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http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/bubkes/

"I have yet to see *one* criticism of something in the Carlin paper [snip] if you actually looked at the linked comments paper, it attempts to raise questions. Points to new studies, revised data, etc."

Can you point to *one* paragraph, "new study" or "data revision" in the report that you think is worthwhile debating? - All I can see are the same old arguments and misinformation put out out by the anti-science lobbyists at CEI and other FF think tanks that have been debunked a million times over. Here are a few specific critisisims...

1. He claims that tempratures have been trending downwards for the past 11yrs - this can be debunked by a simple google search and is laughable to anyone who has looked at the temprate records.
2. He blathers on about sunspots and cosmic rays - a theory born from a book by a self-agrandising author and completely unsupported in the litrature, debunked in detail by yours trully here.
3. He complains the last IPCC report is 3 years old and thus out of date. - Fucking nonsense.
4. He claims that the 1998 temprature spike cannot be explained - maybe it's a mystery to him but yet another simple google search shows it's well known that the 1998 spike was due to El Nino.

I stopped there because my head was about to explode. Suffice to say that after skimming what I was sure would be 98 pages of anti-science drivel I no longer think he should be sacked, I think he should be prosecuted for collusion and conspiricy.

"all the more reason to not rush through it to satisfy political whims of the day!"

I'm sorry to say, and mean no disrespect, this is exacly what the psuedo-skeptical slimeballs at CEI want you to think. They lost the technical debate over a decade ago and have been promoting "debate" as a delay tactic ever since. These are the same people who promoted "tabacco scientists" in the eighties and are still recieving funding from Phillip Morris. They are the scum of the earth and I don't find it the least bit "bizzare" that the "slashdot crowd" are calling bullshit on this particular example of Machevelian politics.

He is an ECONOMIST for fuck's sake. That IS relevant.

Regardless, Real Climate looked into this last week. Much detail there, finishing with: "So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at."

The usual "climate skeptic" bollocks. He has nothing new.

"That completely misrepresents the opinion of climatologists."

Ummm, no it doesn't. It's just that you're about 10yrs out of date in the consensus game.

Please refer to the recent climate confrence in Copenhagen (basically an interim IPCC report), the confrence gave six key messages as listed in their report (warning 5mb pdf). Key message #5 was Inaction is inexcusable

The conference was organised by a "star alliance" of research universities: Copenhagen, Yale, Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, Tokyo, Beijing - to name a few. It included 2500 participants from 80 countries and had 1400 scientific presentations.

The folk at Nature have also echoed their sentiments.

True this does not mean "at all cost" but that is a pedantic nitpick rather than a misrepresentation of the consensus opinion on the part of the OP.

Here's some scientists view on the matter. Apparently this report is typical for AGW deniers stuff in every way. You decide:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/bubkes/

Thank you for the post. It's the kind of thing reasonable people can argue about. :-)

if temperatures turn up again before sunspots do, well then I'll take that as quite sufficient disproof. If I was you I wouldn't put any money on that actually happening, but we'll see, won't we?

Sounds like the perfect setup for an InTrade market, yes?

C02 levels track the temperature, not lead it, by an 800-odd year margin.

Well, there are precision problems with that measurement, but there is a lag. All that shows is that CO2 increases proportionally to temperature increases, and amplifies cycles that are already underway. Increasing the CO2 directly, then, will cause a temperature increase just as if the CO2 increase had been bootstrapped by a temperature increase caused by a different mechanism.

water absorbs C02 proportionally to temperature -- you've noticed the recent spate of articles about "ocean acidification" yes? -- and therefore your graph is the expected consequence of oceanic temperature rise

Maybe I'm misinterpreting something, but shouldn't an increase in the ocean's CO2 capacity lead to a decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentration relative to the prior equilibrium?

results of the CERN CLOUD experiments

I'm also looking forward to seeing those results, though I'm not quite as confident as you that a meaningful relationship will be found.

higher temperatures mean more rotting plant material

And as permafrost thaws, the area formerly covered in it becomes a productive biome, which acts as a carbon sink. (Of course, that might be offset by desertification elsewhere, but you're right: either way, it's a second-order effect.)

Unlike AGW theory, this is not inconsistent with any observed data; and none of the theoretical links are controversial except the GCR-cloud link, which we can confidently expect will soon be proven beyond reasonable doubt, unless the entrenched AGW interests manage to defund it through politics.

It's not the effects that are in doubt, but their magnitude. Let's say you're right, and warming episodes are initiated by changes in the solar cycle. Temperature increases, which releases more CO2 --- that CO2 would then lead to additional heat retention (modulo second-order effects) and lead to further CO2 release. Even if we jump-start the process ourselves by directly pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the result will be the same.

Actually, it's not that hard, because artificially raised C02 environments do not show significantly raised heat retention. This indicates that there's much less energy actually available for absorption by C02 to make any difference in the real atmosphere as opposed to idealized physics models.

Everything I've read indicates that CO2 absorbs a significant amount of infrared radiation and that this climate sensitivity is important -- on the order of 3 degrees C for a doubling of CO2. Why would this heating not be important as a positive feedback mechanism?

we plunge into a new Little Ice Age.

If we do, I'll eat my socks. :-) At least we know how to mitigate an ice age better than we know how to mitigate global warming --- we can always just add a little more methane to the atmosphere. But still, it seems to me that the conventional AGW scenario is the better-supported theory today, though your idea seems offer a plausible bootstrap mechanism for climactic cycles.

Nice cut and paste skills for an AC. Of course the text is from Senator Inhofe's discredited Minority report. This is the same senator who introduced an anti-science fiction writer to the US senate as a climate expert. It comes as no surpise to me that Inhofe's pet lobbyists at the CEI are the same people in TFA who are trying to corrupt the process at the EPA.

Here is my own attempt at cut and paste from WP describing the area Inhofe alledegly represents:

"Oklahoma is the nation's second-largest producer of natural gas, fifth-largest producer of crude oil, has the second-greatest number of active drilling rigs,[72] and ranks fifth in crude oil reserves.[73] While the state ranked fifth for installed wind energy capacity in 2005,[74] it is at the bottom of states in usage of renewable energy, with 96 percent of its electricity being generated by non-renewable sources in 2002, including 64 percent from coal and 32 percent from natural gas."

You do realise that friendsofscience is run by Ken Gregory who knows nothing about science, and is not a friend. Anyway, the Carlin paper is full of wingnut claims. For anyone interested, there's some information: here

I wonder how many of these reports on other things (crime, drugs, copyright, etc) have been censored too in order to only give the government's point of view?

I know paranoia is popular on slashdot, and nobody RTFA, however, don't you think it's at least reasonable to judge the EPAs actions on the merits of their arguments?

For what it's worth, some climate scientists wrote a short article on Alan Carlin's paper.

There is, of course, no substitute for reading Carlin's paper yourself, but you need to also read the references, and try to find out more information about the arguments. Then you can judge whether the EPA is just being manipulative

ANYONE with a physics degree can certainly comment on the physics of AGW theory.

Correction - ANYONE can comment on AGW theory.

[flame thrower on]An ecology degree or a degree in meteorology is what you you get when you can't do the math for your physics.[flame thrower off]

That's just funny.

I suspect he was speaking more from his economics degree.

I suspect he's talking from his pocket - part of some astro-turf organisation. Doesn't really matter, since if he has good arguments, they should stand on their own merits. The problem is, his arguments are *terrible*. Not even worth the paper they're written on. To understand that, you have to actually understand the paper and some AGW arguments for and against. Most people are fully capable of doing that.

For what it's worth, the realclimate crowd have written a short article on why the EPA did what they did: Bubkes

Too bad that the folks who wrote the report in question were economists instead of scientists, and the compiled their "data" from anti-global warming websites. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/06/bubkes/#more-691

This has already been addressed at RealClimate. The short answer is that the data on which the analysis rests is questionable, as is the analysis itself. But if all you really want is en excuse to engage in a bit of gratuitous government- or Obama-bashing, then please don't let me stop you.

So how many human civilizations' worth of CO2 and other emissions did that just kick out? ;-)

The comments on the original are to the same tune. What makes anyone think that volcanoes are a significant source of CO2? Where would the CO2 that volcanoes are supposed to emit come from?

Volcanoes do emit some C02, but then, they emit some of just about everything. Their climate effects are mostly reduced atmospheric heat content due to an increase in ash and aerosols in the upper atmosphere. This effect is particularly pronounced for tropical volcanoes because (surprise!) Earth gets most of its sunlight in the tropics, and while the ash/aerosol cloud does spread out over a few months timescale to all latitudes, its effect is greatest at the latitude of the volcano.

"Volcanoes emit far more CO2 than humans" is the equivalent of "Anthropogenic CO2 emissions increase the frequency and severity of hurricanes". The majority of people on both sides in the public debate on climate change have left the science far, far behind, and are happy to believe stuff that "just makes sense" to them.

Here is one of my sources, note that Keppler et al's plant idea has been debunked since that article, meaning that peat is the main source of methane.

RC's opinion on cows is almost an after thought: "Agricultural emission, from rice farming and ruminant animals, is not so easy to quantify either, but we'll leave a description of that to the reader's imagination."

"Seriously", don't pretend you care about the environment by posting anti-science NIMBY twaddle, read some real science.

Don't know if you're being serious here. Once you're reading it, it's no longer "science." You can do science. You can't read it.

"Like a lot of grand plans we do "in the name of science" nobody yet knows what throwing that many turbines up would do ecosystems around the world. It's a lot of energy to be robbing from systems that depend on that energy."

Most of the wind energy in the atmosphere is in the bottom 5,000m, the largest wind turbines are only 100m tall (about as tall as the largest trees which are much more effective at damping SURFACE winds), "robbing" the energy of the wind is the least of our problems. As for birds, modern prop turbines move slowly and kill fewer birds than the same number of high rise buildings with mirrored windows.

"Seriously", don't pretend you care about the environment by posting anti-science NIMBY twaddle, read some real science.

Given that almost ALL of the energy circulating in the oceans originates from the Sun, not the atmosphere, it's interesting that you don't raise an eyebrow at a significantly strong El Nino in 1998. I mean the oceans heat capacity is over 1,000 times that of the atmosphere, so I would suggest you have your cause and effect back to front (I could also say that about temperature preceeding CO2 rise, which is obvious from the record).

Once again, what sort of idiot would assume that the strength of El Nino's and La Nina's influence on the climate hasn't been extensively studied? Seriously! And not just ENSO, but other oscillations, such as the PDO. Even in the deep La Nina's we've been dealing with for the past two years we've been in the top 10 hottest years in recorded history. It's easily removed white noise on top of the signal. Its effects are trivially calculable and it broadcasts itself quite visibly when it happens.

especially loving the arguments from authority

Argument from peer review is not argument from authority. It's argument from science. Try it some time instead of just making sh*t up.

They have a much broader perspective on what we sceptics call, "Natural Variation"

Which you'd be aware has been *extensively* studied, literally thousands of papers, had you actually read the IPCC reports.

It's also interesting to note that the "blatantly obvious signal", is not a signal of anthropogenic climate change, it's a signal of some (very small) increase in temperature, well within the bounds of natural variation.

Far outside the bounds of natural variation. Which again, you'd know if you actually read peer-reviewed science. And the strength of all major forcings for the temperature trends have been well quantified, and the anthropogenic factors are far greater than the natural factors. If you disagree, you've got hundreds of papers to refute, so start busting your arse.

Given that the met office has just installed a computer system that uses around 1.2mw of electricity (enough to power a small town) and that its models failed to predict the temperature trend post 1998 to present day

Actually, it did. I don't have a graph for you starting at 1998, but I have one for you starting at 2002, if you're interested: . I point this out to you to show you that big gray area around the line. See that? That's the 95% confidence interval on their forecasts. See how almost all of this random noise falls within it? The models aren't designed to predict the noise; they're designed to predict the trends. It's like weather forecasting. We can only predict the weather a few days in advance before the "noise" (the weather) becomes dominant. But we can still tell farmers quite accurately whether a certain region will be dryer or wetter than usual and by how much, hotter or cooler than usual and by how much, and so forth. The long range projections can't tell you when an individual front will be passing, but they can quite reliably estimate how many total fronts will cross, how much rain they'll dump, etc. This is known as "convergence". Convergence is a statistically verifiable phenomenon.

The scientifically illiterate deniers, having never actually read a paper on their subject to save their life, often just latch on to the median of the range and act like it's supposed to tell them exactly how hot it's supposed to be at any point in time. Which is ridiculous; that's never going to happen. There's always going to be noise in the signal. But the signal itself will always remain.

The worst about this are people like Monckton who I can only conclude are *deliberately* trying to sow confusion on this by taking a starting point, taking a long-term projection, drawing a line from the start to the end -- *leaving out the curve* -- and then literally making up a fake confidence interval.

If you want to see the forecast confidence i

A) There isn't, that is media driven.

To be fair to the mas-media they just reprint the lobbyists press-releases because conflict makes a good story and the psuedo-skeptics keep inventing new names for their think tanks but most of them can be tracked back to the Heartland Institute. If you remeber the "tabacco scientists" from the 80's you will recognise some of the names (eg: Fred Singer). They are nothing more than proffesional lobbyists in lab coats. That is not to say there are no arguments about the finer details but the idea our emmission can warm the Earth is now over a century old and the National academies of science first warned the US government that it was happening in the 50's.

Yes peer-review is imperfect but I challenge you to find one paper in a reputable journal such as Science or Nature that disputes the much maligned "consesus". As you can see there are nearly 40,000 papers in just those two prestigious journals alone. I realise that's an unfair challenge because it's a daunting task and since the IPCC have already done it I'm pretty sure you won't find anything. I would prefer genuine skeptics (and I think you may be one), read what the editors of (say) Nature think about the problem, talk to some IPCC scientists and look at thier reports.

I also agree it's true that it's possible to be paid by a FF company and still do honest science, however I ask you to be skeptical of people such as Carter who disagree with mainstream science, can't get a paper published on the subject and are paid by think tanks because, those traits put the in the same boat as young earth creationists. I also ask genuine skeptics to do a bit of their own geeky mythbusting before posting psuedo-skeptical drivel to slashdot as anything other than an example of anti-science.

B) The "gap" in opinions exists because one side is driven by lobbyists, the other by science. I agree it's a complex subject and I admit that without some background it can appear to be a simple case of experts who can't agree on basic answers. However that's exactly what the psuedo-skeptics want you to think in order to delay any action that would upset their sponsers. They are a cynical bunch of pricks who know they have lost the science argument, they just want to drag it out as long as it's possible to be paid to do so.

