I'm shocked that someone like Clive Hamilton would even appear let alone care so much about a sad little backwater of the interent as OLO. Actually, after that article, maybe not so much...

Sorry to see yet another reasonable voice decide not to contribute to Online Opinion any more.
The OLO readership still thinks cheap petrol and plentiful water will be available in our cities so we can water our lawns at at 4pm on a hot summer's afternoon if we just vote the Liberals in.

Clive Hamilton's reaction to an attack on his faith was perfectly predictable. If we map "Climate Change" against other religions his behaviour becomes understandable. Faith is a belief held without evidence. The scientific method, a loose collection of procedures of great variety, is based on precisely the opposite concept, as famously declared by Thomas Henry Huxley:

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin".

Believers. like Hamilton, like to use the name of science, but they don't like its methods. They promote slogans such “The science is settled” when real scientists know that science is never settled. Religions vary in their treatment of unbelievers, which ranges from disregard to slaughter. In silencing unbelievers, the new religion of "Climate Change" relies at present on verbal assault and character assassination, though there are those, again like Hamilton, who would go further. They call the infidels “deniers” – a cheap and quite despicable verbal reference to the Holocaust. There is a sustained campaign to deny the deniers any sort of public platform for their views. Fortunately, for the rational members of society, but increasingly unfortunately, for Hamilton and his ilk, their only comfortable option is to worship among like minded believers.

During my life "Bell Ringers" like Mr Hamilton have warned that I would die in a Nuclear War, starve through the inability of mankind to produce enough food, freeze in the coming ice age, be caught in an Asian communist Domino, have to walk everywhere in the first oil crisis, die from various pandemics, lose everything because a programmer wanted to save space in a program pre 2000.
I think I have every right to be skeptical when the Western Govt's of the World are about to place a HUGE burden on their people.
I don't want to be in a situation were we "found the cure, but it killed the patient"
The risk of implementing CO2 emmission control (whether it will be effective or not being unknown) is great to the current economic systems that Clive plainly does not like.
Surely we have every right to debate this important issue.
Or Clive can get the Iemma Govt to promulgate some new laws to stifle free speech with regard to climate change.

I saw this article this morning when it had 5 posts, and now has nearly 50. Just about everything I might have said has been said many times.

But here is something that has not been said, at least on this thread. You do NOT have to write for a refereed journal to ask questions policies that are said to have been based on scientific papers. The refereed-paper defence is an empty one.

The logic of the debate is that one actor (the IPCC plus supporters) has said that on the evidence and on its models, things are going to be very grim because we humans are the problem. Things need to be done at once, says the IPCC.

The other actor (in this case, me, and those who are agnostic, sceptical or critical) replies like this:

(1) why are you sure that you can measure small changes in temperature accurately?
(2) why are you so confident about your models and their forecasts when you have neither accurate data nor known interactions between the variables in many cases?
(3) why is your conversion factor (a doubling of CO2 leads to a 3 degree increase in temperature) the correct one when there are several other possibilities, all apparently with equal face validity?
(4) have you noticed that, contra prediction, the argus measures show no sign that the seas are warming?
(5) how do you explain the plateauing of temperature since 1998 despite a continuing increase in CO2 concentrations?
(6) why do you not release information that would allow others to see for themselves?

And so on. These questions are worth answering, because in default of good answers I see no reason to support a carbon tax or anything like it. Why should anyone?

Spot on Dr Aitkin.

When a leading academic such as Hamilton carries on in this petulant and anti intellectual way its not suprising that many people question the authenticity and indeed integrity of the whole AGW game.

..and he has qualifications in ethics and mathematics? ..the mind boggles.