Don't compare the US political scene with the Australian political scene.  There are no comparisons.

The differences between the Republicans and Liberal Party in Australia are many. 

I will say, some of the positions being taken by those on the extreme right are pretty idiotic.

AFL, I'd suggest you look up at your previous 6 consecutive posts.

[smiley:crazy] Your posts, excellent?



Yeha...

Right on AP.  You could almost be flexible if the outcomes were clear.

But they're not.  The real impact on the environment from a carbon tax.

DIDLY SQUAT!

I know Labor loves taxes, I know Labor wants a surplus by 2013.

But this great big tax on everything, is not the answer.

Nothing constructive to say, I see wombleoz.

Julia, Bob and Lee would be so proud!



.....................pathetic

brilliant stuff afl and womble. some key points made by someone who specializes in this field and not one reply about the content just discredit the organization. i will give you a tip , your juvenile replies give fuel to those that are sitting on the fence to go opposite to your argument, how about answering the direct questions including ones from the first post about temp gathering stations and the flawed positions, nobody wants to answer simple questions just bag bag bag all these authors each and every time

Whats that got to do with an ineffective tax on EVERYTHING?

  ....and the goal posts shift again.

You know you can't justify this great big tax that doesn't do anything for the environment - the only thing you've got is - "but we must do something.

Hey - here's a thought.

How about something constructive.  ffs

lets quote from Jez's favourite paper

Global weather disasters a sign the heat is on

    * Mike Steketee
    * From: The Australian
    * January 08, 2011 12:00AM

   
NOW for the good news: Australia has just had its coolest year since 2001, with a mean temperature in 2010 of 22C.

You probably already had guessed something like that was going on and it may have eased your concerns about global warming. Perhaps it even made you more inclined to the view of geologist and paleontologist Bob Carter that it is "the greatest self-organised scientific and political conspiracy that the world has ever seen"?

If only. Being duped is preferable to being fried. Unfortunately, it is hard to find such comfort from the data.. But then perhaps that is because it has been collected by the alleged co-conspirators.

The Bureau of Meteorology said this week the 2010 mean temperature was above the average of the three decades to 1990, which is the standard reference period, though only by 0.19C.

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The first decade of the 21st century was also the warmest since standard records began in 1910. And based on preliminary data to November 30, sea surface temperatures around Australia were the warmest on record last year, as were those for the past decade.

The news for the rest of the world is not so promising, either. The World Meteorological Organisation, on the basis of data collected from 189 countries and territories (co-conspirators all?), says the year to the end of October was the warmest since instrumental climate records started in 1850 - 0.55C above the 1961-90 average of 14C.

Perhaps the cold northern winter will bring the final figure, which will not be published until March, down a little but the WMO was confident enough last month to say that 2010 would rate in the top three warmest years.

And the decade also was the warmest on record - despite the annual peak in 1998.

That puts a bit of a dent in the argument that the world has been cooling since 1998.

While the records cover only a relatively short period, the trends happen to follow closely the predictions over the past 40 years of temperature rises resulting from increased greenhouse gas emissions.

In 1972, John Sawyer of the British Meteorological Office estimated an increase of about 0.6C by the end of the century. The actual figure was about 0.5C.

Most scientists agree that doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is likely to lead to warming of 2C-3C, an amount that risks significant economic and environmental damage.

So far the increase since the mid-18th century of all greenhouse gases has been 38 per cent, including a 27.5 per cent rise from 1990 to 2009.

As well as rising temperatures, the WMO says that Arctic sea ice shrank last year to its third lowest area in the satellite records and was offset only slightly by Antarctic sea ice at just above the long-term average. Global snow cover is falling and sea levels rising.

Despite that, much of the debate about global warming still is conducted in terms of future and uncertain consequences.

Perhaps we should start looking harder at the present. Recent extreme weather events include not only the Victorian bushfires and record floods in Queensland. According to the international insurance group Munich Re, 2010 saw the second-highest number of natural catastrophes since 1980, with 90 per cent of them weather-related.

