Who are you to dismiss the method?

Now individual political beliefs aside, this is a new level of unprincipled politics even for...well...politicians.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26424610-2,00.html

Tony Abbott has said time and again on the record that he doesn't believe in man-made global warming, despite all the evidence from IPCC around reduced Antarctic ice sheets, rising sea levels and rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. He intends to sink the government's CPRS in this private belief - a scheme that developed bipartisanly under the Howard govt with questionable watering down made during now-laughable "good faith" bargaining from the Libs.

In fact it's been said they got everything they asked for - ammendments I think giving us even less reason to untar ourselves as the per-capita highest carbon emitter in the world. The later we act, the more expensive it becomes and surely the more reliant we become upon imported technology as a result. ABC Business Reporter Adam Kholer's comments last night - we pay more now for not acting upon Kyoto a decade ago.

Ok my point (which I promised was not to be political) - make no mistake that these anthropogenic climate change skeptics (and there are a fair few of them) dismiss nothing less than centuries of progress in my field of establishing a scientific method based on informed hypothesis, empirical evidence, rigorous testing and peer review. This method matured through onslaughts from the same sorts of people that once found their political home within an oppressive Church at a time whence it was more convenient to incarcerate or even execute scientists than face up to threats to personal belief systems or accumulated wealth.

So yes, same shit, different century. But does anyone not see the irony that even these people and their schoolboy trust funds get it, yet a great many people in Australia's second largest political party just can't?

If you want to read the IPCC summary for yourself, it is here. Vote with your conscience.

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf