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Climate models are fairly tightly constrained, because they are not fits to arbitrary equations with lots of free parameters, but rather simulations of physical processes for which most of the critical parameters are fairly well known from other data. So the capacity to improve the fit by adjusting the variables is limited. A climate model also has to be consistent with historical (and what is known of prehistorical) climate data, as well as the climate response to "natural experiments" like volcanic eruptions. See here and here for explanation. Further information about the uncertainties in model projections can be found here (PDF)

The guy who created the hockey stick brouhaha certainly did keep the data "in the dark", in that he did not release it to other scientists.

You want some AGW data? Here's an aggregate of a bunch of different universities' measurements. I look forward to your analysis of it.

Oh, do you want Michael Mann's (the hockey stick guy) data specifically? Here's the data behind one of his most recent papers. Note that he's included his Matlab code.

The whole "show us the data" thing was kind of an issue before, but now there's just no excuse. I bet you still don't know what to do with it, even now that you have it. I sure don't.

Now, it certainly seems plausible that there are models out there with variables and assumptions that result in no warming, or a cooling. What is the likelihood these would get published based purely on their results?

Close to 100%. There are "fringe" journals such as the notorious Energy and Environment that are extremely friendly to critics of global warming. While not highly regarded by serious scientists, there is little doubt that E&E would publish such a model. Besides, one can publish one's models on the internet these days. Many of the models used by climate scientists are available to the public so one could get a head start by modifying an existing model. And there is little doubt that many of the fossil fuel companies would be happy to fund the development of such a model. Heck, I imagine you could get enough money to fund such a study just by asking for donations on right-wing websites. Isn't it curious that nobody has managed to produce such a model to date. Of course, maybe it isn't actually all that easy to come up with a model that is reasonably consistent with known physics, with the historical climate data, and with the climatic effects of "natural experiments" like volcanic eruptions, and yet does not predict substantial warming in response to continued CO2 emissions...

Certainly! Just give me access to the raw, un-adjusted data that these scientists have been hoarding for decades. Oh wait, they keep destroying it.

Sorry, but somebody has been lying to you. The raw, unadjusted data is owned by various national meteorological services, and it has not been destroyed. Some of it is available for a fee, but quite a bit is available freely. You can find it here

Also, lets look at what their models from 10 years ago predicted that the weather would be for the next 10 years and compare to the historical record.

Certainly. Such a comparison may be seen here

Indeed! And fortunately for us, many scientists are in fact socialists (or are funded with a sufficiently open mandate), and make their data freely available. You can find a collection of freely available data sources here.

Yes, it's not every single last bit of data that's been collected; however, the vast majority of all climate data is easily accessed by the public.

1. Make all your data available to anybody.
2. Make all your analysis software available to anybody.

here you go

Actually, climate science seems to be one of the most open fields of science in terms of making data and software publicly available. One reason why there is no serious debate about the accuracy of CRU's conclusions is that they have been reproduced by other scientific groups, and even some amateur hobbyists, using publicly available data.

The real problem here is that the pro-AGW group is going about science all wrong -> they're trying to prove their point with more data that buttresses their theory. They look around, find scads of data that fits their model, and with enough data, declare the "debate is over".

Except that's not science. It's not even bad science, it's just simply not science. You don't prove your point by finding more data that agrees with you, you prove your point by looking hard for data that does *not* agree with you, and not finding it...

The bigger problem of all this is that when it comes right down to it, the pro-AGW folks haven't really stated a falsifiable theory. They have in fact scrupulously avoided a falsifiable theory (warm winter? Global warming! cold winter? Global warming!), and have instead created a political movement rather than a scientific discussion.

For those pro-AGWers who want to mod down, fine. But do me a favor and come up with a falsifiable hypothesis while you're at it.

I really wish Slashdotters would stop making arguments premised on a mish-mash of different "definitions" of science half-remembered from one source or another. Defining the scientific method in general terms is actually a really hard problem, which philosophers of science, and practicing scientists with an interest in philosophy, have struggled with for a century without coming to any sort of consensus. (It's known as the "demarcation problem", meaning the demarcation of science and pseudo-science.) There are no easy applications.

The parent - like many people - refers to Popper's "falsifiability" criterion, but nobody who specializes in the subject accepts this criterion anymore in any simple fashion (Popper himself was more complex than most of his internet would-be followers). These are the problems: Every real scientific theory, from physics to biology, has to deal with one or more falsifiers throughout its existence; there are always unresolved problems, apparent pieces of counter-evidence, inexplicable observations, mathematical inconsistencies or unwarranted assumptions. But on the other hand, for any given falsifier, someone can always come up with some sort of explanation which preserves the original theory, in the worst case by either dismissing the evidence as necessarily instrument error, or by modifying the theory in an ad-hoc, one-off way. And more careful, less idealized studies of actual scientific practice have shown all kinds of complications; for example, for a century after Copernicus the Ptolemaic model fit observations better.

So the assertion that climate modeling is "not science", because, given the unsupported assertion that climate modelers don't look for counter-evidence, it doesn't fit some abstract idea of what science should be, is worth pretty much nothing. In general, anyone who writes that they can dismiss some field of study practiced in research universities and published in peer-reviewed journals as "not really science" on the basis of a one-paragraph description of what science really is, is talking out of their ass.

