Richard Koser,
Why not present a table year by year of the balance of trade in tourism over the last 30 years?
I have not looked at the figures recently, but earlier on, Australians abroad spent far more than visitors to Australia. That makes tourism a loser. In any case, it is non-productive. It merely rearranges the locations at which people eat, sleep etc, thus requiring duplication of facilities for such, plus the use of a lot of Avgas.
There is particular irony in the wailing and wringing of hands over the possibility that one day Kakadu will be underwater and the Barrier Reef bleached by high sea temperatures. The irony arises because the people who make lengthy recreational journeys to see these places are precisely those who add to the greenhouse gas load, which, if you believe in the magnitude of that unquantified theory of global warming, should induce them to stay at home.
Re taxation of miners, nothing prevents you from becoming a miner, selecting your patch of land, exploring it and woth odds of 1,000:1 or so, finding a mine that pays. You would then be qualified to talk about mining taxes, but I guess your attitude might change. Keep your stealing hands off the skills and fruits of labour of those who are keeping this country afloat. If manufacturing is going rust-bucket, that's a problem for reform of the skill of the manufacturing sector. Ivory tower theories are rather useless when the pay cheques have to be written out of profits.

Unquantified theory of global warming?

Please justify this statement.

William Raper
There is no paper of which I am aware - and not for want of looking - that states that a given change of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will produce a stated quantitative change in global temperature. It is not even certain that this is a reverse causation problem in which temperature adjusts GHG. There is no Y =aX + b equivalent (or another more complex form of equation). There are guesses, but there are no demonstrations of proof. All carry caveats, large uncertainties and are poor at hindcasting.
None is suitable for the allocation of remedial funds on the scale being spent with wild abandon, lacking proof.
Hence "unquantified theory of global warming".
Please quote the seminal paper on which you rely, but take it for granted that I've read literature including a large selection from the leaked IPCC AR5 SOD. Please don't mention Arrhenius, that merely shows a low level of understanding by you or assumed of me.

so are you saying that because your believe an equation has not been formulated to precisely predict what level of warming would be expected from a percentage increase in GHG emissions that it isn't happening?

ok, you object to remedial funds being spent with wild abandon, lacking proof, how about we transfer those funds to building base load renewables and diversify and decentralise power generation, thereby reducing, (and with the intention of eliminating) fossil fuels as an energy source? Sounds acceptable to me. how about you? or would you have something to lose?

Any chance of a comment on this from a real scientist?

Already I am losing heavily through factors such as the cost of domestic electricity, because low-cost generation is demonised in favour of high cost windmills and other trivia.

And no, I am not saying that the globe is not warming. It's just stopped for 15 years (by the traditional ways of calculation) and that alone throws a big cog in the wheel of the equation, because GHG have risen substantially but temperature has not. I'm waiting for people with greater insight than mine to deduce the equation. I've been trying since the mid 1980s with no progress to report.

There seems to be a general disbelief on 'The Conversation' that global temperatures have flatlined for 15 years. People like Stefan Rahmstorf, who is not noted for neutrality, say that the temperature would have risen but some unexpected events kept it flat. He then adds in his factors (which increase his make-believe temperature, strangely, rather than some factors increasing and some subtracting). This has a name, 'bias.' I cannot comprehend how people with higher degrees get sucked in by this nonsense and argue with me whenever I note the flatline temperature. It has been accepted by the UK Met Office at Hadley, by historic notaries like James Hansen and Phil Jones, by the original satellite temperature researchers like Spenser & Christy at UHA and the RSS people. Even GISS, after doing a merry dance of fiddling everything capable of a fiddle and calling it 'responsible homogenisation', can't make the last 15 years correlate with temperature change to any significance.

Come on guys, drop the pseudo-science and accept the primary numbers from the primary measurers.