Here is just one example of that kind of political dishonesty.

"We're all going to look back 50 years from now and probably laugh at BOTH sides as more or less equally flawed."

In 50yrs I will either by getting a telegram from the Queen or be dead but I think in the next decade the coal industry are in for the same treatment the tabacoo companies recieved in the 90's. What this proponent of emmission control is saying is let's slow down this uncontrolled experiment on our biosphere and carefully examine how we can replace (or clean up) coal and let's do it with a free market based approach such as cap and trade rather than just another useless tax that allows the rich to pump out as much pollution as they can pay for while the rest of us suffer.

Disclaimer: Politically I describe myself as a "fiscally conservative, science based greenie" but I have not been interested enough to vote since 1978. OTOH I have followed the scientific and political arguments over AGW for almost three decades now and became convinced we have a serious problem when the IPCC released their 1997 resports, I have never seen Gore's movie simply because I knew

A) There isn't, that is media driven.

To be fair to the mas-media they just reprint the lobbyists press-releases because conflict makes a good story and the psuedo-skeptics keep inventing new names for their think tanks but most of them can be tracked back to the Heartland Institute. If you remeber the "tabacco scientists" from the 80's you will recognise some of the names (eg: Fred Singer). They are nothing more than proffesional lobbyists in lab coats. That is not to say there are no arguments about the finer details but the idea our emmission can warm the Earth is now over a century old and the National academies of science first warned the US government that it was happening in the 50's.

Yes peer-review is imperfect but I challenge you to find one paper in a reputable journal such as Science or Nature that disputes the much maligned "consesus". As you can see there are nearly 40,000 papers in just those two prestigious journals alone. I realise that's an unfair challenge because it's a daunting task and since the IPCC have already done it I'm pretty sure you won't find anything. I would prefer genuine skeptics (and I think you may be one), read what the editors of (say) Nature think about the problem, talk to some IPCC scientists and look at thier reports.

I also agree it's true that it's possible to be paid by a FF company and still do honest science, however I ask you to be skeptical of people such as Carter who disagree with mainstream science, can't get a paper published on the subject and are paid by think tanks because, those traits put the in the same boat as young earth creationists. I also ask genuine skeptics to do a bit of their own geeky mythbusting before posting psuedo-skeptical drivel to slashdot as anything other than an example of anti-science.

B) The "gap" in opinions exists because one side is driven by lobbyists, the other by science. I agree it's a complex subject and I admit that without some background it can appear to be a simple case of experts who can't agree on basic answers. However that's exactly what the psuedo-skeptics want you to think in order to delay any action that would upset their sponsers. They are a cynical bunch of pricks who know they have lost the science argument, they just want to drag it out as long as it's possible to be paid to do so.

Here is just one example of that kind of political dishonesty.

"We're all going to look back 50 years from now and probably laugh at BOTH sides as more or less equally flawed."

In 50yrs I will either by getting a telegram from the Queen or be dead but I think in the next decade the coal industry are in for the same treatment the tabacoo companies recieved in the 90's. What this proponent of emmission control is saying is let's slow down this uncontrolled experiment on our biosphere and carefully examine how we can replace (or clean up) coal and let's do it with a free market based approach such as cap and trade rather than just another useless tax that allows the rich to pump out as much pollution as they can pay for while the rest of us suffer.

Disclaimer: Politically I describe myself as a "fiscally conservative, science based greenie" but I have not been interested enough to vote since 1978. OTOH I have followed the scientific and political arguments over AGW for almost three decades now and became convinced we have a serious problem when the IPCC released their 1997 resports, I have never seen Gore's movie simply because I knew

"Regan had a team of science fiction advisers including Larry Niven back in the 80's to help him."

IIRC he also had an astrologer? My beef is with anti-science writers found in the opinion columns of major papers or masqurading as experts to congress.

Sorry, slashcode corrected the link to Gavin Schmidt's blog, which is, of course RealCimate

how come all the climatologists predicting global warming based on man's CO2 emission failed to predict that temperatures would remain steady and fall slightly after 1998

Perhaps because they hadn't included that El Nina of 1997/8 raised temperatures before declining slightly? Eleven of the warmest years recorded were in the past 13 years.

Oh yeah, what is the relationship between the temperature rise on other planets circling our sun and that of Earth?

"Recently, there have been some suggestions that "global warming" has been observed on Mars (e.g. here). These are based on observations of regional change around the South Polar Cap, but seem to have been extended into a "global" change, and used by some to infer an external common mechanism for global warming on Earth and Mars (e.g. here and here). But this is incorrect reasoning and based on faulty understanding of the data."

