The authors begin with an alleged assertion by politicians and climate campaigners.

Yet when does a search for the alleged quote there is one hit - this article - albeit in different locations.

Tom Harris is already well known for being caught trying to edit Wikipedia when it stated, as a matter of fact, tha whilst he was head of the Natural Resource Stewardship Project, he was also working for the High Park Group, a PR company that lobbies for energy companies.

In reality the scientific opinion on climate change is not really a matter of such debate (cf., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change)

This by no means suggests that there isn't room for improvement in measurement and modelling, nor does it suggest that other causes could be responsible for temperature increases in recent decades.

However the recent reports of the IPCC consider it 90% probable that most increases in global temperatures are the result of human activity, they consider it 95% likely that humans have exerted a net warming influence since 1750.

“The technical content can be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply assume that if large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right.”

Just like when most people were illiterate, and the parish priest dictated what was right and what was wrong. Anyone who dared – and dares now – to look for the real truth is a heretic.

Like the priests, scientists will be proven wrong in the future, but it will be too late: the politicians will already have fleeced us to pay for the crackpot schemes to ‘fix’ climate change, when only nature can do that.

We need more people like these two to expose the lies that are going to see people ripped off by politicians, who only ever see solutions to anything in taking more money off their constituents.

People who believe politicians, scientists (just because they are scientists) or the UN need to have a good think before it’s too late.

Lev, you have avoided answering the real questions involved.

I consider it to be insulting and probably liabilous to cast doubt
on their integrity in the way that you have done.
I have seen assertions like this previously about others and I think
it is probably the intellectual hidy hole of the clueless.
I do not know the authors.

I, as a general member of the public, have been bombarded with
assertions that the sky is falling and that the debate is over etc.
Clearly this is not so. Yet I am going together with the rest of the
population be asked to cough up trillions of dollars for an indefinite
period of time.

WE, the mug public DEMAND better answers than we have been getting.

Dishonesty in more evolutionary based 'science'? Well what a surprise. These scaremongers have made enough stupid predictions in the last few years to leave only the gullible believing.

My son's girlfriend is doing journalism at Uni. We often chat about how "the system" works - about how and when news is released. I whinged about being mislead by a 4 corners hatchet job on Brendan Nelson just prior to the election. She explains timing and relevance. In a more cynical tone than I had expected from a young girl she said the timing had to be quite deliberate as they would of known from their research the story was full of holes. It had to be far enough from the election to get the message out there, but not give sufficient time to Brendan to respond. As much as I disliked my trust in the ABC being abused, I had to admire the 4 corner team's almost surgical precision.

And so it is with this article, timed as it is to coincide with the release of Garnaut's report. It may not be so successful, though. The dynamics are very different here on OLO. Within a few hours many will post as Lev has done - picking holes in it. It is a fairly soft target as the consensus is actually very strong, and so I imagine by the end of the week it will look decidedly weak to anybody who reads the comments. If anything it will have the reverse effect from what was intended.

Many have postulated the Internet would have a "democratising effect", reducing the sway over public opinion the of existing oligopoly of TV and Newspapers. Here in Australia, OLO seems to have found a formula that is bring that prediction to fruition. Its great to see.

Lev wrote: "Anyone who dared – and dares now – to look for the real truth is a heretic."

We've seen a lot of climate change sceptics burnt to death lately have we? If you want to get some qualifications in climate science and submit papers to high-quality science journals then nobody will stop you. Anybody is free to do this, and yet we see a extraordinarily good (by scientific standards) consensus amongst those who have qualified. This fantasy world about a world-wide conspiracy to "fleece" the public of funds shows at best a distinct lack of understanding about how the academic world works. Such absurd schemes are the product of minds constrained by fixed , unyielding opinions, struggling to bend the facts in any way they can to suit their theory. Occam's razor: If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then you assume its a duck (you don't, for example, immediately believe its a group of aliens from Alpha Centauri disguised as a duck that has arrived on Earth to take over the world by training an army of attack geese).

People that are sceptical about whether humans travelled to the moon, whether relativity or quantum mechanics is real or not, and whether climate change is happening or not really belong is the same category. To accuse the vast majority of the climate scientist community of being "crackpots" is really quite amusing.