But Professor England says he has not detected much change in the political will to tackle climate change.

"Great politicians like Malcolm Turnbull [are] forever good on this topic. He understands the science well, he's been briefed well," he said.

"In the Government there's obviously a move towards putting in a carbon tax and putting in an incentive to business to go to low carbon technologies and so on.

"So the right moves are being made but I would agree that basically the response globally and also within Australia it's way too slow [compared to what] we should be having given the scale of the problem we're facing."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-03-15/climate-change-real-despite-big-wet/3890990

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Good old Malcolm... but he cannot get his dear leader to understand a word about climate change... or about anything for that matter... Tonicchio, grand leader of the ritewingnuttery, has but one aim in life : to become PM. Proper understanding of issues is alien to him. At least the Gillard government has made a move, though a small move, in the right direction in regard to climate change.

Meanwhile in Perth, Western Australia, there has been heatwaves upon heatwaves...

Imagine you're a weather forecaster who on the day before predicted shit-storms for Sydney on 16/03/2012... So far you'd have egg on your face... Sydney is too sunny as it can ever be. But the humidity is 75 per cent... The temperature is barely above 24 and it feels like 32, though the "feel index" is stuck at 24... The official feel index is completely cuckoo. The machine that calculates it did not drink red wine at lunchtime under umbrellas at Circular Quay.... Something is going weird, of course. The dew point is "too high"... and the trough that was supposed to bring massive clouds is sliding south under the influence of hot northerly HUMID winds... This is autumn, and yet butterflies and birds are now on their SECOND (or third?) breeding season for the year... Confused?. It appears they are... It feels like the summer we never had...

Several teams of scientists trying to measure how much methane is actually being released have reported seeing vast bubbles coming up through the water - although analysing how much this matters is complicated by the absence of similar measurements from previous decades.

Nevertheless, Prof Wadhams told MPs, the release could be expected to get stronger over time.

"With 'business-as-usual' greenhouse gas emissions, we might have warming of 9-10C in the Arctic.

"That will cement in place the ice-free nature of the Arctic Ocean - it will release methane from offshore, and a lot of the methane on land as well."

This would - in turn - exacerbate warming, across the Arctic and the rest of the world.

Abrupt methane releases from frozen regions may have played a major role in two events, 55 and 251 million years ago, that extinguished much of the life then on Earth.

Meteorologist Lord (Julian) Hunt, who chaired the meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change, clarified that an abrupt methane release from the current warming was not inevitable, describing that as "an issue for scientific debate".

But he also said that some in the scientific community had been reluctant to discuss the possibility.

"There is quite a lot of suppression and non-discussion of issues that are difficult, and one of those is in fact methane," he said, recalling a reluctance on the part of at least one senior scientists involved in the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment to discuss the impact that a methane release might have.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17400804

When one looks at the graph above, one should worry, worry big. This does not represent a conjecture but measured OBSERVATIONS. The general curve of the graph can be extrapolated to what it has meant on the past recent warming and what it will mean in the future warming of the planet... It is not a linear warming but an ACCELERATING warming. Although the "proposed" solution of creating artificial water vapour to slow the temperature increase in the pole's atmosphere could work for a while, it still is very iffy... Should the vapour become clear (50% chance), it will in fact accelerate the warming... 

Meanwhile the methane release (already in motion) is going to throw the apple cart upside down. Can we expect a J-curve effect here?... NOT IN HELL!... The ice extent is disappearing: the surface may vary and increase some years but due to the "thinning thickness", the tonnage of ice is going down down... Furthermore, our CO2 emissions are increasing FAST and we've reached the 800,000-year level of CO2 in the atmosphere and STILL climbing. The addition of the highly warming methane will compound the speed of the melt. 

9-10 degree C temperature increase in the artic was my prediction 6 years ago for the year 2100, this prediction was combined with an increase of 5-6 degree C in the temperate regions and a 3 degree C rise in the equatorial regions. One of the factor that interferes with a straight "measurable" obvious increase is the rapid change in the beahaviour of water vapour in the atmosphere. With pockets of high humidity due to evaporation of the sea (leading to some relative cooling) and pockets of dry air, the instability of weather patterns is increasing... Recent weather in Australia (2 years of floods), US (tornadoes, storms) and to some extend Malta (powerful storm in the Mediterranean) indicate a fast destabilisation of long term periodic climatic conditions. In 1974, Lake Eyre (salt lake) flooded for the first time in many many years (120 years?)... Since then the lake has been flooding at diminishing intervals to such extent that last year and this year, the lake has (is) flooded.