Falcon

I am not an American but it sure would help if certain American's and their pet lobbyists stopped using psuedo-science and lies to convince small-minded gullible fools that Al Gore has the power and/or charisma to corrupt the members of every major scientific instutution on Earth. I have even had such fools here on slashdot tell me I can't point to the journals Nature or Science when talking about AGW because apparently they too are part of Al Gore's global conspiracy.

Here are some examples of the lies and lobbying I am talking about, Senator Inhofe who's list of desenting scientists, has as much cedibility as the dicovery institute list of scientists that supposedly reject evolution but that has not stopped a large number of slashdotter's from waving it around like a magic wand that somehow makes facts dissapear. Then there is the "Heartland institute" run by one Fred Singer who was also prominent in the tabacco industry's anti-science propoganda. Another site that has raised it's ugly head and that can also be related to the anti-science lobby of the tabacco companies is called IceCap, this site specializes in conflating various regions of ice all over the planet and is incapable of ditingushing the North pole from the south pole. It is run by a guy who is on the payroll at the "Science and Public Policy Institute", who are in turn funded by the "Frontiers of Freedom" which is the lobbting brain fart of yet another (ex) US senator. Wallop and Singer are mates from the tabacco industries anti-science cmapaign, the major contributors to the Frontiers of Freedom include Philip Morris and ExxonMobil.

Yep, these anti-science and anti-environment politicians/CEO's have nothing but good intentions, they publish their propoganda to protect you from "environmental whack jobs" and the scientific community who make ludicrous claims such as smoking causes cancer or that a healthy economy and a healthy environment are not mutually exclusive. They have somehow convinced a large chunk of the US that it's not them who are running scams and lying it's the scientific community under the direction of Al Gore who are the liars and scammers.

"Get real."

How about you get real, pull your head out of the sand and drop the alarmist hyperbole, nobody is putting greenpeace in charge of anything but there is a problem and the anti-enviroment/anti-science rhetoric/popoganda coming from the US over the last decade is what has perverted any attempt at a real solution.

"(Yeah, I know. This will almost certainly get modded down to oblivion by KOSdot mods, probably modded "-1 Troll" but screw it. I've got the karma to burn.)"

I have no idea who KOSdot are and I'm not a fan of greenpeace but I agree that your misguided alarmisim should be moderated into oblivion.

Yep, sample size matters. I agree we needed the sattelite that's now at the bottom of the southern ocean. However we don't need it to be sure our CO2 is a problem, we already have satellites such as MOPITT, GOME, OMI, TES to measure atmospheric gasses/areosols and their distributions, there are at least two gravity probes that yeild data on ice loss plus information that is vital for modeling ocean currents. Add to that highly sensitive altimiters for, snow depth, sea level, etc plus all the run of the mill weather satellites and we have a sizeable armarda of sattelites collecting evidence from space.

There are also litterally millions of sensors spread across the globe in various networks bobbing about in and under the sea, on land, on glaciers, in rivers, in aircraft, weather ballons, rooftops, submarines, ocean liners, etc, we started building and maintaining this massive data set in earnest about 150yrs ago when physicists argued over wether the sun was made of coal or not. Then you have paleotologists who look at dust and gas trapped in ice cores, tree rings, the tickness of sea shells, isotopes in microsopic samples, pollen distribution, the independent lines of evidence are vast and go all the way back to Fourier in the 1820's. To seriously debunk the claim that AGW is the major factor in the observed warming requires extrodinary evidence that is currently only noticable by it's absence.

What we needed the OCO satellite for was to more acurately pinpoint the major changes in emmision sites (NO2 is also a GHG as is Methane). If an international treaty is to be effective this type of data is essential and the more acurate the more certainty there is for business in a future carbon market. If the treaty includes land use issues such as tree planting, highly accurate data will be needed to audit those claims and monitor this experiment we call the industrial revolution.

Personally without such data I think the planting of trees for carbon credits is of dubious value to fixing AGW and ripe for corruption. Trees are valuable in their own right, far better if a farmer got a credit when he plows biochar into the ground. Making and burrying biochar is an efficient carbon negative process that can run on raw sewarge and other waste organic matter, not only does it's sequester the carbon for 1000yrs but will also fertilize the soil and reduce the need for oil based fertilizers. However, even on a massive scale, biochar alone is not enough to counter our current emmissions.

If you haven't read the IPCC reports the best place to start skimming is here, the reports go back nearly two decades and it's interesting to read some of the older ones and compare their warnings to recent events. These people are certainly not infallible but nothing is, they represent the world's scientific institutions and IMHO getting that many experts to agree virtually gaurentees their statements will be qualified, conservative, and backed by a mountain of evidence.

You have have been misinformed.

The NW passage was not suitable for cruise ships in 1906. Besides none of the crossings via a temporary route say anything much about climate.

"Al's famous hockey stick is dirty data taken from weather stations that have experienced heat islands being installed in the form of pavement. Go check out surface data.org. Sometimes one needs to "scrub" the data, and throw out obviously tainted data from a compromised station."

