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Also one of the big reasons we've been getting so many of these stories lately is that the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, the biggest Earth and space science meeting in the world is coming up on Dec. 11-15 in New Orleans. There will be about 24,000 attendees. Scientists typically release a lot of studies in the period prior to the AGU's meeting so they can present their findings there. So things should settle down a bit after that is over but you can expect stories about 2017 being the 2nd warmest year in the record despite it being a La Nina year long about February so prepare yourself for that.

Strange that it's accelerating if that's the case. Stranger still that it was falling until about 150 years ago... if isostatic rebound is playing a role near the arctic, possibly it's because we're in a period of rapid deglaciation in that region?

They are comparing two different sets of instrumentation that should conceptually show the same quantity, but don't. Then calling the difference "acceleration". That's nuts.

Wrong. Check the link again. The acceleration is seen in the satellite data: The research also finds the rate of global mean sea level rise increased by 0.8 millimeters (.03 inches) per year during the second half of the satellite period.

And both the satellites and the tidal gauges show more sea level rise than can be accounted for by known ice melt plus ocean thermal expansion plus aquifer pumping minus impoundments.

Again, read the link:

the new study reconciles this gap and shows the satellite measurements are accounting for all potential factors influencing sea level rise.

Maybe they should have put a bit more thought into approving building permits.

In some states they've legislated ignorance of sea level rise in order to appease developers.

"The mean sea level trend is 2.39 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.43 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from 1931 to 1981 which is equivalent to a change of 0.78 feet in 100 years. "

The half a foot rise over that period can mean the difference between being just above sea level at high tide instead of just below. But the big problem is the acceleration that's taking place.

Since 1993 (the beginning of the satellite record) we've seen global mean sea level increasing by about 3 millimeters per year or about 1 foot in 100 years.

Over the second half of that period, global mean sea level rose by 3.8 mm/year or about 1 1/3 feet over a century. At this rate by 2050 we should expect about 6mm /year or 2 feet per century. And by 2100, 10 mm/year or over 3 feet per century.

Yes, there's a lot of popular news stories saying that the "little ice age" was due to the Maunder minimum. The only prolem is that the little ice age was already well established well before the Maunder minimum. (The Norse settlement of Greenland was abandoned around 1410, for example).

Current thinking on the little ice age is that it was precipitated by (well documented) volcanic eruptions. http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

And some commentary on the quality of Forbes' science reporting... http://blogs.agu.org/wildwilds...

See above re: huge, complex, and nonlinear.

http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/...

It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age".

Well, except nobody knowns whether the Maunder minimum even had anything to do with the little ice age, except for the coincidence of timing. The best understanding at the moment is that the little ice age was due to volcanic eruptions: http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

It sounds like there's somewhat of a correlation though, if the last time this was seen was before a "mini ice age". Do the electromagnetic bursts from the sunspots also have something to do with the regulation of earth's temperature?

People have been looking for a solar cycle-weather connection for years, but not really finding one.

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

... high sunspot activity generally means fewer clouds, which in turn means it gets hotter. When "solar storm" activity is low, more cosmic rays leak in, forming more clouds, cooling the weather.

When more cosmic rays leaked in, the climate didn't change. Richard Alley mentioned (at 42:00 in his 2009 AGU talk) that beryllium proxy data reveal a spike in cosmic ray intensity during the "Laschamp anomaly" ~40,000 years ago, but the corresponding oxygen isotope proxy for temperature didn't change unusually during that time period.

The volcanic activity could have been going on for hundreds or thousands of years for all we know.

Kind of like the Ozone hole ?

Oh what do you know
http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

so lets see
1. Low atmospheric circulation in the Antarctic winter
2. Volcano bubbling away
3. Scientists come along find Ozone Hole. .. ...
N. Ban CFCs and profit on new set of patents ?

In the news release, the researchers say the warm blob is only 300 feet deep, so no.

http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

Diverting 93% of the water to grow lettuce in the desert since 1920 had nothing to do with it.

Also, ignore the arctic ice that's been increasing for three years, the antarctic ice that's always grown and hit a new record in 2014, snow in Hawaii, and the great lakes that have frozen early,and that have frozen over compete the last two years. Ignore Niagara falls that has frozen over two years in a row and ignore all the record cold around the country. Ignore the fact we kill killed half the worlds trees in the last 100 years and where we do theres drought and ignore the fact the IPCC did not admit trees ate CO2 until 2010. Ignore the fact NAS falsified the CO2 hypothesis in 2010 and ignore the fact the climate models now have 95% error.Ignore the fact corals have genes that upregulate to ignore acidification and warming and ignore the fact pollution (I'm especially looking at you big oil) has gotten worse while we're distracted by this nonsense. Ignore the fact not a single IPCC prediction ever came true.

