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"No. If you could read,..."

And if you could read you would find your precious "article" is actually an abstract, the paper itself does not account for the edges but does agree they are shrinking, and if you read past the 54cm bit you would find a citation at the bottom of your link pointing to the GRACE study that contradicts your 54cm claim.

Now if there are contradictory findings and you had any research skills at all, you could easily find a scientific critique of the two papers. Don't dispair, you do have some skill, at least you can quote an abstract from science that (on the surface) appears to pander to your world view and assists in you ridiculing people, perhaps if you brushed the chip of your shoulder you could learn something about the world around you. OTHOH: I suspect you are trolling and don't really expect a sensible reply to the GRACE data that I and others have pointed out.

BTW, the oil company shills have blown the cooling craze completely out of proportion to what it was (and yes, I do remeber 1975 and was old enough to read newspapers at the time).

"No. If you could read,..."

And if you could read you would find your precious "article" is actually an abstract, the paper itself does not account for the edges but does agree they are shrinking, and if you read past the 54cm bit you would find a citation at the bottom of your link pointing to the GRACE study that contradicts your 54cm claim.

Now if there are contradictory findings and you had any research skills at all, you could easily find a scientific critique of the two papers. Don't dispair, you do have some skill, at least you can quote an abstract from science that (on the surface) appears to pander to your world view and assists in you ridiculing people, perhaps if you brushed the chip of your shoulder you could learn something about the world around you. OTHOH: I suspect you are trolling and don't really expect a sensible reply to the GRACE data that I and others have pointed out.

BTW, the oil company shills have blown the cooling craze completely out of proportion to what it was (and yes, I do remeber 1975 and was old enough to read newspapers at the time).

First up nobody disputes there has been increased snowfall in Greenland's interior, in fact it was predicted by climate models.

Second, there have been more comprehensive and more recent studies from the GRACE sattelites, seen in the citation record at the bottom of your link. Also note in the GRACE mission statement that NASA purposfully designed the sattelites to measure the "exchanges between ice sheets or glaciers and the oceans".

Third, Johanessen et al. came to the best conclusion using the data they had, they just didn't have all the data available today.

Fourth, both the paper by Johanssen in your link and the more recent paper based on GRACE data from Rignot and Kanagaratnam agree with the predictions of climate models that say the interior will build and the edges will melt.

Last of all, allthough the result of 54cm is "very simple", measuring a volume of ice the size of Greenland is not a simple task and the error bars in the studies reflect that difficulty. Johanessen is a genuine skeptic when it comes to the impact of AGW, however even he does not doubt it is happening, nor does he doubt our CO2 emmisions are to blame.

It's also an accepted scientific "fact" that Greenland and the Antartic peninsula are subject to a phenomena called "polar amplification" which has seen their regional average tempratures rise by 3 degrees, compared to the global average of 1 degree. Now tell me again about "global warming scare mongering" or are you just trolling for AC's?

The English vineyards bit is a standard contrarian talking point. The problem is that (a) it's not clear that vineyards tell you anything about climate (rather than economics) and (b) at any rate there's far more wine growing in England now than there was in the past.

See the discussion here

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/

I have never seen a reference that claimed that English wine was "better" than French wine, so that seems to be new and made up.

Quite right. Here's a single chart that's worth more than a thousand ignorant and misinformed climate-change trolls. May I now post my regular link to RealClimate.org for the benefit of any sceptics out there who really do have an interest in what the actual science actually says.

The hypothesis of Climate-Scientists is that there is a long term human caused global warming trend, in order to prove it you first must show that the warming trend is long term (something which we can only do by waiting, say, 150 years) then that it is human caused, and finally that it is a global problem none of which can be solved by a thermometer.

I guess you missed the part where we ceased to rely on predictions of the future because we are observing the predicted results right now. I guess you missed the fact that the Anthropogenic causes of Climate Change are almost universally accepted as the only model which fits the data we are actively observing. You might well have alternate theories, but if so, you need to present those theories and convince us. Otherwise, your views will continue to have the credence of those people who believe that because their Grandma lived to ninety and smoked all her life, that this one data point dismisses the theory that smoking causes lung cancer. It is not up to us to prove anything to you, anymore than we need to convince every hardened addict before the links between smoking and lung cancer can be considered true.

