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They've been claiming for decades that if we don't do anything the sea will rise by 25m in two decades

You may want to check your sources. Likely you are being lied to, but not by scientists. More likely you've been reading denier blogs. Here is what the IPCC predicted 25 years ago: "For the 'Business-as-Usual' scenario at year 2030 global-mean sea level is 8-29cm higher than today with a best estimate of 18cm." - https://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreport...

Since 1990 we've already had about 8cm of sea level rise so we have already already within the projected range and we still have 15 years to go. The rate of rise is accelerating. Even at the current rate we will see about 13 cm rise by 2030. More if acceleration continues. Not far off from the predictions of 1990. - http://climate.nasa.gov/key_in...

You are off by a few orders of magnitude whereas the scientists have already been proven correct.

> As I said, "models without agw are completely useless for the past 50 years" How does this not show that it's due mostly to man?

Models without the average shoe size of red-headed clowns are completely useless for the past 50 years. How does that not show that it's mostly due to clown shoe size?

Incidentally, what size are you wearing?

Because when you put in an AGW term, the models do much better than if you leave out any AGW term. As is abundantly clear from the link I provided. http://www.ipcc.ch/publication.... If you can demonstrate that models with the average shoe size of red-headed clowns as a factor do better than those without, then I will absolutely accept it as a parameter. Kind of have to, mathematically, and by the definition of mathematical model. Or, if you can provide a model without AGW that does anywhere near as well as the models with. How is it you are so ignorant of what is, not only the basic tenet of mathematical modeling, so completely intuitively obvious, that factors which make the model fit significantly better are kept, those that don't are dropped? Are you expending a lot of mental energy to maintain this impenetrable denseness? Why?

If you have a model showing warming, you still have to show that it's due mostly to man, and you have to show that making a given change would slow, stop, or reverse it. That is all very difficult to do. But the current state of the science is that they can't even reliably predict the warming. That doesn't mean they are wrong. I have my method of study be flipping a coin and I could end up with the right conclusion. But the burden is on those who want to radically change energy consumption habits and/or cost structure, and that's where people, including me, aren't convinced. Trying to turn it around as if the burden is on "the deniers", as you say, is an old enough trick that I don't think anyone will fall for it.

As in, http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...? As I said, "models without agw are completely useless for the past 50 years" How does this not show that it's due mostly to man? Compared to the size of the miss without an AGW term, the overshoot in recent years is negligible. Of course, if anybody anywhere does have a model which does match climate history without including an AGW term, this is a great chance to post it and show how those IPCC folks are cherry picking, right? Anyone? Hello? If not, then any honest scientist is essentially required to include AGW in any climate hypothesis. Otherwise, you are indeed a denier. You don't have to show that making a given change would slow stop or reverse it. I have a model that suggests that if you swallow 200 mg of cyanide you will die. I strongly urge you to accept this model and not disregard it on the basis that it does not have a mechanism that would slow stop or reverse it. "If you have a model showing warming, you still have to show that it's due mostly to man"

Simple. That's about the time the warming stopped. I was comparing two periods where temperatures were actually rising, not the plateaus. The point was to show that the recent warming period was not unusual, even in the last 100 years. The planet has been warming since the little ice age.

As I've said elsewhere, there has been no statistically significant surface warming for the last 17 years. The RSS data show no warming for around 18 years.

And now I've been told (by an AGW supporter no less) that the Antarctic land ice has not been melting. Go figure.

He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.

"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.

Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.

The 2010 paper was evaluating the failed CMIP5 predictions

If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.

Temperature rise flat? Unless you are cherry-picking your intervals, in which case you aren't looking at the long-term trends, I don't see it: http://www.ipcc.ch/publication... http://www.epa.gov/climatechan... http://earthobservatory.nasa.g... http://www.skepticalscience.co... ...

It's flabbergasting from where you would draw such conclusions. The 2013 IPCC Summary for Policy Makers clearly concludes the climate temperatures have increased over the past 800,000 years and that recent decadal changes are directly related to anthropogenic carbon emissions (70%). The contradictions seem to only exist in your own mind. Literally every recent IPCC report (Including the 2014 SPM) clearly concludes anthropogenic activity is warming the planet in particular the upper 70 meters or so of the global oceans. http://ipcc.ch/

Talk to me agitation when you've read the IPCC report.

Agitation?

In any case, I have. It's available right here.

Do you deny that is says the climate sensitivity for CO2 is lower than they reported before? Do you deny that the projections for increased severe weather events is low labeled "low confidence"? Etc.

Read the damned thing yourself.