And especially ignore NAA/NOAA when they say "there has been no warming this century"

Creation science, social science, climate science... if you have to add "science" to a word to give it legitimacy, it's not science any more than the Democratic People's republic of North Korea is a democracy. Real sciences yield natural laws to quote Feynman.

Instead, look at 01% of a country that is 2% of the world.

Refs:
1) Ice
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/i...
http://news.ku.dk/all_news/201...
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/ear...
http://www.nasa.gov/content/go...

2) records:
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/vide...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
http://www.staradvertiser.com/...
https://www.facebook.com/video...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/febru...
http://www.latimes.com/local/l...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

3) Trees:
http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.agu.org/news/press/...

Many tests for hydrocarbons are cross sensitive, such as a sensor for Propane will detect gasoline, natural gas, butane, etc.

Very true. I've put together and worked gas detection machines for three decades now. Different sensor technologies have different cross sensitivities. It sounds as if your experience is with IR absorption sensors, probably on one wavelength (more wavelengths reduce cross-alkane sensitivity, but increase cost ; single wavelength sensors are fit for purpose for flammability/ explosion risk monitoring, but not for interpretive/ analytical work).

What sensor is used, what is the sample time, what else is it sensitive to, and were there any significant accidents or releases in the area recently?

FTFA ; sorry, the second FA

In the study published online today in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, researchers used observations made by the European Space Agencyâ(TM)s Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY)

FTFIWP (From The Fucking Instrument's Web Page, http://www.sciamachy.org/

is a passive remote sensing spectrometer observing backscattered, reflected, transmitted or emitted radiation from the atmosphere and Earth's surface, in the wavelength range between 240 and 2380 nm.

Well, that tells me enough - medium UV to medium IR, plenty of appropriate absorption bands there. If they say "methane" they mean "methane."

If it was from the soil, soil based sampling should have seen this concentration long ago in gas exploration.

Looking for actual figures ... the absolute values they're recording are around the 1740-1760ppbv level. Every contractor I've worked with (apart from our own in-house machines) claims to be able to detect at this level in drilling gas results ; none of the contractors I've investigated in depth have been able to prove these claims. When I ran our own machines in the field, I could get them down to this level of sensitivity, but it would take several hours a day of adjustment to keep them there - which is not something you can really spare the time for from your other duties. These days, I set up machines to just detect at this level, then leave it at that level. We're looking for aditions of methane (and other hydrocarbons) to our gas stream from drilling a well ; we're not interested in the atmosphere except as a source of noise to be accounted for.

Link to a proper article about it. http://news.agu.org/press-rele...

Are either of those articles "proper"? Everything they say about methane presents it in a way that shows the largest possible, most scare-mongering numbers.

They fail to mention that "3 times" the normal atmospheric concentration is still only 0.0000054.

Link to a proper article about it. http://news.agu.org/press-release/satellite-data-shows-u-s-methane-hot-spot-bigger-than-expected/

An article by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) briefly mentions climate change, but the article is mostly about how much ash that would fall on the continental US. The article also says, "... multiple inches of ash can damage buildings, block sewer and water lines, and disrupt livestock and crop production ...".

Those are my main concerns - Ash on the ground disrupting the production of food and clean water and getting them to people, and ash in the atmosphere causing climate change.

... Since this person is not making any scientific argument anyway, but simply attempting ad-hominem, and saying "so-and-so is wrong" without ANY evidence (which is all he can do, because he doesn't have any), this was a completely pointless exercise on his part. He was simply making another attempt at dragging my persona through the mud. I can only conclude that was his only purpose, since he didn't make any actual, substantive arguments. [Jane Q. Public, 2014-07-25]

A real skeptic would be checking my calculations but Jane can't even acknowledge them. If the Slayers are right, why is Venus hotter than Mercury?

Mercury's daytime surface temperature is 350C while Venus has a nighttime surface temperature of ~470C.

... despite the fact that Venus is 87% farther away from the Sun than Mercury, implying sunlight 3.5x weaker.

... and despite the fact that Mercury's albedo is ~0.1 and Venus's albedo is ~0.65.

... and despite the fact that a "night" on Venus lasts ~58 Earth days, during which the temperature barely changes from that at "high noon".

