I've heard the argument that "consensus is wrong, all major breakthroughs have come from a gifted few" before in the climate change debate.

And if the consensus is only the consensus of the ill-informed, then maybe the argument makes sense.

So how can a layperson like me know which opinion is most likely to be true?

The only way I can think of is by accepting the opinion of the majority of those who have studied the evidence AND are qualified to evaluate it.

THAT's a consensus that means something!

Cheers!

Interesting piece on Crikey.com today by Ben Oquist about the ABC's screening of The Great Global Warming Swindle tonight.

While the ABC has been plugging the screening as an attempt to tell the ‘other side’ of the global warming debate, and while apologists for the film have been banging the free speech drum, Oquist points to other interests that might be at play.

Eight people who appear in Swindle are connected to 26 separate organisations that receive funding from Exxon, the world’s biggest oil company. The film-maker portrays them as "leading climate scientists" but they turn out to be employees of a giant vested interest.

Oquist also draws attention to an expose in 2003 of advisor to US Republicans, Frank Luntz, who wrote:
“The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate...”

While base motives don’t, in themselves, render the contents of the film invalid, they must give cause for the viewer to be more than normally alert to globalised commercial spin.

It is also understood that the maker of the film has cut it by about a third since its initial screening and some of the cuts were cleansing of embarrasing scientific errors identified by critics and interviews with scientists who now claim to have been mischievously misrepresented.

Perhaps Brigadier Bob Carter who so extolled the film’s militant truths on OLO this morning might like to give another comment before tonight’s screening? Or is he down a bunker?

It seems our contributors who won’t believe that modern man could be buggering up the planet, could be the same people who believe that Islam is a decadent race which would be better put out of its misery.

Those who are of this mind, also could be those who support the existence of tiny Israel, which with the most modern American armaments, if given the go-ahead could quickly wipe-out any ME nation which would oppose her.

It is also so interesting that what we now call the modern corporate culture – is really only a re-fashioning of the 18/19th century free-market which even its originator Adam Smith gave warning that though Laissez-faire was a benefit for already strong nations to expand through competition and trade – which he called the Wealth of Nations - the fact that competition was also based on human greed, meant that it would be the philosophers helped by compassionate churchgoers who would be needed to keep ambitious governments on the right path.

The point is, that Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as an economist, as Thomas Aquinas was a philosopher as well as a declared Christian Saint - one who dared to balance Christian faith with Socratic reasoning which steered us towards the democratic governments we have in the West today - democracy itself being a Greek word.

The major failings of the corporate culture, therefore, is that those that support it, and no doubt benefitting from it, do not realize that corporatism in itself is far from democratic as proven by the way Big Biz is out to reduce its numbers very seemingly by getting rid of all competition.

So we have our unconsciously naive smart-arse thinkers, really not thinkers at all, but just followers of this godammed corporate culture they admire so much, and being opposite to our avande garde so-called left-wing fruit–cakes are also those who would never believe that modern man and his rampant runaway technology might ever be ruining this planet.

Remember that cyclicism has had our world destroyed before through loss of bushland.

So what has changed?

Good on you Bob Carter.

The emerging scientific history of planet Earth has shown that some amazingly strong forces of nature are at work, on and off the planet, to produce ice ages and global warming.

So is the changing composition of our atmosphere critically important? Just look at Venus with a rich CO2 atmosphere and an average temperature of 423 degrees C. Moving towards Venus by unlocking trillions of tons of carbon into our atmosphere each year seems dangerous, given the evidence of global warming.

The precautionary principle would indicate it is prudent to stop adding CO2 etc to our atmosphere until the risk of damage is eliminated.

Does the Swindle documentary offer us a chance to continue our fossil-man lifestyles unabated with a much better, benign explaination for global warming? What of solar activity? How are we to decide if the claims are credible or incredible?

Do the facts support the alternative hypothesis? Yes, solar sun-spot activity has increased we're told. It's revealing to hear what eminent solar scientists on ABC radio said yesterday about this doco's presentation of the facts relating to the impact that sunspot activity is having on global warming. (Source ABC news radio)

It seems there has been an oversight by the Swindle producer of recent solar data including sun 'brightness' data that shows our sun has actually been dimming (slightly) in recent years, thus contradicting the alternative hypothesis.

Who's swindling who - and why? It's time the public are told the whole truth. The consequences of getting it wrong are catestrophic.

And while this may all seem like just a lot of academic hot air to some, the truth is that nature's response has it's own time. By the alarming accounts of the majority of climate scientists, the time to avoid the climate tipping point may already have passed.

It is good to read some commonsense. Climate change fanatics if they get their way could cause immense economic damage to this country. For example are we to stop exporting coal?