To Don Aitkin, my sincerest apologies for the misquotes, I had another OLO article open (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7628&page=0) at the time.

However ...

DA - "there is ample evidence that the upward rise in temperatures from 1975 to 1998 has faltered in the last ten years. All the standard measurers show this in their data"

Sorry you are just plain wrong. Case in point:
eg. graph on http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/ (GISS)
If not, provide direct links to the latest data.
Besides, even if the data showed this, interpreting a short-term dip in temperature as 'disproving' ACC would be incredibly (or conveniently?) naive.

Colinsett, you have a frozen in mindsett. Human CO2 emissions represent a tiny proportion of a tiny proportion of a natural atmospheric gas that is absolutely essential to life itself. To my way of thinking this is blindingly obvious but if your mindsett is separate from your very own biology as with Rudd then you can say stooopidities like "carbon pollution".

Quite frankly, I scratch my head and ask how can we have a pm basically so ignorant of science and importantly art as well? On this basis, one certainly wonders about his desire for an education revolution in Australia.

Your mention of Lake Nyas just tells you of the dangers and stooopidities of concentrated sequestration behaviours. However with the length and intensity of a solar cool down this human portion of any extra CO2 would be stripped out quite ruthlessly locking it away in the carbon cycle again.

This is actually the issue of concern on our planet over the very, very long term. There is a cooling bias operating over millions of years that is progressively sequestrating CO2 and depleting atmospheric CO2. If we really want to save the planet then let's not in effect starve the biosphere

Don Aitken

You know little of environmental toxicology when you claim:

“I don't regard carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It is one of the sources of life on earth, and indispensable to plants and animals. The more of it the better.”

A recent report on the causes of cancer titled "Environmental and Occupational Causes of Cancer; A Review of Recent Scientific Literature” tells us why cancer has been steadily increasing for 50 years.

The report tells us that between 1950 and 2001 the incidence rate for all types of cancer increased 85%, using age-adjusted data, which means cancer isn't increasing because people are living longer.

Cancer experts and health professionals who advocate prevention will most likely find themselves without funding, ridiculed and despised by the chemical industry, the pesticide industry, the oil industry, the mining industry and all their minions - lawyers, bankers, engineers, reporters, professors, and politicians - who make a fat living off those who pump out carbon-based, cancer-causing products and dump out cancer-causing by-products, aka toxic waste.

Even in 1964, Wilhelm Hueper et al, senior USNCI scientists, described patterns in cancer incidence as "an epidemic in slow motion":

"Through a continued, unrestrained, needless, avoidable and, in part reckless increasing contamination of the human environment with chemical and physical carcinogens and with chemicals supporting and potentiating their action, the stage is being set indeed for a future occurrence of an acute, catastrophic epidemic, which once present cannot effectively be checked for several decades with the means available nor can its course appreciably be altered once it has been set in motion." .

Warming or not, think metals and metallic dusts (arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, nickel); solvents (benzene, carbon tet, TCE, PCE, xylene, toluene, among others); aromatic amines; petrochemicals and combustion by-products (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs); diesel exhaust; petroleum products; PCBs; dioxins etc etc - mostly carbon based.

We have shaken off the stupor induced by your misleading arithmetic Don, where you pretend that environmental and occupational exposures are of no consequence to the survival of this planet and its inhabitants.

Shame on you.

to Sams: your GISS links supports my statement. The upward rise from 1975 has indeed faltered since 1998, even on GISS figures. Other measurers show it much more starkly. Go to UAH MSU Lower Troposphere, and to Hadley CRUT 3v. The point is that in this time carbon dioxide concentrations have gone on steadily increasing. Those data are there too. I'II go on thinking that this lack of fit is a problem for the proposition that carbon dioxide increases must cause temperature increases.

to Dickie: Nowhere in your warning about the problem of cancer do you provide any evidence at all that carbon dioxide has anything to do with its apparently increasing incidence. As someone who has had cancer himself I found your post, to say the least, unhelpful, and its last words quite baffling.

Don

Carbon based chemicals, when burnt, convert to CO2. I am talking stack emissions from refineries such as aluminium, nickel, coal, oil etc. The Australian government’s urging of industry to burn hazardous waste oil over unsuspecting communities, as a fuel, adds to the mix and is to the serious detriment of human health and the environment.

I reiterate, many carbon-based chemicals such as VOCs are proven or suspected carcinogens such as benzene, trichloroethylene, and formaldehyde.

Benzene is a Class 1 carcinogen in Australia and other Western nations.

Dioxin and furan formation is dependent on carbon and chlorine in the mix and related to the presence of carbon monoxide, a result of incomplete combustion.

CO elevates atmospheric ozone and methane before converting to CO2.

There is an urgent need to mitigate the releases of carcinogenic carbon-based industrial chemicals. These chemicals have invaded every part of the biosphere and have contaminated the entire food chain.

Mitigating hazardous industrial chemicals cannot be achieved without mitigating the releases of industrial CO2.

Industrial CO2 is the end result of hazardous, life threatening chemicals, Don.

Do you require further evidence that CO2 is hazardous?

A Stanford scientist has spelled out for the first time the direct links between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in human mortality;

"Ultimately, you inhale a greater abundance of deleterious chemicals due to carbon dioxide and the climate change associated with it, and the link appears quite solid," he said. "The logical next step is to reduce carbon dioxide: That would reduce its warming effect and improve the health of people in the U.S. and around the world who are currently suffering from air pollution health problems associated with it."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080103135757.htm

However, economists perversely obsess over "externalizing" costs to the detriment of the planet. If I dump my chemicals and make you sick, I gain if I can get you to pay your own medical bills, and I gain again if I can get taxpayers to clean up my mess.

Time for a reality check Don and a crash course in environmental toxicology if you really care.

Dickie - this thread is about CO2 in climate change - if you want to start a thread about CO2 causing cancer, fine, do it in your own time. Don's thread is about climate change so please have the courtesy to address the topic of the thread.

Don's mention of CO2 being beneficial was about CO2 and plants - they love it in concentrations around 2000pmm which is the level nurseypeople use to encourage plant growth. Please don't try and read further into his remarks, it just makes you look stupid.

If anyone can draw an increasing temperature graph from the satellite figures from 1998 to 2008 I'd welcome it provided you also offer an explanation of your math.