In the middle ages they were growing grapes in England (something we can not do now), and we're just leaving a period which was called the Little Ice age, so its not necessarily any warmer than it used to be nor is it necessarily a man made event. Once again, for me to be right all I have to do is find some problem with the methodology, data, or conclusions in order for me to be correct.

But the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period have been debunked repeatedly on Slashdot. Have you not read any previous discussions on these topics?

I'm going to give you a brief lesson in logic, you can't prove the non-existence of something; I can't prove that there is no global warming, there is no god, or there are not gremlins are living among us. This is why the emphasis is on proving that you're correct.

I repeat - we aren't playing logic games here. We are talking about observed phenomena. You claim that you have alternate theories that explain these observed phenomena - presumably, theories that predicted the current temperature rise by observing sunspot activity 20 years ago. Right? Except of course, sunspots are shortlived phenomena (a period shorter than the period of temperature change that we have observed) and have been debunked long ago as a contributor to climate change. I suggest you spend some time perusing www.realclimate.org - many myths are debunked there.

With global warming I can choose which facts I use to discredit a study, say that there is a greater corelation between sunspot activity and global warming (in spite of it not increasing the irradiance of light hitting the earth) then there is to all greenhouse gasses; in order for his theory to be true, it must explain why my counter argument is meaningless.

No, you can't merely grasp at straws and dismiss a credible scientific argument. Why? Because no-one will believe you. In order to dismiss a credible theory which explains observed phenomena you need to propose an alternate theory that is equally credible - or more. You have not done so. We might all wish that ACW were not true, it takes guts to accept that we (albeit unknowingly) screwed up so badly, and will have to work hard for a long time to undo the damage. But that doesn't mean we will be intellectually cowed, regardless of emotion.

Essentially, the Scientific Methodology works because your theory can withstand all attacks not that someone couldn't find a counter argument.

But you openly admit that you don't have an attack you can mount - you are merely asserting theories that were debunked long ago.

I was initially questioning whether it was possible, not that it was a fact... But you seem to believe in global warming on a level usually res

The GP's post looked familiar to me (the odd spelling of Jupiter), so I checked and sure enough the format of his cut and paste spam is getting better but the content is still just as silly. I think alot of the crap he quotes was originally generated by the psuedo-scientific "electic universe theory".

IMHO, the remnants of the anti-AGW crowd have now evolved into a run of the mill anti-science crowd. In the past I have found this mythbusting search an excellent resource, but I doubt this guy's skeptisim is motivated by science, logic or even common sense.

2.) Tying a trend to warmer temperatures based on older data from the early 1900's is suspect at best. Good, reliable, accurate scientific equipment that measures the temperature wasn't readily available until recently (late 1900's).

This is why we use proxies to determine the temperature back then. There multiple datasets ranging from ice cores (we match the variations in atmospheric concentrations in more recent periods, and use the cores as a proxy to earlier dates), and tree ring data and so on. We generally don't use temperature records from early 1900s for precisely the above reason.

If more radiation hits the Earth, shouldn't that also increase the overall temperature of the Earth and can global warming be attributed to this?

But its different kinds of radiation. Magnetic fields affect charged particles only - aka solar wind and the aurora, and these have negligible energy input, especially relative to normal EM radiation which GW is about. Now, additionally, we have good data recently on the trends in both solar radiance and temperature forcing, and numerous papers have concluded that the sun itself can explain at most 30% of the observed trend. (Google scholar for the relevant papers)

4.) Jupitor is experiencing the same climate change that Earth is. (source: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060504_red_j r.html [space.com])

Check out the time frames! The dates given are 1998 - about 10 years.

Now, what do you think the orbital period of Jupiter around the sun is? Wikipedia has an answer 4333 days = 12 years. So, how interesting it is that we are seeing changes on the same time frame as Jupiter's passage around the sun, a passage that of course is not perfectly circular, in fact getting closer and further from the sun as time goes on...

What's more, there's another major factor - Jupiter's colour. Huge tracts of Jupiter's surface are in different colours, and as these vortices move about, obviously that is going to change its irradiance. Fortunately, Earth is not one big hurricane.

5. This is similar to Jupiter. Mars has an orbital period of 2 years, and has much greater eccentricity than Earth in its orbit. The temperature trend we have is over 3 years, a 1.5 cycles, something like between winter this year and summer next year. How mysterious that there would be a warming trend.

