Good article. The levels of carbon dioxide due to volcanic have been much higher in the past yet life survived. The volatility of climate change is such that governments will be unable to compensate.

My experience has been that when opponents to your view resort to ad hominem attacks you are generally on the right track.

Mr Cook, you write:
"Tipping points are a non-scientific myth," snorts Plimer.

Perhaps you can point me to the page in Mr Plimer's opus where he bolsters this opinion, so that I can have a browse, next time I pass a bookshop near me.

Let the games begin!

My prediction is that it will be pointed out, ad nauseam, that Plimer is a geologist, not a climatologist, and therefore supremely unqualified to share his views with the world.

I seem to recall that the little boy in the crowd, commenting on the Emperor's new clothes, was not a tailor, either.

Try thinking about this with your mind switched on

(quote)
Stephen Schneider, the author of "The worst case scenario". This article envisages hundreds of millions fleeing from cities flooded by a 10-metre rise in the sea level and the extinction of half of known plant and animal species. "An interesting chap," he says. "In the 70s Schneider was telling us we were all going to die due to global cooling. Now he tells us we're all going to die due to global warming."
(end quote)

Obviously, an article entitled "The _worst_ _case_ scenario" does NOT tell us what _will_ happen, it tells what _might_ happen.

Thanks for this warning against taking notice of what else Plimer says
(though if anyone reads his book and finds what of the scientific literature he has actually read, before writing his book, I'd be interested to know about it)

As for tipping points - sure, indirect (feedback) effects are more speculative than the basic science of how greenhouse gases trap heat.
Which is why the large uncertainty in climate scientists' estimates (which they don't attempt to deny, as anyone who actually reads their work knows).

As for the word "pollution", who cares about its exact meaning? Anyhow, I've heard denialists bring it up as a red herring more than I've heard climate scientists actually use it.

Pericles, that's an interesting point. One rarely hears it mentioned that Tim Flannery, Al Gore, Nicholas Stern or Ross Garnaut for instance, are not climatologists either.

That whole line of attack - from either side - strikes me as a bit of furphy. Surely much science is - or should be - necessarily interdisciplinary?

I also find it annoying that the detractors of folk like Ian Plimer or Bjorn Lomborg go ballistic - often before their work is even published - and accuse them of being blinded by pecuniary interest, while ignoring the fact that their own poster boys are just as potentially beholden to financial interests of their own.

It's a pointless p*ssing contest that completely ignores the matter at hand.

The author is right to be suspicious of ‘experts’; so-called experts have their own agendas, too. In the case of scientists trying to make us think they know all about climate change and what caused it, it is more money for their research and their pockets.

And, we should not forget the constant blah how science is under-rated and often ignored in Australia; how it is not given the ‘respect’ it deserves.

Scientists have an axe to grind.

Plimer has done the world a service by putting out a real alternative to the self-interest and arrogance of ‘experts’ who think everyone should believe them and put Australia into even more debt to ‘solve’ something that only nature can change.