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Formerly Classified Global Warming Spy Photos Released
An anonymous reader writes "The Obama administration has released more than a thousand intelligence images of Arctic ice, following a declassification request by the National Academy of Sciences. The images feature a 1m resolution, and scientists who have had to base climate models on 15m- or 30m-resolution photos are rejoicing. The photos, kept classified by the Bush administration, show the impact of global warming in the Arctic and the retreat of glaciers in Washington and Alaska."
"Glaciers are not permanent structures. So what?"
Neither are humans, particularly when they have no fresh water.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
to your wealthy masters, Lord Messiah Obongo and Emperor ManBearPig...
Hey, wasn't a vast expanse of North America covered by a glacier at one point? Damn you cave men and your SUVs!
BTW, for those of you who didn't get the memo, the cover-your-ass term is now "climate change."
Neither are planets.
Oh, right...only since the last ice age.
Did the Bush administration actually deny requests to review these images, or did the request simply not get made until recently?
I guess the usual, it gives away too much about their capabilities, orbits and nobody had made sure there wasn't anything sensitive on that ice. Military intelligence is also a game of economics, even if other nations could find things out for themselves there's no reason giving them free information of any kind.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The great irony of the glacier retreat being the harbinger of doom for humanity is that on most continents the glacial retreat is uncovering substantial quantities of archaeological evidence. I wonder what the people whose archaeological evidence we are finding thought about the glaciers when they encroached on their lives thousands of years ago. It is an interesting juxtaposition.
Man -- I was about to mod you up till you hit on the racist BS. Overbreeding is rampant everywhere.
The fact is, the single most polluting thing a person can do is have kids. I'm intentionally child free so in the balance of things, I could drive a hummer, alone, with extra lead weights in the back, 100 miles per day. I could leave my lights on 24/7, run AC to frigid temps in the summer, blast the heat in the winter, keep a propane flare burning ten feet tall day and night in the back yard, and still not come close to the devastation caused by parenthood.
I don't actually live my life that way, because I'm a bit frugal. What mystifies me is why words such as "conservation" and "conservative" have such differing application when both imply frugality to me -- frugality in how we use environmental resources, and frugality in how we use financial resources. I want to see the birth of the frugal party. Pun intended.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
A pixel is a pixel, regardless of how many pixels reside within a particular space. That doesn't change that fact that 1m = 1 pixel.
Worse yet, the DPI setting on your OS doesn't effect the actual "DPI" of your screen.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
You're told secret data has been wrestled from the grasp of the corporates and you're given a link. The page presents a pair of images right at the top, unavoidable; seen before anything is even read. Two images; one of vast quantities of ice, the second utterly free of ice. Global Warming has been implicated before you've read word number one.
If you look carefully you might notice one end of a landing strip just inland in both photos. These photos cover very small areas; only a few miles. The caption reads:
Sea ice forms along the coast in the winter, and generally melts or breaks away by mid July. Observations of sea ice position reveal considerable year-to-year variability. Changes in the timing of coastal sea ice breakup and in the location of offshore sea ice have significant local impacts: ecological, biological, and human. This image series portrays changes in the timing of coastal sea ice breakup, and gives information on smaller scale properties of ice. This information recorded over long periods, is required to understand and model the dynamics of sea ice and how changes or trends develop and influence other systems.
In other words these photos are 'evidence' of nothing. Minor, small scale year-to-year variation in ice flow patterns. The use of these photos in this manner is equivalent to claiming that because there was snow on my walk on January 10, 2008, but none on January 10, 2009, my environment has been ruined by Global Warming.
Yet there it is, fed to the reader at the very start of the story; no disclaimer provided. The pair of photos will now be repeated ad nauseam for years on end around the planet. Biden will have a blown up poster of these photos in his town hall kit by Wednesday. Fresh new memes the huckster elite will use goad "The West" into self inflicted poverty; "See? The planet is in peril! Man must be stopped!"
Here is a recent and well researched report on the $79 billion that has been spent by the US government (only) on climate research over the last 20 years. 19 pages and 52 citations. I dare you to read it. Global Warming advocates are not the underdogs. They rule vast quantities of public money.
