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> As far as I know no one has created a model of the earth to test global warming or bred a large number of animals to create a new species.

No-one that is, apart from those that have. There have been a fairly large number of the latter, both observing and inducing speciation in plants and animals.

There are plenty of earth models for climatic and other purposes. It's clearly not practical to make physical models, so we have to make do with software ones which don't have such practical constraints. Their accuracy can be tested by seeing if older data can be used to predict more recent data (hindcasting), for example can data gathered from 1900 to 1960 in a given model be used to predict what the conditions were like in the 1960s? If they do, then you might consider some of that model's future predictions trustworthy too. This technique is used to test models of individual parts of an overall climate model, such as temperature changes, cloud actions, El Niño events, gas mixtures etc. Generally these models will only ever get better as research improves and computing power increases. Still, they are an approximation (as all models necessarily are), but as the IPCC said: "Despite such uncertainties, however, models are unanimous in their prediction of substantial climate warming under greenhouse gas increases". More info.

Your sig (http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/home/8608-) led me to this site:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/cosmic-rays-and-global-warming-advanced.htm/

I'm much more inclined to believe the skepticalscience.com conclusion, namely that the effect Svensmark describes correlates poorly with several data points, and that it is likely to be very small.

In no small part, that's because the skepticalscience.com post expends much more effort describing the science. Your link seems to be more political.

Do you know of any other science-based discussions of the point?

I didn't pick the year, the other guy did and I'm rightfully pointing out that he's absolutely 100% wrong. You, on the other hand are trying to cherry-picking 1998 as your start year for your "no trend" assertion because it was an unusually warm year because of an unusually strong El Nino. There's only no trend from 1998 if you carefully choose the start point and end point and ignore all the data between. Which is ludicrously stupid.

Further reading: There has been a warming trend since 1998.

So, the figure in your link (that is, this one) is precisely the kind of thing that bothers me about this "debate". In particular, note that when the "skeptic" piecewise fit fades out and is replaced by the "realist" fit, the last two(?) data points (one of which is well below all the others) disappear. Seriously, what the fuck? If you're trying to convince me of your statistical education, and impress upon me that your opponents are just cherry picking, maybe you should take care not to do really fucking suspicious shit like drop a clearly inconvenient data point from the plot.

Of course, I can't say how much of an effect that point has on the fit, because we're of course not even bothering about goodness-of-fit here. Chi^2 value for that fit, guys? Anyone? As much as the "skeptic" fit presented is indeed a complete joke and insulting to the intelligence, the "realist" fit is completely "chi-by-eye" -- which is to say, it looks like that straight line fits nicely, but who the hell knows if it's statistically significant or not??

And if it is only supposed to be suggestive, and not actually statistically significant, then how about fucken say that? Because otherwise you're just trying to impress scientifically illiterate types with fancy plots that don't mean a damn thing statistically, which more than a little ironic given the context in which it appears.

AGW theories are not treated like science, they are treated like religion. Critics are called heretics ("deniers" in the parlance), journal editors publishing refutations are excommunicated ("thrown into disrepute"). Any "testable" predictions of AGW are either simple trend statistics or not testable at all. Most of the predictions have simply failed, but that's explained away by misinterpretation or, oddly enough, inaccurate data used in models at the time.

Actually, the rise of temperature during the MWP was just as sharp and even warmer than today's. But the evangelists claim now that it can only be shown to be regional and shouldn't count as global warming.

I think they would tell you this:

Every year since 1997 has been warmer than 1997. Every single one. Every one. So you're absolutely 100% wrong.

If you look at the second graph on this page you'll see how you've been lied to. It's getting warmer, the people who are trying to trick you are simply cherry-picking picking two arbitrary points on a noisy line and claimin those two points are the trend. In some cases you're being deliberately deceived, in other cases, the people telling you this junk are just completely ignorant. Oh and if you really believe in climate change denial, Not-actually-a Lord Muncton (one of the most prominent anti-global warming spokespeople), also has a pill that simultaneously cures AIDS and cancer. Seriously. That's the kind of people who claim that anthropogenic global warming isn't real and that you can't trust scientists.

Muncton also advocated that every man, woman and child in the United States should be tested monthly for AIDS and anyone detected with signs of an infection should be "permanently removed from the population". He a right-wing conservative crackpot.

