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The sewage comparison originally comes from Earth: the Operators Manual, but I read about it on Skeptical Science. They also have a cost estimate page.

The sewage comparison originally comes from Earth: the Operators Manual, but I read about it on Skeptical Science. They also have a cost estimate page.

The sewage comparison originally comes from Earth: the Operators Manual, but I read about it on Skeptical Science. They also have a cost estimate page.

That's a good question; I described the difference between climate and weather at the beginning of my article. I later updated it with a better analogy from NOAA: One way to distinguish between weather and climate is that the climate of your hometown will determine how many sweaters you have in your closet. The weather will determine if you should be wearing a sweater right now.

Many times the climate being discussed is global, so an average is taken over the entire Earth. 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.

GRACE also measured the 2005 Amazon drought, regarded as the worst in over a century. Just five years later, the 2010 Amazon drought might have been even more severe.

GRACE also measured the 2010-2011 floods in Australian and Columbia, which dumped so much water on land that sea level temporarily dropped by ~6mm.

So you are actually talking about the recent Scandinavian tree ring data? They wrote about that too. The problem appears to be that you're comparing one regional proxy of summer temperatures (with a 100 year smoothing filter) to a combination of global proxies of annual temperature (with a 40 year smoothing filter). Additionally, given that Scandinavia is around 55-70 degrees North, a trend from that region is highly likely to report amplified cooling (or warming) when compared to the global trend because the poles tend to cool (and warm) faster than rest of the planet.

Additionally, you might want to watch this video on the Medieval Warm Period.

The Escalator graphic illustrates this point perfectly.

You know what's really cool about Skeptical Science? They already did that. I'm surprised that someone who claims to have a degree in mathematics is foolish enough to believe that tree rings from a single country are a better measure of temperatures than a global network of thermometers.

This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator.

Indeed. Since I can measure each stair tread in my staircase and find them to be quite flat, it is therefore apparent that my staircase cannot possibly connect the upstairs with the downstairs.

This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator.

Indeed. Since I can measure each stair tread in my staircase and find them to be quite flat, it is therefore apparent that my staircase cannot possibly connect the upstairs with the downstairs.

Between then and now, States have had record cold temperatures as well.

That's why you want to look at the rate of record highs to record lows. There is a field that works out how to understand if we are looking at trends or outliers. It is called statistics.

He missed that the stratosphere would also cool due to thinning of the ozone layer ...

I used to think that as well but it turns out that reduced ozone is at best a very minor component of stratospheric cooling. There is an explanation of what's going on with stratospheric cooling here.

Actually, the models do a reasonable job of projecting scenarios. Most of the "models can't predict the future" stuff is from people who don't understand what a model is. The first clue is that models don't make predictions, they project what will happen given a set of predictions. This is important, because when evaluating a models performance, you shouldn't fault the model if the predicted events are different from what actually happened. The predictions are external to the model. To properly evaluate the models performance, you have to go back and use the actual events (fossil fuel use, land change, solar input, volcanic activity and other factors) and see how close it's projections were to reality when given real events to determine essentially how well it would have performed with a "perfect" prediction of the future inputs to the model.

Most of the models used to project global warming scenarios do a reasonably good job once the differences between predicted events and actual events are taken into account (remember the predicted events are external, hypothetical data fed into the model). A frequent trick used by global warming "sceptics" is to take the scenario that was furthest from actual events and using that to "prove" that the models are unreliable. If you are interested in reading up on some historical perspective on climate modelling, Skeptical Science did a series of blog posts called Lessons from Past Climate Predictions looking at the record. It can be quite an informative read.

Actually, the models do a reasonable job of projecting scenarios. Most of the "models can't predict the future" stuff is from people who don't understand what a model is. The first clue is that models don't make predictions, they project what will happen given a set of predictions. This is important, because when evaluating a models performance, you shouldn't fault the model if the predicted events are different from what actually happened. The predictions are external to the model. To properly evaluate the models performance, you have to go back and use the actual events (fossil fuel use, land change, solar input, volcanic activity and other factors) and see how close it's projections were to reality when given real events to determine essentially how well it would have performed with a "perfect" prediction of the future inputs to the model.

Most of the models used to project global warming scenarios do a reasonably good job once the differences between predicted events and actual events are taken into account (remember the predicted events are external, hypothetical data fed into the model). A frequent trick used by global warming "sceptics" is to take the scenario that was furthest from actual events and using that to "prove" that the models are unreliable. If you are interested in reading up on some historical perspective on climate modelling, Skeptical Science did a series of blog posts called Lessons from Past Climate Predictions looking at the record. It can be quite an informative read.

There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.

I wish that were true, but there aren't any good arguments against manmade global warming. That was what actually convinced me it was real.

There was no global warming in the last 10 years.

This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator. I think it's a type of confirmation bias, where people only look for the trends that confirm their pre-existing views. The particular reasons temperatures look stable over the past decade are known (Weak El Ninos, increased sulfur emissions from China, below average solar activity and above average volcanic activity) and known to be short-term effects. Furthermore, satellites can measure the energy surplus the planet is accumulating. We know from those satellites that more solar energy is entering than is leaving, and that it hasn't changed.

