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Many myths here.

People got alarmist over Global Cooling then Global Warming and then Climate Change when the first two didn't pan out by name at hyped levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

The biggest problem is that people are fighting the wrong fight, being too concerned about CO2 levels.

http://skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature.htm

Climate change is inevitable no matter what we as a species do or don't do. We have a fossil record going back billions of years proving this, forces like plate tectonics and changes from our own solar system or even supernova's all impact our climate.

http://skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm
http://skepticalscience.com/solar-cycles-global-warming.htm

I claimed that "people got alarmist over Global Cooling", and I will back up my claim with sources. I never claimed there was scientific consensus, there wasn't. I never claimed that scientists were the ones behind the alarmist public message.

Now if your going to attack my argument, by all means go ahead and do so, but don't attack a position that I did not take. Quit putting words in my mouth and pay attention to what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.

For decades they have said they clearly see the dropping temperatures. The reality just doesn't agree: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47

Yes, I vividly remember the alarming predictions of climate change years ago.

Except that the predictions were for a new ice age.

These so-called "climate scientists" have never been able to get their fucking story straight.

They have totally squandered their credibility with their junk science and alarmist attention-whoring. They deserve nothing but our deepest skepticism.

Climate skeptics have a much worse history of trying to manipulate the peer review process:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-peer-review.html

Entire fields "corrupted"? That's a dangerous-sounding generalisation

Yes it is, which is why I didn't make it myself, I let Richard Feynman make it.

Well, he never used the word "corrupted". Closest quote I could find to what you're saying is "it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments", which is not exactly the same, is it?

We know from the East Anglia email releases that important scientists at the middle of AGW research are not following good scientific principles.

Would that be those same scientists who were cleared of all scientific misconduct charges by no less than eight independent inquiries? About the worst you could accuse them of was a little too much snark.

Yes, that is all true, but it is also completely unrelated to GW.

Far from it. While those specific events cannot be blamed on GW with any certainty, there are plenty of papers that say that extreme weather events will increase as a direct result of GW (since more energy is being added to the system). There's every reason to suggest that these kind of consequences will only increase.

they emphasize the negative, while trying to minimize the positive

Maybe, just maybe, it's because what they're seeing is overwhelmingly that the negatives outweigh the positives? Is there any reason their statements must be balanced? This isn't a diplomatic negotiation, it's a summary of the facts and conclusions, as best as we understand them.

It seems very much like you're looking for conclusions that agree with your own, and when you don't find them, you're projecting some sort of bias onto the authors. Have you ever considered the bias might be on your part instead? After all, their combined expertise and awareness of the issues massively outweighs your own, yet you assume that it's them that's wrong rather than yourself.

the question is whether it's enough to worry about

Yes well, when you start from the position that your opinions (based on a few basics and a brief skimming of the web) are more valid than theirs (based on centuries of collective expertise and full access to all the raw data), perhaps you should be worrying about something closer to home first.

WG2 does not measure up to the level of scientificness found in WG1. It is my opinion...

If you have any actual point-by-point critiques, we can discuss those. Until then, I'm afraid it'll remain only your opinion.

I trust one scientist who follows good scientific principles more than 1000 who don't.

Given your lack of specifics, I'm more likely to conclude that you trust one scientist who comes to your favoured conclusions more than 1000 who don't.

We've already established that many climate scientists do not follow good scientific principles.

Sorry, I must have missed that part. As far as I can see, it's the climate scientists that are responding to criticism with data and evidence, while 99% of deniers continue to spout the same old myths, and I've yet to see the remaining 1% come up with anything that hasn't been thoroughly rebutted by those with more expertise. While I'm sure you can dig up examples of climatologists behaving badly (a couple spring to my mind), I'd bet I could find 10 counter-examples for each one, and of course this does not invalidate the work & conclusions of the thousands of other climatologists.

I want you to read WG2 critically and see for yourself

I've certainly read it, but I lack the expertise to critically evaluate it - I can only form a layman's opinion. Unless you're a climatologist, I'd imagine the same applies to you. Since I won't be gaining more than a small fraction of that expertise any time soon, I'm best served by relying on the consensus of those that have. But most of their conclusions appear inevitable, given sufficient warming. If we keep pumping CO2 into the air at an ever-increasing rate, the only remaining debate is about time-frames.

didn't you feel embarrassed to link to this article [wsj.com]?

There was a rebuttal of their "data" in the link next to it, if you prefer (which itself links to this one).

But frankly, while I'm happy to agree than an appeal from authority is no guarantee of correctness, when we're dealing with a subject complex enough that years of expertise are required for a thorough understanding of the issues, we should be giving the experts' conclusions far more weight. And when such a wide majority of these experts agree, then it would be idiotic not to base our policy on the best conclusions we have.