Additionally, there are dust storm factors as well: See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192

6. That source doesn't say that. Go read it again. Methane is more powerful per volume, and agriculture as a whole takes up more than transport. But transport isn't everything and the total volume of methane is small. Campaigners focus on transport, because transport is easier to cut than agriculture without killing bazillions of people.

Were those climate changes, which are no doubt more extreme than what's going on now, caused by the combustion engine?

They aren't. They happened over thousands of years and can be explained by a variety of other factors, whilst the current change is happening over decades and there is no other observed factor that can explain it.

And it's also well documented that ice is increasing in areas like Greenland.

The critical point for Greenland is whether the increased rate of glacier motion more than compensates for the greater accumulation on the surface. While the broad picture of what is happening is consistent between these papers, the bottom-line value for Greenland's mass balance is different in all three cases. Looking just at the dynamical changes observed by Rignot & Kanagaratnam, there is an increased discharge of about 0.28 mm/year SLE from 1996 to 2005, well outside the range of error bars. This is substantially more than the opposing changes in accumulation estimated by Johannessen et al and Zwally et al, and is unlikely to have been included in their assessments. Thus, the probability is that Greenland has been losing ice in the last decade. We should be careful to point out though that this is only for one decade, and doesn't prove anything about the longer term. As many of the studies make clear, there is a significant degree of interannual variability (related to the North Atlantic Oscillation, or the response to the cooling associated with Mt. Pinatubo) such that discerning longer term trends is hard.

But we can't do experiments on the Earth's climate, so the correcting mechanism is broken.

No, it isn't. One can run models against what is there, and correct if the model doesn't reproduce it. For example, in the astrosciences models are run of galaxy formation. We can't run actual experiments on galaxies, but that does not make the models any less valid.

E.g. Lysenkoism, creationism, eugenics and planned economies where interesting ideas. Basing public policy on them, especially public policy which was not democratically alterable was disasterous.

It was disastrous because they were extremely poor science.

It's same with global warming, global cooling, population explosion, population collapse, running out of resources. A few of these are probably correct in fact, but I don't think we'll no enough about any of them to avoid them causing a disaster in the future.

Well, many who are lifelong experts in these subjects do think we know enough about them - who are you to say this?
Actually, I think the problem is trying to use the provisional truth that's the best that science can give you, using it to make predictions into the distant future, and then making drastic economic changes now based on those predictions.

I wish it was the distant future, but it isn't. We are talking about significant climatic changes within a century, not millenia.

Actually, population explosion is my favourite example. Mao decided that the Chinese population was growing too fast when actually it was probably static or falling. He decided to take drastic action, the one child policy, enforced by things like forced abortions. This was a catastophe for the Chinese, and it may yet cause them economic problems in the future because it will cause their society to age before it gets rich. Their gender balance is seriously skewed too.

I can't see the point here.... is it that because the Chinese have poorly implemented population control, that unlimited growth of population is good?

Come to think of it global cooling is kind of interesting too. Just imagine if global warming is real and we had made public policy decisions based on the consensus on global cooling in the 1970s.

There was no consensus on global cooling in the 1970s. This is a myth.

The point is that if you don't really know how to predict stuff into the distant future, you should not have a policy that's determined by those predictions.

But the policies would be extremely beneficial, encouraging energy economy and a reduced reliance on oil and gas from unstable regions.

But I think science probably corrects itself ok in the absence of this. It happened with global cooling, if global warming is similar flawed, that will get corrected too.

Global warming is not some sort of proposal that needs to be tested and corrected, it is unquestionably actually happening.

PS: I like to aim my crackpots here using this handy myth-busting search

PS: I like to aim my crackpots here using this handy myth-busting search

To be fair to both the hockey stick and Mann you could at least provide a link to Mann and co's rebuttals. Also the IPCC is not solely based on computer models, it's available on the net and is chock full of observastions and predictions. So far the most serious complaint about the IPCC is that it predictions for methane levels do not reflect what has been observed. I urge you to read it rather than assume it's contents are guesswork.

"For example, until recently the use of aerosols was believed to contribute to the greenhouse effect"

Different aerosols have different effects, they are covered by the IPCC and climate models.

The basic question of AGW existance is over, even Bush, Murdoch and Howard now argree for the need to curb our emmisions (mind you they are not shouting from the rooftops). The current political and scientific question is now How much CO2 is too much?

