New Research Forecasts Global 6C Increase By End of Century
jamie writes with this snippet from the UK's Independent:
"The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. ... [The study] found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available. On average, the researchers found, there was an annual increase in emissions of just over 3 per cent during the period, compared with an annual increase of 1 per cent between 1990 and 2000. Almost all of the increase this decade occurred after 2000 and resulted from the boom in the Chinese economy. The researchers predict a small decrease this year due to the recession, but further increases from 2010."
The problem is that very few people are actually qualified to debate climate change. Not even NASA. Especially not people who think that a short term cooling precludes overall AGW.
I blame the Internet, it makes the ignorant, knuckle-dragging, unqualified masses think their views actually count for anything.
If you actually looked at the graph you linked to, you'd see that annual mean temperature varies by up to 0.2 degrees year by year, but has an overall upward trend. So what if 2008 is the lowest since 2000? It's still higher than 2000, and higher than anything before 1990.
See what I mean? You can't even interpret a basic line graph and you're trying to debate climate change, disbelieving all the people who actually know something about it.
If you don't think it's real, what did bleach all the coral then? Why is that entire country sinking into the sea and buying other land to move to? Magic? The new Twilight movie? This is the same idiotic non-believer crap as the "we didn't land on the moon" theory. Hey, get out your telescope, look up at the moon, and see the laser-bouncing we put there. How did it get there? Hmmmm.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
On the time frame your data presents, it appears to be rising. Why did you pick such a short data set however? If you go back far enough, temperatures have been far warmer than this and humanity survived. The argument now is that CO2 is causing this increase and as such, we are orchestrating our own doom... What caused it back then? Could the factor that caused such a rise in global temperature back in the days before SUV or even coal be what is affecting us now? Do we know as a scientific fact that CO2 is the driving factor here or is it more of an hypothesis? Before you go "Of course it is CO2!" how about you follow your own advice and look at the data? You'll find studies that say yes, and studies that say no... And eventually you'll remember the good old "correlation vs causation" thing with no clear answer. Heck, if you want an interesting story in terms of correlation, we've had a decrease in solar activity since about 2002, that means more cloud cover which tends to correlate with less warming. So hey, it might also be possible the the sun has something to do with global temperature. As far as CO2 (and some say greenhouse effect in general) goes, the truth is that we have a lot of educated guesses but we don't actually *know*. What we know for a fact is that politics got involved and they all have a very good idea what guesses about climate scientists ought to make if they want grant money. This is true for both sides of the debate and this will lead to the side with the most money winning the debate, regardless of them being scientifically accurate or not.
Mind the frickin' laser...
That's the one email you're going to rest your case on, out of the entire data dump? Silly me, you made up your mind early and you've completely ignored all of the other news that's come out since the initial announcement. Sort of like the AGW advocates themselves...