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OK, what you have done is linked to a modern estimate (if by modern you mean 2006) made by two people. You tried to do this to show consensus.

The paper itself combines multiple estimates from different independent scientists. If you don't want to read the article, the summary says: However, a new paper in GRL this week by Annan and Hargreaves combines a number of these independent estimates to come up with the strong statement that the most likely value is about 2.9C with a 95% probability that the value is less than 4.5C.

You'll get similar results from examining models used in the ensemble of Meehl 2004. Sorry that I don't have time to make all this explicit. As you can tell, I'm swamped with pseudoscientists and I simply can't give everyone a crash course in climate physics.

After poking around a bit, it was a little frustrating to find raw data but it does seem to be there. I chose Land surface 1 hour to < 1 day, platform observations, and found the ds463 set or the ds510 for the US. Seems to be about what some people would be looking for for raw data. I'll skip downloading the 380GB data for now.

So far i think my favorite site for looking at what adjustments have been done is here. It's not really raw data per se since annual and monthly averages are by definition derived rather than raw, but not in any way that really bothers me. :p It does allow you to see what they've done to various stations. Most of the stations are largely unadjusted. Out of the stations where i saw noticeable changes (I don't count changes where the whole set is shifted a fixed amount or where there is no adjusted data for comparison) about 2/3 had more of a warming trend in the adjusted data than in the unadjusted. That's by eyeball comparison, and relying on memory, so YMMV. I'd say about half don't even have an adjusted set or have a fixed shift for whatever reason.

You could list me as a skeptic without the scare quotes i think. I find the station adjustments which themselves follow an increasing trend suspicious (darwin for instance), but not proof. If I had the time and inclination, I'd examine all stations, average all adjustments, and see if there was a net pattern to the adjustments.

What they're allowed to release is released. Download at your leisure.

The raw data is in pretty good shape and easily accessible. However this is just a collation of what is held on paper etc, so the conspiracy theorists still have an escape hatch wich their brain can escape through.

Hat tip to the article on Realclimate for the link. I'm sure you know of realclimate, they're the guys who won't show anyone their raw data.

"It may come as a surprise to some that the first compilation of world-wide meteorological data was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1927, long before anthropogenic climate change emerged as an important issue (Clayton et al., 1927). This volume is still widely available on the library shelf as are updates that were issued periodically. This same data collection provided the foundation for the World Monthly Surface Station Climatology, 1738-cont. As has been the case for many years, any interested party can access this from UCAR (http://dss.ucar.edu/datasets/ds570) and other electronic data archives." - Realclimate

I await the analyisis of the of the slashdot skeptics.

The data is all there (especially from US sources). Here's a very non-comprehensive list:

Data:
NOAA NCDC: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html
NOAA sattelite data: http://www.class.noaa.gov/
ARM data: http://www.archive.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp
NASA GISS data: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/
NCAR data: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/datasets/

Models:
NASA GISS GCMs: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/
NCAR models: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/models/ ...

The data is all there (especially from US sources). Here's a very non-comprehensive list:

Data:
NOAA NCDC: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html
NOAA sattelite data: http://www.class.noaa.gov/
ARM data: http://www.archive.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp
NASA GISS data: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/
NCAR data: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/datasets/

Models:
NASA GISS GCMs: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/
NCAR models: http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/models/ ...

Extremely non-comprehensive list based on sources I've used:

Raw Data:
All of NOAA's satellite data http://www.class.noaa.gov/
NCAR's Data http://cdp.ucar.edu/home/home.htm
ARM data http://www.archive.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp
NASA data http://data.giss.nasa.gov/

Models:
NASA GISS GCMs http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/
NCAR models http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/models/

Extremely non-comprehensive list based on sources I've used:

Raw Data:
All of NOAA's satellite data http://www.class.noaa.gov/
NCAR's Data http://cdp.ucar.edu/home/home.htm
ARM data http://www.archive.arm.gov/armlogin/login.jsp
NASA data http://data.giss.nasa.gov/

Models:
NASA GISS GCMs http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/
NCAR models http://www.ncar.ucar.edu/tools/models/

Depends what you mean by normal. The world has warmed much faster than it is today (0.74 ± 0.18 degrees C over 100 years according to the IPCC (see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf page 5)

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas#The_end_of_the_Younger_Dryas

Measurements of oxygen isotopes from the GISP2 ice core suggest the ending of the Younger Dryas took place over just 40 – 50 years in three discrete steps, each lasting five years. Other proxy data, such as dust concentration, and snow accumulation, suggest an even more rapid transition, requiring a ~7 degree C warming in just a few years;[5][6][14][15] the total warming was 10 degree ±4 degree

This is 11000 years ago too, long before humans were emitting CO2. Warming didn't seem to hurt people back then - in fact the cool Younger Dryas seemed to be more stressful than the rapid warming that ended it.

So most of 'them' must be much older than a hundred plus years... Global warming has been around since 1895 or older.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

They demand the power to do this, but they refuse to release their data.

This should do for a start:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/

They refuse to publish the code for their computer models

Really. Did you try SourceForge? And why not??

http://sourceforge.net/projects/climate-model/>

And this one has been public since 1983. 1983 was a long time ago...

http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/ccsm3.0/

They refuse to rationally refute skepticism.

You mean like giving pointers to climate data and climate models that you claim are not public? Or pointing out that this isn't an new theory?

They refuse to address the question of whether warmer may be better than colder.

Ah yes. A little warmer might very well be better. You have a point. The problem is that we are unlikely to stop at a little warmer.

--

This is not a sig. If this was a sig, the "--" would be closer. If it was a sig, it would say something witty. If it was a sig, it would be meaningful. If it was a sig, it wouldn't be nearly this long.

