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Read the substantiated facts:
  http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/docs/WG1AR4_SPM_Appro ved_05Feb.pdf IPCC science summary v4
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.wunderground.com/education/928.asp links to governmental agencies opinions.
http://www.wunderground.com/education/hoax.asp refutation of unsupportive satellite data:
http://www.wunderground.com/education/stateoffear. asp refutation of M.C's state of fear:

Distribution of EMS produced by our local star:
http://www.tak2000.com/data/planets/solar-rad.gif
or
http://www.eas.slu.edu/People/CEGraves/Eas138/fg02 _18.jpg

The thing that shocks me, as a physicist, is how poisonous these debates are getting.

"Sometimes even papers in highly respected journals fall into the same trap. Friis-Christensen and Lassen (Science, 1991) was a notorious paper that purported to link solar-cycle length (i.e. the time between sucessive sunspot maxima or minima) to surface temperatures that is still quoted widely."

"Notorious" paper?! Why do the realclimate bloggers engage in this name-calling?

Science is supposed to investigate the unknown in ambitious ways. Sometimes it turns out that your findings are wrong or misleading. But that should be expected to happen now and then. It's all part of our gradual increase in understanding. Of course you try to be as correct and complete as is practical, but if we only report findings that we think we understand very well, then our experiments will take ages to complete, and we'll have very little to report anyway.

Better to be a little daring. And if something is wrong, it will surely be corrected sooner or later. That's part of the reason to have a scientific community anyway.

Furthermore, they should welcome attempts to challenge or refine climate models. In physics, we spend a lot of time testing relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmological models, etc. to see if we can get them to fail. Nobody says "Oh, you can't trust him! He's a dark energy denier!"

It is important to fight fraud, but this is best done by trying to reproduce results, not by casting aspersions on someone's character or motivations.

"....it makes it worth at least looking at his claim"

It has been looked at, and will definitely be "looked at" again iff someone were to come up with a new idea.

There may be a correlation, but that doesn't mean that there's a cause-effect relationship between CO2 levels and temperature. I've seen it argued that due to things like the 800 year lag, it's unlikely, at least for the first 800 years of the cycle, that CO2 *causes* the temperature increase, and in fact in previous cycles it's probably been the other way around. One theory I read was that with increased temperature the oceans lose their ability to trap CO2 so it gets released into the atmosphere. (Note that the first link I gave above explains why high CO2 levels may still be a problem despite this). Anyway, all I wanted to say was that the relationship is no doubt many times more complex than Al Gore and some other alarmists would have you believe. P.S. I think it's worth pointing out that I'm not a supporter of big-oil or corporate interests or anything like that. I'm only interested in having the full story told. Regardless of the debate I'm still doing everything in my power to reduce my personal contribution to CO2 emissions because I'd rather not take any chances with this planet that we call home. I'd love for it to still be able to support a diversity of life for many years into the future.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005 /07/the-lure-of-solar-forcing/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004 /12/recent-warming-but-no-trend-in-galactic-cosmic -rays/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /10/how-not-to-attribute-climate-change/

The notion that professional climate scientists have ignored solar forcing in estimating climate sensitivity is 100% false, and by now repeating it is slander.

By no means whatsoever have actual climatologists "forgotten" about the Sun since the earliest days of global warming studies in the 1960's and further. Of course popularizations ignore all the complexities but that's what they do.

The fact remains that by the best known observations and theory there is no way to explain the current observations WITHOUT major to dominant human greenhouse gas forcing.

  There is no trend in solar activity observed or predicted which either explains recent past observations or will in any way nullify the clear and significant effect from greenhouse gas forcing. That depends on very predictable laws of physics, not statistical correlations.

And if the Sun does happen to be in an upswing in output, then that will just make the climate change we are causing that much worse. Since the upper extremes of events and risks are the greatest danger, any uncertainty in solar forcing adds to the variance in future forecasts, and not the mean. This means that doing something about the thing we can do something about is ever more urgent.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005 /07/the-lure-of-solar-forcing/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004 /12/recent-warming-but-no-trend-in-galactic-cosmic -rays/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /10/how-not-to-attribute-climate-change/

The notion that professional climate scientists have ignored solar forcing in estimating climate sensitivity is 100% false, and by now repeating it is slander.

By no means whatsoever have actual climatologists "forgotten" about the Sun since the earliest days of global warming studies in the 1960's and further. Of course popularizations ignore all the complexities but that's what they do.

The fact remains that by the best known observations and theory there is no way to explain the current observations WITHOUT major to dominant human greenhouse gas forcing.

  There is no trend in solar activity observed or predicted which either explains recent past observations or will in any way nullify the clear and significant effect from greenhouse gas forcing. That depends on very predictable laws of physics, not statistical correlations.

And if the Sun does happen to be in an upswing in output, then that will just make the climate change we are causing that much worse. Since the upper extremes of events and risks are the greatest danger, any uncertainty in solar forcing adds to the variance in future forecasts, and not the mean. This means that doing something about the thing we can do something about is ever more urgent.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005 /07/the-lure-of-solar-forcing/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004 /12/recent-warming-but-no-trend-in-galactic-cosmic -rays/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /10/how-not-to-attribute-climate-change/

The notion that professional climate scientists have ignored solar forcing in estimating climate sensitivity is 100% false, and by now repeating it is slander.

By no means whatsoever have actual climatologists "forgotten" about the Sun since the earliest days of global warming studies in the 1960's and further. Of course popularizations ignore all the complexities but that's what they do.

