Garnaut is an economist/banker who recognises that the control of CO2 is a dream-come-true .... i.e. a new swindle to make money out of thin air. It is not surprising to see that that this spiv might be creating a sense of urgency, provoked by the possibility that warming has ceased for ten years and in fact that we are actually seeing the sharpest single year temp drop in the entire GISS temps records. i.e. Global cooling is now being blamed on global warming and you had better believe it. Hence the need to aggressively act now before the ill informed public appreciates the situation that they are being duped bigtime.

Just what is the agenda? Even wildly speculating that CO2 emissions were the sole factor affecting surface temperature, then human sinfulness could only have been responsible for less than 0.01 deg C of warming over one hundred years. For the Rudd government to contemplate betting our future on odds like this, is an exercise in useless, reckless and senseless speculation. e.g. Even if Australia theoretically stopped all its CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in response to this bogus alarmist AGW, our ability to affect the growth in temperature over the next century is limited to something like 0.0028% of whatever warming takes place, or, put simply, nothing at all. It's a ridiculous notion and to give jokers like Garnaut any platform or credibility is monumental foolishness.

Production of wealth! That's interesting. Only through natural absorption and reducing human activities will only stop co2 increasing further. The time it will take to put this element back into the ground is going to take hundreds of thousands of years.

With new technologies, and if i can be hypothetical for a moment, giant atmospheric co2 cleaners placed all around the earth in there thousands wont even touch the surface and even with this, it will still take hundreds and hundreds of years. Then storing it!

But wouldn't it be fair to say, we going to put more time into saving our ass, rather than making money? We will just drain our further profits to fix what we have caused. WOW! That's a great idea! isn't!

This part is called winding back the clock.

1/ population must be brought down to 3 billion. The happiness that will be experience by the people of the time, will be out standing.

2/ Death rate must over ride the birth rate. 9 billion! Well if that's what you want, just imagine a world where everywhere you go there will 10 to 15 people, and i am taking about going for a walk into mountains, but don't count on there being anything there, like trees or wildlife. ( I hope you don't like privacy)

3/ Were tuning the planet back into a toxic swamp! Well I guess that where we started from and the world repeats its self once more.
Evolution is a amazing thing, just when you thought you have counted and mapped all of life's creations, a new one appears. THE VIRUS! Yes that micro world we don't think about. 9 billion people! do the maths on that one.
4/ Going smaller is the only logic way to go, but the problem is, we don't want to surrender our little world we have made, and this is the equation. Put up with a little less now or loose it all in the future. Its your choice.

All the best.

Even if Australia achieved Garnauts targets it will only make 0.00043 C per annum difference to the global temperature figures.

Only economists would have numbers coming out their backsides, and few of them connected to reality.

fortunately, there is a natural resolution to the twin crises of resource exhaustion and global warming. first, we accept that both are the result of over population. then, we reduce population. it's late and drastic measures are called for. ideal would be specific diseases like small pox, released from many distribution points simultaneously.

see, war unnecessary, new technology unnecessary, and if the desirable people are first immunized, what a wonderful world would emerge!

thylacine,

But is GW a raging bush fire? It is well accepted that electromagnetic radiation at certain frequencies is absorbed by CO2, methane water vapour etc. It is also known that the absorption curve is logarithmic so for example a change in CO2 concentration from 50 to 100 ppm would have a greater effect then say between 400-500 ppm.

The claim that increased atmospheric CO2 is due entirely to human activity is speculative. The further claims ignoring negative feed back mechanisms and over playing positive feedback is in the realm of junk science.

The exaggeration of supposed calamities unless a prescribed action is taken is the stock in trade of the green and environmental lobby. Rubbery figures are advanced to frighten us into submission. Professor Ansley Kellow has coined the term “virtuous corruption to describe the process. [ABC Counterpoint 4 Feb]

The left are attracted to GW warming because of their dislike of large corporations, free markets and capitalism. GW affords an opportunity to impose controls on the energy market, slow production and is a move in the direction of a command economy.

A GW moratorium is justified. Anti GW arguments abound on the internet for example:

http://climatedebatedaily.com/

This is a timely response to Garnaut. The change necessary to get anywhere near 90% reductions in CO2 by 2050 are enormous. The pressure on coal supplies from India/China and the pressure to liquify coal for transport as peak oil bites will be unavoidable for Australia. Lets face it, we either sell coal to the emerging economies or they come and take it. In the short term I believe the social dislocation caused by skyrocketing fuel prices will become very apparent in Australia's vast surburbs and our very economic structure threatened by the spiralling cost base of our logistics industries. It is very difficult to be optimistic given the comparitive urgency of our situation and requires nothing less than a world war like footing across all countries and unprecedented cooperation to address what threatens to be run away global warming and its consequences.