There's lots of climate-model source-code available on the web. Much of it has been publicly available for years.
Examples:

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/
http://www.mi.uni-hamburg.de/Projekte.209.0.html?&L=3
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/317/5846/1866d/DC1
http://geoflop.uchicago.edu/forecast/docs/Projects/modtran.html

Now for all the skeptics out there -- those of you who have downloaded and tested any climate code, submitted patches, constructive suggestions, etc. to the code developers, please stand up and give us a shout-out!

Don't be shy or modest -- even if you've done nothing more than submit a one-line change to a makefile, let's hear about it!

McIntyre's paper (23 pages)

It comes down to that the thought that Mann in 1998 got his math wrong when performing principle component analysis over the data, particularly while using Bristlecone Pine cores. (Which I have to say is an amazing organism. They live at least 5,000 years. Wow. Just wow.) The 2008 Mann paper does two different analyses, one with tree cores, and without. The hockey stick remains in both.

Mann should have given McIntyre the data, which he started to do, but then stopped for some reason. Why, I don't know. I suspect there was some personality clash, but that's just speculation on my part. Just release the data. Who cares? If someone wants to examine the samples directly, then let them if they real credentials (i.e. a PhD in climatetology or some other related field). It's just impractical to give access to every Joe down at the bar, samples can be damaged. It's a scientific resource worth millions, not an exhibit at a hands-on museum.

The conclusions of all the investigations was that Mann didn't do PCA right, like how McIntyre said, but McIntyre didn't do it right either.

Perhaps the most interesting for you would be this link than contains links to the Mann's data, and statistics source code to analyze the data correctly. You just have to download R.

Assuming that large scale warming is already well under way (And that's a big assumption given the major cooling trend we have been in for the last 10 years.)

I've discussed this claim before. Short version: there hasn't been a cooling trend over the last ten years, major or minor.

It is likely, in fact nearly guaranteed that not only can't we do anything about it now, we probably NEVER were able to do anything about it.

The climate varies naturally on long timescales but Meehl 2004 shows the current warming can't be accounted for by natural forcings. Greenhouse gas emissions are the only way we can explain the temperatures over the last ~40 years.

Oops. The 35x faster link referred to CO2, not temperature. My bad.

Chapter 3 of the 4th IPCC report says temperatures in the last ~30 years have increased faster than at any point in the last ~1000 years, a rate which is steadily increasing.

This isn't nearly as impressive as the anomaly in the CO2 record compared to the last several million years of proxy data. But Meehl 2004 shows that the warming since ~1970 is primarily caused by anthropogenic emissions, and they used models that are consistent with a climate sensitivity having a maximum likelihood value of 2.9C, with a 95% confidence that it's less than 4.9C but greater than 1.7C.

However, its a question whether the climate reacts to warming by positive feedback, and if so how strongly, or by negative feedback.

There's a debate about how much positive feedback exists, but the case for negative feedback is very weak. For example, events such as Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events are the best examples of abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. These ancient events are worrying because they show the climate has a propensity to shift quickly from one state to another, given even small forcings. That requires positive feedback.

Also, the estimated magnitude of the Milankovitch cycles and other forcings are insufficient to account for the temperature variations observed in ice cores from Vostok and EPICA. This requires positive feedback. In fact, the estimates of positive feedback are too small to bridge the gap.

The decisive evidence for feedback would be if the climate were now genuinely warming faster than or differently from ever before.

Approximately 35x faster, which isn't surprising because of the unprecedented (in the last 2 million years) CO2 levels. Also, the warming is happening after the CO2 increase, which makes this warming qualitatively different from all previous deglaciations.

And this is where the question of the refusal of the climate science community to reveal their data becomes important.

Proxy data are available, Wahl and Ammann have made their code available, the CMIP3 database makes model output public for researchers to perform comparisons, etc. I've previously complained about the (widespread) tendency of scientists to keep their data private to wring every last discovery out of it before making it public. It's worrying, but not a problem unique to climatology. Nor ar all climatologists so hesitant to release their code and data. I publish all my code under the GPLv3, for instance.

Sorry, how do you prove that any portion is anthropogenic when you don't have a control?

See Meehl 2004 for a primary source, but I've also recently discussed a very similar issue.

As a scientist looking at the global warming debate ...

Just curious: what degree in which field of science? I've described my research here, for quid pro quo.

... it always marvels me that no-one ever talks about the effect that water vapor has on global temperatures, given that water vapor has a heat capacity of 1.8 kJ/kgK, while CO2 has a heat capacity of only 0.8 kJ/kgK, and also given that the concentration of water vapor on average is composes 10X more of the atmosphere than CO2, meaning that the total impact of CO2 is about 20 fold less than water vapor, which is itself highly variable in concentration. Why doesn't anyone ever complain about the deleterious effects of water vapor in the atmosphere? Why aren't we moving to ban hydrogen vehicles that put out huge amounts of water vapor?

I've talked about water vapor in depth, repeatedly. As I've explained, water vapor is a feedback, not a forcing. It's not dangerous because it doesn't remain in the atmosphere long and isn't well-mixed to the top of the atmosphere. That's why legitimate peer-reviewed journal articles don't "complain about the deleterious effects of water vapor in the atmosphere."

What this discovery points out is that, well, maybe we don't really have a handle on this global warming thing, and that we shouldn't cut off the arms and legs of our civilization with an environmentally friendly electric chainsaw before we have a full grasp of what is going on here.

First, this discovery isn't related to abrupt climate change in any significant manner. Second, the goal of the legislation in the Senate is to jumpstart a new industrial revolution. No chainsaw involved.

Therefore, if you want to decrease humanities carbon emissions without murdering people, or subjecting them to poverty, you need only remove all regulations limiting the implementation of nuclear power around the world.

Murderous hyperbole aside, this isn't far from the mark. I'd say we have to make small tamper-proof nuclear reactors like SSTAR available to developing nations, but keep the reprocessing and enrichment technologies tightly restricted. Actinide poisoning of the fuel (to make weaponization more difficult than simply starting a clandestine enrichment program) is also probably a good idea.

