Matt Andrews (Letters, May 13) must surely have been referring to Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, not Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth, when he wrote that a little investigation will reveal comprehensive descriptions of the extraordinary number of serious errors, omissions, and misrepresentations.
A British court ruled that Gore's work could not be shown in schools unless eleven inaccuracies were specifically drawn to the attention of children.
Andrews urged people to read some real climate scientists at websites such as realclimate.org, the blog started by Dr Michael Mann and his colleagues.
Mann was the lead author of the infamous Hockey Stick study that was the poster child of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report, but was subsequently discredited and unceremoniously dumped from the Fourth Assessment Report.
The Hockey Stick pretended to show that the modern warm period was unprecedented by rewriting history to remove the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age that followed.
In the very next letter, Paul Pollard wrote that meteorologists could predict the climate in a few decades' time in the same way as they could predict that January will be warmer than now.
We know that weather varies on fairly predictable daily and annual cycles, but we also know that it varies on irregular decadal cycles that we can't predict or explain.
We've seen in the last decade or so that whatever is responsible for these cycles is able to swamp any relatively minor anthropogenic influence on climate. Global warming might be a reality, but its certainly far from simple.
D. Zivkovic, Aranda
Michael Sage (Letters, May 15), the reason for the ''cooling'' in the middle of last century is readily available. It only went on for about seven years, and then there was a period of relative stability for two decades.
The cause was man-made aerosols. These particles reflect sunlight, thereby cooling the planet if they are in the atmosphere. There was surge in the production of these particles during and in the recovery from World War II.
The downside of these particles is that they cause acid rain, which is why they are no longer acceptable.
Aerosols have the largest responsibility in masking temperature rises during the middle of the last century. Fortunately, aerosols have a relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, remains in the atmosphere for centuries. That it has such a long stable lifetime, and the fact that the warming it causes is cumulative, are the reasons for targeting carbon dioxide so strongly, even though there are stronger greenhouse gases.
Venus is a rather Earth-like planet, but it has huge concentrations of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere and a surface temperature many hundreds of degrees above the Earth's.
Earth's current climate is very different from that when it was formed, and is the result of millennia of tiny organisms producing oxygen as a waste product. To think that organisms (humans) are incapable of causing planet-wide changes is thus folly.
You'd do better to not rely on the writings of a man whose arguments had been repeatedly debunked before he gathered them together in a book, which is sad as that is the exact behaviour he condemns in creationists.
Arved von Brasch, Aranda
Retirement trap
It is unfortunate when people make decisions that may not turn out to be the best; it is somewhat more than unfortunate when governments encourage people to make decisions and then change the rules when those people are committed.
This has happened to those encouraged by the Government to participate in Transition to Retirement Plans, commonly called TRAPs for reasons that now become obvious.
The plan generally entails people taking pensions early in small percentage amounts, and then sacrificing normal salary into superannuation, thereby easing into retirement and giving benefit to both self and government.
These people are not rich, though they are probably well-off, but they do not deserve to be treated as they have been by the Government, which has now, with the reduction in cap for salary sacrifice into superannuation, increased the effective tax rate on what will now become salary on top of other income which they cannot choose to give back into superannuation.
The result will, in many cases, be a choice of immensely higher tax, a move to part-time employment rather than full-time, or early retirement.
This does not seem to be what the Government had in mind, so one hopes that this consequence is unintended and may be reversed yet.
If it is not unintended, it is sheer barefaced deceit, since it appears that they can change the rules at any time they like, but everyone else is bound by their decisions.
Charles Ironside, Wanniassa
Email a friend