In almost all other matters you can take it as a given that around Slashdot you will find if not cynics then certainly skeptics. On the other hand if it has a Bush taint, a little anti-business flavor and it's wrapped up in a Global Warming ribbon you people suck it up like hicks at a Benny Hinn sermon.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
What is this strawman you speak of? And what is it that you're debunking? The post you're replying to, simply points out that receding glacier tends to reveal archeological evidences of earlier humans, and muses of what they may have thought of the glacier change. Your knee-jerk reaction, suspecting alterior motive, is the reason why I call you a zealot.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
You seem to be making a case that the earth is overpopulated. And, by extension, we are poisoning ourselves with our waste products. If so, I'll have to point out that this is indeed a natural process. Check out any laboratory with cultures of bacteria.
Meanwhile - I have to point out that the GP's post seems to have gone over your head, or at least you dismiss his reasoning. The earth has warmed and cooled many times in the past. In fact, the earth has warmed and cooled within recent prehistory. That heating and cooling has taken place despite man's presence, and there is limited and tainted evidence to support the idea that man is causing global warming.
There are multiple places where man has left artifacts that are now being uncovered by melting glaciers. One story in South America shows that previously cultivated land is being exposed. (Sorry, it's late, I'm lazy, google it yourself if you're really interested)
The fact that there are more people today than at any time in history or prehistory may or may not have an impact on global warming. Fossil fuels probably have an impact, but it probably isn't as great an impact as the alarmists would like us to believe.
Face it: global warming and global cooling is a proven recurring fact. Politics isn't going to change that. Nor will any consensus change it. Given time, the world will cool again. The only question is, whether man will be here to witness it.
Let's start some moon colonies, some Mars colonies, and start out to the other planets. That would improve our chances of seeing the earth covered in ice again.....
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
*citation needed
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
At least we're winning the battle against something!
Of course climate change is happening. It always has. The question are WHAT is happening, and HOW the information is treated. If anyone, including noted scientists, say anything remotely the opposite of the climate change cabal, they are run out of town, belitted by their peers. They have their jobs & credentials taken away. That sounds more like the status quo is trying to hide something to me. When I was growing up, I was always taught to question the mainstream. But if you do that when it comes to climate change, you are labeled a nut. And now we all these new fangled ways to make money from climate change. And I guarantee you, the poor & middle class will be the ones paying. The rich just buy their way out with carbon credits.
You seem to be making a case that the earth is overpopulated. And, by extension, we are poisoning ourselves with our waste products. If so, I'll have to point out that this is indeed a natural process. Check out any laboratory with cultures of bacteria.
IF the worst case climate change scenarios are true, then yes that is how I would describe it. And yes, it is a common natural phenomenon. It is still not in our best interest for that to happen. HOWEVER I am not convinced that the worst case scenarios are true--I'm not convinced they aren't true either--I'm fully skeptical on the matter, I just don't know (and no, I don't reflexively trust simplistic surveys of experts--and I unfortunately don't have time to review the extensive literature on the subject, so I will remain skeptical either way).
Meanwhile - I have to point out that the GP's post seems to have gone over your head, or at least you dismiss his reasoning. The earth has warmed and cooled many times in the past. In fact, the earth has warmed and cooled within recent prehistory. That heating and cooling has taken place despite man's presence, and there is limited and tainted evidence to support the idea that man is causing global warming.
I'm not dismissing it at all. I think it is a valid point (I'm also not certain he was addressing it that seriously). But I think it is a mistake to generalize past history where the human population was less than 1 part in 1 thousand, and more importantly division of labour was minimal, to the present.
10,000 years ago nearly every living human was engaged in procuring the necessities of life for themselves.
5,000 years ago we invented civilization--some people grow food, others build houses, others sell used cars. Civilization inherently rests on the presumption that a subset of the population can provide enough food for the entire population.
I'm NOT saying that climate change will make that impossible, but I am saying that the threat is that it MIGHT do so, and that the mere fact that mankind survived climate change in the past doesn't mean that we can support nearly 7 billion people in the future if the climate changes in ways that damage agricultural yields.
Please understand, I'm very (philosophically) skeptical on the matter. I'm not committing to one conclusion or the other (because, frankly, there is not enough data in my hands (key phrase that, in my hands) to prove anything). I am simply explaining the possibilities, the reason (that I think) one should be concerned about them, and cautioning AGAINST jumping to either conclusion without doing the proper, scientific (epistemologically speaking) due diligence.
