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You probably shouldn't draw any conclusions from the work you do on it.
Anyway, give this a try

At the moment, the global temperature anomaly is 0.1C BELOW the thirty year running mean (and has been for a couple of months now).

Using the Hadcru data, I get 0.058C above the 30 year mean.

Whose data are you using to get this 0.1 below?

So yes, global warming is real, but it is entirely possible that its cause is, and has been in the past, the Sun. Not CO_2.

There are vast number of independent ways by which it can be shown that the current warming is due to greenhouse gasses, and is not due to the sun.

For one thing the stratosphere is cooling. The sun warms the whole atmosphere, from above. However the greenhouse effect traps heat low in the atmosphere leading to this cooling.

For another the North Pole and the Antarctic Peninsula are the fastest warming parts of the globe. The sun's effect is strongest where it's light is most direct ... in the tropics. However the CO2 greenhouse effect overlaps with the H2O greenhouse effect so its effect is greater where absolute humidity is low.

For a third thing, the warming is happening more at night. The sun warms things when it is shining. However the greenhouse effect slows the rate of heat loss, without affecting the rate of heat gain as much, so the greatest effect would be seen at the coldest part of the day.

Similarly and for a fourth thing, winter temperatures are warming slightly faster than Summer ones.

For a fifth, the temperature response due to CO2 can be calculated, such as has been done in this paper. It turns out that the warming is anthropogenic.

Warm weather is good. Plants grow. People eat.

Already less than they would if there were no global warming:

Worldwide, the authors report online today in Science, yields of corn and wheat declined by 3.8% and 5.5%, respectively, compared with what they would have been without global warming.

You seem to be very full of misinformation. Have you been reading Wattsup?

It turns out scientific sources provide better information on this topic than popular interest ones.

That was not the consensus view

No, I guess the consensus view then was that the globe was uncontrollably cooling due to man's pollution.

You are mistaken. The greenhouse effect has nothing to do with greenhouses.

From EPA.GOV

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere behave much like the glass panes in a greenhouse.

That was easy. Greenhouse effect is a unproven theory that lies at the heart of AGW. I'm telling you it's just a theory just like AGW is, and you should avoid calling it fact when it is not.

I asked that you explain your theory and make it falsifiable.

You actually quoted me and then went on to not answer the question? You cannot falsify it, can you? Doesn't that make you question the theory? Why not answer that simple question?

The 70's were 0.03C wamer than the 60's. The 80's 0.18C warmer than the 70's. The 90's 0.12C warmer than the 80's. The 2000's 0.24C warmer than the 90's. This is exactly consistent with the theory.

Citation please.

And then the warming stopped?
Fact of decreasing N. American temperatures over the last decade
decreasing European temperatures over the last 8 years (Compare Seasonal Averages) 2001 - 2009
decreasing Australian temperatures over the last decade

But really, you need to provide links to the sources of your information, I'm not going to just take your word for it. If you can't do that than this is sort of pointless.

That was not the consensus view

No, I guess the consensus view then was that the globe was uncontrollably cooling due to man's pollution.

You are mistaken. The greenhouse effect has nothing to do with greenhouses.

From EPA.GOV

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere behave much like the glass panes in a greenhouse.

That was easy. Greenhouse effect is a unproven theory that lies at the heart of AGW. I'm telling you it's just a theory just like AGW is, and you should avoid calling it fact when it is not.

I asked that you explain your theory and make it falsifiable.

You actually quoted me and then went on to not answer the question? You cannot falsify it, can you? Doesn't that make you question the theory? Why not answer that simple question?

The 70's were 0.03C wamer than the 60's. The 80's 0.18C warmer than the 70's. The 90's 0.12C warmer than the 80's. The 2000's 0.24C warmer than the 90's. This is exactly consistent with the theory.

Citation please.

And then the warming stopped?
Fact of decreasing N. American temperatures over the last decade
decreasing European temperatures over the last 8 years (Compare Seasonal Averages) 2001 - 2009
decreasing Australian temperatures over the last decade

But really, you need to provide links to the sources of your information, I'm not going to just take your word for it. If you can't do that than this is sort of pointless.

Bad luck:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/uk_forecast_weather.html

I've been to the same music festival this weekend for many years, and have always had half an eye on the sky once the music's stopped. Even when it's not cloudy (which it usually is) I've never seen a thing.

actually, ash from the volcano has already hit north america, if not the US just yet. take a look at the maps below - there are flight advisories for atlantic Canada because of a bunch of ash that has floated west - and it's getting damn close to Maine: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/vaac/vaacuk_vag.html .

