"There have been six major ice ages in the history of the planet. Five were at times when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was far higher than now. This means that carbon dioxide could not have driven climate change in the past, so why should a lower content in the atmosphere now drive it?"

Prof Ian Plimer.







A couple of interesting articles on CC:



http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/climate-sceptics-speak-out/story-e6freuy9-1225808398590

Thank you for your response. I never said anything about carbon dioxide as such and whilst I know that carbon dioxide is important for plant growth it is the climate change bought about by the increased industrialisation and population, reduction in the naturally forested areas particularly in the tropics, and rampant use and processing of natural resources in the last 50 to 100 years that is adding to the acceleration in climate changes that are being "observed".



Put a little more simply there are just too many people on this planet and until we as a species appreciate that and do something meaningful to curb our overall numbers we are always going to be faced with the impacts of the pressure of increased population and industrialisation to support our lifestyle.



Population size and growth is a significant factor in all this that seems to have been lost on the sceptics and alarmists alike.

All these different articles and theories on CC and the causes simply show to me anyway, that the argument of the 'science being settled' is far from correct.



My biggest gripe as far as the AGW camp is concerned, is the physchological manipulation of today's children, which is producing generations of anxious depressed children, without proof of their reasons for CC/AGW.

And, indeed, those same children will be the ones paying for the next who knows how many years for an unproven theory.



Good to see another new 'face' joining in, by the way.

My previous post was not meant as an attack on yours. I like to post interesting pieces as they often don't make the mainstream media.

Welcome Billswann.



I breathed a sigh of relief momentarily when Tony Abbott achieved the dismissal of the ETS - only to hear it mooted that it would be introduced once again in February.



I also hope we will remain uncommitted to anything when Rudd leaves Copenhagen.



He is a dangerous man in that our standard of living means nothing in his zealous ambition to have it his way. Anyone reasonable would not have tried to rush us into a huge tax that many still do not really understand. At least we no longer have his counterpart leading the Opposition who has shown his true colours and left wing nastiness in trying to trash not only the winner but his supposed own party - confirms my personal thoughts that he only went to that party as he recognised Rudd as being the one he couldn't topple or push aside. Two of a kind. which made him the darling of the media and the left along with Hockey who also showed his colours and lost respect of many.





Yes the elephant in the room to use current vernacular is the fact that the world's population has exploded over the last 15-20 years and is mooted to continue to do so and it is this that has caused many problems as you say - with cutting down of forests for building and cooking fires.



With the invasion of western countries threatening to overwhelm their services and causing havoc with unreasonable demands to change the culture to suit that of incomers.



Instead of encouraging third world countries to limit their birth rates we have fed them as they pop out more babies than they could possible feed. Aid agencies even now are calling for more food for starving Sudan which has happened before but maybe because of the west's intervention learned nothing and so history repeats itself.



Man is the problem alright not carbon dioxide and anyway the suspect data the IPCC based its project of AGW on has yet to be examined as far too many scientists in the field are arguing back and forth and many are restricted by career/ salary considerations from speaking out.



The Head of the East Anglia University dept which did the figures for the UN has resigned in the face of the scandal that they are false.



Steve Fielding has called for a royal Commission into the whole affair and that should take place as soon as possible and the ETS bill should be shelved until such time as it is proven beyond doubt that carbon is the cause. That is basis of all law or was when I read it that judgements are based on what a reasonable man would do.

Copenhagen - Climate change talks in Copenhagen produced a deep rift between developed and developing nations Tuesday as China accused the world's richest of failing to live up to their commitments - and a Danish draft proposal caused uproar among negotiators. In a rare meeting with the international press, China's chief climate negotiator, Su Wei, said the European Union, the United States and Japan had all tabled far too modest emission cuts.



"Developed countries shoulder a historical responsibility" for climate change and "need to take the lead to reduce their emissions by a large margin," Su said.



Su described the EU's planned reduction of 20 per cent against 1990 levels by 2020 as "not enough", and US President Barack Obama's proposed cuts of around 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 as "neither notable nor remarkable".



His comments came against the backdrop of a brewing row over a leaked "Copenhagen Agreement" text drafted by the Danish prime minister's office and circulated among a restricted group of delegations attending the UN talks.