To my mind the BBC article is as much a waste of time as it would be if the subject were creationisim. It has taken three decades for the AGW theory to become mainstream science, it has fought and won aginst powerfull vested interests and gullible journalists using nothing more than logic and observation. Now the luddites and vested interests are claiming science is rotten to the core and journalisim is going to be the judge and jury. Give me a fucking break!

To be fair to both the hockey stick and Mann you could at least provide a link to Mann and co's rebuttals. Also the IPCC is not solely based on computer models, it's available on the net and is chock full of observastions and predictions. So far the most serious complaint about the IPCC is that it predictions for methane levels do not reflect what has been observed. I urge you to read it rather than assume it's contents are guesswork.

"For example, until recently the use of aerosols was believed to contribute to the greenhouse effect"

Different aerosols have different effects, they are covered by the IPCC and climate models.

The basic question of AGW existance is over, even Bush, Murdoch and Howard now argree for the need to curb our emmisions (mind you they are not shouting from the rooftops). The current political and scientific question is now How much CO2 is too much?

To my mind the BBC article is as much a waste of time as it would be if the subject were creationisim. It has taken three decades for the AGW theory to become mainstream science, it has fought and won aginst powerfull vested interests and gullible journalists using nothing more than logic and observation. Now the luddites and vested interests are claiming science is rotten to the core and journalisim is going to be the judge and jury. Give me a fucking break!

He "concedes that he hasn't published [his theory of how thermohaline circulation has caused recent warming of the planet] in any peer-reviewed journal. He's working on it, he says."

The impression I get from RealClimate and the Washington Post is that Gray is not capable of doing numerical modeling, or even, necessarily, understanding the models which dominate the field.

About the only scientifically respectable semi-skeptic, Richard Lindzen, says of Gray: "His knowledge of theory is frustratingly poor, but he knows more about hurricanes than anyone in the world. I regard him in his own peculiar way as a national resource."

That's a very complimentary way of saying he should be put out to pasture.

See the following articles:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/05/23/AR2006052301305_pf.html

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /04/gray-on-agw/

Monckton is a good example of pseudo-science.

He doesn't really understand the true issue at hand and uses extremely misleading data in other
places.

The U.N. didn't "cook the books".

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /11/cuckoo-science/

The fact is that even the evidence that shows we are undergoing a warming trend fails to demonstrate that this is a long term warming trend, that the warming trend is man-made, or that green-house gasses have had an impact on the temperature change. The argument is usually along the lines "We have demonstrated that the Earth's temperature has risen 1 degree in the past 100 years, and at the same time man-made green house gasses have increased 10 times so the impact from man made greenhouse gasses is ." In many cases you could replace "Increase in Man made greenhouse gasses" with "Reduction in Pirates" and conclude that the world is warming because we lack pirates.

In a word, this is "bullshit".

The argument for climate change and human influence thereof is not remotely based on that sort of juvenile argument.
Asserting so is now getting to be a dangerous libel.
Would people make similar assertions about the results of biochemistry over the last 30 years? No.
Would Slashdot writers make similar assertions about how those engineers were just fooling themselves
about how semiconductors worked?

The discussion and investigation of physical mechanism, has been and always will be the primary study in climatology. Geoscience existed before global warming became prominent. Was that all just random superficial correlationist baloney?

Why do people casually make assertions about the operation of intensive climate study based on physics, and observations, by professionals who devote their lives to it, over decades?

All I can guess is that they really don't like the answer. I don't like the answer either, but I'm willing to deal with it.

Please, start looking seriously into this if you have doubts.

You will find major study of mechanism and details and things you would never have imagined.

http://www.realclimate.org/

Except you missed out the important bit: the thorough debunking of Monckton's article on realclimate.org.

Even a non-expert can see that there are real problems with Monckton's article. The `smoking gun' Battle of the Graphs compares global average temperatures versus with temperatures in Europe alone, for example. It is known that the European `little ice age' was caused by slowing of the Gulf Stream current (although why the current slowed down is still a mystery), which makes this effect very specific to Europe and certainly does not contractict other studies that measure global climate at the same period that don't show a similar cooling.

For another example, his claim that a Chinese naval squadron sailed around the north pole in 1421 and found no ice, has been debunked by historians for a long time. Did you notice, even the timing of this event (1421) falls within the European Little Ice Age cooling period he shows in the graph just above it? It seems he didn't even notice his own contradiction!

To be serious I don't belive in banning SUV's, I belive by pumping out GHG we are using up finite "environmental services". This problem and this one are intertwined, both need unprecedented international cooperation and long range planning, sadly mankind seem to be distracted by bombs and bullets.

Woops

I should get a damned nickel every time I point this out.

There were no warnings put out by the scientific press on an impending ice age in the 1970s. Stop claiming that there were. It's about as clever as that one about "we can't predict whether it will rain next week; how can we predict the climate in twenty years?".

Like the GP I have watched predictions come true since the early eighties (the hockey-stick graph, polar amplification, glacial retreat, shorter winters, melting permafrost, just to mention a few). The GP pre-emptively crushed the type of posts you chose to reply with, the well known skeptic Carl Sagan could not have done better.

I hold a BSc but IANAC, I have followed the science & politics of this issue for well over two decades. - wooosh - Hear that? The political tide has turned, Murdoch, Bush and Howard have all quietly "gone green" this year. The recent election where I live was fought on two main issues, corruption and the "worst drought in 1000 years".

You my friend are now officially a luddite, no longer "main stream", please take your seat next to the creationists, flat-earther's and the guy selling buggy whips.

"...the countries with the worst environmental programs are exempt from the goals right now"

Worse still your xenophobic agenda is showing, why should "the west" not pay for the CO2 they have dumped since WW2, the idea that developing countries would somehow be allowed unlimited license to emit C02 under the kyoto deal is patently false propoganda. The idea was for industrial countries to compensate the rest of the world (in carbon credits) for emmisions they have already dumped into the atmosphere since 1950-something when they first started to soar. This is not a "lefty" plot to empower China, even the recently departed Milton Friedman was famous for coining the phrase "there is no such thing as a free lunch".

Despite all the political bullshit, media distortions and vested interests I would like to thank the US, it has consistently played "the" leading role in funding serious climate research.

Basically, everything you wrote was wrong except for the bit about the Greenpeace founder.

1. There is no global warming on Mars

2. DDT is dangerous to the environment

3. The Kyoto Treaty exemptions are based on CUMULATIVE emissions, not annual emissions. The US and Western Europe have released the most CO2 into the atmosphere by far. That's not even when you factor equity into account on a per capita basis.

I can't believe anybody would cite Crichton as some kind of authority on science and policy. He's an opportunistic pulp fiction writer at best and a disingenuous propagandist at worst. Biotechnologists have had to defend their work from the unreal dangers portrayed in Jurassic Park. Nanotechnologists have had to defend their careers from the falsehoods of Prey. Non-xenophobes were stuck defending the Japanese in Rising Sun. And now, climatologists are forced to defend their science from the spin and outright lies in State of Fear. Crichton is a one man show in overhyped doom-mongering and crap pseudoscience. Serious people ignore him.

The methane level 'predictions' you talk about are actually methane level 'projections'. In the absence of any data indicating how methane sources respond to climate change and changes in land use they pretty much have to just take a stab at the methane release rate, and they incorrectly projected a continuing rise.

Methane is not as dire a global warming gas as you characterize it. It oxidises in the atmosphere. I would guess its atmospheric 1/2 life somewhere in the range of 6months-2years (CO2 has an atmospheric 1/2 life of about 30 years). There is more on the impact of methane at realclimate.

BTW, almost everything you say is innaccurate:

• scientists that can predict the next millenia's weather to three decimal points ... they predict between 2 and 6 degrees of warming, and express what this means for the weather in very vague terms (increased storminess, etc).
• didn't forsee the recent unexplained drop in atmospheric methane levels ... read the literature. Theres loads of dissenting opinion on how much the various sinks and sources contribute, and how they change according to climate change and land use.
• drop in atmospheric methane levels ... Wrong, levels remained constant.
• Methane is a worse greenhouse gas the CO2! ... Methane is oxidized quite rapidly, so a 1 tonne release of methane does not have the long term effect a 1 tonne release of CO2 would have. (Ive seen similar, even more wrong, arguments about water vapour)
• You can make all sorts of dire predictions if you assume that things will remain constant. ... You can make all sorts of dire predictions if you assume things will change too. This statement is more meaningless than innacurate.
• The problem is that in the real world, nothing is constant. ... apart from the physical constants, and the laws of physics, and human stupidity.
• GIGO ... really?

There is no "global warming" on Mars. There *have* been some isolated incidences of regions on Mars that are warming up, over the course of 3 Martian years or so, but to infer from that that anything like a global warming trend of the type seen (and predicted) on earth is invalid.

As a reference, see the discussion here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192

The case for anthropogenic global warming is extraordinarily solid, and is based on lots and lots of observations of different effects, combined with modeling based on principles of physics. These talking points are just hot air.

GW denialists are sabotaging real debate here. They keep lobbing grenades into the debate, by repeatedly saying things like "H2O vapor is the real greenhouse gas". This point has been discussed many times in the above comments and has been rebutted. More information can be found here and here. I think the point of their constant harping about water vapor is to plant seeds of uncertainty in the minds of the public, in order to "position global warming as more theory than fact", as was stated in a policy paper of a right wing think tank (see Al Gore's movie).

There is a difference between having an honest debate in order to discover the truth versus entering a debate simply to muddy the issues and distract the observers of the debate from the truth. Honest debate cannot happen unless all parties in the debate are interested in discovering the truth. Posting statements with the knowledge that they have been debunked is not honest debate. It is just noise.

GW denialists are sabotaging real debate here. They keep lobbing grenades into the debate, by repeatedly saying things like "H2O vapor is the real greenhouse gas". This point has been discussed many times in the above comments and has been rebutted. More information can be found here and here. I think the point of their constant harping about water vapor is to plant seeds of uncertainty in the minds of the public, in order to "position global warming as more theory than fact", as was stated in a policy paper of a right wing think tank (see Al Gore's movie).

There is a difference between having an honest debate in order to discover the truth versus entering a debate simply to muddy the issues and distract the observers of the debate from the truth. Honest debate cannot happen unless all parties in the debate are interested in discovering the truth. Posting statements with the knowledge that they have been debunked is not honest debate. It is just noise.

This article at RealClimate.com discuss this very topic.

Climate change is going to dump a whack of methane into the atmosphere.

Oh for chrisakes!!! There are many posts above explaining this. To summarize, overall water vapor does not force the climate to a different state because of its short lifetime in the atmosphere. Water vapor content in the atmosphere is a reaction to other factors in the climate system, such as CO2.

Water vapor can however reinforce other changes. If CO2 concentrations increase, then this will cause the climate to warm. In general, a warmer climate will likely mean more water vapor in the atmosphere, which will in turn cause more warming because the vapor is also a greenhouse gas.

If you want a better explanation, read some of the above comments or go to realclimate.org.

I am sick of people posting comments like "water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2" in the full knowledge that this will create misconceptions in people with less understanding of the concepts of climate change. DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE IGNORED WATER VAPOR IN THEIR MODELS?!!

Oooo. Since some people disagree, therefore McIntyre and McKitrick are wrong. No.

That was quick: we arrived almost immediately at the part about science that you don't understand. I am not pointing out merely that "some people disagree." You may be used to philosophical and religious discussions, where disagreements are not resolvable definitively and argumentation is a matter of superior persuasion.

But this is science; your sarcasm has no power here. It is not that "some people disagree." It is that the experts you cite have been shown to be incorrect in peer-reviewed journals, and to my knowledge there has been no response in kind. I've invited you to correct me on that and I invite you again.

Bradley 2003, Rutherford 2005, Wahl 2006, ...

I have always wondered how much we affect the climate through irrigated fields and a host of other means of adding water vapor to the atmosphere.

Enjoy :)

I have always wondered how much we affect the climate through irrigated fields and a host of other means of adding water vapor to the atmosphere.

Enjoy :)

Do you realise that the computer chip you used to generate that bit of flamebait would not exist without computer models.

The whole endevour of scientific inquiry consists of applying models to data, just because a model is not perfect does not mean it is not usefull (eg: Newtonian mechanics).

For your edification: Here are some common myths about the hockey stick from the people who created the original (Mann, et al)

That's a nice theory but methane doesn't last very long in the atmosphere, the best scientists working in climatology are still scratching their heads on this one.

That link's to a story on Christopher Monckton. RealClimate.org takes some pain to deflate the climate change deniers who get a fair amount of press, and they address Monckton here

To let you know how accurate the large model for climatologists is look at the weather prediction in your news paper.