The fact remains that by the best known observations and theory there is no way to explain the current observations WITHOUT major to dominant human greenhouse gas forcing.

  There is no trend in solar activity observed or predicted which either explains recent past observations or will in any way nullify the clear and significant effect from greenhouse gas forcing. That depends on very predictable laws of physics, not statistical correlations.

And if the Sun does happen to be in an upswing in output, then that will just make the climate change we are causing that much worse. Since the upper extremes of events and risks are the greatest danger, any uncertainty in solar forcing adds to the variance in future forecasts, and not the mean. This means that doing something about the thing we can do something about is ever more urgent.

Because of that, I get very worried when I see people trying to interdict scientific debate using moral, and utterly politically loaded statements to discredit everyone that holds a theory that contradict his/her particular view.

I haven't read every paper ever published on GW in the last 20 years, but in the few dozens I have, I've nerver come across "moral and utterly political statements" to discredit anyone in any of them. So I can't see that you get that in the scientific debate. However, once you step out of the purely scientific debate, (and I would not count even a scientifically informed blog such as Real Climate as part of the scientific debate), you seem to hear little else. You, yourself don't seem to be immune from this.

It's sort of true: what's being referred to is the phenomenon of polar amplification. It means that cold places, on average, increase in temperature more than warm places. However, that is merely an average, and greater or less warming than average can take place in different regions. Also, it doesn't mean that warm places don't get hot, just that cold places tend to see more temperature increase.

I am somewhat impressed at how you've managed to continue this argument with someone so completely ignorant and unwilling to provide any evidence to back up his ridiculous claims. I salute you. A few matters of fact, however. At one point in your debate with hackus you said:

Greenhouse gas sources in the oceans are relevant to predicting climate change in the future, to estimate how much gas the oceans may source or sink.

I'll grant you that at some level that's true, but I'm not sure why you say "source or sink", when it seems pretty clear that it's all sink. I.e., the oceans have been absorbing significant amounts of CO2, resulting in a decrease in the pH (i.e., becoming more acidic) due to the reaction H2O + CO2 => H2CO3 (carbonic acid). I suppose what you might be thinking about is sometime in the future, after we've hopefully stopped dumping CO2 into the atmosphere, the oceans will slowly begin to become a source of CO2, instead of a sink, in an attempt to reach partial pressure equilibrium.

Secondly, your argument about the solar output not having had a measurable impact on past climates might not be right. That said, your point that it's largely irrelevant to the current argument is right.

I think many people see EXM for what they are but don't recognise the individual fud generating components. On the surface the reward sounds like a good idea BUT it is cherry picking based on the biggest purse. For example: A corporation want's approval for large project X in community Y, any independent assesments of the merits of project X would have to rely on "reward" science as background and the biggest pile of that science would have been cherry picked by the biggest purse (ie:corporations). Philosophically it's a "seperation of powers" type issue, rigging jury selection if you like that analogy better, whatever you want to call it, it should be avoided.

Having said that, the practcal implementation of science (ie: technology) benifits greatly from rewards. What is needed now (and for the past 10yrs) is policy and regulation to steer global technology and economic models (ie: the market) towards sustainability. Sustainability must become a central theme in global economics, but it probably won't until the west abruptly runs short of personal comforts, if we wait until we have a crap economy we are definitely screwed, the illusion of "the economy" falls away and we have no "money" to stop everything from turning to a steming pile of shit.

To those who don't support "steering the market", does that include scrapping the reserve bank, the FDA, HAZMAT authorities, ect or is there something fundementally different about coal and to a lesser extent oil?

"I guess I'll go read the new report and see if it says anything new."

Please do, or at least look at the pictures and think agriculture.

"From where I stand though, it looks like both sides are playing fast and loose with the science to date."

Regular readers of RealClimate will have no surprises.

All opinions should be seriously considered, without trying to second guess motivation. If a scientist, paid or unpaid, uses bad science to publish something, he will be caught in peer review.

The problem is that these people aren't "publishing" in peer-reviewed journals. They're "publishing" on the web and then their unscientific opinions are paraded in front of the ignorant as if they have any merit. Try explaining to the typical citizen why "timecube" is hogwash.

His name will be worthless afterward.

So, do you agree then that afterward, his opinions should not be as seriously considered? Most of these scientists have already been "caught" in "peer review". For example, the work by McIntyre and McKitrick has been discredited by Rutherford et al. (Don't be thrown off by the realclimate URL - that link is to a PDF of the article they published in the Journal of Climate. Also note that M&M's original article was rejected by Nature, so they published it in Geophysical Research Letters. Not exactly apropos.)

You can't claim victory when you've made very deliberate predictions that temperatures will go up, and then refine those predictions (still going up but in a narrower range), if temperatures actually go down.

Let me draw a parallel: Sulfate aerosols. Twenty years ago... BAD! Spend five billion dollars on a five million dollar problem by requiring major changes to industry by amending the clean air act. Now, twenty years later, the same environmental crowd that fought against sulfates so vigorously tell us sulfate aerosols are keeping global temperatures down and should be intentionally put into the atmosphere. Keep in mind, they don't want to lift clean air act restrictions. They want to spend more money (pocket more grants) seeding it with jet airplanes, balloons and artillery cannons... I still haven't heard how this is supposed to avoid the production of acid rain, but there it is, staring you in the face. Twenty years ago, you would have told me to stuff my sulfate conspiracy theories too, I suppose.

