Paul, sounds like an evil conspiracy, 5 skillfully loaded questions subtly hidden under 3 questions that our chief scientist and advisers and Penny Wong a lawyer are flummoxed by - terrifying stuff - what are those 5 questions?

I'm impressed by Senator Fielding an engineer who has been lambasted on this forum as an idiot and patsy, being able to come up with questions that defy the Chief Scientist and a lawyer, perhaps you have all underestimated the good senator?

I do expect all the personal attacks on people and reputations and avoiding the issue, regular stuff on OLO, of course while still worshiping Al Gore, Nick Stern and various other high priests of the movement.

Beefyboy - carbon pollution? Its all that black soot obscuring the sky is it, no I don't think so. The panic and alarm you are meant to be believing in is CO2 pollution, one Carbon and two Oxygen. Even Penny Wong sees black skies so I understand your confusion. Why do you think there will be a straw that breaks the camels back - are you expecting some huge calamity, like a storm or such event that ends the world? Shows the green/eco propaganda works, none of the scientific community talks about a huge disaster, they say the sea might rise a little, and temperature might go up a little. As Dougie Adams said "don't panic".

Next we'll have shrill squeals of denial by folks who don't want the climate to change.

The climate is going to change, we're powerless to stop it, all we can do is adapt, oh and maybe pollute a little less, but that's just good housekeeping.

Bob, In the paragraph before your questions you describe Minister Wong as "Chief Scientist Penny Wong" This may be politically correct but certainly not factually correct.

Penny Wong's advisers are influenced (or should I say conned) by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). People should be made aware that the IPCC has been searching for evidence of man-made climate change, but after 20 years has failed to find any. It uses its unvalidated climate models to generate alarmist global warming propaganda, which the media faithfully disseminates. Yet the IPCC's models have failed to predict why there has been global cooling since 1998, failed to predict the El Nino effects, failed to explain why the last Northern winter was the coldest in 50 years. Clearly, no reliance can be placed on the models.

The climate hysterics don’t answer questions, don’t want debate because they know that their lies and lack of scientific due diligence will be quickly discredited.

And, of course, many, many people just don’t want to know what has really gone in the corrupt IPCC. When someone tries to tell them (Prof. Carter) he, his colleagues and Steve Fielding are accused of using “loaded questions”. What is loaded about asking why the models that have been used to predict gloom and doom cannot explain why the earth has been cooling since 1998? Why should we be taking notice of models anyway, when they can only ‘predict’ weather patterns for a week ahead; they are useless for any longer projections?

Then, of course, comes the old attempt at suppression from apologetics for the climate hysterics: Prof. Carter is part of a Right-wing think tank.

Science and changes in nature have nothing to do with politics. Politics is being used by the doom-merchants to degrade science; they are the ones using politics and ‘consensus’ in an attempt save face and the huge grants they get from Governments.

Climate alarmists, CO2 produced by man liars, have no right to even mention science because they are dragging us back to the dark ages – the end of the world is coming, and all of the superstitious nonsense of the Dark Ages.

People are frightened; politicians are wetting themselves because they want to be seen to be doing the ‘right’ thing. Anything is better than nothing! Rubbish. Now is the time for politicians to have the guts to do nothing. Their current plans will bring only huge cost to individuals and disaster to industry, while other countries not so interested in pleasing everybody will go ahead in leaps and bounds.

Paul/Sancho, these "five but very skilfully loaded questions" were, let me see? Ah yes, loaded by someone else?

This is certainly not an article aimed at the scientifically literate. The idea that we should all stop arguing because Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT has made a statement doesn't quite gel with scientific discussion as I know it. The idea too that any serious climate scientist would would be confident that climate modelling is over estimating future temperatures is also rather brave. There are simply too many factors influencing climate and there are too many positive feedback loops that will reinforce both increases and decreases in temperature. To make it worse, we really don't have the data to tell us how serious these positive feed back loops will be.

For those that are interested it is useful to have a look at ice core data for the last 400 years. (See: http://www.grida.no/_res/site/Image/series/vg-climate/large/2.jpg) This shows how the Milankovitch cycles (See: http://www.homepage.montana.edu/%7Egeol445/hyperglac/time1/milankov.htm)
dominate the temperature changes and how temperature and CO2 levels roughly track each other. They also show how fast temperature and CO2 rise once warming starts.
The other startling idea is that the carbon tax is all extra tax. The reality is that a large part of carbon tax will either replace an existing tax or return to consumers via compensation allowances. But I guess $4000 extra/family grabs our attention.