Both Greg Combet and Bob Brown have been stressing how far China is ahead of Australia with carbon pricing. Brown quoted $15 a tonne of carbon dioxide while Combet was more modest at $8.

The CSIRO forecasts 1 metre sea level rises over this century. This is a near doubling of the IPCC forecast extreme. A direct measurement suggests that the effect of increasing temperatures has been overestimated by a factor of 4.

The corrections made to the rainfall record tend to reduce the rainfall in the last half of the twentieth century. This is important since our projected future is for a hotter climate and less rain.

Analysts at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology have some explaining to do. In the last two years some 900 mm of rainfall have been removed from the rainfall record of the Murray-Darling Basin.

The details of the proposed mining tax as announced were simple. Filling in the detail by negotiation may result in a still inequitable tax and much less revenue to the government.

What is distressing about the renewables approach is that the expansion of the scheme from a few percent of demand to near 20% occurred without serious consideration of the consequences and with bi-partisan support.

Apparently, the final draft “State of the Climate” report was not reviewed by CSIRO or BOM scientists themselves, and when it is questioned others are blamed for the errors it contains and the confused dating of information.

Sometime after my essay was posted online a funny thing happened on the CSIRO website. There was a change to page 5 of their “State of the Climate” report. This has the appearance of a response.

The CSIRO paper “State of the Climate” is as much a commentary on the state of the climate scientists who put the document together. The CSIRO has waded into a large government funded trough and is not inclined to publish anything that gets between it and the trough.