Now we have to feel sorry for the alarmists!

This gets more ludicrous by the day! The Age, or as it's known "Pravda on the Yarra", is wailing about how tough the life of a climate scientist is. My heart bleeds - no, really, it does.

"Science is exciting when you make such findings," said Konrad Steffen, who heads the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) in Boulder, Colorado.

"But if you stop and look at the implications of what is coming down the road for humanity, it is rather scary. I have kids in college -- what do they have to look forward to in 50 years?"

And that's not the worst of it, said top researchers gathered here last week for a climate change conference which heard, among other bits of bad news, that global sea levels are set to rise at least twice as fast over the next century as previously thought, putting hundreds of millions of people at risk.

What haunts scientists most, many said, is the feeling that -- despite an overwhelming consensus on the science -- they are not able to convey to a wider public just how close Earth is to climate catastrophe.

The Age just isn't a serious newspaper anymore - it's like Green Left Weekly gone posh. I am seriously considering expunging all future references to it from the pages of ACM. I feel a poll coming on.

Read it here (for probably the last time).