At least here you can get some information about ash distribution: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/aviation/vaac/vaacuk_vag.html

Here. Note that a flight level is 100 feet, so FL160 means 16000 feet (or about 3 miles, as GPP said).

The question is, though, how much ash is too much? And if it's safe to fly from Heathrow to Cardiff, as the British Airways CEO is doing tonight, or for the KLM chairman to fly to Germany from Holland, does that necessarily mean it's safe to fly across the whole of Europe?

AFAIK considering exposing the aircraft to the clouds of ashes, there's actually no big difference between flying across Europe long or short distances. Cruising altitude is usually in the high 30000ft and since FL350 is save according to these maps it's only after takeoff and before landing when the aircraft has to pass through the cloud of ashes.

Disclaimer: All I know about this I learnt in the last three days trying to figure out how are the odds that my flight will not be cancelled. - now I have settled with the "money back" option.

Yeah, and some of us have downloaded the numbers and crunched them

Citation needed.

Until then you have no way to compete with NASA GISS, MET and BOM.

Now tell us something we didn't know 100 years ago.

Just did, 100+ years of temperature measurements, the measurements do not seem to support your theories which are pretty much unsupported anyway. Your entire post is one giant bare assertion fallacy after another.

How Can I Be Sure: Aren’t all these changes down to the Sun and natural factors?

Where they say "We now know that man-made CO2 is the likely cause of most of the warming over the last 50 years." (my emphasis).

Surely you either know it IS the cause, or you're some percentage or other sure it's the likely cause.

Still, as long as we _know_ it's probably the cause eh!

How Can I Be Sure: Aren’t all these changes down to the Sun and natural factors?

Where they say "We now know that man-made CO2 is the likely cause of most of the warming over the last 50 years." (my emphasis).

Surely you either know it IS the cause, or you're some percentage or other sure it's the likely cause.

Still, as long as we _know_ it's probably the cause eh!

Source: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/averages/ukmapavge.html#, although you'll have to do the last few clicks to get the correct chart.

Start recording temperatures in 1850, and in 1950 look at the trend. Do the same from 1950 onwards. Notice that CO2 increases IR absorption and is increasing in the atmosphere. Create a GCM and run it with and without the anthropogenic forcing. Notice which one fits the data. Download the program and the data from http://edgcm.columbia.edu/ and run it at home if you want to check. Oh, don't believe that data? Use this, or this new one. Want to check the GCM? run against paloclimate proxies, or write from first principles and do it on paper like Arrhenius did.

then opening up the data and the algorithms to analyze the data would only bolster his case

Knock yourself out, dumbass.

"The data downloadable from this page are a subset of the full HadCRUT3 record of global temperatures, which is one of the global temperature records that have underpinned IPCC assessment reports and numerous scientific studies."

Have you perused the Harry_Readme file (comments on the CRU3 creation process)?

"The problem is, really, the huge numbers of cells potentially involved in one station, particularly at high latitudes. Working out the possible bounding box when you're within cdd of a pole (ie, for tmean with a cdd of 1200, the N-S extent is over 20 cells (10 degs) in each direction. Maybe not a serious problem for the current datasets but an example of the complexity. Also, deciding on the potential bounding box is nontrivial, because of cell 'width' changes at high latitudes (at 61 degs North, the half-degree cells are only 27km wide! With a precip cdd of 450 km this means the bounding box is dozens of cells wide - and will be wider at the Northern edge!

Clearly a large number of cells are being marked as covered by each station. So in densely-stationed areas there will be considerable smoothing, and in sparsely-stationed (or empty) areas, there will be possibly untypical data. I might suggest two station counts - one of actual stations contributing from within the cell, one for stations contributing from within the cdd. The former being a subset of the latter, so the latter could be used as the previous release was used.

Well, got stncounts.for working, finally. And, out of malicious interest, I dumped the first station's coverage to a text file and counted up how many cells it 'influenced'. The station was at 10.6E, 61.0N. The total number of cells covered was a staggering 476! Or, if you prefer, 475 indirect and one direct.

Ran for the first month (01/1901). Compared the resulting grid with that from CRU TS 2.1. Seems to compare fine, some higher, some lower. Example:

2.10: 139 142 146 154 156 157 165 170
3.00: 141 148 154 153 153 159 163 168

(data are on latitude #265 and longitudes #163-170)

Wrote 'makelsmask.for' to, well, make a land-sea mask. It'll work with any gridded data file that uses -999 for sea. The mask is called 'lsmask.halfdeg.dat'. Adapted stncounts.for to read it and use it to mask the output files.

