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Sea level rise.
Antarctic ice sheet mass balance.
Greenland ice sheet mass balance. (PDF)
World wide glacier facts and figures.

Unless you're willing to specifically name something they got wrong how can I evaluate your claim that the predictions haven't materialized?

I believe the prevailing AGW hypothesis proposes greater warming at the poles than the equator, leading to decreased spatial differentials.

You seem keenly aware of the fingerprints of warming due to GHG. You also seem keenly aware that these fingerprints have been observed in the real world. How do you reconcile this with your idea that the temp rise is not caused by GHG? Wrt decreased spacial differentials, there is not a smooth gradient between the poles and the equator. Increased polar temperatures does not mean decreased spacial differentials in Ohio.

The fact is that severe weather events have not shown any increase or decrease trend over the past few hundred years, although with more development along costal areas we have had more humans affected by them.

Check out the graph in this report: http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/download/article_climate_change_hazards.pdf ""Much of the increase in the number of hazardous events is probably due to significant improvements in information access and also to population growth, but the number of floods and cyclones being reported is still rising compared to earthquakes."

An increase in temperature of the atmosphere can be *caused* by increased temperatures of oceans.

You are neglecting the fact that we know from physics that adding CO2 does increase the temperature of the atmosphere.

We certainly observe this with warm currents moderating the climate around the UK...or are you suggesting that the warm air around London is what actually causes the current to be warm?

Seriously??? You think that because temperature can move around from one part of the world to another via currents - somehow this means that even though both the ocean and the atmosphere are heating up the cause of the warming is due to the ocean heating up? This makes no sense.

This isn't a matter a free heat, this is a matter of specific distribution.

Redistributing the heat will throughout the system cannot heat up the system. This really doesn't make any sense.

There are certainly cycles that are between those, even if we haven't identified them all.

Why do you need to invoke unknown forcings? they are not required to explain observations.

Specifically, 2010 was tied with 2005, which shows no statistically significant increase in temperature over the past 15 years.

This doesn't follow.

There is no doubt that throughout the 20th century, there was an increase in temperatures, which will make "the hottest decade ever" a fairly meaningless statistic.

So, in your opinion is the temperature increasing or not? When every decade is warmer than the last, it seems like it must be increasing.

The challenge to CAGW is this -> while temperatures have refused to budge, CO2 has continued to rise.

You are still all over the map with this. Is it rising or isn't it?

Can you give me an example of a single global warming believer who changed their theory when the data didn't match?

Yes. Stephen Schneider once believed that CO2 would not dwarf other forcings and that we were headed (in the very long term) for global cooling. Our understanding of the climate is constantly being refined, but those refinements are becoming smaller and smaller as we get a better understanding.

Three vehement skeptics who took the time to look at the data - and when the data didn't match their theory - they changed their theory.

Well, Hansen's global temps versus the US sited temps aside, isn't that what scientists are *supposed* to do?

Spencer and Mueller's reconstructions are global as well. They confirm NASA's findings. Yes, when faced with contradictory evidence a scientists should change is position. Will you?

Good question. The graph shown at this link compares reported earthquakes to all disasters. It shows number, but not severity: http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/download/article_climate_change_hazards.pdf

"Much of the increase in the number of hazardous events is probably due to significant improvements in information access and also to population growth, but the number of floods and cyclones being reported is still rising compared to earthquakes. How, we must ask, is global warming affecting the frequency of natural hazards?"

I emphatically disagree. You could change the average temperature of earth by having warmer lows, and actually have *less* atmospheric differential overall, resulting in a much more mild set of weathers (and in fact, this is actually observed, with milder weather events during higher average global temps, and extreme weather events precipitated by greater regional differentials).

Good point. A faster trend for minimum temperatures is a fingerprint of warming caused by CO2, and it is what is being observed. I am not certain that we are seeing milder weather events because of this. This last year was the hottest on record and also saw an unprecedented number and severity of extreme weather events. For a more empirical look, see the graph in the following article: http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/download/article_climate_change_hazards.pdf

"Much of the increase in the number of hazardous events reported is probably due to significant improvements in information access and also to population growth, but the number of floods and cyclones being reported is still rising compared to earthquakes."

Temperature has been pretty stable during the interglacial of the last 10,000 years. Civilization arose during this period of relative stability. We are likely leaving that era of stability.

Try again.

"Leakage is generally high and in many cases 30-50% of the water is lost." Even with that, we have the lowest consumer country using at least as much as what you found to be a enormous amount.

http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/freshwater_europe/images/eurohousehold.jpg

Even Lithuania was using more than twice that in 2003:
http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/freshwater_europe/consumption.php

>"My friend sells porcelain filters, so I know a little bit about these things."

Good for your friend the salesman, and I am glad you know a little.

>"I would say the Biosandfilter cannot filter out virus as the device in TFA. Filter of pores down to 1 micron is quite slow. To get rid of the virus, you need 20 times smaller. Someone can design a filter with pores that blocks the virus. But it will drip very slowly. Not very practical."