On the specific question of anthropogenic global warming. As anyone who pays any attention to what climate researchers actually write knows, neither "warm winter" nor "cold winter" is a claimed prediction of the models. The predictions take the form of an average global temperature rise over a period of years, or a set of possible average temperatures given various possible levels of carbon dioxide emissions. And James Hansen's models from the 1980s are looking pretty good today.

Indeed you do need a wake up from your zombie state, for that is the condition of those who endlessly echo zombie arguments about climate science throughout the blogosphere. A zombie argument is one that endlessly presents an illusion of life no matter how many times it has been shown to be just plain wrong.

Let us start with the availability of raw temperature station data from the CRU. Nearly all of it is and has been for several years freely available from the Global Historical Climatology Network maintained by the National Climate Data Center (US Department of Commerce). Here it is: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/v2/ Some station data held by the CRU was not made available publicly because it is the intellectual property of some national meteorological services around the world and subject to non disclosure agreements. Moves are afoot to change that situation. Move along - no conspiracy here.

The NCDC station temperature data set is used by NCDC to produce their global temperature record. It is also used by NASA GISS to produce their temperature record. All three of the temperature records - HadCruT (from CRU), NCDC and NASA are all in close agreement. Furthermore the satellite temperature records produced by UAH and RSS from entirely different data and using entirely different methods are also in agreement with the surface temperature record. All of this stuff is freely available (including code). Do we see a pattern here?

Lest the OP still feel deprived of data, the RealClimate web site (run by real climate scientists) provides a handy page of links to freely available data and code: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Notably, this page also contains a link to the NOAA Paleoclimate site which make oodles of paleo climate data available including multiple studies and their multiple data sources that broadly support the famous hockey stick.

The reality is that climate science has had excellent public and free access to data (and code) and the situation is improving all the time.

So could we please get on with the science and the enormous tack of implementing solutions rather than dealing with the echoes of zombie arguments that stagger around aimlessly on the Internet.

If you follow that site, then you must know that the data is all publically available and has been for a long time. Here's the link where they summarize data sources.

Mann did invite a lot of criticism by not opening his data when people asked him for it. I'm referring of course to the issues with the bristlecone pine and his convolution of several sets of temperature proxies. I haven't heard of any evidence that Mann is involved in any fraud though, but witch hunts by their very nature never come up empty-handed. This one won't either.

I think you're confusing Michael E. Mann, who conducted some research based on climate data with the CRU which actually publishes some of the data.

The controversy in that case was just this: CRU publishes a compilation of recent near-surface temperature, in association with the Hadley Centre. This is made up of data from various national meteorological agencies, which is processed to remove local noise and variations (urban heat island effect, moving of weather stations, etc), gridded and used to produce global surface temperature records.

The end-product of CRU's record was always available in public. What was controversial was that some of the national weather agencies' records couldn't be released because those agencies had copyright over the data, and were selling it commercially. There's also a possibility that the CRU scientists used copyright as an excuse to spite those who were using FOIA requests to harass them (as they saw it, and I for one don't blame them - requesting data you have no intention of using, for the sole purpose of making a noise about it, whether it's released or not is disingenuous at best).

In any case, pretty much all of the actual data, barring a few stations, was in the public domain long before the FOIA requests - those making the requests just couldn't get as much political mileage out of public domain data. You can still find all that data by going to RealClimate

Michael Mann, on the other hand, is a researcher who worked on the "hockey stick" graph - a consolidation of various paleoclimate data, collected from proxies like tree rings and ice cores. He and his co-authors overlaid several paleoclimate reconstructions over each other, to show how well they correlated, and found that they all correlated pretty well, and showed a marked rise in temperature during the industrial era. One controversy with this data is that they added instrument records (that is, the CRU temperature series) to the end of the chart (which you can see as the black line in the image), which shows more warming in recent times. Another is that one proxy (tree ring data) shows a decline in the proxy measurement (tree ring width) from the 1960s onwards, which on the face of it, should imply that temperatures are declining, but which no other data, including all the various instrument data show. Mann used a statistical trick of stopping the tree ring data with the 60s and tacking on the instrument data, a technique some people disagree with.

Anyway, the point is, none of Michael Mann's data was ever hidden away

Well, for what it's worth, Michael Mann and a few others contribute regularly to the arguably political website known as Real Climate, a website which isn't exactly known to allow dissenting views.

By their own words, the site was organized to provide immediate spin/response (you pick) to media stories on the subject of AGW... much like any other environmental organization does for topics that relate to their own specific causes... organizations that most folks do not hesitate to label as political in nature.

"But in global warming we hear "Consensus! Peer-reviewed!"

Yes because that's how science is done, consensus is just another word for old fashioned term "the republic of science" which IIRC was coined by Popper. The "consensus" is simply 3 points that have been widely accepted by science for at least a decade now.

1. The Earth is warming.
2. Human emissions are responsible for the majority of the warming.
3. Failure to reduce GHG emissions will be detrimental to civilization.

Note that points 1 & 2 are what you agree is "set in stone".

"Global warming from greenhouse gases is set in stone. The amount this is warming the Earth is NOT. Feedback effects and factors are not set in stone. This is still being studied.