... Since all atmospheres must get colder with altitude as kinetic energy is transformed into potential energy in a planet’s gravitational field, the lower atmosphere must be warmer than upper atmosphere, even if there is no radiation involved. This follows from the perfect gas law, PV = nRT. ... [Dr. Latour, 2011-11-06]

Riiiight. That's why the stratosphere doesn't exist. I've explained that long-term equilibrium surface temperature is determined by conservation of energy, not the ideal gas law. (If scientists were wrong, basketball players would have to dribble with gloves because the pressurized ball would have to be very hot.)

Many Slayers blame equilibrium surface temperature on pressure, which I call the basketball player glove fantasy. None of the Slayers at WUWT would answer this question: would Venus have the same surface temperature if its atmosphere were pure nitrogen, which isn’t a greenhouse gas?

I've even seen a Slayer convince himself that all objects have the same albedo, which I call the gray Oreo fantasy.

Will Jane explain the fact that Venus is hotter than Mercury using basketball player gloves, gray Oreos, or truly original groundbreaking science?

...and then, you woke up.

Humanity is emitting about one Yellowstone Supervolcano per year, or two Pinatubos per day.

Even assuming that the CO2 is natural, the forcing would still be a problem. The idea that the natural CO2 cycle is little-studied is lunatic. Aside from laboratory experiments on CO2 absorption spectra measuring the "global scale CO2 cycle" is practically the entirety of climate science.

Some places on the earth naturally accumulate sand/soil from natural processes. In the Marshall Islands, it is a hurricane now and again. The sand/soil naturally subsides (sinks) into the surrounding lower-lying regions, or sometimes because of the pumping out of groundwater. Here's a description made for the southern shore of the U.S.:

http://www.agu.org/report/hurr...

When the next hurricane comes along, the graves of these soldiers will be covered again. Let this "foreign minister" flap about "global warming" all he wants: he's really just concerned about getting foreign aid for a populace trying to live on untenable land.

You mean like the overall long-term increase in Antarctic ice mass, despite breakups in the Western sheet?

False. Antarctic land ice mass is decreasing, and reliable estimates of Antarctic sea ice volume (or mass) aren't available.

Even if you meant to refer to Antarctic sea ice extent (not mass), you already ignored me when I told you that this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: " sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide."

But maybe you'll listen to the National Academy of Sciences, if you honestly don't think the National Academy of Sciences is "alarmist". Again, their recent report is educational. They address Antarctic sea ice in question 12.

The gradual, long-term non-warming that has occurred over the last 15-17 years, depending on who you ask?

Jane and Lonny Eacus have repeatedly ignored me whenever I've told you that there's been no statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. But if you honestly doesn't think the NAS is alarmist, you might learn something from their answers to questions 9 and 10. This point is particularly relevant: "More than 90% of the heat added to Earth is absorbed by the oceans and penetrates only slowly into deep water. A faster rate of heat penetration into the deeper ocean will slow the warming seen at the surface and in the atmosphere, but by itself will not change the long-term warming that will occur from a given amount of CO2."

I agree: science is a wonderful thing. You can appear to "prove" almost anything you want if you restrict your study to relatively isolated phenomena, and ignore the bigger picture.

No, that's not science the way it's practiced by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, the American Quaternary Association, the American Society of Agronomy, the

You mean like the overall long-term increase in Antarctic ice mass, despite breakups in the Western sheet?

False. Antarctic land ice mass is decreasing, and reliable estimates of Antarctic sea ice volume (or mass) aren't available.

Even if you meant to refer to Antarctic sea ice extent (not mass), you already ignored me when I told you that this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: " sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide."

But maybe you'll listen to the National Academy of Sciences, if you honestly don't think the National Academy of Sciences is "alarmist". Again, their recent report is educational. They address Antarctic sea ice in question 12.

The gradual, long-term non-warming that has occurred over the last 15-17 years, depending on who you ask?

Jane and Lonny Eacus have repeatedly ignored me whenever I've told you that there's been no statistically significant change in the surface warming rate. But if you honestly doesn't think the NAS is alarmist, you might learn something from their answers to questions 9 and 10. This point is particularly relevant: "More than 90% of the heat added to Earth is absorbed by the oceans and penetrates only slowly into deep water. A faster rate of heat penetration into the deeper ocean will slow the warming seen at the surface and in the atmosphere, but by itself will not change the long-term warming that will occur from a given amount of CO2."

I agree: science is a wonderful thing. You can appear to "prove" almost anything you want if you restrict your study to relatively isolated phenomena, and ignore the bigger picture.

No, that's not science the way it's practiced by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the American Statistical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, the American Quaternary Association, the American Society of Agronomy, the

Actually there is a mostly climate science conference going on right now in San Fransisco, CA. The 2013 American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting has more than 22,000 people in attendance and is generally the largest gathering of the climate science community yearly. I've been hearing some fascinating stories out of it.

