Fungo, you accuse me of being completely off-track with one very simplistic comment (“I could hardly agree less”) and then you just dismiss my call for a bit of justification and substance, thus leaving us all just not knowing what you really disagree about, and yourself looking like a very shallow goose. Come on!

How about a meaningful response….please. http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8132#127142

Under one god, I also read the same article which suggested that introducing iron oxide into the system.

There have been plenty of Scientific hypothesis in the past that have been later proven to be incorrect. But whether a hypothesis is correct or incorrect, it is all about learning and advancing knowledge and an incorrect hypothesis may latter lead to a correct hypothesis, for a given level of knowledge.

A few hundred years ago scientific experiments were condem by religous leaders and seen as the work of the devil. Because it challange religious teachings, now people who challange GW sometimes get labelled has having a mental illness etc.

As too Economics, it is theory and one thing is certain economic predictions are not accurate. I think it was Terry McCain who wrote that ecomomic predictions either over state or understate what happens.

And having seen economic papers that were written to support a particular political view, that ignored other data which did not support that political view, does not particularly fill me with trust on such information.

Ken Fabos,

You’re overlooking a key point in the article - that dissenting from ANY aspect of the wide-ranging orthodoxy can result in the ‘culprit’ being branded ‘a dangerous sceptic.’

The chapter on global warming in Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist ran to 70 pages and had 640 footnotes, so it couldn’t have been published in a scientific journal. However, Cambridge University Press (CUP) accepted the book after receiving unexpectedly favourable reviews, including from environmental scientists.

Lomborg ACCEPTED the IPCC science on global warming in its totality, but that didn’t save his work from violent attacks from the IPCC milieu, including being likened to Hitler by the Panel’s Chairman (Jyllandsposten, 21 April 2004). The review in Nature claimed that Lomborg's text ‘employs the strategy of those who, for example, argue that gay men aren’t dying of AIDS, that Jews weren’t singled out by the Nazis for extermination, and so on.’

Australia’s Aynsley Kellow has explained why this argument is fallacious, and has provided many examples of Nature’s poor editorial standards in his book Science and Public Policy (Edward Elgar, 2007).

To their shame, 12 US tenured academics, led by the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, took the extraordinary step of writing to CUP to demand that the Press convene a scientific panel to identify every error and misrepresentation and add an errata sheet to every copy of the book, transfer its rights in the book to a popular, non-scholarly publishing house, and review its internal procedures to establish how CUP could have let through a book that was ‘essentially a political tract.’

Despite being advised by the chief executive of CUP that the book had been peer-reviewed by four appropriate referees, the gang of 12 persisted in their erroneous claim, most notably in Time magazine on the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in September 2002.

The silence of the main body of the scientific community in the face of this outrageous behaviour provides an illuminating example of the dangerous trends to which the authors of this article have drawn attention

Ludwig,
Q & A agreed, Me & I disagreed with your opinion. Dissent happens, mate

IanC, you have had a few ‘senior moments’ lately ... permit me to have one of my own.

Bob Carter claims expertise in; global warming, climate change, sedimentology, stratigraphy, palaeontology and marine geology.

With these “credentials”, in the Supreme Court of Queensland late last year, Bob Carter ‘acted as an expert witness on climate change’ for the respondent Xtrata, in an appeal by the Queensland Conservation Council against a ruling handed down earlier in the year by the Land and Resources Tribunal for the coal mining company.

The decision of the court is transcribed here:

http://archive.sclqld.org.au/qjudgment/2007/QCA07-338.pdf

It makes interesting reading, but for the sake of brevity, I draw your attention to comments made by Judge MacKenzie (page 20).
Specifically,
“Had either of the following two years been selected as the starting point, and the result for 1998 been treated as an aberrant spike, the period to 2006 would have demonstrated an increase over that period larger than the alleged cooling relied on by the President” (in making the initial ruling).

You tell me Mr Castles, has the Supreme Court Judge erred in his assessment of the representation made by this so called ‘expert witness on climate change’?

I have only two footnotes:

• The appeal was successful and a retrial was ordered because, while all parties at the hearings accepted that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions contributed to global warming, natural justice was denied in the Tribunal hearings

• The Qld Labor government indicated on the day of the judgment it would amend the law to prevent any delay to the mine. The government passed the amendments four days later, effectively over-riding the decision of the Court of Appeal and preventing a re-hearing

Vested interests Mr Castles – it has twat to do with the science, as you and Bob Carter so clearly demonstrate.

One-under-god

The release of methane clathrates is a problem; thawing of the perma-frost is already occurring in various parts of the world. However, catastrophic climate change is not about to occur any time soon (contrary to what some GW alarmists are saying). However, this is not to say we (humanity) should not proceed with caution. We should adapt to a warmer and wetter world, we should also reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and manage our land resources better. How we do that are for others to decide (although I have my own opinions).

You want to talk about cures – so do I. It really pees me off to continually have to refute the mendacity and duplicity of the ‘deny –n – delay’ brigade all the time (see above). I too would like answers and solutions to problems and things I don’t understand (especially if they impact on people or things I care about.
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fungochumley

Like I said, while scientists can say we have a problem, it is for others to decide how it should be dealt with. What bit don’t you understand?

The resolution is complex, but political and business leaders worldwide are trying. It doesn’t help one bit for denialists, alarmists or dysfunctional media jocks to jeopardise the process (I note that Ian Castles criticises the UNFCCC and IPCC process, but can’t or won’t suggest a better medium to address the problems of climate change, or suggest a better process to gather and disseminate the collective science).

Again, to reiterate, whether you believe in AGW or not, it would make sense to live and develop in a more sustainable way – this is the real debate the politicians (and for your benefit, the ECONOMISTS) are struggling with, not the science.

Your answer to Ludwig is shallow - is that the best you can do?
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Ken

The IPCC and Gore got a Peace prize for one simple reason – the impacts of climate change threaten world peace. Some people don’t understand that we do have a window of opportunity to do something about it