The IPCC, Al Gore, and the vast majority of climate scientists will wholeheartedly agree with that. The common meme that they don't is a result of effective propoganda.

"Did you know that Al Gore's company that sells carbon credits is worth 3 billion dollars?"

So what? The only thing that indicaes is there are a lot of companies and individuals who are at least trying to do something. Al Gore is in a no win situation, if he does put his money where is his mouth is then he is a "scammer", if he doesn't then he's a "hypocrite". It's easy to find examples of both claims from political hacks. Note that this does not mean that I think planting trees is an effective way to reduce emissions but he certainly has the right to invest in whatever he believes.

"Propaganda exists on both sides of this argument whether you want to believe it or not."

Yes there's plenty of examples at greenpeace, so why not point them out rather than repeating the opposing propoganda?

>>It's a statistical science. But then again, so is radioactive decay.

Bad analogy.

In terms of what they do, Climate science is closer to Economics than probably any other discipline. They don't really do science in the traditional sense, of empirical observation of controlled experiments and hypothesis testing. There's no control for our environment (unless there is a Douglass Adams Earth-2 lying around in storage somewhere), and they don't really test hypotheses, but rather backfit their models to existing data, which is very easy to become very accurate on. (Hell, I could write a model that was 100% accurate for the last 100 years, and would have no predictive power at all.)

Climate Scientists, like at RC.org, like to pretend they're real scientists - they even posted a rather defensive article on it here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/, but even in that article they admit they can't validate their work, nor can they control their experiments, and these are the two things that make a discipline science.

So RC.org is full of shit. Though anyone familiar with them knows this already - they're anti-scientific partisan hacks who love to hide beneath the mantle of science.

Here is the raw data, now will you please stop linking tabloid hit pieces and repeating their propoganda?

Note the raw data in the link has a few minor holes, this is due to the fact some national weather services (eg: France) will only release their data on condition you keep it private. If you intend to perform a reconstruction be aware the raw data is chock full of anaomolies such as undocumented station movements and typos. OTHOH Jones and his unit have spent the last couple of decades ferreting out and documenting these anomolies so you may want to consider using the more complete and more accurate HadCRUT data set or NASA's similarly painstakingly cleaned GISTemp data set.

As you may or may not be aware historical temprature reconstructions are fairly insensitive to the holes and anomolies mentioned above, meaning that the raw data in the link is more than sufficient to reproduce any of the historical temprature reconstructions in the literature. If this is still insuffitient to shake your faith in tabloid journalisim, you could try some of the other raw data and master repositiries.

Here is the raw data, now will you please stop linking tabloid hit pieces and repeating their propoganda?

Note the raw data in the link has a few minor holes, this is due to the fact some national weather services (eg: France) will only release their data on condition you keep it private. If you intend to perform a reconstruction be aware the raw data is chock full of anaomolies such as undocumented station movements and typos. OTHOH Jones and his unit have spent the last couple of decades ferreting out and documenting these anomolies so you may want to consider using the more complete and more accurate HadCRUT data set or NASA's similarly painstakingly cleaned GISTemp data set.

As you may or may not be aware historical temprature reconstructions are fairly insensitive to the holes and anomolies mentioned above, meaning that the raw data in the link is more than sufficient to reproduce any of the historical temprature reconstructions in the literature. If this is still insuffitient to shake your faith in tabloid journalisim, you could try some of the other raw data and master repositiries.

Besides, the raw data (and the source code for the models used) is readily available - Real Climate even made a handy index page with direct links to it: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/ (note the very first link).

They do use standard modelling software. Most major climate models are composed of pieces of the other ones. Many research groups use a small number of ocean models. The source codes are all available for download. In some cases straight from the web, in other cases you just have to ask. Why is this all so difficult to understand? The data are all on the web too. It was all and is all on the web.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Really this is getting pathetic.

"This hubbub all came about because of the difficulty in prying the source data out of the hands of the guy who produced the "hockey stick" figures. It's covered in the book "Broken Consensus" I think it's called. The "hockey stick" is not the "source data", the source data is all of the individual readings from all the instruments, prior to corrections for sampling errors or known issues. One cannot verify the quality of the "hockey stick" result without having the source data and being able to verify the processing steps that were done to it."

I threw away some mod points because it irks me how unskeptical the garden variety climate skeptic actually is when it comes to accepting the hockey stick has been discredited. Here are a few points you should consider with your skeptics hat on...

1. Mann's original hockey stick was published in the jounal Nature, they are not well known for publishing shoddy work.

2. A senate inquisition was held on Mann's paper in which the National Acedemies of science were called in to give expert testimony on the veracity of Mann's paper. As you will no doubt learn when reading the testimony the NAS came down firmly in favour of Mann although they did highlight some minor technical problems.

3. Given that the NAS were able to agree with Mann's conclusions under oath at a hostile inquisition, how did they do so without access to the data?

4. The journal science is also not well known for publishing shoddy work. So why did NAS then publish a follow up study by Mann in their journal Science if they were not satisfied he had no only addressed the minor technical problems in the original but also greatly increaed the robustness of the findings?

5. Why can't I find a listing for a book called "broken consensus" which you cite as a source? Shouldn't you at least adhere to your own standards of evidence?

6. How do you explain the links to the data and methods found in an article called Dummies guide to the hockey stick on Mann's website?