There are multiple places where man has left artifacts that are now being uncovered by melting glaciers. One story in South America shows that previously cultivated land is being exposed. (Sorry, it's late, I'm lazy, google it yourself if you're really interested)
The fact that there are more people today than at any time in history or prehistory may or may not have an impact on global warming. Fossil fuels probably have an impact, but it probably isn't as great an impact as the alarmists would like us to believe.
First thing: The physics of the greenhouse effect are not disputable (not accusing you of not knowing this, I'm simply placing it into the record of our discussion). If you increase the portion of carbon dioxide in a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide the mixture's opacity in the infra-red rises. This is experimentally, and theoretically (from quantum mechanics) verifiable.
Rising atmospheric opacity makes it harder for the incoming heat from the sun to escape out into space. ONE WAY to restore the energy input/output balance is to raise the surface temperature of the atmosphere. It is however, NOT the only way, and that is where there is ample room for discussion, debate and
If anyone, including noted scientists, say anything remotely the opposite of the climate change cabal, they are run out of town, belitted by their peers. They have their jobs & credentials taken away.
Just to prove that denalists don't suffer from paranoid delusions ...
Meanwhile in the real world there is no such thing as "the climate change cabal," what there is are thousands of mainstream scientists who basically agree, and a handful who are either skeptical (not a bad thing in itself), or outright denialist. The scientist of greatest "note" who falls outside the mainstream view, (and even he seems to have conceeded on AGW now), has not lost his job or credentials but retains his professorship at MIT. Even the kind of "scientists" who "publish" in phish-journals like Energy and Environment, are not thrown out of the academy --though they damage they do to poor unsuspecting individuals like yourself would be minimised if they were.
When I was growing up, I was always taught to question the mainstream.
Which has left you automatically assuming that if 3000+ expert scientists say black is black, and 50 scientist (of which maybe a handful qualify as experts) say black is white, that black simply must be white. Given the epistemological rigor of western Science, "questioning" mainstream science (not merely in regard to climate change) is no guarantee of good mental health. Of course, it's a different story in regard to belief systems which are held as mainstream without such strong foundations.
But if you do that when it comes to climate change, you are labeled a nut.
Putting to one side the more finessed skepticism of a Lindzen or a Piekle, chances are that people with a predisposition to reject science on the basis of how well established that science is are nuts. As you confess, your denialism doesn't result from any appreciation of the science, but from the psychological effects of what you were taught "when you were growing up," or rather, from your tendency to overgeneralise what you were taught to fields of human knowledge where it is simply inappropriate
Perhaps you should balance a skepticism of the mainstream with a skepticism of the contrarian? You might not be so easily duped by AGW-denialists if you did.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
If you're simply "Questioning the Mainstream", you're missing the point somewhat. The point is not to question something specific; the point is to question everything. Not only should you be sceptic of people who believe that global warming is real and man-made, but also of those who deny this. In fact, what you should do in all cases is not trust anyone, but look at the studies and data yourself, and judge it on sound scientific reasons.
here is a prominent scientist that has been crapped on by his peers for not following the status quo- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html
With all due respect to an eminent and brilliant physicist, Freeman Dyson is not a climatologist. The very article you link notes that he is a "subversive" who feels it's important to be in opposition. While I find that a commendable trait, it should be noted when considering his "anti-establishment" views. IMO, he's right when he says that global warming is not adequately established. But my metaphor is, "the majority of runs made by fire departments turn out not to be fires; we could save a lot of money by requiring an independent confirmation of a fire before the trucks go out." Maybe it's true, but the potential consequences are too horrible to contemplate.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." Arthur C. Clarke said that. Dyson, to his credit, does not say climate change is impossible. He merely says he does not believe it to be bad.
Yup. Same thing that happens to all the poor innocent teachers who try to teach Intelligent Design! I mean, Ben Stein said it was true, so it must be, right?!? I'd love it if you could point out a few examples of these scientists who lost their jobs, and who didn't almost immediately get new jobs at petroleum industry funded think-tanks at several times their original salaries.
I'd also believe you guys more if you could come up with a rational explanation for the massive hoax being perpetrated on the innocent public by the 90% or so of scientist who claim that Global Warming is happening and is caused by man. I've yet to hear anyone come up with a reasonable theory as to why these evil scientists would be doing such a thing. I hear can think of plenty of simple, logical reasons why the oil & coal companies would deny it, though...