The draft, which was published by the Guardian newspaper on its website, states that all parties should "support the goal of a reduction of global annual emissions in 2050 by at least 50 per cent versus 1990 annual emissions."



More controversially, the text envisages a deadline for peak emissions from developing nations.



Moreover, financial support for adaptation to the effects of climate change should prioritize "the poorest and most vulnerable countries", rather than cover big developing nations such as China, India or Brazil.



While not an official text, insiders confirmed its authenticity to the German Press Agency dpa.



According to the Guardian, the text weakens the role of the United Nations in handling climate finance and effectively allows rich nations to continue emitting much more than less developed countries.



Su, for his part, accused rich nations of allowing their emissions to grow and said it would be "unfair to set a peak target for developing countries which are still in the stage of industrialization."



The Danish text was also slammed by environmentalists present in Copenhagen.



"The Danish proposal falls far short of emissions cuts needed, and remains vague on the climate cash," Antonio Hill, Oxfam International Climate Advisor said.



Kim Carstensen of the WWF said the draft was "weak and reflects a too elitist, selective and non-transparent approach."



The UN's climate chief, Yvo de Boer, had earlier warned that greenhouse gas emission cuts pledged so far by the industrial world were "not good enough."



According to the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the cuts envisaged by rich nations would not be sufficient to meet scientists' calls for a global reduction of between 25 and 40 per cent - the range needed to avoid the worst impact of climate change.



While underlying the "very positive and encouraging" start to the conference, which began on Monday, de Boer also urged negotiators from 192 countries present in Copenhagen to work to the full ahead of the arrival next week of environment ministers and some 110 world leaders.



The negotiations remain mired by mutual recriminations and deep divisions over how much each party should do to prevent global average temperatures from rising above the potentially dangerous 2-degree limit.



"I have heard representatives of both Europe and the US say that the target that China has tabled can be improved upon; I have heard representatives from Europe and China say that the target tabled by the US can be improved upon ... and I have heard least developed states say that nobody's targets are good enough at the moment," de Boer said.



"So clearly we are going to have a very intense process of negotiations," he said.



Developed and developing countries are also split over how much money is needed to help poor nations adapt to climate change and mitigate its impact, and on whether existing or new organizations should handle the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be required.



Rich nations say they are prepared to provide poor nations with 10 billion dollars in immediate aid next year.



But "if you divide this sum by the population of the world, it's less than 2 dollars per person," Su said.



"That's not enough to buy a cup of coffee in Copenhagen," the Chinese official said.



Pressure on all parties to reach an ambitious deal was stepped up Tuesday by the publication of two new alarming reports.



One, by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said the current decade was set to become the warmest on record.



Another report from Germanwatch, a pressure group, blamed a rise in "extreme weather events" for 600,000 deaths and massive economic damage over the past two decades.

"One, by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said the current decade was set to become the warmest on record."



That statement fascinates me.

Records have only been in existence for 150 years.

The planet Earth has been in existence for billions of years and was at one stage a ball of ice. So what caused all that ice to melt?

No 4wd's around at the time. LOL :-)

"One, by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said the current decade was set to become the warmest on record."



That statement fascinates me.

Records have only been in existence for 150 years.

The planet Earth has been in existence for billions of years and was at one stage a ball of ice. So what caused all that ice to melt?

No 4wd's around at the time. LOL :-)

The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2009 (January–October) is currently estimated at 0.44°C ± 0.11°C (0.79°F ± 0.20°F) above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F. The current nominal ranking of 2009, which does not account for uncertainties in the annual averages, places it as the fifth-warmest year. The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989). More complete data for the remainder of the year 2009 will be analysed at the beginning of 2010 to update the current assessment.



This year above-normal temperatures were recorded in most parts of the continents. Only North America (United States and Canada) experienced conditions that were cooler than average. Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have the warmest year on record.



Climate extremes, including devastating floods, severe droughts, snowstorms, heatwaves and cold waves, were recorded in many parts of the world. This year the extreme warm events were more frequent and intense in southern South America, Australia and southern Asia, in particular. La Niña conditions shifted into a warm-phase El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in June. The Arctic sea ice extent during the melt season ranked the third lowest, after the lowest and second-lowest records set in 2007 and 2008, respectively.



Info from the World Meteorological Organization

Personally, I am in complete agreement with billswan1947 and fwed, BUT there is always the chance that the "climate change sceptics" are correct. The problem is, if the sceptics are right and we do nothing, all is fine. However, should they be wrong and we do nothing, we are potentially leaving our decendants a legacy of global pollution and a toxic environment. Do we take that chance just to save MONEY? Its not as though we are playing "penny poker" here.....the stakes are enormous.

Hi Bill, great to have another person working on the problem, it sure keeps the grey matter finely tuned. I've got an article I'd like you to read and your impressions. Cheers



Bob Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University (Queensland) and the University of Adelaide (South Australia). He is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist and environmental scientist with more than thirty years professional experience, and holds degrees from the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the University of Cambridge (England). He has held tenured academic staff positions at the University of Otago (Dunedin) and James Cook University (Townsville), where he was Professor and Head of School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999.







Professor Bob Carter says:



AS the core samples from deep underground pass through the logging sensor before me, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is clearly displayed. Friendly, brown sands for the warm interglacial periods and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations. And for more than 90 per cent of recent geological time the Earth has been colder than today.

We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent but welcome warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.



The cores tell the story that this period is only a short interlude during a long-term decline in global temperature - they also warn of the imminence of the next glacial episode in a series stretching back more than 2 million years.



Together with 50 other scientists and technicians, I am aboard the drilling ship Joides Resolution. JR, as it is affectionately known, is the workhorse of the Ocean Drilling Program, an international program that is to environmental science what NASA is to space science.



JR's drilling crew can retrieve cores up to 1km or more below the seabed and we are drilling today about 80km east of South Island in New Zealand. The ancient muds and sands that make up the sediment layers we pass through are the most important record of ancient climate that scientists possess. And they tell the tale that climate always changes.



Some core alterations are ruled by changes in the Earth's orbit at periods of 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, others by fluctuations in solar output and others display oceanographic and climate shifts caused by . . . we know not what.



Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, oft-times for reasons we do not fully understand.



Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed - not preceded but followed - by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide.



Yet the public has been misinformed to believe that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that postdates its supposed effect?



The now numerous special interest groups who continue to lobby for unnecessary and economically harmful carbon dioxide taxation need to appreciate that nature, not the world's governments, will determine future climate. Second, that there is no scientific evidence that warmings greater than the much-talked about 2C will cause environmental catastrophe; rather, this number is one plucked out of the air for reasons of political targetry and control. And, third, that to limit atmospheric carbon dioxide to 450ppm, also a widely touted figure, makes no sense, because past carbon dioxide levels attained more than 10 times this without known adverse environmental effects, while greening the planet.



Politically popular though it may be, the belief that atmospheric carbon dioxide is the primary driver of average planetary temperature is junk science. For instance, Earth experienced an ice age about 450 million years ago at a time when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are estimated to have been 15 times the pre-industrial level.



It is simply science fiction to believe that 450ppm of atmospheric carbon dioxide and 2C of warming are magic numbers that somehow mark a "tipping point"in Earth's climate system. Rather, they are politically contrived targets, erected for the purpose of stampeding scientifically innocent citizens into a gaping corral of carbon dioxide taxation.



The simplest explanation for the mild warming that occurred in the late 20th century is that it was part of Earth's ever-changing pattern of natural climate change and the job of scientists is to seek evidence to test that interpretation. They have and literally thousands of scientific papers to date have described climate evidence that is consistent with natural change.



Despite all the efforts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the expenditure of about $100 billion of research money since 1990, no scientific paper exists that demonstrates that the late 20th century warming, or the past 10 years of cooling for that matter, fall outside the rates and magnitudes of past (geological) climate change.



Melting glaciers (but, in some places, advancing), rising sea levels (but, in some places, falling), increasing numbers of storms (actually, currently at a 30-year low), increasing numbers of polar bears and changes in migratory patterns of birds may very well all have happened or be happening. But these facts say nothing about a human causality for such changes.



It is not for the independent climate scientists (the so-called "climate sceptics") to disprove that dangerous human-caused warming is happening. Rather, it is for the alarmist scientists of the IPCC and CSIRO to show that the simple idea of natural climate change can be invalidated. This they have failed to do.

Kfchugo Those of us who are sceptical about man made weather, are not against cleaning up our act. I'm all for it. Logging and animal habitats concern me also.

