Michael Sage (Letters, May 11) asks where the climate researchers with open minds are. The simple answer is that they are to be found in CSIRO, the Hadley Centre, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, all over the world in their thousands.
They devote their working lives to understanding and improving climate science, studying the enormous and ever-increasing data involved. It overwhelmingly supports that global warming is a reality, and that it's entering a very dangerous stage indeed.
Sage cites Ian Plimer repeatedly; a little investigation will reveal comprehensive descriptions of the extraordinary number of serious errors, omissions, and misrepresentations in Plimer's work. Other writers in the same vein have similarly been exposed as deeply erroneous and at times apparently fraudulent. I strongly recommend putting Plimer's shameful book aside and doing some independent investigation into the big picture.
For instance, a little non-partisan exploration will reveal that mainstream climate science does not in fact regard CO2 as the only greenhouse gas. It will also show that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions have not actually been proved incorrect at all (current temperatures are well within the 95 per cent confidence band of prediction). Every other criticism raised by Plimer and others has been comprehensively answered, and these answers are easily available.
It's sad to see that many who question global warming do so with little apparent knowledge of what mainstream climate science is saying, and what the supporting evidence is, rather than simply accepting the highly distorted picture presented by a few.
Read some real climate scientists first: get Barry Pittock's recent book, or look at websites such as realclimate.org where climate scientists write about these issues.
Matt Andrews, Aranda
Michael Sage (Letters, May 11) asks how meteorologists can forecast global warming decades ahead when they can't reliably predict the weather in a few days time.
They can do this in the same way that they can reliably tell you it will be warmer in January then now, but not how hot it will be in a fortnight, or what the average annual rainfall in Canberra is likely to be 2010-20, but not whether December will be wet or dry.
Almost all series of natural and social phenomena involve being able reliably to discern fundamental long-term trends or probabilities, but not being able to predict random short-term fluctuations.
Sage's contention that climate scientists make global warming forecasts with no probabilities attached is puzzling because the IPCC conclusions on this are made with probabilities. For instance, it publishes a range for the likely increase in global temperatures with probabilities, not one figure. In fact the global consensus that has been reached on global warming, after decades of completely open scientific debate by thousands of scientists in many areas, is not that it is a certainty, but that it is a risk, even a small degree of which makes mitigation action worthwhile.
It is those whose apparent view is that anthropogenic global warming simply cannot be a problem requiring action, who seem to be attached to certainties rather than to probabilities and a rational insurance approach to risk-minimisation.
Paul Pollard, O'Connor
Research shame
The news that the Federal Government will axe next month Land and Water Australia, a rural and environmental research agency that receives $13million a year from the Government, has hit farmers and environmental scientists like the plague.
The impact of losing funding for crucial studies into sustainable agriculture and management of natural resources is incalculable. Yet the media seem to have mentioned it in passing while hurrying to report the latest ill-informed comments on the warmists versus the sceptics in the global warming talk-fest, or the effects on our hip pockets in the budget.
Stop a moment to think of the cost of losing momentum in Australia's environmental studies, an upturn in the drift of scientists to other countries, the fall-out in the already struggling farming industry, the increased cost of putting agricultural and pastoral commodities on our table, the cost of arresting degradation for which we didn't have the foresight to research appropriate remedial methodologies, just to list a few.
Regaining this momentum and lost ground, restocking our laboratories with scientists and repairing the damage down the line will put a huge load on the budget deficit: $13million will hardly get the wheels turning again.
David Mackenzie, Chapman
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