So you say a temperature switcheroo in a few decades is impossible? Suppose they just throw up a two or three page "debunking" over at realclimate and continue on their merry way. Would that pass your sniff test? They are simply trying to scare up power and support, just like George W Bush does with the terrorism rhetoric. Remember, the whole sulfate aerosol business started in 1995 when the IPCC's prediction of 1.3C-2.3C temperature increase only turned out to be about a 0.5C increase.

By 1995, in its second full assessment of climate change, the IPCC admitted the validity of the critics' position: `When increases in greenhouse gases only are taken into account, most climate models produce a greater mean warming than has been observed to date, unless a lower climate sensitivity to the greenhouse effect is used. There is growing evidences that increases in sulfate aerosols are partially counteracting the warming due to increases in greenhouse gases.'

Let me translate this statement. It means either it is not going to warm up as much as we said it would or something is hiding the warming. I predict that every attempt will be made to demonstrate the latter before admitting that the former is true.

Source: Testimony of Dr. Patrick J Michaels before the 105th US Congress, 1997

Following the funding >> climate-alarmism logic, then Lindzen must be an alarmist, for I believe he receives federal funding for his research.

Work reported here was done cooperatively with E. Schneider, C. Giannitsis, and D. Kirk-Davidoff. This work was supported by Grant 914441-ATM from the National Science Foundation and GrIant NAGW 525 from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Ten percent of this research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Institute of Global Environmental Change (NIGEC) through the NIGEC Northeast Regional Center at Harvard University (Department of Energy Cooperative Agreement DE-FC03-90ER61010) and through the Computer Hardware, Advanced Mathematics and Model Physics program. Financial support does not constitute an endorsement by the Department of Energy of the views expressed in this article.

So, yes. You can dissent and still be funded by the government. (To be fair, he's only dissenting with the "alarmism", and not the general science.)

I'm too tired to Google so I'll grant you the numbers as you don't seem the type to make stuff up.

Here's a short article that discusses it. I hate to have anyone trust me, because although I'm not the type to just make stuff up, I am the type that sometimes gets things wrong. :) For example, it's the C13/C12 ratio, not the C13/C14 ratio.

Are the higher CO2 levels caused by SUV's and private planes, or the shrinking of the rain forests around the world? Either way, what can we do?

Well, the two issues are related and somewhat difficult to separate. See, the C13/C14 ratios I was talking about tell you the ratio of CO2 gases in the air that came from fossil fuels. However, one might argue that those fossil fuels stay in the atmosphere longer because of the shrinking rain forests. The short answer is: (1) Stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere (or at least stop dumping as much), and (2) Stop cutting down trees in the rain forest. (This is a "global" you, of course. I suspect that you, personally, have cut down very few trees in the rain forest. Not more than 1 or 2 dozen, I'd wager.)

Since water vapor is a much more effective green house gas than CO2, won't ideas like fuel cells, which have water vapor as exhaust, make the problem worse?

Not really. Water, unlike CO2, saturates quite readily in our atmosphere. Then, it rains. (When's the last time you remember it "raining" (or even sublimating) CO2?) You can't add more water to the atmosphere without warming the atmosphere first. Of course, I assume you see the feedback inherent in that system. As we heat the atmosphere, it can (and will) hold more water - thus allowing it to hold more water. Luckily, it's a limited (i.e., sublinear) feedback, so it won't "tip", like some alarmists might claim.

Won't more CO2 be beneficial to plant life around the world, causing more plants to grow... thus releasing more O2 and balancing things back out.

Some plants will benefit from increased CO2, and others will not. Most will. The net effect is, in fact, expected to generate a negative feedback. Just like with the water vapor I mentioned in my previous paragraph, it's also sublinear. (Here's an interesting article on what might happen with some of our food crops. Yes, there's a lot of speculation, but it is interesting.)

I'm not saying that'll happen, but who knows? I guess no one does for sure, which is why I don't want to trade my Toyota in for a bicycle just yet!

See, here's my problem. It's easy for us (as humans) to go from "I don't understand" to "no one understands". And, yes, no one can be 100% sure. However, people who have spent their full time career understanding what will happen should be given some deference here. Granted, trading in your Toyota for a bicycle won't fix the problem - largely because you're only one individual. This is a problem that needs to be tackled collectively. (Ayn Rand fans might attack me here.)

Here's the thing, though. (And I know far less about economics than I do about climatology. At least with climatology, I can fall back on my physics background which is at least somewhat relevant.) When one person decides to ride his bike to work, it's a huge sacrifice. One reason is that our society is not built around such an idea. If you ride you bike on ordinary roads, people driving their cars will get upset with you for clogging up traffic. In fact, by clogging up traffic you might actually be making things worse. Personally, I walk to work - but that's because I can. Charlottesville (not suprisingly) is much more friendly towards pedestrians (and bike riders - although there are still many places where riding a bike in C'ville is not recommended). Anyways, my

RealClimate has an in-depth discussion of the Usoskin et al. paper (as well as a link to the original PDF), if you're interested. The comments are often as good as the original article on RealClimate. Here's a relevant excerpt from the original article:

Regardless of any discussion about solar irradiance in past centuries, the sunspot record and neutron monitor data (which can be compared with radionuclide records) show that solar activity has not increased since the 1950s and is therefore unlikely to be able to explain the recent warming.

Here are a few interesting points that might or might not be discussed at that site: (a) We've currently just passed through a solar minimum (in the 11-year cycle), yet we are still setting record highs. (b) Around 1957 maximum we were in a local minimum of temperatures. This is best explained by the presence of particulates in the atmosphere due to pollution problems.

