Q&A: "Have you ever wondered why governments, oppositions and businesses around the world are taking global warming seriously, from whatever side of politics they come from?"

Nope, never caused me any wonder at all. Disgust? Plenty, but certainly not a bit of wonder.

Q&A's question could replace "global warming" with "privatization/PPPs", "Iraq WMD", "user-pays education", "collapsing and neglected infrastructure", "collapsing and neglected public health care", "domination by financier-speculators and their affiliates in IMF/World Bank", "free trade lies", "abandonment of protectionism", "the Afghanistan War" - the list goes on.

So AGW is just the same. May as well ask why such thieves and extortionists as Macquarie or Goldman Sachs get to plunder public reserves "from whatever side of politics". Or should we just ask Bob Carr and Malcolm Turnbull?

Tony Kevin,

I always thought you were serious too.

You want to take oaths now do you? Always a good way to keep the witches at bay. For the record, I am assuming the scientific consensus on climate change and I regard it as the great moral, economic, environmental and scientific issue of our time. (Although it is still possible it will be a false alarm, we should be prepared to make substantial sacrifices to reduce the risks of climate change).

How you can be so tone deaf in reading the article, is beyond me.

An insight into the way some of the (few) really legitimate doubters feel when they get subjected to this nonsense.

How it feels? Like sitting on a fence, but holding a placard saying: "AGW will kill us! ETS now!" with a banner stating the condition: "make sure you get the developing countries in on it too!"

Of course, on the placard's and banner's reverse are different comments for 'insurance': "I always had my doubts" and "the science isn't 100% in yet".

A sinking upper-middle class ship? Oh well, the state will keep trying to look after (most of) you, using the sweat and taxes from myself and co-workers.

Thanks, Nick

I think you have now answered my question. Readers of OLO Forum might like to compare the ambiguous tone of your reply on 4 February - to my question whether you accept the climate science of manmade CO2-e emissions causing most of the global warming over the past 200-odd years, as set out in the 2007 4th IPCC report, and the Stern and Garnaut reports - with this clear statement at the start of Chapter 2 (“Understanding Climate Science”) of the Garnaut Review (accessible on line):

“The Review takes as its starting point, on the balance of probabilities and not as a matter of belief, the majority opinion of the Australian and international scientific communities that human activities resulted in substantial global warming from the mid-20th century, and that continued growth in greenhouse gas concentrations caused by human-induced emissions would generate high risks of dangerous climate change”.

Your choice of phrases like “I am assuming ..” and “Although it is still possible it will be a false alarm” and ‘some of the (few) really legitimate doubters’, confirm my sense of an underlying degree of climate change scepticism in your original piece. I don’t believe I am tone deaf in reading texts, and this is too important a subject for semantic sitting-on-the-fence games.

I do urge you to spend more time familiarising yourself with the relevant basic climate change science. It’s readily accessible in Wikipedia subject files

That Garnault Review statement quoted by Tony Kevin (like its IPCC master templates), does not describe a hard science at all.

The first obvious point of serious contention is its sweeping claim about "the majority opinion". Even if some actual polling had been conducted - a bizarre notion for testing scientific theory and hypothesis anyway - what of the adamant and very scientifically reputable dissent against it? What of 103 dissident climate scientists from 17 countries in their uncompromising anti-AGW protest letter to UN Sec-Gen Ban Ki Moon at the Bali conference? See: http://www.nationalpost.com/most_popular/story.html?id=164002 and http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=164004

The second problem with the statement is its assertion about "the balance of probabilities" - a concept quite compatible with that vague reliance on a presumed "majority opinion". Such purported scientific validation-by-probabilities is really the stuff of bookmakers and punters (more the latter), especially when uttered by neolib economists from the World Bank, with past form on a conveyor belt from one mining tycoon seat to another (Garnaut). The very term "probabilities" is misleading there too, because it implies some statistical rigor beyond just superficial associations between (some) temperature variations and industrialization.

AGW has long become a secular, pseudo-leftist pagan fundamentalism sponsored by influential monetarist usurers and imperialist Malthusian misanthropes. Tony Kevin is merely patrolling the rear areas for trench dodgers, and identifying Nicholas Gruen as an AGW waverer and "defeatist".

Yes mil-observer, that "hard science" letter trotted out time and time again from our very own Lavoisier Group:

http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/garnaut/GarnautsubappxB.pdf

Even His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI gets a mention!

The office of the UN Secretary General has advised that no reply was given (I am not surprised) but you may have information to the contrary.

Sorry to tell you mil, science is about the balance of probabilities. The theory of AGW is very robust, but it only requires one robust counter-theory to debunk it. This hasn't been done.

Oh wait ... now I understand, you want 100% absolute certainty. mil?

We all wish they would, but they haven't. Until such time they can, it would be wise to take active measures to adapt to a warmer and wetter world (it will take decades) and take measures to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels and the ways we utilise our energy resources. Don't you think, mil?