Right now, we pump - oh sorry "inject"- our wastewater from fracking underground. That water contains heavy metals and radioactive components. (Nothing like just making the problem 'go away'.)

Now that these large potential sources are revealed, what's the implications for their purity with that waste being underground also? There is no way to be sure that the wastewater won't find a channel or crack that will let it flow into those reserves.

Good idea. Note that greenhouses often buy CO2 generators to increase plant growth.

And the increase in ambient CO2 levels is already making the Earth greener.

Okay, I'll bite.

TFA says "a change of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm yr–1 for the 20th century". Meanwhile NOAA http://ibis.grdl.noaa.gov/SAT/SeaLevelRise/documents/NOAA_NESDIS_Sea_Level_Rise_Budget_Report_2012.pdf says 1.1-1.3 mm for the years 2007-2012. So for a layman, it would appear that the rate of ocean rise is slowing. Furthermore, if we project the most recent 1.2mm/yr average, it works out to be less than 5 inches over the next 100 years. Maybe enough to make me move my beer, but nothing to panic over.

Finally, this paper http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012GL052885.shtml (which I only read the abstract) suggests a 60-Year Oscillation in Global Mean Sea Level. So, the choice of where in this cycle the measurements are taken, the results will vary drastically. And depending on the agenda of the funding source, the published conclusions can be drastically different.

It has been suggested by others as possible. Moreover, climate change is expected to increase unusual weather.

... Things have changed. "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW) advocates repeatedly and consistently stated that a trend of 10 years or more proved their point... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-05]

Presumably you're referring to "scientists." Also, I've repeatedly said:

Since climate is an average over ~20 years ... climate is only meaningful when discussing averages over ~20 years. ... I've repeatedly stressed that we need ~20 years to average out weather noise. ... professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages. ... It's also important to remember that a ~20 year timespan is necessary to obtain statistically significant temperature trends...

In fact, I've repeatedly told you that ~20 years are needed:

As I've explained, climate is the global average over ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-16]

This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2013-01-21]

I've even gone into more detail, showing you a paper that says at least 17 years are required:

... at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2012-12-05]

Of course, you ignored me just like you previously ignored riverat1:

And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise. [riverat1 to Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-19]

For global temperatures, Santer et al. 2011 shows that one needs to average over ~17 years of data to obtain statistically significant climate trends. Here's another explanation by Tamino. Also, the Skeptical Science trend calculator helps visualize statistical significance. [Dumb Scientist, 2012-08-15]

Perhaps your ode to conspiracy theories distracted you, but I also linked to another method of calculating significance which is even more conservative:

Also, Bart

... Things have changed. "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW) advocates repeatedly and consistently stated that a trend of 10 years or more proved their point... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-05]

Presumably you're referring to "scientists." Also, I've repeatedly said:

Since climate is an average over ~20 years ... climate is only meaningful when discussing averages over ~20 years. ... I've repeatedly stressed that we need ~20 years to average out weather noise. ... professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages. ... It's also important to remember that a ~20 year timespan is necessary to obtain statistically significant temperature trends...

In fact, I've repeatedly told you that ~20 years are needed:

As I've explained, climate is the global average over ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-16]

This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2013-01-21]

I've even gone into more detail, showing you a paper that says at least 17 years are required:

... at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2012-12-05]

Of course, you ignored me just like you previously ignored riverat1:

And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise. [riverat1 to Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-19]

For global temperatures, Santer et al. 2011 shows that one needs to average over ~17 years of data to obtain statistically significant climate trends. Here's another explanation by Tamino. Also, the Skeptical Science trend calculator helps visualize statistical significance. [Dumb Scientist, 2012-08-15]

Perhaps your ode to conspiracy theories distracted you, but I also linked to another method of calculating significance which is even more conservative:

Also, Bart

the linked stories don't mention how big a change in radiation was experienced. Are we talking 10%, or a factor of 10?

Yes they did, from TFA:

"Anomalous cosmic rays, which are cosmic rays trapped in the outer heliosphere, all but vanished, dropping to less than 1 percent of previous amounts."

and also

"galactic cosmic rays – cosmic radiation from outside of the solar system – spiked to levels not seen since Voyager's launch, with intensities as much as twice previous levels"

Which crappy website did you get this misinformation from? This has ben refuted many times e.g., http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volcanoes-co2-people-emissions-climate-110627.htm http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf

"Based on a range of models, it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense..."