There is nothing wrong with questioning the mainstream, but there is a difference between questioning something and having a knee-jerk reaction against it. You seem to be doing the latter. Before you can question something, you need to understand it, and it sounds like you fail pretty badly on that front.
Speaks volumes about how much "climate scientists" believe in their own evidence : Not. At. All. Clearly they believe repression is necessary to sustain the global warming theory (never mind anthropogenic global warming).
It also proves that the grandparent posts were correct in asserting that anyone, no matter how reputable, finding anti-global-warming evidence is attacked. I mean, this guy is right up there with Fermi, Hawking, Feynman and other legends.
Hmmmm lets consider the "for" and "against" lobby's here: For - a majority of the scientific community, most sensible thinkers. Against - A small minority of sceptical scientists who on the whole tend not to be climatologists... and that nutbag down the road who lives in his mother's basement and believes that JFK was assassinated by time travelling Nazi robots sent back by the NWO in league with the communist vampires, controlled by the Zionist overlords.
admit it would suck to blow all the billions and trillions of dollars only to find out there ain't a damned thing you can do
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon. The changing climate is also a worry (which we wouldn't want to encourage to change faster than it already is), but it's not the only reason, and the money spent on migrating to alternative energy sources certainly wouldn't be wasted.
And the reason that water pipe seems to be leaking is almost certainly just natural wear and tear, the building has had water leaks in the past, I mean we shouldn't even stop hitting it with that hammer, it's not like we're making any kind of differ-FWOOOOSH!
With all due respect to an eminent and brilliant physicist, Freeman Dyson is not a climatologist.
But Dyson's argument in fact questions the methods and claims of the science of climatology. If his argument is valid, then it does not matter that he is not a climatologist - it makes Dyson's criticisms more urgent, not less.
I heard a scientist say that the temperatures of ALL the planets in our solar system rise and fall with sunspot. Take a look at the sunspot data... notice the rise? Once apon a recent point time, all sorts of traditionally cold European countries were able to bear warmer-climate crops.
While we are making a terrible impact on this world, keep in mind that behind every good intention - there's greedy hands looking to get more. Carbon taxes are going to be a very real thing soon, slipped under our noses. Except this time we can't have a modern day Boston Teaparty to fight what we believe in..
I have karma to burn, and the rightwing conservative BS echo chamber on this story's comments is really getting to me...
It's hard to believe in this day and age, that despite overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, that there are still hordes and hordes of conservatives and fringe dwellers denying climate change.
Given that the scientific method is the gold standard of finding what the closest thing humans can get to absolute truth, and that real scientists (and not right wing fake scientists and shills paid for by various business, conservative and libertarian interests) have a huge burden of proof to justify their stances, it's absolutely ridiculous that anybody should deny climate change at all.
Climate change deniers are not scientists, and if they're scientists, they're weirdos, and certainly not trained climatologists.
Like many on the conservative side of politics, climate change deniers think that gut instincts, opinions and truths are as strong as scientifically proven fact. It's common amongst irrational, religious people to think that the truth is whatever you decide to believe. This is an affliction of the far Left too, although the Left is always called out on it -- the Right are not.
Climate deniers know they're getting thrashed when objective standards scientific inquiry and applied to their stupid and mistaken beliefs. So they've resorted to the slow drip-drip-drip strategy of conservative lying: repeat a lie over and over and over, and you can turn black into white, and lies into truth. They tried this with the lies that led to the Iraq War, and they succeeded -- at the cost of thousands of needlessly wasted lives.
With climate change however, the stakes are much higher, and it's the duty of all normal, rational scientifically-minded people to oppose the right wing lie machine.
Why not? It's not like he wouldn't believe stock trading doesn't happen.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Errr.. It was also the political establishment and the London corporations who opposed Snow, Since what he proposed cost money and meant disruption to their business. In turn they bolstered the old school scientists (who KNEW miasma was the cause, because it had been believed as fact for hundreds of years) to resist him. They maintained this even as he presented irrefutable evidence he was right. Your analogy was accurate 30 years ago, back then there were a few scientists saying 'we cannot continue consuming resources at this rate, we will disrupt our environment too severely if we do', names you might recognise such as Lovelock, Sagan, etc. And they got treated as 'idiots, idealists, and hippies', back then, by the same talking heads that even now continue to resist anything that hurts their profit and power lust.
