I agree that the Clean Development Mechanism is misguided. Even without 'additionality' (absence of legal requirement) there is the perverse effect that emissions still increase albeit slower than a presumed entitlement. However we want an overall zero growth or reduction. It is odd that the European carbon trading scheme declined to recognise carbon sinks such as tree planting on the grounds of fuzzy numbers, but gave open slather to CDM. It might be pointed out that offsets typically cost 10% or so of real carbon cuts. If the 2010 Australian ETS has either carbon sink or CDM type offsets they are making a rod for their own back.

As for the greenhouse rogue nations China and India I believe Australia can bring influence to bear. If the ETS requires say a 2% annual reduction in domestic coal use then I think we should cut coal exports by the same amount. Word is that China will soon be seeking more coal and I think that Australia must say no. Strangely enough they will probably have to get the coal from another greenhouse rogue the US as nearby supplier Vietnam is running out. I'd make it tougher still; if China wants our uranium they have to cut coal use.

In summary; we're not obliged to recognise the clean development boondoggle, we can influence China and India's emissions.

The 'new level of craziness' is to think either China or India will do anything other than that which current rulers believe in the best interest of the Nation concerned.

The Rudd government would be crazy to rush into costly measures without (a) a clearer demonstration that warming is happening, it's man-made, and anti-emissions measures will have a net benefit; and (b) strong evidence that major emitters will take sufficiently serious reduction measures that Australia will not be incurring severe local costs for no global benefit. Sadly, our government seems likely to proceed whatever.

Fortunately we appear to have gone past the totally amoral stance of pointing the finger at everyone else.

We are all rogue nations, Australia is at the helm.

No excuses for China's and India's reluctance to come on board, but we are not good role models, having many times their per capita greenhouse emissions.

Just as the Arms Race was dissipated, the finger-pointing greenhouse gas charade can also be dissipated. All it needs is for a moral position to be taken by enough leading nations that everybody eventually has to follow suit.

This all takes time and patience, but much progress is being made. Doing nothing until everybody catches up sounds pious and righteous but is morally indefensible.

Geko said;
All it needs is for a moral position to be taken by enough leading nations that everybody eventually has to follow suit.

Really, they will laugh at us all the way to the bank.

Look how the Russian Oligharcs took the Europeans to the cleaners over
the carbon credits !
Where do you think they got all their money from ?
Buying up old Soviet factories and running them ?

The Chinese will be only too happy to sell us credits if we are stupid
enough to accept them.

Oh where oh where are you Martin Luther ?
They are selling Indulgences again !

Faustino
'The Rudd government would be crazy to rush into costly measures without (a) a clearer demonstration that warming is happening, '

It matters not to the Rudd Government. It is simply about spin. Look at the ridiculous predictions of Mr Flannery. You would think with Sydney's current water supply he would hide with embarrassment . No instead more predictions to give the earth worshipers ammunition to push their agendas. Unfortunately spin from the Greens' Labour is going to cost the taxpayer more and more.

Well need i say that i find this whole war on carbon emissions a top shelf derangement and a joke of cosmic proportions if it wasn't so tragic. This AGW is a paradox. It has no chance of even getting past its first assumption of catastrophic warming because of earth's one-way cooling bias. Its second assumption of depleting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is a bizarre, anti life bias with no hope of success.

Because we don't even have the beginnings of plausibility to this global warming racket this pandemic of lying just continues to have a "life" of its own. Just what is the agenda then? Even wildly speculating that CO2 emissions were the sole factor affecting surface temperature, then human CO2 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.

Even if Australia theoretically stopped all its CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in response to this 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 carbon bankers any platform or credibility is monumental foolishness. Somehow i don't see China as quite so foolish and anti life.