Pssst!.... don't tell anyone but none of them ever had irrefutable proof.

I think Pasteur had pretty irrefutable proof. They had microscopes. They knew what caused the problem. All he had to do was convince religious freaks that bacteria didn't spontaneously appear out of nowhere by an act of God. But if you feel bacteria spontaneously generate themselves out of nothing but component pieces, feel free to drink unpasteurized milk and scoff at the rest of us for being just as susceptible to disease as yourself.

I don't think science is what you seem to think it is.

I guess that all depends on whether or not you classify global warming as science. GP is simply asking for a bit more than speculation before making trillion dollar policy decisions. I don't think that is too much to ask. Climate scientists claim CO2 is one of the primary drivers of "global warming." Yet, CO2 was an order of magnitude higher 450 million years ago and temperatures were roughly the same as they are today. CO2 concentrations are about 20% higher today than they have been any time in the last 400,000 years yet drastic temperature increases have not followed suit. In the mid 90's, Dr. Patrick Michaels called bullshit in front of Congress when predictions of higher temperatures made by computer models did not materialize. After wiping the egg from their faces, "climate scientists" once again were eating humble pie when computer models that generated gloom and doom "hockey stick" graphs were shown to spit out hockey sticks with random input by people who were not climate scientists.

Given that brief synopsis, I can see a person might be skeptical. Especially when the people predicting the end of the world are asking for taxpayer dollars to do it.

Please note how the author quote lots of scientists reporting measurements, but all of the rampant speculation is being done by the journalist himself. Its pretty common for journalists with deadlines to spice up any science story with unsubstantiated speculation from scientists being interviewed over the phone. 10 years ago the genome project was about to give us genetic perfection, twenty years ago everybody was about to cure AIDS, the 1970's it was all moon bases, and the 1960's had Nuclear Power about to make electricity too cheap to meter.

But if you look away from the journalists output and to the published papers on the subject, we find .... zip, nada, diddly squat.

Peter Gwynne appears to have been still writing in 2000, maybe you could write and ask him his opinion.

More at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /10/global-cooling-again/

At first, I thought, hey, maybe you're just misguided. Maybe you are. However, here's the problem with that theory. You've taken the time to get a lot of different links together and post them here. That suggests that you're capable of doing decent searches. Therefore, you should already know what's wrong with your claims. Now, just to answer your objections (so you don't claim I'm "avoiding" the "facts"):

I wonder where are the studies published in scientific journals by climatologists which support these claims.

While solar variations certainly have influenced the climate in the past, including recently, they simply have not been large enough to explain the majority of warming the Earth has experienced in recent decades. (See Stott et al. (2003), among others.) In what must be an incredible coincidence, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased with timing, rate, and magnitude that do agree with the observed warming. (Some commentary by climatologists on Singer and Avery's claims here.)

As for cosmic rays, their effect on cloud formation is still not well understood, but regardless of their effect, cosmic ray flux is not well correlated with climate change (see, e.g., here), so it does not seem reasonable to attribute the recent rapid warming to cosmic rays to any large extent. (Especially, again, given the amount of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere; anyone who wants to postulate an alternative mechanism for warming has to also introduce a lot of of extra cooling mechanisms to explain why the GHGs aren't warming the planet as much as thermodynamics predicts.)

I wonder where are the studies published in scientific journals by climatologists which support these claims.

While solar variations certainly have influenced the climate in the past, including recently, they simply have not been large enough to explain the majority of warming the Earth has experienced in recent decades. (See Stott et al. (2003), among others.) In what must be an incredible coincidence, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased with timing, rate, and magnitude that do agree with the observed warming. (Some commentary by climatologists on Singer and Avery's claims here.)

As for cosmic rays, their effect on cloud formation is still not well understood, but regardless of their effect, cosmic ray flux is not well correlated with climate change (see, e.g., here), so it does not seem reasonable to attribute the recent rapid warming to cosmic rays to any large extent. (Especially, again, given the amount of greenhouse gases now in the atmosphere; anyone who wants to postulate an alternative mechanism for warming has to also introduce a lot of of extra cooling mechanisms to explain why the GHGs aren't warming the planet as much as thermodynamics predicts.)

That's been debunked pretty thoroughly, see e.g. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192.

Firstly of course, we have several satellites monitoring the Sun constantly, and its activity has been declining in recent years, as it goes towards the minimum of its well-known 11-year cycle (the article is from 2005, I guess it's probably reached by now).

As for the Mars ice cap, see the article; it gives many reasons why it is wrong to consider this 3-year regional change to be an indication of global warming on Mars. It's not special. The article concludes:

Thus inferring global warming from a 3 Martian year regional trend is unwarranted. The observed regional changes in south polar ice cover are almost certainly due to a regional climate transition, not a global phenomenon, and are demonstrably unrelated to external forcing. There is a slight irony in people rushing to claim that the glacier changes on Mars are a sure sign of global warming, while not being swayed by the much more persuasive analogous phenomena here on Earth...

Though "paid liar" may be the most charitable thing I could call you.

If we'd listened to that butterfly collector back in the early 70s, we'd have put lamp black across the north and exacerbated whatever situation we seem to now be finding ourselves.

Except that we never saw any hint of an imminent ice age. Advancing glaciers, later spring thaws... none of these things showed themselves.