The global temperature change tracks quite nicely with solar output levels, which happen to be cyclic.

Actually, solar variations are too small to account for recent warming.

The politicians and scientists are making the tragic assuming that the earths temperature is supposed to be constant, and ignoring that it probably cycles up and down over a hundred year cycle.

I can't speak for politicians, but scientists aren't making any such assumption.

Are we affecting it? Possibly, but we are certainly not the dominant or controlling factor.

Actually, as I've shown, we're very likely causing the majority of the recent warming.

It looks to me like the earth has been going through warm spikes for a lot longer than we've been around. Our current spike started well before mankind was doing much of anything. One could even conjecture that we're around because it got warmer...

1. We're talking about spikes in CO2, not temperature. One way to see that the current climate change is artificial is that the spike in CO2 is happening before the temperature spike rather than centuries afterwards like in the natural record.
2. I've already said that the climate varies on long timescales but that Meehl 2004 shows the current warming can't be accounted for by natural forcings. Greenhouse gas emissions are the only way we can explain the temperatures over the last ~40 years. And as I've said, it's quite easy to measure our emitted CO2 because governments tax oil and coal. Those estimates are easily high enough to account for the sudden increase in CO2. We're definitely causing the CO2 spike, and it's very likely causing the temperatures to increase at a rate that's likely to be dangerous.
3. Again, as I've repeatedly stressed, events such as Heinrich and Dansgaard-Oeschger events are the best examples of abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record. These are well known in the climatology community, but they're different from what's happening today for reasons I just mentioned. These ancient events are worrying, though, because they show the climate has a propensity to shift quickly from one state to another, given even small forcings.

As far as "rates of change" go, I'm not certain you can say much at all about the long term history without better resolution in the data. For instance, the rate could vary quite wildly in the blink of 100 years, but that would be blurred in the long term record. These ice and sediment cores implement a nice low pass filter based on how they accumulated and are measured.

Yes, ice core data are smoothed by diffusion and compaction, but studies like Delmotte 2004 and Jouzel 2007 have examined the data at a resolution of ~100 years and largely support the conclusions in the original Vostok and EPICA papers.

Of course, you could respond that decadal variations could exist, but to the best of my knowledge no known natural mechanism exists that could allow CO2 to fluctuate so wildly so quickly. Actually, the Siberian traps may qualify as a plausible natural source, but what sink could possibly have absorbed the CO2 quickly enough to drive the level down far enough below the average for the low-pass signal to record no evidence of this event?

That is a mess of wires obscuring the Cray 3 CPUs to which they are connected. It cost $300 million to develop the first functional system for NCAR before Cray Computer Corp, Seymore Cray's last start-up company, folded. (Not to be confused with Cray Inc. which is still producing new systems.)

This machine required 90,000 watts of power and gave off 310,000 British thermal units of heat per hour â" enough to warm six 2,000-square-foot homes. Getting the heat out of the data center would have been a serious problem. I'm sure the whole NCAR building was designed to do just that.

DigiBarn has more pictures of the Cray 3 CPUs.

There is no question on whether it is man-made or just natural climate cycles. There is sufficient evidence to support the fact that it is a man made phenomenon.

I would direct you to the sources listed at the bottom of the wikipedia article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Here is an interesting quote:
"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century."
Source: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf

http://www.ucar.edu/communications/quarterly/winter00/warming.html

Scientists found that the mitigating effect of volcanoes during one El Niño was stronger than the heating effect of the El Niño itself during the 1982 and 1991. For the record breaking years, it's long been known that these can be attributed to El Niño, not the global warming trend, and thus saying that temperatures have gone down since the year of the last El Niño effect is an often brought up and refuted statement. Yes, a lack of a volcanic eruptions could be considered a cause for global warming in the same sense that your freezer is so cold because I haven't yet dumped liquid iron inside it.

As for any effect on volcanoes by solar cycles, I really would like to see a theorized connection that makes sense, if any, because all these other correlations have theories that help explain them that can be compounded upon and elaborated with other data. Because I have seen no evidence that anything the Sun could do to rock is is any more relevant to Earth climate than a comet striking Jupiter.

According to one scientist, though, solar cycles have the half the effect on Earth's oceans as El Niño and La Niña effects, yet still there exists a long-term warming trend under that idea as well.

Let's see, we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data the hysteria is based on?

WTF!?!?!

This is a big problem, and in the science community in general (not just climate scientists!). The data is safeguarded for some length of time while the researcher(s) publish their findings, personal gain, or simply because the research itself was a very expensive process and the institution wants to "get its money's worth". I work at a climate research center and we've actually had to take hard copies of data and run them through an OCR program like ABBYY because the original scientist wouldn't send us digital versions of the data or even processed maps.

Along the same lines, when is the source code used for the climate models going to be published and thoroughly reviewed?

If AGW is in fact true, it can withstand the scrutiny.

But it is:
http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/download/get_source2.html
http://aom.giss.nasa.gov/code4x3.html
http://www.caps.ou.edu/ARPS/
http://polarmet.mps.ohio-state.edu/PolarMet/pwrf.html

and someone made a nice list of models used in the recent IPCC report and if source code is available here:
http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=667

Let's see, we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data the hysteria is based on?

The raw data would not be of any use to you. You could not make any sense of it, nor is it stored anywhere as a whole. You would want the thoroughly checked, fixed and quality controlled collection of data, and that, incidentally, is available. It's also the basis for climate models, not some raw data penciled in a notebook.

You can download and view source code at http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/, for example. I doubt that's useful for you either. But seriously, try to search for stuff and read for yourself first. There's a lot of documentation online, really.

/waves hand

You don't need to see this data
These are not the data you are looking for
However look at this other data, it could be useful
You can go about your business

Let's see, we're supposed to spend literally trillions of dollars to fix global warming, yet we can't see the raw data the hysteria is based on?

The raw data would not be of any use to you. You could not make any sense of it, nor is it stored anywhere as a whole. You would want the thoroughly checked, fixed and quality controlled collection of data, and that, incidentally, is available. It's also the basis for climate models, not some raw data penciled in a notebook.

You can download and view source code at http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/models/atm-cam/, for example. I doubt that's useful for you either. But seriously, try to search for stuff and read for yourself first. There's a lot of documentation online, really.

I absolutely do not intend to be disrespectful, but I will be tongue in cheek, if you are consumed with fear then regardless of the source, the fear is real and should be treated as such... if for no other reason than because others are watching who need to be reassured. You assert that the change is unprecedented. The Vostoc ice core data brings the assertion that the change is unprecedented into question; anyone can look at the graphs and see three similar periods where the relationships between temperature, CO2 and methane are astonishingly similar. I therefore present data to challenge your assertion.. Your assertion is basic to your argument. By inspection it is flawed. The Vostoc data shows that CO2 lags temperature change by about 500-800 years and therefore cannot be the cause of Global Climate Change. It then follows that if CO2 is not the cause of Climate change then anthropogenic CO2 which is only 3% and indistinguishable from natural CO2 can not then be then cited as the cause. Beyond that the ice cores demonstrate the cyclivity and similarity in periods to 450,000 BP and to extrapolate anthropogenic forces of any kind in those similar cycles is absurd. Not only is your first premise flawed the next assertion that there is some logical reason to estimate and compare and contrast volcanic contribution of CO2 verses anthropogenic contribution is a non sequitur and proves nothing Just because you assert and you have leaped to a flawed conclusion doesn't make it an impressive launching point for more pseudo science. Yes the ice melts, yes the climate changes, yes we get old and die. You can't pin climate change on humans with out data. you are just going to have to understand the phenomena and adjust or you can get hysterical about something that that is natural and can't be changed. There are some serious assertions in the lionked document that don't hold up to either data or analysis. The believers are trying too hard to push the ideology and it has become political as the scientific arguments fall apart. I am not impressed with the weight of paper supporting a flawed concept. In addition to the simple clarity of the science in the "big picture" above. I sense you need to get into the short term data and have me further address the hysterical more modern real time asertions. Mind you it doesn't change the big picture but simply gives grounds for additional pause. I use this document as a foundation of the following response. http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf #1 CO2 is a green house gas this fact is undisputable. You accuse rational people ( your deniers) of ignoring physics... the evidence is contrary. When you understand the physics and read what you asserted your assertions again do not follow. Discussing CO2 . The mechanism is through the absorption of discrete frequencies of infrared and then re radiation of the same wavelengths in all directions but largely because of the blanket effect the return is back to the earth.. We know what the absorption frequencies are and at the present levels of CO2 the frequencies are already saturated. This happens at about 10 meters. They are already absorbing reflecting 100% of the radiation in their frequencies. . The absorption frequencies are 2.7, 4.3 and 15 micrometers and only represent 8% of black body radiation energy. If you double the concentration 100% absorption happens at 5 Meters. Your Venus analogy is very interesting but not particularly helpful in understanding the physics it is again a non-sequitur and unimpressive. As the amount of CO2 increases the bandwidth of radiation increases but it increases logarithmically and therefore any increase in CO2 over 100PPMV results in a non-linear increase in absorption. The model that the IPPC uses is the no-feedback warming but the actual warming that occurs is the combination of no-feedbacks and combined and the constant temperature change due to feedbacks. The model really hasn't provided good correlation to

Mon Dieu! Quantity != quality. You'd get a lot more respect if you'd simply link to one or two legitimate, peer-reviewed articles instead of dozens of pseudo-scientific websites. I don't have time to relieve you of your many misconceptions, but here are the most glaring errors:

On the contrary, if you had watched those YouTube videos I linked to...

We're scientists, not preteen girls looking for cat videos. Link to peer-reviewed articles or expect to be ignored.

Anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of a small, but measurable, increase in average global temperature. This temperature increase is a detectable deviation away from the statistical variations due to natural causes, and is now quite well understood."

That is the most ridiculous thing I have heard to date. It is NOT known, precisely because it has been impossible to statistically separate it from other influencing factors. (Including sunspots!) While many scientists believe that it probably has some effect, nobody has yet managed to measure it with any real statistical significance. Where did you get this idea, anyway? Do you have any sources that purport to have this measurement? The fact is that such a beast does not exist!

Geoffrey's statement is most certainly not ridiculous. I suggest looking at the IPCC 4th report. Download chapter 3, open the PDF to page 15 (which is labeled 249) and look at figure 3.6. The trend obtained from the data in figure 3.6 is 0.65 C plus or minus 0.2 C over the period from 1901 to 2005. The report notes that this rate is higher than at any other point since the 11th century. Meehl 2004 shows that this warming can't be explained by natural forcings alone, but including anthropogenic CO2 emissions matches the observations very well. And, yes, those "natural forcings" include variations in solar output, which can be measured by satellites at L1 so there's no need to search for weak correlations in sunspot data.

Furthermore, as I've repeatedly argued, Vostok shows that the current CO2 level is higher than it's been in half a million years. If you don't think that CO2 can warm the planet, I suggest you remember your sophomore-level physics classes and examine the spectrum of the sun. Then open a textbook and examine the absorption spectrum of CO2. Notice that the peak of the sun's radiation goes through? Now open your thermodynamics textbook and calculate the blackbody radiation of a planet at 286K. Notice that the CO2 absorbs more of this radiation.

That's why scientists say that CO2 is warming the planet. It's not exactly cutting-edge science.

Most of the science that is used to support the greenhouse warming model come from the IPCC Assessment reports, and much of that "science" has been shown to be flawed, not to mention that the reports themselves are heavily politicized, and their conclusions do not match the actual science that they reference.

That's exactly backwards. The IPCC reports are simply compilations of pre-existing, peer-reviewed science. I've read their reports and talked with scientists whose work is referenced in the IPCC reports. No scientist I've met (in public or private) thinks your conspiracy theory is valid. In fact, I've personally confirmed the mass loss in Greenland's glaciers with my own research. I've seen climate change happening with my own data and my own personal algorithms. Does that mean I'm part of the conspiracy too?

Below I link to a letter from Chris Landsea, who is the one who actually did the research on wh

what is major component of this buffer? us. living critters and how they react to an increase in CO2

Wow! Amazing that all of those egghead boffins living in their ivory towers with their hoity-toity "science" missed that one! Thank you so much for pointing it out!

Except for the fact that most ocean life is not primarily constrained by CO2, but nutrients, especially iron. Whoops.

I never ceased to be amazed at people who insist that something must be wrong with the science on a subject when they haven't done even the most rudimentary amount to educate themselves on what the science of the subject actually is. You could at least start by reading the relevant sections of the IPCC technical reports to see what actually has been studied and how. I guarantee you, it's way, way more than you ever expected.

There's a reason why people go to college for years to get a degree in these fields. This isn't high school baking-soda-and-vinegar-volcanoes here. It's an incredibly complex science that you need a solid background in. At least spend a week reading peer-reviewed papers on the subject before you put fingers to keyboard. You're coming across like if someone who had never used a computer started talking about how programmers should make every piece of software be run by voice commands in spoken English sentences like "Could you open up the letter to my grandmother and edit out the part where I told her about my chihuahua?", and have the software figure out what you want it to do. You're broadcasting ignorance on the topic like a beacon.

A 37% increase in the concentration of a trace gas is still a small increase. A 4-degree mean temperature increase, given historic temperature trends and the amount of energy involved, is a large increase. You seem to be confusing percentages, which can be misleading, with absolute amounts, which are scientifically relevant.

It seems unproductive to try to compare "small" and "large" when discussing measurements as different as CO2 concentrations and global temperature anomalies.

Climatologists have concluded that human CO2 emissions are changing the climate because we've introduced gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere that haven't been part of the ecosystem for millions of years. Because we've raised the concentration of this greenhouse gas to a point 30-40% higher than it's been in the last half million years, the temperature of the planet is too high to be explained by natural forcing.

Furthermore, a disturbing number of positive feedback effects present the possibility that the climate is only metastable:

• Melting snow/ice uncovers dark ocean water in the Arctic and dark dirt in the Antarctic. In each case, the albedo of the snow is higher, which means more heat is absorbed after the ice melts.
• A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, which is a more effective greenhouse gas than CO2.
• Warmer deep ocean temperatures may destabilize methane hydrate deposits, releasing another more potent greenhouse gas.
• Melting permafrost releases CO2.
• Melting glaciers help to lubricate the slide of the glacier into the ocean, speeding up the loss of glaciers once the process starts.
• Increased temperatures leads to an increased risk of forest fires, which release the CO2 sequestered in the wood.

There are negative feedback effects, such as the fact that trees grow faster due to more CO2 and thus sequester more CO2 in their wood. But they're outnumbered by the more numerous and powerful positive feedback effects. It seems likely that a little bit of warming will lead to more warming.

Could you provide us with falsifiable predictions that global warming theorists have made?

The most convincing prediction I'm aware of is that the current atmospheric trends cannot be explained by natural forcing alone. See Meehl 2004.

And we generally prefer the term "scientists."

Global Warming theory has met neither of those requirements. The main statement of Global Warming is something like this: "small changes in the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cause large changes in global temperature". Despite this theory, there is absolutely no evidence that a change in CO2 has ever caused the temperature to change, over the entire billions-years history of the planet. So GW theory doesn't explain past observations.

Abrupt climate change is a direct result of an unprecedented excavation of fossil fuels, and the combustion of said fuels which releases CO2 into the atmosphere that's been trapped for millions of years. It's not supposed to explain past observations.

It doesn't explain current observations either: CO2 concentration has steadily increased over the past 100 years, while temperatures have gone up, then down, then up again, then down again (as they are currently). There is no dramatic warming trend as predicted by GW theory.

I've never met a scientist who made a claim like the one you're attributing to me. Most scientists recognize that long term trends are only discernable in the data after accounting for annual variations, multi-year variations, etc. Once those fluctuations are removed by a 5 year averaging procedure, a disturbing upward trend is apparent.

Finally, GW has not made any unique predictions that have later been confirmed as true. It predicted more and bigger hurricanes; that hasn't happened. It predicted significant temperature increases; that hasn't happened. In fact, the theory seems totally based on computer models that have failed to make a single correct prediction about the climate ever since I first started following the issue, in 1998.

First, the temperature is increasing. Second, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report made a very limited claim regarding hurricanes: "It is more likely than not (>50%) that there has been some human contribution to the increases in hurricane intensity."

Third, Meehl 2004 showed convincing proof that natural forcing can't account for recent global temperature trends, but including anthropogenic forcing provides a good match for the data.

Concerning sea levels, have you read the IPCC FAQ on the issue?

"This decade-long satellite altimetry data set shows that since 1993, sea level has been rising at a rate of around 3 mm yrâ'1, significantly higher than the average during the previous half century."

If you have, and you don't think it's correct, why is that so?

If you take the time to read the IPCC reports, you'll see a frank discussion of the issues and an upfront assessment of how certain they are concerning different factors of climate change. But that doesn't stop people from dismissing them as "environmental nutters."

The mechanical requirements for a gondola ride have been worked out already (e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyway_(Disney)). Turning the cable into a loop is a clever idea that provides a route down as well as up, for instance.

As somebody else said, even if such a technology never proves practical on Earth, it certainly might be on other planets. Mars would be easier, for instance - less gravity, similar orbital period, thinner atmosphere.

The issue with building a geosynchronous elevator on the Moon is that it is tidally locked with the Earth (more or less). In effect, the Earth itself is in selenosynchronous orbit, so the cable would reach all the way back to Earth. It is even more unlikely that such a long cable could be built, but it wouldn't have to point toward the Earth, of course. There are many other moons in our solar system (http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/our_solar_system/moons_table.html) and others appear better suited for an elevator. The Galilean moons of Jupiter, for instance, or Titan around Saturn, all have rotational periods shorter than our Moon's, some just a few days.

Or around asteroids (think mining), or untethered cable structures in orbit about any of these. There are good reasons to pursue the technology even if the original concept proves unworkable when the engineering is looked at in detail. Simply failing to pursue new ideas is the only way to guarantee they'll never be realized.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not sure - some of them may be available)

Since you asked:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
http://www.ccsm.ucar.edu/tools/

and some documentation with output (for reverse engineers :)
http://www-pcmdi.llnl.gov/ipcc/model_documentation/ipcc_model_documentation.php

I believe some grants/universities do forbid open sourcing code, or even making it available, at least fro some time.

Try NCL - NCAR-Graphics Command Language.

http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/

And I just cited at least two papers that specifically address the issue of solar variability with regard to it's explanatory power with regard to current warming and to what degree it better explains the warming than CO2. Both papers come up with the same result: the numbers just don't add up as required, and CO2 remains the best candidate.

You seem to be under some impression that solar variation as a possible influence in current warming has been ignored by those scientists who view CO2 as the major contributor. This is simply false. There have been many people working on solar variation as a contributor to global warming. Let's go straight to the summaries by those you potentially feel are ignoring it: the IPCC. In the Third Assessment Report from 2001* the IPCC devotes an entire section to considering solar variation and its impact as a forcing causing current warming. There's several pages there, so be sure to click "next", and feel free to follow up any and all of the references given. The forcing chart shows that solar variation is considered signifcant, but not as much of a contributor as greenhouse gas forcings. Admittedly it is listed as "very poorly understood". You may, however, wish to read the section on attribution of climate change to get an idea of how such conclusions are made -- again, please feel free to follow up the referenced papers from that section also.

That brings us to the Fourth Assessment Report from 2008. The forcing chart is now on page 4 of the Summary for Policy Makers and shows that, with further study, then forcing extent of solar variation has been reduced. You can read Chapter 2, from page 188 onwards, for the details of the various studies (with references that you can follow up as you please) into how such conclusions were reached. In other words, solar variability has been considered an important potential contributor, and source of significant study, even to the IPCC for many many years. No one is ignoring it -- rather they are quantifying it, and considering it closely when attributing recent warming.

Since then we also have that Damon and Laut study (reference int he previous post) which covers the issue of solar influence via cosmic rays. So again, no one is ignoring solar variation, it just doesn't add up so far when you actually sit down and run the numbers, while greenhouse gases do.

* (The Second Assessment Report from 1995 also considered solar variation, but I can't link to that online)

Not really. All we know is that the general trend of the earth's temperatures have been rising.

We know a hell of a lot more than that. Start here.

We don't have a clue what caused it, if it will continue, or anything.

We know that the greenhouse effect predicts enhanced surface warming, stratospheric cooling, changes in the diurnal cycle, etc., which have been observed. We know that the warming isn't coming from the oceans (they're gaining heat, not losing it). We know that the heat isn't coming from the Sun (irradiance hasn't gone up to match the temperatures), or reduced volcanic activitiy, etc. Basic atomic physics predicts that the greenhouse effect exists and will grow as CO2 levels increase.

Plus, it isn't even global warming, its local warming some places have higher highs and others don't.

It is global warming, as the global average temperature has increased, as has the average temperature of most locations on Earth.

Just take a look in an Almanac and you will see that the highest temperatures for a given day don't correspond with the CO2 emissions for the year.

Duh. They're not supposed to. The existence of weather doesn't mean that global warming doesn't exist.

Ok, so some of the costland is gone and cities must be moved further inland.

Oh, that's all. Let's just relocate some cities. Need to move Manhattan? No problem, technology will solve that, it'll be cheap. Venice goes underwater for good? Who cares, it has no historic value, we can build a new city. 10 million coastal Bangladeshis decide they need to move to India or Pakistan? I'm sure that won't have any political consequences. Technology will just solve that anyway.

That is also assuming that technology will not advance to where that is no longer a problem which my guess is based on technology throughout history is that if there is a problem humans will solve it.

Yeah, that's why there aren't any more problems in the world. Technology solved them all.

Global warming hasn't arrived,

Yes, it has. That's why it's a real problem. Of course, we haven't seen nearly as much warming as we are likely to as CO2 emissions continue.

we are still at the tail end of the last ice age.

Going by the ice age cycle, we ought to be cooling by now. The modern warming has nothing to do with the ice age cycle.

Please, shed this idea of the noble unbiased scientist.

Please, shed the idea of incompetence and conspiracy. If you've got a scientific argument, present it. Dismissing arbitrary amounts of evidence on nothing more than allegations of bias is both fallacious and asinine.

I'll also note that many places to do not refer to it as Global Warming anymore because it turned out the average idiot forget about it every winter or even desired it. Now it's Climate Change 'cause we can say a freak blizzard is just as much climate change as a bad hurricane.

That's another retarded allegation of conspiracy. In reality, it was called "climate change" in the scientific literature long before "global warming" ever became popular.

Using real data to make a model does not mean the models are right.

You can't prove a model is right, you can only verify that it agrees with what we observe.

The problem is that models tend to be made to make the data fit the desired output.

Models are supposed to be constructed to reproduce observed climate behavior.

So here is simple question: If clouds cause global warming, why is it that cloudy days are always cooler days?

Clouds cause both warming and cooling, depending on the type and location of the cloud. Both observations and models find that, for cloud cover resulting from a warming planet, the warming effect dominates. As I said, this is uncertain, but "uncertain" doesn't mean "either possibility is equally likely".

You know this from your own experience, but we seem to ignore all this obvious data.

If you spent about 60 seconds with Google, you would realize that your knowledge of cloud-climate interactions is severely deficient. Here is one place you can start. Or you could, gasp, read a textbook or something.

I am very much concerned with humans destroying the ecosystem, and global warming is a very real threat. But, water is not whats going to kill us, it's what keeps it balanced so well.

All evidence says otherwise: water vapor serves as a positive climate feedback, not a negative one.

If water vapor and clouds could cause a runaway greenhouse effect, with such an abundance of water don't you think it would've happened in the last 4 billion years?

You are deeply confused.

"Positive feedback" does not mean "runaway feedback". That only happens when the gain is greater than unity. No one is claiming that water vapor is going to cause a runaway greenhouse effect, merely that it amplifies other radiative forcings.

You're right. I always get that reversed. UCAR has a nice summary.

The best scientific introduction is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report, Working Group 1 (physical science). It attempts to be a comprehensive literature review of the mainstream science. It is all available online here. If you'd like to know more specifically about any particular issue, and are having trouble locating it in the IPCC report (e.g., if you don't know what keywords to look for), let me know and I might be able to provide more specific references.

The IPCC report is kind of dense and is a survey of the modern state of the art. If you're looking for more of a textbook sort of introduction to climate science, I'd recommend David Archer's book Understanding the Forecast. It's aimed at undergraduate freshmen, so it might be below the level you're looking for, but it's still pretty good at laying out a lot of the important issues.

So you have irrefutable evidence that global warming is due to fossil fuel combustion products and not, say, the output of the sun?

Why, yes, actually, it is fairly well established that solar variation is not enough to account for observed climatic effects, and that fossil fuel CO2 emissions are a significant factor.

Now, "irrefutable evidence"? Evidence is always subject to review and refutation by later observation. If you want "irrefutable" go talk to a Bible literalist.

The fact is that most of the global warming theories are based on poor evidence and conjecture.

No, the fact is that most of the "human activity is not impacting the climate" excuses for inaction are based on no evidence and a load of wishful thinking.

So, if the force of gravity is acting on you, and nothing else is, then you have no force applied to you? You expand my view of the ridiculous....

Yes from the point of view of an outside observer there is a force on you, but the point about gravity is that it applies equally to every part of your body at once. So, if you are in free fall and you raise your arm, there is no resistance to that motion (other than internal friction in your joints) and no force that would push against your arm that would tend to lower it again. From your point of view, you have no forces acting upon you. But this really means that there are not differences in the force between different parts of your body.

This is in contrast to the situation when you are standing on the surface of the Earth, or being accelerated in a car. In the case of standing on the surface of the earth, you feel a force on your body because, while the overall forces cancel out (so you have no overall motion), the forces are applied in different places. The gravitational force is being applied to every atom in your body equally, but the restoring force that is stopping you from falling into the center of the Earth is being applied at the point where your feet make contact with the ground. The restoring force that is stopping some other part of your body (your hand, for example) from falling into the center of the Earth is being transmitted through your feet and body to your hand. That is why it takes some effort to raise your hand - the gravity is acting directly on your hand, but the restoring force to hold your hand in the air needs to be transmitted through your arm.

If you are in free fall, then there is no difference in the force being applied to different parts of your body, and you cannot even tell that there is any force acting upon you! There is no difference between the situation where (1) you are falling under gravity towards the Earth, with no other forces acting upon you, and (2) you are in empty space with no massive objects anywhere near you. These two situations are completely equivalent, for the effects on your body.

Similarly, there is no difference, as far as the forces on your body are concerned, between standing on the surface of the earth and experiencing your weight of W=M*9.81m/s^2 and being accelerated in a rocket ship at 9.81m/s^2 and experiencing a force holding you to the floor of the spacecraft. The Equivalence Principle of relativity says that the forces on you are exactly the same in both cases.

Note that the wikipedia article has, at best, a limited understanding of the difference between weightlessness and freefall. Which are not, contrary to their assertion, synonyms.

They are not synonyms, because they are two words that have different meanings. Wikipedia does not claim that they are synonyms, by the way. But it is true that if you are in freefall then you are weightless. And the only way that is known to physics for an object with non-zero mass to become weightless is to let it free-fall.

If you refuse to believe Wikipedia, there are plenty of other references you could look at:

http://en.allexperts.com/q/Physics-1358/free-fall-weightless-ness.htm
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/teacher_resources/weightlessness_edu.html
http://www.physics.umd.edu/lecdem/services/demos/demosc4/c4-54.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/shuttlestation/station/microgex.html
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/SP-4026/noord27.html

The sun rotates every 25-36 days.
The different rotation rates of different parts is what causes sunspots.
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/sun/Solar_interior/Sun_layers/differential_rotation.html

The politicians are going to spin it, of course. But the science is real, and I'd invite everyone to read whatever they can get their hands on (papers, not punditry). We can look at the evidence and models, and make up our own minds. That's far superior to looking at the spin from either side and assuming that both spun views must be equally valid, or that the truth lies in the middle. We do not need false objectivity here, nor equivocation. Just science.

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html

FWIW the thought of a carbon emission tax scares the hell out of me. Still, I hope we can all base potential government policy on reality, not the other way around.

1. How much has the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere gone up since the industrial revolution? How much has the temperature gone up?

