Alas I fear the boys who cried wolf now have the wolf in the room. The problem as prior astute posters have noted is that the climate changers keep moving the goal posts so that the mums and dads don't have the foggiest idea what is going on. Does anyone really know how an ETS works? It's harder than Chinese maths to explain.

The wolf in the room in this case is the catastrophists who say we're all gunna die of tidal waves, hurricanes, rising sea levels, etc. They are loosing people.

Thank you Tony Abbott, Nick Minchin and Iron bar. Ever since our warped media became committed to certain 'consensus' rather than truth we have been fed lie on lie. The unbalanced ABC has been pitiful in its information to those funding it (the tax payer). It should not surprise us however. The same dishonest tactics have been used by the pseudo scientists pushing the evolution dogma. It is quite amusing to see the gw alarmist using the same tactics against the likes of Plimer as he has used against creationist. Just don't let a bit of good science get in the way of funding.

This article in the Wall Street Journal sums up exactly what has made me uneasy about climate science for a long time, and why climategate has ramifications far more troubling than the spurious idea that it completely debunks Global Warming (it undermines the doomsaying, but certainly doesn't debunk the theory wholesale):

"Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science ... this isn't only about the credibility of global warming ... because 'science' said so, all the world was about to undertake a vast reordering of human behavior at almost unimaginable financial cost."

"Beneath this dispute is a relatively new, very postmodern environmental idea known as 'the precautionary principle.' As defined by one official version: 'When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically' ...this puts hard science in the new position of saying, close enough is good enough. One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory."

"If the new ethos is that 'close-enough' science is now sufficient to achieve political goals, serious scientists should be under no illusion that politicians will press-gang them into service for future agendas. Everyone working in science, no matter their politics, has an stake in cleaning up the mess revealed by the East Anglia emails. Science is on the credibility bubble. If it pops, centuries of what we understand to be the role of science go with it."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748704107104574572091993737848.html

A very similar article appeared on reason.com yesterday: http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/01/the-scientific-tragedy-of-clim

Clownfish.
" One hopes civil engineers never build bridges under this theory."
Actually, this is precisely what has happened in the great USA. If you cast your mind back to the bridges collapse of about six months ago. It has caused a bit of a flap because many of the bridges built to provide a national highway after the world war also have the same design parameters.

David

The 'Precautionary Principle' seems to be dying the death, and about time too, given the kind of nonsense it evokes:

Alarmist 1: "There might be a terrible gas leak inside your house any second! You should open all the windows and run outside!"

Sceptic: "Do you have any reason to think this will actually happen?"

Alarmist 1: "No, but you can't prove it won't, and if it did the consequences would be terrible. So run away!"

Alarmist 2: "No! Stay inside! Any minute now there might be a terrible burst of cosmic rays from the sun, and anyone outside will be cooked!"

Sceptic: "Do YOU have any reason...?"

Alarmist 2: "Who needs reasons for something this important? Stay inside!"

Etcetera, etcetera...

Jon J ,That is a "Straw Man" argument if ever I have heard one.

David