NOAA: Earth Smashed A Record For Heat In May 2014, Effects To Worsen

Freshly Exhumed (105597) writes with news that NOAA's latest global climate analysis is showing things are getting hotter. From the article: Driven by exceptionally warm ocean waters, Earth smashed a record for heat in May and is likely to keep on breaking high temperature marks, experts say. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Monday said May's average temperature on Earth of 15.54 C beat the old record set four years ago. In April, the globe tied the 2010 record for that month. Records go back to 1880. Experts say there's a good chance global heat records will keep falling, especially next year because an El Nino weather event is brewing on top of man-made global warming. An El Nino is a warming of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean that alters climate worldwide and usually spikes global temperatures.

Comments

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

How controversial.

records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

taking measurements from inaccurate thermometers and scant coverage from over a century ago, and claiming we know global average temperatures in the 19th century is beyond ludicrous. No amount of massaging of data can make credible comparison to today's grid of sensors.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Ralph Wiggam]

It's weird how those old thermometers were always inaccurate in the negative direction.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

Well if we wanted to we could look at global temp history for a long period of time and have it be really accurate.

Of course looking at that we would find that the Earth is in a fairly moderate area between much cooler global temps and much higher global temps.

The earth has been in the not so distant past very uncomfortable for humans in both directions. The earth some day will get much more tropical again. The earth will again see Ice Ages. These are true statements. Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called statistics moron. The thermometers were surprisingly accurate, there were quite a lot of them actually, and by being smart about it, scientist can produced very good estimates of global tems back that far. Yes, the error bars are larger than recent estimates, but therer's nothing controversial or fundamentally difficult about makeing estimates back that far.
 

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

no, those spirit and mercury filled thermometers not accurate at all, even if you spent hundreds of dollars on one now it would come with "calibration sheet" graph that would tell you the amount to subtract or add for each reading. those go to tenths of a degree plus or minus.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

more like, there just weren't enough of them with recorded measurements to say anything about the globe

also they weren't located in heat islands as more than half of today's are, that's for sure

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.surfacestations.org/
More than 1000 US surface stations photographed and examined. Less than 10% of them actually meet the weather station spec. Most are next to asphalt parking lots and some are near Air-conditioning exhaust vents. Alas, this data was the basis for NASA "correcting" the first satellite temperature readings when they measured global temperatures that were too cool. When big money and politics get into science, truth and objectivity, in any direction, are the first casualties.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If only we knew which thermometers are located in the heat islands so that we could filter them out...oh, wait!

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[bobbied]

Thus the article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

But don't let the quality of the available data cloud your judgment. Just "normalize it" to suit your models, no need to justify your methods. After all, statistics are easy for the average environmentalist wacko to understand.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Jahoda]

By the 1880s, the English Empire alone was more than capable of providing a fair sampling of global temperatures.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You know, there's this funny theorem that in the absence of systematic errors, averaging measurements from multiple instruments (each of them systematically, but randomly-per-instrument overshooting or undershooting) and measurement times (each instrument having a random error here) keeps the mean centered on its true value while decreasing the measurement error.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you cite any document regarding poor quality of the data they're referencing? Serious question.

I was thinking the same thing. Obviously technology has advanced remarkably, but were the temperature sensors back then significantly imprecise?

I did find this: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=695355
which doesn't have any cites either, but did have some interesting comments about high precision but lack of calibration standards.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I'll take the cold any day. It's easier and usually more fun to warm up than it is to cool off.

Also, snoooowwwwwww!

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Mashiki]

Uh why is mercury thermometers, baromiters, and sphygmomanometer's considered the gold standard then? Not only in medicine but also other areas of science.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Mashiki]

Scant coverage a century ago? Hell, it was scant coverage in the 70's. But that's supposed to be fully accurate too. Never mind that the number of remote monitoring stations has dropped through the floor. Hell my city here in Ontario doesn't even have a monitoring station anymore, everything is "estimated" from nearly 40km away in London, Ontario. At the airport, surrounded by asphalt. We had a monitoring station 15 years ago but it's gone. My sisters town in Alberta? 52km away, in the shadow of a mountain, in a gully, next to a mountain river, surrounded by trees.

Accurate!

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know the accuracy of thermometers over a century old? You don't. Scientific measurement was more advanced than you might think. EX - Olaf Roemer measured the speed of light in 1676 and came up with 2.14x10e8 m/sec ........ modern measurement = 2.99792458 x 108 meters per second.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[bobbied]

Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors. If they truly are random errors that happen to be distributed around the actual value, then yes. But this distribution of errors is not always true.

Also, remember that we are discussing discrete measurements made on unique devices with unknown accuracy/errors which are NOT duplicated, but are for unique locations which we may or may not accurately know, at varying intervals, under conditions which can have huge impact on measurements. You may be able to normalize away some of these variables in some cases, but when you do this for multiple variables, your data set does not improve in accuracy.

Say you had 50 recorded measurements for the same time and place taken by 50 devices/methods you might be able to claim better accuracy than just one, but only if you have a reasonable distribution of measured values. If say 25 of your devices just gave you random numbers (didn't measure anything) your data set will still be corrupted.

But the issue here is NOT accuracy but TRENDS. Given that we are NOT using the same devices for the last 200 years, there will be little you can do with the data in regards to trend information. Through the years we have changed how and where we measure temperatures. This means that the absolute error in each data point will remain because it's about how much things have changed. Problem is, there are things that have changed which have nothing to do with the data. Locations, equipment, and techniques have all changed over the last 200 years, many of these changes are invisible in the data, but can change the trends you see in it.

For instance, Say you measured temperature data in the middle of a grassy field for 200 years. What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago? Now add in that the area around the field starts to see a lot of buildings and about 50 years ago light aircraft traffic (piston engines). Then in the late 60's that traffic switches over to jet turbines and a lot more of the field gets paved. Now, consider how many data points this might actually be in the USA data set given that a high percentage of "observations" are made at airports these days and tell me how much affect that has on your TREND or how you think you are going to normalize that out of the data?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

Nobody in their right mind is saying that it wasn't cooler 200 years ago; there are enough accounts of both the Thames and Hudson rivers routinely freezing over back then, even if you completely ignore temperature readings. However, thermometers back then were nowhere near as accurate as they are now, and the idea of using those records to get a global temperature that's accurate to .1 degree Celsius from measurements that were, at best, accurate to half a degree is just plain ludicrous.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

You would expect them to read lower than they do today because of the increased amount of asphalt and development near them. For example, in my hometown other than the terminal, there were no buildings within a mile of the weather station at the airport and only five scheduled flights a day when I was born. When I went with my father to maintain the weather station, it was rare to see any planes. Also, there was only one concrete runway. Now there's an Interstate, about 4,500 houses, 35 office buildings taller than two stories, twenty-five acres of asphalt parking lots, and nearly three miles of asphalt runway all within a mile of the weather station. Also, there's nearly a hundred take-offs per day. Of course all of those things raise the temperature measurements. So of course you expect the older readings to be in the negative direction.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors. If they truly are random errors that happen to be distributed around the actual value, then yes. But this distribution of errors is not always true. