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I find the deliberate altering of the atmosphere with aluminium and barium much more egregious than the normal output of carbon. http://www.geoengineeringwatch... The elites that want to set up the carbon exchanges will certainly exempt themselves from a carbon taxing scheme. It is an agenda to track all human behaviours by pricing all activities in carbon credits which will be tracked by some super-governmental agency that will not be affected by democratic edict. A taxing scheme that makes you pay an indulgence just for breathing to an entity that is immune from democratic input from your elected government is not something I can get behind. You are implicitly bad because you are a carbon based life form so pay them an indulgence and you will be forgiven. Sounds like they learned a thing or two from the holy roman empire. This site http://scienceandpublicpolicy.... discusses many of the other aspects of the AGW issue. Being conservative with energy consumption is a good practice. Using more than you need just because is not and should not be criminal. It is just common decency not to be wasteful.

Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?

Yep. There's one right here. And here is another one you won't like.

Southern California gets wildfires in the spring and the fall due to the prevalence of strong Santa Ana winds (hot dry winds blowing from the deserts, over the mountains, toward the sea) and, given that the region is essentially an irrigated desert there's ALWAYS material ready and willing to burn. Any time a fire starts in the brush or in a canyon for ANY reason it will naturally become a massive wildfire unless fire fighters get it out in a hurry while it's still small

Some wild fires are started by power lines knocked-down by strong Santa Ana winds. Many are caused by illegal alien migrant workers who camp-out in some of the brush-filled canyons and use small fires to cook or keep warm on cold nights (one body has been found in the remains of such a campsite in the canyon where one of the current fires began). Some are started by morons throwing cigarette butts out of cars. Occasionally some hunter causes one. Many are either directly caused by federal land management activity or made worse by federal policies. And then, of course, one should never underestimate the destructive power of a pair of stupid teenage males who clearly have no valid reason to live.

Nowhere in that list was "global warming". In fact, there were some really bad fires in the 1960s that were only matched, NOT in the 70's or 80's or 90's but in 2012. When you consider that Southern California has been getting more and more-populated and developed decade-by-decade, it should NOT surprise if the number if fires detected (with more people around, and more arsonists present) and fought (with more property at risk) goes up - indeed the trendline for value of property should also go up (because more developed property, with higher value, is threatened when more land is developed and populated). Lining-up such fire data with climate data will easily provide a correlation-causality illusion. Of course, such false relationships are the sort of propaganda no self-respectingAGW alarmist can resist: When the "weather" seems severe it's proof of global warming, but when the "weather" is cold or fails to produce the predicted hurricanes and tornadoes, these uber-intellectual titans insist that "only an idiot" would conflate "weather" with "climate" - and they think the general public is too stupid to spot the completely dishonest and hypocritical "spin"...

Note for the future: When Katrina hit and Al Gore was running around pushing his book and film, he and his friends were pointing to a rise in hurricanes and tornadoes as evidence for AGW - but we are (and have been for severl years) experiencing a record low-level of such activity (and A.G. and his friends are notably quiet about these "weather" incidents). It is inevitable that hurricaine and tornado activity will rise in the future - when it does, look for Al and his compatriots to once again start using "weather" as "proof" of their "climate" theories. Given that we continue to build more-valuable things in more desireable (and riskier) locations, we can predict that the monetary damage caused by those future weather events will go up and up too, which will no-doubt make it into some dramatic (and intentionally misleading) graphs...

The 1970's were a period with unregulated pollution - more CO2 annually than today. Yet, during that period, we experienced global cooling. 125 well-credentialed scientists signed this letter: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.... Here at slashdot, we (rightly) accuse M$ of spreading FUD against Linux et al ("open source is an open sore" etc.). Is is possible that politicians could use Man-made global warming (let's call it MGW) in the same way to extract money from large corporations? It is an appeal to guilt (think of the children), and fits neatly into campaign speeches. But I should think some of us will take a closer look.

The reported $120 million is total funding, not what is spent on "climate."

