<I am interested to hear evidence from both sides, free of personal slagging>

Morner's "evidence" are claims of a scientific conspiracy to fool the world into believing that sea levels are rising when (he claims) they have been stable for the last fifty years. Its implication is that scientists reporting on sea level are fraudulent. Morner does not substantiate his claims. Is this the sort of rubbish that you think would make my life more fulfilling? And the idea of it being on a side is a nonsense. Rubbish has no side; it belongs in a bin. Or am I simply closing my mind, sitting in my little box, and ignoring the wonderful world outside?

<I did not claim my position to be that of a sceptic>

I wish that you would take a sceptical position. I wish that whenever I read words like "sceptical" and "open minded", I wouldn't be so disappointed with what follows.

The following website may be of interest:

Rising Sea Levels Set To Have Major Impacts Around
The World...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090310104742.htm

That's a whole lotta wishing, Fester.

>>I wish that you would take a sceptical position. I wish that whenever I read words like "sceptical" and "open minded", I wouldn't be so disappointed with what follows.<<

As my dear old granny used to say, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride"

I'm still not buying in. There's simply too much emotion, categoric assertions based on less-than-categoric data, and sheer fashion-following sloganism for me to get really excited by all the fuss, one way or the other.

Foxy draws our attention to another "it's gonna get nasty" article.

One day, when we decide that there really is a problem, someone will do some serious thinking about preventive strategies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A564185

http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/12/05/holland_goes_beyond_holding_back_the_tide/

There are countries out there who have faced the problem of encroaching seas for millennia. And who didn't just stand around wringing their hands in despair, but actually got off their butts to do something about it.

Maybe, straight after we've finished the bushfire enquiry, we could have a floods enquiry.

A proper one.

The we could have another bushfire enquiry, without the emotion and knee-jerking, to look at the problem in a national context.

From both of these, we could get an acceptance of the status quo: bush fires are going to happen again; floods are going to happen again.

And then we will be in a position to make some objective, realistic and practical action plans to address the problems.

Oh look. A pig. With wings. How pretty.

<One day, when we decide that there really is a problem, someone will do some serious thinking about preventive strategies.>

That is fine if sea level rise is a nice, predictable, and even process. But is it? Some research has suggested that sea level rise can be a sudden event when precipitated by ice sheet collapse, with a rise of a few metres occuring in the space of perhaps a few weeks.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/06/25/2283071.htm

That might be a hard thing to deal with.

Oh well, look at it this way, we're all going to find out soon enough, one way or another.
I feel that it will go way faster than expected, Nature has a long habit of violent dyspepsia. We are watching it all collapse, and no matter your opinion on what can or is being done, nothing we do now will halt it in time.
If you think about it, the huge influx of fresh water in the disaster scenario will go a long way towards diluting and flushing our toxic waste from the oceans. The violent storms and re-arrangement of the worlds weather patterns would also break up and disperse the surface litter. In the process Gaeia will rid herself of a fair bit of the skin pests She suffers from, lol.
We're a planetary infection, that's the attraction of far horizons, an innate desire to sporulate!

Could someone from academia please tell me when they dropped maths and physics and replaced it with the arts in science.