It is not possible to absolutely prove Global Warming until it happens, like wise it is not possible to prove a person will die if shot, until one shoots him.
Then it is too late.
To claim that the extremely well researched computer models which accurately predicted Hurricane Catarina, - the fist hurricane ever to occur in the Southern Atlantic, and even to it's track, are "dodgy" is not crazy, just plain ignorant.
It is also the case that China is ramping up it's renewables big time, with 200 gigawatts just of wind farms plannrd by the end of the decade.
Their announced goal is to go completely renewable in the long term, I would not be surprised if they put strong carbon controls in place in due time, - meanwhile it would be best to clean up our own backyard, leading by example is probably the only effective option.
Geoff Thomas, Kuranda

THE 85 trillion dollar tax
that dosnt change any polution but adds to the cost we will pay

See it for what it will become [the ultimate public trough] where mates serve mates ,dealers get the margins ,the full burdon put on the little people.

Destroy a rainforrst to plant a pine plantation, where we give clean Coal dreamers[sceamers]credit or cash , to rebuild that they destroyed ,

Its so crass
we will be paying for all the lunatic scemes the think tanks can sell to those who failed to do the right thing thusget paid to fix the problem their greed produced.

we are led by the same nutcase green lobby [now taken over] by multinationals and the new world order
[if big buisness isnt concerned why should we be?]

The media has beat up this while being silent on medicine that is killing us ,while our assets were sold off to the highest bidder ,

while govt declares wars on its own people , while lawyers made laws aimed at getting ever more cash from the people [ taxpayers]

who gets the big bonus ?[not factory workers but the lawyers creating these scemes ,the brokers dealing them out,

this reverse scam, set up between the twoparty farce, john dont like it so kevin the good guy can save us [its the same2party money machine think-tanks running it all behind the scenes

If its real> user pays ,
put the real carbon tax on everything

[if the bannana came from townsville by truck to sydney then went back to townsvill the banana bears the cost [in time the banana will stay to be eaten in townsville [just playing games to tax us more?]

the factory pays for its cost
the truckie his cost
the consumer their cost

Prove its not revenue raising give each our proper legal alocation [equal credit of carbon tax to everyone] world wide

[the poor can buy their food with the tax offsets they sell to the rollsroyce owner
+a luxury tax componant to be fair .

In response to Geoff Post's comments - sorry Geoff, but that business about predicting hurricanes ect is all complete fantasy. If you look back at your source, you'll find that its activist invention. Or they are confusing the global circulation models with the Hurricane prediction models which are quite different and may well, finally, be be able to claim some success. The various IPCC projections are now mostly wrong - temperatures have been falling, not rising.
It is not a matter of proving beyond doubt, but producing a scrap of proof that industrial gases are changing temperatures. The whole debate has degenerated into lunacy. Leave it with you.

No this is not crazy! This is sheer MADNESS! Australia can reduce its emissions to zero without making an iota of difference to the climate! In China, India and US, billions of people are increasing their emissions on a daily basis. Russia is hoping for climate change to exploit the arctic seabed and develop Siberia.

Australia is rushing in to be the first ‘over the top’. The introduction of emissions trading will result in a serious lowering of living standards. You do not have to take my word for it_ the Governor of the Reserve Bank was very explicit about this in a speech given some weeks ago. It will be the battlers, the elderly, pensioners and low income workers who will be worse off_ the rich will be able to continue to afford to live the way they want. In the meantime Government members, climate change experts and all those on the ‘Climate Change Bandwagon’ will continue jet-setting generating carbon emissions at the expense of every one else.

The Government’s decisions are based on the belief that ‘the scientists must be right’ because they have based their conclusions on the basis of ‘complex scientific computer models’. No scientist in the ‘soft sciences’ (climate, economics etc.) has ever been able to predict outcomes fifty years into the future with any degree of certainty. The fact that climate change experts keep revising their forecasts every few months is the simplest proof of this. In contrast, astronomers can, for example, predict when a particular comet will pass us by hundreds of years into the future and with certainty. Similarly for physicists, engineers and so on.

