James - you worry far too much about the criticisms. In this area name calling and bitter accusations are par for the course and it must be said that the AGWers are by far the worst of the two sides. They frequently resort to name calling in place of argument.
The skeptics have responded occasionally in kind, however, and that is to be regretted. That just makes things worse.

Mac - the point about the computer models is that they are being used to forecast but they are completely unverified. they have no history of successful forecasting of any kind. The other proof you cite simply shows that temperatures are high at the moment.
One point you make worthy of note is that scientists have summed all the influences on climate they know off and can only explain recent increases by the concidental increase in CO2 - quite so. Correct as far as it goes. The problem is that they may not know all the influences. That's what the argument has been about. They know there must be other factors that have made climate vary in ancient times, but basically don't know what it is - why does the earth flip in and out of ice ages, why has the current intergalacial been so long - yet they have gone ahead and made forecasts anyway. The whole thing is set for a public policy disaster.

I was as convinced an AGW'er as anybody, until I began to 1) think about the past a bit more reflectively - even my own past: I recall clearly being told by a marine scientist in the early 80s "I have no doubt that we are entering another Ice Age", and 2) look a bit more deeply into exactly how Global Climate Models work.

It has been said here that humans are embarking on an experiment that has not been done before, and cannot be replicated. In a sense, this is true: the only way to verify the predictions of GCWs is to wait and see.

However, we *can* measure our current circumstances against the laboratory of the past. In which case, current climate changes no longer look so extraordinary, nor so overwhelmingly threatening.

This is not to say that GCWs are worthless; on the contrary, they are highly impressive programs. However, when the models - or those relying on the models - are making predictions so wildly at odds with what we *know* (with reasonable certainty) has happened previously, then one must question the validity, not of the models themselves, but of the assumptions and approximations fed into them.

When it also appears that observed data is, as pointed out by Freeman Dyson and John S. Theon, being fudged to better fit the GCWs' predictions, doubts grow.

In all, it appears that over-reliance on GCWs, and what appears to be a degeneration of the peer-review process, has become such that some scientific publications have become little more than an intellectual circle-jerk of a small coterie fervently agreeing with one another.

Finally, when it is also patently obvious that many of the most public faces of the AGW-Alarmist movement are a cavalcade of shonks, shysters and scam-artists who stand to profit handsomely from the alarmism they promote, and who are demading other, poorer, people to make sacrifices they themselves clearly will not, and who openly equate dissent with Nazism, then my bullsh!t meter goes into overdrive.

The problem with being anti AGW or just skeptical , it is very hard to inject "Passion" into arguments . Pilmers book suffers in this respect , it's like reading a dictionary yet it has an enormous amount covered and referenced .

On the other hand supporters of AGW , some only children ease into passion because they see themselves saving a bird , lizard , frog or whatever this feel good thingy becomes a Consensus among generations who simply like doing something like believing eg; God factor .

They might research further when the people who believe "Debt can defeat Debt" AKA "Stimulus" has to be repaid multiplied by Carbon Credits starts to bite their pay packets ; will lack of Enthusiasm burn out Passion ?

Actually, ShazBaz, I think the biggest problem with Plimer's book is that he is probably too passionate about the subject.

Tie that in with Plimer's admitted "take no prisoners" debating style (learned, he said of "Telling lies for God", in outback pubs), and in "Heaven and Earth" we see him, instead of arguing what are reasonable doubts about climate change alarmism, absolutely determined to go the whole misere and demolish AGW wholesale. The result is that what is worthwile in his book is obscured by some truly embaressing clunkers that have only played right into the hands of the AGW faithful.

Mind you, I think what *really* raised the ire of the True Believers was his final chapter, raising the ghosts of Lysenko and Lord Kelvin.

(I missed the topic on "Heaven and Earth" last week, btw, due to an unexpected stay in the local hospital. God bless Public Health, I says)

A good article based on historic evidence. What few seem to realise is that the climate computer models pushed by the IPCC and believed by the gullible masses, have not been validated with actual historic data, and never will be, because they are based on the false assumption that climate change is man-caused. The models failed to predict that there would be a cooling trend since 1998 despite increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and they failed to predict the El Nino and La Nina effects

Sudden pre-historical changes in climate are not news to scientists, and they raise the level of concern that a quick flip to extreme climate could occur soon.

The case for global warming does not rest only on computer models. It rests on a very wide range of science, including the basic physics that Fairbairn so facilely dismisses, just because some numbers look too small to him, and paleo-climatology.

The faults with this article are the dismissal of basic physics and the reliance on only a certain range of evidence. Skeptics need to do much better than this if they are to make a case worth taking seriously.