Thank you southerner. I think I agree with you in one area. Some animals are probably way better at predicting the weather than us, and your ants may have had a sense the rain was on its way. (Not pretending to base this on any scientific knowledge.)

Richard,

Scientific edvidence will explain the damage that Greenhouse Gases cause to the Ozone etc. But nature will shown the first signs and the acceleration of Global Warming. One must take both into consideration when deciding whether Global Warming is actually happening or just an act of nature. Most Scientific Edvidence will be written by a person with a PHD behind their name.

When a sevre storm is coming, the first thing you will hear is thunder, than you notice there are no birds to be heard, the wind will blown, than there is complete calm and finally the rain will come, quite often accompanied by hail. This is how nature tells her story. I hope this will help you.

And it's a lovely story, southerner. Sleep well.

Wow, there certianly are some bizarre ideas out there regarding climate change and its possible impacts. Or should I say highly publicised and highly improbably negative impacts.

I can only hope that the indemic political apathy of the Australian public prevents this or any future government from doing something rash. Choosing the correct insurance policy can be a tricky business.

After all, to expect a significant percentage of the population to be interested in (or even capable of passing) Geology 101 might be a little much. As for the concept of sensitive dependence on intial conditions? Or assessing the reliability of historical economic and geographical modelling?

Yep. Way, way over the collective's head.

For those of you who do understand at least the basics; Keep up the good work, after all we do need some educated people to steer things in a semi logical direction.

Just thought I'd be an average little nobody and get back to Davsab and Fester who made genuine responses to my earlier posting where I said "..... it doesn't get any more anthropocentric than human co2 emissions causing global warming." Davsab and Fester serve to illustrate quite well the anthropocentric mindset. Of course the anthropic principle simply sees humanity more like a parasite living on a host with classic alpha and omega insecurity.

Davsab seems to regularly parrot the IPCC with its "standard of standards" of "rational and logical reasoning". He raises the high priest argument with some forcings numbers and percents, where he comments that if the average person cannot understand this jargon then they should be excluded from any debate because "how can they be expected to understand the science behind global warming?". Of course everyone can be seduced by formulas until they penetrate the many inbuilt arbitrary assumptions. I'll generously comment that perhaps Davsab hasn't reached that necessary awareness but perhaps he can understand these fings called "forcings" which is beyond my comprehension.

Fester seems concerned about combating greenhouse gases and points me in that direction to show that " the warming effect of CO2 has a real basis". Well let's say that has some truth to it but to an incredibly miniscule amount ..... say a tenth of a degree from such a CO2 increase at most.

For an ordinary person like Keiran here it is not humanity's dirty doings but our largest plasma discharge formation the sun which is neither perfect nor constant nor regular. e.g. Our sunny boy is currently at an extremely high level and don't you think that may have some effect on the cosmic ray flux which in turn impacts on water vapour and cloud formation? Like to get more temperature, additional water vapor is needed. Why the focus on prescribed CO2s then? Don't people ever look at water vapour that makes up 95% of all greenhouse gases?

But you have to love clouds because there's a lot of water in that air up there.

This forum (with word limits) cannot give a crash course in the science that others have spent years in study or research – scientists can be a boring lot sometimes.

By all means join the debate, but it will help everyone if people understood certain climate science fundamentals first. Otherwise, misinformation at best, or a disingenuous agenda at worst, will stifle any discussion and leave people who really want to contribute or understand all the more confused.

For those that haven’t studied the science on global warming and want to understand the concepts and make comment on any issue, the following site (amongst others) is worth a look at;

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/category/extras/faq/

Keiran makes some statements about CO2, the Sun and water vapour (clouds) that are very adequately explained there, you can even join in the discussions (without word limits).

Or this;

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html

This is the AR4 report that caused all the fuss in the 1st place.

Water vapour acts as a powerful greenhouse gas absorbing long-wave radiation. Keiran is right, atmospheric water vapour concentration increases as a result of a global warming; this enhances the greenhouse effect further (positive feedback loop). It is well known that the rate of evaporation is affected by the temperature and that higher temperatures increase the (saturated) vapour pressure. This process is known as the “water vapour feedback”. One important difference between water vapour and other greenhouse gases such as CO2 is that the moisture spends only a short time in the atmosphere (say 10 days) before being precipitated out, whereas the life time of CO2 in the atmosphere may be longer than 100 years.