Still a bit disturbed by the large number of cells marked as 'influenced' by a single station. IDL seems to use the inbuilt 'TRIGRID' function to interpolate the grid, so there's no way of getting the station count for a particular cell that way anyway. Not that it would mean much, since there is bound to be some kind of weighting (it's not clear what that weighting is, though, from the IDL website). So the figures in the station count files are really rather loose. What might be useful as a companion dataset would be the ACTUAL station counts. Counts for cells with stations actually INSIDE them. Of course, that might be rather sensitive information..

Managed a full run of stncounts. It took over five and a half hours, which is a bit much!

Back to the gridding. I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh."

Meh?

then opening up the data and the algorithms to analyze the data would only bolster his case

Knock yourself out, dumbass.

However global temperatures are still rising while sunspot activity is decreasing that only gives us breathing space. When sun spot activity increases again and global temperatures increase driven upwards by both solar and man made factors.

Yeah I read it wrong the first time as well. It actually shows growth for the last three years.

More importantly, it shows a trend where recent years have a lower minimum than later years. Remember not to confuse weather with climate like Fieldings is. The long-term trend simply has irrelevant noise due to ENSO events, etc imposed on top of it. As I said before, the real problem scientists face is here

I see the statistics on your web site removed the Maurader Solar Minimum / Little ice age; most CO2 proponents do.

You might be referring to this paragraph: Abrupt climate change is a long-term warming trend imposed on top of natural variations which tend to swing wildly in both directions. If you mean that the temperatures remain inexplicably high after subtracting all those natural variations, you're almost right.

But that reference removed the ENSO events, and figure 2 shows a warming trend even before this subtraction.

Also, contrary to popular belief, climatologists aren't denying the fact that natural variations such as changes in the Sun's brightness affect the climate. Climatologists aren't saying that our emissions are completely responsible for everything that's happening to the climate. It's just that once we account for all known natural variations, an artificial signal remains which is best explained by accounting for greenhouse gas emissions.

If we do not get some cycle 24 sunspots soon, we might be hoping for some global warming. I thought we where on the way but a cycle 23 spot showed up the the sun went quiet now for over a month; not good.

No, solar variability is smaller than greenhouse effects.

Your points are just plain WRONG. The US isn't the world, no

I'm glad to see you admit your error where you conflated warming in the US, which you accused of being false, with proving that AGW was wrong.

but it's one of the few countries that has been able to maintain almost continuous sensor coverage. Places like Russia/Western Europe (a vast expanse) just haven't

Russia has 35 stations that have been operational since 1961, many of them earlier. Spain, 9; Portugal, 3; France, 17; UK, 17. And so on. And these are just for self-monintoring, modern stations. Individual measurements have a far longer history. Written temperature records in the UK go all the way back to the 1600s.

The majority of temperature stations are in the US. A lot of those stations are cited in idiotic locations, vulnerable to the Urban Heat Island affect.

You *want* to know what the heat island effect is. Did you completely skip reading my post where I talked about detrending?

Secondly, the satellite temperature anomaly differs from the surface temperature anomaly and they only come into agreement via. "adjustment"

A complete misunderstanding of how the MSU dataset was assembled. It has to be adjusted because it's not all data from one satellite; it's a data from many different satellites, each with differences. *And* the data doesn't come as temperatures; it comes as radiance measurements, which have to be interpreted. Different algorithms have been used over the years to interpret the data. And lastly, we only care about the temperature for the lower troposphere when talking about warming trends, so the effects of the upper troposphere and stratosphere have to be mathematically removed. It's a very complex science, and has nothing to do with the notion you present of scientists looking at a satellite data reading and saying, "Let's move it a couple degrees to match what it says on the surface!" In some cases, ground readings are taken into account, but only to measure how the data gathered by the satellites corresponds to a known point or point on the surface, to better understand how to interpret the satellite data.

There's also radiosonde balloon data, but that's even more complicated than the satellite data.

For information about just how dodgy a lot of these temperature stations actually are, take a look at Surface Stations.

I already have an entire post on this thread busting that notion. I'm not going to repeat myself. Anyone who makes this argument has made it blatantly obvious that they have never once looked at surface station climate reconstruction methodologies.

Yes, it is well within the bounds of natural variation.

Completely and utterly false, as even a most cursory look at the data shows.

This is the process where so called Scientists massage the data to make it fit their pre-conceived ideas. For further information about "adjustment", I refer you to Climate Audit. ... As I understand it, temperature records from Roman times are hard to come by. Dendro records have their own problems (climate audit has a very comprehensive review of the issues, if you care to look).

Peer review has a very comprehensive review of the issues, thank you very much. There are dozens of papers on this topic. Pointing people to a website of one of the couple dozen professional deniers (out of thousands who don't) is the antithesis of science.

