I I would truly love to believe that climate change was just a fantasy produced by mad leaders and mass hysteria. But having needed to drive 30 minutes each way each day for 12 months on the Stevenson Expressway in Chicago I got a close-up view of the gunk that industrial societies have been and are throwing up into the atmosphere. Glaciers melting, floods, tornadoes and bush-fires do not impress either. I reckon the threat is real.

What worries me is that the government's present plan to deal with the situation (ASSUMING IT CAN BE 'DEALT WITH') SEEMS TO HAVE LITTLE OR NO RELATION TO THE REAL THREAT, AND A GREAT DEAL TO DO WITH CREATING A NEW REVENUE FLOW FOR CANBERRA.

Linking 3 or more 'facts' together to form a commonality is the old 'ABC' argument. A is a black car and B is a black cat, therefore A = B because both are black. B is a black cat and C is a white cat. Therefore B = C because both are both are cats.
Therefore A = C and black is white.
I don't know the causes for climate change but intellectually lazy arguments like this add nothing to our understanding.

Ronald Kitching, Thank you for this timely & thoughtful piece,and your understanding of our communities dark dilemma, where progressing past these rent seeking mobs with their yellow journalism on global warming & population control and their failure to understand the benefits of CO2 as one of lifes sources. And societies ability to solve through progress where performance not prescription will see another day once the lost have rounded the bottom.(forgive, but don't forget their names).Its a grave pity today's primary education in this country fills a child's head full of doom a gloom "the world will come to an end, if we don't stop man, producing CO2" which is destroying everything! Shallow educationists delivering their mob new minions,so they think!

Firstly, Ronald failed to give a single piece of evidence for
any hysteria. Which occupies more of our daily papers, football
or climate change? If there was indeed any substantial
climate change hysteria, I'd expect football to come off second
best. Ronald provides no surveys, no observations, no
evidence of any sort. My gosh, hysteria is a pale shadow of its
former self.

Secondly, Ronald failed to explain how the purported hysteria
of the public over climate change has any bearing
on the truth or falsity of the 2 main claims of
climate scientists: there is an imbalance between energy
arriving and energy leaving the planet and that a major
part of this imbalance is caused by human activities.

If the existence of this imaginary hysteria has no
connection then is it just intrinsically interesting and
worthy of comment?

I'm guessing, not having read "The Crowd", that it is similarly
devoid of quantitative evidence for its assertions. Some people
do science and some people just like to make stuff up ... I do
love a (good) novel.

Some reflections on the "culture" that Ronald obviously champions.

A global transformation is now required in human culture--after the devastation, or collapse, of gross ego-civilization in the twentieth century. Something entirely new is required, something comprehensively right and grounded in Reality as a seamless Unity.

Since the collapse of that gross ego-culture it is no longer possible to return to a tradition that idealizes the gross human ego. Indeed what happened in the 20th century, particularly at its end, was the definitive failure of the civilization based on the idealization and glorification of the gross ego and on the wholesale adoption of the gross egos power and control seeking perspectival view of "reality".

The Renaissance destroyed the earlier form of civilization based on the archaic and childish "God"-myth. After the Renaissance Western civilization became based on the myth of the gross human ego. The ego-civilization came to its essential end in the 20th century.

From now on, the only right basis for human existence is the establishment of a civilization that is no longer based on the idealization of the gross ego, but also no longer based on archaic "God"-mythologies. True and right life is intrinsically ego-transcending. True and right life is the life of intrinsically egoless coincidence with Reality Itself. True and right life intrinsically transcends ALL mythologies--whether of "God" or "Man".

The old civilization is ego-based and ego-bound. The old civilization
idealized the ego, and it thus inevitably ended with a world of fear saturated egos destroying one another. That course, in fact, is still happening, and must be stopped---but it cannot be stopped merely by force.

A transformation of human understanding and of human processes altogether must occur---on every level, including the artistic level.

It is also interesting to note that Ronald and his IPA/CIS type clones endorse both gross ego-culture, and the archaic "God"-ideas too.

Using the thus posited "God"-ideas to put forward the proposition that capitalism, which is an "advanced" form of power seeking gross ego-culture, is part of "God's" plan for humankind, and even the pinnacle of human culture thus far.

Once again, Sancho sneers at alternative views to the ones he holds. He doesn't say exactly what we are sceptical of, nore does he tell us why we are wrong not to fall under the spell of the climate fanatics.

He is a good example of the adage that you cant' reason a man out of something that he hasn't reasoned himself into.

I hope Sancho is putting money away to cover the massive added costs for everything he buys when the carbon taxes land on us. There will be no discounts for the true believers if the climate change hysterics get their way.