Dear Belly & Max Green,

Why do you waste your time engaging in discourse with the denialists?

They have their reasons for not wanting to believe in AGW and its consequences. What's important is knowing who and what they are that places them in that position.

I have come to the conclusion that denialists such as Loudmouth, Hasbeen, individual, mhaze, ttbn, etc., are actually inmates at psychiatric detention centres around the country. That is the only reason I've been able to come up with to adequately explain their denial of AGW.

MR OPINION,
I know right? That's how they seem, but I've met denialists in real life and sometimes it's shocking how dumb smart people can be. How stubborn. How almost-normal, except for this great glaring contradiction between their politics and the specific science of AGW which has them entranced by all sorts of crazy lies.

MHAZE,
where is your specific paragraph from a specific paper from a specific peer-reviewed author that demonstrates AGW is a problem for today's climate science, not a normal FOUNDATION TO REFINING IT! It might shock YOU that 'The climate's changed before', but it certainly doesn't shock climate scientists. They study those proxies and natural climate forcings with great interest to refine today's models. Previous natural climate changes and forcings are not a problem for today's climate science, instead they are FOUNDATIONAL TO IT! So when you say "And as I showed you last year, 25% of the last 12000 yrs were warmer than now. Periods like the Minoan Warm Period, the Egyptian WP, Sumerian WP, Roman WP, Medieval WP"...
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=8989#295403

... I say, "Der!" and face-palm, because you're certainly having trouble coming up with the numbers for even ONE of these periods, the MWP we've been discussing for pages now! Oh MHAZE, where did you go? ;-) Yooouuuuu whoooooo? ;-)

Dear Max Green,

You know something that the denialists do not know. That is why you are concerned about the consequences of AGW.

BTW, AGW has a sister: the hole in the ozone layer over Antartica appears to be getting bigger again. So if droughts and super storms don't kill us then UV radiation might starve us of oxygen by killing off the phytoplankton in our oceans.

PS Keep that under your hat and don't let the denialists in on it otherwise they, along with their mates in the psych centre, will get even madder than they already are.

Misopinonated,

Of course there is climate change going on, it always has been, always is. The key questions are,

* to what extent is CO2 the major accelerant, presuming any other solar-induced factors are insignificant;

* amongst volcanic emissions, bushfires, undersea vents, animals farting, etc., to what extent is human activity responsible for that rise in CO2 emissions; and

* how can we reduce CO2 emissions to an optimal level ?

Yes, world temperatures have risen by a degree in the past century. Yes, sea-levels have risen by a couple of inches in the same time.

And, given that renewables are still somewhat unreliable and reliant on government subsidies, sooner or later we will have to revisit nuclear energy generation. So perhaps you can tell us about Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima and how we shouldn't adopt 60-year-old technology.

Joe

Dear Loudmouth,

I've only got one word to say to you: Foucault.

Loudmouth,
did you know the isotopes of carbon dioxide we emit by burning fossil fuels have a different signature to natural CO2 from volcanoes and trees? We can tell it's us because the increase in CO2 corresponds to what we actually burn each year (- about a third absorbed by nature), and the atmospheric mix of CO2 is gradually changing from natural to fossil fuel CO2 as it increases.

Dr James Hansen is *the* climatologist that diagnosed our climate problem — but he says believing in 100% renewables is like believing in the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. http://tinyurl.com/yclaf2sn Instead, Hansen says the world should build 115 reactors a year! http://tinyurl.com/zp3552t Reactors like today's CAP1400 could come in at around $2.3 billion per GW if built in bulk. There are breeder reactors coming that can eat all the nuclear waste, getting 60 times the energy out of it. But that's tomorrow. Today we should do what the French did in the 1970's and pick our best reactor design, standardise it, and mass produce it. The French deployed Gen2 reactors en-mass and built up to 15 reactors a year at one point. Only bold mass deployment will standardise, bring the price down, stop all the outrageous 'one-of-a-kind' and even 'first-of-a-kind' costs some nuclear projects have today, and get the job done in time.