According to a number of studies, total global cyclonic energy over the last few years has been among the lowest in 30 years.

And I would like to quote an excerpt from Mims' review (from the IPCC transcript), which I think is relevant and significant:

"ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INCLUDING MENTION OF THE NVAP-M PAPER AND ITS FIG. 4C IN AR5: Positive feedback of water vapor (enhanced evaporation due to warming induced by GHGs) is key to GCMs. This key fact is why the new NVAP-M paper should be discussed and cited in AR5. While the original NVAP work was criticized, this should be considered in light of published problems with all the major global water studies (see, for example, Trenberth, K. E.; Fusillo, J; Smith, L. Trends and variability in column-integrated water vapor. Climate Dynamics 2005, 24 (7-8), 741â"758). The 2012 NVAP-M study is a significant improvement and expansion over the original study. It is also the most comprehensive, multi- sourced atmospheric water vapor study to date, for NVAP-M uses data from quality-controlled upper air radiosonde soundings; SSM/I, HIRS, AIRS satellite soundings; and GPS stations. Note that HIRS retrieves the vertical profile of water vapor over land. A timeline of instruments used for the 2012 NVAP-M paper is at ftp://ftp.agu.org/apend/gl/2012GL052094. In conclusion, the initial 2012 NVAP-M paper well deserves discussion and citation in AR5. The citation is: Thomas H. Vonder Haar, Janice L. Bytheway and John M. Forsythe. Weather and climate analyses using improved global water vapor observations. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L15802, 6 PP., 2012. doi:10.1029/2012GL052094. Disclaimer: I do not know and have never met any of the NVAP team. I received one brief e-mail from a member of the team in response to a question about when the 2012 paper would be published."

This paper was published in early 2012, while some of the other papers cited in AR5 have not even been published yet. So any claim that they have not had time to evaluate it is not very credible.

Yes, the world is warming, on average, but what kills is not the average temperature rising by one or two degrees, its drought,
extreme events such as storms, ocean acidification, etc. The danger is that people think we're heading for a Mediterranean climate here in N Europe, etc. and that global warming might not be a bad thing for chilly Ireland, for example, when massive droughts and crop failures (across Europe and elsewhere) are starting to threaten global food supplies.

Any evidence that those are happening on a more frequently scale than usual? I hear the usual fears and I see the usual lack of evidence. Confirmation bias is an ever present threat under these circumstances.

Yes, but it is and will be probabilistic. See for example this on the Moscow heat waves, for example, and the discussions at RealClimate. Attribution studies are very expensive (in time and money, for computing ensembles), but are a key body of work over the last few years, and there is a section of the upcoming IPCC AR5 report summarizing it. The IPCC reports are
the best summary of the science, even though they are very conservative.

And the term, anthropogenic climate change mixes a number of human activities. Sure, AGW, desertification, and deforestation (to name three problems with likely global impact which would fall under the umbrella term above) have synergistic effects. But lumping them all under one category as you do here, doesn't help us figure out which activities are causing which problems or how to use our limited resources best to mitigate the effects of what we're doing.

Yes, and I didn't go into details. I didn't mention desertification or deforestation, for example, but you're right about synergistic effects. For example I've been working providing data to a group at NUI Maynooth" studying the effects on forests: the (measured and predicted) lengthing growing season leads to multiple generations of tree-predating insects surviving. Some species may have difficulty surviving this, so foresters need to know 30 years in advance what species to plant.

In particular, bad policy has been a remarkable driver of higher costs and fairly often confused for an AGW-related harm. For example just from the US, food prices have been driven up by ethanol subsidies for corn (which simultaneously drives up the price of corn, the price of gas, and reduces the availability of food) and the total cost of damage from cyclonic weather and flooding has been driven up by US government flood insurance policy (which still subsidizes to some degree construction in flood-prone areas).

Yes. The numbers I've seen say that the shortfall in wheat due to the Russian heatwave in 2010 equalled the crop production in Europe diverted to make ethanol under EU policy for 5% ethanol mix, for example.

Its ironic that the denialists

Yet another anti-scientific propaganda term. I find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the scientific basis of criticism of AGW while simultaneously using language that discourages scientific thought.The problem here is that there is a wide range of criticism of AGW from simply claiming it doesn't exist to disputing the claims of harm from global warming. I agree that some degree of anthropogenic global warming is occurring (though the basis for such a claim is much shakier than proponents are willing to admit), but I don't agree that the harm from AGW is as great as claimed.

