bb: to call them "denial scientists" for a start! That's "respecting them"? Their scientific expertise and judgement hardly qualify them as "deniers" - a label that is patronizing, trivializing and - it seems - intentionally marginalizing.

The three quotes cover:

1) Le Blanc-Smith's direct assessment of AGW "fraud". His comment is very clear. You claim to "have no idea what he is charging", but that would suggest that the "denial" is yours in this case;

2) Kininmonth's description of AGW as "a dangerous fiction". In normally understood concepts of science (and academic pursuits of the humanities too), "fiction" posing as research implies clearly a creative, dishonest and fraudulent quality.

3) Carter's description of IPCC advice as "political not scientific", again implying clearly a fraudulent process, because the IPCC's overlords instead claim specifically scientific authority and credibility.

Your very pedantic effort here echoes that of Q&A, who avoids the substance of the commentator's quotes to try finding a technicality to seem in control and "one up". That's either inadvertently confused and compromised, or just plain sophist a.k.a. a "fraud".

A further tick to Young's article: the fraud of derivatives-based debt trading and hedge-betting mirrors the fraud of AGW and its derivatives-compatible spinoff in ETS.

Yes Mil-Observer,imagine a carbon credit economy.Our govts make a fortune in what is really a tax and the large corporates will sell us carbon credits that may well be worthless.Just another pyramid ponzy scheme whereby,those at the bottom lose everything.

I just don't trust Al Gore.He is too slick to be believable.

Daviy: "Modelling is useless for the economy and the climate because both are chaotic systems...In both cases the extent of the problem is unknowable so it all comes back to a subjective assessment of... the risk of doing nothing as apposed to doing something? What we do know is that every little thing we do will have an effect on the outcome even if we do not know what that outcome will be. At least lets understand that whatever guess we make it is a guess and keep mindless dogma out of it."

Could someone translate this for me?

Daviy,

I read James Gleick's book, Chaos, some years ago and was fascinated by it. I also liked the ideas you put forward in your article. They were in the same vein as Gleick's.

The way I see the AGW vs denialists debate is as being as complicated as chaotic behaviour itself. In fact, it is like the experiment conducted on ants, where food sources were placed at two points equidistant from an ant's nest. As I remember it, the behaviour always seemed to follow a pattern where an ant scout would discover one food source and somehow alert his mates who would then follow. Meanwhile the other one stayed unknown. Eventually, another ant scout would find the second source, and a similar pattern of following the leader would ensue.

Anyway, getting back to whether a chaotic system can be accurately modelled or not, I agree it can so long as the exact equation and the variables' starting values are known. However, based on my uni maths background, I also know that there are lots of equations that simulate chaotic and other complex behaviour. You just have to look at all those different fractal diagrams to see how many there are. How would a scientist know which was the correct one to use? The whole process of modelling a chaotic system is really trial-and-error.

However, I expect that someone will eventually make some kind of breakthrough.

I am surprised that nobody has pointed out to Graham that stochastic models don't work on envelopes.

Everyone heard the ABC Thu Jan 29, 2009 3:25pm AEDT

Heatwave a sign of climate change: Wong

Federal Climate Change Minister Penny Wong says the heatwave gripping south-east Australia is part of what scientists predicted would happen.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/01/29/2477433.htm