I’m sorry, but you’ve been duped. The notion that there is a mix of scientific views on this is a myth which was cynically peddled by ExxonMobil and supported by the outgoing US administration.

The scientists aren’t divided. A few junk pseudo-scientists and ill-informed fatcats are trying to proclaim that it isn’t, because they want to keep on driving their SUVs and flying in their corporate jets, but actually no one is stopping them from doing so. We’re just saying they’re being selfish and irresponsible, and if that makes them mad, then I’m very glad to hear it.

As for the word ‘deniers’ being applied in this sense, I disagree with you completely since I do think it’s entirely appropriate.

Because if blithe and wilful disregard for the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of practically the entire scientific community isn’t denial, then I don’t know what is. It’s not an insult. It’s a factual description of a belligerently ignorant mindset.

Where I do agree with you is that it’s a mistake to politicise global warming. The scale of the issues facing us all is such that we need to look at them apolitically and across party lines.

I don’t remotely see the efforts we need to make to address global warming as implying an end to global economic prosperity. I’m not calling for a return to a pre-industrial economy — far from it. Rather I’m suggesting that we must make much more concerted use of the technologies we already have available for renewable power generation.

It’s also clear from the economic analysis carried out in the UK government-commissioned Stern Report that the costs of ignoring global warming far outweigh the investment required to mitigate and alleviate it.

Many thanks again.

Yes, there are a range of different contributors to the world’s climate, and they each have different effects. This reference discusses the relative roles of solar and greenhouse gas effects.

Quantification is difficult, primarily because there is debate about the speed with which climate change will occur in response to rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

The measurements of global warming to date vary according to the methods used. The analysis is complicated by the fact that land masses heat faster than the oceans, and so the northern hemisphere (which has relatively more land) also warms faster than the southern hemisphere.

Thus we have European weather stations presently recording relatively rapid increases in mean surface temperature, whilst satellite measurements of the ocean surface show much more modest increases.

There is an interesting quantification in this primer, which provides some of the background to the IPCC estimates of an increase in global temperature of between 1 and 6 C by the end of this century.

That is a wide range, but there is a concentration of predictions within the 2 to 3C range.

To gain an appreciation of the effects which would/will be produced by such temperature changes, I would recommend Six Degrees by Mark Lynas, which recently won a Royal Society award.

As for the role of Australia, I wouldn’t underestimate the importance of your country’s actions to the outcome of global climate change. According to this analysis from CSIRO, Australia has 0.32 per cent of the world’s population, but contributes 1.43 per cent of global carbon emissions. So much for Australia’s actions having little effect.

Furthermore, Australia’s carbon footprint is growing at twice the world’s average rate, and Australians currently produce 4.5 times the global per capita CO2 emissions.

We’re not blameless in Britain either (far from it) but pretending that the actions of individual nations (and even of individuals for that matter) will have a limited effect is sadly a very convenient excuse for robbing the bank because everyone else is doing it.

Australia is also an interesting place to look at the issues because of the critical choices it currently faces in energy usage. Your country surely has just about the most reliable solar energy resource of any country in the world, making Australia an excellent candidate to be one of the first nations in the world to be entirely powered from renewable sources, and given commitment and investment, surely one of the future world leaders within a rapidly expanding global market for solar technology.

But significantly, Australia also has considerable coal resources (as I recall in the past this has conditioned a certain level of economic self-interest which deterred Australia from signing up to Kyoto).

The carbon emissions from coal-fired energy sources are worryingly high in comparison even with power generation from oil and gas, and the same logic applies here to Australia as to China – if countries are intent on continuing down this route, regardless of all advice on the consequences, then the outlook for controlling climate change within manageable levels looks miserably bleak.

Thanks again, and do give my best regards to the Old Coat Hanger,
Roads

Including Nigel Lawson – the hopeless economist and erstwhile British Chancellor of the Exchequer who knows nothing about science and couldn’t find his way out a paper bag, let alone a recession. It’s great to see his book on global warming. What a fine and totally useless contribution that is.

David Bellamy? That clod who was forced to admit that he ‘inadvertently mistyped’ the misinformed and flawed statistics on glaciers (which he stole from ‘Junk Science’ in the first place) and then found his own wrong numbers exploding around the internet, proving they were true?

And as for the others, well – who are they, exactly? You don’t name them, so I’m forced to wonder really. Joe Bloggs (that’s Joe Schmoe to you, I think) who’s fed up with paying $100 to fill the tank for his SUV every hundred miles or so? Sure. That’s not exactly a courageous stand in the face of almost biblical persecution, is it?

But what is the nature of this ‘persecution’ exactly? The poor, downtrodden huddled mass of petrolheads, forced to crawl along, all helpless and starving in the gutter, whilst a multitude of wicked, conspiring and conniving scientists and meteorologist fat cats live callously off the gravy? Informed and thoughtful souls so inexplicably having the jolly fine cheek to request that you and I might use the train a little more?

And what exactly do you mean by ‘bandwagon’ here? Honestly, I just can’t think of a less appropriate word for the compiled results of painstaking research by the entire scientific community, backed up by a comparison with rigorously studied evidence of climate change stretching back over the whole of geological time.

Perhaps gravity is a bandwagon? What about electricity? Nuclear physics? Plate tectonics? Thermodynamics? Evolution?

You say some of those things might not be all they’re cracked up to be, eh? Come on, let’s get a grip – you could apply for that Nobel Prize right now. And you never know, you might just win…

And that’s how I would have it; deniers in the open, unfettered by weight of popular opinion, unhindered by cold hard fact. Where would you have your bitterest enemy? Sniping from the silos or out front offering you out for a straight-up, knock-em down, drag-em-out scrap?

Debate – for surely we have one, like it or not. You can’t force-feed chickens without tasting bile in their flesh; so it is with climate change and the flat Earth society. The media will give them oxygen in any event, no matter how at odds with reality their standpoint or stoic they remain in the face of irrefutably well-argued evidence.

The purveyors of the ecological status quo are those with most to gain; shares steeped in history (and oil), investments dripping with unassailable surety. For my part, I’ve no love for the ecoblind; I deal with ugly prejudice and a blatant lack of care for the future every day. Yet I welcome the arguments, be they rational or otherwise, since that is how the facts emerge, as they finally and so belatedly are doing today.

I for one subscribe to a future for my children; I hereby forfeit the opportunity to wager their legacy on the advancement of my own ego or position. But only by engaging allcomers in dialogue like this can we hope to inform and persuade. Slamming the door won about as many maidens as faint hearts.

In the meantime, to those who’d claim me a scaremonger I’d say this:
If it’s a fight you’re after, then I’m your Huckleberry.

However, it’s incorrect to call global warming ‘a debate’, because it sadly isn’t any more. To make an analogy, I’m sure that some people still think the world is flat, but actually there ain’t no debate about it.

The circulation and recirculation by the so-called climate change sceptics of flawed and misleading arguments and false information (I euphemise here – many would call these ‘lies’ ) is one of the most depressing aspects of the present situation.

The completely unfounded success of this misinformation campaign over the past decade has caused enormous damage to the environment and must be held responsible for great delay in tackling the causes of climate change.