7. Why do people belive that some difficult to obtain data (ie: time consuming) from a few nations means that the other 99.99999% of the raw data available on the web is insuffitient to recreate the hockey stick?

8. Why is McIntrye only interested in "auditing" climate science that disagrees with his opinion? Could this be because his own paper did not stand up to the traditional auditing method called "the test of time"?

If the above points do not at least cause you to question your sources then I can only conclude your sketics hat must have slipped down over your eyes...

"This hubbub all came about because of the difficulty in prying the source data out of the hands of the guy who produced the "hockey stick" figures. It's covered in the book "Broken Consensus" I think it's called. The "hockey stick" is not the "source data", the source data is all of the individual readings from all the instruments, prior to corrections for sampling errors or known issues. One cannot verify the quality of the "hockey stick" result without having the source data and being able to verify the processing steps that were done to it."

I threw away some mod points because it irks me how unskeptical the garden variety climate skeptic actually is when it comes to accepting the hockey stick has been discredited. Here are a few points you should consider with your skeptics hat on...

1. Mann's original hockey stick was published in the jounal Nature, they are not well known for publishing shoddy work.

2. A senate inquisition was held on Mann's paper in which the National Acedemies of science were called in to give expert testimony on the veracity of Mann's paper. As you will no doubt learn when reading the testimony the NAS came down firmly in favour of Mann although they did highlight some minor technical problems.

3. Given that the NAS were able to agree with Mann's conclusions under oath at a hostile inquisition, how did they do so without access to the data?

4. The journal science is also not well known for publishing shoddy work. So why did NAS then publish a follow up study by Mann in their journal Science if they were not satisfied he had no only addressed the minor technical problems in the original but also greatly increaed the robustness of the findings?

5. Why can't I find a listing for a book called "broken consensus" which you cite as a source? Shouldn't you at least adhere to your own standards of evidence?

6. How do you explain the links to the data and methods found in an article called Dummies guide to the hockey stick on Mann's website?

7. Why do people belive that some difficult to obtain data (ie: time consuming) from a few nations means that the other 99.99999% of the raw data available on the web is insuffitient to recreate the hockey stick?

8. Why is McIntrye only interested in "auditing" climate science that disagrees with his opinion? Could this be because his own paper did not stand up to the traditional auditing method called "the test of time"?

If the above points do not at least cause you to question your sources then I can only conclude your sketics hat must have slipped down over your eyes...

"Why were the IPCC's predictions for 2000-2010 so very far off ? (actual temperatures close to 3 standard deviations from predicted values, meaning the chances of those predictions being correct are less than one in a million). Of course no doubt the rest of their prediction, which hasn't changed in response to this embarassing fuckup, are much better, right ?And why don't you answer the question why this embarassing total failure of prediction has not resulted in a reversal of policy ?"

What's embarrasing is your uncited use of the cherry picked drivel put out by Roger Pielke. The first graph in this article compares IPCC model outputs to the two main data sets of observed temps. Regardless of what your favorite think-tank claims, the observed warming trend is still 0.14degC/decade. The relatively cool bip of 2008 that the lobbyists claimed was the "end of global" warming was actually the 10th hottest on record.

"Please state which physical principle tells you that earth surface temperatures will rise as a result of increased incoming surface irradiation?"

Are you kidding me? You really don't know that atoms absorb photons of specific wavelengths and when they do so they move to a higher energy state and thus jiggle more vigourously? Surely you don't need to be told that temprature is simply a measure of how vigoursly atoms are jiggling, do you? Here is a simple experiment you can perform to convince yourself that the suns rays can warm the Earth's surface; walk outside on a clear summers day and feel the radiant heat coming from the direction of that large glowing object in the sky.

That last question is the kind of irrational nonsense that can only come from blind faith, and is th reason why I compared your anti-AGW beliefs to those of creationists. Both beliefs when taken to their logical conclusion fly in the face of large chunks of very basic science.

Here's a very simple physics argument for AGW.

Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.

What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.

If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2. Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output. We know that the observed CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel burning thanks to the radioisotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today.

Of course that's a very, very crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, but the result is approximately in line with the IPCC reports.

Here's another version of the same calculation (but a bit more complex), with full references and some maths you can download and try out yourself:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing

This suggests that AGW is a plausible explanation for the temperature and atmospheric changes we are observing. But is it correct?

If human CO2 output is not responsible for the observed temperature rise, we need to find two things: a strong cooling effect to counter the increase that we know rising CO2 must be causing, and a second strong warming effect to be behind the observed temperature rise. This sounds unlikely (and as yet no one has been able to make a convincing case for what these alternatives might be in 40+ years of research), therefore it is probable that the temperature increases we are seeing are largely caused by fossil fuel use.

(I think I posted this before, but I can't find it in my comment search history now, ah well)

Here's a very simple physics argument for AGW.

Imagine a sphere the size of the earth at the earth's distance from the sun with the earth's albedo (average reflectance). What will the surface temperature be due to solar radiation? Do the maths and you get a temperature about 33C lower than that we observe on the earth's surface today. In other words, the earth's atmosphere acts as a blanket trapping heat and raising the temperature by about 33C: the greenhouse effect.

