By my reckoning Ashby got two things right and one half-right, against 27 wrong and 14 red herrings. What I can’t understand is how a “sceptic” could post such easily debunked material? Didn’t he check his facts?

One thing’s right though – the ETS is a great big con! The Treasury says it won’t even reduce emissions the claimed paltry 5% (see http://tinyurl.com/chart3-6). And the Opposition’s fig leaf is even worse (13% increase in emissions). Both the old parties are useless, carbon-captured has-beens.

Let’s hope the Government listens to the Greens’ suggestion (based on Garnaut) of a straight $20/tonne carbon tax for two years, with no targets initially: http://greens.org.au/node/5624

point about size – venom from a funnel web spider is about 4 millionths the weight of the average adult – but is usually lethal left untreated.

CO2 in the atmosphere will become just as lethal, left untreated. By the time you can prove it to a 100% degree of accuracy – it will be too late – then what will you all do with the precious money you’ve saved?
Of what value is an economy of any magnificence – if there is no planet in which to operate it?

The risk of non-action is far greater by orders of magnitude than that of action that fails – after all, we can still rescue a stricken economy – but who’s going to build us a new planet?

Who is “Leon Ashby”? What is his education in natural sciences? What research papers has he submitted to the field?

All we really know is he is a director of the right-wing think tank “Institute of Public Affairs” and the “Australian Environment Foundation” is a front group of it.

But still he writes and distributes his opinion on climate change which i’ll discredit here.

> Is CO2 a pollutant?

What makes it, or not makes it a pollutant is whether it is a greenhouse gas and whether greenhouse gases will warm the earth. The argument presented is simply begging he question. The argument also hijacks this ‘question’ by trying to introduce what carbon dioxide can also do. To try and win the argument by convincing the reader that climate science is complicated isn’t valid.

> Only 3.4% of the CO2 is human caused

This argument disregards that there’s a required balance needed in the atmosphere and it is only that 3.4% that is the problem. To start talking about the other 96% of greenhouse gases is simply trying to hijack the argument again.

> Frontier Modelling says it will cost Australia

Who is Frontier Modelling? A company commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull. Financial statistics like this are so easy to manipulate. The cost of reducing that 3.4% CO2 follows an exponential graph. Reducing the first 1% is cheap and will cost each australia eg $20 per year, while the last 0.1% no doubt involves so many industries and methods of manufacturing that it would cost a ridiculous amount. Taking a realistic perspective: once we spend a couple of years cutting down the first percent or two of this “exponential graph” will start to flatten and innovation and economics will take over. This is very much what happened with CFCs – the original binding target was not enough to fix the problem but once it was put into place everything else solved itself very quickly.

> 31,000 Scientists saying CO2 does not cause climate change

The argument leading up to this is ridiculous. How some brain dead donkey can think a scientist not being able to give more than 90% certainty equates to saying “does not cause” is ludicrous.

All you can conclude here is:

* From 2,500 papers only 2 papers were independent, dealt with CO2 levels, made it to the second review, and did not reach a 90% certainty.

But what you can also conclude is:

* 95% of the papers concluded climate change was more likely than not affected by human activity (the main conclusion from IPCC)
* 80% of the papers on CO2 concluded climate change was almost definitely attributed to CO2 levels,
* 16% of the papers on CO2 levels gave quality to a conclusion, the others no doubt were more quantifiable research papers which in turn gave foundation to those papers which could qualify, IPCC had to review them still to check such priori.
* 50% of the papers on CO2 levels made a second review, the IPCC only took those papers it felt gave concrete or unique enough conclusion into the second review,
* 25% of the papers were on CO2 levels, climate change is a complicated science, and papers related can be submitted from any of the natural science fields.

To so blatantly twist and manipulate the IPCC findings like this in my opinion immediately discredits everything presented by Leon Ashby. This is scaremongering, not realistic scientific questioning.

The truth is that from the 2,500 papers the IPCC evaluated over 95% concluded that global warming was real and more likely than not affected by human activity. Compare this to you wont find many scientists who can give you a 100% certainly that einstein’s theory of relativity stands, and probably many that can throw doubts even on newton’s laws. Furthermore what type of scientists constitute this “31,000″? economic scientists? medical scientists? One petition is hardly comparable to 2,500 research papers.

When there’s such a large scientific consensus supporting a strong probability, especially when climate science itself is statistical mathematics and all about probability, isn’t it the public’s responsibility to fall in line and leave further questioning to the experts?

> Climate change is natural, and warmer periods occur without human CO2 emissions being the cause

Notice the timelines all vary. This line of climate skepticism always requires a precise timeline selection for each graph. Mostly it’s just manipulation of statistics again.

From the first paragraph of wikipedia’s Global Warming article:

“The IPCC also concludes that variations in natural phenomena such as solar radiation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming This wikipedia entry seems the best rebuttal to “warming periods” skepticism.

> The Evidence of the Arctic Ice Cap

A lie. Last summer it was the thinner it’s _ever_ been with only 50cm thickness in places.

> list of Scientists who have found the opposite results to Miskolczi … It will mean Australia`s economy will become the
> equivalent of Cambodia`s within 10 years.

All emotive pleas with some magic number “0.33″ pseudo-science in between. The fossil fuel industry is spending millions of dollars every week on creating crud around climate change.

How would you expect it to appear?

And are you surprised people want to follow this convenient interpretation?

Thought this might enlighten you.

http://noteviljustwrong.com/blog/9-general/124-uk-lawyer-slams-gore-over-court-case-claims.html

BTW Lomborg points out in todays Australian that if all the Kyoto obligated countries did what was required, it would still only reduce the temperature by 0.22C by 2100.

Building the pyramids probably had a better cost benefit than this.

Only frauds and fools would be still persist with this nonsense.

The reason SJT asks is that he is blissfully unaware of his position as a “useful idiot”. It’s these who are unaware of being used.

Somewhere you disagreed that socialism tends to be environmentally destructive.

Here is evidence for the prosecution.

http://mat-rodina.blogspot.com/2009/07/death-of-aral.html

My case stands.

I was hoping you could tell me.

“over the last 15 years, all temperature data is showing the global temp going UP.”

This is supposed to prove the latest Global Climate Change pronouncements, handed down by the High Priests of GCC, that it is warming faster than projections??

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

So, Little Sod, SJT, Luke…

How is that tropospheric hot spot coming along???? The IPCC claim that warming from ANY source should cause a hot spot. Is their physics wrong, or, is the data showing more than actual warming???

It is really irrelevant as the warming we have seen is benign and CONSISTENT WITH natural CC!!

How does it feel to be ignorant tools of religious nuts!!

SJT July 13th, 2009 at 9:18 am

WTF that certainly is Worse Than Failure. I accept that the climate changes to state the damn obvious but AGW means Anthropogenic Global Warming doesn’t it? The last time I looked Anthropogenic meant caused by humans and Global Warming was what was being caused. This in turn it is argued causes all the climate change that is going to kill Gaia.

So now we should concern ourselves with climate change that humans don’t cause. I see SJT you are changing sides. So please quantify. How much climate change is caused by other factors? What percentage is due to humans? There are a myriad of other causes that is what is being argued by the side that opposes you.

You will notice that SJT doesnt dispute the fact that Gore has a major conflict of interest and that he has amassed a fortune since losing his VP job

All SJT wants to do is try and distract attention from that, by disputing something that has been well written about namely his court case in the UK which Gore may have technically won, but beyond that it was a big poke in the eye for the lard arsed fraudster.