A simple graph but its conclusive power should be reveberating around the Corporate board rooms of the Big Fossil fuel industry players.

(Not that they don't already know it. It's just that they prefer to confuse the pubic by funding crack pot AGW denialists and professional spin doctors. Very similar to what the tobacco corporations did and are still doing in relation to the bluring of the causal links between smoking their products and health diseases such as lung and throat cancer.)

Nobody disputes that humans put CO2 in the atmosphere. The dispute is about its effect on the climate.

Compared to the mass of a person it is a huge amount. Compared to the mass of of other atmospheric gases, water and vegetation on the planet, it is negligible.

The scale of change is also disputed, both as regards time and temperature.
The idea of 'optimum climate' - treated by AGW groupies as whatever the climate was the day when industrialisation started -  is also disputed. In other words, the notion of 'change' assumes a set of climate conditions against wich the 'change' is measured.
Temperature changes do not follow CO2 amounts. Any deviation from a correspondence between increased CO2 and increased temperatures - and let us note that there is ONLY deviation from this supposed causal correspondance - is treated by computer models calibrated to, er.. treat the lack of correspondence ('hide the decline' and the like). The causal correlation is assumed into the models on the basis that CO2 is a greenhouse gas causing global warming. But computer models come with a smallprint:

This report relates to climate change scenarios based on computer modelling. Models involve simplifications of the real processes that are not fully understood.

Accordingly, no responsibility will be accepted by CSIRO or the QLD government for the accuracy of forecasts or predictions inferred from this report or for any person's interpretations, deductions, conclusions or actions in reliance on this report.

See, for example, http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/environment/greenhouse/ccfinal.html or http://www.longpaddock.qld.gov.au/about/publications/pdf/climatechange/qldundere...


A carbon tax or trading scheme under these circumstances is the no-understanding solution. A unilateral tax by a small country is even more brainless.
That Gillard wants to introduce it to appease the single MP who did promise it before the election, Adam Brandt, to save her own political skin is despicable.

Gillard would not be prime minister now if she had said days before the elcetion: 'There will be a carbon tax under the government I lead.'


In summary, there is no clear scientific case for a carbon tax in AUstralia and there is ABSOLUTELY NO political case for it. Gillard will not survive it, whether she presses on or abandons it.