Greenpeace annual spending (year ended 12/31/2010) -- $35 million

Al Gore's Climate Reality Project had revenues of $16 million and spent $25 million in 2010.

WWF, formerly The World Wildlife Fund, spent $243 million in 2012.

The US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climate_money.html

There's a lot of money floating around, most of it being spent by "warmers."

Because that's the real issue that most skeptics have been questioning of late. Anyone who isn't an idiot knows that the earth's climate is ALWAYS changing (and always has been).

Well, I don't like to call these prominent 'skeptics' idiots (those are your words, not mine), but they certainly have considered this to be questionable: Roy Spencer, Steve Macintyre, Joseph D'Aleo & Anthony Watts,

But even the "skeptics" were willing to accept the findings of the Berkeley study. Watts had famously promised “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.“

...Unless of course the Berkeley study proved them wrong that is. Watt's is now back peddling: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/

James Hansen is a certified nut job who would prefer we had a Dictatorship than a democracy.

And the AGW people are the ones who made this all Political

I try to encourage people to be skeptical of political motivations(IE: funding). Arguing the science itself is best left to scientists since most of us have no direct access to the raw evidence nor the means by which it is taken. This isn't to say that we should shut our eyes to the evidence, but when there are opposing scientific claims being made, the only means by which we can determine which is more likely to be true(or closer to being true) is to simply follow the money in order to follow the motive.

I accept that GISS, NOAA, IPCC and several other agencies have suggesting an increase in global temperature. I accept that CO2 has a logarithmic relationship to temperature(shown via more rigorously controlled experimentation as opposed to most of climate study which is more of a social science, meaning many uncontrolled variables, no reproducibility and so on). I accept that global climate change does happen(at one point earth did not exist, which means that neither did its climate. Now it does, so QED). I accept that humans are creating lots of CO2 and such.

But I also accept that the actors involved in making conclusions about these things are being paid to find specific results, and that further funding is directly related to what conclusions they make. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

Of course, if I were to suggest the solar centric model of our systems orbit was receiving more funding than the ptolemaic system as justification of being skeptical of the evidence that our system orbits the sun, I'd be dismissed. The reason I think I am justified in raising political arguments for the issue of climate science is because as opposed to some other less funded competing scientific conclusions, unpaid volunteers(like McIntyre) are exposing fundamental problems with the conclusions of people with millions of dollars of backing.

Are you denying that there is increased energy within the atmosphere and surface as result of increased CO2 in the atmosphere over the last fifteen years?

No that would be Professor Phil Jones

I see. You have no understanding of what acidification actually does. Are you claiming that increased CO2 dissolution in our oceans leads to greater biomass and has a net positive effect?

you may find “ACID TEST: THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE OF OCEAN ACIDIFICATION” – A NEW PROPAGANDA FILM BY THE NATIONAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL FAILS THE ACID TEST OF REAL WORLD DATA an interesting read.

Universally is a strong word. Any evidence for global warming comes with the same amount of evidence against it.

In this article we have people claiming its Global warming causing it, which is said without proof once again...but if we listen to Dr Mörner who has studied ocean levels for 40 years...there is no measurable increase in sea level, and he is an expert in his field...not one person who wrote the Nobel winning report was an expert in sea-level change and yet they make all sorts of claims on being experts on that..

Here is a nice list of everything global warming "causes" as said by the media and scientists:

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

If you want to discuss more: lets discuss NASA data being stacked:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/

As you can tell station data has gone down in last few years, and if you plot it against temperature rise, you get a very obvious trend:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf

That tells the story of how bad the NASA datasets are which are one of the main data-sets used in AGW Debate..or we can just get it straight from NASA/..

James Hansen’s colleague Reto Ruedy told the USA Today weather editor:

“My recommendation to you is to continue using CRU data for the global mean [temperatures]. “What we do is accurate enough” — left unspoken: for government work — “[but] we have no intention to compete with either of the other two organizations in what they do best.”

So in other words the NASA data is worse then the data that was doctored purposely by CRU

There is a debate whether you want to bury your head in the sand or not, because the data does not point to ONE thing causing current warming, assuming there is warming considering how much of the data is suspect currently....

And even assuming today's trend is warming, there is debate on the ocean causing a majority of it... Or solar cycles...the science of the climate is far from settled, we have just now scratched the surface...

"Think about who you are siding with and why you believe in what you believe."

Because they refuse to release or "lose" their raw data.
Because there has been no "Statistically Significant" global warming for the past 15 years. (Phil Jones)
Because the press has touted some Global Warming "science" as peer reviewed, when it hasn't.
Because a climatologist that says there is Global warming and he can prove it will get money, but I've yet to hear of a climatologist get funding for showing there is no problem.
Because the solutions have minor predicted results, but require enormous upheaval in the way we do things and enormous cost.
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html

Because those who are claiming it's an emergency, don't act like it's an emergency.

The problem is that gullible idiots like you make unwarranted assumptions about the quality of the scientific evidence based on no more than faith. And every piece of evidence to the contrary is summarily ignored.

No-one is ignoring the problems with this piece of evidence. The problem with this piece of evidence is that it can't be called that; it doesn't meet the necessary standards of scientific evidence. It wasn't peer-reviewed, and it wasn't from a primary source. It shouldn't have been in there. No similar problems have been found in the peer-reviewed portions of the IPCC report, so we're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And, yes, I know you're going to mention articles that challenge the conclusions in those areas, but challenge is not the same as succeed. Unless you're going to mention an article that has been peer-reviewed, or one that has not been rebutted, or has a counter-rebuttal that has not been answered, then I'd ask you not to bother, please.

The problem isn't with the "deniers" who are pointing all of these problems out. The "deniers" don't deny climate change or even global warming.

You must talk to different opponents of AGW than myself. I meet lots of people online who even go so far as to dispute a warming trend.

They just deny the right of censorious assholes like you to claim that climate change is a) unprecedented and b) caused by man-made fossil fuels without actual engineering-quality reports showing either of these things to be true or even likely. They aren't the ones in denial - it's you.

I'm assuming don't know this person, so I feel your insults are hasty and based on scant evidence. What were you saying about evidence again?

The smell from underneath the IPCC bandages is pretty bad. The proxy reconstructions of past climate have been shown to be heavily cherry-picked and badly done statistics

Sorry, you appear to have posted a link to Climate Audit's front page. Seeing as they've made lots of claims in the past for which rebuttals exist, it's a little hard to know where to start answering this.

the measurement of surface temperatures by NOAA and NASA appears been heavily manipulated to show warming

No. Data is not being deleted by NOAA or NASA. It is not being supplied to them. The suggested reading is Peterson and Vose 1997 which explains where the data comes from. As for the interpolation claim, if coastal temperatures were being used to estimate mountain temperature anomalies, the anomalies would be larger than reported. You don't believe it? Get the data and work it out for yourself.

as has the temperature records from the Climate Research Unit relied upon for the calibration of climate models - and is the subject of several independent investigations for possible scientific fraud in the US and the UK.

There is no evidence in the emails from CRU for data fraud. If there were data fraud, this could be determined by cross-checking it against the GISS dataset. Unless you believe that everyone's "in on the conspiracy", and are collaborating to fake data. I find such a conspiracy (which, of necessity, would include not only CRU and NASA, but everyone who supplies them with data) highly unlikely.

But you'll ignore it all because it comes from "deniers" and you'll invoke preposterous conspiracy theories involving fossil fuel companies while ignoring the cosying up of nearly entire fossil fuel industry with the alarmists.

I'm hoping

The problem is, the deniers believe that even one error in a summary report means that the science is wrong, while the scientists are all aware that, yes, it's a bitch, but indeed, sometimes typos creep through.