Unfortune the United Nations Heath Care for Refugee's disagree with your assessment. Please see http://postconflict.unep.ch/liberia/displacement/documents/UNHCR_Water_Manual_Refugee_Situations.pdf . They seem to think otherwise. The costs, distribution of material in a crises, and uses the use of common material must have biased their view point. Also, boiling water seems to kill viruses (of 1 micro) quite nicely and is cheap.

Also, Biosandfilters (or their equivalent) are the basis of public water works for 200 years in the western world. So I can see your concern over being practical.

Ah. I see the problem here. I was writing about the world as it actually exists, and you were writing about an abstract definition of capitalism that has not and will not ever exist.

Ah but for a brief period capitalism did exist, from the late 1700s to the early 1800s. In some places it lasted until the US Civil War.

Case in point: given that much of the labor force in the US was held in slavery in the 1830s, wouldn't it be fair to say that they were not, in fact, engaged in the free "voluntary exchange" of their labor?

You could say slaves only if you included indentured servants, those who were made serfs until their debt was paid off. Fact is is most slaves were in the south, which had a lower population density, more people lived in a given area of land in the northeast than did the same amount of land in the south. As for slavery, studies in economics of the period conclude that without the civil war slavery would have ended within a generation anyway. Forced labor as the slave provided is economically unsustainable. It costs more to buy, own, and secure slaves than it does to pay freemen a living wage when those slaves want to be free.

This is why you don't leave your keys in the car, and why, if your car is taken from you, you file a report with a branch of the state. This is why people who have no home don't just come and take yours while you are away on vacation -- because the state will come in with laws (and guns if necessary) to protect your property

None of these exhibit capitalism. Capitalism is a free and voluntary exchange. Having your car stolen isn't voluntary, neither is having someone move into your home uninvited. Yes, it's government's job to do something about these. The purpose of government is to protect it's citizens, mostly from invasion but also from criminals who would deny someone their rights. Otherwise for other things civil society can do a better job than government. I recall back in the late '80s and early '90s Mother Teresa wanted to setup a shelter for the homeless and abused in NYC, however the city had so many requirements and regulations that would of had to be met it became too expensive. If the city had gotten out of the way she could have helped many people. Look at those in India she helped, though she was Catholic many Hindus admired her. Heck even China has realized capitalism, pseudo capitalism, even if it's corrupted, works.

A nuclear power plant has some waste to dispose of but lacks the space to dispose of it. It is willing to pay for someone to take it. I have a place to put it, which is my own private property. They pay me. I bury the stuff in my backyard. This is free, voluntary exchange. Now, in your capitalist Utopia, would there be anything to stop me, or not?

Yes, because it's still a threat to your neighbors, those downwind, and those downstream. Let me clue you into something, though most Libertarians would abolish the EPA, I actually support a strong Environmental Protection Agency. Not only do I support one at the state and federal levels, I'd actually support one for all of earth, I'd support one for space if we ever colonize space. Pollution doesn't know anything about imaginary lines drawn on a paper map by humans. Take a look at the Inuit of the Artic Circle, the Inuit have high blood count of PCBs and other manmade toxic chemicals they'd never made or used themself.

• Toxic chemicals poison Inuit food.
• Our Stolen Future: PCB contamination of Inuit.
• High PCB Levels Found I

Heatwaves...

1988 5,000 to 10,000 dead in Central and the Eastern U.S.
2003 35,000 dead in Europe (7,000 in Germany).
2006 140 dead in California, 25,000 cattle dead and 700,000 poultry dead due to heat.

And they want it to get hotter?

This also ignores crop related issues. http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/downlo ad/ew_heat_wave.en.pdf

Caulerpa taxifolia seems to be a good candidate for taking over the worlds seas and oceans.

Originally a genetically modified strain was found that survived well in aquariums in Germany, and this strain was accidently released by the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, it quickly spread and seems to be impossible to destroy effectively. As it is asexual technically it is the same plant, there is no known predator apart from one slug I think. It is currently spreading like wildfire and nobody really knows what to do. It easily spreads via ships ballast tanks, and the plant is toxic.

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

http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/publication/downlo ad/ew_caulerpa.en.pdf

A real disaster in the making..

i just read this "story" and want to exchange some remarks with the world about it:

GIS (geographical information systems) are using satellite pictures now for decades to monitor and work with them. from farming (how much water is in my soil), geology, archeology and so on, people already use this technologies in daily use.

for example see here:
http://www.grid.unep.ch/product/remote_sensing/ind ex.php
also wikipedia has a nice article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gis

the great thing google provides is that everybody - no matter if professor in geology or not - can now have a look at the data and do something with it. a region that never was of much interest to experts can become of interest by the people living there and doing the first step of discovery they themselves.

google did not re-invent gis and its application. but what google did was to offer parts of the data satellites collect daily to the "people" with a simple user interface.

everybody can have a look at our planet from space and do something with the data.