Your idiotic graph stops in the year 1990. We've had 20 years of data since then.

20 years out of 1200 is essentially meaningless and would barely be visible on the graph. And the hottest years on record have been since 1990, so you're not helping your case.

Moreover, a large part of the increasing trend shown starts around 1900, so is obviously not man-made CO2 based.

Huh? You are awa

Wow. Your source is Bob Carter, one of about two dozen (out of the world's several thousand professional climatologists) who is a public skeptic. And actually, he's not really a climatologist; he's a paleonolotist -- but don't let that stop you.

FYI: 1998 was one of the strongest El Nino events in modern history. El Nino raises the atmosphere's temperature by slowing the upwelling of deep, cold water in the eastern pacific. La Nina cools it by just the opposite. It doesn't change the long-term picture, of course; the rate at which water cycles in the ocean has no bearing on how much total heat input there is into the system; ocean waters aren't magically decoupled from the rest of our atmosphere. It's just a source of white noise on top of the blatantly obvious signal.

But don't let that stop you deniers from picking it as your starting point.

And, also FYI: only one of the three major global climate databases lists 1998 as the hottest. The other two list 2005 (they were close). But again, don't let that stop you.

The UK had its first snowfall in October in 74 YEARS!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3278378/Snow-covers-parts-of-England-as-winter-weather-sets-in.html

Mod parent down!

Utter rubbish - *LONDON* has not had snow for decades, the UK certainly has. Actually even the link you provide says that. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/28_30october2008/ has more details.

Perhaps your recollection of the articles in National Geographic are as inaccurate as your recollection of the Telegraph article?

Incidentally the Met article suggests that the recordings of snow/not snow happen at 9am every day, so it is entirely likely that there HAS been snow in the last 74 years, but it wasn't measured because it melted by 9am.

Still totally untrue. *London* might not have had snow for decades, but the *UK* sure has. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/interesting/28_30october2008/ "The last occurrence of sleet or snow being reported across these areas was October 2003." and later on in the article "A number of stations across the climate district of SE & Central S England reported a day of snow on 28/29 October 2008, including Reading University, Whiteknights (Berkshire), Hampstead (Greater London) and Odiham (Hampshire). The last previous date that any snow was recorded during October over this climate district was 29 October 1974, but in London it was 31 October 1934."

Rather than demanding simplistic answers that fit their politcs, scientists put error bars on things that are uncertain such as clouds. Clouds are not ignored they are simply not well understood, the affect of cosmic rays on clouds is even LESS well understood and like the Hadley center, I fail to see how a lack of an observable trend in cosmic rays results in an observable trend in clouds. Also kind of strange how the climate does not cycle over 11yrs in tune with the cosmic rays from sunspots.

Mis-informative would be a better tag for your post, if the evidence was based soley on extrapolation of tempratures then you might have cause to dissmiss it as speculation. As it stands your post is just another lame political troll using the same tired old arguments that have been debunked to death.

BTW: The phrase "climate change" was coined by SKEPTICS in the early 90's, they pointed out that the term "global warming" implied a certain conclusion - both terms are literally correct.

"Myself I like facts to support my arguments, and I'm also a strong believer in falsifiability in science."

Strange then that we haven't seen any from you in this thread, but since you have now named a source I will happily be moded flaimbait again by repating my original call of bullshit to your "facts". I like this random site by an amature astronomer, it mentions Svensmark, but I encourage readers to do their own debunking like that scientific amature has done, what follows is my own summary...

Svensmark for those who don't know him belives cosmic rays influence cloud cover, and this explains...well, everything! The glaring problem with this idea, (that incidently demands a "do nothing because nothing can be done" response), is that the 3-4 decade long data set that measures cosmic rays shows no statisticaly significant trend whatsoever. Extra points for those who can find the raw cosmic data sets, AFAIK they are available 'somewhere' on the net. Svensmark now claims that the current cooling is because of a change in cosmic rays, problem is we are not currently cooling and no change in cosmic rays has been detected. Now some people will confuse cosmic rays with sunspots and this is encouraged by Svensmark, problem is that if it's "sunspots" then why doesn't the climate have an 11yr cycle like sunspot activity does? - IMHO and as a holder of a science degree Svensmark's "theory's" are like swiss cheese and his motivations for demanding inactivity are embarrasingly obvious.

For those who like Occam's razor here's how to shave Svensmark: Clouds are the most uncertain part of climate models, the effect of cosmic rays on clouds is even less certain and produces no detectable forcing outside the current margin of error for clouds.

Here is a similarly terse application of Occam by the UK's Met office. It's the only myth they can be bothered debunking in their "toolkit", the rest of their toolkit panel contains "facts" that you might want to look at, you know - to support your future arguments.