WG2 does not measure up to the level of scientificness found in WG1. It is my opinion...

If you have any actual point-by-point critiques, we can discuss those. Until then, I'm afraid it'll remain only your opinion.

I trust one scientist who follows good scientific principles more than 1000 who don't.

Given your lack of specifics, I'm more likely to conclude that you trust one scientist who comes to your favoured conclusions more than 1000 who don't.

We've already established that many climate scientists do not follow good scientific principles.

Sorry, I must have missed that part. As far as I can see, it's the climate scientists that are responding to criticism with data and evidence, while 99% of deniers continue to spout the same old myths, and I've yet to see the remaining 1% come up with anything that hasn't been thoroughly rebutted by those with more expertise. While I'm sure you can dig up examples of climatologists behaving badly (a couple spring to my mind), I'd bet I could find 10 counter-examples for each one, and of course this does not invalidate the work & conclusions of the thousands of other climatologists.

I want you to read WG2 critically and see for yourself

I've certainly read it, but I lack the expertise to critically evaluate it - I can only form a layman's opinion. Unless you're a climatologist, I'd imagine the same applies to you. Since I won't be gaining more than a small fraction of that expertise any time soon, I'm best served by relying on the consensus of those that have. But most of their conclusions appear inevitable, given sufficient warming. If we keep pumping CO2 into the air at an ever-increasing rate, the only remaining debate is about time-frames.

didn't you feel embarrassed to link to this article [wsj.com]?

There was a rebuttal of their "data" in the link next to it, if you prefer (which itself links to this one).

But frankly, while I'm happy to agree than an appeal from authority is no guarantee of correctness, when we're dealing with a subject complex enough that years of expertise are required for a thorough understanding of the issues, we should be giving the experts' conclusions far more weight. And when such a wide majority of these experts agree, then it would be idiotic not to base our policy on the best conclusions we have.

The scientific quality of WG2 is unfortunately rather low

Thanks for your blithe dismissal of that, but I think the many climate experts and scientific bodies who contributed to and reviewed it have a more credible opinion.

it's easier to just quote some scientists who are typically described as skeptics [wsj.com]

Well, if that's your best source for your opinions, it's no wonder you're labouring under this misapprehension. Maybe you should be listening to actual climate scientists? Or if you just want to see a bunch of signatures, try this letter, signed by 255 scientists.

If you want us to believe that WG2's conclusions are inaccurate and can be safely ignored, you're going to need much more credible evidence than that.

And yet he gets just about everything wrong... Seriously, he's a hack.

And yet he gets just about everything wrong... Seriously, he's a hack.

If scientists cannot agree on what the temperature really is and what it is doing, how is it possible to believe any prediction they make?

Duh. Scientists never unanimously agree about anything. But if you were going to pick somebody to set against the 97% of climate scientists and the National Academy of Sciences (and just about every elite scientific society in the world) who agree that the planet is warming, Spencer is a pretty weak reed. After all, this was the supposed expert on satellite measurements who insisted that the satellite measurements proved that the planet was not warming--until it was shown that he had failed to correct for orbital decay

No, it is based on actual empirical evidence. And the temperature has indeed risen. 1998 is not the hottest year on record.

we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke

Weather != climate. Meterologist != climatologist. We don't agree on that at all.

in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.

Only 10% of scientists predicted cooling in the 1970s. 62% predicted warming (the rest took no stance). After 30 years additional research, we have a much stronger consensus of 98%.

I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow.

So because you can't predict the flip of a coin, you're saying anyone who predicts the average result of 10,000 flips should be ignored, regardless of the consequences?

I agree most of us are not equipped to judge - but climatologists are, better than anyone else. You probably accept the assertions of most branches of science, even the weird ones like quantum physics, so refusing to listen to one particular branch of science just because its conclusions might directly inconvenience you doesn't sound all that rational.

we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke

Weather != climate. Meterologist != climatologist. We don't agree on that at all.

in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.

Only 10% of scientists predicted cooling in the 1970s. 62% predicted warming (the rest took no stance). After 30 years additional research, we have a much stronger consensus of 98%.

I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow.

So because you can't predict the flip of a coin, you're saying anyone who predicts the average result of 10,000 flips should be ignored, regardless of the consequences?

