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Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.

This is Richard Linzen's "Iris" hypothesis. One of the few plausible bits of actual science from the so-called climate skeptics. Unfortunately, it seems not to work and was thoroughly refuted about ten years ago.

The alarmist models have largely failed to model both the past and ongoing present situation, and are therefore useless in predicting the future.

This is a big steaming pile of bullshit.

It isn't being thrown out, it's being thrown IN. Into a vast sea of data that overwhelmingly favours one side even though you can try to cherry-pick data that points in the other direction (a la http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif).

Nobody is taking one hurricane and saying QED, AGW exists. We're examining the effects of GW (A or no A) on a hurricane. And it's basing it on factors like sea level which are less chaotic than say wind patterns.

This is how you do science. More controls are good. But science is done in reality. We didn't need to create a control Sun and then make its entire mass utterly vanish instantaneously in order to learn orbital mechanics, and we do our verifications using a model of how gravity works and much smaller scale experiments like the Cavendish experiment (generally -- some astrophysicists have since dome some grand measurements as well).

And when birds start flying and magnets levitate, nobody gets excited when we make excuses for why they aren't falling to the Earth. When rockets start moving away in a vacuum, you don't point to it as proof of non-conservation of momentum and dismiss it when we point out you aren't considering the full system of rocket and ejecta. "That's just part of the rocket, not the whole rocket-ejecta system". And when people point out that Earth's gravity does play a substantial role in bird flight, citing the top speed of an eagle dive, nobody claims that they are extrapolating the entire existence of gravity from a single bird dive.

Could you remind me again, won't this be the 15th year since global warming stopped?

There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998

No, no, no.

the short answer is that sometimes CO2 trails temperature increase, sometimes it doesn't.

Usually when CO2 trails climate, it's because of orbital forcing, but interestingly, sometimes that temperature increase will increase ocean acidification and amply carbon feedbacks.

Hey, the carbon/feedback cycle is complex, no doubt about it. But carbon is a forcing -- no doubt about it, and right now GHG are responsible for the lion's share of the present and future temperature increase.

Here's deeper discussion of this issue: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm

Here's a video that responds to the CO2 trails climate meme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ3PzYU1N7A

Really? Because of network effects. That's it. Everyone else is communicating on it.

It's purely a predatory play- they capture people who are at a time in their lives when they're well known to be indiscreet. They then record all that indiscretion. Then they monetize it.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg is taking the results of that monetization and campaigning -hard - for XL Keystone pipeline.

http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_23151754/keystone-xl-foes-rally-front-facebook-protest-zuckerbergs

a fact he's aggressively trying to lie about:

http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2013/04/30/1943091/facebook-rejects-ad-highlighting-zuckerberg-groups-support-for-keystone-xl/

because like all other deniers,. he's first and foremost a narcissist:

http://www.afterpsychotherapy.com/narcissistic-personality-disorder/

who relishes the idea that he's smarter and more knowledgeable across a highly technical domain than are the the world's scientists who have spent their lives disciplined in and mastering that domain.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm

But one thing he doesn't have in common with other deniers

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

is he's going to be around long enough to be forced by society to bear, without reserve, the consequences of his actions today, which depending on how bad things get, could range anywhere from total dissolution of his personal wealth to fund emergency, remedial action against global warming - an outcome that is now a virtually certainty- to extended torture at the hands of enraged mobs / quasi-civilization, should we reach five degrees of warming and real civilization just breaks down.:

http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nRf2RTqANg

Repeat: Please explain how energy -- radiative only, without conductive or convective assistance -- can travel from colder to warmer.

Jane, I'm sure you will agree that Science is more than a grab-bag of factoids. So with that in mind, please explain why you wear a jacket in cold weather, or a blanket at night? - Like wool, CO2 is a thermal insulator, it has the effect of "cooling" the upper atmosphere (or in the case of a blanket, cooling the bedroom) and warming the lower atmosphere (the bed). Clouds do exactly the same thing because H20 is a greenhouse gas (ie: a thermal insulator), As an Aussie I can tell you from 50 odd years of first hand experience that overcast summer nights are sleepless nights unless you have the air-con on full blast, we even call it a "blanket of cloud".

But here's the real problem with your argument, climate scientists are NOT claiming what you believe they are, in other words the well known "back radiation" canard is a strawman argument. Now ask yourself, who built that strawman for you and how can you avoid that kind of trap in the future?

You may think of me as a troll if you wish but my intention is to educate and promote genuine skepticisim, I "pick on you" from time to time because I believe you're intelligent, genuine, and misinformed.

That means American personal cars and homes produce between 1/4 and 1/5 of the world's CO2 emissions.

That can't be correct. Total human emissions of CO2 only account for about 3% of the world's CO2 emissions, so do you mean that American cars and homes account for between 1/4 and 1/5 of that 3%?

Where on earth did you get that number? Or are you just subtly regurgitating this fallacy by saying that since humans do not put out nearly as much carbon as the rest of the biosphere that our impact must be unimportant?

A better study might look at the scrutiny applied to these 97% vs the *rejected* papers that disagreed with the 97%.

That would be an interesting study, but I don't think it would practical to do so. I doubt most journals archive copies of articles they don't print. Of course, someone should give it a try. I expect the result will be far from what you would expect. According to the information available to me, it looks like the majority of rejected papers that deal with the source of global warming, also support the human-cause hypothesis. I am aware that at various times the people who promote the idea that alternate viewpoints are being excluded from publication have been challenged to provide proof. So far they have been unable to find any papers that were being excluded from publication on any grounds other than poor methodology (which has directly led to unreliable conclusions). In fact, there is real evidence to show that some scientists who are opposed to the human-cause hypothesis were actually given preferential treatment in one journal. There's no evidence of the opposite happening.

Please. Anybody that's looked seriously at the "hide the decline" issue and doesn't see scientific misconduct for political reasons is completely biased. I actually used to be a "warmist", not a "denier", until Climategate. Not that I was really a "warmist", as I knew trying to model the temperature of the Earth at best was always going to be somewhat uncertain, but I at least gave the scientists the benefit of the doubt.

Anybody who looked seriously at content of the emails saw the conversations were taken out of context. From wikipedia.

Many commentators quoted one email in which Phil Jones said he had used "Mike's Nature trick" in a 1999 graph for the World Meteorological Organization "to hide the decline" in proxy temperatures derived from tree ring analyses when measured temperatures were actually rising. This 'decline' referred to the well-discussed tree ring divergence problem, but these two phrases were taken out of context by climate change sceptics, including US Senator Jim Inhofe and former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, as though they referred to some decline in measured global temperatures, even though they were written when temperatures were at a record high.[32] John Tierney, writing in the New York Times in November 2009, said that the claims by sceptics of "hoax" or "fraud" were incorrect, but that the graph on the cover of a report for policy makers and journalists did not show these non-experts where proxy measurements changed to measured temperatures.

Basically, tree-ring data was removed because it showed a decline. That sounds ominous until it is known that after 1960 tree-ring data for high-latitude locations showed a known problem.

Tree-ring growth has been found to match well with temperature. Hence, tree-rings are used to plot temperature going back hundreds of years. However, tree-rings in some high-latitude locations diverge from modern instrumental temperature records after 1960. This is known as the "divergence problem". Consequently, tree-ring data in these high-latitude locations are not considered reliable after 1960 and should not be used to represent temperature in recent decades.

This known unreliable data was removed. All the data has been published. Please find the discrepancies.

And if "hide the decline" isn't enough for you, then there was the explicit email requesting others to erase email to avoid freedom of information acts. That's a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Where was the prosecution?

Freedom of information act does mean that anyone and everyone can harass you because you are a climate scientist. If you were conducting science for a small university and all the sudden your university gets deluged with FOIA requests (some for data not even processed yet), what would be your response? How would you like it if people you didn't know sent mass emails to you at work asking for your incomplete work? Especially if you knew these people were against you politically only because they didn't like your work. I imagine you would be defensive and a bit frustrated at times because you want to do your work and not deal with things outside of your job. The House committee noted this:

The committee criticised the university for the way that freedom of information requests were handled, and for failing to give adequate support to the scientists to deal with such requests.

Or how about this, "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

If your colleague at work wants to see your work, you'd likely show it to him. If he is your enemy at work, would you let them? Especially if they are asking for your incomplete work so that they can show your boss how incompetent you are. You might protest that the work was in

This chart shows your repeated claim to be bullshit.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

Call me a denier for asking a question.

A new game. Few or none of the people here are doing that.

Yes, right. That's why the second response to my post was this. I don't even have to look beyond this thread to see people doing that.

If 400ppm CO2 is causing global warming, then can someone please explain to me how the Earth's climate was cooler during the late Ordovician period [geocraft.com] when CO2 was about 4400ppm?

See here.

I've seen that. But what I haven't seen is how they determined the solar output was lower. Everything I've seen seems to focus on how CO2 was lower than 4400ppm. That it was actually only 3000ppm.

BTW, I find it interesting that they blame the sun, since the sun is beyond man's control. The sun was very active in the 90s. We had high temperatures then. Then solar activity declined for about a decade, and 1998 stayed the hottest year in recent records.

The sun cooled. The warming retreated. I merely point that out, then I'm a denialist. When AGW believers point to the sun as the answer to this particular conundrum, then of course that is it! Accepted without question.

I'll take it on faith that you asked that question in all seriousness. However there are denialists who keep raising the same objections year after year, and most of them were legitimate objections at one time, but they ignore the explanations that have since been found for them.

Denialists? You mean skeptics, right? The only people who use that term are people interested in provoking flame wars. I don't waste my time on the mouth breathers who use that term in a discussion about climate.

Yeah, things change. Whheew. By the way, do we have any certainty over this? Polar bears are supposed to be extinct since quite a few years now. Still see them around.

Perhaps the part where the rate of change is unprecedented and humans are the cause went over your head?

Huh? How? Who says?

You really don't understand ecosystems do you? We humans are not entirely independent in this world. We depend on many different species for survival. Take salmon for example. They are affected by river temperature as higher temperature mean less oxygen and this affects their growth, size, ability to spawn, etc. Salmon are not likely to migrate to another river for colder temperatures on their return from the ocean. Forgetting that the loss of salmon has implications for a wide number of species like bears, birds, etc, many people depend on them for basic survival as well as the fishing industry. This is just one species.

According to previsions 20 years ago, sea should have risen by 1m right now. It didn't happen. Fuck them and their stupid extrapolations predicting doom. They are just as clueless as you and I. Maybe it's time to acknowledge it by now.

Would you care to cite any studies or are you labeling anything you don't understand as stupid? Simple logic says if the world is getting warmer, the ice caps will melt. (And they are melting faster than ever). So where does that water go? This isn't rocket science.

The biggest thing you seem to be forgetting is that we - as humans, even countries - cannot do anything that would put even a mild dent in the level of CO2 produced.

This statement only reinforces the fact that you have no clue. So what you're saying the massive amount of CO2 we put in the air has no effect. Or are you one of those people that can't balance an equation?

WTF? Is it just for fun? Even if all of Europe stopped producing CO2 TOMORROW, it wouldn't change a thing. Asia (China, India) would pollute as much as we do/did in no time. And they don't give a flying fuck about all that. So exactly, what is the point?

We can't do anything about Asia so no one should do anything. That's rather a childish attitude.

And moreover, what is bad in this? Is CO2 killing the planet? Did you watch my video?

Wow you need to go back to basic biology and learn two terms: ecosystems and balance. As for the video, Matt Ridley seriously? His last article to the WSJ was so thoroughly debunked it wasn't funny. In fact Many authors routinely destroy his premises. It's not that Matt Ridley is a skeptic. He's a denier who uses flawed logic when presented with real science.

I recall that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has not broken that record since.

No, the latest record was 2010.

I recall that the temperature reached in 1998 was lower than that of 1934.

No, globally, 1934 is the 49th hottest year on record.

There seems to be a certain difficulty to create a correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.

No, an enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 has been confirmed by multiple lines of empirical evidence..

I recall that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has not broken that record since.

No, the latest record was 2010.

I recall that the temperature reached in 1998 was lower than that of 1934.

No, globally, 1934 is the 49th hottest year on record.

There seems to be a certain difficulty to create a correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.

No, an enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 has been confirmed by multiple lines of empirical evidence..

I recall that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has not broken that record since.

No, the latest record was 2010.

I recall that the temperature reached in 1998 was lower than that of 1934.

No, globally, 1934 is the 49th hottest year on record.

There seems to be a certain difficulty to create a correlation between CO2 levels and global temperatures.

No, an enhanced greenhouse effect from CO2 has been confirmed by multiple lines of empirical evidence..

Dude. Really?

Call me a denier for asking a question.

A new game. Few or none of the people here are doing that.

If 400ppm CO2 is causing global warming, then can someone please explain to me how the Earth's climate was cooler during the late Ordovician period [geocraft.com] when CO2 was about 4400ppm?

See here.

The answer to the puzzle you ask about was unknown for quite some time. It was one of the legitimate objections to the AGW theory. However, serious scientists looked for an answer rather than dismissing it. I've been following the AGW debate for 10-15 years. I wasn't convinced up until about 10 years ago, because there were many serious questions. One by one though most of the serious objections have been explained. That isn't proof (proof doesn't exist in science anyway) but there is a clear trajectory, which seems like a good way to bet. I'll take it on faith that you asked that question in all seriousness. However there are denialists who keep raising the same objections year after year, and most of them were legitimate objections at one time, but they ignore the explanations that have since been found for them.

Actually, 1998 is now the 3rd warmest year on record behind 2005 and 2010.
In the United States, 1934 is the 4th warmest year on record behind 1998, 2006, and 2012.
Globally, 1934 is the 49th warmest year because the extreme heat was mostly limited to North America.

The problem is that the government is keeps getting bigger to supposedly fight global warming but they do nothing in their direct power to do something about it.

That would be a problem, but assuming you mean the American government, it hasn't actually taken many, if any, steps to fight global warming. A major reason for that is that Republican party strategists have focused on a campaign of claiming that the science isn't settled in direct contradiction to fact, confirmed by this study, that it is. This argument is used to delay and derail any legislation that might govern traditional Republican allies in the oil and coal industries.

That piece of nonsense refuted in a single image.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

Apparently, nobody noticed that global warming stopped about 13 years ago...

Ahem...

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

If man had something to do with it, and our activity is essentially increasing exponentially with new humans being born all the time (and China kicking industrial action into high gear), then wouldn't the impact on climate also be exponential?

No, actually. CO2 concentrations increase temperature logarithmicly, so while population is increasing at a decreasing exponential rate (expected to hit 0% growth this century), the higher the concentration of CO2 goes, the less warming each addition ppm actualy contributes.

Human activity has been increasing, yet the whole warming thing STALLED 17 years ago.

You math is off, the warming trend is flat if (and only if) you take start from the fall of 1997, and that's 16 years currently. However, that's a cherry-picked start date and there are problems with choosing your data to make a particular point. more generally,you can always draw flat trend lines on noisy data regardless of whether the overall trend is up, down or constant.

I do recall a few inconvenient facts about global warming. I recall that the global temperature peaked in 1998 and has not broken that record since. ... I recall that the temperature reached in 1998 was lower than that of 1934.

You need better recall - none of those things are true.

The fact that the correlation has not yet been proven is only a small part.

It hasn't and it never will be, because in science you can never prove anything. I do find it a handy guide on which way to bet though.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

Lets look at the data:
explicit endorse, >50%: 65
explicit endorse: 934
implicit endorse: 2934
no position: 8269
implicit reject: 53
explicit reject: 15
explicit reject,

So that's some pretty straight up lies you're quoting there. Either say 65 against 10 (that is, out of all quantifying studies with explicit outcomes), or say 3933 against 78. Also note that most papers have no position, which makes the 12k+ claim kinda ridiculous, because over 66% doesn't take any position on the debate. Excluding those, we get that (78/(3933+78) ~) 1.94% rejects and (3933/(3933+78) ~ ) 98.1% accepts.

I think you may be committing at least two errors here:

1. Confirmation bias #1: Thinking that "GW alarmists tout every earthquake, every drought, every flood as proof of global warming".
Global warming affects the climate, which affects the weather - generally, in making it more extreme.

2. Confirmation bias #2: Thinking that just because you experience cold weather there is no global warming.
The longer, colder, more snowy winters are actually an effect of global warming, counter-intuitive as that may seem.

I think you may be committing at least two errors here:

1. Confirmation bias #1: Thinking that "GW alarmists tout every earthquake, every drought, every flood as proof of global warming".
Global warming affects the climate, which affects the weather - generally, in making it more extreme.

2. Confirmation bias #2: Thinking that just because you experience cold weather there is no global warming.
The longer, colder, more snowy winters are actually an effect of global warming, counter-intuitive as that may seem.

Dude, that's a joke at your expense. You keep trying to argue around the fact that your "statement of fact" is obviously wrong.

I've provided you a simple and effective demonstration that your belief is not coherent with reality. Even your counter proof says "Trend: 0.14". You do realise that a positive trend indicates warming, right?

Here's a quote from the Met Office:

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.

As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. (emphasis added) If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16C/decade (or 0.15C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8C. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

The atmospheric warming trend has slowed a little, however, the ocean (which absorbs about 90% of the extra incoming heat from the green house effect) continues to warm, Decades of slower warming are expected. Especially, see Figure 2 in the last link. Natural variability laid on top of a trend can always lead to an endless series of plateaus, if you try hard enough.

Dude, that's a joke at your expense. You keep trying to argue around the fact that your "statement of fact" is obviously wrong.

I've provided you a simple and effective demonstration that your belief is not coherent with reality. Even your counter proof says "Trend: 0.14". You do realise that a positive trend indicates warming, right?

Here's a quote from the Met Office:

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.

As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. (emphasis added) If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16C/decade (or 0.15C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8C. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

The atmospheric warming trend has slowed a little, however, the ocean (which absorbs about 90% of the extra incoming heat from the green house effect) continues to warm, Decades of slower warming are expected. Especially, see Figure 2 in the last link. Natural variability laid on top of a trend can always lead to an endless series of plateaus, if you try hard enough.

Dude, that's a joke at your expense. You keep trying to argue around the fact that your "statement of fact" is obviously wrong.

I've provided you a simple and effective demonstration that your belief is not coherent with reality. Even your counter proof says "Trend: 0.14". You do realise that a positive trend indicates warming, right?

Here's a quote from the Met Office:

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.

As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. (emphasis added) If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16C/decade (or 0.15C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8C. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

The atmospheric warming trend has slowed a little, however, the ocean (which absorbs about 90% of the extra incoming heat from the green house effect) continues to warm, Decades of slower warming are expected. Especially, see Figure 2 in the last link. Natural variability laid on top of a trend can always lead to an endless series of plateaus, if you try hard enough.

Your argument has been well and truly debunked.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm

Idiot

The most important thing to do is actually spot-check references. This is so poorly and rarely done that you will very quickly sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to arguments about climate change. (And pretty much anything else.) Sure it takes time, but you learn a *lot* by following how people argue.

It is not too difficult to separate the signal from the noise, but you have to eschew black and white thinking. There are plenty of "earth-is-holy" nutcases out there who desperately believe in AGW, and have no friggin' clue about anything other than their spirit guide. But those people do not work in universities.

If you are interested in seeing some detailed analysis on "skeptic" arguments, then I recommend Peter Hadfield's excellent 5 video series on Monckton: Monckton Bumkin. Sure he makes fun of Monckton, but you'll see why if you actually watch some Monckton videos and then try and trace the arguments. Monckton walked away from a direct conversation with Peter Hadfield on Monckton responds to Potholer54 on the "skeptic" website WUWT.

