.

Are we experiencing just another drought, albeit a nasty one, or are we in the throes of climate change? Perhaps the age of people play an unseen role in how we perceive our current environment. Let me explain.
We are currently living in an age of mass communication through media such as television, newpapers, personal communication devices such as mobile phones and of course, computers. More and more people have access to computers and access to forums such as Online Opinion, but such wasn't the case back in the period 1938 to 1947, Eastern Australia experienced the worst drought on record, but was followed by 7 years of flooding rains. http://www.bom.gov.au/lam/climate/levelthree/c20thc/drought3.htm will provided the full story.
In those times, people were fortunate to have a simple radio. There was no other means of communication except for telephone and newspapers where available. In the case of the latter, information was slow and unreliable. I could imagine that if people of the day had access to our modern systems, climate change would have been much talked about just as it is today, but in 1938-47 they had more to worry about. Victorian catchments were dry, they had Black Friday and don't forget WW2.
Perhaps Climate change is more about the ability to convey fear to the masses more easily than it is about actual Global warming. I'm sure that if we experience flooding rains for the next several years, climate change will have already been relegated to dusty shelves, archives and forgotten hard drives.

Most of us may now agree that the climate is warming, but to claim that "climate change is not a subjective issue like industrial relations or even economic management, where ideology legitimately shapes policy positions" shows a breathtaking naivety, arrogance or both. The question of exactly what to do about is as messy, contentious and political as any other important policy issue:

How much of our effort should be directed to adaptation and how much to mitigation.?

Can geo-sequestration or carbon stripping be made to work?

Should offsets be allowed?

How far should Australia do down the path of reducing its emissions when its competitors are not?

Should we have a carbon tax or a trading scheme or both, and should we do this unilaterally or push for an international post-Kyoto scheme?

Is it legitimate to expect developing countries to share the burden of reducing emissions, given that rich countries caused the problem and are better able to afford economic costs?

Is taking luke-warm showers and using expensive solar water heaters really going to save the planet?

Dogmatic pseudo-science cannot provide certain answers to any of these questions

Murray says that "the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has delivered to humanity an undisputedly-high level of statistical certainty on global warming." So why do many eminent climatologists, statisticians and economists continue to dispute it?

He then says that "The panel’s 2,000 or more scientific experts from around the world are 90 per cent-plus sure, which makes it “very likely”, that people are causing a dangerous build-up of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere." This does not actually mean that those scientists hold that view (and it wouldn't matter if they did - consensus is not proof). What it means is that the results of IPCC computer modelling suggest that the true situation is within plus or minus two standard deviations of the sinulation result. The projections of climate change models are actually based on economic modelling - projecting the rate of economic growth of each country with an assumption (which has been shown to be too high) as to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions realted to this growth. The economic aspects of the modelling have been totally discredited, e.g. by Castles and Henderson, and economists seeking to model much simpler relationships would generally not have confidence in results below the 95% confidence level. Nor would they feel confident about forecasting economic outcomes more than ten years or so ahead.