There is, of course, a vast difference between predicting weather - which is a local phenomena, with significant specificity - and predicting the climate trends - which is averaging general trends globally. Consider, for instance, that it is very hard to stand on a beach and predict the exact height and shape of the next wave and precisely where and when it will break. On the other hand predicting the approximate height and time of the next high tide is rather easier. GCMs are, indeed, currently rather poor at making predictions down to the level of day to day local weather. They have, however, been very accurate at predicting year on year global climate.

They are not sure as to just what influences our weather let alone to what extent. Ask them how much influence the sun or the earths core temp or the annual freezing of the southern oceans contribute to our weather and all they can do is shrug their shoulders and talk in non specifics.

As noted above, contrary to your claim, the models have proved to be remarkably robust and accurate. They are also, contrary to popular perception in some circles, not just a big pattern matching machine that are "trained" on past data. They are models that are fed in physics. Yes, there are some tweakable parameters, as there should be in any model where there is some uncertainty. The greatest area of uncertainty in models currently is clouds, since they can be both a positive or negative feedback depending on the exact nature of their formation. Of course this problem is taken very seriously and there is a lot of study. The last IPCC report had considerable detail summarising that work. The simple reality, however, is that the models have worked pretty well, and have, in fact, made significant predictions that have since been observed.

But when they draw conclusions they are just blowing smoke the more assumptions the more smoke e.g. higher CO2 means higher temperature, therefore the level of CO2 measured in ice cores proves the temperatures years ago were less therefore we have global warming therefore etc etc

Historical temperatures from ice-cores are determined by ratios of hydrogen or oxygen isotopes in the ice. The guts of the issue is that when combined in water the different isotopes, being different masses, fractionate out at slightly different temperatures, thus the exact isotope ratio is a function of many things, but a very signficant factor is the prevailing temperature at the time the water became vapout before precipitting out. Thus the ratio, while not an exact indication of specific temperatures (unless the many other factors are also accounted for), is a good indicator of general temperature trends over long time scales. For more detail see here. The result is that, using ice cores, we can plot temperature and carbon dioxide independently.

Furthermore, more recent temperature reconstructions (as in reconstructions of only the past 1000 years or so) rely not on ice cores but on a wide variety of sources including coral, tree rings, glaciers, and more. Usually many of these different methods are cross referenced with each other to create any single reconstruction. The results can be seen in this plot of 10 different reconstructions by different independent teams. The results, as you can see, while different, all show the same trend. If you're still uncertain, feel free to use the

I don't think you can point to any peer-reviewed papers which demonstrate any of the significant facts you just claimed.

Your claims are wrong. You may want to start reading here:

False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (Dec. 4, 2004)

Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" (Dec. 4, 2004)

On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (Jan. 6, 2005)

Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stock" controversy (Feb. 18, 2005)

and

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding...

I don't think you can point to any peer-reviewed papers which demonstrate any of the significant facts you just claimed.

Your claims are wrong. You may want to start reading here:

False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (Dec. 4, 2004)

Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" (Dec. 4, 2004)

On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (Jan. 6, 2005)

Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stock" controversy (Feb. 18, 2005)

and

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding...

I don't think you can point to any peer-reviewed papers which demonstrate any of the significant facts you just claimed.

Your claims are wrong. You may want to start reading here:

False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (Dec. 4, 2004)

Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" (Dec. 4, 2004)

On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (Jan. 6, 2005)

Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stock" controversy (Feb. 18, 2005)

and

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding...

I don't think you can point to any peer-reviewed papers which demonstrate any of the significant facts you just claimed.

Your claims are wrong. You may want to start reading here:

False Claims by McIntyre and McKitrick regarding the Mann et al. (1998) reconstruction (Dec. 4, 2004)

Myth vs. Fact Regarding the "Hockey Stick" (Dec. 4, 2004)

On Yet Another False Claim by McIntyre and McKitrick (Jan. 6, 2005)

Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stock" controversy (Feb. 18, 2005)

and

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

The academy essentially upholds Mann's findings, although the panel concluded that systematic uncertainties in climate records from before 1600 were not communicated as clearly as they could have been. The NAS also confirmed some problems with the statistics. But the mistakes had a relatively minor impact on the overall finding...

It is true that a warmer atmosphere will hold slightly more water vapour. The reason why water vapour is "ignored" as a GHG is because it's cycle time in the atmosphere is in the order of 10 days where as CO2 is ~150yrs.

Realclimate has an interesting discussion about the missing methane.