Climate change should be front page of newspaper and front article on news bulletins... There is no time to waste anymore. No time to fart around. WE HAVE TO CUT DOWN OUR EMISSIONS OF CO2. The North Pole is going to fart and when it does at full bore within the next two to five years, the shit will hit the weather channel.

THE three wise monkeys of Australian climate science, Professors Will Steffen, Matthew England and David Karoly, posted a self-justifying report on the Climate Commission website last week linking recent floods, heavy rain and low temperatures to global warming.

...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology atmospheric physicist Professor Richard Lindzen also views climate alarmism as "quasi-religious".

"Virtually by definition, nothing in science is 'incontrovertible' especially in such a primitive and complex field as climate," he told the UK House of Commons last month. "'Incontrovertibility' belongs to religion where it is referred to as dogma."

Lindzen's clear summary of the sceptic case is worth reading for anyone sitting on the fence. These are the agreed facts, shared by alarmists and sceptics: the climate is changing. It always has. Carbon dioxide is increasing. There is a greenhouse effect. The earth has been warming. Man's activities have contributed to the warming. But how these facts are interpreted is where the climate wars begin.

"The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes," Lindzen said.

"The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest."

Alarmists want science to act as the servant of politicians pushing for "carbon control". That is not its role.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/the-reality-of-a-wet-cold-summer-has-failed-to-dampen-activists-enthusiasm-for-alarmism/story-e6frezz0-1226302557028

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Well if this isn't grand codswallop from La Devine...

Lindzen summary is not clear... He masks his murky position with assumptions that are WRONG. Of course the climate change scientists have to be quasi-religious... Would they be dilettante about their findings, the whole world would suffer faster than necessary...

The scientist, F. Sherwood Rowland, involved in the discovery of CFCs demolishing the ozone layer has just died... If he had not pushed his work in a "quasi-religious" (rigourous scientific experiments demonstrating to the rest of the world the problem, with authority) manner, the ozone layer of the planet would be but history.

Where Lindzen confuses the prognosis — now that "everyone" agrees that climate change (global warming) is happening and that "humans are contributing to this warming", (but climate has always changed: the grand daddy of all flippant excuses used by the denialists) — by disputing the amount of the effects by "humans".

There is no two ways that the present increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is 99.9 per cent human induced. So the dispute is on the influence of this increase on the "climate change"... There the maths and the experiments of 120 years ago still apply: CO2 is a moderately warming gas the influence on water vapour behaviour is huge... That is where the warming comes from. Water vapour is more of a greenhouse gas than CO2.  The presence of CO2 in the atmosphere may have a tendency to increase the retention of water vapour in its two main competing forms (clear and clouds) in the atmosphere. As well the increase of METHANE from human activity and accelerated warming (see article above) is also increasing the warming.

Climate change has been studied for the last 120 years and some mistakes have been made, sure. But in the last thirty years, measurement and experiments have all but confirmed the sad inconvenient truth: WE ARE WARMING OUR PLANET FAST in terms of geological time-frame. Now the biggest mistake of all is to ignore our contribution to this process. It will bite us in the bum. 

Of course, La Devine has some inappropriate pictures of Tsunami in Japan accompanying her article, as if this had to do with climate change... It has not.

A wise monkey, La Devine isn't... just a silly un-researched ill-informed "commentariator" with too much column space given to her by Rupert... One day she will wake up... or may be not... 

And lets not forget that while the east coast of Australia was "cool" (temps were barely below average  — tallied mins and max) and wet (near record wet), the west experienced "heatwaves upon heatwaves"... Talk to your folks in Perth, silly woman...

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Oh and I forgot... Blainey? who sez according to La Devine:

While stressing that he is a great champion of science, he believes it is now "given the benefit of the doubt which is given to all the dominant religions in their heyday".

"I don't make this as an anti-science point, but I marvel at the way when something which everybody believed in and science said was true and was taught in school and was the truth, that when a new discovery is made we only hear of the new discovery; there's no apology for the fact the science was so wrong and so misleading to the previous generation. I think as a powerful discipline it is remarkably lacking humility and any discipline, any god, lacking in humility is ultimately heading for a fall."

Blainey is a polemicist, whose great claim to fame is to be borderline with brilliance because he's loved by the other polemciists who like to dispute evidence for oratorial purposes... especially disputing scientific evidence.