Check again, they rounded up a few know nothings about climate change with titles. I stopped reading about halfway through the list because I couldn't be bothered to finish reading the poorly laid out "signatories" section. The most relevent title I saw was "former head of climate change for meteorology". For the most part it appears to be the usual bundle of physicists and other people with little to no expertise in the field.

The Wall Street Journal is likely under the same orders that other Rupert Murdoch owned papers are under: Under no circumstances can they say anything positive about global warming. Much of the so-called controversy is generated directly from Rupert Murdoch's publications. I'd attack the arguments but they're just the usual gish-gallop of idiocy meant to reassure conservatives that climate change doesn't exist.

I skimmed the article and it looks like most of the stuff in there can be corrected from this article.

Climate change is here, it's happening, there's 14 separate lines of evidence that all indicate the world is warming, and 13 other lines of evidence that indicates the current global warming is casued by humans. It's time to end the idiocy.

Sure you watch Fox News. Your entire presence on Slashdot is to churn out right-wing propaganda. You don't comment on anything else.

And you come out with the same hurricane shit every time there's a global warming thread in Slashdot.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/extreme-weather-global-warming.htm

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm

http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm

I thought this global warming denial nonsense was long sense refuted for anyone willing to look at the facts in an objective manner.

Call me when the ice on Antarctica will start melting at an accelerated rate.

Ring! Ring! It already is melting and the rate is accelerating as measured by the GRACE satellites. But it still amounts to less than a millimeter per year of SLR for now.

It's us. It's not just correlation, it's multiple lines of evidence that all point to human caused climate change. Coincidentally, you argument that it's not necessarily us is falling out of favour even with people in denial, it used to be one of the top 10 arguments, now it's not even in the top 50 most frequently used arguments.

[citation needed]

Because some the reports that I've seen say agriculture production had already fallen due to negative climate change effects. For instance, this report says that many of California's tree crops may die off because the "winter chill" which protects the trees from some pests will no longer consistently occur. As I understand it, the reason that actual output hasn't fallen is because technological advancements are (so far) outpacing the negative climate related effects.

A warmer climate means you get a longer growing season in the northern areas that are already the most productive. This is good for places like the US.

I can't find it right now, but there was an article that said over 50% of the U.S. mainland was afflicted by either flooding or droughts this year. As the average temperature increases, the average amount of area covered by those conditions will increase. Neither condition is good for growing crops. It doesn't take much land area consumed by drought to negate all changes from a "longer growing season".

Near the equator in areas where it's already too hot for most cereal crops, additional CO2 will make tree farming much more profitable - trees grow better due to additional CO2 fertilization.

As far as I'm aware, additional CO2 has a negligible effect on plant growth, few plants are struggling to get more carbon, they tend to be limited by competition, pests, water, and sunlight first. Even in perfect greenhouse conditions, additional carbon dioxide seems to only boost growth by a few percent (~3%).

Further Reading.

There has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years. The Earth is not getting hotter, it got hotter and then, a decade and a half ago, it stopped.

The first sentence is true, yet the second sentence is false.

Here's my favourite of the many debunkings of this myth. The third graph is particularly compelling, and will be even more compelling when the data for 2011 is added.

So here are two requirements for those wishing to conclude that global warming has stopped based on the interview with Phil Jones:

1. Accept the backwards logic that allows global warming to keep on stopping while temperatures keep on rising.
2. Ignore the real question of whether the last 15 years is consistent with a continued warming trend (which it is).

So no, global warming has not stopped. It takes some serious wishful thinking to say that it has.

It's long past time to face facts: the Earth is getting hotter, and to deny it is an exercise in fantasy.

Nobody is denying that it got like 0.2 degrees hotter in the past 10 years, it's the fact that some people seem to be making the leap between it getting hotter and humans not trading enough carbon credits, now that is an exercise in fantasy.

Roy Spencer seems to be popping up in a lot of denier posts, being one of the few deniers (of man-made gw) among those who should actually have a clue. However, he's also a signatory to this curious statement, which contains such gems as:

We believe Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence —are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting, admirably suited for human flourishing, and displaying His glory. Earth’s climate system is no exception. Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history.

This in itself doesn't invalidate his science, but it does mean that he's cast his lot with a bunch of pretty anti-scientific people, and has a decidedly non-scientific basis for his approach to science. That said, his "science" is also... controversial, to say the least, to the point that a journal editor-in-chief relinquished his position after having published a flawed article of his.