"Yes. Assuming it's a legitimate fossil, we're left with divine intervention (aliens), or time travel (the end of causality as we know it). Now, it just so happens that the falsification of evolution pretty much falsifies reality as we know it, which lets you know just how strong of a theory we're dealing with"

How would you know it was a legitimate fossil? You are just going to use that word to get out of any fossil I bring you. Give me a comprehensive definition of 'legitimate' both necessary and sufficient to rule out all reasonable null hypotheses. Seriously, go read Quine's work, "“Epistemology Naturalized” is a good placce to start, and you should probably read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" as your approach to science is hopelessly outdated.

"But while we're on hypotheticals, are you willing to entertain the following notion:

[snip]"

Richard Linzen's hypothesis is legitimate but unlikely, that is the reason he continues to get funding for his work. Why is it unlikely, well for a start he put forward ways to test his hypothesis in a paper. This paper showed evidence for the hypothesis you list. Unfortunately this work was deeply flawed and a follow up study which Prof Linzen acknowledges addresses the flaws in his paper found that the impact of clouds on climate sensitivity did not reflect a large global impact of the mechanism he proposes. The relevant citation from Trenberth is below.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

I strongly believe Linzen should continue to be funded. Even with the studies conducted so far there may be non-linear impacts from cloud cover which could have some regulatory impact on the climate. A clear understanding of the effect cloud cover will make climate models more robust, reduce the amount of disagreement between them. So yes, I give that hypothesis more credence than the explanations for a precambrian rabbit.

But just like you made the perfectly reasonable operating assumption that time travel is impossible (even though there is nothing in the laws of physics to rule it out), you should also make the perfectly reasonable assumption that the impact on the sensitivity of changes in cloud cover can be reasonably inferred from the recent temperature record and that it is not crazily non-linear, especially given the paleoclimate record (why did this non-linear effect of cloud cover not impact previous hot periods in this non-linear way?). Doing that places an upper bound on how much the sensitivity can be impacted by the effect of clouds. Especially when we have results like Dessler's:

http://geotest.tamu.edu/userfi...

It isn't comprehensive but it suggests that, at least for current levels of warming clouds may exhasperate global climate change (water vapour is a green house gas).

Much of this is covered in the IPCC 5th Assesment WG1 report, which I provide a link to below.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5...

You want section 7.

I know you wont reflect on your position though, or read any of the citations I've provided, because I've interacted with you in the past and I strongly suspect you are a paid shill for the fossil fuel industry. So this is for anyone else reading this, look at which of the two of us is supporting their position with references to the relevant literature (be it the philsophy literature when it comes to the nature of scientific investigation, or the climate science literature when it comes climate science). hsthompson69 does not cite sources for hypotheses and claims he makes, he is likely doing this deliberately because unless like me you happen to be familiar with the literature it makes it much hard to check what he is saying, makes it hard to look up standard refutations and makes it hard to consult the relevant literature. He wont address any of the points I've brought up but will instead switch to a new set of canards and gish gallop.

people who understand the the amount of captured energy is going up?
and where do you get the 1.1 mm from?

http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...

"From 1950 to 2009, measurements show an average annual rise in sea level of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm per year, with satellite data showing a rise of 3.3 ± 0.4 mm per year from 1993 to 2009,[6] a faster rate of increase than previously estimated"

" With all the money that has been spent on global "
what do you mean all the money? hardly any has been spent dealing with the issue.

The measured rate of rise has been averaged out at 1.1 millimeters per year, so who in their right mind with the credentials to back it up would predict 20cm by 2100?

You mean aside from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

Honestly, at 1.1 mm per year, in a hundred years that gives you 11 cm. A projection of 20 cm is entirely reasonable. But don't actual numbers stand in your way or anything, because, you know, Benghazi. Or whatever.

Thought I had done this. You can get there from the link I provided but it is not direct. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...

Given that 1/4 of all CO2 emissions have happened in the last decade with no corresponding acceleration of warming that would be predicted, and even a leveling off, I think models aren't correct.

The IPCC has predicted warming at a rate of 0.15C and 0.3C per decade ever since their first report in 1990, and that is exactly what we have observed:

"Since IPCC’s first report in 1990, assessed projections have suggested global average temperature increases between about 0.15C and 0.3C per decade for 1990 to 2005. This can now be compared with observed values of about 0.2C per decade, strengthening confidence in near-term projections." - http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...

So temperatures have risen, and continue to rise, exactly as much as we would have expected. Although the temperature wobbles about the mean, (and if you pick small enough intervals the natural oscillations can swamp the long term signal), the trend has not changed and remains above 0.2C/decade since 1970: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g...

Even though human-driven global CO2 has risen 'terrifyingly fast' to 400ppm -- empirically speaking I am not terrified -- because the temperature rise that should accompany such a SHOCK by any reasonable interpretation of CO2drivesT, and to any reasonable extent, has not arisen.

