I realised “oh shit, these people are self involved wankers”.

Do the world a favour and throw yourself off a bridge, Stuart Moreland.

Your pathetic generalisation of the generation who will save the world is not helping your cause, which if it’s as dire as you claim, needs all the help it can get.

Some people are able to take the news that the heating is accelerating: the blanket has been thickening for decades at about 20 g/m2 per year.

Wait, it gets worse. When you convert the rate at which the blanket is thickening, that figure itself has worsened. Smoothed over the five years around 1983 the measurements convert to 22 g/m2/a, much as in long-published papers. However the rates are continuing, rising through 32 g/m2 in the five years around 2005. The facts are shouting at us that the rate of increase of warming is itself accelerating.

I now explain to people that the atmosphere is getting warmer because of the CO2 that is already up there. If they can take it I then explain to them that the rate of warming is going to get worse because of the extra CO2 that everyone continues to put up there.

I rarely get the chance to tell them that even that is accelerating away from us. They have said “oh shit!” already.

It would save us all time and effort.

Double crikey!

I’m sure the 500+ people who snuffed it in Melbourne in Jan this year will be pleased to know that the unprecedented heatwave was normal, as was the 47 degree day.

In fact, by your logic, it just doesn’t matter how hot it gets - its all normal and part of the natural cycle. Let it bake baby - its all good!

Its going to be really good to see the skeptics get the full rich credit they deserve in 10 years for stopping us doing anything. Imagine the grateful feedback from the people who are left!

I’m sure the 500+ people who snuffed it in Melbourne in Jan this year will be pleased to know that the unprecedented heatwave was normal, as was the 47 degree day.

In fact, by your logic, it just doesn’t matter how hot it gets - its all normal and part of the natural cycle. Let it bake baby - its all good!

Its going to be really good to see you get the full rich credit you deserve in 10 years for stopping us doing anything. Imagine the grateful feedback from the people who are left!

Significantly slowing down our emissions may have economic and social consequences, but it is not in any way putting the climate at risk.

What do suggest is a better way than science to try to predict the likely consequences of climate change?

a) You say “climate is deteriorating”. What you mean here is that (for some reason) climate patterns are changing in a way deleterious to the status quo. In this view any attempts at intervention are actually an attemopt to ‘customise’ the climate to suit us. I favour adapting.

b) “Can’t do anything about it” well yes, or rather and worse, attempts to ‘do something’ will be likely to backfire. And its the whole climate were talking about here…

c) Yes. climate is changing. The causes, to my knowledge, aren’t fully and properly understood even for the natural state, what to speak of when human inputs are added. Therefore a ‘fix’ will likely be utterly disastrous, catastrophic and/or a waste of valuable resources. Resources which would better be spent on fostering personal responsibility and readiness to adapt in a personally and socially responsible way.

The scale of modern society, and the primacy given to economic imperatives over and above social ones - including, sadly, within government - shows that only individual efforts can be reliably trusted in the present scenario. That’s all. Some people are going to retreat to their half buried shipping containers, others will integrate into local comunities for strength in numbers, and yes, still others will turn to their internal world through prayer - the scale of society means that responses will differ markedly. Bravo!!

But as I’ve said before, seeing masses of people leaving it to ‘science’ makes me think, “Oh Shit.”

As I understand it, if you feel any intervention in the climate is inappropriate then either a) you don’t think the climate is deteriorating b) you think it is deteriorating, but we can’t do anything about it or c) you think it is deteriorating, and we should do something other than try to intervene in the climate about it.

Presumably (c) is where the personal responsibility comes in.

Making some assumptions, which may be wrong and feel free to set me right, but there is a school of thought which feels that its possible for the world to go to hell in a handbasket but for the intelligent, motivated and ‘responsible’ to survive. Into this camp I would put survivalists, people who plan to move to Tasmania and shoot anyone who tries to join them and religious people who feel that Jesus/Mohammad/Buddha etc will save the righteous just before the end.