All this makes me very skeptical to anything claimed by this personnage, apart from the fact that his findings seem to be demolished by the scientific community he claims to be a part of. His credibility also suffers from his being a creationist who also seeks to deny or invalidate huge areas of well-established science. In short, he comes across as a scientific crook, and you guys come across as pretty desperate for constantly referring to him.

I'm not a climate scientist, but neither am I an automobile engineer, and I still put my faith in those who are everytime I ride a car. I wouldn't, however, trust a car designed by the lone crazy-ass engineer who claims that everyone else is doing it wrong, that brakes in cars are just for wimps, and that God should cater to everyone's braking needs.

* Man Eating Duck dons asbestos underwear *

It's quite a well known graph but it does not show that it has been hotter in the past 12,000 yrs than now, (which is what you implied with your original comment about records), in fact it shows the opposite. It shows 2004 was significantly warmer than at any other time during the Holocene. The thick black line is a moving average with an interval measured in centuries (it states a 500yr interval was used for sediment proxies, other proxies are likely to be 1-200yr intervals). Since the duration of recent human induced warming fits entirely within the last moving average interval the graph smooths out the hockey stick at the end. In other words the last 50yrs is virtually invisible on the 12,000yr X axis and only accounts for part of the last data point on the black line. This is why they included the hockey stick insert for comparison, it effectively zooms in on the last 2Kyrs of the main graph to display the rapid increase that is not apparent in the moving average.

All climate scientists of any repute from the last 50yrs will tell you CO2 has been the dominant regulator of the Earth's climate since multi-cellular life first appeared 500M years ago, the last time CO2 was at similar levels as today was 3M years ago, long before humans walked the Earth.

The fact is that there is abundant scientific evidence that human activities are causing global warming. A good summary is here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-we-know-were-causing-global-warming-in-single-graphic.html

Chaotic Climate Change is what smart people call global warming once they realize that the earth has actually lost two degrees of average temperature in the last decade or so.

Smart people who aren't smart enough to try to answer their own questions:

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

a round of solar flares that melt the tundra, releasing more methane in ONE DAY than a year's worth of greenhouse gas output from all of mankind's activities combined.

LOLWUT? Got a source for that? That's serious news to me, only sources I can find are conspiracy sites and nutjob blogs.

And that, greenhouse gases aren't that bad- they are in fact, if we're smart, an opportunity to plant more food crops, convert more desert land into food-based rain forests, and end world hunger. If we were smart, that is. But never underestimate stupidity and greed for wanting to adapt in the way that costs more instead.

Addressing climate change might cost more for *you* if you live in, say, North Dakota, but it would be ridiculously narrow-sighted to say that accepting global arming is cheaper than addressing it overall. If you said you have a FYGM attitude at least that would be somewhat understandable. And good luck with your expanded-tropical-zone planet that's suffering from ocean acidification.

I referenced an analysis on the impact of carbon pricing in my other reply to you. Perhaps you care to critique that.

Is any economic study truly scientific?

There is an analysis of the economic impact of carbon pricing here. It includes links to the original studies. I'm sure you will find fault with it but there it is. Like I said, I think you're the one being alarmist.

What? If the methodology is poor, how can you trust the conclusion?

I didn't say anything about trusting the conclusion. I'm saying the results might still be correct despite methodological errors. This should be obvious and not at all controversial. You still have to show that the results are wrong, you can't just say there are errors therefore the opposite of the conclusion is true.

The parent has already listed several examples. Wishing they didn't exist doesn't make them go away.

As for the stations, you should read Watt's paper, in which he answers the questions you asked. Many of the sites were set up in suitable locations, then were encroached upon later, making the sites unsuitable. But, those sites were NOT compensated for. When taken as a whole, the stations have a margin of error greater than the temperature change they are said to demonstrate.

1) The paper Watts co authored concluded there was no statistically significant difference between temperature trends for good sites and bad sites. The Best project found the opposite of what they expected to find. They found that heat island affected sites were understating global warming slightly.

2) McIntyre's paper was rendered unimportant by Wahl and Ammon who demonstrated that McIntyre appeared to have cherry-picked data in his paper to get his results and beyond that, using alternate statistical methods which didn't suffer from the same supposed flaw, the same hockey stick graph was consistently reproduced from the data.

