Professor Garnaut is not a climate change expert but an economist. It is entirely reasonable that he should take the human contribution to climate change as given, and focus on his own area of expertise – namely devising policy responses that minimise the economic costs of mitigating and adapting to climate change. It may be true that most of the areas he covers have been mentioned elsewhere, but he does a valuable task in drawing together current thinking on climate change and responses to it. Areas where I think Garnaut’s contribution has been particularly useful and distinctive include:

- Focusing on how Australia’s climate change response might integrate in the longer term with international policies and initiatives to address climate change post-Kyoto;

- Proposing tough but realistic conditions for dealing with trade exposed emissions intensive industries;

- Debunking, albeit politely and obliquely, the special pleading of generators for compensation;

- Emphasising that there is an economic cost to not acting, as well as to acting; and

- Reinforcing the case for broad ETS coverage, including the transport sector.

Tomorrow’s green paper will reveal how far the Government accepts his arguments.

I haven’t seen these figures showing that ‘all our climate predictions are fast becoming climate change fact.’There are however some high-profile climate predictions made in the recent past that have not, and almost certainly will not, become fact.

For example, IPCC Coordinating Lead Author Phil Jones told BBC News Online in 2003 that ‘Globally, I expect the five years from 2006 to 2010 will be about a tenth of a degree warmer than 2001 to 2005.’ Now, with nearly five more years of temperature data available, it seems highly likely that global temperatures over the 2006-10 quinquennium will be COOLER than in the previous five years. That is the message that emerges from the monthly data published by Professor Jones’s own Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, in conjunction with the UK Met Office Hadley Centre.

According to the CRU/Hadley data, global temperatures were fractionally lower in 2006 than on average from 2001 to 2005. There was a further slight decline in 2007 to the lowest level this century, and yet further cooling was predicted for 2008 last January. The figures now available up to the end of May 2008 suggest that the average for the year as a whole will be well below the CRU/Hadley Centre forecast.

Disturbingly, the CRU/Hadley Centre news releases have obscured the failure of global temperatures to rise under misleading headings such as ‘Another warm year as Bali conference ends’ and ‘2008 another top ten year’, and misleading statements of the form ‘x of the past y years have been among the hottest z years ever recorded.’

Nigel Lawson has deftly observed of such formulations that ‘It is as if the world’s population had stopped rising and all the demographers could say was that in eleven of the past twelve years the world population had been the highest ever recorded’ (‘An Appeal to Reason’, 2007, p. 8)

My hope is that I live long enough to see climate change alarmism exposed for what it really is, just another left wing fad. The real danger is that in attempting to control the perceived myth of AGW, the polititians will wreck western economies.

To give jokers like Guano any platform or credibility is monumental foolishness. What makes Guano look diabolically ridiculous and a barefaced liar are these temp charts ... i.e. The Southern Hemisphere .. where we live ..... has been trendless for thirty years.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3231
Even a dumbo banker would see this fact as relevant. All this talk about carbon pollution (?) coming from Rudd and Guano is bat poop designed to fertilise some special people's pockets ... an outrageous, superstitious climateering fraud on Australia.

At the Brisbane Town Hall meeting on Friday, only one speaker challenged Garnaut’s acceptance of “mainstream” science, a retired physicist who said he’d been dealing with related science for decades, and knew few scientists who did not dispute the “settled” view. He pointed out that climate science was extremely complex, and wondered what efforts Garnaut had made to understand contrary views. Garnaut said that he had sought the views of the most reputable dissidents [no names mentioned], but accepted, and adopted for the Draft Report, the mainstream view. He said that it would be irrational and imprudent not to take this view seriously.

And also, in my view, to treat it as gospel. It has been suggested by another eminent economist, Henry Ergas, that Garnaut is at times partisan rather than professional. In Brisbane, on the question of Australia “not taking a leadership role”, Garnaut said that we were not leading but following many years behind 20-odd EU countries. In fact, Australia has actually done better than the EU at containing emissions post-Kyoto, and the EU ETS was a bad joke which did little if anything to reduce emissions and provided huge windfall gains to many companies. Garnaut must know this, and that Australia will be out on front if it proceeds as currently proposed. In The Australian yesterday, Ergas expressed concern that Garnaut does not fulfil his brief, failing to compare costs and benefits of alternative policy responses and failing to stress that the costs for AGW he estimates are relatively small [especially as Garnaut models a four-fold increase in GDP by end-century] and do not support his argument for urgent action.

So Garnaut's recommendations can be queried on economic as well as scientific grounds