BTW: A genuine attempt on your behalf to debunk those "facts" will also inform your "strong beliefs" as only genuine skepticisim can.

"Germans are telling us GW is taking a hiatus, which means most all of our previous models are wrong"

The German paper used the same models but with slightly different assumptions and they arrived at similar conclusions about the long term trend (post - 2015). It's an interseting paper but the Germans themselves would agree it's complete nonsense to say it "means most all of our previous models are wrong".

"I would love it if someone has a link to an article about an accurate computer model of the weather system, but I've never found one."

There is no single accurate model and there never will be. Accuracy is a function of mankinds future actions, the precision of observations and the resolution of the numerical analysis amoung other things. The models themselves are basically Finite Element Analysis models, thus the need for very powerfull number crunchers. They account for forcings and some of the major feedbacks but cannot account for feedbacks we know very little about ( thus the hand-wringing about "tipping points"). It's generally agreed that at best they can only predict large scale climate changes (ie: continental proportions).

The MET office in the UK is a good source of info on models and even has a computer program you can tinker with yourself (I will let you find that yourself). Thier list of climate center sites is also very useful.

The IPCC site has become close to useless since it's last redesign and it is difficult to find stuff on it. However the MET office provides an accesible way to read the reports. The IPCC does not conduct science, it reviews it. The RANGE of conclusions in the report are derived from thousands of simulations from various models and are distilled down to worst, best and most likely senarios.

Yes I know the MET is a single source, it just happens to be a good one and will point you in the right direction. If you are looking for a good climate mythbusting site then you might want to try realclimate.

"[TFA] makes me cringe."

Ditto!

"Germans are telling us GW is taking a hiatus, which means most all of our previous models are wrong"

The German paper used the same models but with slightly different assumptions and they arrived at similar conclusions about the long term trend (post - 2015). It's an interseting paper but the Germans themselves would agree it's complete nonsense to say it "means most all of our previous models are wrong".

"I would love it if someone has a link to an article about an accurate computer model of the weather system, but I've never found one."

There is no single accurate model and there never will be. Accuracy is a function of mankinds future actions, the precision of observations and the resolution of the numerical analysis amoung other things. The models themselves are basically Finite Element Analysis models, thus the need for very powerfull number crunchers. They account for forcings and some of the major feedbacks but cannot account for feedbacks we know very little about ( thus the hand-wringing about "tipping points"). It's generally agreed that at best they can only predict large scale climate changes (ie: continental proportions).

The MET office in the UK is a good source of info on models and even has a computer program you can tinker with yourself (I will let you find that yourself). Thier list of climate center sites is also very useful.

The IPCC site has become close to useless since it's last redesign and it is difficult to find stuff on it. However the MET office provides an accesible way to read the reports. The IPCC does not conduct science, it reviews it. The RANGE of conclusions in the report are derived from thousands of simulations from various models and are distilled down to worst, best and most likely senarios.

Yes I know the MET is a single source, it just happens to be a good one and will point you in the right direction. If you are looking for a good climate mythbusting site then you might want to try realclimate.

"[TFA] makes me cringe."

Ditto!

"Germans are telling us GW is taking a hiatus, which means most all of our previous models are wrong"

The German paper used the same models but with slightly different assumptions and they arrived at similar conclusions about the long term trend (post - 2015). It's an interseting paper but the Germans themselves would agree it's complete nonsense to say it "means most all of our previous models are wrong".

"I would love it if someone has a link to an article about an accurate computer model of the weather system, but I've never found one."

There is no single accurate model and there never will be. Accuracy is a function of mankinds future actions, the precision of observations and the resolution of the numerical analysis amoung other things. The models themselves are basically Finite Element Analysis models, thus the need for very powerfull number crunchers. They account for forcings and some of the major feedbacks but cannot account for feedbacks we know very little about ( thus the hand-wringing about "tipping points"). It's generally agreed that at best they can only predict large scale climate changes (ie: continental proportions).

The MET office in the UK is a good source of info on models and even has a computer program you can tinker with yourself (I will let you find that yourself). Thier list of climate center sites is also very useful.

The IPCC site has become close to useless since it's last redesign and it is difficult to find stuff on it. However the MET office provides an accesible way to read the reports. The IPCC does not conduct science, it reviews it. The RANGE of conclusions in the report are derived from thousands of simulations from various models and are distilled down to worst, best and most likely senarios.

Yes I know the MET is a single source, it just happens to be a good one and will point you in the right direction. If you are looking for a good climate mythbusting site then you might want to try realclimate.

"[TFA] makes me cringe."