First of all it's Mann et al's hockey stick not Al Gore's, second there is no such "surface data.org" web site, third the source of your half truth is the national academies testimony to the senate which states...

"The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years ....[snip]... We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities." /end_quote

"Remember all the data pointed to a new ice age in 1970, now the same data points to warming..."

No, but I am old enough to remember reading a whole lot of newspaper articles based on one national geographic article that by chance I also read when in HS. I do remember when the negative forcing of soot was offsetting the positive forcing of CO2 more than in is now. Again looking at the national academies, they first warned of global warming in the 50's, nothing has changed in those warnings except the credibility and urgency have increased by orders of magnitute.

"Turns out that just about all dust in antarctic PENINSULA ice record comes from Patagonia." /fixed

Not sure what your point is here because more dust/soot sitting on the ice speeds up the rate of melting, your link correctly states that the dust levels are low right now because the glaciers are MELTING in patagonia?

I'm not sure where you get your information but if I were you I would start to question them since the sources you do give, are now publishing papers that make Al Gore's movie look optimistic.

"No-one gives a shit about warning signs dude."

Perhaps that's because organised astroturfers have conviced many people science doesn't apply to AGW.

The fact that the first hit on a google search for 'icecap "global warming"' is the icecap.us site would indicate your pessimisim is warranted. I actually had someone reply to me the other day who said something like "you don't get to quote Nature and Science as evidence for AGW because they are not statisticians".....sigh.

You mean this data? ... Or this one?

Interestingly, I posted another reply to your parent comment that also included those links. Except, I linked to the main page. I was referring to the figures above the one you directly linked to. Figures A2 and A show the Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change, measured using two different data sets. Uncertainty is indicated by the green bars. Notice the trend in both figures.

The graph you're talking about from 1880 onwards is from this paper, where they specifically state that the warming in the U.S. is known to be smaller than the rest of the world. The reasons for this are not (to my knowledge) completely understood. But the rest of the world have had temperature sensors too, and we've had satellites up for decades which provide the basis for the statement that global temperatures are increasing faster than temperatures in the U.S.

In my opinion, any evidence based on "global temperature" that includes data from more than just recent years should be viewed with scepticism, because our worldwide measurement and calculation techniques have changed dramatically, which likely skews the results in one direction or another.

Figure A (linked to above) is based on this article, which describes adjusting for inhomogeneities in station records and station history adjustments. Sensibly integrating differing datasets is an irritating task, and it's an ongoing process. But it doesn't seem to be a problem climate scientists are ignoring- the techniques for dealing with non-uniform noise characteristics for different data sets are well known.

Furthermore, we don't just have to rely on mechanical recording devices. Tree rings, coral growth rates, borehole measurements and ice core proxies can be used to independently verify the temperature record. They agree to within the limits of experimental uncertainty.

NASA presents data on mean global temperature extending from today back to 1880 as a single line graph with no error bars, which is ridiculous.

Yes, the particular graphs you linked to on that page aren't very detailed. Instead, I suggest the IPCC 4th report. Download chapter 3, open the PDF to page 15 (which is labeled 249) and look at figure 3.6. It includes 5-95% error bars. The trend obtained from the data in figure 3.6 is 0.65 C plus or minus 0.2 C over the period from 1901 to 2005. The report notes that this rate is higher than at any other point since the 11th century.

My point is that arriving at a "mean global temperature" is a very difficult calculation to make.

I wholeheartedly agree. I think scientists should be careful to state the estimated uncertainty in all their statements, and abrupt climate change is no exception. It's just that the error bars are now small enough to rule out the hypotheses "climate change isn't happening" and "climate change is largely natural."

Bah. I'm feeling lazy. link link link

Some of the planets are warming. Some aren't. Some, we aren't sure. Pluto is easily explained by seasonal changes. None of it has anything to do with what's going on on the Earth.

Next question?

If a rise in CO2 follows temperature increase, then CO2 levels are an effect not a cause.

More accurately, it's a positive feedback effect. External factors increased the temperature, which took 600-1000 years to release CO2 from its reservoirs, which then reinforced the warming trend for the next ~4000 years. If you seriously think that CO2 can't warm the planet, I suggest studying the solar spectrum, absorption lines of CO2, and blackbody thermodynamics. If you can somehow show that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, you'll receive a Nobel prize and be able to rewrite basic physics textbooks...

Additionally, if CO2 levels are so high today, but temperatures have barely increased, you have further weakened your position that CO2 is responsible for temperature changes.

My point is that the natural pattern as observed in the ice core proxy data is for the temperature to increase due to Milankovitch cycles. THEN CO2 increases, probably as a result of permafrost melt, etc. That's not what's happening now, though. CO2 has increased before temperatures for the first time in the last half million years.

You have a good nose, without reading your entire link that particular group has become known as the Inhofe 400 (random link that I breifly scanned, I believe the list is also on WP somewhere). It's not the only machevelian stunt the senator has performed wrt AGW.

