Chris McGrath:

The biggest threats to the Great Barrier Reef are crown of thorns starfish and storms and cyclones, neither of which are directly attributable to CO2-induced global warming.

The proliferation of crown of thorns is due to nutrients from agricultural run-offs, specifically from cane farms, and that impact is being targeted now—probably not enough.

And storms and cyclones are no more frequent , and no stronger now than they have been many times in the past.

There’s more property damage now because there’s more property in their path.

And have you ever heard uber-alarmist and activist, James Hansen, recant this 1970 statement, despite his high profile and warmist agitation??

“….although the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does increase the surface temperature, the rate of temperature increase diminishes with increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”

Chris McGrath:

You would think if the problems could be solved as easily as you claim, the hundreds of millions in US taxpayers' money to Solyndra might have had more success.

Most of these 'solutions' to storage and the 'dilute' problem sound wonderful in theory , but not when scaled up---and they often consume too much energy in the production or storage of it.

And what about the whole new HVDC power grid that would have to be built to distribute the electricity from renewables on any large scale?

And then there's the extra vulnerability of an HVDC power grid.

Scientists advocating all of these massively expensive alternatives to fossil fuels, know that the science doesn't support the CAGW 'consensus' story.

And anyway, most of the alternatives are not really renewable, as they require very rare, very expensive, and sometimes very dangerous [ to the environment and to human beings] materials that are in no way renewable.

We should be using coal judiciously and as cleanly as we possibly can, while maintaining [ or restoring] our prosperity in order to be able to afford to do the necessary research into the impediments to solar etc.

And I suppose that, say, Solyndra for example, wants to take responsibility for its economic risks and losses, whereas, supposedly, nuclear energy does not?

Freeman Dyson is arguably the world's greatest living physicist and mathematician who worked on climate science along with nuclear physics,astronomy and a multitude of other areas. It is a great embarrassment to the climate"scientists" that he describes their climate models as garbage-in garbage-out. Oddly enough Freeman Dyson does not even have a PhD so he would not be recognized by most of the pretend "scientists" in the climate pseudo-science area who would not even understand most of his work.
From his homepage:
Freeman Dyson is now retired, having been for most of his life a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He was born in England and worked as a civilian scientist for the Royal Air Force in World War 2. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1945 with a BA degree in mathematics. He went on to Cornell University as a graduate student in 1947 and worked with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. His most useful contribution to science was the unification of the three versions of quantum electrodynamics invented by Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga. Cornell University made him a professor without bothering about his lack of Ph.D. He subsequently worked on nuclear reactors, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics and biology, looking for problems where elegant mathematics could be usefully applied. He has written a number of books about science for the general public. "Disturbing the universe" (1974) is a portrait-gallery of people he has known during his career as a scientist. "Weapons of Hope" (1984) is a study of ethical problems of war and peace. "Infinite in all directions" (1988) is a philosophical meditation based on Dyson's Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology given at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. "Origins of Life" (1986, second edition 1999) is a study of one of the major unsolved problems of science. "The sun, the Genome and the Internet" (1999) discusses the question of whether modern technology could be used to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather than widen it. Dyson is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 2000 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for progress in Religion.

Riddley Walker:
That’s a very substantive and devilishly incisive comment of yours.

How do you explain these facts, and why do you think Flannery and Steffen of the Climate Commission completely ignore them, to admonish us that ‘the science is settled’, when Blind Freddie can see it’s not.

Could it be that some facts are just inconvenient, and don’t fit with other agendas?
If so, don’t you think an explanation is required for discounting facts from some of the world’s foremost scientific institutions?

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/hansen_07/

James Hansen at GISS said that the US is not warming
‘Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought. The drought of 1999 covered a smaller area than the 1988 drought, when the Mississippi almost dried up. And 1988 was a temporary inconvenience as compared
with repeated droughts during the 1930s “Dust Bowl” that caused an exodus from the prairies, as chronicled in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath…..’

‘February 04, 1989 Last week, scientists from the United States Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that a study of temperature readings for the contiguous 48 states over the last century showed there had been no significant change in average temperature over that period.

Dr. (Phil) Jones said in a telephone interview today that his own results for the 48 states agreed with those findings.’

Since Hansen made his comments in 1999, the US has cooled.

Annual 1999-2011 Trend = - 0.69degrees Fahrenheit /decade [ NCDC Annual Temperature Contiguous United States ]

[ ‘The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the1930s and the warmest year was 1934. Global temperature, in contrast, had passed 1930s values by 1980 and the world has warmed at a remarkable rate over the last 25 years.’ ]

Global temperature—without the US, which has by far the most continuous and reliable temperature measurement regime of the ‘globe’??

The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himalaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts

Geophysical Research Letters) analyzed nine long and nearly continuous sea level records over one hundred years ( 1903-2003) and obtained a mean value of SLR as 1.74mm/yr, with higher values in the earlier part of the 20th century compared to the latter part.

A comprehensive paper by Prof (emeritus) Carl Wunsch and co-workers ( J of Climate December 2007) generate over 100 million data points using a 23-layer general circulation ocean model which include different types of data ( salinity, sea surface temperature, satellite altimetry, Argo float profiles etc) and obtain an estimate of SLR as 1.6mm/yr for the period 1993-2004.

A more recent paper by Wenzel & Schroter (Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans 2010) analyzes tide gauge records over a period 1900-2006 and obtains a mean value of 1.56mm/yr with NO statistically significant acceleration in sea level rise.

The latest paper by Houston & Dean (Journal of Coastal Research 2011) carefully analyzes 57 tide gauge records each with a record length of 80 years which include 25 gauges with data from 1930-2010. This study finds no acceleration in sea level rise, but instead a small average deceleration of -0.0014 and -0.0123 mm/yr2. These latest findings appear to contradict the general perception that sea level rise is escalating at present.

If global warming is real, sea level rise has to accelerate, indicating accelerating expansion of the oceans.

All of the CAGW markers are missing.