Sams: "Commodities change price all the time and the market adjusts to it."

Most of the things you have said so far have been reasonable, but not this.

A thought experiment. If climate change happened tomorrow and the worlds seas rose say 50m, what would happen? Most Australians would die, I suspect. If the price of petroleum rose to $1000/barrel tomorrow, what would happen? The same thing of course. Without modern farming techniques which depend on petroleum, agricultural productivity drops by a factor of 10. Here in oz we produce twice what we use, so 4/5's of us would die because we simply can not build the infrastructure require to use coal of whatever in the buffer available.

The point of this is the rate of change matters more than the kind of change. We humans are very adaptable. If all else remains the same and the seas rise 50m over the course of a century, I'm guessing we in Australia would wriggle out of it - I don't know how, but I have faith. Billions in other places that are pushing the limits much harder than us may die of course, but we would come through.

Climate change happens fairly slowly. Sea levels won't rise in a decade or two. People speak of climate "tipping points" where change presumably speeds up - but I have yet to hear of a real live example. Resource exhaustion on the other hand look like it hits very quickly. This is possibly because of exponential overshoot. Peak oil the first and a good illustration - it is at the top (ie flat) part of its curve can you imagine what the price will do on the downhill run? To me it looks to it will be a struggle to switch our economy over to its replacement in 5 to 10 years we have, given we don't know what it is yet. And oil is just the first:

http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0806/ref.shtml

My parents lived through interesting times in the 1940's. My guess is the next 10 to 20 years will be just as interesting.

Ah yes, Sams I did mean measures and not standards.
Sometime in the future there will be an attempt to establish emission
standards for co2, but as the ISO standard setting process takes longer
than the lifetime of any of us I doubt if we will see it.

It won't be a matter of prices changing and the market adapting as the
market will out of the picture when the amount of fuel available is so
low that it will all be government controlled and allocated.

That may not occur before 2020, the magic year, but it will occur.
I will take a punt and say formal rationing will be in effect by 2014.
What I really meant is that fuel mitigation legislation will overturn
where necessary any CO2 legislation that gets in the way of providing
energy, fuel and energy legislation. In some cases they will not be
mutually exclusive, but the emphasis will fairly quickly shift from
global warming to energy

The more I read about what will befall us unless we all stop doing all sorts of things in the hope that one day the climate will get better, the more I recall Y2K!

Do you remember how most large organisations around the world were duped into spending hundreds of millions of dollars in order to get rid of the Y2K bug? On the appointed day planes were supposed to fall out of the sky, bank computers were going to start spewing out wrong balances, hospital life support, telecommunication systems were going to give up and nuclear power stations wree going to do another Chernobyl etc.

and then nothing happened!

Apart from old programs mainly written in Cobol most other Y2K alarms and predictions were fake.

Don Aitkin, in a reply to Sams you endorse John Maclean's submission to Garnaut as "well written and clear". You then proceed to quote John's claims about tables on forcings and the LSU around each as presented in the the IPCC's Third and Fourth Assessment reports. You give me no confidence you've sighted these tables for yourself; if you had you will understand John's claims are not substainable. TAR The Scientific Basis Fig.3 and AR4 WG1 Fig.SPM.2 are essentially the same beast,six years apart, the latter showing improved LSU for many of the forcings.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, gave a bleak warning at a gathering of European Union ministers where he pleaded with the EU to take the lead in global talks on tackling climate change. He stated, “… we have a window of opportunity of only seven years because emissions will have to peak by 2015 and reduce after that. We cannot permit a longer delay."

Dr. Pachauri went on to state climate change was accelerating faster than thought. Heatwaves and floods were increasing, and higher temperatures were having a far-reaching effect on glaciers and snowfall.

"The targets that the EU had set earlier may need to be looked at once more, because the impacts are turning out to be more serious than we had estimated earlier," he said.

Inadvertently, Dr. Pachauri is stating that the predictions made by the climate change computer models only months ago were inaccurate! And yet, the world is being asked to believe that predictions made by the same computer models fifty years or more into the future are accurate!

Some of the "2500 scientists" media, politicians quotes that just came up in a quick search:

“a report released by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries, said climate changes are "very likely" caused by human activity.”
Feb 3, 2007 - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded, "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate …”. The IPCC report …was written by more than 800 climate researchers and vetted by 2,500 scientists from 130 nations.”
Aug 13, 2007 - Newsweek magazine

“UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which earlier this year said global warming is ``very likely'' caused by human activities … The group's study was reviewed by more than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries.”
Sep 24, 2007 - Bloomberg News

“the panel [IPCC], which marshaled the work of 2,500 scientists, was 90% sure that global warming was caused by human activities.”
Sep 25, 2007 - Los Angeles Times

“… 2500 scientists from around the globe participated in the development of the report, which found that the warming of the planet is “unequivocal” and that there is a 90% certainty that most of the warming is due to human activity.”
Feb 14, 2007 - U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, Chairman, Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works

BTW, I wasn't "caught" editing Wiki - I edited it openly to correct mistakes.

Lev says: "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)"

Climate change causes are constantly in debate because the field is so immature. Citing Wikipedia is hardly meaningful considering since anyone can can edit it.

Lev: However the recent reports of the IPCC consider it 90% probable etc..."

Insiders have often explained that these percentage confidence levels have little statistical significance and are nothing more than the opinions of people involved in parts of the process, opinions that other scientists disagree with.

BTW, I note warmers often using tactic #27 Guilt By Association from Dr. Michael C. Labossiere’s “Fallacies” – see http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ .