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Sorry, but that man in the coma for 23 years, is only "communicating" with the world through "facilitated communication", which is a hoax. A discredited technique.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6930608.ece

The novel method of communication has not convinced all medical experts, however. "It's Ouija board stuff. It's been discredited time and again when people look at it. It's usually the person who is doing the pointing who is doing the messages," Arthur Caplan, Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said after watching a video of the pair.

The spectacle is so incredible that even Steven Laureys, the neurologist who discovered Mr Houben's potential, had doubts about its authenticity. He decided to put it to the test.

"I showed him objects when I was alone with him in the room and then, later, with his aide, he was able to give the right answers," Professor Laureys said. "It is true."

YMMV

The problem was not the sample size, pilot studies like this are common. The problem was the dubious methodology that Wakefield used in generating the paper, namely not disclosing his a patent application, payment by an attorney specifically to support the claim that the MMR is linked to autism, and his selection of children whose parents were involved in such law suits by the same attorny when he said he randomly selected them. This was brought up first by Brian Deer http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5683671.ece and led to a two-and-a-half year ethics investigation by the General Medical Council, which found the he acted “dishonestly and irresponsibly" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8483865.stm

Scientists are, by nature, skeptics. They don't believe anything you tell them; they have to see the data themselves and replicate the results. In science, if you make a claim, but can't substantiate it, then your claim is unproven.

The Lancet is retracting the original paper not because the claims were not substantiated by further studies; normally the paper would remain in publication. Subsequent investigations also found that the study was highly flawed and that Wakefield misrepresented or changed data to support his claim.

In the original study, Wakefield reported 8 of 12 children in a hospital clinic experienced symptoms of autism as well as inflammatory bowel disease within days of a vaccination. Later investigation revealed that the autism symptoms described by Wakefield were different from those described to the hospital, and that in only one case did the autism symptoms occur a few days after the vaccination. The majority were reported before the vaccination occurred. Hospital physicians at the time did not find any signs of inflammatory bowel disease but the study reported that they did.

Dr. Wakefield's integrity was questioned when it was revealed that he had been paid by parents of autism children to determine if the MMR vaccine was the culprit. This conflict of interest was not reported to the Lancet before the paper was published.

I can't tell you how they are controlling, and I have described the estimate as "rough", but my own experience of my own extended family, which has a number of Oxbridge and Russell group graduates as well as US, German and Italian universities, suggests that getting into Oxbridge is partly accidental and, other things being equal, depends on your school and your social circle. My brother is far more intelligent than I am, but associating with a group of kids who clowned about at school caused the school not to put him forward for Cambridge, whereas I was more conformist and was being guided in that direction from the age of 13. I think I am unprejudiced in saying that Oxbridge does not in fact take the top tier of UK students because, in fact, it is too small and the selection process can never be sufficiently accurate. I believe that in practice their recruitment system gets them students reliably from the top 5% of the IQ range, i.e. +2sd, and some obvious standouts, but that overall the majority of students from that group go to the Russell group.

not to discuss this story after today's story about evidence the chinese government has been hacking britian government and companies for some time.

But 3d TV requires glasses

False. Some displays do not require glasses.

Just google for: 3d tv no glasses
1 2 3 4 5

pull this thread as I walk away...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7009081.ece

I wonder if developing countries are as paranoid about vaccinations as the 1st world ones are.

Many African Americans believe that AIDS was created in a CIA lab and is spread thru the use of vaccinations.

http://www.avert.org/origin-aids-hiv.htm

Africans think this is BS.

"Dr Chris Ouma, head of health programmes for the charity ActionAid Kenya, said that the claims “fly in the face of experience on the ground”."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article884626.ece

> Yep, by this logic, it should be illegal for a
> woman to have sex with Gary Coleman.

Yup, I'd support that law. If I can't have sex with Gary Coleman, NO ONE CAN, bwahahahahahah!

'Cause it takes--
Diff'rent Strokes,
Yes it takes--
Diff'rent Strokes...

But seriously, adult film star Melissa-Ashley has had to testify at least SIX times that she's an adult, thanks to overzealous child porn prosecutions. Don't we have better things to do than police so-called morality? Catch real child molesters, not casual porn fanciers.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article527674.ece

Not only that but the name has been trademarked by Fujitsu http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7006023.ece

Really? Monks under siege in monasteries as protest ends in a hail of gunfire

Or:

Front Line was pleased to receive confirmation today that human rights defender Aminatou Haidar has finally been allowed to return home to her family after 32 days on hunger strike. According to BBC sources Ms Haidar was able to speak to members of the media before boarding the flight. "This is a triumph for international law, for human rights, for international justice and for the cause of the Western Sahara" said Ms Haidar.

http://www.frontlinedefenders.org/node/2300

It requires someone with enough confidence and resources to attack about twenty US companies for months.
It requires someone to anticipate the unusual move of Google on this attack.
It requires someone confident enough to operate from China and escape the Chinese government's scrutiny, even after their operations have been revealed.
I think that makes a lot of hypothesis.

The Chinese government has spent hundreds of millions training a "cyber-army". Maybe they have spent so much in that toy that they are flexing their muscles a bit ? It is not that long ago that experts were warning about the hacking capabilities of China

so I looked for an hour

keen is not immeadiately convincing. he is slandered a lot, but that is not necessarily a big deal, but his classroom behavior appears to be judged at either a positive or negative extreme and so it is likely judging him correctly is difficult. I might guess he does not suffer fools well.

looking at the keen slanders, it appears that a guy name piekle is slandered for supporting keen, but by the attack, it appears that piekle is a bit hard to slander. and it looks like piekle turned out to be important. here is a mass media url that mentions piekle: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

looks like piekle is the guy who forced cre to admit that the raw data was long gone, so sorry folks. interesting article, because of the comments. I though some were rather pointed and valid

but let me just talk some more about your link to nasa data. I have heard that pretty much everyone relies on just five data sets and they all go through cre. so I suppose the nasa data does too. this was global data over maybe 100 years. if the raw data is gone for your cite, it is a little interesting you sort of claim this surely highly processed data graph is raw data. this is, like someone said about the fact of the missing data, a convenient error.

OH NOES! Climate data being faked for political purposes! What's next? Climate data being faked to scam grant money? Oops! Already happened!

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers....he Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999975.ece/

Climate change continues to be a horse ridden by people with personal and political agendas. It continues to amaze how an entire generation has been duped into believing correlation equals causation.

I do not agree that this was more than a dyslexic typo that went unchallenged for far too long.

It's a good thing the correlation between global warming and extreme weather disasters like hurricanes and floods in the same report is still on a sound foundation then. Oh, wait...

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Ouch.

The climate is warming. The climate has been warming from 10,000-15,000 years, and we should be glad of that. It's hard to grow crops on a glacier. 15,000 years ago much of the US was under immense glaciers, as was much of Europe. Now they are not in our current Holocene epoch, which is why this is called an "inter-glacial period." There's are various natural cycles going on here, with spans of twenty and eighty thousand years roughly. My minivan's emissions did not cause the end of the Wisconsin Glacial epoch. After a few more thousand years the cycle will once again reverse - and the glaciers will return. When they do we're all going to have to try to fit into North Africa, Eastern China, and equatorial South America. I suspect the locals will have a problem with that when the time comes. And yeah, I know you know all this.

I am also aware that nobody has a good understanding of the dynamics of large chunks of melting ice, this is obvious if you look at how woefully the 2007 IPCC reports underestimated the loss of Artic sea ice .

I'm pretty sure that the dynamics of melting ice in large chunks and small are that if the ice gets too warm, it melts. The loss of arctic ice is attributed by NASA not to warming but to winds pushing the ice onto currents that conveyed it out of the arctic.

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

Quit scaring people with your pseudo-scientific dendro-science. We're on to your game. The sky is not falling. Well, the sky is falling, but it's falling far more slowly than you say it is, and in the opposite direction. Let us sit under the magic warm-monger tree and contemplate understanding natural cycles a bit more thoroughly before we deliberately attempt to manipulate them.

As I thought. You're not reading sources at all. You're simply hiding from reality.You're the real denier

The lead author of the chapter on Asia, Dr Murari Lal, has admitted that the story about Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was known by him to be false when it was made but it was deliberately left in to put pressure on politicians.

Dr Syed Hasnain, the man who made the original claim about glaciers, now works for Rajendra Pachauri and applied for grants from the EU to study the problem he knew fine well did not exist.

Conflict of interest? Scandalous misappropriation of funds?

Naah. It's just a typo. A storm in a teacup.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

What do you make of the fact that the IPCC Chairman used these claims to get millions in grant money?

Doesn't sounds like a minor mistake, does it? He used in multiple grant applications the totally bogus figures they've had to "correct".

This seems to validate all the "deniers" claims that global warming is just a fraudulent industry designed to keep funding going for the scientists involved by scaring people. The leftists look the other way because they use the man-made global warming alarmism to push through their preferred socialist agenda. That's why they get so angry at anyone who comes up with an alternate solution to the problem. They're not trying to solve a problem, they're using it as an excuse to grab the power to make people do what they want them to do.

"But he [Rajenda Pachauri (Head of the IPCC)] admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible." ...

"A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m -- a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year." ...

"I [Professor Hasnain] was keeping quiet as I was working here," he said. "My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?"

My opinion: This is the only section of the IPCC under critical review right now. Do you really think are not "other errors" elsewhere in the report that make "innocent mistakes" that mischaracterize actual observations to the tune of x10-x100 the actual observations that always seem to error on the side of promoting AGW? Billions of dollars of funding are awarded to scientists substantiate the theories that their political check writers want, this is the poison in the science! After all, this error was not until recently 'pointed out' by Prof. Hasnain because he was afraid of the "might of the IPCC". Still think it's not a house of cards? Just wait until public opinion shifts enough for scientists to speak critically of the report without the threat of losing their job and/or funding.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6999051.ece

Don't know why this is marked troll, its based on facts...

Organ harvesting in China

Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China refers to the practice of removing human organs and tissue from the corpses of criminals executed in China and using these organs for organ transplants.

Families billed for bullets in China

In the past, capital punishment was carried out by a single shot to the back of the head at execution fields outside Chinese cities and families of the dead were sent a bill for the bullet.

Slavery in China

It's a story that has made headlines around the world: Slave laborers have been found in Chinese brick factories. The authorities have freed many of them, but some fear there could be hundreds more being imprisoned, beaten and starved. Some parents have begun searching for their sons on their own.

Good luck getting a job with children when that accusation is revealed to a potential employer.

Sometimes when the world conspires to enact injustice, it's the prison wardens of small minds in the general population who need to be taken to task. Likewise with your credit record. A merchant can make an unfounded allegation about payment failure, and the blotch is hard to remove. Soon people begin to fear the malingering blotch and behave in frightened, risk averse ways, which the worst of the merchants soon begin to exploit.

Personally, I think the solution is to add teeth to the liability laws, to the point that when a person suffers an social injury (such as denial of employment and credit), there is someone useful to sue for having allowed the unsubstantiated information to flow around the loop in the first place.

Comments that quickly get you sued if you mention them in public can be erected as monuments if you commit them to permanent electronic storage, equally without basis, and then dress up the reports with an agency masthead. It doesn't even matter if the agency can tell their torus from a hole in the ground.

Michael Hicks

Every time his family is detained by airport security for extra Vaseline, it's an offence against their reputation and dignity in the court of small minds who witness the spectacle.

Kind of makes a guy want to set up a credit reporting agency on relationship fidelity. A solid marketing tie-in to a couple of dating agencies, you could do pretty good, $20 for a quick peak at the morning-after decorum score would find many takers. Or just a quick $5 for the post-coital returns-your-call score.

Of course, 100% of your data would be scurrilous, but a solidly designed masthead on the official-looking fidelity report seems to take care of this. Something like "by appointment of the queen" if your headquarters reside in the BVI. Don't touch that one if you reside in the U.K. The queen has rights under British law.

I just don't get why credit reporting agencies and the police enjoy this giant loophole on damaging reputations with unfounded data, when liability laws are in other regards extremely strict on this matter.

How about one that would appeal to my exogenous backbone, my poker cue of moral outrage? How about a public CYA cowardice index, which details the many small cowardly decisions people make in life, such as not to interview a person because you've discovered an unsubstantiated allegation as part of a background check, knowing full well that the agency in question does not vouch that there is any reality behind the aspersion, but you then decide to cover your own by screening the person out from further consideration nevertheless, on the grounds that your peers will prove equally mired in cowardice in the judgement of your actions.

Those are the many tiny moral transactions by which our faulty instruments of government ascend into the shadowy penumbra of totalinariasm.

The reason there is so much blame in this world against government is that secretly wish government to function well enough to protect us from our own cowardice, which it rarely fails to achieve.

We could start by demanding a reversal in this effective debasement of our liability laws.

Which is a fairly scary development in itself. And they still have several hundred million people to go.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article6984166.ece

Google defies Chinese internet censors Times Online - Jane Macartney - 59 minutes ago Images of students crushed under tanks in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown are available for the first time on Google's China server.

Wow. Did not expect that so soon. It's almost as if they had already taken steps. At first I thought you might be wrong but after I found the article and checked for myself. Wow. "Tank man" is indeed available on Google.cn's images, as are others related to the massacre. It's not quite what the English version is but it's not like it was a while ago when I searched on google.cn. Some bureaucrats in China are def. shitting kittens right about now. According to this chinese article, google switched the censoring off earlier today, apparently without warning. In the article are pictures of the flowers mentioned.

Could it be due to lack of sleep? Recent studies suggest a link. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/child_health/article6916053.ece

If AC is giving you the curb weight, doesn't that mean the particle filter is already in there?

For the Cooper S vs D:
Gas: 28/37 - EPA
Diesel:42/63 - I can't find American numbers, but I did find this, and multiplied by .83 to convert from imperial MPG.

So, you're right, 30% isn't true... It appears that it may be better in terms of efficiency. It has less horses, but the same torque. I don't know if the numbers are really that much better.

There is hiring discrimination in Japan based on street addresses. Google got a bit of bad PR for making available map data that made this discrimination easier last year:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/24/184239
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6337499.ece

some families seem to point out patterns - pre vaccines, happy, post vaccines dolphin-esque.

This probably originates from a single study in the UK more than ten years ago that linked the MMR vaccine with increased incidences of autism. That study has been since been thoroughly debunked and discredited. Stop repeating it.

The idea that the Israelis really fall back on racial profiling rather than behavioural profiling just isn't true. It wouldn't be practical given that many Arabs can pass for Israelis .... and when it would risk giving a free pass to eg Caucasians.

Look at this comment by Philip Baum and you will see what behavioural profiling involves:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6973408.ece
It's not all about looking shifty, although that is part of it.

Right, but then please stop spreading the myth that "dirt is never helpful" -- just a few references for your benefit:

Dirt can be good for children, say scientists

Babies Know: A Little Dirt Is Good for You

Health and happiness is all down to a roll in the dirt

These are news articles, I know, but they do quote actual researchers!

Every night, the stuff is pumped out of municipal septic tanks by a half-mile long convoy of trucks, which then dump it in nearby storm drains. It all ends up on the beach.

No, the article expresses the writer's anti-pharma agenda. The real reason for Norway's low MRSA rate is their level of cleanliness

I read that portion of TFA and what he conveniently doesn't mention is that lesser-known artists get some benefit from the increased exposure by having their songs available to millions. By just ignoring any positive effects of file sharing, he's oversimplifying the problem and inviting the very criticism that the preceding poster commented on. File sharing hurts acts like U2, not necessarily the lesser known artists.

Also, look at the chart in this article. It clearly shows that revenue from live acts is increasing, which goes directly to artists. Couple that to the second chart that shows that revenues to actual artists in the UK are increasing, you can safely make the conclusions that the ones who are suffering under the internet are the labels, who are (were) the distributors of content, NOT the artists.

Artists are actually doing much better since the dawn of the Internet because of increased ticket sales from live performances, and box office sales are better now than ever. I highly doubt illegal downloading contributes very much to lost revenue since a very small percentage of the people who download illegal media would actually buy the product.

That's easy for you to say not to pay the disgusting BBC tax, but recent developments will most likely mean that all phone lines will get a new BBC tax (eventually).... because you "could" get the BBC by clicking a link.

If the government can come up with a fake reason to slap a 50pence/month (plus VAT tax on this 50p tax) on all phone lines (even VoIP lines line SkypeIn), then they could put another tax on phone lines "just in case" you want to visit the BBC / view online content.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6770899/Pre-Budget-report-2009-50p-broadband-tax.html

BBC shows via Video on demand (different to their iPlayer service), another reason to tax phone lines, whether you use the BBC or not.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/media/article6964461.ece

"Simpler, sure. Completely ineffective though" I think A. C. Clarke would disargee.

I think Arthur C. Clarke understood the difference between Type 1 and Type 2 errors. This being News for Nerds I assumed you would too. Sorry.

I gave an example of a just application of the law, can you give an example of an unjust case or are you just waving your hands? As far as I understand it the UK laws are similar to Aussie laws, the defendant must show why they believe the accusation to be true. This does not mean I can't print a derogatory opinion, it means I can't fabricate evidence and make baseless accusations without risking a law suit. In otherwords, it's simply extending the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" into the fourth estate.

Pretty much all civilised countries have libel laws that work well for the affluent when they have genuinely been libelled. The problem is for the less affluent person wrongly accused of libel. Actual cases are, of course, difficult to cite because they are by their nature disputed. But the fact that the UK is a destination for libel tourism does suggest that either it's easier to win a case here than elsewhere or that damages will be higher. Of course, we might be an outlier because we're leading the way to a better future, but for those of us who believe in free exchange of ideas it does look rather more as if something is seriously wrong.

No more 'Pope on a rope', says the Vatican http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6964554.ece

I'm not surprised Italy is having a problem with the internet after they sentenced Amanda Knox to 26 years on 100% circumstantial evidence that would be laughable even for a TV drama. What other BS do you want to do Italy? My wife wanted to go someday but not now, not ever.

Who are these pro-warming scientists who won't release their data?

I don't know, who they are, but I do know, that no full, raw, unedited and "uncalibrated" series are nowhere to be found. The recent "leak" of the materials from East Anglia's CRU contained e-mails and programs (some showing obvious attempts to apply bogus corrections), but not the data files.

Worse — whatever raw data this particular CRU had before, was dumped "to make room", and only the result of their "calibration" is preserved. Whether they sincerely believed, the original data will never be needed, or maliciously thought to hide imperfections in their calibration algorithm is a hot topic. But what's clear, is that it is not available — to anyone.

But, again, even if the calibration were perfect (or, at least, sincere) — we can't get it. And so, there is no way to reproduce the results — for example, a highly-moderated poster (mrsquid0) claimed to have discerned from the leaked IDL-programs, that the correct, rather than bogus version of the script was used to produce a chart published in Nature. However, when asked, where he got the data to run the program for himself, he posted no response... Because he never has... Have you?

Unless the IEA produces data it claims is 100% raw uncut, this story is below the threshold of credibility.

Can we, um, ask the same of the CRU?

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

Economists are people who do statistical analysis. You don't need a degree in meteorology to calculate average temperatures read from various weather stations. And if you have any shred of understanding on the subject, you will know that even if they have a temp reading for 1000 stations in Russia, and the temp is recorded as a float, and is recorded every second for 100 years, into that would be:
4bytes * 7000sites * 100 years * 31536000seconds in a year = 88,300,800,000,000bytes. Woah, a huge number! Wait, that's only 88Terabytes, and you can get 2TB drives for $150. Sorry, I don't buy the CRU excuse that they couldn't store the data and had to clean it off - they didn't even have 10Tb, much less 88. Data storage gets cheaper and cheaper - a disk cluster 20 years ago is a thumb drive today. Not buying it.

Then, had you actually read the article, you would have seen this: "One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU's selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done."

Using all the raw data is precisely what the number crunchers are saying they did. Do you really think a bunch of PhD's in math care whether the data is temps, or stock prices? They do analytics on *numbers*. Don't worry, they're happy to leave the meteorology to the weatherman...that's not what is being studied here, though.

Link

Reminds me of this.
"Since a road closure, dozens of drivers have blithely followed directions from their satellite navigation systems, not realising that the recommended route goes through the ford.
Normally the water — the start of the River Avon — is about 2ft deep but it can swiftly double in depth after heavy rain.
Every day since the main B4040 was closed after a wall collapsed on April 8 one or two motorists have been towed out, having either failed to notice or ignored warning signs. Some farmers have been charging £25 to give a tow with tractors."

As long as they don't touch my bananas. waait a minute!

As I understand it, we know there's olivine on Mars and that there's water on Mars. Assuming the laws of physics operate the same on Mars as on Earth, then you have all the explanation you need for methane on Mars. Serpentinization is the process of reacting olivine with water. It generates methane as a byproduct.

The question isn't whether serpentinization is a source of methane, but rather whether it is the majority source or not. My take is that if the methane production was due to life on Mars, there'd be a lot more methane being produced than a few hundred tons a day. I don't see life on Mars staying in one place over millions much less hundreds of millions of years. But I suppose there's a chance it could happen that way (say if life on Mars is a relatively recent phenoma).

We voted for Obama because we no longer wanted our President to escalate an unnecessary war.

And who knows? He might even follow through on that promise.

Sorry but this is a fella who ran on invading Pakistan as a way to defeat the terrorists the US and NATO are fighting against.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2182955.ece

Invading Pakistan, or even sending a bunch of "advisors" there would be like throwing a match into a cloud of gasoline vapor.

"It's lucky then that the data comes from many different independent sources and is therefore not bogus at all then, isn't it?"

Please question your assumptions:

"...we have only one raw dataset comprised of all the world's surface temperature measurements." However, what this means is that the 0.9C increase in the global average surface temperature during the last 150 years is guaranteed to be closely replicated by each of the research centers that are analyzing the data. Link

At least one large portion of the raw data source has decided that there is a real problem:

The [U.K.] Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN's main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week's climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions. The Government is attempting to stop the Met Office from carrying out the re-examination, arguing that it would be seized upon by climate change sceptics. Link

Further, it is not clear that measured air temperatures are the sole or best indicator of the state of the global climate system. Link

Hint, the plot in the paper does not have this correction applied.

It doesn't? How do you know? Were you able to review their processes and reproduce their results yourself? From the beginning?

No, you can not. And nobody can, because they've destroyed their records years ago. Up until now, only "the fringe" wouldn't believe them. Now, with their attempts (successful or not) to manipulate and misrepresent some data exposed, we ought to question everything they've ever told us.

Please, refute:

a) That North America was covered by an ice sheet until about 10,000 years ago. See Wikipedia
b)That Mars is suffering "climate change" too. See here

Now please prove that the retreat of glaciers in North America was caused by cavemen driving SUVs and burning fossil fuels and not by some unknown natural phenomenon.

The Earth undergoes cycles of climate change. We(humans) have a minimal affect on it.

Your position on this issue is typical of the Republican War on Science, and it's flawed on two counts:

First, it's highly disingenuous of you to summarily dismiss global warning as nothing more than a manifestation of the cyclic climate changes that have occurred over thousands of years, when you know that the climatologists and geologists who have been studying this problem are already keenly aware that such cyclic changes take place, and yet remain undeterred in their conviction that the phenomenon is a real anomaly that doesn't fit the pattern.

Second, if you honestly believe that global warming, by which I mean an anomalous climate change, is even happening, then you don't understand the issue, because nobody, and I mean nobody, who knows anything at all about global warming, disputes that it's happening. It is happening; it's no longer controversial (despite these recently leaked emails); and it's not what the debate is about. The debate is about whether human activity is causing the global warming that is happening. And there is plenty of reason to believe that that it is. I personally like to group the reasons into three broad categories: scientific philosophy, scientific evidence, and scientific consensus.

With regard to scientific philosophy, there is a principle in science commonly known as Occam's Razor, which, simply put, states that the simplest explanation for something is often the best explanation. The converse of this is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. In the context of global warming, what we know is as follows: Over the past 150 years, mankind has seen a rapid rise in industrialization. Industrialization requires energy. Energy is often obtained through the burning of fossil fuels, which releases "greenhouse gasses" into the atmosphere, so named because they are opaque to infrared radiation (like the glass walls in a greenhouse) and therefore trap the radiation that would otherwise radiate away from the earth, allowing it to cool. During those same 150 years, the mean temperature on earth has risen sharply in a way that has never been seen before. It seems to me that the simple explanation is that the burning of fossil fuels is causing the the global warming that is happening, and that the alternative hypothesis, that this is one great big coincidence, is the extraordinary claim that ought to require extraordinary proof.

With regard to scientific evidence, in 2005 a study was released in which mathematical models were developed based on the various plausible causes of climate change. These models were then examined under computer simulation to see which models agreed with the data. None of the models agreed with the data, except one, that is: the one based on anthropogenic climate change. That model fit the data almost perfectly.

Finally, there's scientific consensus. In 2004, a meta-study was conducted, examining other studies during the prior ten year period. Not all the studies drew conclusions about the cause of global warming. Some studies dealt with new methods of making historical temperature measurements, and things like that. But the study found approximately 700 peer-reviewed, published, scientific studies demonstrating how human activity is contributing to global warming in one way or another. Now, I say "approximately" 700, because it's difficult for me to remember the precise number of such studies. It's not, however, difficult for me to remember the precise number of peer-reviewed, published scientific studies during that time period demonstrating that human activity has nothing at all to do with global warming. That number is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nill. Bupkiss. There aren't any.
 

For everyone's information: data was not manipulated

Oh, for crying out loud. Not only was it manipulated, they threw out both the raw data and any audit trail.

"SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based ... Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible. "

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6936328.ece

I hope you're at least getting a paycheque for throwing out nonsense so easily proved wrong.

We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.

Sadly, they don't have the raw data. They threw it away. Worse, they probably have threw it away much more recently than they originally stated.

We'll never see it because they've deliberately destroyed it.

Based on my reading of the e-mails, which are available on Wikileaks for your own inspection, combined with this more recent information about the destruction of the raw data, I'd have to say they are very far towards that latter end of the spectrum.

Anyone remember this?