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So now you simply need to provide the data you say proves that Greenland was regional only. It should be easy for you, right? opinions don't count, only data.

The PAGES 2K study on "Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two milennia" seems to be the most comprehensive round up of the science. Here is a PDF copy of the paper.

Of course I know about the Hockey Stick graph (which has been confirmed by more than a dozen similar studies done since it first came out). What does that have to do with your claim that Mann and others are saying there is no natural warming for the last 1000 or 2000 years? The Hockey Stick graph clearly shows that it was warmer 1000 years ago and was gradually cooling until the recent sharp uptick in temperatures.

If you zoom in on the Danish graph it appears that the peak for 2015 was about 2 weeks before the current peak for 2016. It looks like the 2015 peak could be slightly higher than the 2016 peak but it's impossible to tell without looking at the actual numbers. For all practical purposes it's a tie and will remain so unless there is significant freezing in the next few weeks.

Practically no one ever predicted Arctic summer sea ice would be gone by 2015. Certainly not the IPCC which puts it in the 2040s or later last I heard. In 2007 there was some speculation that if the rate of loss continued it could be gone by 2015 but if you asked actual cryologists about they would have laughed. So your claim that Arctic sea ice not being melted out by 2015 is a failed prediction of AGW is just a straw man.

Yup, a pretty good place, but "...the risk of a tsunami impacting on the UK... is low, but that it cannot be discounted completely."
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/using/casestudies/tsunamiuk.asp

It'd eventually become less lethal when/if we start spending more time in space (or near nuclear reactors) to evolve against the increased radiation. Cockroaches and insects are surprisingly hardy against radiation. And there are certain earthworms that evolved to become arsenic resistant.

It could be that our lack of exposure to radiation is what's preventing us from evolving biologically to become better-suited as a space-faring species.

I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?

From the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

I think it's similar to this mission at Lake Ellsworth.

So is it going to freeze before it hits the top of the bore then? If not that means we're releasing whatever is in that water into our environment. That could be really really bad any way you look at it. I'm not hopeful enough that it could release something giving us extreme life-extensions.

So, drilling a hole in the ground and sucking out millions of barrels of hydrocarbons, which have been isolated for thousands (or millions) of years, as well as any organisms living there is fine. Collecting a sample from a lake that has been isolated for thousands of years for research is the beginning of the apocalypse? I can only assume you're quite concerned about the Large Hadron Collider, as well.

I think it's similar to this mission at Lake Ellsworth.

It sounds like one of those Space Odyssey books, without leaving earth.

So what *are* the ramifications of releasing a large pocket of oxygen into our current atmosphere, both for us and for the lake which has been sitting isolated for 14 million years?

Your fears are unfounded, from the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

So they're taking the appropriate precautions there ...

Not so much being snarky as not being a scientist and am curious. It's great that we can go anywhere that's locked away and hidden, but should we?

The moon was "locked away" but we went there, didn't we?

Everyone needs to relax, there's an expedition to explore Lake Ellsworth and we've already explored an ultra-oligotrophic lake named Hodgson Lake and the results:

They found... nothing. The analyses show that the Hodgson Lake water 'is one of the clearest water lakes I have ever worked on, clearer than the distilled water we use in our lab, with almost nothing in it,' says Hodgson. The samples have virtually no nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and very low measurements of other chemical elements.

So they're going to take necessary precautions approved by a governing body and the odds are high that their results will just turn up some of the purest water we've ever seen. Of course the article notes that if they find extremophiles, it'll be a boon for studying the many protective enzymes the organisms need to live.

I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?

From the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

I think it's similar to this mission at Lake Ellsworth.

So is it going to freeze before it hits the top of the bore then? If not that means we're releasing whatever is in that water into our environment. That could be really really bad any way you look at it.

I'm not hopeful enough that it could release something giving us extreme life-extensions.

I fail to see the need to drill to this lake so far below the surface. For one thing I would be worried about bringing back up who knows what with organisms and bacteria that we have not seen before that could be dangerous, also don't you think they would be contaminating this lake by drilling into it?

From the article:

Now, the team has satisfied the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which safeguards the continent's environment, that it's come up with a technique to sample the lake without contaminating it. Valery Lukin told New Scientist: "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again." The next season, the team will bore into that frozen water to recover a sample whose contents can then be analysed.

I think it's similar to this mission at Lake Ellsworth.

There hasn't been any weatherballoons or similar testing by the governments right after closing the airspace.

The NERC have been flying aircraft and taking samples since the start.

So all these claims about fraud and such all turn out to be nonsense.

Data from a particular NERC (UK Research Council) project I'm involved with are allowed to be kept by the researchers for a certain amount of time (18 months, maybe?) but then have to be released to the BADC: http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/home/index.html - this gives the researchers time to do some analysis and get some papers out on all the hard work they've done, but obliges them to release the data to the community.

Some of the BADC data sets are restricted to non-commercial use only, so you need to flash your 'Academic Investigator' magic card at them to get it. These guys keep good metadata and license agreements and all that stuff. There's even some datasets from CRU, unrestricted (registration required).

The article this may be based on quite old stuff, though so is the Grauniad article itself. One NERC press release dates back to 2003, while the news article is dated July 25th.

NERC seems to run the lab mentioned, they are here: http://www.nerc.ac.uk/
Defra also has a site about the long term tests: http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/gm/fse/

With regards to the golbal warming issue, I don't think the fact can be denied (just ask the wooly mammoths). The earth was covered with ice 20,000 years ago, and it melted. So you might argue that we've been in a bit of a warming trend for the past few thousand years.
Humans may be contributing, but to consider them as the root cause is a bit anthropocentric.

Ocean Currents are complex, and we're jsut staring to understand them.
There is a north atlantic current that seems to self-regulate temeperature. Shows how cyclical this climate change may be.
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/publications/documents/pe-sp r04/atlantic.pdf

I hope you didn't think I was talking about seawater droplets. Sea spray does contain submicron particles. And with toast, I was talking about aerosol soot, not bread crumbs.

You're not playing Chicken Little; I'm not throwing caution to the wind. I'd rather see someone like the Forsight Institute setting the pace for nanotech; you'd probably rather see someone like the EPA or FDA.

You're right that caution can kill. How about a real-life example? The FDA took ten years to approve the Sensor Pad, a simple device that makes self-examination for breast cancer much more effective. FDA put it in the same class as an artificial heart for approval. Their incentives are wholly on the side of caution. They're not accountable to the victims of their delays. Another notable example is the FDA's footdragging on approval for the home HIV test. The FDA serves a good function. But that function often comes at a high price. My point is that regulation isn't a panacea.

I'm not an anarchist, and I'm sure you're not a totalitarian. But we probably do have different world views. You're worried about DDT thinning egg shells; I'm worried about millions of people dying from malaria. You don't like asbestos; I don't like the thought of dying in a house fire. You're offended by car exhaust; I can't stand horse manure. Nanotech could be poised to drastically improve material conditions in the world. I'm asking that you consider the flipside of your worldview, the risks of choking progress, as you promote regulation.

When you impy we should wait until the best experts have given us a thorough diagnosis on the safety of nanotech, I'm thinking of the benefits we'll lose while stalled: cleaner cars, safer buildings, medical breakthroughs, better slacks. I'm also skeptical that nanotech regulation won't be motivated by junk science, liker other health scares (e.g. alar, saccharin, acrylamide, etc).

I did see the smiley, so I'll assuming you mean that in a cute Dilbert sort of way.

Only half joking...I fully agree with this classic bit of fax lore.

"The meetings will continue until productivity increases" is rather like "the beatings will continue until morale improves".

If people from all around the world can collaborate with each other to build things like Linux without meeting face to face, why do I need to see these people?

I'm sure people would like to know that the use of GPS for geodesy has been going on for many years.

The way that it is done is not to use the same sort of measurement used by handheld GPS receivers but to use the phase of the signal coming from the satellite.

If you monitor the gps network for a long enough period using these techniques you can get down to the millimetre level of accuracy horizontally. The longer you monitor the better the accuracy you can get.

A group working here, at Oxford University, has been doing such work in Greece and the South Island of New Zealand and is now part of a national centre of excellence, called COMET.

This page should give you a better idea about what they're doing.

I'm sure people would like to know that the use of GPS for geodesy has been going on for many years.

The way that it is done is not to use the same sort of measurement used by handheld GPS receivers but to use the phase of the signal coming from the satellite.

If you monitor the gps network for a long enough period using these techniques you can get down to the millimetre level of accuracy horizontally. The longer you monitor the better the accuracy you can get.

A group working here, at Oxford University, has been doing such work in Greece and the South Island of New Zealand and is now part of a national centre of excellence, called COMET.

This page should give you a better idea about what they're doing.