Ditto!

Well, what you say may be true for the USA, but for the world NASA, WMO [PDF] and the MET office all disagree. Nice mis-information there.
USA != World

Sorry, that argument is logically false also. (dont you understand statistics?) We saw a *spike* in 1998 and nothing has been "cooling" since. If you take 1998 out of the data and treat it as an outlier, then in fact it has been warmer every year from 1993 to today. Not quite as warm as 1998, but getting there. So why dont you take a look at the raw data and let me know if you still think everything's just peachy, yes?

And here it is, you can even see the 1998 spike.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/myth6_1.gif

I'm well aware there was a medevil warm period and a "little ice age". Both of those things lasted a few hundred years, and none of them were as extreme (cooling or heating) as what we've seenin the last 50. Sorry, nothing about this speaks "natural cycles" to me. Since a quick look at the data suggests otherwise, i think you're motives for believing what you want are not grounded in science, which is too bad.

There are a bunch of measuring stations both on the surface, and satellites do some measuring as well. These are collected into various datasets that have their own estimate of "average" temperature, whatever that means. Wikipedia is pretty good on this, actually. The main three datasets and where to get them is mentioned in the first paragraph. Now IANACS (I Am Not A Client Scientist), and I get fuzzy when it comes to how they actually measure the "average". There are... models. :) Digging deeper into the website of one of the dataset like e.g. the Met Office will probably get you more details.

Japan did indeed see DST as something not worth doing, but even before that comes the problem of what time zone Japan actually lies in.

Look at a time zone map and you'll see most zones leaning over to the west as people try to get a little more sunlight in the evening. France and Spain are particularly noticeable. Japan, on the other hand, leans to the east. Japan's time is the same as Korea's, despite lying well east of that country, and Vladivostok lies west of Japan, yet is an hour ahead! Why did Japan do this?

Answer: Since there are 24 time zones around the globe, and thus a new one every 15 degrees of longitude, Japan decided to base theirs on the point in their country that lies on a multiple of 15 degrees, which is a point in Hyogo prefecture. The problem is that the vast majority of the population of Japan, including almost all the big cities (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Sapporo) lie east of this line.

Nobody in Okinawa clamors for DST, because the time zone positioning is just right for them. It's the people up in Sapporo whose kids are walking home from school in darkness at 4 PM who want it.

What Japan really should do is break the country into two time zones, with the Kyushu/Shikoku side keeping the current time, and the rest of the country jumping an hour ahead. Barring that, just have the entire country jump an hour ahead and stay there permanently. It would even give them the chance to distinguish themselves from the rival Koreans just a little more!

What we're stuck with is a country where we have to endure 28-degree (83 deg F) indoor office temperatures in the summer for the sake of power conservation, yet no thought is ever given to fixing the clocks. The cynical, conspiracy-theorist answer is that they'll never do this because the electric companies make too much money from people using their lights in the early evening!

Of course, it's obvious that Indiana is not equivalent to the United States in general, but in particular when considering whether DST costs the US more, one should consider that Indiana is not your average state. It sits on the far western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. Additionally, the whole western edge of the time zone is pushed about 5 degrees west of where it "should" be according to solar time (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/images/time1pr.gif); the combined effect is that even on standard time there's plenty of daylight in the evening and less in the morning. Changing to DST results in more daylight than people really use (IIRC from visiting it's still twilight until nearly 10 pm) and there's insufficient light in the morning, leading to increased energy usage. So the western edge of the time zone has been spending more money all along, and Indiana was previously saving it. I don't understand why the change has to be mandatory, and you can insert your favorite theory about interests there, but the fact remains that Indiana's geography is significantly different from most of the country (though I would note though that the western edge of the Mountain Time Zone is also pushed west, which might explain Arizona's case), so that it is far from proven that DST costs more across the US as a whole.

"I'm more interesting in overwhelming scientific evidence, myself. Come back when find some of that." The links I provided in my original comment describe the evidence in great detail. If you're actually interested in the evidence, and you're genuinely interested in learning more, here's a list of common questions and answers from the UK Met Office. As for here on slashdot, I'm more interested in a substantive discussion backed with citations than vacuous posturing. I suspect your comment falls in the latter category--come back when you have some of the former.

That same page you link to has an interesting graph. Seems to correlate to global warming nicely. You should look up some solar radiation studies, you'd be surprised how well the data correlates.

And what part of "The Sun's energy output has not increased since direct measurements began in 1978" did you not understand?

Given that there may be 800,000 years covered by the samples, that does not prove that the earlies sample is 800,000 years old. how are we to know if it is not in fact 8,000,000 years old, but due to natural climate variations, a large proportion of the sample has melted in this time.