As for mining, there is great freedom in Australia for free enterprise. If you wanted to set up a chain of dry cleaning shops, using solvents made from oil that all Australians own, you are free to try your hand at wealth generation. But don't presume that all and sundry can share in the dry cleaning industry wealth because the solvents was originally the 'property of all Australians'. A property has no mineral value to anyone until it is discovered, processed, packaged and sold. The people who do this are the people who should keep the returns on their investments. So yes, go away and write about subjects within your sphere of knowledge unless you want to bend your back mining like I had to.

OK Felix, you put your achievements up on a page here, I'll do likewise and let others judge who is most scientific.
Ad homs are not part of good science, nor should they appear on a blog with this ostensible high class heritage.
Since when did 'environmentalism' gain the status of a science? Did you make that one up?

Geoffrey, if you can put aside your sanctimonius self-pity and hypocritical ad hom attack for a moment and just calmly read what I said I merely asked for a professional scientific response to your post. It is beyond my ken, but I'm sure there are well qualified people who could answer your concerns.

So before you start attacking, try thinking.

Felix, an elementary survey of the world shows that the most active conservation effort loosely corresponds with the wealth of the nation concerned. I have no emotion of self pity and I did NOT make an ad hom. No University I ever attended (there were 3) ever had a school of environmental science. These days it's a curious amalgamation of math, physics, chemistry, geology, etc, the core subjects that have been taught at universities for centuries. Just because you give it a fancy name, you do not give it any particular status.

FWIW, we corporately funded a lot of University and CSIRO work, perhaps before you were born, as well as providing open scholarships and visiting lectureships.

I'm pleased at your gratitude for our voluntary acts in years gone by. Thank you. But where do you think mining profits go? Why, they find their way into the general economy. There are no swimming pools full of coins for Scrooge McDuck to swim in. Your problem might be that you don't get a chance to take a handful as it passes by without the intervention of the dread hand of Government and other rent seekers. It ultimately resolves to the question of which party is best placed to spend the money wisely, the people who bent their backs to earn it - or the carpetbaggers.

Geoffrey, this is the most extraordinary piece of projection and prejudice-walking I've seen for some time.

You originally raised a technical point about the regularity of the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and recorded temperatures. I would be fairly confident this has been dealt with before, despite your rather dismissive comments about the researchers involved and their explanations. So I expressed a wish for a response from a qualified scientist as I was unable to answer adequarely. For this, I was accused of an ad hominem attack, was challenged to a rather childish little ego game and treated to a gratuitous attack on the idea of environmentalism and asked if I'd made it up.

My comment was anything but an ad hominem attack. Your response sailed pretty close. Either way, it was aggressive and offensive and in no way attempted to engage constructively in the discussion.

Then you add an assumption about my age (I'm 56 as it happens) and make some nasty little accusations about money and my not getting a chance to get my hands on some of it, ending with a repitition of your point that you bent your back earning it. Of course, the rest of us just swan around waiting to collect the coins that spill over the side of McDuck's swimming pool, unlike you, who are one of the tiny number of people who has ever done any work. If that isn't paranoia and self-pity I'd like to know what is.

Felix,
Can I suggest that the words you write have an element of surprise in them, surprise that someone like me could write actualities instead of theories.
Since my first contribution to "The Conversation", I have been reviled, abused, ridiculed, misquoted accidentally, misquoted deliberately, misquoted maliciously, been exposed to clairvoyants who tell me what I am thinking and generally carrying on like a bunch of supercilious prats who have seldom seen the real world.
If you think that I dwell on free riders and so on, simply keep in mind two phrases "Carbon tax" and "Mining Superprofits tax". I dislike Communism like this because history shows its abundant past failures. Look, if you want a more deep discussion of the above, feel free to email me at sherro1 at optusnet dot com dot au What you read here has been through a filter of brevity and lack of nuance.

Was it Doctor Johnson who observed that a politician is like an ape, in that, the higher he climbs the more you can see of his arse? Apparently it doesn't apply only to politicians.

I can't imagine why anyne would bother ridiculing you - you do such a good job yourself.