Article in smh by Michael Duffy this morning, worth reading.

Banjo, what do you make of this?

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5hxtxEnGYqzX_bBu1CyVsCfx9W9dA

JamesH, would like your comment on the following statement (or this Geophys. Res. Lett. 35, L20704 2008 - it is not a populist media paper article).

“Water vapour is the atmospheric gas that collectively has the greatest greenhouse effect on climate, although it does not directly instigate warming or cooling trends, because the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere varies only in response to temperature change.

Instead, water vapour only amplifies temperature trends being caused by other factors such as atmospheric CO2 concentration or Earth's albedo. The extent to which humidity changes in response to temperature variation is therefore a key parameter in global climate models, because that quantity determines the strength of the associated warming or cooling.

Dessler et al. present satellite data from 2003 to 2008 which show that models have gotten that relationship correct, and that relative humidity is effectively constant at any given temperature. Thus, the temperature increases predicted by global models are virtually guaranteed to be several degrees Celsius by the year 2100."

Short term politics does not entertain cyclical long term weather events, As this drought was forecast some 50years ago by Indigo Jones,rip.

There might be an element of fundamentalism amongst ardent climate-change advocates. But I don’t think that it is particularly strong, at least not compared to continuous economic growth fundamentalism.

Just about every single business person, economist and politician at all levels has for decades been just totally intolerant of the view that we need to cap economic growth, and the population growth and increasing levels of consumerism that feed it …and the grave impacts that all of this is having on our biosphere.

This is pretty strongly connected with climate change, or at least with the rapidly escalating level of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The orthodoxy of unquestioned continuous growth and of dismissing anyone who dares to question it is humanity’s biggest mistake. This is VASTLY more important than any perceived or real orthodoxy amongst committed climate-change activists or other environmentalists.

Still, in this day and age, when it is utterly obvious that the level of human impact on the planet is far too great and still rapidly increasing, there are scant few people who are willing to stand up and espouse and end to expansionism.

The greens, by and large, MISS this huge part of the story on climate change and other enormous environmental issues! In fact THIS is by far the greens’ biggest failing…NOT (any perceived or real) fundamentalism on climate change or any other issue or any lack of tolerance of dissenting views.

I think the authors are quite off-track with the gist of this article. I also notice the same sort of misguided focus in some of their previous articles.

Ludwig, I couldn't agree more - well, just a little bit more:-)

Congrats on your 3rd!

I could hardly agree less.

3rd what? Not child I hope, given your views on population growth.