"Since IPCC’s first report in 1990, assessed projections have suggested global average temperature increases between about 0.15C and 0.3C per decade for 1990 to 2005. This can now be compared with observed values of about 0.2C per decade, strengthening confidence in near-term projections." - http://www.ipcc.ch/publication...

So temperatures have risen, and continue to rise, exactly as much as we would have expected. Although the temperature wobbles about the mean, the trend has not changed and remains above 0.2C/decade since 1970: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g...

Well, Gore is not a scientist and I don't pay that much attention to him. (How's that for changing the subject?)

So what do scientists who work on sea ice have to say? If you look at past IPCC predictions of the evolution of Arctic sea ice you would see that they constantly underestimated how fast it would be lost. IPCC AR 4 - Chapter 10.3.3 - "Changes in Ocean/Ice and High-Latitude Climate"

Having just read the summary for policy makers from the IPCC's fifth assesment report http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/... and their estimates for sea-level rise by 2081-2100 were at worst less than a meter including allowances for the antarctic ice sheet going kablewy. Now I'm now expert but I'm fairly certain 10 feet is a long way off a meter and I'm more ready to believe the actual published scientific data than the crap in the new york times has carefully regurgitated in order to sell more copies.

Yes, a small change in the partial pressure will have a measurable effect, and this effect is relatively easy to calculate, to within an order of magnitude. The values for CO2-related forcing haven't changed that much in the 100 or so years since we first started calculating it. There is some uncertainty, but no one is talking about .2 C or 20 C per doubling.

The stratosphere is a complicated topic but I recommend that you start with the IPCC report and move on to Science of Doom. Were you just going to do this game of picking a random topic and saying that the science isn't predictive, or are you actually interested in the subject? Because really, you don't know enough to ask the questions that don't have answers, so pretty much everything that you're deeply ignorant about is going to have an answer, at least until such point as you know enough to actually get into the scientific literature.

It's okay, we understand if these things are too scary and full of math for you. They have charts and everything! There's not even anyone there to hold your hand and tell you it's all Obama's fault. But you don't have to think, learn, or understand if it's too hard for you. We would of course prefer in that situation that you shut the fuck up.

What a load of frog shit!.

Seriously, don't pay any attention to the beautiful mathematics and painstaking research that created the dancing hurricanes on the screen and go straight to the quote at the end of that Ted talk, roughly translated into politics, it means you're a luddite using creationist debating tactics.

Do you not realise that these models work on the same finite element analysis techniques and "physical laws" (mathematical models) used to successfully model everything from atomic bombs, to the flow of molten metal in an engine block cast. These everyday and exotic engineering models are so successful that over the last 30yrs (just over half my lifetime) it has become virtually impossible to finance an engineering project without them. And if you do realise that, then why are you so quick to argue these methods cannot provide useful insights into the behaviour of Earth's climate but are presumably ok with passenger jets flying around that were designed by these techniques? Perhaps Boeing added one molecule too many to the missing jet's wing tip? Turbulence is the physical manifestation of chaos , so it's like totally unpredictable, right? - Please, give rational discussion a fucking break and shut the fuck up with this tiresome "scientists are know-nothing morons" nonsense.

In the philosophy of Science ALL models are "wrong" by definition, what matters is the degree of "wrongness" (or "truthiness" as it's known in the US). When we look at observations of water vapour over the past few decades they are a very good match for model outputs from 1980's models, they are a much better match for the average of ALL 1980's model outputs. Why? - because the models are just as likely to be "wrong" in either direction.

There are plenty of solid examples on google detailing phenomena that were first seen in climate models and later observed in nature, but I doubt you have heard about phenomena such as "polar amplification" or "stratospheric cooling", Why? - because google will tell you "anything you want to hear", right?

It would help if climate scientists were more forthcoming on what they know and don't know.

http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...

What's missing?

And if they do they call them deniers and work to deny publishing and funding.

Provide me with a single link to a scientific paper that says there's no anthropogenic global warming that has been denied publication.

The reason they are not published is because they don't exist. Not because they've been denied publication.

There is no scientific controversy on AGW. There is only denialism, specifically crafted by Frank Luntz in a memo for the Bush Whitehouse in 2002:
http://www.motherjones.com/fil...

The fact that you talk as you do means that his approach has worked on you.

If you really are serious about this question (doubtful from your tone), then yes, of course the effects of warming have been explored and explained. This diagram sums up the basics nicely.

There are positive effects (e.g. slight increase in cereal productivity at moderate temperature increases in some latitudes), but these are heavily outweighed by the negative effects in health, flooding, freshwater availability and ecosystem impact, to name a few. Beyond that, there's the obvious costs of just changing our infrastructure to adapt (moving coastal cities or building levees, migrating farms further north, moving populations out of floodplains etc). If you'd like more detail, there's plenty in the IPCC AR4 WGII Policymakers' Summary, and of course in the WGII report itself.

If you really are serious about this question (doubtful from your tone), then yes, of course the effects of warming have been explored and explained. This diagram sums up the basics nicely.

There are positive effects (e.g. slight increase in cereal productivity at moderate temperature increases in some latitudes), but these are heavily outweighed by the negative effects in health, flooding, freshwater availability and ecosystem impact, to name a few. Beyond that, there's the obvious costs of just changing our infrastructure to adapt (moving coastal cities or building levees, migrating farms further north, moving populations out of floodplains etc). If you'd like more detail, there's plenty in the IPCC AR4 WGII Policymakers' Summary, and of course in the WGII report itself.

http://www.epic.noaa.gov/epic/...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools...
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/
http://nomads.gfdl.noaa.gov/CM...

Some data: http://www2.cesm.ucar.edu/

Some background info:
http://www.ec.gc.ca/ccmac-cccm...
http://www.climateprediction.n...
http://www.climate.uvic.ca/
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/techni...

This one has videos: http://vimeo.com/user12523377/...

In this age of information, ignorance is a choice.

People here tend to forget that the UN is filled to the brim with corruption.

Nobody forgets that, it's just that the scientists involved don't actually work for the UN. I don't think they even get paid for their (volunteer) work on the IPCC report. There are some UN-paid staffers, but I only see about a dozen listed on the IPCC site. They're all part of the World Meteorological Organization. If you want to call the WMO a hotbed of corruption, you can try, but I'm pretty sure you don't have any reason to do so.

That their human rights body is chaired by countries with the worst human rights records -- and worse, that this is allowed to continue -- demonstrates why everything that comes out of the UN should be looked at with the greatest scepticism.

Well, a worldwide council with maybe five nations in it wouldn't be much use... Joking aside, you're about eight years out of date on that one. Regardless, I don't see how it follows that one bad organization in the UN implies the whole thing is worthless. The UN is a forum where the nations of the world get together to talk. It works about as well as the participants do. There are few (if any) nations that consistently value human rights over convenience, safety, and prejudice. There are a lot more with an interest in accurate weather and climate forecasting.

The "proof" is summarized in the IPCC WG I report. Refute it if you can.

The East Anglia/Climategate email hack and subsequent quote mining only matters to those already predisposed to disbelieve the scientists about anthropogenic global warming and amounts to practically nothing.

Following your advice, I looked at the overview from the first IPCC report, and in section 2 it lists one prediction as about a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature between the time of that report (1990) and 2025. It's not 2025 yet, but based on an observed warming of about 0.16 degree Celsius per decade, we should see a warming of about 0.8 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2025. It falls a bit short of one full degree, but the prediction was literally "about 1 degree Celsius," and 0.8 degrees Celsius is in fact about 1 degree Celsius.

Define about.

Is a 20% delta about 1 degree C?

Is a 1% delta about 1 degree C?

Is a 49% delta about 1 degree C?

Is a 51% delta about 1 degree C?

51 is about 100; so is 75, and 95 as they are all above the 50% mark, thus they are closer to 100 than 0.

It's a lot harder to make that case with bigger numbers (6 is about 10?) than it is with small number (0.6 is about 1).

  1 degree C is such a small number that you really have to put the prediction in terms of " 1 degree C +/- some delta", not use general statements like "about 1 degree C".

BTW, "about" is not measurable.

Maybe you could help us out by showing us where we can find predictions from past IPCC reports.

At the IPCC website of course.

Following your advice, I looked at the overview from the first IPCC report, and in section 2 it lists one prediction as about a 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature between the time of that report (1990) and 2025. It's not 2025 yet, but based on an observed warming of about 0.16 degree Celsius per decade, we should see a warming of about 0.8 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2025. It falls a bit short of one full degree, but the prediction was literally "about 1 degree Celsius," and 0.8 degrees Celsius is in fact about 1 degree Celsius.

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

I think it's actually the "at least show me that there's a cliff, and where it is so I can decide if I should stop or turn" theory.

OK. Here: Working Group I Report: The Physical Science Basis

NO it hasn't. Geez, 1 article form 2005, and it doesn't measure mass; which has been declining.
I will admit, that was one of the better attempts at cherry picking.
It's been loosing more mass then gaining:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessm...

really, what is your problem? The science is sound. I wonder, do you know the science? i mean, you seem to cherry pick the predictions of the science, but do you know even the basics of the science?

Care to elucidate what these falsehoods were? Are you saying the sequence I described (That is, some denialists mistook a certificate that Michael Mann had on display for a Nobel peace prize, claimed it was fake, only later to find it wasn't a Nobel Peace prize, but a real certificate he really received from the IPCC, thanking him for his contributions to winning the Nobel Peace Prize) did not actually occur?

[ No response]

I take it then that you accept this actually happened?

No, he was not. Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner. The above quote is from the IPCC official statement on the matter: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/nobel/N... [www.ipcc.ch] To freshen your memory - this is the exact statement still available in a post by Mann on his own Facebook page: Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Regardless of your ranting, the allegation that Dr Mann was/is being deceptive by his reference to winning the Nobel peace prize was tested in a court of law and found to be false. Opposing counsel admitted it was false and had no substance, leaving nobody of any significance arguing that it had substance. Oddly, on such matters I'm inclined to stick with legal judgements rather than the word of some random guy on the internet, particularly since I already pointed this out to you, and you studiously chose to ignore it.

Likely Mann is leaving that statement on his facebook page because it really annoys the denialists, it gets them frothing from their slack jaws and mouth breathing even harder than usual. Good for him. I'd do the same thing in his place.

He WAS awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

No, he was not.

Thus it is incorrect to refer to any IPCC official, or scientist who worked on IPCC reports, as a Nobel laureate or Nobel Prize winner.

The above quote is from the IPCC official statement on the matter: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/nobel/N...

To freshen your memory - this is the exact statement still available in a post by Mann on his own Facebook page:

Dr. Mann is a climate scientist whose research has focused on global warming. In 2007, along with Vice President Al Gore and his colleagues of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Presumably this was written by a legal counsel, not by Mann himself.

Irrelevant - that's what he or someone under his guidance submitted to a court - "a Nobel prize recipient". Whatever happened later to that submission does not change the wording that was used.

I fail to understand what benefit you see from posting falsehoods into a discussion. Are you often in denial to proven facts?

This is where the IPCC chairman and his bobbleheads need to be. Is there any way to fly them and leave them on the abandoned ship? I realize that Climate Change is a reality however these guys are not the experts we're looking for.

You're probably just trolling, but you're currently modded +3, so I'm going to reply.

Such as the US just had one of the 10 coldest years on record.

Minima and maxima are by definition outliers. While there is an entire body of statistical literature on outliers, they're not used to determine trends or draw conclusions, because they are essentially (bad) luck.

The UK getting record snowfall despite AGWers claiming the UK wouldn't see snow after 2008.

Sources please. Because no serious scientist would ever make such a definite statement. A mathematician might, but science, including climate science, is all about statistics and probabilities. In any field. Perhaps you mean this article in the Independent? The scientist quoted says that in 20 years time, snowfall will become a rare and exciting event. So I think that we can consider him proven wrong if it snows in southern England for say, five out of ten years from 2020 onwards?

Antarctica getting within .5 degrees of the coldest recorded temperature on earth.

Antarctica is a huge and largely unexplored continent. Finding a new minimum in a situation where very little information was available is hardly suprising, and certainly shouldn't be used to draw any conclusions.

Along with 2000 record low temperatures recorded over the last couple of months.

Among how many measurements? Record since when? And see above about outliers.

Add that to the IPCC report showing no warming for 17 years.

Indeed. They also investigated why, but you're conveniently leaving that out since it doesn't fit your agenda. I'll give you a hand as to the causes according to the IPCC: an exceptionally quiet sun (there's another of those outliers), several smaller volcanic eruptions increasing the amount of dust in the upper atmosphere, and an increase in dust in the lower atmosphere, probably due to industrial pollution. According to the IPCC, the discrepancy is partially explained by these three causes (which weren't put into the models when the prediction was made), and the remaining difference is small enough to fit within the natural variation (stochasticity) of the models, or be attributed to errors in the models.

Its become pretty obvious which side has been lying. Now they are grasping at straws to report ANYTHING that shows their side "might" be right.

Sorry, this is not the 18th century anymore. Science is a quantitative affair, and necessarily so, because our world isn't binary. The question is not whether there is human-induced climate change, the question is how strong an effect humans are having on the biosphere. Maybe it's small enough to be negligible (probably not, according to what we currently know), maybe it's huge and a danger, but it's a quantitative question.

I'm going to ignore the alarmists and look at the evidence myself. If AGW was real, they wouldn't have to lie as often and at least ONE of their predictions would have happened.

Excellent idea. Try reading the IPCC report instead of The Drudge Report and you might find some.

For some data in supporting change in the range of 4 inches, consider:

- Wikipedia's chart shows that the change in sea level for the past hundred years has been 6 inches. This chart comes from from the US EPA.

There is no evidence that the rate of sea level rise is increasing. Sea level rose rapidly after then end of the last ice age; since then it has been levelling off since. Even IPCC states recently published estimates of sea level rise over the last decades remain within the range of the TAR values (i.e., 1–2 mm yr–1). One to two mm per year equates to 4-8 inches per century.

Values above this range can be - and are - produced by models. Models can say anything, depending on the assumptions baked into them. In this case, the assumptions must be questioned carefully, since there is no evidence of an increase in sea level change.

"Climate change" is natural cycles, not caused by humans. NIPCC report is at http://nipccreport.com/

The report from the NIPCC ("Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change") is a piece of trash propaganda from the libertarian Heartland Institute. To confuse people, It was released just two weeks prior to the IPCC report ("International Panel on Climate Change", a board of U.N. climate experts). The real IPCC report is at http://www.ipcc.ch/.

What makes you think that isn't being done already? In the new IPCC AR5 Working Group I report there are two chapters that address this, "Chapter 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing" and "Chapter 10: Detection and Attribution of Climate Change: from Global to Regional". The attribution of climate change to it's various causes is an important part of the field already.

I said the rational premise,
as opposed to potty-mouthed 8 year old's tantrum premise that you have so eloquently stated in your rebuttal.

The free market would sort it out, if we could figure out how to change people so they value the future in the 50 to 100 year increments by which we are affecting it with the scale of our unregulated activity globally. Unfortunately, individual lifespan mitigates against giving a damn, it seems, for most people.
But if we can't change human nature to care enough to act responsibly on these things and let everyone sort it out in a market, then those who are aware and care need to take charge. There is no room for democracy on a ship headed toward the falls, especially when people are typically arguing about (or deciding in a free market) what color the party favor napkins in the ship's dining hall should be.

http://www.ipcc.ch/ for thousands of relevant-topic PhDs' views on the subject of greenhouse-gas induced global warming and measures needed to counter it.
They all had to go through thesis-defense and peer-review before being considered credible on the subject. What's your defense?

If you intend to engage in adult conversation, kindly cease your condescension.

Sorry about that, most of the links you have ever provided me with are full of tabloid ad-homs about "greedy scientists selling their soul", so I figured snaky catches your attention. ;)

Nothing below the above sarcastic apology is intended to be insulting / snarky / sarcastic / offensive / condescending. I have used "scare quotes" in places where I lack a more descriptive phrase.

Seriously Jane, why do you go to Senator James (coal state) Inhofe's propaganda site to read their interpretation of what "peer-reviewed and/or science-oriented journals" say about climate change? Why not go directly to where the cream of the climate science community hangs out ?

I know you pride yourself on being a skeptic and we've talked about self-skepticism before, so in all seriousness here's the challenge.

Take a random climate depot article about the AR5, take a random climate science article about the AR5. Pick out a few random contradictions between the two articles that can be resolved by checking the AR5. Let me know how you go, no need to respond here if you don't have the time right now, I will remember for next time we cross paths. In the spirit of non-snarkyness. I'm willing to spend an hour or so to do a similar self-assessment on my own claims if you can offer one that you think may help me see "the error of my ways".

Personally I think that if your not concerned about climate change and the current political response then you are simply not paying attention. So use the PRIMARY source Jane, it's more ardours than the myriad he-said-she-said sources but it will free your mind as it did mine in the mid 90's. When/if that happens you will understand why I (unintentionally) haunt your posts. There is no shame in ignorance or falling for corporate propaganda, however refusing to use basic research techniques such referring to primary sources to resolve apparent contradictions, is just another way of saying "wilfully ignorant".

Seriously, I was you in my early 20's, albeit with a different subject, when you try the exercise above your going to get pretty pissed at the people who have "brainwashed" you into doing their bidding. If you want a "mastermind propagandist" to focus you anger then Inhofe is the common thread that runs through the vast majority of links you have thrown at me. When you see one of their victims in the future you will want to shake them like I shake you every now and then (often without realising it's you before I hit submit). So here's a couple of obvious questions you might ask about me...

Why do I care if you or anyone else is "brainwashed" by corporate propaganda?
Why did I spend 30 minutes typing up this reply??

Simple succinct answer from "the greatest polymath of all time" - "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities" - Voltaire.

I'm not immune to that law of human behaviour and neither are you, I have no other motive to convince you AGW is a problem other than my 3 grandkids will have to live with our collective decisions. I may "take the piss" every now and then but if you can manage to take a step back from the verbal duelling thing we have going, you might be able to see that I am a

Dealing with your 'blockquote' style is way too hard. I suspect this is a rathole, and nobody else is reading it, and that you know what you said, so I'll omit the quotes.

So, your assertion is that changes in CO2 levels is NOT caused by human activity, or that the contribution by humans is negligible. Sadly, most authorities disagree with you. I have no way of measuring the effect, so I can't weigh in, other than to mention that I trust folks who do this for a living far more than I trust you. Here are a few links:

EPA
IPCC
NOAA
More IPCC
RealClimate

According to folks that study this, the sea level is rising. Here are some links:

Union of Concerned Scientists
National Geographic
EPA
NASA, scroll down.

The ice core mystery has been explained in such a way that the time differences are in the noise. Here is a link that attempts to explain it: arstechnica. However, one obvious reason why CO2 might follow temperature rises is that lots of CO2 is released in the arctic tundra when the permafrost melts. As solar cycles cause warming CO2 is released. However, it could easily be a situation where small changes in temperature cause CO2 spikes, which then contribute to a feedback loop. Since nobody was there, nobody really knows for sure. However, this article describes a paper in Nature 2012 that describes the feedback loop. Note the paper assumes that excess CO2 causes temperature rises. That is pretty much not contested at this point, I believe, due to a strong theoretical understanding of the interactions. Since there were no excess sources of CO2 in the Pleistocene, the temperature rise precedes the CO2 rise. Since we are artificially increasing CO2, we trigger the warming effect without a requirement for excess solar radiation.

I have read 'Good Calories, Bad Calories' by Taubes. The book is very convincing. The view of nutrition as a power game, with no real science behind it is quite interesting. Sadly for your case, there is LOTS of science to back up the assertions of Global Warming caused by human activity. Too many to simply dismiss.

If there is no problem with CO2 causing global warming, and we are going to be ok despite these emissions, well, that would be wonderful. Due to lobbying by Koch and friends, that is probably what we are going to end up with anyway. However, if there is only a 1% possibility that the worst will happen, and hundreds of millions of people will die because of it, I will still support doing whatever we can to prevent it. Can you really be so sure of your facts, many of which are supported by papers paid for by Koch subsidiaries who have a real financial interest in stopping any action on climate change?

Here's the IPCC section on ocean acidification from 2007: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch5s5-4-2-3.html. You can go back farther if you're willing to look. You're already wrong in that at least one thing that they predicted is coming true with a vengeance. Feel free to look up the other predictions and compare with today.

I find it rather amusing that on the one hand you're complaining that no one says anything about ocean acidification (when they are), and then are complaining that they are wrong about everything (when one thing they are complaining about is ocean acidification). On the upside, maybe you can start to do something about ocean acidification. I mean, beyond posting on Slashdot. Maybe support one of those poor persecuted scientists whose cry for help regarding ocean acidification is being suppressed?

The logical fallacy of that should be obviously: whether a particular solution is right or wrong has no logical bearing on whether the science-- that human-generated carbon dioxide contributes to temperature according to well-known models-- is correct.

I don't believe I have seen anyone argue that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas.

You haven't paid attention, then-- among the garbage-dumpsters of junk pouring out from the so-called skeptics, yes, that argument is there, in truckloads.

The arguments are over the "feedbacks" and the "forcing factors" in the models

Uh, why are you putting these words in quotes?

Also, according to this, the warming contribution of CO2 tails off asypmtotically.

The word you want is "logarithmic," not "asympototic." (a logarithm does not have a horizontal asymptote). This has been known since Arrhenius made the first calculation back in 1896, so I'm puzzled that you're suddenly amazed at it. It is why climate sensitivity is conventionally quoted in terms of doubling (that is, log base 2), instead of, say, response per ppm.

....Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up,

OK, I will momentarily suspend my skepticism and consider the hypothesis that you actually are interested in the evidence. I have a question, then: Have you actually read the IPCC working-group 1 report, The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change. I don't mean, a summary of it, or a critique by some website with an axe to grind, or somebody's paraphrasing it, or somebody else's explanation of why you shouldn't read it. Have you actually read the report?

http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_and_data_reports.shtml

If you haven't-- well, then I can reject the hypothesis that you are actually interested in the evidence, if you're not willing to look at the evidence.

Personally, I like how people keep on referring to it as a "leak" - this particular report might not have been published yet, but usually only because it still needs revisions. The IPCC's actual published reports are freely available, and this one will end up there as well once they're sure it's right.

I'm finding it hard to see what the change is here.