Your nose is probably sensing phrases in the link such as "these scientists hail from prestigious institutions worldwide" rather than "these scientists represent prestigious institutions worldwide" as is the case with the IPCC. They cannot claim that because most of the institutions who house these people do not agree with them and would come down on them with an army of lawyers to protect their reputation. The fact that they tolerate people such as Dr Ball flies in the face of accusations that there is some sort of conspiracy to repress them.

Not all of the people on the list are hacks, many are simply misrepresented using out of context quotes, like Ray Kurzweil who does not dispute the IPCC consensus but thinks the problem will soon be solved by nanotechnology (exactly how I'm not sure), a few people on the list have also contributed to the IPCC reports. Anyway I will leave it to you to compare what the qualified scientists on the list actually say to Inhofe's cherry-picked quotes.

The Antarctic as a whole is not cooling, but warming with the rest of the world, some data from some places showed it was cooling and of course this was expounded by denialists as proof that warming wasn't global.

see : http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/state-of-antarctica-red-or-blue

The Antarctic's ice is melting much less than the arctic because the antarctic gets a lot of it's coldness from it's altitude (mountains etc), whereas the arctic is just floating ice, and is also adjacent to more land and less water - water stabilises temperature - so this makes the arctic more sensitive to temperature changes. But the edge bits are melting.

I think the ice shelves breaking is more likely to be caused by sea level rise though. Where the sea level cracks the ice off from the land. Which shows the non linear nature of ice melting. We don't just get ice melting linearly with temperature increases, we can get whole chunks breaking off and floating away

Imagine a large thin sheet of ice floating on water that has formed over thousands of years. The ice has formed slowly from immense glacial flows and some snow falling on top, the forces that constrain it are the floatation on the water and the force of gravity, which have been fairly constant during the formation, forcing the ice shelf to form at an elevation where gravity balances it's floatation force.

Suddenly (in ice shelf formation time scales) the sea level changes slightly. The two forces are out of balance, and the ice is bearing load. It breaks.

I made all the above up, have no specific knowledge of ice sheets but hope that it refutes your claim that it is cretinous to think CO2 could cause ice sheets to crack.

CO2 has caused sea level rise which has been accelerating lately : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise

The warming reversed meme can be discarded by your reading this : http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/07/global-trends-and-enso/

If you RTFA it says the ice shelf was mapped in the 1930s and has been constant size until very recently. We also know bits (this big) don't break off every now and then, where every now and then is less than the age of the ice currently in the shelf (which has been measured to be thousands of years old). Otherwise it would have already broken off.

Dude, stop dragging those red-herrings around, they stink.

If by pointing to Mann's reconstruction methods you mean to imply Mann, et al's hockey stick was debunked you are simply wrong...

The statisticians at the National Academies do not agree with you, or should I say their written testimony to the senate doesn't agree with you. Anyway they are probably the best statistical experts you can find in one place and are certainly not alone in their approval of Mann's work. Furthermore the minor problems they did point out were adressed by Mann in a later publication in Science which you can look up yourself, this is how science works, no?

The reason I point to that testimony is because it's the half-truth that many psuedo-skeptical, armchair statistitians base their opinions on, whether you in particular realise that or not is irrelevant.

Quote TFL: "The basic conclusion of the 1999 paper by Dr. Mann and his colleagues was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on icecaps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years
....[snip]...
We also question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities."

Why anyone would waste money and scientists time by having a senate enquiry on one particular graph is beyond me but whatever the reason it has served to further strengthen Mann's arguments.

As for the expert you keep demanding, that's not how science does things. Perhaps the NASA links are weak evidence by your standards because most people just rely on their reputation, but if you think they are wrong the onus is on you to provide evidence to the contrary. No matter how many papers I throw at you supporting NASA, you can continue to troll by demanding an individual expert claim an institutional publication which has nothing to do with the credibility of the evidence.

And since you obviously think you are good at stats why haven't you answered my question? - Under your stated assumptions, what's the probability that Antarctica and/or Greenland is NOT losing ice?

Lots of junk references do not make his post any more real than hand-waving.

If you want some facts:
http://www.realclimate.org/

Why the Hockey stick graph has been proved wrong:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11646-climate-myths-the-hockey-stick-graph-has-been-proven-wrong.html

Come on it's all just so old.

And why bother saying climate change is not man-made if you're denying the climate change in the first place. Silly.

Oh here's 10 myths about climate change debunked:
http://www.sierraclub.ca/national/programs/atmosphere-energy/climate-change/ten-myths.html

If you the same intellectual coward that is promoting the notion that science is politically skewed by politics and money then let's look at the favorite target of these attacks, namely the IPCC.

1. The 2500 scientists do not get paid for the peer-review work they are doing (and btw that's all the IPCC does).

2. The lead chapter authors get "free" plane tickets to go to the "free" confrence rooms and work.

3. The budget is $5-6M/yr and is sourced from 300+ politically diverse nations.

Here are your citations, now STFU with your unoriginal corruption meme.