Non-scientific, yes. The terms "sceptic", "denialist","AGW believer",etc are not pro- or anti-scientific, they're political.
And I will not shy from the politics. There are simply n

... a 15 year stretch without statistically significant warming at the 95% or better confidence level

I read somewhere that the calculated confidence level was around 93% so it's not like it wasn't even close.

I know that it is physics-based dogma that solar variation cannot possibly affect climate ...

Don't be silly. Any climatologist will tell you that's the first thing you have to take into account for the climate. We've had good measurements of insolation since the 1950's and very good satellite measurements since satellites started measuring it in the 1970's (or early 1980's). The simple fact is that the Sun's output hasn't varied enough to account for all of the temperature change. At best it can account for less than 10% of it. On top of that if the warming was caused by the Sun the whole atmosphere would be warming. But in fact the stratosphere has been cooling, a signature of greenhouse gas caused warming.

Climate scientists have calculated what would happen if the Sun went into a new Maunder minimum type cycle. At best it would delay the warming by a decade or so.

Sunspot records go back to before the beginning of the thermometric era and they are a good analog for solar activity. Global temperatures during that time track pretty well with solar activity until around the middle of the 20th century. Did you know that the temperature difference between the low of the Little Ice Age and the middle of the 20th century is only about 1 degree C? It doesn't take that much temperature change to make a significant difference.

Climate scientists are well aware of the various problems with the observations and account for them with error bars and confidence levels.

Under all of that it just keeps nagging me that you can't ignore the physics. The absorption of IR by CO2 is easily demonstrated in the lab. The signature of CO2 absorption is seen when comparing top of atmosphere spectra with near surface spectra. It seems illogical to think increasing CO2 won't increase Earthly temperatures.

I try to stick to the science and name calling is not my style although occasionally I get goaded into it.

If it gets 5 degrees warmer they sink ... what has that to do with evidence?

"If". That's what it has to do with evidence.

Plus, there's the matter of timing. You're claiming 40 years till those people have to move. If instead, it's two centuries, then that changes the strategy. It no longer is such a good idea to pile up a lot of cash flow for something that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Simple logic, melting ice on greenland, and perhaps a few ice bergs breaking of from antarctica is enough.

No evidence that stuff "will" happen like you claim to justify your concern. For example, Antartica currently is accumulating ice and Greenland is within historical range for melting and a later paper indicates earlier results overestimated melt rate by a huge amount (about a factor of two or three allegedly, can't really tell from the story).

In other words, the ice fields that matter aren't melting particularly fast for a threat that supposedly will be bothering us in 40 years. For example, that last paper above estimates 2 mm of sea level rise from the melting of Greenland's ice fields over a six year period (2003-2009). That's under 2 cm of rise, if it continues as is through 2050.

OTOH, you need something more like 2 meters of rise. I doubt you'll see that by 2100, much less 2050.

... Just in case you would like something other than just my word that it hasn't warmed significantly in the last 2 or 3 years. Now, call that what you will, but it isn't the rantings of some crazy person. However -- again for the sake of truth and fairness -- the graphs in that article are misleading. They are the doings of the media, not the scientist being quoted. [Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-22]

When you claimed that climate scientists predict temperature trends on timescales of 8 or 9 years, I pointed out that 8 or 9 years is too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. Now you've tightened your self-imposed blinders even further by talking about 2 or 3 year temperature trends. Note that any 2 or 3 (or 8 or 9) year timespan would be too short to obtain a statistically significant trend. It's not something special about the last 2,3,8, or 9 years, so contrarians can recycle this talking point ad nauseum. That's the entire point of the Escalator, in fact. (Incidentally, at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures.)

But let's read your article, Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague, by David Rose:

[Prof. Judith Curry] said that Prof Muller's claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a 'huge mistake', with no scientific basis. ... Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to 'hide the decline' in rates of global warming. In fact, Prof Curry said, the project's research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties - a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained. 'There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn't stopped,' she said. 'To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.' However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill. 'We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. There was, he added, 'no levelling off'. ... As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: 'This is 'hide the decline' stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. 'To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn't paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.'

Wow. These are very serious accusations. But are they valid?

The graph in Rose's article labelled "the inconvenient truth" is misleading, but mainly for the same reason that Jane's references to short term trends are misleading. Since that graph only shows 10 years of data, any conclusions drawn from it will be conclusions about the noise in the climate, not the long-term trend. But this isn't really the media's fault: Prof. Curry chose that absurdly short timespan herself by talking about the trend since 1998.

