Garbage. You should stick to what you know Clive.

It is wonderful to feel you are not in the wilderness alone. What is terrifying is that climate change is "main stream credible" and those that have thought long and hard, and disagree are labelled idiots. No one in the 'main stream' is prepared to say they have it wrong on climate change and the emperor really has no clothes. Political folly to address vested interests.

I agree with Clive 100% But given fossil fuels won't last for ever I also agree with Bjorn Lomborg that we need to invest in researching and developing alternative sources of power that can achieve baseload. Here he discusses his views with a very committed global warmist, Tony Jones on Lateline: http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2011/s3153560.htm Better to spend 1% of GDP on Research and Development than to crash Australia's economy - which will do NOTHING to cool the world or help our children and grandchildren in the future. The fruit-bats are flying in circles down under.

Great work! We do not have to delve very far into Australian literature to realise a great deal of it explores the struggles our early settlers had with our extreme and highly unpredictable climate. It would be great if our younger, computer modelling scientists actually stopped trying to predict an uncertain climate future and learnt from the past and our iconic poets and novelists that our climate has always been in a state of flux. Truly, it has always done this and likely always will. I'm all for investigating cleaner energy and looking after our environment. I think nearly everyone is. I just think it should be for the right reasons and not for the illogical reasons we are being fed at the moment. Absolutely great to see some common sense in print! Thank you.

Excellent article by Clive using a much loved poem pointing out "what's new?". My observations of local people's summing up of the "man made global warming" debate is that it is way behind their concern of tne world's people birth rate explosion. Maybe all world governments would be much better occupied debating that and seeking an early solution to prevent a world of complete utter poverty and devastation.

Beautifully written Clive and a delight to read. Dorethea would be proud of your glorious prose. Well done that man.

You,ve put brilliantly what anyone with a grain of commonsense knows.

I had to search around for this, as even though this article came out in Saturday's Murdoch press, The Australian, I couldn't find it on their site. As a result, I am now on the RSS feed for this journal, so that's a huge plus. Clive James, you are eruditely and poetically voicing our concerns! Here we seem to have an ignorant press mostly asleep at the wheel, a press without any scientific qualifications to their name who simply reiterate an inner yuppie green mantra that's stultifyingly dull and boring. They hate any disagreement and discussion about their C02 theory, have you noticed and try to clamp down on any "dissenters". (I just had to listen to some of them on the Australian ABC's Insiders this morning and wait for the business section of it where it mentions the reality that productivity here is down; and then naturally, if you tend to be a logical person the inference is that if our power bills escalate our industries will be out of the game. From this, our dollar will drop, our industry will go offshore, our house prices will drop like stones and our almighty mining industry will prioritise cheaper projects elsewhere. We do also read out here in the real world, as opposed to the sophisticated (cough), rarified intellectual (cough) view of our press hounds that we are all dullards, and so are familiar not only with MacKellar's masterpiece, but have also read other drought and flood ridden authors such as Mary Durack's, "Kings in Grass Castles" - or have even grown up on the books of Mary Grant Bruce's "Billabong" series about a cattle family. or you can even consult Aboriginal myths and legends to find out abour our climate! Oh, and some of us have even read a bit of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, and happen to know Wordsworth enjoyed having conversations out loud with himself on the mores, to the consternation of his manservant. I have to say, there's a hard core element here of inner yuppies who will savagely maul you verbally if you haven't been to see the object of their faith, Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth". Never mind that these people are not scientists, and are clueless - they "believe". I wonder what they will be thinking as the climate continues to cool much to the apparent "private" consternation of the East Anglia mob, which was outed by the cypherpunks last year. That damn hockey stick graph! Apparently the word around their mob is that they are not going to make any more predictions as it's too risky, and they're simply going to chant C02 over and over to their graves. Well they might, as a group of them got together and convinced a naive gullible bunch in our Queensland government that we'd have droughts forever, or at least to 2050! I kid you not! Look up the old reports! As a result, the population here grew, no deep water dams were contemplated, the Wivanhoe Dam initially built for flood mitigation was made shallower by emergency plug tiers; essentially dropping out the volume of half of the Sydney Harbour. Result, rained all winter, and we old stalwarts were loudly muttering about a full dam and a La Nina here, as we had been through the '74 floods, so we knew we were for it! Did they take any notice? No, they were listening to the likes of the Flannery clones about drought to 2050. As a result this green bingeing has caused Brisbane billions of dollars worth of damage and what's worse, heartache; and despite a dam, it was only 1 metre less than the '74 floods! How did we know we were for it, well, like your experience earlier, you literally couldn't see a foot ahead of you, the rain was so thick - and it never stopped. The people who did predict this watch the sun's activities, just like that friend of Boris' who predicted the snow over there. I know whom I'm placing my money on for future predictions! Oh, and if you listen to the real scientists and look at the real graphs as opposed to the hockey stick ones, it's going to get cooler over the next 20 years apparently. Plus, the higher proportion of earth's time has been spent in ice age, and we've been dam lucky to thrive in an interglacial period. I suggest you speak to the likes of Bob Carter and Ian Plimer as well. But the graphs also reveal that an ice age is about due give or take 200 years, and when it starts it will be swift, a matter of a decade. Very interesting! Australia has a wealth of power generating natural resources and should have the cheapest power on the planet. But we are "Going backwards" with Julia ( know as Ju-liar) probably to do an Ireland for while! Talk about wasting a boom, this lot’s making us go broke faster than a speeding train. Sigh!

Clive James you are a brilliant writer, thank you for writing about a subject that is so close to the hearts of the average person who is normally given no option but to read the tripe of pseudo-intellectuals when they get up in the morning. I will hold my breath until it is published in the mainstream media, like a lot of your other articles are... mum i wish to be cremated, not buried.

Bravo, Clive! But you realise, of course, that questioning the work of the IPCC's brave, impartial science politicians is a sign of delusion, so the self-congratulatory narrative of the modern climate zombie goes. In these strange times, you will be a much richer writer if you suspend your ability to interrogate culture - and fashion.