We see all the signs of global warming, from temperature anomalies to the northward shift of plant hardiness zones. It's the difference between a theory having no basis, and a theory being irrefutably correct in the basics. This debate is exactly analogous to the scientific issues vs. political controversy over evolution: the scientists are talking about selection mechanisms and evidence of gene co-option, and the pols are listening to the cranks demanding that the science classroom discussions include "GODDIDIT".

Your role in this is to be an extra in the mob of cranks.

The current manmade global warming stuff is also a media driven thing - this time with some 'scientists' jumping on board the gravy train.

The cooling and contraction of the stratosphere is not a media-driven thing. It is a greenhouse-gas driven thing, as more and more IR radiation is filtered out of the windows where the gases of the stratosphere can absorb them. You might note that this is itself absolute proof that the surface warming is not driven by the sun; greater solar input would warm the stratosphere, not cool it.

And this rhetoric is typical of you propagandists. It's always "gravy trains" and "alarmist industries", without the slightest attention to the evidence. Evidence is the difference between alarmism and warning of a real threat, and it's the evidence that you cannot debate or even allow yourself to look at.

I guess that makes you an amateur and a true believer who knows even less than the professional you attacked at the beginning of your post. Knowing that which is incorrect is paramount to knowing less than nothing.

While you have been relentlessly attacking me for several posts (without linking to, or even mentioning, a single verifiable fact - for reasons which are no mystery anymore) you have never named the professional I allegedly attacked. Well, you won't find anyone named, or even referred to, in it. To borrow a phrase, it appears that every word you've written is a lie, including "and" and "the".

(aside before I end this: even Robert Zubrin is with me on the merits of hydrogen. He has a strong record in aerospace research; all you have is bald assertion.)

Let's talk about consequences here. If the scientific models are wrong but we act on them anyway, we might lose GDP equivalent to a small recession. Or we might show overall gains; most anti-GW measures are "no regrets" actions which have benefits beyond climate, such as reduced pollution and consequent improved public health. The march of technology makes this outcome highly likely - and it's the GW denialists (such as TXU) who want to build dozens of poorly-scrubbed coal plants which will dump particulates in the air and mercury in the food chain.

If the scientific models are right and we fail to act on them, we will lose GDP equivalent to a major global recession. We will also lose coastal cities around the world, and entire ecosystems along with millions of species. We'll lose all the fertile land in the world's river deltas which winds up under salt water. And the billions of people who lived on that l

You really, really don't sound like the sort of person who could get a "peer reviewed paper" published on climate change.

You don't seem to understand the chaos theory you rely on, especially the difference between predicting small-scale events and long-term trends. The difference between weather and climate has been beaten to death in this forum, so I'll just limit my commentary to stating that your demand for a good thirty day forecast strikes me as irrelevant.

You say that climate is always changing, and that's true. But you're only arguing against a rather naive and simplistic view that the environment is entirely static, which no informed person on any side of the global warming debate shares (read: strawman). Having said that, it's clear that we've had about ten thousand years of relative stability, followed by a century of abrupt warming that coincides with mankind pumping billions of tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. While certainly there is such a thing as coincidence, no alternative explanation can compete with the anthropogenic theory. Solar forcing is often proposed, but it only manages to account for a small fraction of the total.

Scientists know full well that they're dealing with a chaotic system when they're looking at the climate. But the climate has been reasonably stable over recent history, and that stability has been very good for human activity. Chaotic systems often fall into regions of stability, but they can be knocked out by external influences (say, pouring billions of tons of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere). So if we know nothing else about the climate (as you want to lead us to believe) that only leads us to conclude that we're better off not messing with it so brazenly, because we don't know where it will end up or how easy it will be to adapt to the new conditions.

You want to convince us that "real science" doesn't do consensus, and that the media has been painting a false picture of emerging scientific agreement. I would argue the opposite: that the consensus among active researchers is far stronger than the media usually portrays. Two things are happening here. First, the media both loves controversy and hates appearing one-sided, so if journalists believe that there might be two sides to the issue, they usually try to at least pay lip service to both. Second, entrenched industrial interests take advantage of this by paying a small, incestuous group of climate skeptics and policy organizations to cast doubt on the reality of global warming, its human origins, and the need to take political action to counter it.

In short, I would be unsurprised if 95% of the scientists actively doing climate research believed in the reality of anthropogenic global warming, and I would be skeptical of claims of robust disagreement. Industry forces have certainly tried to manufacture the illusion of deep disagreement in the past.

"But I try not to let my druthers make me stupid. I do not go assigning blame for things I don't like to bad things that are happening without some sort of evidence that they are actually causal."

From the horse's mouth.

"You may be the center of your universe, but that doesn't imply that you are the center of the universe."

There is no reason to behave like a jerk simply because everything is utimately pointless. If everone decided to "go bush" tommorow, the "bush" would be a desert filled with rotting corpses and starving people within three months.

If they expect science to prove that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is true, then yes, they misunderstand science, because science cannot do this.

Pretty much, although the process is rarely that simple. (Not only do you have to make sure the new observations aren't themselves erroneous, but often there are multiple competing theories that the new observations affect.)

True science is actually pretty exciting stuff, but it's not for the faint-hearted. A theory of yours that you've relied on for half of your life could be shattered beyond reconciliation by some dork on the other side of the planet that you've never even heard of. Such is the life of a scientist.

For the record, I am not a climatologist, which is why I listen to what people who are climatologists are saying. In a nutshell, this is what they are saying:

• Although there is much we still do not understand, the theory of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has currently withstood all serious attempts to disprove it.
• There currently is no competing theory that better fits the available data. (The case for solar forcing, which seems to be a popular in mainstream media right now, is currently quite weak.)

This is why the vast majority of climate scientists believe that the theory of AGW is correct—in fact, most climate scientists are spending their time trying to figure out what the effects of AGW will be.

If they expect science to prove that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is true, then yes, they misunderstand science, because science cannot do this.

Pretty much, although the process is rarely that simple. (Not only do you have to make sure the new observations aren't themselves erroneous, but often there are multiple competing theories that the new observations affect.)

True science is actually pretty exciting stuff, but it's not for the faint-hearted. A theory of yours that you've relied on for half of your life could be shattered beyond reconciliation by some dork on the other side of the planet that you've never even heard of. Such is the life of a scientist.

For the record, I am not a climatologist, which is why I listen to what people who are climatologists are saying. In a nutshell, this is what they are saying:

• Although there is much we still do not understand, the theory of AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has currently withstood all serious attempts to disprove it.
• There currently is no competing theory that better fits the available data. (The case for solar forcing, which seems to be a popular in mainstream media right now, is currently quite weak.)

This is why the vast majority of climate scientists believe that the theory of AGW is correct—in fact, most climate scientists are spending their time trying to figure out what the effects of AGW will be.

"My argument is that you can't take fuzzy data, drill it out to 5 decimal points, and suddenly claim it's precise data because your computer model goes out to that many significant digits."

If that's your argument you just lost. Ask the boys at NASA who planned the trajectory of the Cassini probe. The "three body problem" has no anylitical solution, they have a computer that takes "fuzzy data" and iterates it over physical laws expressed as non-linear equations. Their approximation to reality spat out an optimal solution that shot Cassini through the gaps in the rings of Saturn, twice!

In short your argument is that an entire branch of mathematics is fundementally flawed, or maybe you mean the branch called statistics is fundemntally flawed since by your assertion it cannot cope with "bias" and "fuzzy data".

So wich branch of mathematics is fundementally flawed, or is it just maths and physics in general that is flawed?

What makes you think you were practicing skepticisim

"AND THIS IS WHAT MANY GLOBAL WARMING PUNDITS ARE CLAIMING"

This shouting about the "hottest year in X tousand years", do you have a source where someone is claiming that as fact? My regular source only talks about "the hottest year(s) on record", ie: ~100-150yrs. They are all bunched up in the last decade, that is if you belive in statistics and error bars?

"the general process for estimating that the global mean temperature is 1 degree higher than it was 10,000 years ago"

We are certain it's one degree higher than it was 100yrs ago, no need to go back to the dawn of civilization unless you are interested in what has occured in the distant past (paleoclimate). Of course paloclimate is less certain about some things than we are about recent conditions. However, it is very certain the current rate of change has not been seen by homo-sapiens. It's also very certain that the northern ice cap is much older than the human race and it is unreasonable to assert it is not currently dissaperaing at a geologically rapid rate.

Your objections to the assertions of paleoclimatologists are well thought out, but they overestimate the mixing of N/S climate and underestimate the strength given to the argument by diverse proxies arriving at the same answer. But still you are correct in asserting that the further back in time one goes the less certain the reconstructions. Diverse proxies go back a few millenia, after that the field narrows as proxies such as tree rings, agriculture and the written word no longer have wide coverage.

You are entitled to your political view, but very few people outside the US see carbon trading as some sort of communist plot to destroy the US or any other economy. It used to be the same here in Australia but there has now been a remarkable political "greening", this stunning shift in attitute has come from conservatives and is reflected in ordinary people. It has come about for two reasons, the first is our trully bizzare weather. The second is our prime minister and GWB got together last year and decided to try and stitch up the economics of the nuclear fuel cycle (ref: Indian nuke deal). Whatever their motives, I welcome my government's sudden enthusiasim. As for the US, I suspect that NASA's "remote sensing capacity" vs "man on mars" dilema will be used as a "bargaining chip" for future GHG negotiations (between now and 2012). I have no illusions, Kyoto was a miserable failure in many respects, but it has clearly been an extremely valuable instrument for focusing political and scientific attention on what I, and literally billions of others consider a "clear and present danger".

"carbon sequestering and increasing atmospheric albedo".

I'm sorry but this is just vapourware from the coal industry (and my government), coal would be the temporary lossers of any change in GHG politics, not the entire "US economy". I won't bother pointing out the hunders of billions in indirect costs associated with oil imports as the neo-cons seem to have worked that one out themselves and also oil is a much more intractable problem it would best if oil was used for fertilizer and plastics but replacing gas for personal transport is still a very optimistic decade or two away. A car has a life of 10-15yrs, a power station has a life of 30+yrs and there is one power station for every million cars or so. I agree it is good to work on cleaning up coal, but coal is also the softest target for regulation and/or taxation.

As an historical analogy, it is instructive to look up Edison's political and court battles with the encumbent gas companies who provided street lighting at the begining of the 20th century. Edison of course did more than invent a light bulb, he invented the now encumbent electricty generating and transmition industry to power his bulbs. A very important point to notice is that the gas and the electricity industries are now both major drivers of "the economy". Edison ensured a more stable economy through disversification of energy supply. The time has come for one or more economic "drivers" to ask for directions from their passengers, then again, Blair is still up the back of the bus waving a map at George.

"Carbon sequestering" - I

There is no proof that humans are causing the current warming trend.

Yet another victim of the weatherman's bullshit, they must be stopped. /sarcasm

"You suggest that expressing skepticism is incompetence."

No, and that burning smell is your strawman going up in flames.

