Keith, I have not adopted the term Climate Change. Damage control is a wider and greater problem than climate change.
I wrote “Climate change” has become a happy hunting ground to divert us from the greater problem which subsumes it - damage control.” And lo, commentators on this article are still focussing on ‘climate change’and ignoring the main point.

Damage that is happening includes: - (and from many causes)
Big social problems that Spindoc rightly refers to as needing urgent attention
The enormous waste – so much thrown out even before it is used, so many resources spent making products with build-in-obsolescence, so many people with wasted lives in futile jobs or not jobs
Quality of life in megaslums
Industrial diseases still not prevented
Extinctions of marvellous animals and loss of habitat for many more, especially birds
Our own quality of life as we are asked to put up with worse traffic, worse water, no gardens, increasing surveillance and noise, landfill problems – and we have and enjoy so much that our grandchildren may never see (? the Barrier Reef? unspoiled beaches?)
The damage through wars
Food, water and timber resources becoming shorter for the poor, eg in sub-Saharan Africa. The fishermen whose fishing areas have been trawled out by Western fishers, wrecking sea bottoms.
Peasants' landholding problems as their families have nowhere to farm.
Social unrest and even chaos in countries like Rwanda, Fiji,
Hundreds of thousands of people made homeless by the recent financial messes.
Up to twenty million people who are economic and political refugees, millions dependant upon outside aid. In the 19th and 20th centuries of Westerners' population booms, the millions of excess people could migrate to fill open spaces in USA, Canada, Australia etc. Now other countries are having their population booms with no empty spaces to migrate to.
And there is more.

This is not wallowing – this is saying – Start somewhere to stop some of this damage!
It need not become as bad as it may.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.Near them,on the sand,
Half sunk,a shattered visage lies,whose frown,
And wrinkled lip,and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive,stamped on those lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them,and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozmandias,king of kings:
Look on my works,ye mighty,and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck,boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

OZMANDIAS - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Has anyone given thought to the fact that the golbal financial downturn has in fact already reduced emmiosions.

Less demand, means less production, which means less emmisions.

No good saving the planet if we can't afford to feed ourselves.

The fact is that the environment has to take a back seat when the ecconomy is running on empty and it will never be any different. Unless of cause you wish to live in a hole in the ground somewhere and either grow or catch your own food.

Last Sunday I drove from Melbourne to East Gippsland. I hadn't been that way for 30 years or so, and as we passed through former farmland now taken over by innumerable McMansion housing developments the air got hazier and smoggier. For 100km or so the sky was blighted by smog that pours from the disgusting brown coal fired power stations.

A couple of days before, on the way into Melbourne, we passed through some of the country devastated by the Black Saturday fires - only to witness further destruction wrought by the North-South water pipeline under construction.

Valerie Yule's article may be a bit simplistic, but I think she's quite right in general terms. We've certainly managed to stuff up large chunks of the Australian environment in a very short time.

In the 1960s, Paul Ehrlich, the Paddock brothers, and a number of other scientists and environmentalists were predicting famines in the 1970s. They were extrapolating from current trends in food production and population growth. However, they could not anticipate the success of the Green Revolution, which doubled and tripled grain yields. Cornucopians like Julian Simon and Clownfish have been dining out on this ever since. However, Norman Borlaug, the scientist who has been given the greatest credit for the Green Revolution, often said that all they were doing was buying the world some time to stop population growth.

Now we are up against global losses or shortages of arable land, fresh water, fish stocks, biodiversity, fossil fuels and minerals that are vital for our technology, and capacity of the environment to safely absorb wastes. This is according to scientists, not ignorant fringe Greenies. Papers on these topics can be found in Nature and Science, the top peer-reviewed science journals, and the peer-reviewed journals in the different relevant fields. The research is also covered in science news magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American.

Attacking the World Watch Institute is merely shooting the messenger. Either you admit that the threats are real, or at least credible enough to be taken seriously, or you have to explain why so many scientists from so many countries, with different cultures, religions, political views, and national interests, are writing these things if they know them to be false. Why are are farmers lying about how deep they have to go to find water? If there is a conspiracy, who organised it and why? Why has no one broken ranks and leaked to the press?

Yes, indeed, Divergence, Norman Borlaug has warned about unrestrained population growth - so it's just as well that population growth is indeed being restrained, isn't it?

Indeed, the UN estimates that the global population will plateau before the end of this century - due in no small part to the work of secular saints like Borlaug, and their good work in raising developing countries out of poverty. After all, prosperity is one of the best contraceptives around.

But comfortable western "green" elitists aren't happy with Norman Borlaug - not at all. Tsk, tsk, all those nasty brown people using up our precious resources; that won't do at all! If one can't afford organic food, then one shouldn't eat at all.

But, it's sadly amusing to see that the rubes are still paying their two bits to see charlatans like Ehrlich and Brown work their sleight-of-hand.

Ehrlich and Brown were indeed wrong in the 70s (and not just about food, but about minerals, energy and just about every other resource you care to mention); they were also wrong in the 80s and the 90s.

"Now we are up against global losses or shortages of arable land, fresh water, fish stocks, biodiversity, fossil fuels and minerals that are vital for our technology, and capacity of the environment to safely absorb wastes."

Not to put too fine a point on it, but - b*llsh*t.