Part 2

The other thing to consider is the span of temperatures that range across the globe and encompass all living things. The difference between the cold of the poles and the heat of the Sahara seems extreme to us. Yet in fact, this is a very narrow band of temperatures indeed.

The North Pole is an extremely warm place in the solar system. The Sahara is an extremely cool place in the solar system. We and our fellow life-forms live in a razor thin band of temperatures. We, together with our little blue planet, have enjoyed an almost impossibly improbable existence. What will it take to steer us off this narrow track? Just some jumped-up monkeys in suits? A dessicated coconut? A bat-eared galoot for a Treasurer? Is that all?

Oh by the way Dr Coles, I've had a bit of a twinge in my left foot for a couple of days now. Would it be asking too much if you could, er -

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Dr Coles asks others to do their homework. Does he assume superiority in the homework stakes, and is he entitled to such assumption?

Last year in Canberra a mentally impaired young man with a compulsion to ingest water was left unsupervised for long enough for him to abscond to a bathroom. There, he proceeded to drink enough water to kill himself.

With the learning associated with his title, we might expect Dr Coles would have done enough homework to know that the difference between a poison and a medicine might be the dose rate.

Our planet carries a fixed amount of carbon, and continuously transfers it between multitudes of differing combinations. All living matter has it as its basic structure, and more than twenty per cent of this biomass is represented as fungi – which might be a blow to human self-importance.

All living matter is dependent upon the interplay between carbon in the atmosphere, as CO2, and plants and similar entities. Four hundred million years ago, coral reefs entrapped CO2 , combining it with calcium. A hundred million years later, vegetation got into the act, and much of the captured CO2 was entrapped in vast coal seams – a process continuing on during the course of another 350 million years. The interplay continues – capture and release of atmospheric CO2 , largely in parallel with cooling and warming phases of this restless planet’s climate.

Homo sapiens is injecting the atmosphere with CO2 . The dose rate is millions of years of sequestration compressed into an almost instantaneous release over one century.

“CO2 is part of our food chain and not a pollutant”. How parallel with the sad situation of the lad who drank until he died. And that was written by one professing the title of Dr.

Ah, Andrew Bartlett, someone who has found the benefit of knowing they will always be in a position of political opposition.
He reminds me of UK’s Michael Foot, the darling of the left who, when he became leader of the UK Labour Party, behaved like a complete buffoon and confirmed his incompetence.

Here Andrew luxuriates and wraps himself in the moral high ground hypothesis “I am not advocating a withdrawal from the export market, but if we continue to go down that path, then we must take some moral responsibility for it and be a global leader, not a spoiler, in tackling climate change.”

Good one Andrew, I assume you have calculated the consequences of Australia’s withdraw from its export markets? The result is not a favourable outcome, back to a recession worse than the one which Keating’s incompetence vomited up on the Australian electorate.

I heard politics described as the art of the possible. Andrew, you are in the wrong house.
Instead of the senate, Andrew should be sat in the outhouse, for all the crap he is coming forth with.

Being an Australian Democrat, Andrew has decided his position on the field of politics and here illustrates that simply whining from the sidelines does nothing to improve the capacity of the winning team.

So, Australians produce 4.5 times our globally proportionate share of CO2 and this needs to change, does it? Well it will change, and soon, if the Bartletts of this world succeed in giving our economy a massive moggodon in the name of climate cretinism.

You see, China, India and South America are all boosting their output big time and before long our share of CO2 will be entirely proportionate because everyone else's will have risen after key industries move off shore. The only problem is that by then our dollar will be worth 12c US and half a Renminbi. And it won't be our country any more because the median income chinese family, all 300 million of them, will be in the market for a cheap weekender in Australia. You guys better hope they need a gardener.

I agree with Bob Brown that we should plan to massively reduce the scale of coal exports. Whatever prosperity we gain from exporting non-renewable coal and other mineral resources will be paid for by future generations and obviously by harm to the global environment through pollution and global warming.

Of course it goes without saying that all attempts to reduce our footprint will come to nothing if we keep inceasing our numbers as Divergence, ericc and others have pointed out.

Andrew, last time we discussed population levels, you countenanced immigration of around 110,000 (see http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4099#29482).
had you noticed that annual immigration might be as high as 300,000? (See Ross Gittins "Back Scratching at a National Level", 12 June 07 at http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/backscratching-at-a-national-level/2007/06/12/1181414298095.html) of which only 13,000 are classified as humanitarian immigrants?

“I agree with Bob Brown that we should plan to massively reduce the scale of coal exports. Whatever prosperity we gain from exporting non-renewable coal and other mineral resources will be paid for by future generations and obviously by harm to the global environment through pollution and global warming.”

As Perseus correctly wrote “And it won't be our country any more because the median income Chinese family, all 300 million of them, will be in the market for a cheap weekender in Australia”

Bob Brown is like Andrew Bartlett (author of another recent thread), another one who luxuriates himself in high-brow values, protected by the certain knowledge that they have no hope of ever being acted upon.

I find that sort of cynicism quite contemptible.

When jobs fold and the pits close I only hope it is the likes of Bob Brown, Andrew Bartlett and daggett who are stuck in the unemployment lines. I hope it is they who are first to have their houses sold out from under them and to be first to wear the sackcloth of economic stagnation.

Certainly, selling coal is not an infinite pursuit (nothing ever is) but just as the deployment of coal and UK invention of coking coal was a result of limited wood resources and competition for those resources by different users, so too when the economics of alternative energy sources become competitive, so the demand and use for coal will decline.

In the mean time, the likes of Bob Brown and Andrew Bartlett will whine on like Grecian Sirens, wooing the politically and economically inept to their doom.