"Eventually, we will bounce back and we will reclaim everything that they have taken from us,” Bilal Merhi told the crowd.Err, and what was it we took from them?
Ms Hanson, 60, is attempting to resurrect her political career by contesting the seat of Lockyer in rural southern Queensland.Hanson wants referendum on burqa
Local farmer and businessman Ian Rickuss has held the electorate for the Liberal National Party the since 2004.
He currently enjoys a 18.8 per cent margin.
LAST week delivered for the global warming debate, the most anticipated data point of the decade. The year 2014 was declared the hottest of the past century, by a margin of 0.04 degC. The news has been greeted with enthusiasm by those who attribute all warming to man-made influences, (notably in the Fairfax press in Australia), but few commentators have qualified their comment with the observation that NASA put an error margin of +-0.05 C on their result.‘Angry summer’ alarmists all choked up without reading fine print
The figure below shows global surface temperature as compiled by NASA for the past 134 years. Single data points (years) are unimportant. The 5-year moving average in red is a more useful indicator of temperature trends, and its slope shows clearly the steady rising trend from 1980 to 2000, and the temperature pause from 2000 to present. Anyone with a high-school science education can look at such a graph and form their own conclusions, but four of the most important are that
• The slope of the rise from 1980 to 2000 is about 0.19 degC per decade (the rate consistent with current warming models for “business as usual” CO2 emissions)
• A closely similar rate of rise in global temperature occurred from 1910 to 1940, pre-dating current high CO2 emissions
• Pauses in the rate of rise occurred from 1880 to 1910, from 1940 to 1970, and from 2000 to present.
• The model trend as computed by the IPCC continues upwards from 2000, but the pause is a clear break of observed earth behaviour away from the models.
The pauses are regarded by the majority of scientists (both within and outside the conventional anthropogenic global warming camps) as being attributable to natural cycles in global climate, although the two groups favour different causative mechanisms.
What is surprising is that, instead of reading the multiple patterns in such a graph, enormous global publicity has followed on that single point of 2014 — even though we won’t know for a decade whether it represents a break from the current “pause” trend. Thus John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute, greeted the 2014 result with the comment “This data shows not only a series of alarming years but decades of warming to make an undisputable trend”, which suggests a lack of awareness on his part of the steep warming trend which occurred from 1910-1940 without significant man-made assistance, and the pause from 2000 which occurred despite current CO2 emissions. Will Steffen of the Climate Council also finds cause for alarm in the 2014 data point, using the occasion to release a document titled “Off the charts: 2014 was the world’s hottest year on record” in which objective graphical analysis as we teach in high schools is replaced with poetic subheadings personifying the climate as “Angry Summer”, Abnormal Autumn” and “Scorching Spring”.
We can also look back to 2007 for a fascinating morsel of history; the figure shows at that year there is a clear hint of the start of the pause, although not statistically significant at that time. When Bob Carter, a former head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University, called attention to the discrepancy between the change temperature trend versus the modelling predictions, Andrew Ash (then acting director of the CSIRO Climate Adaption Flagship), stated “Professor Bob Carter claims that ‘no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998’. This is an unethical misrepresentation of the facts”. I suggest this is an incredible accusation to make against a scientist who has read (correctly, as history shows) a trend in a global temperature data set. When comparing Carter’s observation with pronouncements prompted by the single 2014 warm temperature point, we see a disturbing double standard in how scientific commentary is received. (In defence of the management of CSIRO I note that CSIRO has not issued a media release related to the 2014 temperature data point).
Some climate scientists will counter my views with claims that 21st century temperatures are cause for great concern because they are “the hottest ever”. Multiple lines of geological and historical data show they are not. Observations of past surface temperatures constructed from chemical composition of clam shells as far apart as Iceland and the south China Sea point to global temperatures of medieval times (800-1300AD) being warmer than those of today, and those of Roman times even warmer. The message is, the Earth can and does cool and warm on time scales of decades to millennia, and CO2 emissions are not the dominant driver. Our grandchildren will be best served if we devote our Direct Action strategies towards robust protection of communities from effects of drought, fire and floods. All have been a part of our history. And history guarantees all will be a part of our future.
Michael Asten is a professor of geophysics at Monash University, Melbourne.
Patrick
Treasurer Joe Hockey has raised the prospect of people living until 150 to explain why Australians should accept cuts to government benefits and pay a greater share of their health costs.He used to be hopeless, now it's just embarrassingly uncomfortable for everyone.