What parts of the atmosphere are responsible for this 33C increase? By far the most important is water. As a gas and in clouds, it is responsible for up to about 90% of the effect. The remaining warming is caused by the so-called greenhouse gasses: CO2, Methane, O3, NO, etc.

If you examine the absorption spectra of these gasses and weight by atmospheric concentration, you'll find about 40% is due to CO2. So 40% of 10% of 33C is around 1C of warming due to atmospheric CO2. Atmospheric CO2 has gone up by roughly 40% since the industrial revolution, so we would expect about a 0.5C rise in global temperatures due to human CO2 output. We know that the observed CO2 increase is due to fossil fuel burning thanks to the radioisotope ratios we can see in the atmosphere today.

Of course that's a very, very crude back-of-the-napkin calculation, but the result is approximately in line with the IPCC reports.

Here's another version of the same calculation (but a bit more complex), with full references and some maths you can download and try out yourself:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing

This suggests that AGW is a plausible explanation for the temperature and atmospheric changes we are observing. But is it correct?

If human CO2 output is not responsible for the observed temperature rise, we need to find two things: a strong cooling effect to counter the increase that we know rising CO2 must be causing, and a second strong warming effect to be behind the observed temperature rise. This sounds unlikely (and as yet no one has been able to make a convincing case for what these alternatives might be in 40+ years of research), therefore it is probable that the temperature increases we are seeing are largely caused by fossil fuel use.

(I think I posted this before, but I can't find it in my comment search history now, ah well)

I'm sorry, you are jack shit.

All the relevant data and algorithms were open since, well, forever. I personally worked with several global datasets using open source models.

Go on, educate yourself: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

> I want to become reasonably informed about global warming, but I don't have time to go get the appropriate degree, and nobody out there is boiling stuff down to layman's terms so I can make a reasonably informed decision.

This page has a bunch of links that do as you ask and try to boil the information down for you:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/

What, exactly, do you mean by "nobody in the public sphere is willing to make an effort to explain it"?

Do you mean that the news media isn't explaining it? That's not exactly surprising; they don't explain anything. They just say cell phone radiation will cause brain cancer, they don't say why.

Do you mean that Wikipedia doesn't explain it? It does.

Do you mean that there are no websites with explanations from and discussion with climate scientists? There are.

Do you mean that there are no Youtube videos with explanations? There are.

Do you mean that Al Gore didn't make a movie out of his Powerpoint presentation? He did. (yes, I know there are problems with it - but you know what? That's what happens when you assume that a layman has the intellectual capacity of a sea sponge, and hand the presentation over to a politician).

If you cannot find layman's explanations for the science behind global warming, then that's because you're not looking. It's not like "the public sphere" can shove a tube into your brain and pump the information in.

..there is still not enough evidence to prove human interference is the absolute cause

Actually there is overwhelming evidence that global warming is caused by human activity. It's just not obvious to most people because they spend their time watching American Idol and getting their information from 'infotainment' channels like Fox and CNN.

Instead of blandly stating as 'fact' something you haven't actually researched, why not try searching out some actual climate scientists and see what they have to say?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/start-here/

So er we're talking a foot of water every 60 years? Sounds almost scary, except when you put it into context. Increases in sea level are not new phenomena. No doubt they were produced by all that fossil fuel consumption 20,000 years ago.

Great, sounds like more Denier talking points. For the FACTS on the matter, start here please.

Yes, those sea level changes 20,000 years ago were caused by humans. It's not like coal burning was some recent thing started in England's industrial revolution. No, they used coal as a fuel then because it had LONG been used as a fuel. With good reason -- it's very energy dense, gives you some good heat. (As long as you don't mind the smell or the environmental damage, of course.)

Before the modern days of coal mining, coal was REALLY cheap to get to -- almost lying for the taking anywhere there's anything of geological significance. And the folks back then were just burning it for whatever. And so yes, even back then, all that extra CO2 was gathering in the atmosphere, increasing the absorption spectrum where the sun is most intense, warming the planet. It's just that right now, CO2 is being emitted at a MUCH higher rate, leading to literally unprecedented warming rates. (Heard of the hockey stick? Yeah ... that's how much faster it's increasing.)

And THAT, my friends, is the reason to worry. Could we adapt to the slow warming on NATURAL scales, or with caveman level emissions? Absolutely. Can we do it now in the gotta-have-an-SUV days? Absolutely NOT.

Go back to your Denier cave plz.

AGW does not rest on CO2 absorption - that is logarithmic and at the levels we're at in modern times (280ppm+) the effect of a doubling or tripling will go unnoticed.

And you base this on a batshit insane denialist? Read this. You need to do better than some right-wing political blog. Come up with actual science, not just idiotic talking points.

Feedbacks have not been observed, on the contrary, at least one of the speculated feedbacks has instead been observed to be negative.

This nonsensical drivel will get you nowhere. You keep spewing out links, but obviously don't understand any of it. Did you even read the paper? Here's what the authors add:

"It is of course possible that the observed humidity trends from the NCEP data are simply the result of problems with the instrumentation and operation of the global radiosonde network from which the data are derived."