Here is a rebuttal to Michael Crichton's "State of Fear".

The trouble is: how do we make up our minds about the issue if we reject scientific consensus as proof? The only thing I can think of is to understand as much of the issue as we can for ourselves rather than from the media. That's something I definitely need to work harder on.
You will find a lot of homeworks here:
http://www.realclimate.org/ "Climate science from climate scientists"
Click on the "archive" link at the top.

Try this recent one first, as it debunks several common unscientific claims:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /11/avery-and-singer-unstoppable-hot-air/
Then you can also use their search engine with keywords like "myth".

Please also note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives references to the studies that its reports are based on.
http://www.ipcc.ch/

The trouble is: how do we make up our minds about the issue if we reject scientific consensus as proof? The only thing I can think of is to understand as much of the issue as we can for ourselves rather than from the media. That's something I definitely need to work harder on.
You will find a lot of homeworks here:
http://www.realclimate.org/ "Climate science from climate scientists"
Click on the "archive" link at the top.

Try this recent one first, as it debunks several common unscientific claims:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /11/avery-and-singer-unstoppable-hot-air/
Then you can also use their search engine with keywords like "myth".

Please also note that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives references to the studies that its reports are based on.
http://www.ipcc.ch/

William Connolley on realclimate parsed the question fairly, here:

The main points that most would agree on as "the consensus" are:

1. The earth is getting warmer (0.6 +/- 0.2 oC in the past century; 0.1 0.17 oC/decade over the last 30 years (see update))
2. People are causing this.
3. If GHG emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate.
4. (This will be a problem and we ought to do something about it)

I've put those four points in rough order of certainty. The last one is in brackets because whilst many would agree, many others (who agree with 1-3) would not, at least without qualification. It's probably not a part of the core consensus in the way 1-3 are.

I understand that I can either argue from authority (ask you to take my word for it as an expert) or provide some evidence.

You will see in these Slashdot discussions plenty of weaseling on the first three points, despite readers of this list presumably being better informed on science than the general public. The first three points are not open questions in science. Like anything in science they are open for revisiting, but they are not where the action or controversy lies within the research community.

While I agree with the fourth point very strongly, and while a majority of participants in the relevant sciences probably do, it's not universally agreed. It's not really a scientific question, though; it's a question in economics, policies, values, and risk.

The broad scientific questions, the ones typically up for debate, are essentially settled.

What interests me here is why people continue to rant about questions that are part of the consensus, when the case is pretty much closed. They take offense when one has the temerity to suggest they are not only barking up the wrong tree, but that the tree they are barking up was chopped down for pulp years ago, but they don't seriously consider the possibility that while the policy is uncertain, the broad outlines of the facts are known well enough.

For those of you who think people like me are wrong, disingenuous, or even dishonest, consider how the situation looks to you vs how it would look if we were basically right. There would be organizations with substantial investments in resources (especially fossil fuels) whose long term value would be at risk. (There's ample precedent. Consider the history of the tobacco industry.) Their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders would be to minimize that risk. They would therefore inject the greatest possible doubt into the public's understanding of the science.

Consequently, there would be many arguments in the press, mostly appealing to the elements in the society who are generally most suspicious of regulation and taxation, that would cherry-pick evidence and spin tales that were scientifically incoherent and yet superficially convincing.

They would appeal to the fairness of the lay audience. They would claim that there are two sides to every issue. They would object to any presentation that was scientifically balanced on the grounds that their manufactured opinion was not represented. The echoes of this argument ring through every public discussion of the topic, on Slashdot and elsewhere.

Science and commerce do not deserve equal time on scientific questions. Cherry picked evidence does not deserve equal time with the totality of the evidence. The best policy is not a compromise between truth and fiction.

Capitalism is necessary for prosperity, and vigorous defense of private interests is part of the game. Cherry-picking evidence isn't illeg

Talking about 'respectable' scientists is dangerously close to saying "The scientists I picked all agree."

Lindzen:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006 /04/lindzen-point-by-point/
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00095B0 D-C331-1C6E-84A9809EC588EF21

May very well be a big-energy shill, crank, or crackpot, but MIT doesn't seem to be working real hard at distancing themselves from him, and he at least comes off as reasonable.

See here and here.

Questions about data handling for solar forcing
The remaining uncertainties and where they come from

Questions about data handling for solar forcing
The remaining uncertainties and where they come from