If you are interested in how information flows through society, then Naomi Oreskes has an excellent book on the disinformation campaign: Merchants of Doubt. It is a little too detailed for a light read, but the details are stomach churning in their audacity.

Getting to the core of the scientific issues is more work. I'm working on a phd, and have a long background in math, modeling, and also some understanding of scientific culture. That type of experience doesn't just fall in your lap. skepticalscience does a good job.

The jury is still out how much is natural and how much is man made.

If the jury is still out, it's because someone put Anthony Watts on it. Turns out, the natural component is about -5% of the warming, and the man-made component is about 105%. Seriously it doesn't get much clearer than that.

The planet was already warming anyway (kinda occurs after ice ages) remember.

Actually, we were on a long term cooling trend and we're still in the ice age. Never the less, the warming after a glacial period occurs immediately after that period ends and then a slow decline begins that eventually leads into another glacial period.

As for the people on the coast, we are talking about 50 - 100 year time frames. No house is going under tomorrow.

It's not usually a matter of sea level rise submerging a city, it's the effect of repeated flooding which becomes more common as sea levels rise. Usually, it won't be the evacuation of a city but a thousand unnoticed tragedies as individual residents and businesses are forced out by a combination of flooding damages and insurance costs. You might only notice the effects during events like Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina, if then.

Or, some people learned in 5th grade how science works: you come up with a hypothesis, and then you test it through experiment.

For example, you might think "won't increased CO2 help plants grow?" and then try to find out whether that's true.

You may not remember all the claims that "a few years do not make climate, we need at least 10 years of data..." but I sure do.

All the claims from who? I once heard someone claim the moon was made of cheese. Does that make the people who have always said the moon is made of rock and dust somehow wrong?

Doesn't it bother you that even IPCC admits to a "17-year lack of warming", yet CO2 has continued to steadily rise? It doesn't fit their model, man. And they even admit that they can't explain why.

I can explain why, just as the engineer in The Australian newspaper that you are quoting can and did in the first paragraph. 17 years isn't anywhere near approaching the >30 years that are needed to establish a climate trend.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

This isn't a matter of honesty or transparency, it's a question of statistical significance. It's a rule of thumb that it takes about 30 years of weather observations to establish what a given climate is like. Shorter than that and there is too much noise in the signal. Heck, El Nino alone may take 12 years to come around, and it's effects won't be the same every time.

A model is a completely different thing,statistically. You can run it as many times as you like.

The scientists, operate according to statistical and scientific method. To accuse them of inconsistency is deeply hypocritical, given the cherry picking behaviour of the deniers.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

... Things have changed. "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW) advocates repeatedly and consistently stated that a trend of 10 years or more proved their point... [Jane Q. Public, 2013-05-05]

Presumably you're referring to "scientists." Also, I've repeatedly said:

Since climate is an average over ~20 years ... climate is only meaningful when discussing averages over ~20 years. ... I've repeatedly stressed that we need ~20 years to average out weather noise. ... professional climatologists usually smooth data and model output using ~20 year averages. ... It's also important to remember that a ~20 year timespan is necessary to obtain statistically significant temperature trends...

In fact, I've repeatedly told you that ~20 years are needed:

As I've explained, climate is the global average over ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2010-02-16]

This graph shows why scientists prefer trends calculated over at least ~20 years. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2013-01-21]

I've even gone into more detail, showing you a paper that says at least 17 years are required:

... at least 17 years are needed to establish a statistically significant trend of global surface temperatures. [Dumb Scientist to Jane Q. Public, 2012-12-05]

Of course, you ignored me just like you previously ignored riverat1:

And 10 years has what to do with climate trends? Not much. A recent paper by Santer et. al. calculated the signal (climate) to noise (weather/natural variation) ratio for climate trends. For 10 years the S/N ratio is less than 1. They found it takes 17 years to be sure the signal is greater than the noise. [riverat1 to Jane Q. Public, 2011-11-19]

For global temperatures, Santer et al. 2011 shows that one needs to average over ~17 years of data to obtain statistically significant climate trends. Here's another explanation by Tamino. Also, the Skeptical Science trend calculator helps visualize statistical significance. [Dumb Scientist, 2012-08-15]

Perhaps your ode to conspiracy theories distracted you, but I also linked to another method of calculating significance which is even more conservative:

Also, Bart

The future is now.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500.gif

Somebody isn't giving you the current science on this topic.

The early to the beginning of the late Ordovician was very hot, and had the highest sea levels of the Paleozoic due to those high levels of CO2 from vulcanism.

In the late Ordovician vulcanism subsided and the earth cooled due to the drop in CO2 to the point where there was an ice age and mass extinction events.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/CO2-levels-during-the-late-Ordovician.html

Might be better for your argument if that wasn't completely false.

Precisely the hoax to which I was referring. You DO know that the planet stopped heating up some 16 years ago, right?

If the planet stopped heating 16 years ago, why did ten of the ten warmest years on record occur in the last 16 years? It is literally impossible for the planet to have stopped heating before it reached those peak temperatures. It is simply not physically possible and it is sheer insanity to claim other wise. Furthermore the decade from 2000-2009 is the warmest decade on record. How does you claim even make the least bit of sense?

It appears that you are either perpetrating the hoax or have fallen for it, global warming continues.

There exists a theory that the increase in temperature forces dissolved CO2 in the ocean out of solution.

Where is it supposed to go, right back into the atmosphere?

Obviously, the theory is that a rise in temperature of the oceans is the source of the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, not the other way round. Have you really never heard of that theory?

To be fair there is a counter to the theory.

It is worth noting that the total amount of CO2 dissolved in the ocean is about 50 times greater than the total amount of CO2 present in the atmosphere.

>Well its all fricking moot anyway isn't it?

It feels like this is certain. Partly since the ideas you mentioned to circumvent the problem are not really all that workable. Imagine the >2000 nuclear power plants you need to substitute the energy stored in coal, oil, and gas. What will the rate of >=INES6 events be? Remember we still can't eat wild animals in some parts of Germany due to Chernobyl, so much for the backyard.

Then you shouldn't forget that all geological resources need more and more energy to get them out of the ground over time due to declining concentration, so at some point your netto energy always declines to where your society reverts to a simpler state if you can't find anything new and better.

Then you always have the waste problem that you hope the environment will swallow but doesn't - that also affects your netto energy.
The problem now with our favourite waste CO2 is that it will stay with us for a long time, look at the following for a good explanation ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsnaXlhctLY ).

Combine this with the fact that we haven't come up with any clean replacement technologies that are put into production in a credible way (renewables in my country support ~2% of electric energy consumption and we seem somewhat committed), it should become apparent that the catastrophic non-linear climate change will hit us right in time when we run out of energy to deal with it.

Also notice that on the psychological level we won't be able to make the right decisions, first of all the effects of CO2 are delayed by around 40 years http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html this will take the otherwise sensible "show me" guys out of the pool of people you can get behind your "do something, anything" agenda. Then as things go down people will fall prey to hyperbolic discounting and say lets use those resources as the danger is far away.

They are under pressure from netto energy decline now and also decide against investing in new and uncertain technologies that will give them less netto energy anyway but could help with things in the future, (this has been called the energy trap http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/, and is more generally mentioned by Denis Meadows while not involving energy), hyperbolic discounting at work again.

Notice that many people have researched the issues, politicians have attempted to deal with the issues in some halfhearted form and gotten nowhere. Also notice that people have no problem to go to war over resource issues and risk loss of live for more oil or gold (the latter being the worst reason). I'm pretty sure that they also have no problem accepting loss of live on a grand scale, but it does have to happen later and maybe stretched out over time and space so we don't notice that much.

Because of that, I'm 100% certain that no action will be taken regarding climate change that will amount to substantial preventative measures. Which is easy to say since way back in the 19th century was the time to plan ahead, and some good insights that could have led to action then, never had any impact.

Har har you such a smartey man

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-stopped-in-1998-intermediate.htm