"There's big money in pushing global warming, too"

I see you are promoting the notion that warnings from science are politically skewed by politics and money, so let's look at the favorite target of these attacks, namely the IPCC.

1. The 2500 scientists do not get paid for the peer-review work they are doing (and btw that's all the IPCC does).

2. The lead chapter authors get "free" plane tickets to go to the "free" confrence rooms and work.

3. The budget is $5-6M/yr and is sourced from 300+ politically diverse nations, most of it is spent on the "perks" in #2 above.

Here are the gory details, now can we drop the unoriginal corruption meme.

debunk Mann's hockey stick

Mod parent informative. Inhofe did indeed invite an anti-science fiction writer to present "scientific" evidence. IMHO Chriton is an excellent author of fiction, meme's that he popularised in his book "State of fear" such as "AGW is a religion" and "scientists are are in it for the grant money", are still common on slashdot.

NAS testimony, Mann's post.

There just isn't a slam-dunk case that is quantitatively convincing

Replying to myself: the closest thing to a slam-dunk case is ocean heat content. See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/06/ocean-heat-content-revisions/ for a discussion of recent work.

"That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked."

The hockey stick has not been debunked, in fact it has been made more robust by a recent follow up paper. If you are genuinely interested in the science as opposed to the politics then I urge you to re-read your own wikipedia link, particularly the first paragraph in the "updates" section.

"That period includes The Little Ice Age, which, among other things, froze out the Viking colony on the West Coast of Greenland as well making it impossible to grow grapes for wine in England. If you're basing your post on the Hockey Stick Graph, you need to be told that it's been repeatedly demonstrated to be an artifact of badly handled data, and thoroughly debunked."

The hockey stick has not been debunked, in fact it has been made more robust by a recent follow up paper. If you are genuinely interested in the science as opposed to the politics then I urge you to re-read your own wikipedia link, particularly the first paragraph in the "updates" section.

Yes, you're right that individual weather events can't be attributed, but then bush fires aren't really weather. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/bushfires-and-climate/langswitch_lang/fr

This must be some previously unknown usage of the term "debunked" to mean "replicated and demonstrated to be robust".

This must be some previously unknown usage of the term "debunked" to mean "replicated and demonstrated to be robust".

The somewhat inaccurately called "Y2k bug" that he is referring was a very specific bug, and has been discussed on slashdot before. Climate change skeptics were making a big thing about some tiny correcting to Nasa's tempatures. The changes effected the temperature curve for the US a tiny but, but was nearly completely negligible for the world. Here is is an article, and a blog entry about it.

That's a great article (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/04/water-vapour-feedback-or-forcing/) though you didn't get to the best part in your post: water vapor is a feedback not a forcing of temperature. I love throwing this article at denialists who crow that water is 20x more potent than CO2. CO2 will accumulate in the air for hundreds of years causing increased warming. H20 of any concentration will come out of the air in about 10 days and reach an equilibrium based on the true temp forcings.

Sure CO2 only makes a small difference, a few percent. But a few percent change in the atmosphere's warming effect is a degree C. Exactly what the IPCC are warning about.

You can read up on some of the science here:

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

It's not difficult and you might find it interesting.

"I'm a working scientist (ok, PhD student), so I read journal articles pretty often."

And how would you read them if your institution did not foot the bill for subscriptions?

"In almost all cases, the only people who actually benefit from access to particular data are a small handful of specialists."

When you amalgamate "almost all cases" you end up with "almost all publications". The rest of your post smacks of elitisim, trivializes scientific curiosity and completely ignores the social and scientific impact of radical improvements in communicating knowledge.

I would have thought working scientists would actually be proud of their work and want to diseminate it to the largest audience possible but in your case I'm obviously mistaken.

"What are we aiming for, the average 1940's temperatures, earlier, later ?

We are not aiming for a specific temprature we are aiming to stop influencing tempratures with our GHG emmisions (ie: stopping our current "climate control" experiment).

To do this we must first calculate how much of our excess GHG can be absorbed by the planet. IIRC this figure works out to be ~3Gt/yr, currently we produce ~10Gt/yr.

"In the end (or even the beginning) the only reasonable thing to do is to keep an eye on the current scientific situation yourself...[snip]...Relying on the mass media for accurate conclusions is stupid at the best of times."

Well said, although I a prefer to make/modify my own conclusions based on available evidence. I have followed the science for at least 25yrs, at first out of interest, then out of disbelief, and now out of concern for my soon to be grand-child. I have found this site to be extremely informative, particularly wrt the paleo-climatology assumptions you are making in your post.

"And we certainly do not know enough to experiment with that [using technology to change climate]. Even if we could do it safely, do we really want to live in a world where commercial interests control whether your region gets rain today, this month, this year ?"

Well no, but that is exactly what the coal industry has been doing for the last 200yrs, albiet in an uncontrolled manner.