Yes State of Fear is fiction, but it has like all serious books a bibliography at the back, where as a serious scientist, Crichton shows where he drew his information from. Parliament is a court of law. That is why lying to Parliament is taken as a serious criminal offence. We elect our representatives to the Parliamentary Court of Law, but because it does not have to be unanimous to give a verdict, the delegates to it have organized themselves into Political Parties. To a certain extent this has evaded the necessary procedure to establish the truth in a case such as global warming.

If you want to see where the High Court said Parliament is a court the transcript of the Kable case on the 7th December 1995, makes it abundantly clear. When they brought down that decision almost 10 months later, the “Kable Principle” was established, a principle ignored by almost every Judge in Australia since then. The High Court Transcripts are on the net at Austlii Document Collections. Go read.

For an interesting read enter underwater volcanoes, in Google and you will see that there are a great number of active volcanoes under water across the world. Some of these are in Antarctica, and when they warm the ice above it melts. In deep water the CO2 goes straight into the water just as we make soda water, but when a volcano is closer to the surface, or in the air as in Hawaii the CO2 is spewed directly into the atmosphere, and very high CO2 readings are recorded in Hawaii near the active volcano there.

Sometime a crater lake will accumulate a huge reservoir of CO2, in its deeper waters, over time, and in some weather conditions, when the surface water cools the water in the lake will tip over releasing huge amounts of heavier than air CO2, which flows over the rim of the cone, and fills the valley below killing every man, woman and child and all livestock in the area it covers. Senator Fielding is asking the questions that must be answered

I'd put my money on Al Gore and Steve Fielding both being partly right. As they say, on any controversial topic, the truth is usually somewhere between the polar opposites that mark out the extremities of the debate.

Does AGW contribute to global warming? Certainly. Is draining the atmosphere of excess CO2 going to stop the increase in atmospheric temperature? That's not altogether clear. It could be one of those "necessary but insufficient conditions" that engineers and other scientists talk about. And you won't know the answer until the hypothesis is directly tested. But it probably is correct to say that reducing pollutants in the atmosphere in general will improve human health in terms of reducing the particulate matter is taken into the lungs. The latter sounds to me like a good enough reason to reduce the human contribution to atmospheric gas levels.

Examinator, Feilding can't understand climate, & Penny Wong can. You've got to be kidding mate.

Farctelle, you must thing Wong is an even bigger dill than I do. Don't you think she had access to the CSIRO, & Met Bureau staff if she had wanted to take them with her, to the Fielding meeting.

I'm sure this was not done because her advisers were dead scared that they would have had no chance in a genuine debate with the Fielding crew.

This is the thing they fear the most, genuine debate. Just look at the great Gore fleeing like a frightened rabbit from the simple senator. If he had anything but bull sh#t to offer, here was his chance to secure the critical vote, & he ran like the carpetbagger he is, when confronted with the truth.

Peter,
By a quirk of the system his vote not him is going to make the difference. Yet Fielding has adopted a mantle of the arbiter of truth and fiction WITHOUT either the moral right or the competence to do so.
If we examine his mandate we find he wasn't elected to make laws...that's the purpose of the lower house. Nor was he elected to decide on global warming T or F. At the risk of stating the obvious that was done by the majority of people hence the ALP is government.
He and the Senate are a house of review therefore his question should be is this the best out come to that end.
But true to form of pollies in general representation comes a poor 4th behind ego, being re-elected and party good.
As Fractelle pointed out his investigation is/was no more than self aggrandizement deliberately(?) choosing the scientific equivalent of soothsayers to advise him as opposed to real Climatologists etc. Perhaps to justify his dealing himself into the big game (increase his re election prospects). Well beyond his ambit and competance.
The SA senator who held up the Murray/Darling bill did so to meet the *Additional* needs of his state.
I doubt that the majority of his state would support him second guessing those who have greater competence.
BTW I am on the fence re global warming but not on Catastrophic Anthropomorphic corruption of World ECOLOGY and CLIMATE.The consequences of which will be :-( for us all .

Both Fielding and Gore believe in a supernatural 'Creator' so I wish some people would stop trying to score points by suggesting that only the sceptics are religious. As an atheist, I respect both freedom of religion and freedom of science. The latter is trampled upon every time dissident scientific voices are vilified. Let us not forget Galileo, who spoke out against the orthodox scientific wisdom and authority of Europe's greatest Academy of Science of his time. And let's not forget that Professor Ian Plimer is probably Australia's most effective opponent of the creationists.

Sceptics are people who do not bow to authority but question it rigoroulsy. In doing so, they are not religious, as religion generally requires some kind of obedience toward, or humility in the presence of, authority (god).

Having followed the debate for about 15 years now, it concerns me that both sides are too dogmatic, especially those who say the science is settled. It's not just that the science is never finally settled but more specifically that there are too many dissenting, scientifically qualified, voices. I do not mean those who challenge whether global warming is happening but rather the real issue, which relates to whether or not CO2 is the principal driving force behind any warming and also as to whether the long-term warming that the IPCC demonstrates has happened over the past 150 years is manageable through adaptation or is likely to be catastrophic.

On these key points, the science is not settled no matter how often Rudd and Turnbull continue to dishonestly and ridiculously describe an essential source of life as 'carbon pollution'.

Some of the most 'religious' people I know are atheists - but none more so than die-hard Greens whose god is Nature.

To conclude with Karl Marx's motto: De Omnibus Dubitandum ("Doubt Everything")!

No never the bloke is a dud an idiot unlikely to be right on any issue.
Yes I truly think just that, such a fool in the senate is making us all look like fools.
His primitive belief system, God is in control stuff, is well why bother he is going going gone soon roll on double house election please.