So that is an interesting analogy, but like most deniers you deliberately twist it. The reality is that you are essentially one of those old-guard fools arguing well after the fact that Snow was wrong.. and desperately clinging to a miasma theory that flatly contradicts rationality and reality.
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
The company I work for has some work in Uzbekistan. Reading up on the CIA page, it says that while there is no official censorship of the media, there is widespread self-censorship. Anyone who does not censor themselves is usually fired or "taken care of." So while there may be no official cabal of Global Warming alarmists, it does not mean there there are no dire consequences for taking a stance against it.
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon. The changing climate is also a worry (which we wouldn't want to encourage to change faster than it already is), but it's not the only reason, and the money spent on migrating to alternative energy sources certainly wouldn't be wasted.
Well, the question is, does the increased fuel efficiency actually pay for itself? The thing is, the more efficient you are, the more complex you are. The more complex you are, the more you cost. This relationship between efficiency and cost is exponential due to increased complexity efficiency demands. I put together a simple JavaScript model of this at http://www.treatyist.com/issue1/savetheearth.aspx . Basically, by jiggering the predicted cost of fuel (using gasoline as a baseline), versus, the exponent of increased energy efficiency costs, you can arrive at a number of scenarios where reducing greenhouse gasses actually doesn't pay for itself. If it pays anyone, it also pays the Chinese and the Europeans..
In any case, most models show that even a rather dramatic altering of CO2 emissions will not alter the course of climate change for a minimum of 200 years. Even if we stopped now, the glaciers are still going to melt. The CO2 is already in the air.
This is my sig.
"Typically, you don't need to. Anyone can read any study and get a basic idea of how believable the conclusions are. How big is the sample? Is there a control group? Does the data show causation, or only correlation? Is the data self-reported? There are a bunch of simple questions you can ask to gauge how much stock you should put in a study." - That's a valuable skill that you either were taught or stumbled apon, not all people think that way.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Are there any religions you believe should be endorsed by the government because they bring about the right result?
My comment is to point out the flaw in "wrong reason, right result" thought process; not to debate the validity of global warming.
Well, which is it, are fossil fuels going to run out soon, and therefore aren't actually present in sufficient quantities to present much of a threat, or is there way too much carbon locked in fossil fuels for our continued health, and we should get off them before we exhaust the supply?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
It's clear that you are not well versed in Conservative Science, because you're not being Fair And Balanced. The five basic principles of Conservative Science are as follows:
1) The earth is six thousand years old.
2) Pi equals three.
3) Global warming is not real.
4) Evolution never happened.
5) Cells are people too.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Mussolini
Funny. You think some scientists go for the oil and gas money, but the others don't go for government money to fund research?
You need to recognize that BOTH sides do EVERYTHING they do for money.
It amuses the piss out of me how you can point at the other guys and say they are doing it for money but can't think for a second that maybe your team is doing the exact same thing. Ignorance is bliss isn't it?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The word is Skeptic, not Denialist. Denialist is clearly an emotionally loaded word designed to evoke thoughts of Holocaust deniers.
So the flat-worlders are round-world skeptics, huh? When the evidence is overwhelming, that's when a skeptic becomes a denier (or just a nut).
With all due respect to an eminent and brilliant physicist, Freeman Dyson is not a climatologist.
God I get tired of this. I am a computational physicist. The people working on GCMs are climatologists. I guess their work is entirely worthless then, right? Because only a computational physicist is qualified to do computational physics. It's all in the NAME see, which carries with it a mysterious and eldrich power.
On the other hand, someone like Dyson has decades of experience in the strange dialectic between imperfect data and imperfect theory that is the basis of science at the individual level. Anyone who is so ignorant as to blithely dismiss him because some abstract label doesn't conform to their prejudices is contributing a whole lot of noise to this debate, but no signal whatsoever.
When you have something substantive to say about climate physics or GCMs (like their lack of energy conservation and artificial boundary conditions, particularly at the ocean surface) please feel free to contribute to the debate.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
So it's OK to spend trillions on a sham because it promotes environmentalism. That's the problem with this whole thing, it's not about a problem, it's about an agenda.
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
As a kid I remember the big catch phrases being acid rain, the ozone layer and, to a significantly lesser degree, global warming. I remember seeing pictures of perfect blue lakes where all the life had been killed off by acidification and being told that the hole in the ozone layer would mean that I'd need to wear SPF 8000 sunscreen when I grew up, unless we did something about it.