I agree most of us are not equipped to judge - but climatologists are, better than anyone else. You probably accept the assertions of most branches of science, even the weird ones like quantum physics, so refusing to listen to one particular branch of science just because its conclusions might directly inconvenience you doesn't sound all that rational.

we can all agree that weathermen's (climatologists) predictions are basically a joke

Weather != climate. Meterologist != climatologist. We don't agree on that at all.

in the 1970s these same climatologists were claiming that the ice age was right around the corner.

Only 10% of scientists predicted cooling in the 1970s. 62% predicted warming (the rest took no stance). After 30 years additional research, we have a much stronger consensus of 98%.

I am absolutely not equipped to say that they are right or wrong. What I will say is that they are often wrong about what is going to happen tomorrow.

So because you can't predict the flip of a coin, you're saying anyone who predicts the average result of 10,000 flips should be ignored, regardless of the consequences?

I agree most of us are not equipped to judge - but climatologists are, better than anyone else. You probably accept the assertions of most branches of science, even the weird ones like quantum physics, so refusing to listen to one particular branch of science just because its conclusions might directly inconvenience you doesn't sound all that rational.

When presenting tree ring data, they replace very recent data with actual temps, usually using a different color or something to indicate that it has been swapped out.

Factually not true:

"In creating the WMO graph, Jones cut off the tree-ring density curve around 1960 when it diverged from instrumental temperature and grafted the instrumental temperature onto the green line. This technique has been rightly criticised for failing to distinguish between reconstructed temperature and the instrumental temperature in a graph."

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=3&t=158&&n=653

(You might want to retract your ad hominem on the GP now)

It is very revealing that so-called "skeptics" of global warming reject the results of studies carried out by multiple different laboratories, using a wide variety of different analytical methods and many different types of data collected from around the globe, but uncritically accept as fact conclusions based upon 3rd hand accounts of agricultural practices in one small region of Europe. Summary and citations of the actual science can be found here

It is by the way, absolutely false that there has been "NO" temperature increase in the past 10 years. In fact, analysis of the data shows a clear upward trend over the past 10 years. The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance" -- which means showing that there is less than a 5% probability that an apparent increase of that magnitude could occur by random statistical variations. This is a particularly stupid argument, because statistical analysis of climate models (as well as weather trends) indicates that 10 years is too short an interval to reliably detect the predicted global warming trend even if it is real. (Although if you correct for known natural sources of climate "noise," it turns out that it is significant after all. So while we cannot prove that global warming did not end 10 years -- or 10 seconds -- ago, this is not evidence that it has stopped.

Hansen did not predict an ice age in 1971. Your claim is a blatant lie.

Obligatory:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif

Why does the denying side have to disprove the theory?

Because there is sufficient evidence to convince any reasonable person that the AGW theory is correct. It therefore falls on the people who don't accept the consensus view to show why the consensus is wrong.

I would say if the AGW supporters have such definitive evidence, then why are there any deniers at all?

Mostly economic or philosophical disagreements. Back in the 30s, the Germans published a book criticising general relativity with (supposedly) 100 authors who criticised relativity. Everything you claim about climate change could have been claimed about relativity 80 years ago.

If you want evidence, start waiting because we won't find out the results of our pumping CO2 into the atmosphere experiment for a few thousand more years.

Actually, we can already see the evidence. The world is warmer than it has been since the industrial revolution started, ocean acidity is increasing, ocean levels are rising, glaciers are melting, Arctic ice extent and volume is at record lows opening new shipping routes, plant and animal species are shifting northward and to higher latitudes. Analysis of radioactive isotopes in the carbon dioxide in the air confirms that the CO2 from burning fossil fuels is increasing. I could go on and on but why don't you read up a little bit on it, first.

If climate change is stopped, billions of people will die

[Citation needed]. The costs (desertification, acidification, extinctions, sea level rises, population displacements, extreme weather events, famines from crop failures due to changing weather patterns etc etc) are hugely greater than the benefits (which are mostly longer-term).

Consider also that the enormous cost to the global economies adapting to such major changes will far outweigh the short-term costs of subsidising a carbon-neutral energy infrastructure.

If you're genuinely interested in learning more, you could start here, or skip straight to the IPCC WGII report that discusses this.

>>Tells you about the rigor of climate science, that's for certain.

Well, kinda. It depends how much accuracy you're really expecting from predictions of the future.

Hansen (1981) underpredicted the temperatures by about 30%. Hansen (1988) overpredicted by about the same.

Skeptical Science has a good analysis of why this happened:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction-advanced.htm

Climategate was not an op ed in the WSJ, but a manufactured controversy where fake and out of context quotes from stolen emails were used to deceived people into thinking that scientists were doing bad things.

The op ed you are referring to in the WSJ was littered with errors and lies, and those "prominent scientists" were mostly politicians trying to make a buck.

And Fritz Vahrenholt is not and never was a scientist. He is a politician, and has made a living selling his services to the energy industry. His claims are blatant lies.

There is consensus, and a liar like Vahrenholt will not change that.

Why do you assume that scientist that disagree must necessarily be in a different field?

Because actual scientists in a field are doing actual research on the topic, and they have been through all the debates and reviews and all that.

Of course, that still doesn't mean that some scientists in a field can't be dishonest scumbags who consciously spread falsehoods about their field because of their political or religious beliefs. There are biologists who deny Evolution, for example.

Here is a list of scientists that are skeptics AND possessing the required pedigrees

Case in point. Notice how you are referring to things like speeches and blog posts rather than actual scientific papers?

And as I pointed out above, there are always some scientists within a field who sadly let their ideology cloud their minds. However, what matters is what they can show through their research.

Akasofu, for example, makes claims that are demonstrably false, and he is basing them on misinformation.

I am not very tolerant of bullshit, and you are spreading bullshit. Your link is about Anthony Watts once again misrepresenting scientific research, and that makes me even less tolerant of you.

Of course you had to mention the "hide the decline" lie. You think it means something it doesn't. Just like the research you think supports your superstition because Watts said so.

CO2 is currently under 0.04% of the atmosphere and according to the historic record is the effect, not the cause, of warming (Temperature has always increased before CO2 levels).

I assume you're talking about the ice age CO2/heat lag? In those cases the warming cycles weren't initiated by CO2 but that doesn't mean CO2 can't initiate or be directly responsible for warming:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-lags-temperature-intermediate.htm

Now I understand that it has been shown that CO2 can help increase temperature ... but by what amount? Where is the equation that shows that X increase in CO2 increases temperature by Y? If we doubled the CO2 amount from 0.04% to 0.08%, which may not even be possible if we wanted too, how much would that warm the planet?

The equation's pretty complicated and always being refined, that's basically the main purpose of a climate simulator.

If humans are in the vast minority of the forces that create climate change then you are going to have a really hard time explaining why everyone needs to live beneath their means so we can get our hand in a wrestling match between titans.

We're responsible for the vast majority of fossil CO2 release and a very meaningful chunk of the warming overall. Now who said anything about living beneath their means? Your car will go weeng instead of vroom and your electricity will come from different sources that probably won't cost any more, what's the big deal?

Global warming relies heavily on the greenhouse effect, that's falsifiable.

You won't get anything so simple that covers the entire global warming theory:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?n=385

Sometimes people ask "what would it take to falsify the man-made global warming theory?". Well, basically it would require that our fundamental understanding of physics be wrong, because that's what the theory is based on. This fundamental physics has been scrutinized through scientific experiments for decades to centuries.

Sorry, conservative policies are supposed to be about keeping things the way they are right now. Thus fighting climate change should be a conservative policy. However modern conservatives are all about the money. It's now about keeping the money in the hands of the rich.

"[C]limate has always changed, and changed radically" is a moron's argument, equivalent to "my car is always moving, why should I care if it's moving rapidly towards a brick wall?" As new as it may be to you, this isn't a new issue. There's been more than 50 years of research into climate change. One of the first things they looked at when they detected global warming was "is this natural". It's not. It's human activity. It's confirmed by at least 13 different lines of evidence that it's human activity, and that it's running at about 100 times the normal pace of change.

It's not hysteria, but cold rational evaluation of the evidence. Here's a rule of thumb, if you can't be bothered to educate yourself on a topic, it's probably the safe bet to believe the scientists rather than the politicians or celebrities.

Sorry, conservative policies are supposed to be about keeping things the way they are right now. Thus fighting climate change should be a conservative policy. However modern conservatives are all about the money. It's now about keeping the money in the hands of the rich.

"[C]limate has always changed, and changed radically" is a moron's argument, equivalent to "my car is always moving, why should I care if it's moving rapidly towards a brick wall?" As new as it may be to you, this isn't a new issue. There's been more than 50 years of research into climate change. One of the first things they looked at when they detected global warming was "is this natural". It's not. It's human activity. It's confirmed by at least 13 different lines of evidence that it's human activity, and that it's running at about 100 times the normal pace of change.

It's not hysteria, but cold rational evaluation of the evidence. Here's a rule of thumb, if you can't be bothered to educate yourself on a topic, it's probably the safe bet to believe the scientists rather than the politicians or celebrities.

Sorry, conservative policies are supposed to be about keeping things the way they are right now. Thus fighting climate change should be a conservative policy. However modern conservatives are all about the money. It's now about keeping the money in the hands of the rich.

"[C]limate has always changed, and changed radically" is a moron's argument, equivalent to "my car is always moving, why should I care if it's moving rapidly towards a brick wall?" As new as it may be to you, this isn't a new issue. There's been more than 50 years of research into climate change. One of the first things they looked at when they detected global warming was "is this natural". It's not. It's human activity. It's confirmed by at least 13 different lines of evidence that it's human activity, and that it's running at about 100 times the normal pace of change.

It's not hysteria, but cold rational evaluation of the evidence. Here's a rule of thumb, if you can't be bothered to educate yourself on a topic, it's probably the safe bet to believe the scientists rather than the politicians or celebrities.

Sorry, conservative policies are supposed to be about keeping things the way they are right now. Thus fighting climate change should be a conservative policy. However modern conservatives are all about the money. It's now about keeping the money in the hands of the rich.

"[C]limate has always changed, and changed radically" is a moron's argument, equivalent to "my car is always moving, why should I care if it's moving rapidly towards a brick wall?" As new as it may be to you, this isn't a new issue. There's been more than 50 years of research into climate change. One of the first things they looked at when they detected global warming was "is this natural". It's not. It's human activity. It's confirmed by at least 13 different lines of evidence that it's human activity, and that it's running at about 100 times the normal pace of change.

It's not hysteria, but cold rational evaluation of the evidence. Here's a rule of thumb, if you can't be bothered to educate yourself on a topic, it's probably the safe bet to believe the scientists rather than the politicians or celebrities.

By the way, I am old enough to remember scientists in the 1970's forecasting a coming ice age based on what they thought to be incontrovertible science.

No, what you are old enough to remember is a media scare based on amplifying the predictions of a few scientific papers, and one that didn't even make sense given that most of the scientific papers coming out at that time predicted warming . The moral of this story is not that climate science is untrustworthy but that that you should not rely on the media for news about science.

Citation needed. If people believed as you did, there would never be any innovation...

Also, you raise a false dillemma. Vast amounts of financial capital in our society have tied themselves up into energy sources they can more easily control. It's a mindset that won't invest much in alternatives, and will invest in politics to keep their control in place (like preventing laws regulating coal pollution).

Actually, I live in a fairly energy efficient house (partially passive solar), so I am practicing that I preach to some extent (not perfectly). The state of the art in home construction these days in cold climates is to have lots of efficiency and no furnace:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?_r=1
"DARMSTADT, Germany â" From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace."

I also eat pretty low on the food chain, that saves lots of energy and water and medical costs and pollution and animal suffering and so on.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm

I provided lots of links to people putting time and money into alternatives, and they just continue to improve. The fact that GE is predicting solar will be cheaper that coal in five years despite how coal is subsidized so much (including by not having to pay for the health costs or environment destruction costs) just shows how good renewables are.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Coal did not pay its true cost in 1993:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/12/the-true-cost-of-coal/4566/

Coal does not pay its true cost now (perhaps half a trillion dollars a year):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/true-cost-of-coal-power.html
http://www.desmogblog.com/true-cost-coal-half-trillion-dollars-year

And that is what makes it so hard "economically" to sell alternatives.

So, it is indeed hard to compete against such a tilted playing field, true. That is a missing issue in your comment about "so you do it", unpaid externalities.

In fact, if you reread my comment, you will see I said "No one said it was going to be easy"... That is why it is now a socio-economic issue more than a technical issue. We have plenty of technology if we wanted to use it. And it would overall be cheaper to use it overall across our society, and then alternatives would be adopted faster when gasoline was $20 a gallon with externalities priced in (we'd all drive electric cars pretty fast) or when coal electricity was $0.50 a kilowatt-hour (we'd all switch to wind and other renewables plus energy efficiency real fast). But that does not happen because we don't pay up front. Instead we pay on our health insurance bills, or in national debt to fund a war machine, or future environmental destruction that needs to be fixed, and so on...

That's a different problem, and one that has to be shown to be significant. The measured glaciers show about 10% of glaciers increasing in mass, so growing glaciers have been sampled. As I understand it, a pair of satellites have been used to measure the global change in glacial mass and they confirm that the measured results are broadly correct and the total glacial mass on earth is shrinking at around 500 billion tons a year.

Hey, someone did that. The IPCC won.

Really? There is work showing CO2 emissions are necessary and sufficient to cause the observed warming?

More or less. The work tends to be more detailed than your over simplication, but recent studies that have attempted to separate natural and human effects on temperature have found that human activity accounts for over 100% of the warming. This is possible because natural effects have recently been cooling rather than warming the atmosphere. For example, we've had back-to-back La Nina's and the sun is in a period of minimal activity. However, the increase in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and the attendant feedback effects are still causing the oceans and the atmosphere to warm despite the natural effects.

This graph shows what I'm talking about, it's from this review of the causes of global warming.

Really? There is work showing CO2 emissions are necessary and sufficient to cause the observed warming?

More or less. The work tends to be more detailed than your over simplication, but recent studies that have attempted to separate natural and human effects on temperature have found that human activity accounts for over 100% of the warming. This is possible because natural effects have recently been cooling rather than warming the atmosphere. For example, we've had back-to-back La Nina's and the sun is in a period of minimal activity. However, the increase in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) and the attendant feedback effects are still causing the oceans and the atmosphere to warm despite the natural effects.

This graph shows what I'm talking about, it's from this review of the causes of global warming.

Actually, no. McIntyre proved that there was a technical flaw in Mann's method of statistical analysis that could occasionally cause an artifactual upturn (or, with equal probability, a downturn) at the end, but despite analyzing a large number of noise data sets, he was not able to find even one case that generated an upturn that approached the magnitude of Mann's "hockey stick" analysis. So, correctly interpreted, McIntyre's results proved that it was highly unlikely that Mann's Hockey Stick curve could result from the artifact. So it is not surprising that numerous subsequent studies, using analyses not subject to this error, and also looking at other types of climate data, have confirmed that the hockey stick is correct.

So in the end, McIntyre's technical criticism of Mann's approach (which at worst involved a subtlety of statistical analysis that no reasonable scientist would have called a "fraud") turned out to be correct, but irrelevant to Mann's conclusion.

Even the Black Death didn't wipe out European civilization

And some man-made disaster did? I suspect you underestimate the effect of the Black Death:

The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60 percent of Europe's population,[2] reducing world population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million in the 14th century. The aftermath of the plague created a series of religious, social and economic upheavals, which had profound effects on the course of European history. It took 150 years for Europe's population to recover. The plague returned at various times, killing more people, until it left Europe in the 19th century.

I find it interesting that you seem to think a carbon tax would be much worse than losing 30-60% of the country's population.

The more routine harmful predictions made for the effects of AGW just aren't that significant to humanity either: slightly higher sea levels, modestly less rainfall in some locations, slightly higher temperatures (except in the upper northern hemisphere) slightly more acidic oceans, slightly more extreme weather, etc. Most of that can be solved just by having people move out of less safe or productive areas over the decades or centuries.

That view represents a failure to appreciate the magnitude of the changes. The difference between glacial and interglacial is about 5 degrees. The predicted warming by the end of 2100 is about 4 degrees. That means in a little over a century we will be as far removed from our 20th century climate as it was from a climate where much of North America was under a mile thick sheet of ice. We don't know precisely what the effect of going up another 5 degrees will be, but we can try to estimate the impacts.

Obviously, I dont see the suggested imposed costs as being in line with the externalities in question.

The experts disagree with you, they say the costs of inaction greatly exceeds the cost of taking action. Only 2.1% of the economists surveyed indicated that the thought the U.S. shouldn't take action to address climate change, presumably that means only 2.1% of the economists thought the costs of action would be equal to or higher than the costs of inaction.

CO2 may not be as well mixed as I assumed. Here is some more information about that. But climate scientists are no doubt aware of this and take it into account as best they can. You'll have to provide a lot more solid evidence to convince me it significantly affects what they are saying.

Well, actually, they do ignore it:

Have you done a comprehensive review of the literature and confirmed that or is that just your supposition? (And no I haven't either but if Jaworski had something other scientists would pay more attention to him.)

The estimates I've seen lately mostly say that human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming in the past several decades.

That's not remotely possible, but furthermore, like Obama's "jobs saved or created", it's not falsifiable :)

Why isn't it possible? If natural forcings would lead to cooling but it's still warming then you can say human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming. Here is an article on a paper that indicates natural forcings may actually be negative. The actual paper is here.

My take is that you should provide evidence for that conditional or stop wasting my time.

My point was that you need to actually consider the negatives and positives. Current research points to far more negative effects than positives.

I agree. It's worth noting here that "do nothing, but build wealth" is one such moderate action.

Actually, no that would be inaction. Increasing efficiency and applying a moderate carbon tax would be moderate actions, in part, because with peak oil looming, prices are rising and supply is not increasing to match, so reducing our rate of oil consumption would be a smart hedge against rising prices. Following the current trends, the world needs at least 43 million barrels a day of new production by 2030. That's to replace 1/2 of our current daily production which will decline over the next 20 years. We have no idea if that production can be found and if so, where that production will come from and that's for the low growth scenario.

