Get a grip billie....the drought is a natural event that has occurred many times before and there have been much worse ones in recorded history. Just because you cannot remember it, doesn't make it untrue. You are but a blink in time and quite a panicky one too. Comparing the nazis to global warming is just a little ridiculous. The nazis were evil incarnate thrust upon this earth by a group of small minded sheep (much like GW alarmists). Global Warming is the latest panic driven event to grip the world since avian bird flu, the war on terror, y2k...and on it goes

Well, Billie invokes Godwin's law.

I am quite amazed that StabinTheDark can read so much, because thousands of experts have come out against man made global warming. If he reads a hundred others who claim it is 'real', that means he must have read hundreds of thousands...wow...More likely he just ignores the documentaries that are against global warming.

Stab's final comment is priceless, as that is what many scientists are doing....it doesn't matter if the science is solid...they exagerate the claims in order to use fear mongering. This is why it is a religious movement, not a scientific movement.
http://alangrey.blogspot.com/2007/01/neo-env-watch-rhetoric-exposed.html

Grey:

I was clearly using a figure of speech. I’ve read and seen documentaries on both side of the fence. At the end of the day I’m not a scientist. And at the end of the day the scientific community will always experience division, especially on a high profile issue like this.

So where do we turn?

The fact remains that there is strong evidence to suggest that the majority of scientists qualified in the field agree that humans are contributing to global warming. They may differ on how much and what to do about it, but they agree on that.

Yes there are plenty who don’t. Like in any number of contentious fields, there is disagreement, especially since hard research into the matter is still very much in its infancy.

I’m not saying to silence them or to stop research. By all means continue. But in the meantime, a paradigm is emerging.

My point is this. Even if the middle to lower end of the range of estimates are correct, it is going to take an enormous effort to reverse trends in place globally. We have everything going against us. Culturally, economically and technologically. These are practices that can’t turn on a dime, and we may need to. Apathy isn’t going to help us do it.

At the end of the day, getting people thinking about their impact on the environment can only help the human race in the medium to long term.

For you to rubbish the research done by a majority of scientists in the field by accusing them of a ‘religious movement’ is ridiculous

Grey is subject to the Golden Rule of Climate Sceptics:

"For a climate sceptic to make an argument, they must resort to lies, misinformation or an attack on science or the scientific community"

In Grey's case, it is an attack on science.

To set the record straight, there is no dispute about climate change due to human influence in the scientific community. Climate Sceptics pervert the rigours of science to create this perception.

As mentioned in the film "An Inconvenient Truth", Naomi Oreskes completed a study which demonstrated the extent of the scientific consensus on global warming. From a large sample, she was not able to find even one abstract of a peer-reviewed paper which contradicted or disagreed with the consensus position as described by the IPCC. (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686). This means abstracts were directly or indirectly in agreement; or were neutral or not addressing the issue.

The sceptics used every trick in the book to try to discredit this study. Not one of their arguments could not be backed up. When they failed they changed tack in various ways, trying to move the goalposts and/or trying to criticise the peer-review process. One can get an idea of the hollowness of such debate from this very forum: (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=5382)

Returning to the subject of the article, the winners will the countries that are most engaged in trading schemes and the companies providing the solutions and technologies for cutting global greenhouse gas emissions.

Why? Because carbon emissions eventually have to decline. If it does not decline within say 50 years, then necessity to solve it only becomes more acute. Dykes, airconditioning, sunscreens and insecticides are stop-gap solutions.

In the long-term, it's as simple as that.

Thanks David Latimer for your brilliant insights and your one cutting edge scientific reference proving beyons a shadow of a doubt the human influence on climate change.

PS Oreskes' paper has been discredited a number of times as has Big Al's fanciful walk through the climate change science...

Richard Castles,

Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in the 1960s. At that time India was a net importer of food, experiencing widespread malnutrition and a very high population growth rate. He was not alone in predicting famine. Among the others who did were the Club of Rome and even agronomists like the Paddock brothers. If you had been around at the time, I suspect you would have been unwilling to bet any serious money on India not having a bad famine within a decade.

The reason they all proved to be wrong, or at least wrong about the timing, was that they could not anticipate the enormous success of the Green Revolution, which has doubled food production since those books were written. Sometimes technology does buy time for human societies. Sometimes it doesn't, and there is a population crash, as has happened numerous times in human history. How lucky do you feel?