So, if you are not one of the above I’d really like to hear an alternative to intervening in the climate because, frankly, its a pain in the a-rse and I am more than happy not to if its not necessary.

But anyone who thinkgs they are going to take their shotty and keep 5.9 billion of their fellow humans at bay by pure manliness is kidding themselves. Testosterone can acheive many good things, but it is a dangerous drug.

@ Hugh… ‘steps’ simply means taking personal responsibility for my own wellbeing and those I’m responsible for - based on my own judgement. You seem to have taken major objection to my posting without explaining exactly why.. you’ve even painted me as reckless. Why?

I don’t think ‘science’ is crap and its definitely not irrelevant.. I see it as a work in progress and that’s all, and definitely not as ‘the answer’. It is a questioning process, using the rational method. Hooray for it, but to me its just one out of a lot of ways of progressive thinking that deserve a big Hooray.

I’d like to see more emphasis put on personal responsibility and less on quasi-institutional ‘saviours’.

As a point of clarification, are you objecting to intervention in the climate, such as would be the case with geo-engineering by injecting particles into the upper atmosphere to induce cooling, or do you think its dangerous to stop intervening in the climate, as would be the case if we stopped producing enormous amounts of CO2.

In the case of geo-engineering I am minded to agree the consequences are far to unpredictable.

In CO2 emissions, its pretty clear that the intervention is producing the stuff. There is no basis for arguing the climate is somehow dependent on us continuing do so - it got on fine for a few million years without us.

Just checking, as I am a tad confused.

Advancement of science literally means uncovering mistakes in old, assumedly conclusive truths. Science is a search, not a set of concrete colnclusions.

My point is that climate (we’re talking about the the transference of the sun’s energy here, not a little thing) is so utterly complex and interrelational that I dont trust that anyone has a sufficiently adequate handle on it to justify their messing with it, pious protestations notwithstanding. And when its media driven and polticised, well then I really have to say ‘Oh Shit.’

More to your point, current science can’t even explain the Sun correctly - e.g. why the temperature on the sun’s surface is orders of magnitude less than the temperature one million miles above the surface, or in the case of the solar wind, why these particles are not only unaffected by the Sun’s gravity, they continue to accelerate away from the Sun?

So science is proposing to intervene in an incredibly complex system (so complex that it takes our most powerful computers to attempt to model it), the main driver of which is not properly understood. I say, “Oh Shit.”

The difficulties facing non-mainstream scientific researchers (and I’m not talking about ‘way-out’ researchers here) to have their findings published for further examination are well known and documented.

It appears that for many, orthodox ‘science’ has become their only shelter in the face of climatic and other uncertainties. Climate change I can deal with - I’m a man and I can look ahead and take steps… But media-driven mass hysteria posing as rationality and based on blind faith in what passes these days for science….? “Oh Shit.”

It is the putting huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere which is the action.

If something might be poisonous do you keep eating it until you are certain that it is poison, or is the prudent action to stop eating it until you know that it is safe?

ALTAKOI - Some very good points. Bringing things back to the big picture is a great way to get “skeptics” to either fully deny climate change or to have to accept it.

And I have also found that the climate change “debate” feels very similar to discussing evolution with a creationist!

What utter nonsense. Name some science that has been declared mistaken.

I believe we need to listen to dissenters who espouse unpopular causes or who take issue with the way the herd is going.

Sorry about the dead link. You need to go to Bob Carter’s home page: http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/

Then click on ‘Comment and Opinion’.

Then try and consider the arguments and data that he presents instead of pre-emptively dismissing them because they don’t fit with the dominant view.

The nub of the matter is that there is abundant evidence that climate changes, on local, regional and global levels over time. The proponents of the greenhouse gases theory need to calculate the amount of global warming that would have been taken place anyway at this stage in the global temperature cycle and then demonstrate that there is some unpredented additional amount of warming and that this could not be produced by the natural drivers of temperature change that have produced major shifts in the past. Most of the things that have happened have happened before. Open sea at the North Pole is just one example - see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/26/ice-at-the-north-pole-in-1958-not-so-thick/

Beyond that all we have is computer modelling.

