That each Australian (might) “…on average emit 99 times more greenhouse gases than the average Bangladeshi…” – or that Australia might have one of the highest per capita emission rates in the world, is the usual nonsense spouted by the people who want to blame Australia for everything.

Bangladesh and other third world countries should be doing something about their populations, and Australia should stop importing Bangladeshis and other people to Australia to avoid the same problem of over-population. Australia has now almost double its sustainable population – no matter what builders and developers and our dumb politicians tell us.

Places like Bangladesh and the African countries have ruined their own countries by over-populating them. Australia, where most people clutch the coastline because the rest of the continent is too hostile to inhabit simply cannot take more people and sustain itself.

The question is not per capita emissions – which mean we are still a relatively rich place and can, perhaps help the less rich: the real problem for Australia is to cap and lower its population. Cutting back on what each of us emits is not going to make any difference to the world problem, nor will it help the over-populated and badly run developing countries.

I can’t see why Tanveer Ahmed’s cousin has the right to be convinced of anything Australia does or does not do – after all, he/she has skipped Bangladesh to let them get on with their troubles on their own. We note, too, the comment that Bangladeshis are “apathetic about global issues.

Tanveer also kicks the old cans “climate sceptics” and the laughable “intense rigour over time in peer reviewed journals and academic meetings” - the latter having been pooh-poohed by scientists themselves a number of times.

The “moral leadership” bit is confusing. Is Tanveer Ahmed saying that the morals of Australia and other Western countries are better than those of Bangladesh and other developing countries? That they are too stupid to run their own shows?

If I said that, I would be called a racist.

Tanveer Ahmed: "the basic relationship of carbon dioxide to rising temperatures is not a subject of serious debate."

Yes, the basic relationship is that temperature rises, then CO2 emits - not the other way around as fat hedge fund pig Al Gore claimed in his movie and countless public appearances. So it is not a subject of serious debate, but a source of amusement for those of us who can forget the billions still being wasted on this AGW/ETS scam, and ignore the misanthropic design that the scam has to depopulate most of the planet (especially countries like Bangladesh), and deny them the development they need to live decently and realize their potential.

The emission of CO2 apparently does not cause the planet's temperatures to rise.

If the world's oceans were not currently at about their lowest in geological history, Bangladesh wouldn't exist. If Gondwana hadn't broken up the way it did, Australians might be Indians. To suggest that we are causing dangerous climate change in the context of the shifts of Ages is one of the funnier jokes ever uttered.

Well written article and worthy of real consideration. I don't think it has dawned on many in the western world as to what will be the consequences of any serious climatic change. Specifically the global instability mass (billions not millions) 'climate change' refugees will cause.

They still view the world as it was in the 17th Century predominately endless, untamed, and ripe for development. They give scant thought to the logic that we ARE Polluting and therefore changing the world.

Even sadder if not bordering on psychotic wilful ignorance to the plight of people today let alone their future.

mil-observer
Al Gore is hardly the be all and end all of the argument he is just the popular face of it. Most people get their views from the popular media and as such get at best a characture of the truth. I suggest you look to New Scientist et al for more scientific reasoned approach. The other problem too is that the information is across several fields and as such is difficult to find let alone digest.

Leigh.
You have significant issues with your objectivity and logic.
The author is not in any way blaming Australia for everything but is making a demonstrable observation that Australian tend to lack a wider (world) view of the probable pragmatic consequences of Global climate change.

Every one in a democracy has the right to an opinion. Neither Democracy nor the country have a hierarchy of rights to hold a view. Apart from which from this article We have no idea as to her qualifications or knowledge about the topic. Simply because she’s from another country or as I suspect because she’s migrating here doesn’t in anyway reduce her powers of observation or intellectual quality.
It is a preposterous assertion that only Australians are able to pass comment.
Neither does it mean that she would be any lessor a citizen as anyone of us.

"Climate sceptics are often conservatives and fear the prospect of large-scale government intervention more than the destruction of the human species."

I think this single sentence encapsulates almost everything I dislike about this article.

Firstly, the implicit assumption of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) enthusiasts that anyone who questions the AGW orthodoxy is somehow closed entirely to the idea of climate change. On the contrary, I would argue that AGW proponents have a closed worldview: They are steeped in a worldview that "the earth abideth forever", that the climate of the early 20th Century is somehow the way things just ought to be, and that any change from that is, ipso facto, a cataclysmic threat.

On the other hand, I accept that Earth is a dynamic planet, and that its climate has changed quite radically many times in the deep past, and that it will continue to do so, and that life will continue to thrive, as it has always done. This includes human life, which has survived several episodes of climate change - and, interestingly, prospered when the climate has warmed. We are, as Prof. Ian Plimer comments, probably the first humans ever to fear a warm climate.

I also think that it is sheer human vanity that decides that any possible change in the Earth's climate is by necessity our fault. I am rather of the opinion that the greatest drivers of climate change are stellar, volcanic and, where biological, driven by the Earth's dominant biomass: "Minute, invisible, bacteria".

Then there is the assumption that anyone who questions the AGW orthodoxy is probably conservative (or, no doubt, a capital-C conservative, preferably with "neo" prefixed). Without going into my life history, let me just say that "conservative" is not an epithet usually used of me.

Then there is the frankly hyperbolic closure to the sentence: "he destruction of the human species." This is utterly ridiculous, but unfortunately typical. Not even the most alarmist projections of such AGW scriptures as the IPCC report make such an overblown claim, yet it has become an almost reflexive part of AGW rhetoric.

' But science is played out with intense rigour over time in peer reviewed journals and academic meetings.'

Is that why 40 years ago the major scare mongering among the peer reviews was the coming ice age.

'if ever there was an issue on which to take moral leadership, this is it.'
I agree. Governments should demand some evidence before running off on numerous junkets to make themselves look good at indulgent talk fests. Dr Tanveer Ahmed is far from convincing in this article.