Richie 10,
Fielding isn't doing the job he was elected for ....
as I said if you polled the state on yes or no on that question the answer IS clearly NO. He was elected as a lesser evil by the majority. The rump of his support is from a SMALL minority.(check out the voting trends)

Secondly your argument is inconsistent on one hand you argue that he has a mandate (voted in). Yet you contradict this mandate concept by denying the MAJORITY elected govt's.
The house of review is to exactly that not make policy by default. Likewise as previously explained it is NOT up to him to decide on GW but to ensure the elected policy is the scrutinized.
Ultimately you offer no rebuttal only gain saying .

By Sancho’s logic, everything is toxic. And Sancho is technically correct: CO2 can have toxic levels. But so too can oxygen. Sancho even seems to think that people are pollutants – the world is over-populated, he claims (very wrongly in my view).

When Rudd/Turnbull speak of "carbon pollution" they are referring to the current state of affairs, not just the future. They are saying that we have carbon pollution now and we need to do something about it to stop it getting 'worse'. Well, the current global levels fluctuate between 360ppm and 390ppm. So, the question must be asked as to when CO2 becomes toxic (a pollutant) rather than an essential source of life. No-one in this thread has disputed that we cannot live without CO2.

At what ‘dosage’ does CO2 become toxic? Well, if any of us has ever been in a confined space with lots of people (breathing out the stuff with little room for oxygen to be drawn in) for an extended period, we have experienced the toxicity of CO2. We usually feel drowsy in such an environment. Here’s the facts: at a level of 10,000 ppm, some people (not all) will feel drowsy. Now just consider again that the current levels of this ‘pollution’ are at 387ppm. No-one, not even Al Gore, suggests that the combustion of fossil fuels will create a volume of emissions at anywhere near the 10,000 ppm level in the future.

At 50,000 ppm, things become more serious – dizziness and headaches – and at 80,000 ppm, very serious (loss of consciousness).

All the above (though with different measurements) equally applies to the toxicity of oxygen.

Thus, it remains dishonest and extremely misleading to speak of "carbon pollution". And this essential source of life doesn't turn into its opposite just because the US Supreme Court defined it as a pollutant in 2007.

Byork

Your argument has nothing to do with the reality. And it is extremely dishonest to speak of carbon as a non-pollutant. You appear not to understand that many carbon-based industrial chemicals are bioaccumulative. That means that a small emission of a carbon chemical can cause a large amount of damage when it invades the food chain and biomagnifies. And I have not yet touched on man-made CFCs responsible for depleting ozone.

“At 50,000 ppm, things become more serious – dizziness and headaches – and at 80,000 ppm, very serious (loss of consciousness).”

A vacuous unrealistic argument Byork. While the levels of atmospheric CO2 are not yet catastrophic, the long-term chemical formations of those CO2 levels have been. Exposure to carbon based chemicals has an insidious impact on human health and there may be a significant lag time before symptoms of illness appear. Of course the Greenhouse Mafia is well aware that the source or causes of these illnesses are very hard to prove.

The rampant unregulated industrial emissions in Australia remain out of control and humans and ecosystems have been used as cannon fodder with impunity. That’s why Australia is coming dead last in the Annex 1 Kyoto countries for mitigating carbon emissions.

You may offer a suggestion as to why two hundred and fifty Australian citizens have had to go offshore to commence a class action against Alcoa if you think carbon is harmless and when you and I have propped up the impotent EPA and departments of environment for forty years while Australian citizens succumb to serious illnesses from industrial pollution.

Now a nervous Department of Environment has charged Alcoa with criminal activity. "Let's do a deal eh?"

Alcoa’s Australian Managing Director Alan Cransberg demanded that Alcoa receive free permits to continue emitting carbon emissions under the CPRS. Even before the announcement of the scheme, it was reported Cransberg was threatening that Alcoa would move offshore if the government didn't provide compensation.

Polluters are rewarded for desecrating a once healthy planet and the Greenhouse Mafia call those who object, “alarmists?” Huh?

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,25624988-948,00.html

That's an odd response, byork.

Have you been under the misapprehension that the problem with excess CO2 is mass asphyxiation of human beings? Where have you been for this debate?

As for humans being pollutants, well, you can keep putting words in my mouth, but it doesn't constitute an argument.

Farmers are currently poisoning, en masse, rabbits and mice, because their vast numbers are stripping the countryside of vegetation. Based on hyper-populationist ethics, however, they have every right to, because it's god's will that they should reproduce so fruitfully. Or do you have better justification for counting humans above and separate from the laws of nature?

This link is to a website that clearly believes Senator Fielding is right.

http://www.jonchristianryter.com/2009/090308.html

I post it without comment as it contains quite a lot of argument that I have not had time to check out.

There is so much doubt in my head that it is human activity that causes global warming.This site seems to argue that it is only a capitalist plot to export American and Australian Jobs to third world countries like India, where the cost of living is fractional, and wages very low. This is so the rich Americans can get richer, and make their fellow Americans poorer.

I think that may well be the motivation behind the whole idea.

Great post, PtB.

It's Occam's Razor, after all: if given a choice between the validated conclusions of several thousand scientific researchers, or the conspiracy theories of a lone fundamentalist Christian blogger, a rational human being should endorse the most unverified, batsh-t insane option available.