Cheer up Aeldric, we still have 21 years to enjoy a nice holiday on the Great Barrier Reef...
;-)

I, for one, enjoy hearing what the state of denial still is. (And reading your summary is far less depressing than buying a whole printed edition of the Oz...)

Don't give up,aeldric.I didn't have the patience to read all the comments on the Plimer piece but it is astonishing that denialists are in such numbers,seemingly.
Bad prognosis for Australia and the planet,but then,I knew that.
Keep up the good work.

Lance Endersbee is a member of the Australian Climate Science Coalition, which was created by the Australian Environment Foundation, a front group created by the conservative think-tank, the Institute for Public Affairs. All these groups receive generous funding from mining and fossil fuel companies. As sourcewatch put it,

More recently, the IPA has been the driving force behind the establishment of a number of new non-profit front groups, including the Australian Environment Foundation - which campaigns for weaker environmental laws - Independent Contractors of Australia - which campaigns for an end to workplace safety laws and a general deregulation of the labour market, and the ironically named Owner Drivers Australia, which campaigns against safety and work standard for truck drivers.

Interestingly, on the "about us" part of their site (linked above), the ACSC says,

"We do not believe that past and current climates are sufficiently well understood to enable projections of future climate changes to be accurately predicted."

Yet at their conference, the scoop article tells us,

"Several scientists identified hard evidence that severe cooling is the biggest climate challenge that we face"

Putting them together, we get,

"We can't make any predictions except ones I like."

Interesting. Well, the "about us" page also tells us about Endersbee,

Emeritus Professor Endersbee is a civil engineer of long experience in water resources development. His fields of specialisation include the management of planning and design of major economic development projects, water resources, energy engineering and transport engineering.

Like many climate change deniers - who for some unknown reason have among their scientifically-qualified ranks many engineers and geologists, but not many meterologists, biologists, etc - Endersbee has no particular expertise in the area he studies. He's entirely self-taught, and thus is no more or less qualified to speak on the matter than any other self-taught random drongo who can string a couple of sentences together coherently, like you or me.

Scoop's article is a press release from the Citizen's Electoral Council, an anti-semitic right-wing fringe party, so of course it's not very technical and doesn't give us any details. But searching for Endersbee online gives us this summary for example. He says things like,

The recent increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is an evident fact. The critical questions to be considered are whether the man-made emissions of CO2 are the actual cause of the increase in levels of CO2 in the atmosphere

Yes, they are. We know this from isotopic analysis; the carbon already in the atmosphere is different to the carbon in fossil fuels. This is explained in copious detail here.

The large cities are also hotter, but this is mainly caused by the vast areas of black pavements and the dark buildings that absorb the heat of the sun, and continue to release that heat at night.

Which would be relevant if temperature measurements were taken only in cities. They're not.

The past winter in the northern hemisphere has been the coldest for several decades.

This confuses weather with climate. This financial year our spending exceeded our income by $150,000. Does this mean we're doomed to bankruptcy next financial year? Well, no... we bought a house, and we're not buying a house again next year, so... Year-to-year things jump around a lot, what matters is the long-term trend. Any idiot can understand this; a climate change denier chooses not to.

I could go on like this, but that would be almost as tedious as this old Professor, who really should retire quietly and gracefully. Monash pretty much has to let him host little conferences, because they have to let old academics who worked there years ago have their way. It's part of academia to listen politely to distinguished old fools. But we don't have to pay him any mind.

If you really wish to present and consider "all viewpoints", aeldric, how some flat earthers or Stalinists or Raelians? If you were running a website about health, would you include stories from the tobacco industry that smoking is good for you? No. It's not unfair to exclude the truly loopy and wilfully ignorant, and lies from those who very obviously stand to profit by inaction.

If we are going to post excerpts from The Oz (who do have good business coverage, even if their editorial / political stuff is awful) then we need to post the links - otherwise they could justifiably become grumpy with us.

Personally I wouldn't increase the pagerank of some piece of climate skeptic lunacy by linking to it though - I'd just ignore it entirely.

I was kind of hoping that we could hang onto that stuff until it was worth something. Silly me.