http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16416794%255E2702,00.html
As usual with you people, you dont pay attention. To make it clear and easy for you I have provided the reference to the specific article,in the Australian. Quite a different story to your response.
You also failed to notice that I said if we are dopey enough to sell the "control" over our assets (which can take many forms in a free and open economy).I never mentioned Tasmania workers, dopey or other wise, but then anything goes to get a razz,and when one is trying to prop up grossly over stated and scientifically suspicious arguments like AGW, and the attendant protocols bound up in Kyoto.

Tell me also oh knowledegable one, how does the calculation of our carbon debt get built into the price that the Japanese pay for wood chipping the trees that are cut down in OZ. How does that mechanism work.

It would also help if the so called cures for GW were more soundly based than Kyoto is, and likely of doing some good. Thats were I'd put my money and mouth. How about you?

Unfortunately because of dubious science,and even worse public policy all put together by IPCC acolytes, Kyoto was going to cost huge sums of money to achieve precious little. Not much logic in that, but then I wouldn't expect a bunch of myopic academics to appreciate that either.

Big Mal, yeah I read the article. It reports that one NZ industry group estimate “that New Zealand may have to spend between $600million and $1.2billion to meet its Kyoto commitments” and that “Mr Howard said the Coalition's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol was based on the belief it would hurt Australian industry and cost jobs”.

These are beliefs / assertions that, in my view, do not stand up to scrutiny.

It makes no mention of what the benefits of meeting the Kyoto targets will be.

IF Australia were part of an international emission trading scheme, IF Australia had cooperated and helped build an international scheme instead of hindering such action, then carbon costs would be internalized by requiring emitters to account for and, to some extent, offset their emissions.

Australian exporters of paper products may have to ad a few cents to their sale price in order to appropriately offset their emissions, whatever they may be. In the case of the forest industry, where replanting takes-up carbon, companies may in fact be carbon neutral and have no net emissions; if they grow as many trees as they emit carbon. They may even have a carbon surplus, which they would, if their country had a trading scheme, be able to sell to another company which had a carbon debt.

You say it’d help if the cures for GW were more soundly based than Kyoto is, and more likely of doing some good. I couldn’t agree more.

The problem is that very little is being done because certain interests wish nothing to be done.

You doubt the validity of climate change science and the prospects of Kyoto. Fair enough. Most of the world understands that climate change is a real threat and most of the world is trying to do something about it. The effectiveness of Kyoto is the result of the whole world’s attitude; those committed to reducing emissions and those who are committed to emissions as usual.

Q. When and how will we reduce our emissions?

Martin, Bim was correct in relation to coal. Coal exports are the emission of the country that burns it not the country that dug it up. The carbon was in good order and still stable when it was sold overseas. They then burned it to produce the emission.

It is not the case with wood. Wood products are sold with stable carbon in good order and condition. The paper can be used for a classic novel or fine furniture that will remain stable for 50 to 200 years or more. Or it may be used give a second rate journo an audience for 3 minutes. It may briefly promote Angelina's tits and commence emissions imediately. The choice is exercised by the final value adder but the emission is deemed to be made by the person cutting the tree.

And in my case, the trees I cut were re-established as native forest by my father on land that his father was compelled to clear on pain of forfeiture of land title. My wood is mostly durability class 1 that, even as fence posts, will last 60+ years and as house frames will last 200+ years.
And I find it deeply offensive that some landless, treeless, spiv from Brussels can set up a system that penalises every grower for the emissions of Rupert Murdoch.

The perfideousness of the Australian Greenhouse Office is even worse. Dutch power companies can now gain and trade carbon credits from the annual growth of native forests in Africa while our own expanded forest and annual growth gets nothing. And Bill Burrows has shown that 90 million hectares of open woodland is absorbing a tonne of carbon/ha each year through regrowth and thickenning and not a single gram is measured in our so-called inventory.

Overall Kyoto is a farce. It has completely forgotten some emmissions, for example, in NSW we have locked up forests in National Parks. When these forests were productive and managed there would have been a greenhouse negative effect from the cutting, utilising and subsequent regrowth of timber, accompanied by managed grazing. Now as national parks the forests burn about once every three years emmitting thousands of tons of greenhouse gases, I notice that no one in the green movement ever notices this, Kyoto like most political inventions is not a genuine attempt to solve the problem, it is simply a political ploy aimed at giving European politicians a boost on both the domestic and international fronts. It has been deviously exploited by the green movement.

Martin, you can't really accuse others of having beliefs/assertions that, in your view, do not stand up to scrutiny when the data does not support your own arguments.

The fact that a doubling of carbon dioxide will cause direct warming of less than 1 degree is well known to scientists and claims for any greater warming rely on dubious assumptions about positive feedback mechanisms.

Just take a look at the figures: In 1960 the CO2 levels were 319ppm and the average global temperature about 0.01 degrees below the 1961-90 average. More than 40 years later, in 2004, CO2 was about 375ppm and the temperature 0.455 degrees above that long-term average, and incidentally the 3rd year in a row that temperatures had fallen.

Regardless of what you might claim about positive feedbacks to CO2 warming, temperatures fluctuated in normal fashion across that 40 years. There's nothing unusual about that perid of warming because from 1910 to 1940 the global average temperature rose about 0.6 degrees.

Personally I don't give a rat's what you and others of your ilk have fed the gullible news media. It's not belief or computer models that count but real-world data, and that data gives no clear sign of any human influence. On that basis the Kyoto Agreement simply has no merit.

Perseus, it is not the spivs, as you put it, from Brussels that wrote Kyoto but representatives from every country, including ours. And please, how on earth has the Australian Greenhouse Office been treacherous? The AGO does an excellent job carrying out the Prime Minister’s policy.

Australia’s expanded forest and annual growth is not internationally recognized for two reasons, 1) because Australia turned it back on international developments by refusing to ratify Kyoto and, in part because of this, 2) international agreement on carbon sinks has been delayed and are not yet fully developed, even if we were to be part of international trading.

Snowman, the data does, in fact, support my position, at least according to virtually all the world’s climatologists and certainly all the world’s national science academies. My political ilk include Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, President of the United States German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, His Excellency Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, the Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, the French President Jacques Chirac, and yes, even the Right Honourable George W. Bush. We all agree that while uncertainty remains in our understanding of climate science, we also agree that the consequences of climate change are serious, that its happening now, that human activity is contributing to it, and that that globally, emissions must slow, peak and then decline, moving us towards a low-carbon economy. And all in a manner consistent with the aims and principles of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Who can you name that supports your views or data?

Let me also add to my reasonable list Arnie and David King.

"Climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism." - David King, UK government chief scientific adviser, January 2004.

"I say the debate is over. We know the science, we see the threat, and the time for action is now." - Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, July 2005.