It's unfortunate that this isn't actually isn't any room for debate, but the amount of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) means that only laymen who refuse to accept the consequences of AGW continue to dispute the issue. You may recall even the CEO of Exxon says AGW is real and he has billions of reason to deny it is happening. The actual scientists have a remarkably high level of confidence (97% of researchers in the field agree with 2% undecided) that AGW has been occurring for decades. I wish it was not happening but wishing doesn't make it true. There are, of course, uncertainties in what exactly will happen in the future, but some things are predictable, especially in broad strokes. We know leaving a pot of water on a hot burner will eventually cause it to boil, even if we can't predict the exact second that it will boil over.

There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.

I wish that were true, but there aren't any good arguments against manmade global warming. That was what actually convinced me it was real.

There was no global warming in the last 10 years.

This is a common error, frequently made be people who don't understand mathematics and graphs. As long as there is random noise in data, there will always be "plateaus" where things look stable but the underlining trend continues. In the case of global warming, if you try you can actually find a series of continuous downward slopes so that any year of the temperature record can appear to be part of a declining trend, while actual temperatures rise consistently. This is sometimes called going down the up escalator. I think it's a type of confirmation bias, where people only look for the trends that confirm their pre-existing views. The particular reasons temperatures look stable over the past decade are known (Weak El Ninos, increased sulfur emissions from China, below average solar activity and above average volcanic activity) and known to be short-term effects. Furthermore, satellites can measure the energy surplus the planet is accumulating. We know from those satellites that more solar energy is entering than is leaving, and that it hasn't changed.

It's unfortunate that this isn't actually isn't any room for debate, but the amount of evidence supporting Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) means that only laymen who refuse to accept the consequences of AGW continue to dispute the issue. You may recall even the CEO of Exxon says AGW is real and he has billions of reason to deny it is happening. The actual scientists have a remarkably high level of confidence (97% of researchers in the field agree with 2% undecided) that AGW has been occurring for decades. I wish it was not happening but wishing doesn't make it true. There are, of course, uncertainties in what exactly will happen in the future, but some things are predictable, especially in broad strokes. We know leaving a pot of water on a hot burner will eventually cause it to boil, even if we can't predict the exact second that it will boil over.

Saying Hansen isn't a climatologist is a bit like saying Claude Shannon wasn't a computer scientist. Yeah, the term didn't exist back then, so his PhD was in astrophysics (about the atmosphere of Venus).

Yes, logically, a person's lack of education doesn't imply something he's written is poor. But we don't have an infinite amount of time and attention. It's nothing new at all that time and attention is rationed according to educational achievements - arguably, it's one of the main things we use those formal educational titles for.

But anyway, Watts' pre-release paper does get attention, and people do adress why he's wrong.

That part has me confused. He's never been a non-believer in AGW.

This is misleading almost to an extreme. Muller was well known for being skeptical of the research. He in particular attacked the "Hockey Stick" (See his article from 2004: Global Warming Bombshell. His criticisms were such that he was universally regarded as a skeptic prior to BEST (see Quotes by Richard Muller, and his skepticism regarding the research was consistent. Note that Watts initially supported BEST, and that work was financed in part by the Koch brothers. Do you think that would be the case if Muller was regarded as being a "warmist"? Your popular technology article appears convincing until you read the linked sources. From those it is clear that your are right sort of, Muller never was a AGW denier per se, but the quotes read in context show that he was highly skeptical of the research which is why he was universally categorized as being one of the AGW skeptics prior to 2010. The point is that he was open minded which is why he changed his mind.

Muller's claim that he's a "recently converted skeptic", which is a flat-out lie as he has always been a warmist.

Prove it please. This article from 2004: Global Warming Bombshell shows his earlier skeptic bonifides. True, even in this article he is concerned that global warming may be real, but he is skeptical of the research and was repeatedly so (see Quotes by Richard Muller. Remember that he did get support from the Koch Brothers who are not ones who would knowingly fund a "warmist". The main difference between him and most other skeptics was that he did not reject AGW out of hand and had a degree of open mindedness and honestly that lead him to do primary independent research which lead him to change his mind, thus proving that honest global warming skeptic doesn't always have to be a oxymoron.

If you are serious, I'd suggest starting with Skeptical Science. They don't allow abusive comments either for or against AGW and there's a ton of information there. Start with the Big Picture link and they'll lay out a very convincing science based case for AGW.

what is attributed to climate change

His present tense vs your future tense:

will be the result

He's right in saying we can't reliably say today that this or that effect we just experienced is definitively caused by climate change (and few if any climatologists have claimed that). But he said nothing about future effects - and there is strong evidence to correlate climate change with increasing strength of storms.

This [advantages vs disadvantages] is a discussion that doesn't seem to happen much.

While it's true this discussion hasn't been covered by the media much, that's mostly because so many people seem stuck at the "it's not human-caused" stage, or worse, at the "it's not warming at all" stage.

But it's certainly been studied in the scientific literature. There are a huge number of factors that could go either way of course, but that link (though far from being a comprehensive survey) summarises a number of studies of both positives and negatives. Opportunities were also considered (alongside risks) by the IPCC WGII.