Here's a interesting quote (from Bradley Plumer):

I've noted before that pretty much every environmental regulation that's ever been enacted has been greeted with predictions of economic doom—yet those dire warnings have never panned out. Pollution restrictions invariably turn out to be much cheaper than expected, in part because they trigger the development of new technologies. (By contrast, nature isn't nearly so forgiving when we try to muck with it.)

What sources and sinks would you find near an ice core drilled into 2 miles of ice in the middle of Antarctica or a mile of ice in the middle of Greenland? Possibly volcanoes but they don't run steady for thousands of years and I would think the anomaly caused by such a thing would be obvious in the data.

Jaworski doesn't have much credibility in the ice core community. A letter to ESPR from Hans Oeschger in 1995 addresses Jaworski's points. A quote from it:

The project to reconstruct the history of the greenhouse gases was conducted; it was, and is, very successful – much above expectation. The CO2 concentrations measured on the SIPLE core, Antarctica, serve as a measure of that success. They illustrate (JAWOROWSKI, Fig. 5 a, p. 168) the history of atmospheric CO2 increase since the middle of the 18th century. Another important result was the observation of low CO2 concentrations of the gases extracted from ice-age ice. The low glacial CO2 concentrations have been confirmed in ice cores with different physical and chemical properties both from Greenland and Antarctica and independently from (carbon 13) measurements on carbonate of foraminifera shells in ocean cores and, yet again, more recently in moss samples.

The scientists studying this are well aware of the points Jaworski raises and don't ignore the difficulties involved in their measurements.

The trend in CO2 levels is not linear. If you look at the full Mauna Loa CO2 record there is an upward curve to to it. Current estimates for the BAU scenario show a CO2 level of 560 ppm in about 2070.

The estimates I've seen lately mostly say that human contributions are responsible for more than 100% of the warming in the past several decades. The 0.8C of warming you keep mentioning is not the full warming that will be caused by the increase in CO2. The thermal inertia of the oceans causes a 20-40 year lag in temperature increases so even if we instantly stopped increasing CO2 it would be that long before warming slowed down.

With the assumption that the CO2 level in a single ice core represents the global average accurately. Given the regional and temporal variation of CO2 in the atmosphere, I'd argue this is unlikely to be very accurate.

I have to take that as a supposition on your part with little science to actually back it up. While there may be some local variations in CO2 because of local sources/sinks CO2 in general is well mixed in the atmosphere once you get away from those. The locations that ice cores are taken are all well away from any local sources and sinks. I trust that scientists know what they're talking about in this case.

At the rate we are currently going we'll hit 590 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere well before 2100. The warming from doubling of CO2 is more likely to be around 3C when you take feedbacks into account. I don't get what you mean by "AFAIK, human CO2 emissions have only been asserted to by > 50% by even the most alarmist people".

Lindzen is well known for cherry picking and has been debunked over and over again by others in the field. I just can't give him much credibility although I do pay attention to what he says since he has some knowledge.

"Assume for a minute that we accept the GRACE numbers. The first problem is Antarctica contains a lot of ice : 30 × 10^6 km. At 100 km per year, it will take 300,000 years to melt."

(BTW, I think you should have used km^3 for cubic kilometers) The rate at which Antarctic ice is melting increased at a rate of 26 gigatonnes/year^2. In other words it's accelerating, losing 26 more GT each year than the year before. At that rate it will take a lot less than 300,000 years to melt. But it would still take several thousand years for all of it to melt regardless of what happens. There's a lot of ice there, enough to raise sea level by nearly 200 feet it all were to melt.

The GRACE satellites don't measure the flow of ice at all so flow would not show up on his map. You would have to actually visit the site to at least set up some instruments in order to measure flow. Flow increases when the ice gets warmer too.

Given that we had 20cm of sea level rise in the past 100 years, I'd bet we're in for another 20cm for the next hundred, if we don't hit a Maunder minimum type event. So, 8 inches, tops.

Sea level was rising at about 3 mm/year in the 2000's. In 1900 it was rising around 1 mm/year. So the rate of SLR is accelerating. A Maunder Minimum type event would slow projected global warming down by 5-10 years at best.

However, a 1 degree difference does not itself point to human activity, which is part the point that was being made by the person that called it "amazingly stable".

That's not a reasonable statement. The size of the change does not determine it's origin. That statement only makes sense if we assume that we are fundamentally ignorant of everything else concerning the climate. You may not know this, but there are people who have been studying the climate for over 50 years now. That kind of maybe is evidence that the person who wrote it is suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect on this topic.

Examine figure 6 on this introduction to global warming and you'll see 13 lines of evidence that "point to human activity".

Really? Says here they gave $200k in 2011:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/denialgate-heartland.html

A few journalists were scared of global cooling. Scientists, not so much, though it was discussed in a small number of papers (which got the attention of journalists, "SQUIRREL!"): http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-1970s-science-said-about-global-cooling.html

Feedbacks are a consequence of the forcing. Both should be counted. Also, keep in mind that 2C is the difference between a glacial and interglacial period - not insignificant. Human influence is both positive (greenhouse gasses) and negative (aerosols). Damn I hope you read through this post - it took way too long to compile :)

Granted, they are not a coherent movement so I can't say that all skeptics have predicted global cooling. The leaders of the movement who are willing to predict anything at all have predicted or promoted global cooling. They are right of course. If CO2 is not a major driver then global cooling has indeed been imminent for the last couple decades. Here is the solar output since 1985: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:138/from:1985

Here are examples from leaders of the skeptic movement predicting or promoting global cooling:

Joseph D'Aleo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_D'Aleo

John McLean: http://www.skepticalscience.com/mclean-exaggerating-natural-cycles.html

Christopher Monckton: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/monckton-global_warming_has_stopped.pdf

Anthony Watts: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22global+cooling%22+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwattsupwiththat.com

Piers Corbyn: http://www.mediaite.com/tv/global-warming-skeptic-predicts-brutal-winter-warns-you-aint-seen-nothing-yet/

James Dellingpole: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100055500/global-cooling-and-the-new-world-order/

Don Easterbrook: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/29/don-easterbrooks-agu-paper-on-potential-global-cooling/

Henrik Svensmark http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/10/svensmark-global-warming-stopped-and-a-cooling-is-beginning-enjoy-global-warming-while-it-lasts/

David Rose: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worry-NASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html

Alan Caruba, "An Icy End for Mankind?" Science and Environmental Policy Project, November 26, 2005; and Robert W. Felix, "Not by Fire, But by Ice: The Next Ice Age Now," Bellevue, WA: Sugarhouse Publishing.

Lawrence Solomon: http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2010/05/03/lawrence-solomon-arctic-ice-sets-records-in-april-could-auger-global-cooling.aspx

The only notable people missing are McIntyre, McKitrick, Spencer, and Lindzen. None of these people are willing or able to make predictions.

My prediction? We've just had the hottest La Nina on record - hotter even than all but one of the El Nino's of the previous century. La Nina's are cooler part of the ENSO. ENSO neutral 2010 was tied for hottest year on record. Even a small El Nino (warm part of ENSO) will push us into the hottest year on record. So the hottest year on record will come with the next El Nino. Probably within 2 years?

Have a look at Early Warning. You'll have to root around a bit for the climate entries (some are oil, some are economic), but a recent few point out the medium-term possibility of killer droughts, and the long term possibility of not-necessarily so bad. The main issue that is very hard to appreciate (hard for me, too) is that it takes a long time (many decades, maybe centuries) to reach equilibrium. The heat capacity of the oceans is ginormous., meaning that they can absorb an extraordinary amount of energy without their temperature changing much.

What that means in the short term is that we may (articles mentioned in EW, above) hit a point where the land is warm, but the oceans are relatively not. This leads to less precipitation over land. Long-term, land and oceans are in thermal equilibrium, not so much drought, but that is not predicted to happen for centuries. A century or so of drought would suck. Centuries-from-now-equilibrium might be better, assuming that you trust the models.

Another issue caused by oceans-are-enormous is that yearly variation really does swamp slow steady change, depending on which part of the ocean is warming or cooling the air that happens to be blowing our way. We're having an insane "warm" winter here in the Northeast, but it is allegedly caused almost entirely by a change in the Arctic Oscillation -- not Nina/Nino, not global warming. It's a wind pattern, apparently it can change in a matter of weeks. AO trends might be affected by global warming, but people are still arguing about that.

It's also virtually guaranteed that centuries from now the oceans will be many meters higher. Other papers, also referenced from EW, mention this. Hansen has several; one of his principal worries is that he sees geological evidence of the oceans rising 20 meters over 400 years -- that is, a meter every 20 years. Could that happen to "us"? When would it start? What we don't know is how this actually happens, because it's a rate of glacier flow into the ocean that would be outside of anything we've ever observed, and "explosive". Reasons to be nervous about this include: the IPCC explicitly ignores sea level contributions from ice caps melting; the IPCC predictions of arctic sea ice melting have turned out to be grossly over-conservative; recent satellite observations of Greenland's ice cap show an accelerating rate of loss (but accelerating how? Too early to tell).