Also, the abrupt cooling shown in the BEST data in April and May of 2010 isn't real. Those months only include data from 47 stations in Antarctica, compared to March 2010 which has 14488 spread around the world. So April and

it is incredibly foolish to believe that humans are responsible for the melting of the polar icecaps. one volcano eruption puts off more CO2 than all of the emmissions that humans have put out since there were humans.

That statement is factually incorrect. Volcanos do not emit more CO2 than humans-- they emit less, by orders of magnitude.

http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2011/2011-22.shtml
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf
http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11638-climate-myths-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter.html

From http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/scienceshot-volcano-co2-emission.html :
"A popular myth among climate change skeptics is that volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide dwarf those generated by humans. But a new report in today's issue of Eos reveals precisely the opposite: In a mere 2 to 5 days, smokestacks, tailpipes, and other human sources of CO2 spew a year's worth of volcanic emissions of that greenhouse gas. According to the paper, five recent studies suggest that volcanoes worldwide (such as Alaska's Shishaldin, shown) emit, on average, between 130 million and 440 million metric tons of CO2 each year. But in 2010, anthropogenic emissions of the planet-warming gas were estimated to be a whopping 35 billion metric tons. Individual events—such as Mount Pinatubo, whose major eruption in 1991 lasted about 9 hours—can produce CO 2 at the same rate that humans do, but they do so only for short periods of time. It would take more than 700 Mount Pinatubo-sized eruptions over the course of a year to emit as much carbon dioxide as people do, the study notes."

Let me note that it is misinformed statements like this that tend to make real scientists dismiss global-warming deniers as crackpots. If you really want skepticism of anthropogenic global warming to be taken seriously, you need to have a basic understanding of the real world.

it is incredibly foolish to believe that humans are responsible for the melting of the polar icecaps. one volcano eruption puts off more CO2 than all of the emmissions that humans have put out since there were humans.

That statement is factually incorrect. Volcanos do not emit more CO2 than humans-- they emit less, by orders of magnitude.

http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2011/2011-22.shtml
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/archive/2007/07_02_15.html
http://www.agu.org/pubs/pdf/2011EO240001.pdf
http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11638-climate-myths-human-co2-emissions-are-too-tiny-to-matter.html

From http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/scienceshot-volcano-co2-emission.html :
"A popular myth among climate change skeptics is that volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide dwarf those generated by humans. But a new report in today's issue of Eos reveals precisely the opposite: In a mere 2 to 5 days, smokestacks, tailpipes, and other human sources of CO2 spew a year's worth of volcanic emissions of that greenhouse gas. According to the paper, five recent studies suggest that volcanoes worldwide (such as Alaska's Shishaldin, shown) emit, on average, between 130 million and 440 million metric tons of CO2 each year. But in 2010, anthropogenic emissions of the planet-warming gas were estimated to be a whopping 35 billion metric tons. Individual events—such as Mount Pinatubo, whose major eruption in 1991 lasted about 9 hours—can produce CO 2 at the same rate that humans do, but they do so only for short periods of time. It would take more than 700 Mount Pinatubo-sized eruptions over the course of a year to emit as much carbon dioxide as people do, the study notes."

Let me note that it is misinformed statements like this that tend to make real scientists dismiss global-warming deniers as crackpots. If you really want skepticism of anthropogenic global warming to be taken seriously, you need to have a basic understanding of the real world.

. CFCs are entirely artificial, with no known natural process capable of creating them in atmospheres.

Odds are good we'll find at least trace amounts of CFCs in the lunar crust. Any volcanism with high concentrations of chlorine, fluorine, and carbon can create CFCs.

It caused so much disruption because of sea level rise (caused by global warming), increased precipitation (increase by global warming)

I'm sorry, what? The 13 feet storm wave was so much more disruptive because of a few inches of sea level rise over the last 100 years? And, what increased precipitation? According to actual data there's been no increase in precipitation at all: http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2012/2012GL053369.shtml

You anti science people amaze me.

Read Trenberth's paper more carefully. The problem is nothing to do with the observations of the energy coming in, or leaving, the global climate system. There is a net influx of 0.9 +/- 0.5 W/m^2 - that's already clear from IPCC figures (see Table 4).

What he attempts to address is where the energy is being stored. To continue the analogy, we know we're eating too much relative to our expenditure, we just don't know which part of us is getting fatter because we don't have good enough scales. He suggests the "missing" excess heat is being stored deep in the oceans, and later studies (von Shuckmann 2009) appear to bear that out.

No climate models "successfully predicted 15 years of stagnation" because that's not what they're designed to do. In fact you probably couldn't write a model that would be successful at predicting a 15 year stagnation because of natural variability. The climate models I'm familiar with generally use 30 year averages for their projections and have since the 1980's. A paper from last year statistically analyzed the issue and found it requires at least 17 years of temperature records to separate the signal of warming from the noise of natural variability.

• Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica
• Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE
• Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements
• Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions
• Simulation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Nonannular atmospheric circulation change induced by stratospheric ozone depletion and its role in the recent increase of Antarctic sea ice extent

This little canard about Antartic ice being okay will continue well beyond being a pants-on-fire bald-face lie. We will have to wait until it is *so* obvious that Antartica is losing ice, that even Glenn Beck has to admit it. But then, the forbes (and the conservative think tanks) will just slip right on to another canard.

History repeats itself. We've seen this before.

• Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica
• Increasing rates of ice mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets revealed by GRACE
• Accelerated Antarctic ice loss from satellite gravity measurements
• Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions
• Simulation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Interpretation of Recent Southern Hemisphere Climate Change
• Nonannular atmospheric circulation change induced by stratospheric ozone depletion and its role in the recent increase of Antarctic sea ice extent

This little canard about Antartic ice being okay will continue well beyond being a pants-on-fire bald-face lie. We will have to wait until it is *so* obvious that Antartica is losing ice, that even Glenn Beck has to admit it. But then, the forbes (and the conservative think tanks) will just slip right on to another canard.

History repeats itself. We've seen this before.

Since you don't know the difference between north and south, water and land, surface are and volume, humidity and temperature, maximum and average, it is a complete waste of time to even discuss anything with you. Merely to note that you are yet another anonymous far right wing troll on the internet, who may or may not be being paid to preach genocide on the internet. Next to that truth, there's nothing anyone can say that is worse.

However, in the off chance anyone is reading this far, some useful actual science can be found at:

1. "Modelling the influence of snow accumulation and snow-ice formation on the seasonal cycle of the Antarctic sea-ice cover" http://www.springerlink.com/index/R23VXQQD8VPTJ5W0.pdf
2. "Snowfall-Driven Growth in East Antarctic Ice Sheet Mitigates Recent Sea-Level Rise" http://wuos.org/content/308/5730/1898.short
3. "Variability of Antarctic sea ice 1979–1998" http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2000JC000733.shtml
4. "Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling" http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n2/abs/ngeo102.html
   1. High impact peer reviewed journals, as opposed to squibs from the far right wing WSJ editorial page. As Samuel L. Jackson might say, "Science, m****rf*****r do you speak it?" (Go on troll mods, rate me down, it's something you'll be ashamed of one day, smothering the truth to protect the lies. But being nice doesn't stop people who do evil for money or kicks, only the shunning of society.)

Every location on Mars gets an eclipse by both Phobos and Deimos twice a year.

No, only at the equator :

There is a narrow band, centered on the equator of Mars, within which every point is eclipsed at least once during each semiannual eclipse season. Outside that band, the density of coverage decreases slowly with increasing distance from the equator, until the limiting latitudes are reached.

BTW, a surface transit (that is a more appropriate proper term, as neither moon ever fully eclipses the Sun) was also observed by the VIking Lande 1 in the 1970's.

And for the Earth solar eclipses, over an 18.6 year cycle, are equally likely in either terrestrial hemisphere.

Antarctic sea ice has increased somewhat. That is partly an effect of the ozone hole over Antarctica strengthening the circumpolar winds pushing existing ice around and opening more leads that subsequently freeze over (Turner 2009) and partly an effect of global warming causing increasing precipitation over the Southern Ocean freshening the surface and less mixing of the ocean layers (Zhang 2007). Antarctic sea ice is different than Arctic sea ice in that it melts nearly completely and then reforms every year rather than being more or less permanent.

From measurements of the GRACE satellites we know that land ice in the Antarctic is decreasing.

No, I think we would have expected the slight cooling trend to continue as it has for the last 8,000 years while we easily adjusted to the very slow change until it finally reaches a tipping point into the next ice age. From what I've read that's somewhere between 5,000 and 25,000 years from now. Plenty of time to prepare. But if "On the effect of a new grand minimum of solar activity on the future climate on Earth" (Feulner & Rahmstorf 2010) are right we've already prevented the next ice age. If global warming continues as expected (assuming human emissions continue as they have) then we're in for some pretty drastic and costly adjustments for our civilization.

That's odd. I seem to remember rather heated...oh discussions not all that long ago about this. And people keep saying that the sun has a negligible impact on the earths temperature? Especially in relation to Co2 levels. Especially with past relations to sunspot activity. And yet, this study came out the other day.

http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2012/2012-39.shtml