I suggest: Willfully expressing profound ignorance of a realted field of expertise and repeatedly passing it off to the public as an authorative scientific statement after being corrected by one's peers IS by definition incompetence, but you can assume mallice if you like.

And as I said from the very start this is not about censorship it's about misinformation. Ironically it now appears that TFA is actually a politicaly inspired character assasination. So far from defending science against "censorship" it would appear that you are unwittingly aiding a certain politician's personal crusade to "dismantle the scientific method".

I could care less if the weatherman says "everyone knows the moon is made of cheese", since it's obvious he is joking. Nor do I object if he presents his personal opinions as personal and as opinions. And if you dig a bit deeper you will find that the scientist is not suggesting skeptsism be censored from science, she is suggesting AMS members be held to proffessional standards of behaviour and ethics.

Disclaimer: "Why is it so?" is a question that has stuck with me since watching the originals in the 60's. Here is my definition of skepticisim that also has an excellent rundown on the scientific method. Here are some fresh fruits from the dedicated and large scale application of those principles. I have held a BSC since 1990, I do not belong to any proffesional or political organisations, nor do I intentionally speak for anyone else.

"You suggest that expressing skepticism is incompetence."

No, and that burning smell is your strawman going up in flames.

I suggest: Willfully expressing profound ignorance of a realted field of expertise and repeatedly passing it off to the public as an authorative scientific statement after being corrected by one's peers IS by definition incompetence, but you can assume mallice if you like.

And as I said from the very start this is not about censorship it's about misinformation. Ironically it now appears that TFA is actually a politicaly inspired character assasination. So far from defending science against "censorship" it would appear that you are unwittingly aiding a certain politician's personal crusade to "dismantle the scientific method".

I could care less if the weatherman says "everyone knows the moon is made of cheese", since it's obvious he is joking. Nor do I object if he presents his personal opinions as personal and as opinions. And if you dig a bit deeper you will find that the scientist is not suggesting skeptsism be censored from science, she is suggesting AMS members be held to proffessional standards of behaviour and ethics.

Disclaimer: "Why is it so?" is a question that has stuck with me since watching the originals in the 60's. Here is my definition of skepticisim that also has an excellent rundown on the scientific method. Here are some fresh fruits from the dedicated and large scale application of those principles. I have held a BSC since 1990, I do not belong to any proffesional or political organisations, nor do I intentionally speak for anyone else.

Since I tire of repeating myself, here is my take on "economic ruin" brought about by a leftist plot that uses global warming to overtake the planet.

I agree the actions to be taken (if any) require a political "consensus" and TFA itself, is an example of the propoganda used in those "negotiations". Misrepresentation of the science is what concerns most scientists. Having said that, "science advises policy" but it's only natural for non-politicians to want to hear it from the horses mouth. The scientists I have talked to rarely get into policy disscussions and when they do they stress that it's their personal opinion.

Thank-you for your digging. Being an early fan of RealClimate I saw the name "James Inhofe" in your post and recognised him as the guy who introduced a science fiction writer as a climate expert to a senate enviromental commitee that for some inexplicable reason features him as it's chairman. Your links have confirmed a strong feeling I had but did not want to voice without evidence.

TFA is a politically inspired, anti-science character assasination dressed up as news. Josef Goebbels would have been proud to put his name to such an insidious propoganda stunt.

Thank-you for your digging. Being an early fan of RealClimate I saw the name "James Inhofe" in your post and recognised him as the guy who introduced a science fiction writer as a climate expert to a senate enviromental commitee that for some inexplicable reason features him as it's chairman. Your links have confirmed a strong feeling I had but did not want to voice without evidence.

TFA is a politically inspired, anti-science character assasination dressed up as news. Josef Goebbels would have been proud to put his name to such an insidious propoganda stunt.

Thank-you for your digging. Being an early fan of RealClimate I saw the name "James Inhofe" in your post and recognised him as the guy who introduced a science fiction writer as a climate expert to a senate enviromental commitee that for some inexplicable reason features him as it's chairman. Your links have confirmed a strong feeling I had but did not want to voice without evidence.

TFA is a politically inspired, anti-science character assasination dressed up as news. Josef Goebbels would have been proud to put his name to such an insidious propoganda stunt.

Paleoclimate reconstructions are not soley based on argon proxies, if they were I would agree with you. Since multiple studies using different proxies and methodologies all come up with basically the same answer, I don't agree with you and anyone who proffesses to be scientific would likewise disagree. Independent repeatability via diverse paths is the cornerstone of a strong scientific conclusion.

"This is the problem with the global warming crowd. They present their hypotheses, theories, and their models as FACT."

No, this is the problem with the anti global warming crowd. They present their hypotheses, theories, and their models as if nobody had ever thought about it before they came along, they dogmatically assume one study constitutes or refutes an entire scientific disipline.

"In other words, it's a guess, built off of a computer model."

Yes, all science is an eductaed guess, in the same way that the trajectory of a space probe is a guess built from an iterative computer model that calculates an inexact answer to the "three body problem". Computer models are not based on the data they are based on the laws of physics and chemistry, data (gleaned from direct observation, tree ring, ect) is parametized input to those models. Nobody tells the model to build a hurricane, they emerge from the maodel that is soley based on physical "laws" and observational data.

"The reality is a lot of them are social engineers and socialists, not environmental or climate scientists."

Yes, yes, we all know that every national science body on the planet is overflowing with communists who want to destroy the US economy.