But this crazy rush to impose all sorts of laws, taxes, treaties that will impact generations to come doesn't make sense until we know a bit more.

I'm suggesting merely that we take a step back, and allow more debate from those who

a. Wish to present alternate theories, rather than be howled down by the Warmist camp who have virtually turned this into a cult, so their attitude toward anyone with a different point of view, or a different theory, is treated like a blasphemer.



b. Those who wish to present alternate ideas on things like nuclear power.





"Do we take that chance just to save MONEY? Its not as though we are playing “penny poker” here.....the stakes are enormous."



If we are not spending the money in the right direction, I believe the Global Financial Crisis we've just experienced, will pale into insignificance compared to what will happen if the AGW camp wins the day.

THE Great Barrier Reef is just fine and threatened by nothing



By Dr Walter Starck



Water temperatures and the frequency of destructive storms are a bit below the long-term average. The coral bleaching events of 1998 and 2002 were nothing unusual.



They were simply a result of surface warming due to extended periods of calm weather when normal wave mixing ceases.



This often happens in El Nino events.



Rapid recovery from these and more recent storm damage attests to the healthy vigour of the reef system. Run-off of agrichemicals and fertilisers is at lower levels than those in our own drinking water and has declined, not increased, over recent decades.



Of the more than 2500 reefs in the Great Barrier Reef complex, about two dozen are regularly used for tourism and 90 per cent rarely or never experience a human presence.



The commercial fishing catch is restricted to a level that equates to an average harvest level of 9kg/square km/year when 4000kg is considered a conservative estimate of sustainable yield for reef fisheries.



Globally, atmospheric and ocean temperatures as well as sea level rise have all declined over the past decade.



Antarctic sea ice extent is at all-time highs. Record and near-record cold had been recorded in many areas around the world over the past few years. Record extreme high temperatures on all continents save one were between 1881 and 1942. The exception is Antarctica in 1974.



Dr Walter Starck received a PhD in marine science from the University of Miami in 1964 and was a pioneer in coral reef science. He has lived in Far North Queensland studying the Great Barrier Reef since 1978



So just tell me WHO ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE?

Thank you all for your views. The sad part about all of this is that the mechanics of climate change of any sort is so poorly understood. On one hand we hear about carbon emissions generated by humans to support our lifestyle are causing it and on the other hand about the natural climate cycles of the planet, just to mention two factors. However each factor that seems to appear is based upon a piece of research and/or analysis quite often undertaken in "isolation" without placing that information/educated guesswork in context of all the factors affecting the planet.



Whether climate change induced by human activities as affecting the the planet or not one would have to agree that the balance has shifted and we are likely to see some irreversible changes if we do not address issues like population size and growth in an effort to reduce the pressure on the planet.



It seems to me that is prudent to to assume that we are having an impact and that we need to take action to at least preserve the planet in a livable state not only for us but for future generations. We owe it to those that follow.



However in doing so we need to ensure that whatever actions are taken are meaningful and measurable as well as practical otherwise we are just window dressing the issue.



I think the answer is for the sceptics and the alarmists lies somewhere in between their respective positions and they need to mitigate their passions either way and start working together for the benefit of the planet.



Quite apart from the passions are the respective egos involved so that they can be the first to say "I told you so" whichever way the cards fall.



As I see it our lifestyles are unsustainable from an environmental and future generations point of view in the long run and something has to be done to address the real issues instead of playing party or professional politics, such as population size, population growth, depletion of non-renewable resources to support our lifestyle.

I think the answer is for the sceptics and the alarmists lies somewhere in between their respective positions and they need to mitigate their passions either way and start working together for the benefit of the planet.

I think you are correct here.

The problem with this debate is that is political. It all depends who you vote for as to what decision you will adopt.

It seems to me the dollar comes first in a lot of peoples minds.

If there is a problem, ok, but as long as it does not cost us anything TODAY, just forget it.

If the problem persists, then blame the government for not doing anything.

Gee.......

Following is one of the most appalling pieces of fear mongering I've seen, even for the Greens.

For the ABC to allow this to be published makes them complicit. As I stated above, the effect of this type of propaganda on our young people can't be measured.



[url=http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2765351.htm]Link[/url]



On reading the comments below the article, it is quite clear that many other people feel the same as I do, and money is not the only issue, or indeed the main issue.