There are numerous methods for dating ice cores. Besdies, many of these cores are taken from the deep Antarctic where there just isn't substantial melting: you may get slow accumulation from little precipitation, but very little melting.

Strangely enough, there aren't all that many accurate temperature readings for the globe over 1,000 year old, and so all that can conceivably be claimed is that the current temperature fluctuations are the fastest in recorded history.

That's true; they may not be the fastest "ever". But they likely to be the fastest in tens of thousands of years at least; we see no evidence of changes that abrupt in the paleological record.

So from this we should be able to deduce that you believe that the sun is having no affect on temperature change here. however to claim thus would be to ignore evidence from at least 2 planets, where the temperature there has continued to rise.

As noted by the earlier poster, this evidence does not support the Sun's influence on temperature change. Indeed, Martian temperatures also rose during a decrease in solar irradiance. This is evidence that the warming on both planets is not solar.

In fact, looking at our nearest neighbour, it seems that other than the sun, there has been no other possible cause for this temperature rise.

Elsewhere in this thread a poster gave a cause which is more consistent with the evidence than "the Sun" (namely, Martian albedo changes).

Besides which, I seem to recall that temperatures peaked around 1998, and have been stable/dropping since then.

Not true. (Incidentally, 1998 is a disingenous choice of reference year by global warming deniers, as it had an anomalously strong El Nino.)

However, no such claim of bias is levelled at those whose funding comes from organisations with a vested interest in keeping the AGW myth going,

You mean, like the National Science Foundation?

or those who would lose funding were it to be known that the change in the Earth's climate WAS natural.

Really? Who do you think would lose funding? Do you think climate science would disappear if not for anthropogenic global warming?

Additionally, ALL the research being done that shows CO2 is the cause of global warming is started under the premise that this is what is the cause,

That is ridiculously false. Nothing is assumed a priori about the cause. Rather, the strengths of various natural and anthropogenic forcings are estimated from observational data. You plug in the amount of heating due to the Sun, the greenhouse effect, the cooling due to volcanism and air pollution, etc., and run your models from that.

relies entirely on almost identical computer models,

The models are not "almost identical". Some operate on spatial grids, some use spectral methods; they have competing models of biosphere feedbacks, ice dynamics, etc.

Besides which, what is wrong with "almost identical" models? The Earth runs on the same laws of physics, you know. Do you complain that aerospace codes all run on the same Navier-Stokes equations? As long as they are coded independently so they don't share the same bugs, what is the problem?

includes large "fudge factors"...

Such as?

and has yet to provide accurate results based on known information, even f

And Fortan? Well, I have just finished working with the Met Office (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/) and, yes, they do use Fortran - and just last year I had to translate great swathes of it into C so that it could run on a system that lacked a Fortran compiler. Engineers are not bad programmers - but they do want access to complex - and fully tested - routines that already exist. So Fortran is going to continue for quite some while yet - a few more decades at least.

People of my age stand not just on the shoulders of giants, but beside them. The abstract conversations in which us geeks revel were much harder to set up - and be paid for - in the 1950s. People of all ages should thank John Backus in memoriam for his technical vision and inventiveness.

"Speaking of bad weather, I think these guys - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ who are the authority on weather prediction in the UK. Use Fortran for weather forecasting and climate prediction http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical /fortran90/index.html and they don't seem to be tiring of it."


Same thing with Meteorological Service of Canada ( http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/ ). Fortran is all over the place, here. Most of our programs that handle meteorological or air quality data are written in some species of Fortran.

-HT

"Speaking of bad weather, I think these guys - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ who are the authority on weather prediction in the UK. Use Fortran for weather forecasting and climate prediction http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical /fortran90/index.html and they don't seem to be tiring of it."


Same thing with Meteorological Service of Canada ( http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/ ). Fortran is all over the place, here. Most of our programs that handle meteorological or air quality data are written in some species of Fortran.

-HT

Speaking of bad weather, I think these guys - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ who are the authority on weather prediction in the UK. Use Fortran for weather forecasting and climate prediction http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical /fortran90/index.html and they don't seem to be tiring of it.

Personally I don't see why this man seems to be getting such a bad send off here. After all the man invented a programming language that at a time when their were few others around, a language that has survived in critical usage until today. There may be many geeks on this site, but I doubt many of those who seem to be dancing on his grave could have done something so difficult, anywhere near as well as he did.

Just because an old language is more difficult to use than some more modern ones, does not mean that old language is a bad thing to have existed. And it doesn't mean that it wasn't a great achievement.

