I have to agree with the author that these kinds of technofixes will encourage the already strong urge to put off doing anything significant about emissions reductions. Carbon Capture and Storage is already an ongoing excuse to continue the expansion of coal mining and export by Australia, despite significant problems including the inconvenient fact that there's more than 3 times as much CO2 produced as coal burned to make it.

The acceptance of the problem isn't surprising; governments have resources that most of us don't, including having scientifically competent people to inquire into the validity of climate science (finding it's valid and that most arguments against aren't much better than the popular one that hot spikes like 1998 in warming trends are somehow evidence of cooling). There are judicial and intelligence agencies that can and would find evidence of falsification or hiding of contrary evidence, or of conspiracies to do so if they existed and have the power and authority to enquire and audit scientific organisations. All that and they haven't. Because they can't find what doesn't exist.

So, even rather sceptical political leaders find that their powers don't include the power to overturn scientific conclusions of the institutions that study climate or expose conspiracies that don't exist.

The vast majority of climate scientists and institions - they haven't been implicated in anything sinister - continue to conclude that AGW is a real and urgent problem. All the stolen emails have failed to show that any published scientific papers on climate are wrong in any significant respect.

Thank you Ken but I suspect your comments will fall on deaf ears. It is after all not the science that is questioned but the social science.
As a world community we are simply averse to considering an alternative future - locked into a notion of historical inevitability the assumption is made that either we continue as we are or we are doomed to go back to the stone age. So there are the pseudofixes of clean coal and the other technofixes that the article focusses on. All of them provide a justification for politicians to do nothing.
Of course that justification is cushioned by the knowledge that most people do not understand what the fuss is about - there have always been exceptionally hot days, long periods of drought, severe weather events so what is new? These people choose to see the climate change debate simply as an attempt to subvert their standard of living.
These people basically choose to be unfree - they prefer to be dependent on the whims of corporations as they set their energy prices, hike up the price of fuel and force them to pay more for the necessities of life.

At the risk of repeating myself a win-win carbon sequestration system exists now and is not very high tech.
See the story Ground Control on landline ABC
http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2008/s2490568.htm
If that can be combined with the pyrosis technology from BEST Energies at Somersby NSW you can sequester a lot of CO2 and make a lot of money at the same time.

I don't think there is anything at all we can do to change the change of climate. The damage has been done many,many years ago & it is only now that the symptoms are becoming obvious. From the pollutions of the industrial revolution, the great wars & subsequent wars, from holes in the ozone layer by rockets & the Concorde it was just simply too much for the old planet not to change. We are experiencing the beginning of the infection, it'll still be quite a while for the boil to develop. An antibiotic is available but mankind doesn't want to administer it because it would mean cutting back on heavy duty frivolity on one side & preventing the forming of a reasonable lifestyle on the other. My feeling is that good old mother earth will gradually do what's best for her children & we won't like it one bit.

Like most members of the public, I’m not qualified to comment. I therefore refer you to a higher authority through the recent words of a most respected scientist and a lead author to the IPCC:

<< On Oct 14, 2009, at 10:17 AM, Kevin Trenberth wrote to Tom Wigley:
“Hi Tom
How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”
Kevin>>

I rest my case and close yours.

Curmudgeon Col and others,

Perhaps it a factor of your age, but you really don't read and extrapolate very well, do you?

I said that the 'natural theorists' are relying on a historical science, geology, (retrospectivity) to predict(?). New and unprecedented things happen all the time even in Geology i.e. the 65 million year old mass extinction meteor.

The issue is, my past fixated opponent, is that even geologist have to admit that never before in the history of the earth has a species changed the world so dramatically. Mass biological changes (deforestation),changes in vegetation type and covering, uniquely human pollution (amounts of man made pollutants CFCs ), changes in water flows, destruction of deltas, depletion of fossil water, et al.

The Ice ages and previous warmings have occurred under different circumstances/causal factors. Geologists are unable to *precisely* date anything. They require other science disciplines to give them/confirm details,the same science(ists) who now favour AGW.
NB up untill the 50's tectonics were disputed by them. (oops)

The point is that the *effect of man* is new and the data-set (and time frame)is too short for geologist retrospectivity. But they accept that the era of man ...because of his unique changes.
They are unable determine absolutely and scientifically either that *A*GW ISN'T happening or what the future holds.
The BEST they can do is say it hasn't happened that they can see in the past and ignore the real/observable facts.

As for "socialism by stealth", Stealth? strewth, It's neither Socialism or stealth how many articles have been written?

PS give the term back to the living(?), unwrapped, dessicated, mummy you idolize it's as relevant.