And others have pointed out what you clearly missed in your eagerness to parrot talking-points from right-wing sites:

"In 2005, well before Paltridge et al. paper, a much more extensive analysis of water vapour datasets had been published; Trenberth at. al 2005 compared four different reanalisys (two versions of NCEP, NVAP and ERA-40) and SSM/1 satellite data. Although they considered the total integrated water vapour column, the problems with both NCEP and NVAP were clearly noticed.
Paltridge et al. didn't even refer to Trenberth et al. work; honestly, i'm not that surprised that it has been rejected on J. Clim. This does not mean that those datasets should be thrown away, but the caution in using them is required, for _scientific_ reasons.

Thus, the existing AGW models have been falsified.

You have shown no such thing. All you have shown is the same extreme dishonesty as all other deniers. You claim that actual scientists are wrong. Thousands of them. And you and your right-wing retard friends know better. Laughable.

For more information, look up the "scientific method" and read some Popper.

You wouldn't recognize the scientific method if it kicked you in the face wearing spiked boots.

"the science is settled?"

Sigh, look up the origin of that slogan. It comes from the well known tabacoo "scientist" and all round anti-science propogandist Fred S Singer who falsely claimed to be quoting Tim Wirth. Your politics is allowing you to be played like a fiddle by lobbyists who think of you as nothing more than a useful idiot. If I am wrong then simply point to ANY climate scientist who has made that statement.

"The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked ... the methodological basis for such a conclusion (that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climate period of the last millennium) was simply not given."

before resigning. The publisher (Inter-Research) wrote the following editorial afterwards. Funnily enough they also publish a journal titled "Ethics in Science" :-) I hate to be in their shoes.
That quote comes from here ("Global warming: a load of hot air?") which has a nice summary of the politics (in 2004).
Lemme see if I can find the stolen CRU e-mails themselves..
Ah here, on the quite climate-skeptical looking website the Air Vent blog.
Can't find anything specific about the Soon and Baliunas article though.
The people at realclimate.org have done their utmost best to clarify and debunk the e-mails here.
To quote: "sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants". In my personal opinion, the RealClimate debunking was believable, although it definitely showed us all that the CRU scientists were biased against the climate sceptics. They look a bit paler and more faded under the shock of sunlight they received on their e-mails :-).
Still, if the CRU climate scientists are petty and biased and spiteful but their scientific argumentation is solid (as I believe it still is--but I'm not a climate scientist), then I think we should look forward to reducing our CO2 production to the levels of 1990 and then even lower. On a worldwide level this becomes a problem for sociology or politics.
<incoherent_rant_mode>
I strongly suggest to read the last chapter of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, he mentions how a societal (in this case, even global) problem can be recognized, even on time, but still the governing elite can be unwilling or powerless to do what is necessary to mitigate it due to social or cultural constraints (i.e. as if the Greenland Norse refused to live in igloos because it was "un-european" and "un-civilized"). Maybe I should even try to read Joseph Tainter whom Diamond refers to.
I was alive and conscious in the '90's, and I can tell the young ones, that to live at a level of industrial production similar to in the '90's (Kyoto protocol proposal, a reduction of 5%, which the USA refused to sign) doesn't mean abject poverty while being enslaved to the CO2-measuring communist overlords, as some climate sceptics try to paint it. But then again I was born in Europe, not in one of the Asian Tigers for example, so that colours my perspective strongly.
</incoherent_rant_mode>

I doubt you would be able to really understand it but their methodologies are available in the peer reviewed literature they have published and more data and code than you could probably analyze in your life is available from the many links on this page.

Which is all the more reason to not be jumping to conclusions... And a good indicator of how little anyONE, especially the hysterics on BOTH sides lurking around slashdot, actually understands what the "true facts" (I use that term because we're discussing a political issue here) are.

It doesn't really matter anyway. Assume that the worst case AGW scenarios are true. What the hell are we going to do? The nations of the world are in a prisoners dilemma that will only result in no action being taken no matter how dire any purports the consequences to be because the short term costs are not politically worth the long term gains from making any change.

So, it doesn't really matter what the "true facts" are, anyway. Until Washington DC and all the other world political capitals are completely submerged under water, there's not going to be any progress on any real issue... much less one that clearly has two politically strong sides.

So, if it makes you feel better to worry about all of the changing, knock yourself out. I just try to be adaptable myself. Climate has always changed regardless of cause. And the rate of change has been much greater in the past than it has recently. If there's anything to learn from the dinosaurs, it's that you better be ready to adapt or die.

You can only control so much.

Sure Gavin Schmidt's publication list is impressive, but the tone of the realclimate.org blog is not. Discussion is not encouraged, and god help you if you ask a question that runs in any way counter to the prevailing opinion. Just like the rest of the internet, really.

My "blathering on" was to make it clear that no one person can have the expertise to review the entire field, but the multidisciplinary nature of the field is largely unacknowledged and contributions from outside the "internationally recognised" climate scientists, or those working in internationally recognised climate research centres are discouraged.

And you didn't provide context. From the quoted article:

The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as ‘virtually certain’ or ‘unequivocal’

Indeed, these are facts, supported by measurements.

he attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established – that is ‘highly likely’ and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion.

This, however, is not a fact. It's a theory, based largely on an assumption of a positive feedback loop in the models.