Australia always has been a land of drought and flooding rains, and weather records are broken as regularly as cricket records. But not in the way they have been recently.

The temperature of 46.4C in Melbourne on Black Saturday was more than 3C above the previous highest for February.

July 29 last year saw the temperature reach 38.2C in Moscow, while for the whole month the mean temperature was more than 2C above the previous record.

Munich Re says the heatwave and associated fires and air pollution in central Russia killed at least 56,000 people, making it the worst natural disaster in Russia's history.

Pakistan experienced its worst ever floods, costing 1769 lives. Munich Re says the hurricane season in the North Atlantic was one of the most severe in the last century even though most countries, including the US, had a lucky escape, with the storms mostly over the sea.

So, can we blame climate change? Probably to some degree, even cautious scientists tend to say.

CSIRO research has identified climate change as contributing to the 20 per cent decline in rainfall in southwest Western Australia over the past 40 years, as well as the reduced rainfall in southeastern Australia.

Neville Nicholls, meteorologist, Monash University professor and one of the lead authors of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, says of the Queensland floods: "The reality is that we don't know if there is a climate change component in it."

On his estimate, the current La Nina that usually generates higher rainfall in eastern and northern Australia is the strongest or second strongest we have ever experienced. While there is no evidence to link La Nina to climate change, one possible connection is that water temperatures in the oceans around Australia have never been so warm and the La Nina has been unusually strong.

"But honestly we don't know," says Nicholls.

Nor does he attribute the Victorian bushfires per se to global warming. "The particular weather situation we had is the kind of weather situation we have had in the past: it was hot, it was dry and it was windy."

The differences were that the 12 years of drought was twice as long as the previous longest drought in the region, the heatwave at the end of January 2009 was the worst Melbourne had ever experienced and the temperatures on Black Saturday saw a large step up from the previous record. "What you can say is that there is very strong evidence that global warming exacerbated the fire situation."

Applying the same reasoning, Nicholls does not argue that climate change is responsible for any other single event.

But he does point to the succession of extraordinary heatwaves, with big jumps in record temperatures, starting in Europe in 2003 and continuing all around the world, culminating in Russia last year. More than 17 countries broke their maximum temperature records in 2010. "Putting them together, you really have to strain credibility to say it has nothing to do with climate change," he says.

"With climate change you expect many more of these really hot events and that is what we are getting. At the same time there are still records being set for cold temperatures. But for the last couple of decades we have certainly been getting more hot records being set than cold records."

Even if the world achieved what so far has proved beyond it - a mechanism to stabilise greenhouse emissions at 450 parts per million of CO2 - global temperatures still will rise by an estimated 2C; that is, four times the increase that has occurred in the past 30 years. That means further consequences already are locked in and we will have to turn our minds increasingly to adapting to them.

Nicholls says most developed countries, including Australia, already have set up heatwave alert systems.

Other changes will be harder. Reducing water allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin is still years away at best, and the recent rain will tempt politicians to postpone it further.

Building rail lines that don't buckle and electricity systems that don't fail, as they did at the time of the Victorian bushfires, let alone the bigger tasks of managing increasingly vulnerable coastlines and transforming agriculture, will be big challenges but ones that only will get bigger the longer we delay.

against*

Sure wombleoz, wombleoz.

Is that all you can muster?  You think the Australian people will be duped by that nonsense.

Bye bye Labor.

Environmental effectiveness. The reality is that cutting Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions, even altogether, will confer no measurable environmental benefit. Computer models suggest that a cut in emissions of, say, 20% by 2050 will (hypothetically) prevent warming by less than one-thousandth of a degree. By definition, then, a carbon dioxide tax is ineffective.


answer to this one womble please in you own words if at all possible

excuse me i didnt know you were womble?