The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.
The past year may go down as one of shattered myths as the realities of global terrorism, the dangers of flying and random violence are brought home.Plane crashes, terrorism, random violence - new realities amid our relative security
Is this just normal now? That's perhaps the most disturbing thought I had as news of another terrorist attack, this time in Paris, broke. Somehow this has begun to look familiar, like an episode in a show we've seen before. The feeling is familiar too: when you awake to something catastrophic, unprecedented and unthinkable – or so you thought.
This feeling, more than anything, seems to have defined the past year; a year that, by apparent consensus, was positively, gallingly crappy. It's not just terrorism – to which I'll return, soon – it's everything. It's the feeling I had as watching the debris and dead bodies from that AirAisa flight being retrieved, it was like witnessing a ghoulish symbolic performance of a year in review. Little symbolises the unique squalor of 2014 like the bizarrely tragic year in aviation. Surely the worst ever.
Except that it wasn't. Not by a long shot. "By numbers – the safest year in modern aviation history," trumpeted the Aviation Safety Network. That might be hard to take as you contemplate the sorry fate of Malaysia Airlines and its passengers. But there it is: only eight planes crashed in 2014. That's three fewer than the previous best, a couple of years ago. And this in an age when there are more planes in the air than ever before. Really, it was a relative triumph. Do the statistics lie?
Well, yeah, a bit. But not shamelessly. Judged by numbers of deaths, rather than crashes, 2014 is the worst year since the late '90s. Even so 2014 was still better than almost every year before that going back to 1960. Plot them on a graph and last year doesn't disturb the general downward trend. Turns out it doesn't look as out of place as it felt.
That sort of thing happened quite bit last year. That's not to deny that it was objectively terrible in many ways, often in the ways we didn't feel so keenly. There is no silver lining I can find to 7000 Ebola deaths, for instance, even if this seemed to lack the emotional kick of Phillip Hughes'. But it's also true that the things that angered, depressed and panicked us were less than they appeared.
We began with Daniel Christie, whose brief 2014 was spent entirely in a coma until his family ended life support after a few days. One punch, a fractured skull, then death. The facts are so arresting precisely because they are so simple and so few. And so, in a flash came the media coverage, the political responses and the public awareness campaigns. The "king hit" became the "coward's punch", and whatever it was called it became the target of a new criminal offence. Sentencing became mandatory. Venues had lockouts and new, enforced closing times. We had been provoked by a new and growing scourge. Australia had a major drinking problem, and with it a marauding violence problem, and Christie was the face of it.
And yet. The statistical truth is that we're drinking less than we were around the time Kevin Rudd ousted John Howard, and massively less than we did in the '70s and '80s when, apparently, we were perpetually tanked. Violence on licensed premises is dropping, too, and so are alcohol-related assaults. We're even going to hospital less for alcohol-related reasons. And this with a growing population.
Of course, none of that helps the Christies. And – to be sure – none of it means there isn't a serious problem we've been ignoring for too long. But there is something to learn from the way a problem can suddenly become a panic.
So back to terrorism, that other definitive blight on last year, and given the tragic events in Paris, quite probably this one. The frightening emergence of ISIS abroad, then in a more symbolic form at home tell us this is no mere illusion. We witnessed the first domestic casualties of Islamist terrorism we've had. This all has a vaguely apocalyptic feel, and yet when more than 20 Australian soldiers were killed in Afghanistan in 2010-11 it hardly gave us pause. That just felt normal. So we performed the customary ceremonies and moved on to worrying about the carbon tax which, by contrast, seemed to scare the pants of us.
Here's the thing: in our streets, in our bank accounts and in the air, we in Australia lead about the safest, most secure lives of any people. Ever. Our real income is up and the road toll is down (the lowest since 1945, by the way). We live without any genuine prospect of political strife. We're not about to be invaded or bombed with nuclear weapons – our most feared enemies have knives and guns, not armies in tanks. We're not likely to be decimated by some disease or virus – Ebola or otherwise. Yes we have problems, but they're the kind most of our species could only have dreamed of having. And yet that's so easy to forget because there's this continuous, churning fear.
