The cuckoos in the green movement - the anti-pops

But the Sustainable People Lobby hate these NGOs. Why? Because they are helping people to live longer and hopefully, happier lives.

Australia has a population growth of 1.9 births per female. Australia's forecast population projections were recently revised upwards by 20 per cent to 35 million by 2050. A 20 per cent revision in itself is news but it passed through unscrutinised by the media.

The population debate has only found traction recently when couched in terms of the most catastrophic global warming projections. The more horrific the projections, the more dire the forecasts of overpopulation. This is anti-logic.

It’s a common fallacy that by associating two different phenomena, you make emphatic and definitive statements about their cause and effect when you bring both phenomena together.

Recently Sydney Mayor Clover Moore rallied a crowd outside the Sydney Opera House and equated the Opera House - a symbol of optimism - with rising sea levels. She said:

Already we know that this building, our Opera House, for decades a symbol of optimism and the human spirit, is under threat from global warming?

Really? It sits 7m above high tide.

Professor Nils-Axel Morner, a past president of the International Union for Quaternary Research Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution said there was “no rational basis” for such hysterical claims as Moore and some heads of state have recently made.

During the past 2,000 years, sea levels have fluctuated with five peaks reaching 0.6 metres to 1.2m above present sea levels. From 1790 to 1970 sea levels were almost 20cms higher than today. In the 1970s, the sea level fell by about 20cms to its present level.

Yet The Copenhagen Diagnosis report co-authored by 26 climate scientists, states that melting of summer Arctic sea ice, loss of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and projections of the rise in sea levels have accelerated dramatically since 2007.

It says the statistical global warming trend has continued over the past decade, contradicting assessments by some scientists - including Copenhagen Climate Council chairman Tim Flannery - that there has been a recent cooling. Now James Hansen, a top NASA scientist and the spiritual leader of the climate change scientists, says he hopes the Copenhagen summit fails as it’s deeply flawed.

Who does one believe?