So far as I know we cleaned up emissions from cars and factories to combat acid rain, and it's been very effective. I'm not sure why anyone would've thought that scrubbing pollutants out of the air would affect global warming though. CO2 was never getting scrubbed out.
The air conditioner thing you're referring to had to do with CFCs, iirc. CFCs were the primary agent wrecking the ozone layer, punching holes in it over the Arctic and Australia, as well as other places (to lesser degrees).
Acid rain and ozone layer depletion were issues with proximate, easily identifiable and fixable causes. Rain pH, pollutant content and ozone layer thickness are all very easy to measure and demonstrate, compared to global warming. It's difficult to pretend that these are the result of natural oscillations in the climate.
It always amuses me when people make this argument. You obviously think academic scientists make a lot more money than they actually do.
But even ignoring the bad pay these guys who are only in it for the money are getting, here's another problem with your theory... You are arguing that something like 90% of scientists worldwide are only in it for the money, but the 10% who are quite often paid directly or indirectly by the oil companies are all the innocents? Are you really that naieve? Your theory just doesn't pass the laugh test.
Certainly there is money to be made off of the so called 'green' movement. Oddly, the majority of that money seems to be being made by the same corporations who would be making the money if there was no green movement. Global warming might be shifting a tiny sliver of the worlds wealth around, but certainly not enough to justify it's overwhelming support in the scientific community on the basis of greed alone.
Finally, you ignore the fact of the data. There is tons of data supporting man made global warming, and more is found everyday. Occasionally, evidence that support MMGW is found to be flawed, in which case that evidence is dropped and replaced with the new evidence. If that new evidence contradicts the theory, the theory is revised to take the new information into account. This is the scientific method at it's most basic.
The other side doesn't work that way. Instead of relying on the scientific method, they rely on doubt. They pick up on all those bits of evidence that on the surface seem to contradict MMGW and make press releases about them. They do this even if the discrepancy is already explained by a revision to the theory or even if there is no real discrepancy at all, only a perceived one. If they are ever faced with any evidence that truly does support the theory of MMGW, they just conveniently ignore it. These are exactly the same techniques that the ID crowd use when arguing against evolution, but either way it amounts to the same thing: a load of unscientific crap.
Actually, the ice cap isn't growing (covering more area), its getting thicker, because more moisture is transported to Antarctica as a consequence of warming.
Its, at the same time, also shrinking (covering less area), and recently its also been containing less total ice despite thickening. (Because less of the area is cold enough to have an ice cap, but there is still more moisture transported to the areas that do support an ice cap.)
So?
Short-term variation and long-term trends are two different things. The year to year variation isn't what is important, its the long-term trend that matters. The year-to-year changes are much greater in magnitude. (There have, in fact, been sharp year-to-year increases -- and drops -- in the last few years, but no evidence of a reversal or halt in the long-term trend.)
Temperature measures are also often done lots of places that are not inner cities, including Antarctica. So what?
What?
Okay, so where is your evidence for absolutely no more than 20% of global warming being anthropogenic? And, even if we granted that, wouldn't the effects of global warming still warrant human action to address it even if none of it was anthropogenic?
No, it doesn't, which is why there is a term specifically for global warming with man-made causes, "anthropogenic global warming".
Well, no; the entire ~200,000 years during which H. sapiens has walked the earth has been within the most recent 10% of the (present) Quaternary ice age, including several glacial periods; the last glacial period during the present ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. There were at least four other ice ages in Earth's history, though.
But the current rapid-and-accelerating global warming is not something consistent with the evidence we have of what has occurred in the past, and we have a pretty good understanding that man is causing it and how.
What frustrates me is that the right seems to have ceded any form of argument about "so what should we do about it?" to the 'environmentalist' left, and instead attacked the very concept beyond the point of reason.
Ok, so if we assume global warming is happening:
1) Is it on the whole bad thing? you hear all of the likely problems, but no one in the mainstream is talking about the advantages of longer growing seasons in greenland.
2) How much of it can and do we actually control?
3) What are the best ways to combat it? Are there ways to do so without massive government intervention? (or in a way that requires government to have less regulatory power, such as a flat carbon "tax" to add a market pressure for innovation).
Because the liberals are the only ones with a proposed solution, if things finally get to the point where most people agree a solution is needed, theirs is the one we'll be stuck with.