Our mortal selves aren't under threat, here. But the myths we've built about ourselves very much are. The myth that our addiction to alcohol is innocently, endearingly larrikin, for example. Or that the problems of the world – like Russia's incursion into Ukraine or the disaster of Iraq and Syria – have no call on us and simply don't raise their heads in Sydney or Paris. Indeed the myth – that incidentally underscores how cheerfully we'll slash foreign aid – that we can set ourselves apart as (largely uninterested) onlookers: that the world is a sideshow to which we'll occasionally buy a ticket, but not our society.
Maybe we don't realise it yet, but 2014 might just be the year those myths died. That, I think, is why it hurts and shocks so much. This is as painful a process for a society as losing people. It's not just that people perished and dangers emerged. It's that those deaths and dangers weren't meant to happen. Not to us. And I can't find any statistics that can remove that feeling.
When I woke up in New York on Wednesday morning and heard about the horror in Paris earlier that same day, the cold-blooded murder of the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine, I thought first of Wolinski, and then I thought of my friends Nisha and Saley.How can anyone make sense of the Charlie Hebdo killings?
Wolinski, of course, was one of those murdered in that massacre of elderly cartoonists, and several others, by two brutal terrorists. Well, to call them terrorists is, of all strange things under the sun, to pay them a compliment. For they were not, like most terrorists, assailants of strangers whom they could not fully register as human - these were cold-blooded killers of people whose faces they were forced to see as they killed them, men so far gone in evil that they were willing to murder a roomful of helpless and unarmed old men.
We should, I know, not dwell on the mere tabloid details of this horror, and its dramatic conclusion, but seek to place it in context or proportion or… something. I find that hard. We under-rate, or don't talk sufficiently, of the sheer deliberate cruelty, the sadism of terrorism - in what was what I hope the worst video any of us will see, we saw these same killers cold-bloodedly murdering a fallen policeman as he pleaded for his life, and making a casual joke as they did. These men enjoy killing helpless people. If there is a worse thing to be said about anyone, I would not know what it is.
...
But unemployed people don't typically - or indeed, ever - look 80-year old men in the eye and then blow their brains away. Excluded or invisible people always suffer from their sense of not quite belonging - as the Jewish immigrants of Wolinski's generation to France did, too. They write books, they protest, sometimes they even emigrate. They do not mock dying policemen and then complete their murder. To make the secular model, or anything except fanaticism itself, responsible for the horrors we have seen would be absurd, if it were not so obscene.
Fanaticism is the enemy, not faith. It always is. But only a fool would deny that faith has been the seedbed of fanaticism in mankind's long and sorry struggle for the light. That's why, when the non-religious commit acts of shocking cruelty and intolerance, as they often have and will again, it is normal for us to say that they have made a religion of their politics, or that they are in the grip of a blinding and inhumane dogma.
France has that "stark secularism" not to de-fang faith, but exactly to keep faith from turning towards fanaticism - and it does this by compelling the faithful to look each other in the face and recognise that they must live together or die. Secularism is not a way of disarming religion. The basic social contract of the Enlightenment is that tolerance is there above all to guarantee the free exercise of faith. No one can try to forcibly convert a Muslim (or a Jewish, or a Catholic) child in France, or to prevent their worship. This comes at the low cost of accepting the right of all faiths to persist, including the faith of those who think that we should never have faith in anything.
This is a very new thing in the history of the West. Five hundred years ago it would have been unimaginable for French Catholics to accept this co-existence with Islam. A mere hundred years ago, as we know, Jews were hounded and imprisoned, and worse was yet to come. Ours is the great era of tolerance, and we have no reason to apologize for it.
Sometimes tragedy provokes individual eloquence. Hassen Chalghoumi, the Muslim imam of Drancy, a Paris suburb, rushed to the scene of the killings and said: "I feel an immense sadness but above all anger. We can argue over liberty, but when we're in disagreement we respond to art with art, to wit with wit. We never respond to a drawing with blood. No! Never. These victims are martyrs, and I shall pray for them with all my heart." Courage, CS Lewis, that great Christian philosopher said, is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point. France is at a testing point this weekend - of truthfulness, decency, and solidarity - and also of what they call the ability to "desolidarise" - to put the people we know before the abstract categories we imagine. Come to think of it, making people, with all their flaws, fully visible while leaving ideal types alone, is exactly what the caricaturist has always done for us. It's their special form of bravery.
