This article should be one of great embarrassment to the author.

Major carbon cycle perturbations affect nearly every aspect of earth's surficial systems, and in often drastic ways. As carbon dioxide builds up in the atmosphere, causing greenhouse climatic warming, climate zones shift causing tropical conditions to migrate over temperate zones.

These shifts in climate zones trigger great ecological instability, migrations of animal and plant populations, expand the range of tropical diseases to plague temperate-adapted organisms, and cause them to experience elevated body temperatures, a condition known as hyperthermia, beyond their experiences.

In the oceans, warming, and acidification of the upper waters as atmospheric carbon dioxide diffuses into them, can kill life on a massive scale. For example, warming of Pacific Ocean waters during modern El Niño events devastate marine life.

Greenhouse conditions existed during the KT mass extinctions 65 m.y. ago and the Pleistocene-Holocene mammalian extinctions of 10-12,000 years ago. Coupling climatology to reproductive physiology via effects of ambient air temperature upon uterine blood flow to developing embryos accounts for the extinctions via established physiological principles.

The Deccan Traps volcanism was one of the greatest episodes of mantle plume volcanism in Earth history, and the vast bulk of its lavas erupted right at K-T boundary time. The duration of its eruptions was coeval with major shifts in the carbon and oxygen stable isotope records, "Strangelove conditions" in the oceans, and the K-T bioevolutionary turnover.

In addition, it occurred simultaneously with other phenomena such as marine transgression, reduced photosynthesis of terrestrial and marine floras, and reduced weathering rates that would all have contributed to producing a major trans-K-T perturbation of the carbon cycle (Dewey McLean, 1995).

Effects of a Major Carbon Cycle Perturbation:

Atmosphere:
Carbon Dioxide buildup
Greenhouse climatic warming
Climate Zone shifts

Hydrosphere and Lithosphere:
Sea level rise
Ocean chemical changes
Sedimentation changes
Polar Ice melts

Biosphere:
Ecological instability
Animal and plant migrations
Tropical diseases expand range
Hyperthermia

Anthropological emissions of “See O’Too” are now 150 times greater than volcanic emissions. Hopefully John Ridd will perform some research, prior to future articles, to better understand the potential consequences?

Matt Andrews, thanks for your links and info.

However, I will observe that your blog article is an example of why I find many of the claims - and indeed counter-claims - in the climate change debate ... untrustworthy, is possibly a poor word, but it will have to do.

I freely admit that I speak only as a layman (although one with a lifelong interest in science) but it seems to me that too much of the climate change debate relies on computer modelling, which while impressive in themselves, are still rudimentary at best when compared to a system as overwhelmingly complex and chaotic as climate. Indeed, I'm reminded of nothing so much as Laplace's overconfident cosmic clockwork.

It seems that too often when observation conflicts with the models' predictions, whether it be the apparent recent cooling trend or tropospheric warming, instead of conceding that the model is inadequate, some climate scientists resort to some statistical prestidigitation, and juggle the data to fit the model.

I may be wrong, but that strikes me as rather weak science.

Finally, maybe it's just an ageing GenXer's inherent cynicism speaking, but I'm also inclined to be skeptical about, not the fact of climate change itself, but some of the claims regarding its causes and effects, simply because I've heard all these claims of imminent and overwhelming, and ultimately illusory, disaster far too many times before.

I should also add that when people such as Freeman Dyson, who I respect immensely as scientists, are distinctly heretical about claims of climate change disaster, while people who I can only describe as snake-oil salesmen, hypocrites or indeed outright liars, such as Al Gore, Sting and HRH Prince Charles are the leading lights of the climate change lobby, it doesn't do much to alleviate my cynicism.

Matt Andrews - just to follow up the last post with a few links. Here is the response to Senator Fielding's queries.
http://www.environment.gov.au/minister/wong/2009/tr20090624c.html

Now note this is not a skeptic document its from the global warming crowd, and it agrees that temperatures are declining. It says that now we have to look at heat in the oceans. We won't go into the ocean stuff just yet, but for now lets agree the point is conceeded and move on. This decline is not substantial yet, so its possible to laugh it off or argue that the heat is really in the oceans, but if it continues for, say, two more years then scientists will start to abandon ship.
Further on the cosmic rays business. It is an on-going and developing part of science. This link is to a poster paper presented at the recent conference in Copenhagen which links cosmic rays to clouds.
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/1755-1315/6/29/292024/ees9_6_292024.pdf?request-id=5575c04d-4d0b-4f04-b8b4-e40272f3590a
Mind you considering where he presented it I'm surprised this guy made it out alive, and never mind the science. Of course it is one paper but so are the others and as a line of inquiry its looking a lot more promising than carbon.
Here's a recent interesting paper in Geographical Research linking drought and the sun's magnetic field. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121542494/abstract
says the droughts in eastern Australia
are related to the solar magnetic phases and not the greenhouse effect.
The Aus met office strongly disagrees but the academic (from Uni of New England) seems to have a strong correlation.
This incidentally is the problem with the link to forcings you gave. Its assumes all the forcings are known, but its becoming increasingly clear that they are not. The sun's influence is not just through radiant light

I am reminded of the Book of Lamentations, which sits just after Jeremiah in the King James Version. I have a distinct feeling that critics of this article are all convinced they are God himself. At the end of the day what does it matter. The world has always had prophets, of doom and otherwise.

With the media, harboring a few skeptics, and a host of true believers, it is truly breathtaking to be able to read an article, that runs against the tide. In the short term Rudd and Wong, Gore and a host of others will be permitted to devastate the world we live in, and at the end of the day, every one of us will end up in a cemetery. The skeptics and the true believers will either be buried or give up their carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in a crematorium.

Whether they are right or wrong is neither here nor there. I am reminded of the wisdom of an old priest. Man proposes God disposes, and at the end of the day this is still true. All the words in the world will not alter one bit of what is going to happen. China will continue to pollute, because they have a huge population, India will continue to boast that it has one of the lowest per capita See O’Too emissions in the world, and continue as it is doing, industrializing, and Africa will slowly become industrialized, Brazil will continue to clear rainforest, and if Mike Baillie is right, in his dendrochronology science, a comet will come past, and cause a mass extinction.

Michael Crichton in his book State of Fear makes an impressive case that CO2 warming is a confidence trick. Mike Baillie in Exodus to Arthur documents the last six thousand years of disasters, and in New Light on the Black Death, documents atmospheric disturbances, that showed up in tree rings, but hardly anywhere else at that time.

From a distance, the world look round, and the snow capped mountains flat. Lighten up, you will probably not make one iota of difference

The author's opinions may be sincere but they reveal his profound ignorance of the real state of science on this. Almost everything he says is wrong.

Scientists don't go making this stuff up. Multiple independent lines of research all confirm that climate change is real. The chances that science has the fundamentals of this wrong are next to zero by now. We should abandon all they know in favour of a cosmic ray effect no-one's been able to clearly show exists at all?

The author's recycled and unsubstantiated slanders of real people doing real science and doing their best to honestly answer the serious questions put to them are really quite insulting. He may have the right and the opportunity to air his opinion, but I'm glad that OLO allows me to air mine and I think the article is denialist drivel as well as insulting to vast majority of people doing climate relevant science.

When an article is saying stuff so completely the opposite of what every institution that actually studies climate says alarm bells should go off.