Speaking of bad weather, I think these guys - http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ who are the authority on weather prediction in the UK. Use Fortran for weather forecasting and climate prediction http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/nwp/numerical /fortran90/index.html and they don't seem to be tiring of it.

Personally I don't see why this man seems to be getting such a bad send off here. After all the man invented a programming language that at a time when their were few others around, a language that has survived in critical usage until today. There may be many geeks on this site, but I doubt many of those who seem to be dancing on his grave could have done something so difficult, anywhere near as well as he did.

Just because an old language is more difficult to use than some more modern ones, does not mean that old language is a bad thing to have existed. And it doesn't mean that it wasn't a great achievement.

From meto.gov:

This Evening and Tonight:
Scattered showers soon dying out then dry and largely clear [...]

First, how forecasts are generated. All forecasts are a result of numerical weather prediction. There are around a dozen different models in operation around the world, and most of that data is retained by the operators of the models (usually the national forecasting office). However, all data from the US GFS model, operated by the NWS, released as works of the government are public domain.

What all the sites in this sample (bar the BBC) do is take the data files the GFS produces and reprocess them into a webpage. No human is involved at any stage. (The BBC get their data feed from the UK Met Office).

As the models only produce data points for every 40km or so spatially and every three hours temporally all the sites interpolate to some extent to produce a point forecast. The GFS also runs four times a day but these sites might take all four runs or just one a day. Combined, that's why differences between sites exist in these results. Nothing else.

REAL performance statistics are available here and here.

Not for me: 2006 UK Temperatures or for some time 1998 Temps
There may be a trend there.......

Unfortunately I couldn't find the wind speed data for this year but that seems to be significantly higher than usual.

Not for me: 2006 UK Temperatures or for some time 1998 Temps
There may be a trend there.......

Unfortunately I couldn't find the wind speed data for this year but that seems to be significantly higher than usual.

Thank you for the response, thank you for forcing me to read more deeply, and thank you for the partial reality check on the rising sea level. Now, according to the paper I read earlier today, the Antarctic ice shelf is increasing in mass, and can be expected to do so for the near future (if, as they predict, climate changes increase precipitation over the continent). The Greenland shelf--it is claimed--is starting to trickle away, but much slower than I'd believed.

The paper goes on to predict that a 3C increase in the temperature around Greenland is reasonable to expect, and would eliminate the continent's ice (representing 7 meters rise in sea level) over the course of two or three millennia. So while I think I wasn't too far off on the end result, I was terribly far of on the time scale.

You still misrepresent me in a couple of places. You say that I've claimed the sun is warming. I haven't. I've heard that it might be, but I only speculated that a change in the sun's output might have kicked off warming events in the past. The other misrepresentation is that you keep saying I said "no doubt" when I actually said "little doubt." It's a small thing, but important to me.

I'm not a scientist, and certainly not a climatologist. Despite your obviously impressive familiarity with the arguments of the contra-global warming folks, you're not a climatologist either. If you were, I'm sure you'd be too busy doing research for Exxon to be slumming on Slashdot. I'm having trouble believing that the overwhelming majority of scientists are in on a grand conspiracy. The idea that they might be saddled with groupthink seems more plausible, but I'm still not buying. When science reaches a consensus that is just plain wrong, there is too much incentive to turn that sacred cow into tasty burger (especially given the white hot public debate).

As I've been led to understand things, some studies have indeed been throwing out the tree ring data, claiming it to be less trustworthy. I understand that it looks suspicious. But I also think it looks suspicious for GW debunkers to demand that everyone focus on the one set of data that seems to support their position best, when it seems that several other data sets tell a slightly different story. I'm hardly qualified to judge between the two, but it appears that (broadly speaking) the most qualified people involved in this debate are supporting anthropogenic global warming.

Finally, I do recognize that I have more than a little emotional investment in global warming. Part of me wants it to be true, not because I want us all to drown and burn to death, but because I think there are so many other things out there that are going to require intense levels of international cooperation, and lots of reasons to start thinking about ways to preserve and sustain the planet. Maybe this just seems like a good place to start. If global warming is being grossly exaggerated, then the reasons I described aren't sufficient reason to believe.

So I'm going to fold, because I'm tired and I'm late for something and whatnot. I'm sure I'll be back, as obnoxious as ever, next time the subject comes up. Because this is Slashdot, the place I come when I want to get pissed off. But I'm pissed out for the day, and trying to be a bit reasonable. It's been enlightening.

The idea that forecast cannot be tested is absurd if you use the scientific method; predict, test, revise & repeat.

The UK Meteorological Office has successfull Forecasts of Global Temperature risk using their climate model for the last six years.

Here is there take on the future : Climate, the greenhouse effect and global warming - is the climate changing?