Awesome thread, boys. Q&A, Fester: Thanks for taking the obviously large effort in you put into your replies.

GarahamY: Your prodding is what kept the debate so vigorous. I find being forced to defend your position on-line is one of the best drivers for exploring a topic, ands its obvious that is doing the same for Q&A and Fester. The end result is possibly the best thread I have seen on OLO. I am hoping your disingenuous replies were designed to have that effect.

I guess I am a "climate change hysteria skeptic". Which is to say its its impossible for me to evaluate the scientific arguments myself. So I just believe the consensus - that it is real. But I can't quite understand why everyone is getting so worked up about it. Yes, perhaps islands and deltas will be flooded, and people will die in the millions. But I just read in Time that food prices have risen by 50% or so in some developing nations as we move land usage over to fuel production. Its hard to get worked up by the thought rising sea levels in 100 years when underground water supplier in the most populous countries will run dry in 10's of years.

So it looks to me like resource depletion will hit harder and faster than climate change is ever likely to. Unlink climate change these things stand out like dogs balls, as in $1.50/litre balls. No even bothers arguing the point. Is this wrong? If not, why is everyone getting so worked up about climate change?

Q&A, i wasn't labelling GY a 'sceptic' in a purist scientific sense, more in the common usage of one who leaves no stone unturned to avoid admitting need to act on anthropogenic climate change. Good luck with getting that politician out of prevarication.

Rstuart, why should we worry about ACC when resource depletion is going to crash our civilisation anyway?
Because
a) it is morally, ethically, and legally required that adults take responsibility both for consequences of own actions And those they endorse/d & directly benefit from. There are plenty of modern day exceptions (eg. terra nullius) but the principal is a precondition for public order.

b) climate change will only get worse faster if we continue to add millions of tonnes of GHG’s each year. Theres maybe 300Gigaton of C in oil, 3000 in coal – lack of oil may slow coal burning, but may not, vis my local member & Federal Minister for Energy & Resources Martin Fergusen’s determination to turn our lotsa-coal into bit-of-oil (and never mind the emissions).

Resource depletion wont solve ACC, unless you’re a real die-off believer, in which case yes we’re all just whistling on our way to oldavai gorge. But even that will go better without permanent drought across southern Australia & an 11month fire season. You want your roo-skin clad offspring to have some chance don’t you? You wont in any case get any public figure to even breath that possibility, so it’s a dead point as far as public policy and debate goes.

The claims by Marohasy about global temperature leveling off or dropping are unfounded. A simple email to her source, Roy Spencer at NASA, can clear it up. Which is what I did. Roy says that Marohasy is confused. He states that the data is not from the much vaunted Aqua satellite project as Marohasy claimed, and is not global average but a much smaller sample of 20 degrees either side of the equator.

Paper published by Roy Spencer can be found here:
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Spencer_07GRL.pdf

Now for some clearly needed Ad hominem. Marohasy, the scientist who has misrepresented the information in the interview. She has had a long association with banking, industry and anti-conservation environmental groups that advocate actions like whale hunting. Not the person I would be quoting on climate change.

Check out Marohasy's web site:
http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/about.php

Finally, the author of the article, Pearson, complains about The Age leaving out some phrases that soften the claims of one of their climate change articles. Pearson has done the exact same thing in this article. See the quoted paragraph from the readily available transcript of the interview from the unashamedly right wing Counterpoint program.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/counterpoint/stories/2008/2191714.htm

"Jennifer Marohasy: It is extraordinary, though I perhaps should pick you up on 'global warming has stopped'. It has stopped for the last ten years, but that's a very short timeframe. If you look over the last 100 years, it's mostly been warming over the last 100 years but there was some cooling from 1940 through to 1975 and now there appears to be some cooling since 1998. But if you look at the longer timeframe, say, since the last glacial maximum, well, that's going back, say, 16,000 years, then there actually has been significant warming, and sea levels of course have risen over 100 metres over this period. So the last eight to ten-year dip may just be a dip, and there may be continued warming into the future, or it could be the end of this interglacial warm period and we could go into another ice age. We don't know what the future holds."