3) I suppose if McIntyre's claims are true, he should publish an article showing that the data has been inverted and that it has a material impact on the work, because as far as I can tell the only place that information has been published is McIntyre's blog and Watt's blog. That doesn't exactly meet the requirement of peer reviewed literature.

The list goes on and on, i know each has been hyped as "the last nail in the coffing of AGW", but they never are. Sometimes they're not even real. The problem is that mistakes are bound to be made, that's why there's independent confirmation of results. Take a look at the big picture each arrow is an independent area of study withing climatology. All of 14 of the areas of study have arrived at the same conclusion, the world is warming. Look at figure 6, there are 12 different lines of evidence that indicate that the warming is anthropogenic.

It would require a large amount of very significant evidence to overturn anthropogenic global warming at this point. Considering that it's greatest critics rarely publish any of their criticisms, mostly because they never even try to publish anything, it seems highly unlikely that it will happen.

"I'd say 10C is more the limit and I'm probably setting it a bit low."

Well, I'm reassured. Tell me, do you have any reason for believing that number, rather than the numbers being given by people who actually study the issue?

"Remember that most of the current and forecast warming is in the upper northern hemisphere which doesn't have a lot of biological diversity (both because of the arduous environment and because most of it used to be ice-covered ten thousand years ago). Also, your "mass extinctions" do not include humans or species we depend on."

So you don't care about mass extinctions, as long as it doesn't directly lead to human extinction? Wow. I'm constantly impressed by the selfishness of global warming deniers like you. Do you care about anything beyond your immediate personal comfort? Screw other people, screw other species, screw other generations, screw the people downwind and downriver from the coal plants, because I think light from CFLs looks a little weird.

You think climate is unpredictable? Well, take a look at the whole frakking ecosystem, where millions of species living in tense, fluctuating equilibrium with all the others, each with very specific habitat requirements. Do you really think we have a shot in hell at fixing it once it's broken? Do you really think we can choose where the dominos stop falling? Do you really prefer testing the limits of evolution's adaptability in order to avoid "crippling the economy" by ratcheting growth back by 8% over a couple of decades?

In short, are you completely, suicidally insane? Somehow I doubt that. And yet the path you're proposing sounds that way.

"So what is it? Is solar going to vastly reduce costs or not? If it does, then the whole argument about reducing carbon dioxide emissions can be tossed. Because it will happen anyway as solar replaces fossil fuel burning for more and more applications."

I believe it will happen eventually. There are only two questions in my mind:

1) Whether we'll be buying solar panels from China, or China will be buying solar panels from us. Judging by what's happened to American solar companies this last year, I fully expect the former.

2) Whether the transition will happen soon enough or completely enough to make a difference. There is a lot we could do to accelerate the trend, but frankly you typify the sort of attitudes that could delay it for crucial decades.

We're already well above the 350ppm "safe zone", and 2011 was the biggest year ever for CO2 emissions. The transition needs to happen a lot faster than the free market will support. Consider that the capital investments in coal are for the most part already paid off, and the oldest plants aren't even compliant with 1970's era air quality standards (they were grandfathered in under the misguided assumption that they'd be shut down soon).

It's also got an uphill battle because coal is more expensive than your power bill would indicate. By hundreds of billions of dollars.

Here's what the study included: "government coal subsidies, increased illness and mortality due to mining pollution, climate change from greenhouse gas emissions, particulates causing air pollution, loss of biodiversity, cost to taxpayers of environmental monitoring and cleanup, decreased property values, infrastructure damages from mudslides resulting from mountaintop removal, infrastructure damage from mine blasting, impacts of acid rain resulting from coal combustion byproducts, water pollution." All this must be paid for, but none of these costs are charged back to the electricity users.

Force coal companies to pay the full costs of their product, and solar would be cost-competitive right now.

We could also accelerate the changeover by increasing funding for research in alternative energies. For example, home solar w

I'd suggest reading Skpetical Science's Newcomers page. It might help get you up to speed on what's true and what's not. Most of their debunking pages have multiple levels of technical detail so you can read whatever level your comfortable with and get more detail, if something catches your interest.

You've actually made an error here. More icecap melt = more freshwater now and less later. See the thing about glaciers is they're made up of a finite amount of ice. When it's gone, some areas that were previously fertile will begin the desertification process.