CO2: Around 40%
Temperature: Around 1 degree Celcius

2. When and why were Europe and North America deforested? Why does it matter?

Europe experienced a lot of deforestation at the hands of mankind between 1100 to 1500 AD. There wasn't much after that until recent years, when it has again become a serious problem.
America experienced little deforestation until the arrival of European settlers, and there has been extensive deforestation since then, mostly over the last two centuries.

As for why it matters: Forests are a good CO2 sink. Losing them at the same time as releasing unprecedented quantities of CO2 in to the atmosphere will lead to a situation we have not had before and therefore can only make educated guesses as to what will happen.

3. What bad effects of the temperature rise have been observed since the industrial revolution? How sure are you that the bad effects are attributable to global warming?

If I may, I won't just concentrate on what the temperature rise has done, but instead the overall effects of temperature, increased CO2 and so on. It's not fair to look at only one part of the story...

Possible (debatable) effects: More flooding, tornadoes and extreme weather than we had before.
More definite effects: More swans in Siberia, colural foliage fading, severe damage to coral reefs, ocean acidification and more...

4. How much are you predicting that the carbon dioxide levels will rise?

I'm not predicting anything... It's probably safe to say "between not much and quite a lot". Please go look at some research yourself for estimates.

5. How much are you predicting that the temperatures will rise?

I'm not predicting anything... It's probably safe to say "between not much and quite a lot". Please go look at some research yourself for estimates.

6. What bad effects are you predicting due to increased temperature?

Similar to the effects we're experiencing today (see above), only worse relative to the amount of climate change inducing factors involved (including, but not limited to, CO2, temperature rises (from any source) and so on).

7. Isn't it true that without the greenhouse effect, the earth would be a frozen ball of ice and life would be very difficult on the planet?

Yes, that is true, which is why no-one is suggesting we strip the atmosphere off the planet - things would be rather unpleasant.
This is a very silly question though, because you know full well that it's not a binary situation "we have a greenhouse effect"/"we don't have a greenhouse effect". What matters is how MUCH of a greenhouse effect we have. Too little or too much are both bad situations.

``I think we can all agree, 256 cores is enough for anybody''

No. Why would that be enough? I can think of many scenarios where more cores would be useful, and computers with more cores have already been built.

There is an excellent essay in Spencer and Weart on the history of this connection, from William Herschel's suggestion of Sun-induced climate variability in 1801, to the widespread interest in 1850.

In short, nobody has been able to demonstrate that the total energy reaching the earth from the Sun changes by more than about 0.1%. As early as 100 years ago we knew this figure was under 1%.

People try to link global warming to all sorts of things, for all sorts of deluded reasons. If you have the time, or find yourself engaging with people who dispute the consensus position, do put aside an hour or so for reading the The Modern Temperature Trend essay, or the history section of the IPCC AR4 - though I found Spencer & Weart much more engaging. A lot of people arguing against the consensus haven't read the history and often don't know that the arguments they're putting forth as if nobody ever thought of it before were discredited decades ago.

You know, a lot of the climate and weather prediction models are open source. You can download the source code if you want, and run it on your own PC if you have certain compilers. Some links for you for your own perusal: Community Climate Model NASA GISS Model Weather Research and Forecasting Model Regional Atmospheric Modeling System As long as you have access to a Linux/Unix machine, you can get these models yourself. If you want to contribute, you can do so. Just know that you probably need to have taken graduate level courses in numerical methods and actually get the physical terms in the model to make changes that mean something. Science in this case is rather open. People can easily download these models and make changes to improve it if they needed to (or to test sensitivity, etc).

No. Read section 2.7, which summarizes pretty much every peer-reviewed paper published on the subject. Not even close. I mean, seriously -- did it never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, we have observatories and satellites studying in detail essentially every thing the sun does, in addition to all kinds of long-term proxy data?

I read section 2.7. At the very end it says:

"The level of scientific understanding
is elevated to low relative to TAR for solar forcing due to direct irradiance change, while declared as very low for cosmic ray
influences (Section 2.9, Table 2.11)."

Aren't they saying they don't really understand solar forcing, let alone cosmic ray influences???

Isn't the real problem caused by the IPCC Mandate:

The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.

Doesn't say anything about looking at external influences like solar radiation or cosmic rays.

At least they acknowledged the fact that the influence is not understood...

The thing is that before we paid much attention to this stuff, there was ONE real model that predicted a global temperature increase: global warming. It was not ignored before because "the man" was trying to hide science, it was ignored because there was NO effort to show an actual cause and effect relationship.

Spoken like a person who's never read a paper on the subject. The study of climate change is part models and part real-world data gathering and testing. Even among models alone, there are *many different* models, most on particular aspects of climate forcing and impacts, not the more famous global models. There is not one "model". And it wasn't ignored, by any standard; it's been an active ongoing research topic in the scientific community for decades. Peer review is the judge, not public opinion.

This becomes embarressing when things like the carbon retention of the Sahara are studied, as we discussed weaks ago, and suddenly billions of tons of carbon disappear from the air in our models, but the temperature hasn't changed at all.

Waht arr yoo talkng abowt?

The reason this worries me is that, while fighting pollution and emissions is never a bad thing, we could very well be ignoring the elephant in the room, simply because the global warming discussion has become so political, (and that's the activists faults, not the scientists). What if, although our carbon certainly doesn't help, most of this is due to cyclical sun output?

No. Read section 2.7, which summarizes pretty much every peer-reviewed paper published on the subject. Not even close. I mean, seriously -- did it never occur to you that maybe, just maybe, we have observatories and satellites studying in detail essentially every thing the sun does, in addition to all kinds of long-term proxy data?

You know what caused the onset of the iceages? North and South America connected at Panama, cutting of the Pacific-Atlantic currents, which cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere.

Ice ages happen regularly, on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, along the lines of Milankovitch cycles. The Isthmus of Panama formed once, three million years ago.

The LHC will generate several PB of data per year, as will the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. These projects aren't all that uncommon.