The roots of the battle for free speechHistorian Tom Holland was one of those who tweeted Charlie Hebdo's cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad in the wake of the deadly attack on the magazine's office. Here he explains the ramifications of defending free speech.Religions are not alone in having their martyrs. On 1 July, 1766, in Abbeville in northern France, a young nobleman named Lefebvre de la Barre was found guilty of blasphemy. The charges against him were numerous - that he had defecated on a crucifix, spat on religious images, and refused to remove his hat as a Church procession went past.
These crimes, together with the vandalising of a wooden cross on the main bridge of Abbeville, were sufficient to see him sentenced to death. Once La Barre's tongue had been cut out and his head chopped off, his mortal remains were burned by the public executioner, and dumped into the river Somme. Mingled among the ashes were those of a book that had been found in La Barre's study, and consigned to the flames alongside his corpse - the Philosophical Dictionary of the notorious philosopher, Voltaire.
Voltaire himself, informed of his reader's fate, was appalled. "Superstition," he declared from his refuge in Switzerland, "sets the whole world in flames."
Two-and-a-half centuries on, and it is the notion that someone might be put to death for criticising a religious dogma that is likely to strike a majority of people in the West as the blasphemy. The values of free speech and toleration for which Voltaire campaigned all his life have become enshrined as the very embodiment of what Europeans, as a rule, most prize about their own civilisation.
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To the gunmen who yesterday launched their murderous attack on the Charlie Hebdo office, it is the mockery of a prophet whom they feel should exist beyond even a hint of criticism. Between these two positions, when they are prosecuted with equal passion and conviction on both sides, there cannot possibly be any accommodation.
It was the Salman Rushdie affair that served as the first symptom of this. Since then, like a dull toothache given to periodic flare-ups, the problem has never gone away. I myself had first-hand experience of just how intractable it can be in 2012, with a film I made for Channel 4. Islam: The Untold Story explored the gathering consensus among historians that much of what Muslims have traditionally believed about the life of Muhammad is unlikely to be strict historical fact - and it provoked a firestorm of death threats.
Unlike Charlie Hebdo, I had not set out to give offence. I am no satirist, and I do not usually enjoy hurting people's feelings. Nevertheless, I too feel that some rights are worthy of being defended - and among them is the freedom of historians to question the origin myths of religions. That was why, when I heard the news from Paris yesterday, I chose to do something I would never otherwise have done, and tweet a Charlie Hebdo cartoon of Muhammad.
The BBC, by contrast, has decided not to reproduce the cartoon for this article. Many other media organisations - though not all - have done the same. I refuse to be bound by a de facto blasphemy taboo.
While under normal circumstances I am perfectly happy not to mock beliefs that other people hold dear, these are far from normal circumstances. As I tweeted yesterday, the right to draw Muhammad without being shot is quite as precious to many of us in the West as Islam presumably is to the Charlie Hebdo killers.
We too have our values - and if we are not willing to stand up for them, then they risk being lost to us. When it comes to defining l'infâme, I for one have no doubt whose side I am on.
The Belgian branch of Anonymous has posted a YouTube video about its new campaign called #OpCharlieHedbo.Anonymous to 'avenge' Charlie Hebdo victims
In the video, a person wearing Anonymous’ trademark Guy Fawkes mask and speaking French with an obscured voice, refers to Al-Qaeda and Islamic State specifically, saying the group had decided to ‘declare war on you, the terrorists’, The Mirror reports.
"We will track you down to the last one and will kill you,” the person in the video say.
"You allowed yourselves to kill innocent people, we will therefore avenge their deaths."
And when SBS filmed the then Mufti of Australia, Sheik Hilaly, praising suicide bombers as heroes in the Lakemba mosque just days before the September 11 attacks, it refused to air the footage for fear we might get the “wrong idea”.Are we really all Charlie? No, no and shamefully no
This will go on. Be sure of it. Your ruling classes will not easily admit to having made an error that cannot now be fixed. It will prefer oppression to freedom, if that brings at least the illusion of peace — and many may even think they are right.
Hear already the lies.
You are told Muslim groups condemn the killings as unIslamic. Yet the Koran and Hadith preach death to unbelievers who mock Islam, and tell of Mohammed killing poets, singing girls and others who made fun of him.
No greater authority than the Ayatollah Khomeini, the then spiritual ruler of Iran, ordered the killing of writer Salman Rushdie for making mock of Islam in his The Satanic Verses.
We are also told the pen is mightier than the sword, but tell that to the people in the Charlie Hebdo office who found their fistfuls of pens no match for two Kalashnikovs.