It will take an experienced modeler very little effort to get any of the climate change models to generate any desired prediction, simply by changing a few of the structural relationships and underlying assumptions etc.

The folly of proposed policies will take some time before the underlying madness becomes obvious. In the meantime, climate change _ if it is really happening, will carry on regardless, possibly spelling disaster to some and opportunity to others.

Tes Lato, the computer models have been well and truly discredited.
Its just that those who believe have not been willing to hear it yet.
They were asked for the source code by the critics but they were
refused access. In something as important as this I would have thought
it should have been released by government legislation if necessary.
After all $trillions will be spent and we should know if we are
subject to a programming error.
One school of thought by modelling experts is that it is very
presumptuous of the IPCC to think that they can model the weather that
far into the future.

I was at meeting the other day and there was a real strong believer
there and I asked him, if all that he was saying was correct why has
the temperature over the last 10 years done more than a slight rise
and then fall back to where it was.

I immediately got the mantra that the science is settled and 99.9% of
scientists say so. When I contradicted him that it was not all settled
and that there was significant scientific argument going on, he did
not want to discuss it further and walked off.

The similarity of the belief and the tone of the argument has echoes
of religious argument so carbon credits can truly be labeled as
indulgences, ie an amount you pay to be permitted to sin.

Continued; this word limit is a bit short at 350.

Lato;
On your main point about China and India going full steam (ha pun)
ahead and no matter what we do will be just a waste of a great deal
of money. You are so right, we should do ourselves a favour and go
flat out to change our transport and farming systems away from oil
and to other means of achieving an alternative energy source.

I think myself that solar thermal is probably the best bet, but we
will need coal for quite some years yet. Coal world wide will peak
around 2035 so we have to get cracking. The energy from coal has
already peaked and the rest we are using is of lower quality from what I have read.

Another good source is the hot rocks scheme, if they can pull that off it will be a real bonanza.

Nuclear, especially now that so many countries are going to build
nuclear power stations has a shortening lifetime with peak around
2040 at the present rate. Trouble is if they build more nuclear power
stations the time of peak uranium will occur before the stations have
reached their lifetime limit.

Breeder reactors could be built but there seems to be reluctance to
go that route.

Answer to "Curmudgeon".
The data I have mainly relied on in terms of models, are those developed by the Hadley Centre Meteorological office in UK, http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/models/modeltypes.html
Whether the folk there are "Activists" or not would depend on your definition, - possibly if they were totally "in-active," ie did not even turn up for work, they might lose their jobs.
Anything else would be mere speculation.
I also read widely, an excellent article on Global Warming was put together by the University of Texas in America, although that is now partially out of date, I researched the WAIS, (Western Antarctic Ice Shield) info, as 3 years ago, just one section of that was estimated to be releasing 1 third of global sea rise water, and the whole WAIS contains enough water to raise sea levels by over 5 metres worldwide.
WAIS is a big one, a left over from the last ice age, and starting to show significant instabilities, see http://pigiceshelf.nasa.gov/
I was also involved in a group studying the effect of Global Warming for the 2025 plan for Cairns Australia where we used the extremely conservative predictions from the CSIRO and also an extremely conservative risk management process the defence department would sneer at, as it ignored any possibility below 50%.
Despite that it was obvious that Cairns would have to be mainly abandoned within 50 years, not a conclusion the Government was prepared to release.
Evaluation of the RISK of Climate Change, at a time when the Insurance companies of the world are working to exclude it as a basis for insurance claims, takes away the grounds for the argument that it is crazy to reduce our Carbon footprint.
Should the worst case scenario occur, civilisation as we know it will be destroyed, much less worse will see 3/4 of the world population die in agony, minimum of say 1 metre in world sea level rise will cost thousands of times more than the amounts considered by Mark S Lawson and co. to be "crazy".
Cheers,
Geoff Thomas,
Kuranda