The old number was that the doubling sensitivity was most likely to be in the range 2 C-to-4.5 C. Specifically:
"we conclude that the global mean equilibrium warming for doubling CO2, or ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’, is likely to lie in the range 2C to 4.5C, with a most likely value of about 3C."
(reference: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-5.html#box-10-2 )

This report-- if the leaked version is accurate-- is that it's "'likely' to be above 1.5 degrees C, 'very likely' to be below 6 degrees C".
That's not a "reduction" or a "retreat"-- it is, at best, a slightly higher range. But since, as the summary says, "Since "extremely" and "very" have specific and different statistical meanings here, comparison is difficult.," I don't see that there's any clear change at all-- just different wording.

This is spin-- there isn't be anything new here.

Well perhaps you deniers should share your better understanding of what AGW predicts with, for instance, the IPCC; they think that
"a 'runaway greenhouse effect'â"analogous to Venus-appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities." - http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session31/inf3.pdf
Thank God you guys know better than the researchers, not only the science, but even what they are theorizing.

... to a not so extreme event.

From the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report:
Climate Change 2007

Sea level is projected to rise between the present (1980 - 1999) and the end of this century (2090 - 2099) by 0.35 m (0.23 to 0.47 m) for the A1B scenario ...
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch11s11-9-4.html

Costly too.

Generally speaking, the people who write the papers are the same cast of characters who do the reviews on the papers. Its a fairly incestuous process, so I don't put a lot of stock in "peer review" when it comes to something as unphysical as climate science. Peer review in general, in all sciences, is also undergoing a kind of crisis of confidence. http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34518/title/Opinion--Scientific-Peer-Review-in-Crisis/

People treat climate science like it was a hard science like physics or chemistry, where input A results in output B. It isn't. It is at best a "soft science" where opinion and confirmation bias creep in at every opportunity.

Keep in mind that people are trying to make predictions about the future behaviour of a complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamic system based on poorly founded, unphysical simulations of the past behaviour of that system -- you cannot simulate a system unless you understand all of its inputs and outputs, and the physical relationship between them. Prediction is, if not impossible, is very very hard. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/504.htm

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr.pdf

"I was asking for evidence in addition to what's reported in the media so you can help me learn something - I've read media reports but I haven't seen any models for myself. I'm not making assumptions about you and your knowledge, I was asking for references."

Pardon me. I misunderstood you. Well, if you try, they aren't hard to find. Here, for example, is a classic diagram from climate models from the IPCC's own website. Note that this is not just a "simplified" explanation for laymen; the diagram is derived from calculations used in actual climate models:

Back radiation shown as 324 Wm-2 at lower right

You can find many more examples if you Google for "back radiation" or "climate model" and "diagram".

"And I asked a question about your belief regarding a connection between co2 and gw. You didn't answer. If your answer is "no connection has been demonstrated", that's fine - you just haven't said so."

I didn't answer explicitly because I felt my answer was pretty clear from my earlier statements. I don't claim that CO2 doesn't cause warming. However, I am skeptical about whether it has been a major -- much less the major -- cause of warming in the 20th Century.

I'm not discounting the possibility. But every attempt to actually demonstrate that so far has been pretty full of holes. The burden of proof lies with those who propose the models, and they have fallen short in that regard.

Consider for example the temperature projections made by the AGW proponents in the IPCC reports. EVERY report has had to "adjust" for the fact that projections made by the previous reports just haven't panned out. If temperatures had actually followed ANY of the patterns projected by the AGW proponents, in ANY of the majority opinions in the IPCC reports so far, it would already be much warmer than it is now. And they admit that they cannot explain the discrepancy.

Not to mention the exaggerated claims in the media that went much further than the actual reports. By my argument isn't about the media, it's about the credibility of some of the "science".

Yes, well, you are certainly well-indoctrinated. No breaking through all that conditioning, uh... OBVIOUSLY.

I've spent quite a bit of time in Germany, and know many people there. The proletariat (that's the only way to describe them, really) really have no power at all - it's all at the top. And at the top, they are quite focused on bringing all of the United States of Europe under their control. It's working quite well. And while climate change is real, fear of climate change, and the illusion that policy-makers can "fix" it, is just a tool to keep the populace in line.

They've made go in-roads with the same techniques here, as you illustrate very clearly. You don't even seem to have the critical thinking skills needed to dig into the science and question the talking points. The IPCC - "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" is NOT an organization of scientists - it's an organization of politicians. They say so right on their website how they are organized, and that they cherry-pick from scientific reports, procedures that have been criticized and have had issues in the past. If you don't know who Maurice Strong, the founder of the IPCC is, you should do a little research into him and the kinds of people you are putting your trust (and the future of your decedents) into.

I got the same thing when I clicked on his link but when I Googled the IPCC and clicked on the link below I had no problem.

http://www.ipcc.ch/index.htm#.UZFvMkqbEvA