I like the author found the ABC airing distasteful. The way it was handled didn't put anybody in a good light. I turned the thing off halfway through the discussion.

But I take exception to the authors statement: "But the aggression is all one way".

The opening statement of the piece effectively said "Climate change supporters are liars". If this isn't open aggression then I don't know what is.

As for the asymetric reaction, a scientific documentary does not usually start off by calling everybody who disagrees with it liars. Certainly Gore didn't, Stern didn't, Attenborough didn't. This might go some way to explain why they were handled differently.

Finally, although the reaction was unfortunate, it was understandable. If you go around calling 90 odd percent of a community liars then expect a reaction. In this particular case one of the people tagged as liar was the show host, Tony Jones. I imagine that was in the back of his mind when he did the interview with Durkin.

The bottom line is that in science one is meant to address the issues at hand. Attacking the messenger is technique used in a different profession: politics. Yes, the ABC response wasn't appropriate for a scientific documentary, but it was par for the course for a political documentary. As the title implies, "The Great Global Warming Swindle" was a political piece, as as such I think the response was appropriate.

If global warming is a swindle, only history will tell.

There has been some beaut scientific swindles in the past. Once it was believed that exposing a person to radiation made them radio active.

It was once believed that if man were to travel faster than about 35mph he wouldn't be able to breathe or if man were to be more than about 12 feet off the earth that he wouldn't be able to breathe.

Sure scientists have been wrong, they have also been right.

I agree with the author that the inconvientent truth was not subjected to same level of debate as the swindle is, but then sometimes the first cab off the rank has the advantage of shaping and forming public opinion.

We need devil advocates, because sometimes they can prevent mistakes being made.

I think we are all spin-doctors, all of us without exception.

I think we are all responsive to ideas that fit into our personal world-view. I do it all the time. Surely this is the basis for my religious, social and economic preferences.

When one is "sitting comfortably" in society, it is easier to defend one's comfort zone than to examine and take issue with it. That would be akin to self-flagellation, and who would be so silly? The earliest thing we learn in babyhood is not to pooh in the nest - it is the first lesson we learn in polite society.

So is it any wonder that the simple measurement of our environment by yardstick, stopwatch and thermometer should encounter so much disbelief when it turns up such a steaming pile of pooh?

Hell man, I didn't do it! That's not my pooh! It doesn't look like one of mine! It smells like someone else's!

Alas no. It is definitely ours.

Time to take off the suits and ties folks. Come down from those ivory towers. We've got some serious maintenance to do.

I am glad to see that a young bloke like this author is onto the shocking bias of the ABC and, in particular, that of the unpleasantly querulous Mr. Tony Jones.

Part One

Even if these critics of global warming warnings prove half right, will the efforts to prevent pollution and over-use of limited power sources such as oil and coal and woodstocks be a waste of effort in the long run?

As a retired farmer, when one views millions of acres of landscape including freshwater lakes gone salt, makes one personally wish earlier settlers had taken more notice even before WW1, of an early surveyor, Nunn, who became Dr Nunn, who before WW1 warned about over-clearing an extremely fertile pink soil gully, covering thousands of acres, actually now known as Nunn’s Gully, but now pitted with salt pans.

But those rich pink gullies were so easy to clear, unlike the sloping reddish country which grow the lofty salmon gums, the gullies mostly covered in ti-tree scrub with only the occasional York gum. Also such gullies needed far less fertilizer than the higher lands, the rural bank Johnnies advising the new cockies to stick to the rich lowlands, otherwise the banks might fore-close.

Now old and in retirement having gained Honours in philosophical-style observation in Third World problems, one looks at characters like Martin Durkin and even Alexander Deane and wonders what they
are on about?

Judging from the people I know, most skeptics of global warming are right wing voters.

So I can take comfort that the skeptics are right, if only politically.

I just wish the skeptics were really right.