The problem is that gullible idiots like you make unwarranted assumptions about the quality of the scientific evidence based on no more than faith. And every piece of evidence to the contrary is summarily ignored.

The problem isn't with the "deniers" who are pointing all of these problems out. The "deniers" don't deny climate change or even global warming. They just deny the right of censorious assholes like you to claim that climate change is a) unprecedented and b) caused by man-made fossil fuels without actual engineering-quality reports showing either of these things to be true or even likely. They aren't the ones in denial - it's you.

The smell from underneath the IPCC bandages is pretty bad. The proxy reconstructions of past climate have been shown to be heavily cherry-picked and badly done statistics, the measurement of surface temperatures by NOAA and NASA appears been heavily manipulated to show warming, as has the temperature records from the Climate Research Unit relied upon for the calibration of climate models - and is the subject of several independent investigations for possible scientific fraud in the US and the UK.

But you'll ignore it all because it comes from "deniers" and you'll invoke preposterous conspiracy theories involving fossil fuel companies while ignoring the cosying up of nearly entire fossil fuel industry with the alarmists.You'll ignore the clear conflict of interest of the scientist who made the original bad claim on Himalayan Glaciers claiming millions from the European Union to investigate the problem that he knows doesn't exist. You'll ignore the clear conflict of interest of Rajendra Pachauri and his willingness to fill his pockets with cash all the while exhorting everyone else to embrace the New Poverty of enforced energy rationing to Save the Earth from Global Warming that no-one knows is even happening to any great extent nor even a serious problem that can be "fixed".

Those aren't typos. The entire climate science story is falling apart as scientists investigate clear evidence of fraud, conscious manipulation of evidence in order to deceive and junk science.

The "deniers" are not the problem - its the neo-creationists like you who keep waving away that "there's nothing to be seen here - move along" while the Global Warming Hysteria explodes behind you.

And yes, I'm a liberal. A very angry liberal.

3 has not been established, unless you mean temperatures of tenths of degrees which no one cares about. You need water vapor and mythical positive forcings (which, when measured, have turned out to be negative) to get to any temperatures that would cause changes worth talking about.

The good Lord, say what you want about his writings, actually summed up the state of science on that really nicely a week ago:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/climate_lies.pdf

One problem with this analogy is that it's not just one "doctor" that's saying "operate", it's thousands . How many more "second opinions" do you want before you accept that perhaps you actually need an operation? Are all those doctors quacks, every one of them?

Here are some "second options" :

• Heidelberg Appeal http://www.sepp.org/policy%20declarations/heidelberg_appeal.html
• Leipzig Declaration http://www.sovereignty.net/p/clim/leipzig97.htm
• Oregon Petition http://www.petitionproject.org/
• Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/UN_open_letter.pdf
• US Senate Minority Report http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9
• Copenhagen Climate Challenge http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/

Are all those doctors quacks, every one of them?

Here's a list of 450. Now please STFU. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/reprint/450_peer_reviewed_papers.html

It is understandable that many people have latched on to the emails, but in their defense the people at CRU indicate that the emails are ‘without context’ or somehow ‘normal banter’ in a scientific institution.

The program code however is different.

It is the actual program code, the modeling code that contains the most damaging evidence. I am not talking about the 'comments' in the code but rather the actual computer program source code itself.

Unlike comments and emails the computer code can only be interpreted in one way. Unlike the comments and the emails the computer code is whole unto it self and requires no external context.

So now everyone has the code.

However now the CRU have somehow ‘lost’ the world’s raw climate data that they used in their modeling.

It may have been necessary for them to have lost the raw temperature data. If the raw temperature data was available then they might be asked to reproduce Exactly The Same Results, in front of skeptical witnesses, as they had used in their peer-reviewed publications that were distributed to the world. This might have been impossible without using some infected modeling code, which an investigating scientist might discover.

If the results can not be reproduced the paper that used the results should be withdrawn. Then every paper that cited that paper, and so on until the whole web of pseudo-science that can be traced back to the original fabrication has been purged from the libraries

It is not scientific unless an independent body can reproduce the results.