Warmer temperatures also don't tend to deposit the water in ways that humans appreciate. It means more extreme droughts and more extreme flooding. The U.S. 2011 is a pretty good example. Parts of the north eastern U.S. were experience massive flooding while Texas was experiencing the worst drought it's ever had. Take a look at this. 56% of the Unites States experienced either flooding or drought in 2011.

Eventually a warmer earth may result in better food production, but we have to figure out ways to adapt to flooding, droughts and ways to upgrade land that has poor topsoil because it has not been viable for food production for millennia. The biggest problem is that the new land that could eventually grow crops is going to be offset by the loss of a lot of coastal areas where people like to live. Those people are going to be mostly moving into prime agricultural land, because cities tend to be located where we could grow food. That's how they became cities in the first place. So we're going to lose some of our best land and exchange it for land that needs a lot of work to upgrade to productive.

Lastly, more CO2 has a marginal effect on vegetation because most plants aren't CO2 limited, they tend to be limited by other factors. Increasing the amount of CO2 available to those plants has no appreciable effect.

Lastly, I'm curious which free societies don't have food production or drinking water problems?

Here are some good places to start.

Mart

And if global mean temperature is to vague a concept, flowers open earlier in the spring than they have done before. It is only in one place, so the global mean temperature is a better meassure, but the methodology is easier understand for the flowering.

Please bookmark this page and refer to it as needed.

Thank you. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm

This is fairly typical of the kind of clutching at straws that one hears from people who are desperate to reject global warming. They reject the consensus of 97% of climate scientists and seize upon the creationist scientist Spencer, who has rather weak credentials in the climate science field, and who is best known for making basic errors in mathematics and for over fitting overly simplistic models.

Spencer, while not particularly accomplished, seems to be a real scientist. As scientists go, he falls into the category of "lonely guy with a pet theory." There are always one or two guys like this on the periphery of a field--guys who have some oddball theory that they haven't been able to convince much of anybody else of. While they almost always turn out to be wrong, they can occasionally serve a useful role as gadflies.

"I became a skeptic when they tried to erase the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age."

Which climatologists did this exactly?

This guy did. Here is what he had to say in his conclusion:

Thus, the temperature data give no support for the global Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

HERE is an environmental website's take on it.

HERE is another from an environmental website.

HERE is a whole paper on it (PDF warning).

Do you need more? Google it.

Links, please, to back up where you believe the science is faulty, and to back up your premise that if you disagree with the general consensus of climatologists that it's hard to get funding. I just don't buy that; especially not with the general Republican stance. They love their climate denial scientists lots. Though, they seem to have a lot of trouble finding any to fund. And thus, they try to cut funding for ALL climate change research.

I do know, however, that GWBush tried to silence NASA scientists from talking about Global Warming, and that House Republicans are still at it (we all know how biased NASA is, right? /snark)

So, please. If you're going to make assertions, back them up. Otherwise, it's just faith based denial.

Oh fuck I love it when someone shows up with this argument.

Do you know where you got this from?

Warmer earth = larger temperate zones = more food production. More CO2 = more vegetation growth = more food production.

Do you know at all the origin of that, because it has ZERO basis in scientific reality.

Plants grown artificially in enhanced CO2 environments have reduced nutritional value, tougher leaves higher concentrations of defensive chemicals making them a poorer food source.

the denier talking point you made was literally created out of whole cloth by an oil executive who just thought it up one day and then said it in an interview with the media. It's a joke.

Have some reality: http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-is-plant-food-too-simple.html

For certain values of "real issue".

http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-we-know-were-causing-global-warming-in-single-graphic.html

You've disproven the greenhouse effect? Well don't wait, go pick up your Nobel prize!

http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-co2-enhanced-greenhouse-effect.htm

Actually, we came up with a lot of questions that were never answered very well. Like why were both Mars and Pluto exhibiting signs of global warming.

Seriously, two solar powered Mars rovers can't be causing that much pollution on Mars.

Same tired old AGW arguments. Have a read. Perhaps you should admit to yourself (and everyone else) that you simply don't want to believe in climate change. It's OK, I don't either. The difference is I'm not allowing my desires to rule my thinking.