Evidence aside, it seems reasonable to assume that, even assuming equal advantages and disadvantages, the disruption of the status quo and the significant costs of rapid adaptation, both for humans as well as the rest of the ecosystem, would result in a net negative. We would hope to see positive results greatly outweigh the negative for it to be worth allowing climate change to continue, but that is far from certain, and the studies that I've seen tend to show the opposite.

One of the distinguishing features of self-styled "skeptics" of climate science is that their skepticism is amazingly one sided; they seem to become utterly credulous regarding any argument, no matter how blatantly lame, that seems to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The "It's warming on Mars!" claim (accepted by many "skeptics" as unquestioned truth) is an excellent example. Of course, a genuine skeptic would immediately think, "Wait a minute. There can't be a lot of thermometers on Mars, and they can't have been there very long. I wonder how you measure a multi-decadal temperature trend on Mars? Just how good is the evidence for a warming trend on Mars, anyway?" Not very good, as it turns out.

Similarly, any genuine skeptic, hearing the claim that warming is due to the sun being a "mildly variable star" would immediately think, "Wait a minute. Thus sun is clearly visible up there in the sky. It can't be that hard to measure solar radiance. Is it really plausible that scientists haven't thought to check that?" They have. It's not the sun.

One of the distinguishing features of self-styled "skeptics" of climate science is that their skepticism is amazingly one sided; they seem to become utterly credulous regarding any argument, no matter how blatantly lame, that seems to cast doubt on the reality of global warming. The "It's warming on Mars!" claim (accepted by many "skeptics" as unquestioned truth) is an excellent example. Of course, a genuine skeptic would immediately think, "Wait a minute. There can't be a lot of thermometers on Mars, and they can't have been there very long. I wonder how you measure a multi-decadal temperature trend on Mars? Just how good is the evidence for a warming trend on Mars, anyway?" Not very good, as it turns out.

Similarly, any genuine skeptic, hearing the claim that warming is due to the sun being a "mildly variable star" would immediately think, "Wait a minute. Thus sun is clearly visible up there in the sky. It can't be that hard to measure solar radiance. Is it really plausible that scientists haven't thought to check that?" They have. It's not the sun.

nobody seems to be able to find anything he's ever said that put him in the "skeptic" camp...

And yet the people who are pro-AGW have heard of him, and have felt the need to create a rebuttal page listing what he has said and where he went wrong. Here is an article written by Muller about the hockey stick graph.

The problem is that he is not an extremist, and when he finds evidence that does support the climate change then he accepts it. However, he does have problems with some of the claims from the scientific community and he calls them out on it. He is a true skeptic, unlike the people who keep insisting that they are called skeptics who turn nasty on anyone who actually has their mind changed by scientific data. Those so-called skeptics are really just deniers.

If more evidence turns up to support man-made global climate change, and the ocean levels rise, then climate deniers in congress and the senate should have to pay to relocate everyone living in coastal cities. Fair is fair but, it won't work out that way.

Do you actually know how much the sea level rise is predicted to be, and over what timeframe? Right now we're estimating about 200 cm by 2100 . That's not really enough to warrant mass relocation of most first-world coastal cities, I'd imagine, and there's plenty of time to make modifications to existing harbors and such in the meantime.

Yes, there are some areas that may be seriously screwed (like Bangladesh, IIRC), but honestly it'll mostly be business as usual in the USA.

I've observed that people who regard themselves as climate science "skeptics" generally insist that one should disregard information provided by web sites run by experienced scientists who have studied the primary literature in depth and have concluded that the scientific consensus on the nature and hazards of global warming is broadly correct. Apparently, in "skeptic speak," having studied the evidence enough to have formed an opinion constitutes being "biased" (presumably, only ignorant people can be "objective"). So sites such as RealClimate, Skeptical Science, Open Mind, the IPCC web site, and the the NASA GISS web site are all out of bounds. Of course the distinguishing feature of climate science "skeptics" is that (unlike the skepticism of successful scientists) their skepticism is quite one-sided, and they become quite credulous when it comes to anything that seems to cast doubt on climate science--so they will happily cite sites like "WUWT."

But I cite SkepticalScience not as a source of opinion (I've already stated my opinion) but because that it is a site that provides good links to published reports that contain the evidence supporting my opinion. Nevertheless, it happens that I've personally reviewed many of the summaries provided on SkepticalScience and have compared them to the primary literature, and I find that SkepticalScience tends to be reliable and accurate, and a fair reflection of the consensus opinion of working climate scientists. This is in dramatic contrast to my experience at WUWT and other "skeptic" sites, where I often find that descriptions of the published literature are highly misleading, sometimes in ways that appear to me to be intentional.

Take a look at the chart they're using vs a google search [google.ca] for the same chart. Why is their chart different than the rest? All the other charts show that real temperatures most closely match Hansen's scenario C, which involved CO2 emissions ceasing to increase past 1990.

And here we see an example of why a site like SkepticalScience is useful, particularly compared to a Google search, which often turns up frequently-repeated misinformation. If you doubt that SkepticalScience is accurately reporting the models, all you have to do is click on the link, and it will take you to the original paper by Hansen. And if you doubt that the GISS data is accurate, you can click on the link, and it will take you to actual GISS data. Moreover, it is quite obvious just from looking at the short term variation of the models that Scenarios B and C diverge only slightly up to the present day, so it is impossible that we could have temperature data that would differentiate between them. However, the question of whether there is any evidence of the warming trend "leveling off" as described in Scenario C (which was calculated for an unrealistically optimistic scenario of CO2 mitigation that does not at all correspond to reality) can be addressed statistically by mathematically subtracting known sources of short term variation, and the answer is "No."

By the way, one way in which real scientific skepticism differs from climate science "skepticism" is that real scientists are skeptical of even their own work, and often acknowledge errors and revise their conclusions in the light of new evidence and better analysis. So, for example, based on subsequent work, it is now generally thought that

Nothing out of context there.

That seems dishonest because the quote explicitly contradicts your conjecture.

He says the debate is over, period.

No he said "If you look at the peer reviewed scientific literature, the debate is over", when you deliberately misquote, it looks pernicious.

No contrary arguments allowed, no research that strays from his conclusions allowed.

Of course, he didn't actually say that. That's a straw man argument that you've created (or read elsewhere and repeated). Given that Al Gore has no actual role in the funding for Climate Change research, I find it difficult to see how he could enforce that rule.

He calls such attempts "bullshit."

Specifically he said "They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!"

It seems he's calling bullshit on people who pretend to be scientists and spread misinformation.
It's not volcanoes
It's not sun spots
It is getting warmer

Most people would agree that calling bullshit on someone telling lies is reasonable.

So what do you think about his quote, "it's not a matter of theory"?

Here's a full quote: ""I want to be polite to you. The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue. It's not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."

Once again, it sounds like he's talking about the scientific issues, and not the political ones. Not one of the three quote you provided supports your claim.

I believe such thinking doesn't belong in the debate, but that's the way Gore thinks.

So you want to tell people how they can think? That doesn't seem very libertarian, and given that Gore's statements do not say what you claim they say, I seriously doubt that your guesses about what he's thinking are accurate either. Of course, debate must always end, and the side losing the debate rarely wants to concede that it's over, especially if there is ideology at stake.

Is my stating that out of context? Dishonest?

Quite clearly, yes and yes.

I don't. A key feature of the AGW crowd, and indeed many liberals (new fascist liberals, not classical liberals), is that anyone who honestly disagrees must be a bad person, dishonest, with ill intent.

Of course, you realise that statement appears hypocritical because you are essentially accusing everyone you disagree with of being intellectually dishonest, bad people because they believe everyone they disagree with is intellectually dishonest, bad people. Furthermore, I have made no claims about your moral character, what I have said is that dishonest behaviour is inconsistent with libertarian beliefs. It is a failure to live up to your own ideals.

Thus you will view any contrary statement I make through that lens.

That's possible, though I doubt it. As far I can see I've only criticised your dishonest statements and I provided the evidence that proves that they are dishonest. You may believe what you're saying, you might even be correct in your estimate of Al Gore, however, the evidence you provide to support your accusations has been taken out of context so that the meaning can be manipulated to support accusations that the context clearly demonstrates are incorrect. That behaviour certain fits the English definition of dishonest.

Nothing out of context there.

That seems dishonest because the quote explicitly contradicts your conjecture.

He says the debate is over, period.

No he said "If you look at the peer reviewed scientific literature, the debate is over", when you deliberately misquote, it looks pernicious.

No contrary arguments allowed, no research that strays from his conclusions allowed.

Of course, he didn't actually say that. That's a straw man argument that you've created (or read elsewhere and repeated). Given that Al Gore has no actual role in the funding for Climate Change research, I find it difficult to see how he could enforce that rule.

He calls such attempts "bullshit."

Specifically he said "They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!"

It seems he's calling bullshit on people who pretend to be scientists and spread misinformation.
It's not volcanoes
It's not sun spots
It is getting warmer

Most people would agree that calling bullshit on someone telling lies is reasonable.

So what do you think about his quote, "it's not a matter of theory"?

Here's a full quote: ""I want to be polite to you. The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue. It's not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."

Once again, it sounds like he's talking about the scientific issues, and not the political ones. Not one of the three quote you provided supports your claim.

I believe such thinking doesn't belong in the debate, but that's the way Gore thinks.

So you want to tell people how they can think? That doesn't seem very libertarian, and given that Gore's statements do not say what you claim they say, I seriously doubt that your guesses about what he's thinking are accurate either. Of course, debate must always end, and the side losing the debate rarely wants to concede that it's over, especially if there is ideology at stake.

Is my stating that out of context? Dishonest?

Quite clearly, yes and yes.

I don't. A key feature of the AGW crowd, and indeed many liberals (new fascist liberals, not classical liberals), is that anyone who honestly disagrees must be a bad person, dishonest, with ill intent.

Of course, you realise that statement appears hypocritical because you are essentially accusing everyone you disagree with of being intellectually dishonest, bad people because they believe everyone they disagree with is intellectually dishonest, bad people. Furthermore, I have made no claims about your moral character, what I have said is that dishonest behaviour is inconsistent with libertarian beliefs. It is a failure to live up to your own ideals.

Thus you will view any contrary statement I make through that lens.

That's possible, though I doubt it. As far I can see I've only criticised your dishonest statements and I provided the evidence that proves that they are dishonest. You may believe what you're saying, you might even be correct in your estimate of Al Gore, however, the evidence you provide to support your accusations has been taken out of context so that the meaning can be manipulated to support accusations that the context clearly demonstrates are incorrect. That behaviour certain fits the English definition of dishonest.

Nothing out of context there.

That seems dishonest because the quote explicitly contradicts your conjecture.

He says the debate is over, period.

No he said "If you look at the peer reviewed scientific literature, the debate is over", when you deliberately misquote, it looks pernicious.

No contrary arguments allowed, no research that strays from his conclusions allowed.

Of course, he didn't actually say that. That's a straw man argument that you've created (or read elsewhere and repeated). Given that Al Gore has no actual role in the funding for Climate Change research, I find it difficult to see how he could enforce that rule.

He calls such attempts "bullshit."

Specifically he said "They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!"

It seems he's calling bullshit on people who pretend to be scientists and spread misinformation.
It's not volcanoes
It's not sun spots
It is getting warmer

Most people would agree that calling bullshit on someone telling lies is reasonable.

So what do you think about his quote, "it's not a matter of theory"?

Here's a full quote: ""I want to be polite to you. The scientific community has gone through this chapter and verse. We have long since passed the time when we should pretend this is a 'on the one hand, on the other hand' issue. It's not a matter of theory or conjecture, for goodness sake."

Once again, it sounds like he's talking about the scientific issues, and not the political ones. Not one of the three quote you provided supports your claim.

I believe such thinking doesn't belong in the debate, but that's the way Gore thinks.

So you want to tell people how they can think? That doesn't seem very libertarian, and given that Gore's statements do not say what you claim they say, I seriously doubt that your guesses about what he's thinking are accurate either. Of course, debate must always end, and the side losing the debate rarely wants to concede that it's over, especially if there is ideology at stake.

Is my stating that out of context? Dishonest?

Quite clearly, yes and yes.

I don't. A key feature of the AGW crowd, and indeed many liberals (new fascist liberals, not classical liberals), is that anyone who honestly disagrees must be a bad person, dishonest, with ill intent.

Of course, you realise that statement appears hypocritical because you are essentially accusing everyone you disagree with of being intellectually dishonest, bad people because they believe everyone they disagree with is intellectually dishonest, bad people. Furthermore, I have made no claims about your moral character, what I have said is that dishonest behaviour is inconsistent with libertarian beliefs. It is a failure to live up to your own ideals.

Thus you will view any contrary statement I make through that lens.

That's possible, though I doubt it. As far I can see I've only criticised your dishonest statements and I provided the evidence that proves that they are dishonest. You may believe what you're saying, you might even be correct in your estimate of Al Gore, however, the evidence you provide to support your accusations has been taken out of context so that the meaning can be manipulated to support accusations that the context clearly demonstrates are incorrect. That behaviour certain fits the English definition of dishonest.

Right now waste heat forcing on the climate is about 0.028 W/m^2 versus 2.9 W/m^2 for human caused global warming. That's less than 1%. So we have a long way to go before waste heat in a big enough issue to worry about.

He's come out with some pretty apocalyptic predictions, such as his 1988 chart showing 3 different scenarios, all of which are looking to be way off the mark.

You're kidding, right. Hansen's 1988 projection for the CO2 release scenario that best matches what actually happened is way off (indeed, it is almost surely within the range of error of the temperature data, particularly after properly adjusting for unpredictable short-term effects such as volcanic eruptions. So if his projection is "apocalyptic," I guess reality is as well.

Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University predicted an ice free arctic by 2015.

Funny how a speculation of one scientist somehow mutates into an absolute prediction. Here's what Wadham was actually saying in 2007: "It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040." So a rough estimate of no ice at the height of summer, sometime between 2013 and 2040, and probably toward the low end (estimates of other climate scientists range as high as 2100), probably toward the low end, somehow becomes an absolute assertion that there will be no ice at all in 2015. And how is that apocalyptic? Arctic ice is floating, so it's not as if it will contribute to rising sea level. It will certainly be convenient for navigation. It is important mostly because it is yet another indicator of the warming trend.

And here's [sciencedaily.com] another prediction for some catastrophic sea level rise.

And once again, this turns out to be not a definite prediction, but a warning that there is considerable uncertainty on the high end regarding the speed and magnitude of the sea level rise, and that while the IPCC estimate is about a third of a meter in 100 years, it could plausibly turn out to be three times as large, particularly since the melting seems to be occurring faster than projected. This is, in fact, an honest account of current scientific knowledge. Is this apocalyptic? It will certainly be very expensive to deal with, even if reality turns out to be toward the low end of estimates--expensive enough to more than justify the comparatively modest costs of CO2 mitigation. A lot of people will need to move inland, producing huge numbers of refugees. But do you really consider it to be an apocalypse?

He's come out with some pretty apocalyptic predictions, such as his 1988 chart showing 3 different scenarios, all of which are looking to be way off the mark.

You're kidding, right. Hansen's 1988 projection for the CO2 release scenario that best matches what actually happened is way off (indeed, it is almost surely within the range of error of the temperature data, particularly after properly adjusting for unpredictable short-term effects such as volcanic eruptions. So if his projection is "apocalyptic," I guess reality is as well.

Professor Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University predicted an ice free arctic by 2015.

Funny how a speculation of one scientist somehow mutates into an absolute prediction. Here's what Wadham was actually saying in 2007: "It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040." So a rough estimate of no ice at the height of summer, sometime between 2013 and 2040, and probably toward the low end (estimates of other climate scientists range as high as 2100), probably toward the low end, somehow becomes an absolute assertion that there will be no ice at all in 2015. And how is that apocalyptic? Arctic ice is floating, so it's not as if it will contribute to rising sea level. It will certainly be convenient for navigation. It is important mostly because it is yet another indicator of the warming trend.

And here's [sciencedaily.com] another prediction for some catastrophic sea level rise.

And once again, this turns out to be not a definite prediction, but a warning that there is considerable uncertainty on the high end regarding the speed and magnitude of the sea level rise, and that while the IPCC estimate is about a third of a meter in 100 years, it could plausibly turn out to be three times as large, particularly since the melting seems to be occurring faster than projected. This is, in fact, an honest account of current scientific knowledge. Is this apocalyptic? It will certainly be very expensive to deal with, even if reality turns out to be toward the low end of estimates--expensive enough to more than justify the comparatively modest costs of CO2 mitigation. A lot of people will need to move inland, producing huge numbers of refugees. But do you really consider it to be an apocalypse?

"The end" may not be nigh, but trillions of dollars in climate-related costs are.

That last quote is fake. It's a misrepresentation by the Daily Fail. Educate yourself.

OK let me try again:
There is *no* correlation whatsoever between solar cycle and either weather or climate.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-cycle-length.htm
If you say differently: Citation required.

Remember: approximately the last 10 years have NOT been increasing significantly in temperature. Now we have one that looks like it is, but it happens simultaneously with the peak of a well-known 11-year solar cycle, and physicists are saying that they had underestimated the solar activity at this peak by as much as 20 TIMES.

Once more it's time for The Escalator.

Give me 20+ years of climbing temperatures (a mere drop in the bucket considering how old this planet is) and i'll change my mind...wait what?

Would 40ish years do?.

HOWEVER, We are breaking records that were set 40-60+ YEARS AGO PEOPLE! This is a WARM year, nothing more, nothing less.

The issue with temperature records is that in a stable climate, both record warm and record cold temperatures become progressively less likely to occur. The chance is 1/n of setting either record, where n is the number of readings taken. Climate change, however, loads the dice, so far this year we've set 10 times as many warm records as cold records. Now, that could be just one warm year, but 13 of the top 14 warm years occurred in the last 14 years.

The last record high temperature in MY area was set in 1954.

In my area it was set last year, and then again earlier this year, and again last week.

Why did it take almost 60 years to break a high? Oh i know why! Because there is no such thing as global warming! Because we are experiencing a fluke in what is otherwise a cooling of the earth.

That's some fluke, the long term global cooling trend ends around 1900, and a global warming trend takes over.

You mean scientists can't actually PROVE that global warming exists?!?!?!

They already have proved that global warming exists, you just weren't paying attention. Now you seem to refuse to look at the evidence. It's hard to take your protests seriously when you appear to have your eyes shut tight, your fingers stuck in your ears and you're shouting "Nananana - I can't hear you! Nananana - I won't hear you!".

There are at least 4 separate temperature reconstructions that all show long term warming trends, including one funded by the Koch brothers who as owners of a vast fossil fuel empire have vested interests in showing that global warming isn't happening. If the scientists they hired to prove that global warming doesn't exist actually came to the conclusion that it does, why don't you believe them?

Give me 20+ years of climbing temperatures (a mere drop in the bucket considering how old this planet is) and i'll change my mind...wait what?

Would 40ish years do?.

HOWEVER, We are breaking records that were set 40-60+ YEARS AGO PEOPLE! This is a WARM year, nothing more, nothing less.

The issue with temperature records is that in a stable climate, both record warm and record cold temperatures become progressively less likely to occur. The chance is 1/n of setting either record, where n is the number of readings taken. Climate change, however, loads the dice, so far this year we've set 10 times as many warm records as cold records. Now, that could be just one warm year, but 13 of the top 14 warm years occurred in the last 14 years.

The last record high temperature in MY area was set in 1954.

In my area it was set last year, and then again earlier this year, and again last week.

Why did it take almost 60 years to break a high? Oh i know why! Because there is no such thing as global warming! Because we are experiencing a fluke in what is otherwise a cooling of the earth.

That's some fluke, the long term global cooling trend ends around 1900, and a global warming trend takes over.

You mean scientists can't actually PROVE that global warming exists?!?!?!

They already have proved that global warming exists, you just weren't paying attention. Now you seem to refuse to look at the evidence. It's hard to take your protests seriously when you appear to have your eyes shut tight, your fingers stuck in your ears and you're shouting "Nananana - I can't hear you! Nananana - I won't hear you!".

There are at least 4 separate temperature reconstructions that all show long term warming trends, including one funded by the Koch brothers who as owners of a vast fossil fuel empire have vested interests in showing that global warming isn't happening. If the scientists they hired to prove that global warming doesn't exist actually came to the conclusion that it does, why don't you believe them?

It's all explained in the published papers. Nothing nefarious about it.

To quote Skeptical Science:

Does the divergence problem mean we cannot rely on tree-ring growth as a proxy for temperature in the past? Briffa 1998 shows that tree-ring width and density show close agreement with temperature back to 1880. To examine earlier periods, one study split a network of tree sites into northern and southern groups (Cook 2004). While the northern group showed significant divergence after the 1960s, the southern group was consistent with recent warming trends.

This is a general trend with the divergence problem - trees from high northern latitudes show divergence while low latitude trees show little to no divergence. Before the 1960s, the northern and southern trees tracked each other reasonably well back to the Medieval Warm Period. This suggests the current divergence problem is unique over the past thousand years and restricted to recent decades.

There is a veritable graveyard of discredited scientific theories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories). When has consensus ever been the genesis of truth? Danish professor Henrik Svenmark (http://www.space.dtu.dk/Medarbejdere.aspx?lg=showcommon&id=38287&type=publications&page=1) has a different theory for phenomenon of Global Warming

Yes, Svensmark offers very good example of a "discredited scientific theory." A real skeptic would ask why anybody would continue to place any credence in Svensmark's theory, considering that the supposed correlation between cosmic ray flux and global temperatures has not held up (self-styled "skeptics" of climate science usually chop off their graphs about 1990 or so to avoid revealing this inconvenient fact).

How 'bout Richard Lindzen? Does not a PHd in Applied Mathematics count?

Not for very much. I've got a PhD. Most of the people I know have PhD's. That and five bucks will buy you a Starbucks coffee. Richard Lindzen is what we call a "guy with a pet theory." In most every field of science, there's a couple of guys like that hanging around the fringe. Scientists who have a pet theory, but have never managed to muster the evidence or arguments to convince any other scientists, and who just can't seem to let go of their pet notion even though their field has long ago moved on. Lindzen has a hypothesis that there is a cloud mechanism that will kick in Real Soon Now to protect us from the consequences of CO2 induced global warming. But he was never able to take his hypothesis to the next level to make it a real theory, which would require coming up with a well-defined physical model and expressing it in a mathematical form that could be used to test it against historical climate data. This is the sort of "sanity testing" that genuine scientific skeptics require of a theory, and Lindzen has never managed to achieve it.

refrain from declaring us doomed if we don't shut down our civilization post haste

I wanted to make a separate response to this.

No one - not a single serious climatologist in the whole world - is saying that "we must shut down civilization post-haste". This is a terrible strawman argument being perpetrated by people who don't want you to actually read the scientists' actual proposals, for fear that you might realize that "chicken little" is a gross caricature of the actual scientists.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-limits-economy.htm

Economic assessments of proposed policy to put a price on carbon emissions are in widespread agreement that the net economic impact will be minor. The costs over the next several decades center around $100 per average family, or about 75 cents per person per week, and a GDP reduction of less than 1%. Moreover, the benefits outweigh the costs several times over, as real-world examples illustrate.

Where I live, the unusually mild winter has lead to a dramatic increase in ticks.

Frighteningly, some ticks seem to be able to transmit a meat allergy to their victims. Yeah, you read that right; getting bit by the Lone Star Tick can make you allergic to meat.

But enough anecdotes.

I'm sorry but I simply don't have any confidence that anyone has succesfully modelled our climate to the point that they can predict the weather a week from now, let alone years from now.

Climate is not weather. That is a rather epic fail on your part.

Example: I can't tell you whether it will rain in the Sahara desert on September 9th (weather). But I can tell you that it will be hot and dry most of the time (climate).

For more reading: http://www.skepticalscience.com/weather-forecasts-vs-climate-models-predictions.htm

See IPCC, or easier to read: the human fingerprint in global warming.

There are a few other theories like "internal variability", "solar flux", "natural effect" and "time delay" which are popular among "sceptics". However, each alternate theory has been evaluated and rejected because it doesn't match the facts as well as anthropogenic green-house gas induced global warming. Ironically, the self-branded "sceptics" are unable to be sceptical about their own pet theories.

The way the measure temps is laughable

I suggest that what you are doing is trying to understand the issue by reading people like Anthony Watts and their manafactured contraversies are confusing you. Here's a link to a very simple NASA experiment you can do yourself, it anhilates the ashpalt and concrete argument, Watts' recation to that debunking was to start issuing false DCMA take downs to hide it. Watts is just wrong and refuses to aknowledge it for political/financial reasons, however the database that Watts has is the best available survey of the current state of US wether stations, so he has contributed something positive. Unfortunately there is a lot of potential for error in his own survey so it's unlinkely it would be very useful as a way of measuring improvement (or otherwise) of the infrastructure.

This is not to say that the urban heat island effect is a fantasy, it's just that climate scientists discovered it decades ago because it's fucking obvious!!!! In fact the MET reseach center that was at the center of the climategate beat-up and accused of "tampering with the raw data" has spent over two decades maticuosly transcribing the raw data set (multiple times with different transcribers to cross-check) and looking for precisely these kinds of anomolies. Unlike Watts and his army of amature photographers they are world renowned experts in sources of observational error wrt to weather staions and they back that up by frequently publishing in top tier journals such as Nature and Science. It's extremely tedious work and is replicated by an independent team using different statistical methods at NASA. These are the two main historical temprature sets, the enourmous amount of work that goes into verifying them is why the rest of the scientific community trust and applaud them.

I am fed up with these idiot scientists

The cure for that is to get your information from the horse's mouth

I blame scientists for this

Which is exactly what the anti-scientists who manafacture these 'contrversies' want you to do, they paint scientists as both complete morons, omnipotent conspirators or grant leeches hoping you will buy one or the other demonization and join their army of useful idiots. The 50 or so stink-tanks in the US who generate most of these climate myths, they have powerfull supporters in congress such as senator Inhofe. They use the exact same play book that was used for decades to deny that smoking causes cancer, it's the same play book creationists use. Why is it the same play book? - Because some of these stink-tanks such as the heritage foundation are paid to do it by the three different groups of deniers. Winning heats and confusing minds, it's how these stink-tanks earn a living.

Now as for the supposed claim (didn't RTFA) that AGW has caused Moose populations to drop dramatically, if the orginal work was published in a peer-reviewed journal I'm inclinded to think the journalist added that bit of confusion all by himself. A hard core cynic might even think it was inserted to distract from the real cause of the Moose decline but it's much more likely that the journalist was just manafacturing his own little contraversy to grab eyeballs and/or appease sponsers. If you want good investigative journalisim that gets to the bottom of these 'climate contraversies' I highly recommend Peter Sinclair's youtube series climate crock of the week.

Global warming is neither of the above. In the 1970's, it was all about global cooling. In the 1980's, it was the O-Zone layer. Now it is global warming.

You seem to be confused. In 1970s some reporters made a big deal about global cooling, however, most scientists still believed the world would warm. It was about 60% warming and 10% cooling. The ozone layer was a different issue having to do with skin cancer, not climate change. In the 1980s the scientists continued to research global warming and most of the 10% who predicted cooling were won over by the evidence supporting global warming. That's how science is supposed to work.

There's data to prove global warming, and data to disprove it.

There's evidence to prove global warming, but there really isn't any to disprove it. Like most established theories, evidence that at first seems counter to the theory, often ends up incorporated into the theory as nuance.

For every article about the moss not growing in Japan, there's one about icebergs blocking the Bearing Strait.

I'm not sure how an iceberg peeling off the Arctic ice cap and blocking the Bering Strait would constitute evidence against global warming. I would think that was the expected behaviour if the polar ice cap was breaking apart due to global warming.

To say that Global Warming is indisputable fact that should not be debated is a disgrace to Newton, Einstein, Tesla, and every other real and empirical scientist who has ever lived.

Scientists don't debate facts. Facts are facts. Global average temperatures continue to rise, that's a fact and that fact means global warming is occurring. You can argue about the consequences of global warming, or about details within the theory, but the theories explaining the phenomenon have been tested for decades and still hold strong.

Real scientists would say "I think this is happening, now somebody prove me wrong so society as a whole can learn and grow."

That would put you back in the 1970s when there was still some controversy on the basics. Real scientists don't say "prove to me that evolution doesn't exist" or "prove to me that physics is all a hoax" or "prove to me tectonic plates exist". That sort of thing is wasted on theory that is older than the scientist. That's how you treat new theories rather than theories that are more than 30 years old.

No, the long-term warming trend is so strong that it is statistically significant even using rather primitive statistics. You have to do tricks to make it non-significant. One common dodge is to pick a short period of time, since no matter how strong a trend is, it is always, always possible to find a time period short enough to make it fail a significance testing (for example the claim that there has been . It is even easier if you cherry-pick outliers as start or end points. That's why we so often hear claims that global warming stopped in 1998. Why start in 1998? Because 1998 is a warm-year outlier, far above the overall warming trend, so that even if the warming trend is real, regression to the mean will create the illusion of a pause in warming.

Whilst dismissing what the Sun is doing...

Yup, the fact that the sun is cooling is definitively the answer to why our planet is getting hotter...

Ok, here's some information on the consensus. Usually when people say "97% of experts agree that climate change is anthropogenic", they are referring to this paper.

First, when you call anything you don't like "a religion", you discredit yourself. I, personally, find it amusing that you have the hubris to call the majority of the scientists in the world, and every country's national science body part of "a false religion" because you disagree with them.

Second, neither point is "still out in the debate":
1) Humans are causing it, no other explanations fits the facts.
2) It's a bad thing. On economic grounds, estimates for end of century spending for deal with the effects of Global warming are close to 7.5 trillion, and the costs of averting it less than 2 trillion. Then there's the moral problem of having poor and undeveloped nations shoulder most of the worst consequences of our fossil fuel use.