Bazz: "I thought they were worrying about the wrong problem."

Have you considered you might be worrying about the wrong problem? I know that is a bit difficult as there are so many excellent problems to worry about, but if you are looking at the next 20 years yours might indeed be the wrong one?

Try to envisage what will happen in a few years if oil ring production really has peaked in 2008. At some point, that tribe of monkeys in Canberra is going to wake up to the fact that we have a really, really serious problem. As in so serious it might get them chucked out of office. What are they going to do then? They can't just electrify every car on the road, they can't suddenly wave a magic wand and make public transport work, they can't fix every tractor and truck, they can't reorganise our cities, abandon plastics and forego fertilisers. As you full well know, flipping a switch on our infrastructure like that is just impossible. So they will be desperately grasping for solution that doesn't require infrastructure change - even if works for just for a short while.

I am betting someone will wave the Coal to Liquids, or Gas to Liquids wand in their face, and say "give us money and we will fix it". And you know what - it is even a realistic promise. In a few years a country with huge coal reserves like Australia could indeed make the problem go away, locally at least. We could probably even export the solution. What a winner!

There is only one fly in the ointment. If they do that our CO2 emissions won't go down. Because the FT process is so inefficient, they will double, triple or worse if we export. If that is how is plays out you had better hope and pray that most climate scientists are dead wrong. Otherwise a major chunk of the planets population is going to end up just plain dead in a few hundred years.

Global warming/ Nuclear winter. It's all bulls#!T. The world goes through natural phases. It's what the world does.

http://sahultime.monash.edu.au/

This article mentions 'ice cores'. These are the c.1980 Arctic and 1998 Antartic (Vostok) cores indicating temperature/Co2 changes over the last 400,000 years.
I saw the first in 1987 studying environmental archaeology, and was fascinated by the 100,000 year regularity of the 4 Ice Age cycles, AND the virtually identical temperature change profile of each. This temperature chart is on display at The Museum for London.
If you look at the 3 preceding Ice Age temperature change profiles and where we are on the fourth and present one- we're at the end, the critical point preceding the fifth Ice Age. The change from interglacial to ice age is invariably 'catastrophic' ie temperature goes up very fast immediately before an ice age, then drops drastically into it.
The only problem with this evidence is the timescale. It works over 100,000 year cycles. That we are going into an Ice Age is undeniable. The next phase of climate development is a drastic temperature drop as we are presently very close to the peak of the temperature increase seen in 3 previous Ice Ages.
The Museum of London chart is worth seeing in its context- human artifacts from the last 10,000 years. The catastrophic temperature rise expected at the end of an Ice age presumably coincides with this phase- the Post Holocene. So as the temperature has gone up, so has all advanced human activity. Apparently we are dependent on temperature for increased activity like any other chemical reaction; which means that one should expect human activity to decrease significantly with the forthcoming Ice Age. When it will happen is unfortunately unpredictable- on a time scale of centuries, but any significant decades long earth wide cooling phase is very contrary to the catastrophic warming phase profile we are probably [just] still in. When that happens, we've just moved from one 100,000 year temperature cycle to the next!
It's fairly likely that 2000AD will be seen in the future as the geological date. The 1998 Vostok expedition may come to be regarded as the most uncomfortably significant scientific human achievement ever.

The following web site gives some further investigation
into understanding climate change. For example, the water
vapour in the upper atmosphere is increasing and has the
effect of reflecting heat back to earth.

http://oea.larc.nasa.gov/PAIS/SAGE3.html

I'm sure none of this science is any where near being completed yet.

I don't understand why Rudd doesn't abuse the IPCC and CRU scientists. The released emails clearly show that there is no consensus, the modeling don't work, the data don't match, peer reviews have been bastardised, geoengineering is hopeless because they can't measure it, real measurements have been hidden and other results "invented".

We will no doubt be told that this is just an acedemic storm in a teacup.

Examinator, you say <<when it comes to seriously working scientists in the field there are minor detail differences but 99% agree on the basic objectively arrived at conclusions.>>

Woops! Check the emails from CRU, you're not even close to reality. By their own words they said not even 90%, all they would comit to was "likely". You can't support your position with links any more, we have the "horses mouth" to turn to. Don't keep hammering IPCC "scientists", it now apears they only "review and assess", they don't do their own research.

The polar ice cores evidence of four 100,000 year Ice Ages to date was produced from 2 sets of consistent incremental and stratigraphic depositional deposits over 400,000 years each.
To any body that can understand statistical magnitudes, this gives a predictive certainty to their being a fifth Ice Age, and our present position- about to step into it, way beyond the majority of scientific certitudes that most people and scientists regard as absolute.

Have fun with your 'debate' kids.

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