Whatever Lomborgs background, I find it hilarious that you accuse him of a "do nothing" position. Your own link (the second one) is about geo-fucking-engineering. That is, attempting to modify the planetary climate artificially, in case you don't understand. Hardly "do nothing". He also advocates a cost/benefit analysis of any attempted solution. Makes sense, no? And perhaps his real crime. He's an optimist who thinks we can engineer our way out of the problem.

Did I accuse RC of advocating political solutions? I re-read my post several times and didn't spot it.

"First of all, linking to realclimate.org without providing context is wasting everyone's time."

What the fuck are you talking about? The quote provides the context, the title of the RC article demonstrates it's a strawman.

You like impressive lists? - Here's one...

Gavin Schmidt's publications. ( includes 5 Nature, 2 Science, 7 Geophys. Res. Lett).

All his 50 odd papers are on climate science, M.Mann who founded RC has an even more impresive publication record. You can blather on about what you think is the definition of a climate scientist but Mann and Schmidt are both internationally recognised climate scientists regardless of what you think.

Lomborg's list is a tad less impressive, it consists of a sole publication in a sociology journal. I have no objection to him speculating about "what to do", I have a problem with him distorting science to fit his predefined answer of "do nothing".

While on the subject of "what to do", please point to any RC article that ADVOCATES any particular political solution for reducing emmissions. I've been reading the site for several years and have yet to see one.

"First of all, linking to realclimate.org without providing context is wasting everyone's time."

What the fuck are you talking about? The quote provides the context, the title of the RC article demonstrates it's a strawman.

You like impressive lists? - Here's one...

Gavin Schmidt's publications. ( includes 5 Nature, 2 Science, 7 Geophys. Res. Lett).

All his 50 odd papers are on climate science, M.Mann who founded RC has an even more impresive publication record. You can blather on about what you think is the definition of a climate scientist but Mann and Schmidt are both internationally recognised climate scientists regardless of what you think.

Lomborg's list is a tad less impressive, it consists of a sole publication in a sociology journal. I have no objection to him speculating about "what to do", I have a problem with him distorting science to fit his predefined answer of "do nothing".

While on the subject of "what to do", please point to any RC article that ADVOCATES any particular political solution for reducing emmissions. I've been reading the site for several years and have yet to see one.

I find your citation of ice core data amusing, because in general it doesn't support the AGW thesis.

A common misconception that you need to stop spreading.

try reading this. The link between the rate CO2 increases and the rate temperature increases is clear from the Vostock and other ice cores.

Except that all the data says that CO2 lags temperature. The AGW model requires positive feedback. Historically, the feedbacks have been negative. Why assume a positive feedback loop will occur now?

This is a common misunderstanding. I suggest reading this article on the subject. CO2 is an amplifier (insulator), which is one of the biggest reasons that humans dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is causing acceleration in warming.

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

For the vast majority of the time CO2 and temperature rise together (as is expected when acting as an insulator), only during initial warming does this trend not follow, which is not sufficient to debunk the rest of the warming period. CO2 may not be the trigger but it is the greatest influencing factor over the rate of temperature change.

CO2 levels and other greenhouse gases very tightly correlates with temperatures when examined over the last 400,000 years.

Maybe if the climate "researchers" would open up their methodologies, source code and data, I might be able to understand it.

I doubt you would be able to really understand it but their methodologies are available in the peer reviewed literature they have published and more data and code than you could probably analyze in your life is available from the many links on this page.

"The global warming group is the ones saying that we should not question and waste time debating whether global warming was true or not"

Strawman.

Nope, 85%. Also, this might be the debate she was talking about. I tend to agree with CapitalistImperialistPig: dendrochronology seems kind of spooky. Research involving living matter just strikes me as softer and somehow ickier than "pure" physics like boreholes, ice cores, instrumental records, etc. For instance, the divergence after 1960 makes me uncomfortable, but mainly because I don't know much about it. I also don't know how many cores are "enough" for reliable temperature reconstruction (even aside from all the other considerations), and the thought of taking enough time to try to understand that question makes me shiver. I'm comfortable relegating tree ring data to the status of "supporting evidence" which happens to correlate well (before 1960) with other proxies.

But that's just it, this is part the problem with the whole anti-Global Warming crowd. They keep repeating this line, until people like you repeat it too:

"Give us the programs and data so any high school science student can run the programs and get your results, then let "real" programmers look over the code for stupid mistakes, and real scientists check the data for stupid errors, then we might be on the way to science. All we have right now is "The dog ate my homework"."

Yet the data is available, and always has been, here:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

Sure the CRU's model isn't available but so what?- I believe others are available. The data is there for you to come up with your own conclusions, how many people would even understand the CRU's modelling system that aren't climate scientists themselves and hence part of the so-called conspiracy anyway?

The data is there, I'm just waiting for someone to do an objective study on it to show something contrary to the professional climatologists conclusion from it, yet all we get is this repeating of the myth that the data isn't available. Some data isn't, but most of it is- enough to be able to do peer review and conduct your own counter-studies.

If there was anything coming out of the denier crowd that was useful then great, they might have a stronger case, but right now? They are for the most part just making shit up and using half-stories that ignore the all important context.

