Mr Right is on the correct track. Whether GW is natural or man-made, no one is going to do anything about it.
Today’s issue of The Economist has put it succinctly. . .
“Malthus will be wrong tomorrow because he was wrong yesterday” and “there is no limit to human ingenuity”.
Melting ice caps will give us more room to fish, drill for oil . . we are already converting coal to oil so “peak oil” is just rubbish. Who knows, we could soon have nuclear powered B doubles

The "we can't predict the weather tomorrow, so therefore we can't predict it in 20 years" line always cracks me up.

How about: "We can't predict what number will come up on the next roll of the dice, so probability theory is bogus"?

Predicting the next throw of the dice is a weather forecast.

Predicting the results of one million throws of the dice is climate science.

On a million throws of the dice, we can predict with a very high degree of confidence that we'll get within a very small percentage difference of 166,666 of each number. Yet amazingly, we still can't predict better than 1-in-6 what the next roll will be.

And guess what? These days even weather prediction gets it right a lot more often than the 1-in-6 chance you have of predicting the next throw of the dice!

OLO, whoever edited this down to 2000 words from the original 3600 did a wonderful job. It is more concise and clearer than the original, and yet retains all of the salient points. Like the article it critiques, it is addition it is an excellent contribution to the debate. Others, in particular a few (but not all) of the articles from members of the AEF were less than helpful.

I was wondering if are more flak generators on the skeptic side than there are on the support side. It seems like it. Elsewhere others have pointed out that OLO publishes more articles skeptical of AGW than articles supporting it. Is this a reflection on how many articles of each type that get submitted?

It seems from the responses that column inches given to AGW is somewhat out of step with its perceived importance to OLO's participants. The participants seem to be far more concerned with resource constraints - like Peak Oil, water and so on. It would be interesting to know if that is just a reflection of the attitudes in the wider community, or OLO represents the "bleating edge" as it were.

Dear plerdsus:

I fail to understand how immigration to Australia is bad for the environment globally?

It is likely that the majority of immigrants come from nations with significantly poorer environmental policies, technology and records than Australia. How keeping them "there" will help I don't understand.

Controlling our immigration levels to meet our skills/economic demands and any refugee obligations we have seems sensible to me; the upside of helping the environment is a small plus too.

John

Geoff Davies courteously gave me an advance copy of his paper, for which I thanked him. Nonetheless, close readers of my stuff will puzzle at some of what he says.

For example, he says that 'Having failed to understand why climate scientists are advocating urgent action ('stridently' he claims) Professor Aitkin proceeds to play the people instead of the ball...' What I actually said was that I would consider 'the reasons for the stridency of the AGW claim...' No climate scientists mentioned. It is a strident (literally 'harsh, loud') claim: if we don't do these things now were are doomed. The claim comes from the IPCC, but the leaders of the vcarious international climate organisations, by Al Gore, by some of our ministers. I did my best to avoid personalising the debate, naming people only where I used their own words and giving a reference.

Much more important than dismissive name-calling (of which I think there is far too much in this debate) is that Geoff Davies has introduced his own issues, after listing mine. As he knows, I agree that his issues are important, but they are not the ones I dealt with in my paper and, as one can infer from his paper, they do not depend on AGW for their importance. That's fine. Having read his objections, I think my tentative conclusions about each still stand. But can I suggest that people read both papers and see for themselves whether the questions that worry them are addressed there .

Finally, may I suggest, as courteously as possible, that people treat Wikipedia on climate change with a large grain of salt. While I use Wikipedia myself as a quick reference on a lot of things there is good evidence that what is presented there on AGW is not balanced (see http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story.html?id=490337).

Don,

That link you posted about Wikipedia wasn't terribly convincing. There were around 800 words devoted to questioning the impartiality of one Wikipedia editor, William Connolley, but only one factual incident was given support them. That incident was the banning of Benny Peiser's edits on Wikipedia's Global Warming Consensus page. According to the link you posted, Connolley said his edits were "crap".

Peiser wrote a paper about the scientific consensus on climate change. It undermined an earlier paper Naomi Oreskes that is one of the pillars of the claimed consensus on climate change. The Oreskes paper features prominently on Wikipedia, and Peiser his paper to be given equal prominence. Oreskes paper was peer reviewed and published in Science. In it he said he reviewed 928 papers, and found that none argued against AGW. Peiser said he reviewed 1,247 papers and found 34 argued against AGW. He further went on to say that "Science should withdraw Oresekes' study and its results in order to prevent any further damage to the integrity of science."

The issues that Connolley had with Peiser's paper were:

- No peer reviewed journal would accept it. The paper was eventually published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

- The paper was factually wrong. When the 34 papers were examined by others, on one was found to argue against AGW. It wasn't peer reviewed. So in fact there were no pier reviewed papers arguing against AGW, which was in total agreement with Oreskes eariler paper. Peiser later agreed this was the case.

Personally, I am glad there are people like Connolley keeping crap like that out of Wikipedia.

http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/BPeiser.html