There is also the inconvenient truth that global temperatures have been tracking within a stable range since the beginning of 1998. See: http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/MSUvsGISTEMP.html

That’s it from me - time to move on!

The issue is the rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, not the exact point at which these become dangerous, or the exact amount we can get away with, or indeed exactly when bad becomes really bad. While current climate change initiatives are attempting to keep CO2 levels below 350 ppm, you can ignore all the modelling and just extrapolate CO2 levels of 500ppm+ on current observable emmissions. So really, saying that 400ppm or 425ppm is safe because the modelling is off is not a skeptical argument. To make a skeptical argument you have to be able to say you believe that doubling or tripling of levels is safe because that is where inactivity is heading. And once we get there, of course, further inactivity will continue the increase. Anything else requires action pretty soon and pretty drastically.

I personally think the opinions of skeptics over about 60 on climate change are about as biased as the views of the late middle aged on the glories of sending 18 y.o to war. Perhaps there should be requirement to disclose your age in all debate about climate change (41)because the main thing which seems to determine whether you have an “oh sh-t” moment is the difference between the date of the worst scenario you consider plausible occuring and your estimate of the date of your death.

I think “Oh, Shit.”

With that in mind, it is worth remembering that science is not done in books, nor on the internet. It is done in scientific papers, with references and peer review. Writing a book is no more scientific than writing a newspaper article.

Of course you’re right! This weather is normal!

The revolting heatwave and 500+ ‘deaths’ from heat stress in Melbourne in January 2009 were totally natural.

The 47 degree day we had on black saturday, wiping out all previous temperature records by a record margin was also healthy and normal.

Also normal is the slow descent of Victoria into a baking filthy desert.

I can’t believe that people would take unprecedented high temperatures and heatwaves and somehow spin that into global warming ‘evidence’.

In fact, it doesn’t really matter what happens. We could have a 55 degree day, and you’ll say that’s normal; the more the corpses from heatwaves stack up, the more its just business as usual!

Thank god wise and sober people such as yourselves can see through the ridiculous climate ‘scientists’ and their ‘scientific papers’ to see the pure unvarnished truth.

I just love being part of this science experiment, and unlike other, more boring experiments, there is no opting out!

And imagine the interesting feedback you’ll get in 10-15 years, when we can look around at the weather and thank you for it……

MICHAELT - The link you gave to Bob Carter did not work, but I did quickly find a site which said “ Bob Carter is famous for saying global warming ‘stopped in 1998’ “. This claim has been debunked many times. If Bob Carter says anything of more substance then please let us know.

Wikepida presents Dr Roy Spencer’s views on creationism and intelligent design, saying:

On the subject of Intelligent design, Spencer wrote in 2005, “Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as ‘fact,’ I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism… . In the scientific community, I am not alone. There are many fine books out there on the subject. Curiously, most of the books are written by scientists who lost faith in evolution as adults, after they learned how to apply the analytical tools they were taught in college.” He further states “I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world… Science has startled us with its many discoveries and advances, but it has hit a brick wall in its attempt to rid itself of the need for a creator and designer.”

I’m sorry, but I cannot take anything else this man says seriously.

It is really annoying that you guys simply refuse to look at evidence that doesn’t fit the majority view. Other good sites from credible scientists are those of Dr Roy Spencer (http://www.drroyspencer.com/) and our very own Professor Bob Carter (http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm).

This cannot be reduced to ideological simplicities of left v right or people-bashing. It is about intellectual rigour.

Fortunately quantum mechanics and relativity are not attacked by religious or political loonies.

If there is some new real evidence hidden amongst all the rubbish please let us know. And contrary to your expectations, I’m sure that all of Australia’s leading climate change scientist would also like to know.

TOM MCLOUGHLIN - You say “We could transcend that, we could, but we won’t because we are at heart animals.”

I wish I could think of something to show that you are wrong, but I cannot. But I do think that for some, like me, it is important to keep trying just in case we do succeed.