Nine higher resolution samples from the book can be found at: http://www.grid.unep.ch/activities/global_change/a tlas/exemples.htm

Nine higher resolution samples from the book can be found at: http://www.grid.unep.ch/activities/global_change/a tlas/exemples.htm

Nine higher resolution samples from the book can be found at: http://www.grid.unep.ch/activities/global_change/a tlas/exemples.htm

Iraq has suffered mightily from ecological disaster during the regime of Saddam Hussein and in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, Gulf War I, and Gulf War II. However, it was once the garden spot of the Middle East, and there is work already underway in restoring ecosystems in the Tigris/Euphrates River Basin.

Yes, there are a lot more pressing needs for the Iraqi people as a whole. But F/OSS is certainly better for them, as a developing nation, than bondage to Microsoft which is no doubt in Bill Gates' plans.

There's an old Union organizing song which has a line that says "we need bread and roses too." Iraq needs all the things people are saying they need in this thread. But they also need access to technology, both for practical and not-so-practical reasons. A developing nation needs bread, but that doesn't mean roses are out of the question until the bread situation is dealt with. We could do worse than to encourage F/OSS in Iraq. Certainly the Bush Administration, Halliburton and their buddies at Microsoft are hard at work encouraging other things to base Iraq's computer infrastructure on.

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been established by WMO and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation." (see here ).

I am now going to taunt you.

The land area of the United States is 9363130 square kilometers.

0.06 * 9363130 = 561787.8 square kilometers

or to use square miles:

0.06 * 3,794,083.06 = 227644.9836 square miles

Or the size of the *entire* states of Arizona and New Mexico together.

Sure. Yeah. Let's just go ahead and use about one sixteenth of our total land area for nothing but windmills. It'll be like a chipper-shredder for birds the likes of which the world has never seen. I like wind power just fine, but let's be sane about what kinds of quantities of power we can extract from it.

Besides, I'd be curious to know what kind of effects pulling this much energy out of the air would have on the weather. According to this, the U.S. generates about 3.6 billion kWh of power a year. What would happen if we sucked all that juice out of the air? No more tornadoes maybe, but what if no more thunder storms to dump rain on crops? I'm not sure if we could affect the weather this way, but I would imagine that there'd be *some* consequences.

Lately it's been in the news that polar bears are showing up hermaphroditic due to being at top top of the food chain at the top of the world. It's also reported that the melting polar ice cap may make polar bears extinct. So there's really no need to worry about the hermaphroditic thing, see? Doubtless Nature has a similar plan to take care of the discarded cell phone "problem."

A UN study : http://www.unep.ch/iucc/fs108.htm
some recent studies about the temperature rise itself :
BY IPCC : (PDF,long article) http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/spm22-01.pdf
by ipcc : (PDF,Very long, very technical) http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/wg1TARtechsum.pdf
EPA : http://www.lter.uaf.edu/~davev/nrm304/glbxnews.htm
by NCAR :http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/07/0107 20093052.htm
There are already some effects : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/07/01072 6101653.htm
overview of effects by region : http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/sr97.htm
We already missed some heating by sheer luck : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/04/01042 4072410.htm

Of course, most of these documents are just models, but ARE YOU WILLING TO TAKE A CHANCE ???

"I guess we are about 15-20 years (maybe sooner) away from having a few problems with machines making unauthorized (by any human) decisions that could go against humans in general. At the rate things are changing, I would feel that in 30-40 years time things will be out of our hands."

kinda scary if, in fact, "war is quickly becoming a game only machines can play". Then again, if "artificial" intelligence is a belittling name for it, and we find ourselves blocking its progress, then maybe it'll subjugate us and serve its real host with a favor in kind. Here we haggle over our "intellect" as "property", while we actually manage our "property" (as in coastal real estate) with so little intelligence*. Or maybe trading more ideas we'll dump less industrial filth, and we'll get smart enough to leapfrog over the *pending antarctic melt down. Who the hell knows?

It is very difficulty to classify the intelligence of Deep Blue. Its main advantage appeared to be that it could process information at a much faster rate than Kasparov. Also, unlike Kasparov, it did not whine and grumble when it lost.

My beef with the in-awed worship of "machine intelligence" (as in the age of"spiritual machines") is that the two bits gurus rarely refer to "emotional intelligence", (which may represent a healthy portion of the 90% of our "brain" we don't use. Other human cultural traditions, such as the Tibetan Buddhist, have copious libraries full of recorded learning about states of feeling, compassion, awareness and consciousness which the analytic Western tradition seems to ignore if not repress. Will "intelligence" outsmart us in a few short years with simple yes or no answers? Maybe or maybe not:)

On that note, apparently Deep Dark Blue is still kinda dumb when playing more binary and ancient human bored games like Korean shogi or Chinese go. "Deep Blue beat Kasparov by plotting 14 moves ahead, but a good shogi program would require a computer to read at least 20 moves ahead - professional shogi players can think 30 - 40 moves ahead.. Another lure for programmers is the ancient Chinese game of go, which is even harder for computers than shogi.." - latimes 990819A ..

Sure, just a couple more exponential steps up mount moore's law, but until we let eugenetic engineers hardwire quantum wetware into our loved ones, how will digital decisionmakers get *meaningful* information from human feelings, intuitions, subtle verbal and subtler non-verbal communications, etc.?