Thursday, January 05, 2006
ANNOUNCEMENT MADE
“The debate over human-caused global warming has been settled,” declares Professor John Quiggin, in his Takeshi Kaga-like role as Grand Imperial Debate Arbiter:
More significantly, perhaps, 2005 saw the final nail hammered into the arguments climate change contrarians have been pushing for years.
Hammering nails into arguments, eh? Just as well the debate is over; some of us seem to be getting a little tired.
UPDATE. Ian Plimer dares to continue debating:
For about 80 per cent of the time since its formation, Earth has been a warm, wet, greenhouse planet with no icecaps. When Earth had icecaps, the climate was far more variable, disease depopulated human settlements and extinction rates of other complex organisms were higher. Thriving of life and economic strength occurs during warm times. Could Greenpeace please explain why there was a pre-Industrial Revolution global warming from AD900 to 1300? Why was the sea level higher 6000 years ago than it is at present? Which part of the 120m sea-level rise over the past 15,000 years is human-induced? To attribute a multicomponent, variable natural process such as climate change to human-induced carbon emissions is pseudo-science.
Plimer is a professor of geology at the University of Adelaide and former head of the school of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne. Quiggin is an economist.