Jara

Sometimes in rubbishing the author, you're rubbishing the argument (Wilde was rather good at that) Here's the link https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/category/the-facts Don't bother refuting it if you can't be bothered - I was just trying to demonstrate what a waste of time it is trying to respond to an article like the Mundine one when all I'd be doing is preaching to the choir or to people who wouldn't believe what I was saying anyway (ie a total audience of about 3) , Better things to do with my time.

Tell you what - I'll see you and I'll raise you - I just posted a fact sheet from the Climate Council - you write a cogent response to its arguments (maybe the Five Questions they most commonly get asked?) and I'll respond to the Mundine one (haven't actually got round to reading it yet - am busy with real work - but if it's by Tony Abbot's love-child, I suspect it'll be the usual stuff: an emissions trading scheme or anything like it will cost too much, and what difference can little Australia make, the big polluters are China, America, etc, and climate change is a hoax anyway.

Hey Daisy - sorry, haven't replied properly - busy with work, family, etc. Read this - good comment on the Finkel report: https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/category/the-facts

Hey Daisy - I was half asleep when I saw your post - but Dieter's right - you criticise somebody for writing an ad hominem attack - in an ad hominem attack! Wonderful!

nah - seen plenty of Mundine's garbage - don't want to pay to read more of it - ad hominem will do for now (remember reading a hilarious article by him just before the last election, when negative gearing was an issue, he said how good it was for Aboriginal people - article didn't make any sense at all - I read it and thought - er what? i wonder what percentage of Aboriginal people are in a position to take advantage of a tax avoidance scheme like that?) Sorry - ad hominem's all he gets from me. Read his bio on Wikipedia - if ever there was a hominem that deserves an ad, it's him. Boasting about how, when he was President of the ALP, he was pulling the chicks, even though he was overweight. Weird. Even if I could get through the paywall, I suspect all I'd find's a Liberal party pamphlet. If you can find me something by Gary Foley, I'll read that - there's a man who fights for his people.

Yeah, you're right - not worth trying to get through the paywall - Mundine's a Liberal Party stooge - I liked the quote from his second ex-wife: "He sold out his people and his family." Onto his third now. Real poster boy for those good old conservative family values.

Can't read it. What does he say?

Ah, yes, I know that one. Thanks.

No, neither could I - got it now - Gawn's Beard must have a great memory - thanks again

Ah - that was the one - music to my eyes (hmmm - actually that doesn't make sense, but you get the idea) - thanks heaps

Thanks Daisy but no, it wasn't that one - sorry, I should have been more specific - it wasn't last weekend - it was one somebody posted maybe a month or a bit more ago - embarrassingly, I can't remember who it was against - Monday's game must have addled my head as well as my heart - it was one of the most tenacious passages of play I've ever seen - from memory, Clarrie battled all the way from the centre down to the forward zone in the middle of a scrum, lost it and won it back then sent a beautiful handball to Garlett, who goaled - I thought it was incredible, but I can't find it - thought it must have been in this thread, but can't find it here - tried Youtube, etc.. no luck - thought this would be quicker any help appreciated - do want to gloat at a couple of Maggie mates cheers

Hey - just wondering if anybody could point me to (or post) that amazingly committed Oliver clearance to Jeffy (want to show it to my Magpie mates)? Cheers

Re your first point: say what? Re your second point - You have? I don't think you stated it that clearly. I must have misunderstood. You're asking me how global warming theory could be falsified? Lots of ways, I imagine. Thousands of socialist scientists fudging the figures to .... further their careers, or whatever rubbish somebody else said back there. A Chinese conspiracy, like Trump says. All of their computers or calculations could be skewif. Lots of ways. Anything can be falsified, of course. Maybe we didn't land on the moon, maybe the Albanians shot Kennedy, maybe God planted the fossils to fool Darwin, maybe I'm a butterfly dreaming I'm a Demons supporter. Don't quite get why you're asking.

Yes, I know - in the eighties, they were warning us about a nuclear winter. Still a possibility, of course.

Yep,no worries, sorry - this isn't exactly an academic setting, so I didn't put in references, but I got the figure from a writer called Stephen Pyne - the book was called "Burning Bush" - a fire history of Australia - if such things interest you, you should read it - it's an extraordinary work (he's written a series of books on the role of fire in forming the environments of every continent - to my eye, he's one of the most important scientists/writers alive) I haven't read the book for a few years, but, from memory, he was talking about the general warming of the Australian continent, from its rainforest days to the rise and domination of the eucalypts - process took about 80,000 years. Yes, of course, there have been all sorts of natural fluctuations in climate - ice ages, mini-ice ages etc - one book I read pointed out that we have had a period of 15,000 years of relative warmth - which, of course, fostered the growth of that little thing - civilisation. Who knows? - maybe there's about to be a planetary wobble and we're heading for another ice age. But that's a bit of a different thing from the current concerns about Global Warming - the worry there is the speed with which it's occurring, and the danger that the rapid warming will cause terrible problems for our environment - affect agriculture, Great Barrier Reef, coastal communities, etc... I pray that the scientists are wrong - but I don't like to gamble with my kids' future - like I said back there, I met a few of those scientists for a book I was working on - they certainly didn't strike me as people who'd lie to save their careers - on the contrary, they were kind of nerdy types who were fanatical about making sure that their figures were accurate - I take the standard environmentalist argument: if I'm wrong, the worst that can happen is that we reduce pollution. If the deniers are wrong, the worst that can happen is that our environment becomes uninhabitable.