Both natural and anthropogenic forcings exist. Nobody is denying this, let alone preventing you from mentioning it. As it happens, the anthropogenic forcings are the more significant of the two concerning the recent climate, but the natural forcings are not negligible.

True enough. But all the informed, meteroligist we have heard from Is contributing it to natural forces. I don't know if they are saying anthropogenic disturbances are influencing those natural forces or not. But the one, We don't even know what causes to a repeatable degree (El Nino). We cannot even predict it's behavior outside expecting a large interaction or a smaller one. The atlantic currents are pretty much predicable and we do know much more about it. But something we don't know is how the El Nino effects are powerful enough to effect the north atlantic oscillation wich effect the atlantic currents as well as weather pattern across north america as well as northern Europe. We do know that El Nino can effect it but the NAO is another one of many El Nino like effects that we don't understand in ways to make complete blanket statments like humans are destroying the world thru the weather.

That argument was dumb the last time you posted it and it's still dumb now.

As I responded last time, it's true that most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are natural. Without them, the Earth would be tens of degrees cooler. Our contributions are a relatively small addition on top of that effect, but they are still enough to raise temperatures by several degrees, which is what the whole global warming issue is about.

And you asumptions are wrong. The site I linked to shows that the amounts of human greenhouse gasses are a fraction of what is the true effect. I think your statment about without the other greenhouse gasses the earth would be cooler by 10 degees. But the fact show that man made green house gasses acount for less then 1 percent of total gasses contributing to the effect. Yet the less then one percent is supposed to move the climate to more then half the effect of all the other greenhouse gasses combined. If you ignore water vapor, then it makes more sence. But we don't live in a world without water vapor. This intentional omision to promote a cause is what is dumb! It is also more evidence to suggest an alterior motive to the whole global warming; we have to do something now movment.

Because that would be stupid, and unlike our CO2 emissions, our water vapor emissions are not causing substantial climate change.

I don't know if you looked at that page I linked to in the other post or not, but the conclusion is that human GHG contribution is as negligable too. Why would it make sence to concentrate there? Go ahead and tell me about numbers that ignore water vapor to make the impact apear greater. Or better yet, point me to a study that factors it in and still comes to the popular conclusion. BTW here is that link again.

Something else you respneded to in the other reply was the comment I made about people claiming things were caused by global warming then someone else having to change that statment and show it was caused by something else. You resopnce was Quotes, please. What the scientists usually say is that "global warming may be contributing to the warm winter". you then link to a site who's fist line discusses this axact same thing. So I guess you were either wanting the newscasters names to either ind the general location I live in or as it is now happening you were trying to make sure they had thier credentials revoked. It is amazing that we just had a discusion were i made the acusation of people being ridiculed, blackballed and other things when they disputed global warming and now

Read here and here for more on what scientists themselves were saying at the time. In short, they knew there was a natural cooling trend, but they also knew they didn't have a good handle on manmade greenhouse gas emissions, and they also knew that their climate models weren't up to solid prediction. They said that on the basis of extrapolating the past trend alone, cooling would result. However, they also said that they couldn't predict cooling based on modeling, and that they didn't know whether anthropogenic emissions would outweigh the cooling. Some decades of continued data collection, improvement in statistical techinques, and better climate models later, they now can say with credibility that warming will continue over the next century at least.

"But, climate change is still subject to legitimate scientific debate"

Agreed, and "higher resolution" observations and models are essential to that debate!

"we still don't really understand either the extent to which it's happening or its causes."

This is what is understood, it is 5-6yrs out of date and will be updated this year, anecdotely it appears that the 2001 IPCC underestimated the extent and rate of change in many areas but we will have to wait and see. The margin of error for cause and effect is "beyond doubt" in much the same way as germ theory is "beyond doubt".

"(1) the existence of germs is much better proven than humans causing significant climate change"

I call bullshit, re: link above.

"(2) the surgeon's error may cause somebody to die, but the weatherman's is harmless (except, perhaps, to somebody else's agenda)."

And raise you another bullshit, this year Australia's grain crop was down 62% (~17M tons), we are the world's 3rd largest producer. Frost and snow in the middle of a record heat wave killed of our fruit crops in much the same way as California's crops were recently damaged by frost after unseasonal warmth.

Yet it is still true nobody can prove any one of the myrid examples across the globe is caused by AGW anymore than a doctor can prove smoking caused a particular lung tumor. But if the recent back to back hurricane seasons in the US is not an example of extreme climate variability I don't know what is? To wait for unobtainable certainty is a dogmatic failure to adapt to our surroundings. A surefire path to extinction unless of course the basic premise of evolution is also "just a theory".

The scientific community did believe in global cooling (though, that wasn't term used)

No, they didn't. Here's another article because apparently you didn't understand the Wikipedia entry:

Every now and again, the myth that "we shouldn't believe global warming predictions now, because in the 1970's they were predicting an ice age and/or cooling" surfaces. Recently, George Will mentioned it in his column (see Will-full ignorance) and the egregious Crichton manages to say "in the 1970's all the climate scientists believed an ice age was coming" (see Michael Crichton's State of Confusion ). You can find it in various other places too [here, mildly here, etc]. But its not an argument used by respectable and knowledgeable skeptics, because it crumbles under analysis. That doesn't stop it repeatedly cropping up in newsgroups though. -- http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94

I note with some amusement that Slashdot is basically a newsgroup and here is the myth cropping up again. Who said climatologists can't predict the future!

P.S. Forgot my links to what scientists (as opposed to the media) were saying in the scientific literature at the time: here and here.