Tell that now to even the brave leaders of Jyllands-Posten, who, after years of jihadist plots against their staff have had enough, refusing now to republish cartoons from Charlie Hebdo for fear of yet more attacks.
“It shows that violence works,” it admitted.
Everywhere you will find other papers making the same call.
We are all Charlie?
Bull. Absolute self-serving rubbish. The sell-outs are everywhere and will grow stronger.
The West’s political leaders have already told Muslim leaders they agree that mocking Islam is a sin, and have even passed laws — in France, too — making it unlawful.
They have attacked the very few journalists and politicians who dared warn against the Islamist threat.
Some now back Muslim demands for a boycott of Israel or at least greater recognition for the terrorists who run large parts of Palestinian territory.
Anything for peace, even if it means submission.
And for all the protests this past week, submission is what you must expect.
When this piece was written, what wasn't yet known was that the terrorists in France were so quickly confirmed by name because one of the brothers left his ID in the stolen car.Journalism has become an industry that promulgates infinite pathologies. I can barely stand to keep up with the news anymore.
They were men who stood up for free speech in the face of barbaric threats from extremists. And in the end, their principled stance cost them their lives.Two masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the magazine's headquarters on Wednesday morning, opening fire on staff, and shooting them dead.Among the slain was Stephane Charbonnier, the defiant editor whose satirical newspaper dared to poke fun at everything from religion to feminism.Despite all the controversy, Mr Cabut was insistent that art should not be constrained. Perhaps his most famous quote was: ‘Sometimes laughter can hurt – but laughter, humour and mockery are our only weapons.’
In a statement yesterday, Mr Rushdie said: 'Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.'This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.‘"Respect for religion" has become a code phrase meaning "fear of religion." Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.'Last February, Iranian clergy revived Salman Rushdie's death fatwa, 25 years after it was issued over his 'blasphemous' Satanic Verses.He said Islamaphobic literature and films would not have been made if it weren't for the Satanic Verses.'Surely if the sentence of the Imam had been carried out, the later insults in the form of caricatures, articles and the making of movies would not have occurred,' he said in a statement last February.'I am adding another $500,000 to the reward for killing Salman Rushdie and anyone who carries out this sentence will receive the whole amount immediately.'
... Country Liberal MP Dan Tehan said on Monday that the Abbott government should begin the new year "by broadening the GST" to cover exempted items such as fresh food, health and education, saying the move would deliver up to $21.6 billion in extra revenue each year and enable further serious reductions in direct taxes.Think tank: Abbott government would raise 6 billion from GST on fresh food
... Jim Minifie, a Grattan Institute program director, said he did not think consumers would change their behaviour that much in response to the GST being applied to fresh food.
"People do respond to prices and if some food items were to increase in price by the amount of the GST then there would be a subtle shift towards items that are already taxed," Mr Minifie said.
"But that's probably going to lead to a less-distorting tax ... and it's very much a secondary issue because the response wouldn't be that big," he said.
A key plank of the Abbott government's employment strategy is on the cusp of failure, with just over 500 job seekers so far joining a scheme meant to benefit 32,000.Let's revisit the key Abbott goal here:
The $10,000 Restart incentive was unveiled in Treasurer Joe Hockey's May 2014 budget, the latest bid to tackle a policy area that has long vexed both sides of politics: how to encourage employers to hire mature-age Australians.
Moments after the budget was handed down, Employment Minister Eric Abetz said Restart "more than delivers on the government's 2013 election policy commitment to lift workforce participation and improve quality of life".
It was projected to help up to 32,000 people annually.
However, Senate documents show employers have hired only 510 job seekers through the scheme in the five months since its July introduction.
There are nearly 175,000 Australians over 50 looking for work through Job Services Australia.
The documents warn it is difficult to predict the take-up rate for the $10,000 incentive but it was "likely" demand would grow. If it does not, it's possible the program could fall 95 per cent short of the government's target.
Job seekers aged 50 or over who have been receiving income support for at least six months are eligible. Employers who hire them receive up to $10,000 depending on whether milestones are met. The government has budgeted $524.8 million to fund the project over four years.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Senator Abetz point to the scheme as an important component of the government's so-called Economic Action Strategy.
"As our population ages it's more important than ever that we try to ensure older people are contributors economically as well as simply culturally and that's what will happen under an incoming Coalition government," Mr Abbott said during the 2013 election campaign.
