The claws come out sometimes, and there is a real tendency to play the man and not the ball. If you can’t argue put down the messenger. I still say that before any of you really debate this question you should read State of Fear by Michael Crichton. The argument there is that Global Warming was invented in 1989, when fear of Russian Annihilation by Nuclear Weapons was finally put to bed and the Berlin Wall came down.

North Korea does not quite make the cut as a terror State, and Iran probably doesn’t either. I think it is fair to say that North Korea probably has enough nuclear weapons aimed at it primed ready to go, to wipe it from the face of the earth, if it let off one Nuclear Bomb outside its own borders. Russia has sort of warned Israel it will be annihilated if it preemptively strikes Iran, so we are not really terrified of them either.

The thing is that we have a political system and while the majority rule, there was always room for dissent, and individuals have rights in this country. One of those very important rights is to be able to debate. Debate requires sound evidence and there are more and more scientists who do not agree the ideal levels of CO2. For optimum growth in a greenhouse, the recommendation is 1000 PPM, and greenhouses in temperate climates aim to get maximum production by maintaining that level. No one dies from that concentration. Plants take the maximum amount possible in a day at that concentration, and grow faster.

Climatologists may think they have the answers but computer models are notoriously inaccurate, and a small error can be multiplied many times. To err is human but to really get things wrong it takes a computer. Fortunately we have some man made brains reviewing the computer models, and questioning the results. The Indians say their per capita emissions are some of the lowest in the world, so they have no interest in cutting emissions. Without India and Africa, what we do is insignificant futility

Peter I've not read my way through all the posts on this thread so what I say may already have been said.

My impression, Senator Fielding could be right but on the weight of evidence currently available it is very unlikely. He could be right but it would be very irresponsible to gamble with the viability of the planet as a place to live while so much scientific opinion is against the views he holds and so little with him.

Sometimes the minority is correct but that's generally the minority pushing a change to conventional thinking, not the minority clinging to old idea's long past their use by date.

I suspect that many of the changes we should be making to combat global warming are changes we should be making anyway. They will costs but the cost is better born while we have the capacity and resources remaining to make them, not left until it's to late to do so.

As I've said elsewhere I doubt very much that any part of the answer lies in giving government a new tax to play with but there are some real things we can do which we need to do regardless of global warming.

R0bert

I feel cruel disappointing you when you're so pleased with yourself, byork, but we've seen all of this before.

You eventually realised that you'd submitted a post of quite breathtaking ignorance, and now you're throwing out strawmen and personal attacks in the hope that we'll get distracted and forget the silliness of your statements. No dice, I'm afraid.

So, explain to us again how we only need to be concerned with CO2 if people start suffocating on the stuff. Then I sincerely hope you'll give us your views on gunshot wounds. If your knowledge of climate science is any guide, I expect you'll tell us that the only problem associated with being shot in the face is the risk of lead poisoning.

When you're done with that, I genuinely want to know how you've become so literate, yet so stunningly uninformed about the greatest scientific issue of our time. Have you recently been expelled from an Amish enclave?

Sancho accuses me of being breathtakingly ignorant, silly, and using straw men and personal attacks. How ironic coming from somoene who uses such epithets against me (even sugggesting I belong in an Amish enclave). Sancho continues to misconstrue the point I made about the levels at which CO2 does become toxic - and he does this in order to avoid having to argue a case for CO2 being a 'carbon pollutant' in the sense that Rudd and Turnbull use the term.

I stand by the data on toxic levels of CO2 - Sancho has not actually challenged their accuracy. All he's done is pretend that I am unaware of the hypothesis that the build up of CO2 has a 'tipping point' after which will come a catastrophic run-away effect. Apparently, this hypothesis means that it's accurate for Rudd/Turnbull to classify CO2 as a toxic pollutant.

Yet, poor old silly ignorant me still believes CO2 is an essential source of life, especially plant life, and that hypotheses based on computer-modelling may be correct or incorrect in their scenarios but can never trump observation and scientific theory.

The problem for Rudd/Turnbull and Sancho is that the incorrect and misleading term "carbon pollution" is designed to trigger an emotional response to get people to support certain measures that will harm real people in the real world, especially the less well off. These measures seem to have majority public support at the moment, in large part because 'everyone' thinks CO2 is a toxic pollutant. The media - the capitalist media as us leftists call it - has a lot to answer for in promoting both this view of CO2 and the alarmist elements to the global warming/climate change hypothesis in general.

I still hope to post again - but on the on-going debate about the role of CO2 in all this. Q&A's declaration that life will be "stuffed" once we reach 700 pmm is part of a debate, not the end of one, and it seems to me that the number of qualified scientists who are becoming sceptical is growing rather than diminishing.

rather indepth defense of steve fiel-ding here
http://www.infowars.com/global-warming-or-global-cooling-a-new-trend-in-climate-alarmism/

quote extract
Figure 1: Wong’s graph.

This is the new trend in climate alarmism...Previously the measure of global warming has always been air temperatures...But all the satellite data says air temperatures have been in a mild down trend starting 2002.
http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/RSSglobe.html

The land thermometers preferred by the alarmists showed warming until 2006,..but even they show a cooling trend developing since then.

(Land thermometers cannot be trusted because,..even in the USA,..89 per cent of them fail siting guidelines that they be more than 30 meters from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source,..and their data is forever being "corrected".)
http://www.surfacestations.org/

Ocean temperatures were not properly measured until mid-2003,..when the Argo network became operational.

Before Argo,..ocean temperatures were measured with bathythermographs (XBTs)—expendable probes fired into the water by a gun from ships along the main commercial shipping lanes...Geographical coverage of the world’s oceans was poor,..XBTs do not go as deep as Argo,..and their data is much less accurate.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/marine/observations/gathering_data/argo.html

The Argo network consists of over 3,000 small,..drifting oceanic robot probes,..floating around all of the world’s oceans...Argo floats duck dive down to 1,000 meters or more,..record temperatures, then come up and radio back the results....continued..[begins+ends]..at link...feel free to rebutt...lol

http://www.infowars.com/global-warming-or-global-cooling-a-new-trend-in-climate-alarmism/

Please, god, never let your fundamentalist children, Stephen Fielding and bjork, get together.

Fielding would be only to keen to embrace the ""essential sources of life" cannot be harmful" theory, and begin using the Senate as a platform to argue that humans can't drown in life-giving water, that we may inhale pure oxygen safely, and that a diet of nothing but salt is healthy and desirable.

All of this is so because the almighty has placed mankind above the natural order. Amen.