Please see also:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/climategate.html

For a satirical look and the programming fraud:

Anthropogenic Global Warming Virus Alert.

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i64103

At some level, we as scientists trust one another to not fudge things

Well, we have evidence of fudging the data. Confessions of fudging are in the code! From a report by the Science & Public Policy Institute: Climategate: Caught Green-Handed! (PDF) See Page 8, Example 2.

and the peer review process should take care of most of that.

Peer reviewing does nothing for integrity when you ignore the peer reviewers' comments, or you get to choose the reviewers!

Is Richard S. Lindzen of the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT an idiot media personality?
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=3771

Also: "The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend. More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale. "
- SPPI Monthly CO2 Report: July 2009
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/co2_report_july_09.pdf

You're told secret data has been wrestled from the grasp of the corporates and you're given a link. The page presents a pair of images right at the top, unavoidable; seen before anything is even read. Two images; one of vast quantities of ice, the second utterly free of ice. Global Warming has been implicated before you've read word number one.

If you look carefully you might notice one end of a landing strip just inland in both photos. These photos cover very small areas; only a few miles. The caption reads:

Sea ice forms along the coast in the winter, and generally melts or breaks away by mid July. Observations of sea ice position reveal considerable year-to-year variability. Changes in the timing of coastal sea ice breakup and in the location of offshore sea ice have significant local impacts: ecological, biological, and human. This image series portrays changes in the timing of coastal sea ice breakup, and gives information on smaller scale properties of ice. This information recorded over long periods, is required to understand and model the dynamics of sea ice and how changes or trends develop and influence other systems.

In other words these photos are 'evidence' of nothing. Minor, small scale year-to-year variation in ice flow patterns. The use of these photos in this manner is equivalent to claiming that because there was snow on my walk on January 10, 2008, but none on January 10, 2009, my environment has been ruined by Global Warming.

Yet there it is, fed to the reader at the very start of the story; no disclaimer provided. The pair of photos will now be repeated ad nauseam for years on end around the planet. Biden will have a blown up poster of these photos in his town hall kit by Wednesday. Fresh new memes the huckster elite will use goad "The West" into self inflicted poverty; "See? The planet is in peril! Man must be stopped!"

Here is a recent and well researched report on the $79 billion that has been spent by the US government (only) on climate research over the last 20 years. 19 pages and 52 citations. I dare you to read it. Global Warming advocates are not the underdogs. They rule vast quantities of public money.

In almost all other matters you can take it as a given that around Slashdot you will find if not cynics then certainly skeptics. On the other hand if it has a Bush taint, a little anti-business flavor and it's wrapped up in a Global Warming ribbon you people suck it up like hicks at a Benny Hinn sermon.

If you need a citation, how about looking at: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/ [...]
The site and its owners may have it's own axes to grind (don't we all) but let's stop with the "oil-company" conspiracy theory. It's just another distraction tactic by those with something to hide. Publish your data and models please.

The Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) is a global warming skeptics group which appears to primarily be the work of Robert Ferguson, its President.
Prior to founding SPPI in approximately mid-2007, Ferguson was the Executive Director of the Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP), a project of the corporate-funded group, the Frontiers of Freedom Institute.

Frontiers of Freedom receives money of tobacco and oil companies, including Philip Morris Cos, ExxonMobil and RJ Reynolds Tobacco.
According to a 2003 New York Times report, "Frontiers of Freedom, which has about a $700,000 annual budget, received $230,000 from Exxon in 2002, up from $40,000 in 2001, according to Exxon documents. George Landrith, President of FoF told the New York Times "They've determined that we are effective at what we do" and that Exxon essentially took the attitude, "We like to make it possible to do more of that".

The amount spent by Environmental groups on this issue dwarfs that spent by fossil fuel lobbyists.

If you need a citation, how about looking at: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf In general, $79 BILLION spent by the US government since 1989 to support AGW. Exxon has spent $23 Million. Money has distorted the debate (you don't want to be on the wrong side of billions of research dollars). The site and its owners may have it's own axes to grind (don't we all) but let's stop with the "oil-company" conspiracy theory. It's just another distraction tactic by those with something to hide. Publish your data and models please.

The best way for a climate scientist to get fame and money today would be to disprove global warming

Interesting hypothesis, but I'd claim that it's falsified. On the contrary, the money is in supporting AGW.

ExxonâMobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skepticsâ"less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one fiveâthousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

source: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

(via http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/23/climate-science-follow-the-money/ )

What? Huh?

The money is in good science; if you don't do good science, you don't get money. Hell, most people who do good science can't get money.

Those that manage to get money from NSF don't get MONEY; they get what amount to a living wage. And they get that money regardless of what conclusions they reach. And NSF pays out before conclusions are reached. So, my claim stands; there is no explicit money in supporting AGW, but fame and fortune awaits that scientist that can disprove it. Don't hold your breath.

PS- that small amount of money that Exxon gives to public science is drastically outweighed by what the spent privately on research. Exxon is currently offering around $80k/y (plus benefits) for research scientists, starting, for a person with an MS. A _PhD_ in academia will be lucky to make that after 20 years hard work. Those PhD's could leverage amazing, paradigm changing work into book deals and the public talk circuit. Except, they're generally not motivated by money; they just want to do good science.

The best way for a climate scientist to get fame and money today would be to disprove global warming

Interesting hypothesis, but I'd claim that it's falsified. On the contrary, the money is in supporting AGW.

ExxonâMobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying a grand total of $23 million to skepticsâ"less than a thousandth of what the US government has put in, and less than one fiveâthousandth of the value of carbon trading in just the single year of 2008.

source: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/climate_money.pdf

(via http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/23/climate-science-follow-the-money/ )

Sounds exactly like the ideas used behind global warming and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Very good dissection and dismantling of the global warming alarmists beliefs/'evidence'

Yes it was very good. I have a few questions about the modelling, which peer reviewed publication should I direct my questions to? Oh wait, it was self published by the author who as detailed on the website, " has considerable policy experience in climate change science, mercury science, energy and mining, forests and resources, clean air and the environment." and to boot, unnamed undergraduate and advanced degrees from the mecca of science, wait, its coming....Brigham Young University! I wouldn't wipe my dogs ass with this tripe.

Sounds exactly like the ideas used behind global warming and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
Very good dissection and dismantling of the global warming alarmists beliefs/'evidence'

Humanity produces but ~2% of it, the rest is produced naturally by volcanoes, forest fires and such. Linky, linky or your "facts" are stinky.

Sorry, my bad. Here are a couple of good ones: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20081129004302AAg9qng http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html

So which "natural cycle" is it? We've looked at the ones which have caused past climate change (e.g., solar variations, volcanoes, changes in ocean circulation), and ruled them out as the cause of the current warming.

Oh? Who, I ask, ruled them out? Wasn't it just a few coercively-financed scientists whose bread and butter depend on getting more government grants to "prove" that only government solutions can solve the computer-model-predicted crisis?

"CLIMATE cannot be accurately predicted more than a few weeks ahead" - yeah, one more idiot who can't tell the difference between climate and weather. What this has to do with your claim is beyond me - unless it's the silliness of both.

...we are ramping atmospheric CO2 up to levels not seen in millions of years...

On what evidence do you base this claim? There is hard evidence showing carbon dioxide concentrations are much lower now than in recent geological ages.

Don't you mean "There is hard evidence showing carbon dioxide concentrations are much lower now than in recent geological ages - as recent as millions of years ago"?

Global warming doesn't predict that every location on Earth gets monotonically hotter every year.

The theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming doesn't predict the current cooling since 1998.

What cooling? Your source says nothing about "the current cooling since 1998." Not to mention that you only get a correlation between his beloved PDO and an oscillation on top of an upward trend in temperature - and we've got so many of those that they are probably a correlated block linked to solar output and completely besides man-made Global Warming.

So which "natural cycle" is it? We've looked at the ones which have caused past climate change (e.g., solar variations, volcanoes, changes in ocean circulation), and ruled them out as the cause of the current warming.

Oh? Who, I ask, ruled them out? Wasn't it just a few coercively-financed scientists whose bread and butter depend on getting more government grants to "prove" that only government solutions can solve the computer-model-predicted crisis?

...we are ramping atmospheric CO2 up to levels not seen in millions of years...

On what evidence do you base this claim? There is hard evidence showing carbon dioxide concentrations are much lower now than in recent geological ages.

Global warming doesn't predict that every location on Earth gets monotonically hotter every year.

The theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming doesn't predict the current cooling since 1998.

Strawmen? Who's talking strawmen here?

The hard evidence for an anthropogenic (human) cause for the current warming (which has ceased since 1998 for this reason) is lacking.

Soft evidence, on the other hand, includes computer models of the infinitely complex (and thus un-modelable) climate system that have been tweaked to predict three times the observed "forcing" for the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The human contribution to the total cannot even be accurately measured, but most evidence points to, at the outside, about 5% of the total atmospheric carbon dioxide coming from human sources.

Calling the hard evidence for global cooling a "straw man" while continuing to point at the soft evidence of an anthropogenic cause for climate change labels you an unscientific believer in the religion of Gaia.

Occam's razor suggests that natural climate forcings observed over thousands of years must be given more weight than the puny (and basically unmeasurable) contribution that humans have added to the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide during the current century.

No - there is absolutely not a worldwide consensus. If you really believe that you need to get out more :) With regards to the IPCC specifically; http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/ipccprocessillusion.html

"When international summit [royalsociety.org] after international summit [pik-potsdam.de] after international summit [nationalacademies.org] all recognize global warming and the human influence how can you still deny it? When from every article [sciencemag.org] in a referred scientific journal about climate change from 1993 to 2003, there isn't even ONE that disagrees with the consensus that that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities, how is it not obvious? When even international panels like the InterAcademy Council [interacademycouncil.net] and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [bbc.co.uk] can agree on the human impact, what "controversy" is there?"

Because the statement of a scientific consensus is, among other things, propaganda. And furthermore, a number of climatologists have been caught making specious claims for what appears to be publicity's sake. The findings of the IPCC have also been called into question, in peer-reviewed journals.

So, let's go through some of the list here...

First, the "hockey stick" graph was discredited a few years ago when two Canadian mathematicians tried to reproduce it, and found that the data used had been cherry picked - only the lowest data points were used for the Medieval Warm Period, and only the highest data points were used for the 1980s onwards. For more information, see http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354

That, however, is nothing compared to how the "hockey stick" got into the 2007 IPCC report. That verged on fraud: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

The IPCC report itself was based on faulty mathematics. Christopher Monckton, a physicist, decided to examine the climate model used for the 2007 IPCC report, and found that the math was wrong, and that the impact of CO2 on climate had been overstated by anywhere from 500-2000%: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/monckton.cfm

Looking away from the science for a moment, why is it that Al Gore got a Nobel peace prize for a documentary that either misled or got a large part of its science wrong ( http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton/goreerrors.html )? Why is it that the skeptics who point at the problems with climate science suffer from ad hominem attacks, while the skeptics themselves are just looking at the science? Shouldn't the argument be in regards to the data - and for that matter, isn't the ad hominem attack usually used by the person whose argument is weakest?

The climate is changing - it always has been. In fact, the last eight years have been very abnormal due to the fact that the overall surface temperature of the Earth hasn't actually changed during them (the only measurement station noting an increase in temperature is from NASA, which relies on ground based thermometers which have been overrun by urban centers, which raises the local temperature anyway - sorry, but I don't have the link for this data on hand and I'm running out of time, so you'll have to google for this information yourself). And while CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is a very minor one. Climate-wise, we have been on an upswing for some time. But how much of that is our fault?

I don't know. But so long as the "science" that is being spouted on this is based on discredited graphs, cherry-picked data, and faulty mathematics, I don't think I'm going to find out any time soon. This "scientific consensus" is propaganda double-speak, and what's needed is honest science where theory is based on data, and not the other way around.

Um...

You do realize that there is a difference between Cosmic Rays and Solar Radiation. Right?

As far as the article goes, More sunspots mean more solar radiation, less sunspots mean less solar radiation.

If the sun has been going through a period of low activity as of recent years, that would certainly explain the cooling trends seen by scientists in recent years. Of course, some refuse to talk about it, and continue to hyperventilate about "Anthropogenic Global Warming" as if it was some kind of gospel, rather than just another scientific hypothesis that has yet to be proved even enough to garner "theory" status.

Of course, this is why real scientists continue to collect data, and to test the hypothesis. Many scientists are beginning to see serious cracks in AGW thought, and are beginning to question it's legitimacy. Unfortunately, AGW seems to have garnered quite a few political opportunists and quasi-religious acolytes who continue to insist there is a consensus where none exists.

Personally, I've not bought into the AGW hysteria, and am continuing to gather data. But the more I gather, the more I see that our Earth's climate has been fluctuating between warm and cool for eons, well before Man arrived on the scene, and will continue to do so until the death of the Sun. We are just a passing fancy for our planet, soon to be forgotten. How arrogant of us to think we could affect the deep and wide forces that move and shape our world.

Now, some anecdotal evidence. My wife is from Zamboanga City, Mindinao, Philippines (you can look it up on a map; it's the extreme southwest corner). We have been married nearly 20 years, and I have made at least 9 trips to her city. It's not that big a city, and we generally go to a few select places for dining/swimming, etc. One hotel is right on the Sulu Sea, and their pool is built about 20 feet from the ocean. It was about 20 feet nearly 20 years ago, and it was about 20 feet on our last trip two years ago. The beach is very level; a rise of 2 inches would have cut it to about 10 feet, and left the concrete dock stranded at least five feet in the water. It wasn't. I can't believe that "sea level" some 1500 miles to the north is that much different than sea level around an archipelago like the Philippines. So, I call shenanigans on Mr. Gore, and his mis-statements on sea level rise.

Or this: According to The Tennessean newspaper's report, Gore buys his carbon offsets through Generation Investment Management. a company he co-founded and serves as chairman: Gore helped found Generation Investment Management, through which he and others pay for offsets. The firm invests the money in solar, wind and other projects that reduce energy consumption around the globe... It gets better: As co-founder and chairman of the firm Gore presumably draws an income or will make money as its investments prosper. In other words, he "buys" his "carbon offsets" from himself, through a transaction designed to boost his own investments and return a profit to himself. To be blunt, Gore doesn't buy "carbon offsets" through Generation Investment Management - he buys stocks.

Finally, as a simple google search will show, Gore's Tennessee home uses between 17-20 times the national average for electricity - as much as 220,000 kWh/month. Meanwhile, "environmental criminal George Bush" has a ranch in Crawford, TX, that uses deep groundwater for cooling, heat pumps, and other energy efficient methods to maintain it. Sounds to me that Gore talks the talk, but doesn't walk the walk, which makes him a major-league hypocrite in my book.

You know what I love about the climate change denial argument? It rests entirely on ad hominem fallacies, without ever addressing what is or is not happening.

Hey, Buckwheat, try clicking a few links. Nowhere in my post or my posts, or my "journal" do I deny that climate change is happening. Fools would. I've just not swallowed the "man caused" kool-aid.

It is not an ad hominen if the writer notes that the subject preaches a change of behavior to avoid calamity, but does not make those changes himself.

As for not providing back up claims, try clicking through to my journal. Got it, Sparky? You're just half a level down from those who don't RTFM.

But, try this, while you are spinning.