The news for the rest of the world is not so promising, either. The World Meteorological Organisation, on the basis of data collected from 189 countries and territories (co-conspirators all?), says the year to the end of October was the warmest since instrumental climate records started in 1850 - 0.55C above the 1961-90 average of 14C.

fk me the world average has gone up by 1/2 a degree in 1 year (fk me how can we ever live normal again??), i don't suppose the way the temps are gathered could have a slight bearing??? as in the first post link.....

when are you complete donkeys going to realise its the greatest con job of all time......

SC, Do you want me to answer for him......while we're waiting?

Google gone down?

theres just as many that dont work for them , look overseas at the previously PAID scientists now retired and not depending on the PUBLIC PURSE actually saying its all bunkum

the worlds energy consumption will only ever go UP never down so therefore a tax can never work ONLY alternatives

secong has it ... alternatives

a filthy opportunistic tax is proposed ... where the money goes into consolidated revenue ... to prop up the
failing coffers ... and has no impact or beneficial change ... other than to have the very 'companies' people
are at odds with ... PASSING ON their financial loss to the general public

yeah .. that'll work fixing climate change

One thing is certain out of the scientific community: any single weather event they cannot say with certainty is caused by climate change.

However , what they can say or the different events added together make a very compelling case

Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.

1. Based on preliminary data to November 30, sea surface temperatures around Australia were the warmest on record last year, as were those for the past decade. The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of
Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was
first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate extremist groups maintain.
2. The World Meteorological Organisation says the year to the end of October was the warmest since instrumental climate records started in 1850 – 0.55 C° above the 1961-90 average of 14 C°. It is easy to cherry-pick periods of less than a calendar year and say they establish a new record. The cherrypicking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sudden alteration in the pattern of ocean currents worldwide that leads to warmer weather
for several months all round the world. The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, which tends largely to reverse the effect of its preceding El Niño and make the world cooler. Indeed, the calendar year from January to December 2010, according to the
reliable RSS and UAH satellite records, was not the warmest on record. Besides, what is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-
1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.  3. The last decade also was the warmest on record. After 300 years of global
warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself
higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning.
4. The world is not cooler compared to 1998. Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.  5. The trends happen to follow closely the predictions over the past 40 years of temperature rises resulting from increased greenhouse gas emissions. In the 40 years since 1970, global temperatures have risen at a linear rate equivalent to around 1.3 C°/century. CO2 concentration is rising in a straight
line at just 2 ppmv/year at present and, even if it were to accelerate to an exponential rate of increase, the corresponding temperature increase would be expected to rise merely in a straight line. On any view, 1.3 C° of further “global warming” this century
would be harmless. The IPCC is predicting 3.4 C°, but since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001 global temperature has risen (taking the average of the two satellite datasets) at a rate equivalent to just 0.6 C°/century, rather less than the warming rate of the entire 20th century. In these numbers, there is nothing
whatever to worry about – except the tendency of some journalists to conceal them. 6. Most scientists agree that doubling the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is likely to lead to warming of 2-3 C°. It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take
no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT
estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling. The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate
inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft, or satellites. Also, the models predict that every celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1- 3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from
adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes. 7. Warming of 2-3 C° risks significant environmental and economic damage. Actually, the IPCC’s current thinking is that up to 2° of warming compared with the present would be harmless and even beneficial. Since far greater temperatures than this have been the rule on Earth for most of the past 600 million years, there is no sound scientific basis for the assumption that “significant
environmental and economic damage” would result from so small an additional warming. However, significant economic damage is already resulting from the costly but pointlessly Canute-like attempts governments to try to make “global warming” go away. 8. Greenhouse gas concentrations rose by 27.5% from 1990-2009. Since
anthropogenic effects on the climate are net-zero except for CO2, we need only consider CO2 concentration, which was 353 parts per million by volume in 1990 and is 390 ppmv now, an increase not of 27.5% but of just 10.5%. 9. Arctic sea ice shrank to its third-lowest area in the satellite records, offset only slightly by growth in Antarctic sea ice. In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The
record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported. 10. Global snow cover is falling, inferentially because of Man’s influence. In fact, a new record high for snow cover was set in the winter of 2008/2009, and there is some chance that a further record high will be set this year.