Senator Abetz on Thursday said the government "expects that take-up will increase as employers become aware of the programme".
"As it stands, there are more than 600 mature-aged workers in jobs today that weren't as a result of this programme," he said, suggesting the total number has grown slightly since the 510 figure was reported in the Senate documents.
"The government is focused on building a stronger and more prosperous economy which will see more employment opportunities as employers gain confidence."
Luring more mature-age Australians into the workforce is a potential boon for the economy but finding the right policy settings to make it happen has vexed both sides of politics for many years.
Under questioning at Parliament House earlier this year, Department of Employment deputy secretary Martin Hehir said programs targeting mature-age workers had proven to be "quite intractable".
Just 230 employers took advantage of a $1000 annual subsidy under the two-year life of the Gillard/Rudd government's Jobs Bonus scheme. That program was also meant to benefit up to 10,000 employers.
"So in one sense we know what has not worked in the past, and it has been quite an intractable area," Mr Hehir said.
"So while the days are very early and the numbers are probably still low to begin with, you would probably have to say that it [Restart] is making faster progress than the previous work in this area."
The Abbott government's Commission of Audit noted that the effectiveness of wage subsidies "is open to question" because they may displace other job seekers and jobs may be lost once incentives expire.
Meanwhile, another job-creation scheme has also struggled to gain traction. The Tasmanian Jobs Programme, which offers $3250 to employers in an effort to revive the state's sluggish labour market, has created 114 jobs in its first year. The government said it would employ 2000 Tasmanians over two years.
Opposition employment services spokeswoman Julie Collins said wage subsidies were "not enough" to support older Australians.
"We have Tony Abbott telling Australians they need to work longer – but in what jobs? People aren't taking up wage subsidies because the jobs aren't there," she said.
The government has pledged to re-evaluate Restart in mid-2016.
"As our population ages it's more important than ever that we try to ensure older people are contributors economically as well as simply culturally and that's what will happen under an incoming Coalition government," Mr Abbott said during the 2013 election campaign.Yes, if it's not the under 30s being slackers, it's the over 50s. The Abbott Government apparently thinks that 50 is the new retirement age, and those middle aged people need to be encouraged to 'contribute economically' (other than by being consumers). This is complete bunkum, of course. Most 50 year olds have no chance of retiring at that age, and if they find themselves unemployed, still raising children and paying rent or a mortgage, they are sick with the desperation of trying to find work.
— CIA (@CIA) December 29, 2014
CIA reveals the truth behind UFOs
(1) The Mediaeval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Minoan Warm Period were warmer than the current warming and occurred BEFORE the industrial revolution without high concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is natural variability at work.
(2) Vostok ice core data relating to deglaciations reveals that temperature increases occurred some 8 centuries or more BEFORE the corresponding increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Similarly, a recent study (by Zhiaou & Feng) of Antarctic ice core data covering the last 10,000 years ALSO showed that temperature increases occurred BEFORE the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide increased. The temporal relationship is presumably due to delayed outgassing from the oceans which contain some 50 times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere.
NOTE to the alarmists: causes do NOT occur after their effects.
(3) Other studies of temperature vs atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration on geological time scales show absolutely NO CORRELATION between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. There are extended periods in the past in which these two variables head in opposite directions viz. temperature going down while CO2 is going up and vice versa.
(4) Studies have shown that the Earth's atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has been as high as 30% (compared with the current 0.04%) and yet the 'runaway greenhouse effect' did NOT occur otherwise we would not be here to discuss it.
(5) the alarmists are fond of quoting Venus as the exemplar of the runaway greenhouse effect. The fact is that water vapour is the dominant greenhouse gas and when Venus had water the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure there were at least 3 times what they are currently. (See 'An Introduction to Astrophysics' by Carroll & Ostlie).
(6) None of the computer models of climate (so vaunted by the alarmists) have been validated by real world observations and they have consistently predicted/projected temperatures higher than subsequently observed.
(7) The alleged 'fingerprint' of greenhouse gas induced warming of our planet (according to the IPCC's models) was supposedly a 'hot spot', warming more rapidly, in the atmosphere 10km above the tropics. No such 'hot spot' was ever found by the satellite data.
(8) "The science is settled" claim is patently false - there are still so many uncertainties about the physics of clouds, aerosols, ocean circulation etc. that it is no wonder the IPCC computer models have no skill and have not been validated.
There is much more but a line must be drawn somewhere.