I did find an interesting study of the papers written by climate scientists between 1965 and 1979. Seven articles written in that time frame predicted global cooling, forty four predicted global warming and twenty were neutral. It seems the media at the time, not the scientists, were predicting a new ice age.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/03/the-global-cooling-mole/

Real Climate says

So the problem here is not that the IPCC’s glacier experts made an incorrect prediction. The problem is that a WG2 chapter, instead of relying on the proper IPCC projections from their WG1 colleagues, cited an unreliable outside source in one place. Fixing this error involves deleting two sentences on page 493 of the WG2 report.

In other words the climate scientists didn't get the science wrong.

The biggest failure yet discovered was the claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would all melt away by 2035.

Yes, I think it is very, very important to note that the biggest failure found in the IPCC paper was a single wrong number on page 493 of Volume 2.

Skeptics are taking minor errors and trying to blow them up to ridiculous proportion. That error about the Himalayan glaciers is trivial. There is a 45 page section on glacial melting in Volume 1 that is entirely correct and well-sourced, and nobody's paying attention to it. They'd rather focus on a single flawed number.

No report of that size is going to be perfect; there are going to be minor typos and flaws. So far only two legitimate errors have been found. (The other involves bad data on the Netherlands, which was provided by...wait for it...the government of the Netherlands.)

Maybe we can all agree that the IPCC report is 99.999% correct. Then we can get something done.

As I've explained, climate is the global average over at least ~20 years. That's a limitation of modern science; raw data simply isn't dense enough, and not enough decadal oscillations can be simulated precisely enough to meaningfully talk about "climate" on a shorter timescale. Trends of 8-9 years are probably under the noise floor, and (as I explain in that link) it's important to remember that just because CO2 is the most significant forcing, that doesn't mean other forcings are completely insignificant.

Because of this limitation, climatologists primarily use hindcasts through proxy records to validate the models, among other techniques. Making a prediction and then waiting 20 years to see if it comes true isn't practical, so few peer-reviewed papers tend to ask "Hey, what did that model 20 years ago predict?" But these analyses are informally performed and they seem both honest and generally positive to me. You can verify this yourself by downloading the GCM source codes and global temperature data in the sources listed here. Remember to smooth over at least 20 years, and compare the projected emissions used to the actual values. (Most projections give several "scenarios" where CO2 emissions change differently to account for uncertainty in future human behavior.)

As I've explained, climate is the global average over at least ~20 years. That's a limitation of modern science; raw data simply isn't dense enough, and not enough decadal oscillations can be simulated precisely enough to meaningfully talk about "climate" on a shorter timescale. Trends of 8-9 years are probably under the noise floor, and (as I explain in that link) it's important to remember that just because CO2 is the most significant forcing, that doesn't mean other forcings are completely insignificant.

Because of this limitation, climatologists primarily use hindcasts through proxy records to validate the models, among other techniques. Making a prediction and then waiting 20 years to see if it comes true isn't practical, so few peer-reviewed papers tend to ask "Hey, what did that model 20 years ago predict?" But these analyses are informally performed and they seem both honest and generally positive to me. You can verify this yourself by downloading the GCM source codes and global temperature data in the sources listed here. Remember to smooth over at least 20 years, and compare the projected emissions used to the actual values. (Most projections give several "scenarios" where CO2 emissions change differently to account for uncertainty in future human behavior.)

What matters in science is not what someone with a fancy degree says. What matters is what evidence is provided. I have seen a few climatologists say that the Earth is not warming, but I do not accept that statement because the evidence is that the oceans are warming, and the Arctic ice and Antarctic ice are melting. I have seen some people say that human activities are not increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but the Keeling curve and the ratio of carbon isotopes show that the increase is due to burning fossil fuels.

Science is not a matter of he said, she said. It is about evidence. If you have some evidence to back up your claims, providing it would be far more convincing than an appeal to authority.

This is not handwaving away. If you cannot be bothered to read...

As for your last comment, why should the oil companies pay you anything as willful ignorance is so easy to cultivate?

And that's the one thing that continually puzzles me about Slashdot. You would think that a site that actually talks about science would be supportive of the science that's out there. But then there's loads of people like you who find it easier to believe that there's a cabal of scientists who are bending the numbers of their research in order to...what exactly? Fat science grants? Certainly then you've not been exposed to any scientists doing work.

Perhaps it would be better if you saw this which is a list of those who have come forward and said that climate change is real. You may be surprised by the list. I'm not kidding myself though as it is much, much easier to look out the window and make your decisions rather than looking at a bigger picture.

My God, man, did you even bother to do the most basic of fact-checking on the Daily Mail article?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/daily-mangle/

How incredibly embarrassing for you.

Policies are changed one person at a time.

Funny, though, that someone so easily taken in by simplistic propaganda should be asking anyone "do you really believe that." Here's more for your reading pleasure:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/daily-mangle/

It's a direct takedown of your article.

Had you bothered to do the most basic of research and fact-checking on the article you linked, you likely would have been too embarrassed to post it. At least, I'd like to think so. Then again, why let facts get in the way of the agenda, huh?

If you want any respect for your opinions you might want to rethink your use of the Daily Mail as a reference. Their wild accusations and sensationalist reporting are legendary. Here is an excellent rebuttal of the exaggerations in your link:

http://deepclimate.org/2010/01/11/mojib-latif-slams-daily-mail/

And here is a climate scientist's view of the whole "email-gate" affair:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/the-cru-hack/