Science in the last 70 years has evolved to be more and more accurate, especially the earth sciences... Those sciences that deal with the mechanics of the planet, from the atmosphere to gravity.

I, of all people, am aware of science having been "wrong' in the past — a fact that scientists have acknowledged, contrary to religious nuts who believe the crap they believe with no clue. Thus one has to say that accuracy of observation, timelines and experiments have improved somewhat. Some theories like that of relativity are still going strong. Plate tectonics are all but mapped and one can next-expect a greater earthquake should there be a lull in tremor activities for just one day, though not necessarily.

As I have mentioned before, the atmosphere is super thin... From Sydney airport to the city (9-10kms) is but the same distance to the edge of our "working" atmosphere. At that altitude, the air is already thin and about minus 50 devrees C — air pressure (say density) is less than a quarter of what it is on the surface... Above this, there is far less water vapour and very different dynamics. By 100 kms (60 miles) the air is "nonexistent". If we can put a man on the moon, we can calculate the effect of human activity on the atmosphere with greater precision but this is where it becomes sticky. Some people don't want this precision to happen because the result is already known and uncomfortable... WE NEED TO REDUCE OUR EMISSIONS OF EXTRA CO2 TO ABOUT ZERO...

“It’s about how do we incorporate planning for a future that may look very different from the way the world looks today,” said Nancy Sutley, chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, who is spearheading the administration’s federal adaptation strategy.

Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who started measuring tides in Louisiana in the mid-1800s, have analyzed the numbers for Highway 1, and they do not bode well. At today’s rate of sea-level rise — 9.24 millimeters a year — the road would be under water roughly 22 days of the year by 2030.

Windell Curole didn’t need NOAA’s number-crunching to tell him what’s coming. The 60-year-old general manager of the South Lafourche Levee District said he couldn’t see open water from this road when he was growing up. Now, it is in plain sight, just yards away.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/as-climate-changes-louisiana-seeks-to-lift-a-highway/2012/03/12/gIQAJoEQLS_story.html?hpid=z4

Do you ever wonder how the environment - the global ecosystem - will cope with the continuing growth in the world population plus the rapid economic development of China, India and various other ''emerging economies''? I do. And it's not a comforting thought.

But now that reputable and highly orthodox outfit the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has attempted to think it through systematically. In its report Environmental Outlook to 2050, it projects existing socio-economic trends for 40 years, assuming no new policies to counter environmental problems.

It's not possible to know what the future holds, of course, and such modelling - economic or scientific - is a highly imperfect way of making predictions. Even so, some idea is better than no idea. It's possible the organisation's projections are unduly pessimistic, but it's just as likely they understate the problem because they don't adequately capture the way various problems could interact and compound.

Snow is moving south after blanketing much of Scotland, where there has been one of the most startling turnarounds in temperature in recent years.

The town of Aboyne in Aberdeenshire shivered in sub-zero conditions less than a week after setting a new Scottish record temperature in March at 23.6C (74.5F).

Roads were closed in many areas including the A939 Grantown-on-Spey to Dava, A941 Dufftown to Rhynie, B9007 Carrbridge to Ferness and minor roads around Inverness, Badenoch, Strathspey and Nairn. The snow gates were closed on the Cock Bridge to Tomintoul road and the A93 at Braemar, scene of the Royal Highland games in the summer, and Scottish police urged drivers to take extra care.

The heavy late fall of snow gave Scotland's ski resorts a brief boost after they struggled through a disappointing winter. Colin Matthews, the operations manager at CairnGorm Mountain resort near Aviemore, told the BBC he was delighted: "It's very wintry, I'm glad to say. Very cold at the top of the mountains – minus six and drifting snow.

"It's very unusual not to have skiing in April so this is looking good.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/03/sun-snow-snakes-skiing-salvation

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Okay okay... this is not looking good... This is only the precurser of worse things to come.... Imagine that plants and crops have already sprouted in the "warmth" and suddenly they freeze. Meanwhile in the land of oil barons:

Tornadoes tore through the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area in Texas on Tuesday, ripping apart buildings, tossing tractor trailer trucks into the air and grounding all planes in the region.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths although the storm was still active.

One tornado tore through the Flying J Truck Plaza in Dallas, grabbing two trailer trucks and tossing them, said truck driver Michael Glennon, who caught the destruction on his video camera as debris swirled through the air.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/planes-grounded-as-tornadoes-rip-through-dallas-20120404-1wbhm.html#ixzz1r1LKmoRU

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Year to year, things are not going to improve... Global warming is already here and kicking gently so far....