No, you don't recall correctly. Humans create at least 100 times as much CO2 as volcanos.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

Published reviews of the scientific literature by Moerner and Etiope (2002) and Kerrick (2001) report a minimum-maximum range of emission of 65 to 319 million tonnes of CO2 per year. . . .The burning of fossil fuels and changes in land use results in the emission into the atmosphere of approximately 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year worldwide,

Amusing. You realize that pretty much every claim in that article is false, right? Temperatures are rising, Arctic ice is at record lows in extent and more importantly, volume. Of course, I wouldn't expect much more from Climate Depot, it exists only to deny that global warming is occurring. If they were ever to accept that it was actually happening they'd be out of business.

Warming hasn't stopped.
Artctic sea ice hasn't recovered.

Of course, the real reason they're fundamentally opposed to climate change has nothing to do with the science but with the ideological consequences of accepting global warming. If the unregulated free market can actually endanger the prosperity of the human race, then one of the ideological foundations of modern conservative thought is in extreme danger. That's an identity crisis that the conservative leaders are not prepared to handle, and worse if their followers were to understand the problem, they might stop believing in the conservative mythos.

Amusing. You realize that pretty much every claim in that article is false, right? Temperatures are rising, Arctic ice is at record lows in extent and more importantly, volume. Of course, I wouldn't expect much more from Climate Depot, it exists only to deny that global warming is occurring. If they were ever to accept that it was actually happening they'd be out of business.

Warming hasn't stopped.
Artctic sea ice hasn't recovered.

Of course, the real reason they're fundamentally opposed to climate change has nothing to do with the science but with the ideological consequences of accepting global warming. If the unregulated free market can actually endanger the prosperity of the human race, then one of the ideological foundations of modern conservative thought is in extreme danger. That's an identity crisis that the conservative leaders are not prepared to handle, and worse if their followers were to understand the problem, they might stop believing in the conservative mythos.

No. Those who requested the data requested that if all the data couldn't be provided, then the freely available data should be provided. They were refused.

Bzzt. Wrong. Try again.

30.First, in answer to the question of whether the raw data are accessible and verifiable, Professor Jones told us that:
The simple answer is yes, most of the same basic data are available in the United States in something called the Global Historical Climatology Network. They have been downloadable there for a number of years so people have been able to take the data, do whatever method of assessment of the quality of the data and derive their own gridded product and compare that with other workers.

31.In addition, of course, there are the sources of the data, the weather stations, to which any individual is free to go and collect the data in the same way that CRU did. This is feasible because the list of stations that CRU used was published in 2008.

41. Professor Jones contested these claims. According to him, “The methods are published in the scientific papers; they are relatively simple and there is nothing that is rocket science in them”. He also noted: “We have made all the adjustments we have made to the data available in these reports; they are 25 years old now”. He added that the programme that produced the global temperature average had been available from the Met Office since December 2009.

51. Even if the data that CRU used were not publicly available—which they mostly are—or the methods not published—which they have been—its published results would still be credible: the results from CRU agree with those drawn from other international data sets; in other words, the analyses have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified.

When asked for a list of what data was used, but not the data itself, they refused. Even if the data is available for free on the net, how can the results be replicated if they will not say which data was used?

Jones PERSONALLY refused. The information about what data was used has been available since the original papers and research were performed! IT'S IN THE RESEARCH, DURRRR. Have you ever read any of it?

It has only been replicated by his buddies.

Bzzt! Wrong. Try again.

BEST was funded by the Koch brothers, owners of a giant oil/petrochemical company. Most DEFINITELY NOT "buddies" with Mann. Even still, being "buddies" in science doesn't mean diddly-squat; it's not about WHO you know, but WHAT you know, and HOW WELL you know it. So far, Mann's work has been REPEATEDLY vindicated.

There can be no vindication for trying to "hide the decline".

Ya know, for a minute there, I thought you might be trying to be genuinely serious and skeptical. Then you trot THAT out. /facepalm

It is a well established rule of science that you don't leave out data that casts doubt on your conclusion.

You are correct, it is, and the vast majority of climate scientists and their research faithfully follow that rule, no matter how many intellectually dishonest, ignorant, and gullible idiots falling for charlatans and snake oil salesmen lke Watts, Michaels, Singer, et cetera ad nauseum, try to spin otherwise.

You've fallen for their story.

No, I've fallen for the FACTS of the matter. I've done my homework; I've looked beyond anyone's story; what's YOUR excuse?