Earl - one thing in your reply I take issue with - you say climate change is a natural phenomenon - yes, it is, of course: in the last 80,000 years Australia's climate has got hotter and drier as it drifted towards the equator (and as Aboriginal people introduced a regime of burning which favoured pyrophiliac plants, which reinforced the process) - but it doesn't change at the speed it has since industrialisation - the last warming took 80,000 years - the current one has taken a hundred - that's why most of the scientists I met believed it was man-made.

Well, no, I presume climate scientists are like the rest of us. They have careers, sure. I spent a lot of time with scientists (a couple of fire scientists, but also climate scientists, physicists, et al) for a book I was writing a few years ago. I thought they were an eminently sensible and very admirable bunch. Certainly not the sort of people who would falsify evidence to protect their careers. The trouble was, that being scientists (as opposed to spin meisters for big business) they tended not to speak in certainties. Rather they talked of possibilities, balance of probabilities, etc. This left them open to attack from the spin meisters, who would say: Prove it! (The same thing happened with tobacco companies). These scientists generally seemed convinced that the climate was heating up in ways that concerned them. I remember one of them casually commenting something along the lines of: "Sure, the climate has always changed, but not at the rate it's been changing for the past fifty years."

Huh? Sorry - bit too subtle for me. Need to unpack that a bit more. Falsifiable? I don't get it. Isn't just about everything falsifiable? The report on the dangerous building and the reports on the dangerous climate change - they can all be falsified if you're clever enough. Must be bed time for me - not sure what you're saying.

Why do you listen to the expert who tells you the building is about to collapse and not to the thousands of experts - the leaders in their profession - who tell us that our years of pumping crap into the atmosphere is having an effect on the climate that could harm us all in the long run? I'll tell you why: in the case of the first expert, the solution requires very little effort. All you have to do is go outside. With the second set of experts, heeding their warning comes at a cost. We have to change our way of living. It requires effort. It also threatens the short-term profits of the people who own the system, who are consequently happy to put out all sorts of disinformation.

What do you mean by "naturally occurring"? Sure, we've always had bush fires, but never of that severity. I don't just mean because of the death rate - obviously that was affected by population growth and settlement patterns. I mean because of its speed, severity, spotting rates. Might just be a coincidence, sure. Might not be. If an expert tells me the building me and my family are sitting in might be about to collapse, I don't say, "Well, it might not." I get out.

Where's the lack of logic? I didn't say that there was definite, irrefutable evidence that that particular event was caused by global warming. I said it was my belief; that belief is based upon many years of a) being a firefighter, and b) researching and writing about fire and its role in the Australian environment. Climate scientists predict that the number of "blow-up days" will increase dramatically, depending upon where you are (further inland worse - e.g. Canberra predicted to double by 2050). The climate is definitely warming, and we are breaking all sorts of records. Black Saturday, for example, a result of the worst drought in recorded history. The fire itself broke records: for example, spotting at a distance of 35 kilometres. Another example: I was at a shocking fire in Lancefield a year or two ago - the experts told us it wouldn't be bad, because it was early October. When we got there it was terrible. Sydney fires a few years ago: same thing. Abbott assured us that it was "all part of our natural cycle". Er - not in early October, it's not. These things are happening now, but because of the boiling-frog effect, we don't notice. As Bolt etc say, you can't "prove" that any particular event was due to global warming. Could just be a coincidence. Hell of a coincidence: worst fire coming at the end of the worst drought at the end of the hottest decade for thousands of years.

Seen any bush fires lately? 2009. Worst in recorded history. Scared the crap out of me. Killed heaps of people I knew. Global warming? I suppose the creepy Andrew Blot would just smirk and say: "Prove it."

Great post, Chris - my daughter's was the school that they raised money for - (or one of them - can't remember if they helped others, but they were great for us) - it was very moving, and a great boost for the kids.

Cheers Will check it out (still recovering from weekend celebrations at present)

Thanks Wrecker - googled it myself - main source seems to be Andrew Blot (and The Oz, which I can't access because I don't want to give Murdoch my money) - so it seems that both Labor and Liberal governments gave money to this organisation as part of their foreign aid - if anybody can direct me towards a more objective account, I'd be grateful (as I said, I'm genuinely curious about this - have had a couple of people telling me about it recently (but I rarely believe a word that comes from the mouth of The Blot - there's usually a germ of truth in there which he distorts for his own devious ends) All this "Crooked Hillary" guff from Trump - amazing really - biggest con-job I've seen since the right in America labelled John Kerry a fraud because they reckoned he hadn't done enough to earn his Silver Star - meanwhile they were supporting a playboy draft-dodger who used daddy's money to buy his way out of Vietnam (actually didn't Trump have his own equivalent? - what was the story? He couldn't go to Vietnam because he was fighting his own personal battle against ...VD (!)? ) Always the same story: poor folk die fighting rich folks' wars.