Many of us used to think the alarmists were good willed, and we assumed they were honest. I still think they are good

There is no statistically significant evidence that the modern warming is part of any kind of cycle, nor is there any natural mechanism that could produce a 100 year cycle. There is also no statistically significant evidence that warming stopped in 2000. Moreover, statistical analysis of climate models tells us that the expected warming trend is too small to be reliably detected on anything less than a multidecade climate scale, so such a claim makes no sense.

So now it's some unnamed pundit who predicted a 2C warming by now, which amounts to much the same thing as some guy in a bar--these days, a pundit is a guy who is not an expert but plays one on TV. It certainly was not Al Gore who made such a prediction, despite your ritual invocation of his name. He's more accurate than most so-called pundits in reporting the science, but he's no scientist. If you want to criticize the science, don't you owe it to yourself to look into what the actual scienctists are saying? I refer you again to the IPCC reports.

And yes, scientists qualify their knowledge in terms of probability rather than engaging in the false certainty common in other fields. An engineer will not tell you that a bridge will "probably" stand up. The engineers were quite confident in the soundness of the Tacoma Narrows bridge and the unsinkability of the Titanic. Scientists recognize that any prediction of the future caries some degree of uncertainty. You will find quantification of the degree of certainty in the IPCC reports

You should probably read this or at least look at the pretty graph. When someone tells you it's gotten colder over the last decade, they're "spinning" the facts to the point where they no longer mean anything. By taking a warm year in the past and comparing it to a more recent cold year, you can invent a graph that "proves" it's getting colder. The problem is you can do that for every decade and show how "it got colder" in every decade we have records for and yet since the 1950's every decade average temperature is higher than the previous decade.

That because cherry-picked data is used to confuse people and convince them that what they want to believe is true.

The rise has been stopped for 13 years now.

Actually, it hasn't. You're not allowed to draw a line through any two points in a graph and call it a trend. Graphs don't work that way. There's a very informative graph on this page that should explain how you are being deceived.

Here is a more up-to-date comparison of the IPCC 1990 predictions with recent observations:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-ipcc-far.html
Note particularly the last graph.

The tree ring data works really well up to 1960-ish, it correlates to ice core reconstructions, surface temperature record, and so on ... all our other proxys. It's only after 1960-ish that it starts to diverge for reasons unknown. If your aim is to estimate global surface temperature changes over the last 1,000 years, tree-ring data pre-1950 is a good source.

Post-1950 we don't need to use a proxy. We have accurate and direct surface temperature records, so it's reasonable to simply use those. When you present the estimate of course you need to make plain your various sources and how and why you combined them. This was done in the original paper.

Google will find many discussions of this, for example: http://www.skepticalscience.com/Mikes-Nature-trick-hide-the-decline.htm

Maybe you should just do some reading: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php

Start with #1.

CO2 causing warming isn't based on history, it's based on physics and observation. We know that CO2 captures heat in the atmosphere. We can observe that it is, in fact, doing so. The upper atmosphere is cooling while the lower atmosphere is warming this is a classic fingerprint of CO2 based warming. Combining the known physics with historical proxies, we find that historically something triggers warming which then causes CO2 release. the CO2 becomes a feedback mechanism that continues the warming. So while CO2 lags the initial warming, it then drives the subsequent warming.

It's like you're arguing that second gear doesn't move a car forward because it always follows the movement caused by first gear, therefore second gear must actually slow the car down. The argument seems reasonable unless, of course, you actually understand what you're talking about.

Also, don't believe the hype, the models actually work very well.

So your argument is "the climate has always changed, so it can't be man made this time". http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-warm-period.htm

You're cherry-picking the data: http://www.skepticalscience.com/hiding-the-incline-in-sea-level.html
So, intentional deception, or uncritical parroting of the party line?

It is clear that you are incredibly ignorant and shouldn't be posting on Slashdot.

I'd recommend you try to read this page, or at least look at the pretty graph. That has to do with temperature, but it is generally applicable to your beliefs about ocean levels.

The reason ocean levels have fallen is most likely because Thailand, Pakistan, Australia and a few other places have all experienced massive record-setting floods. There's actually been enough flooding to show up as a small dip in the measure of ocean levels.

Actually, according to BEST there's no evidence to indicate that the trend has changed. Or more accurately, 10 years is too short a time to separate climate signal from weather noise. Here's a graph that shows why the trend is not cooling.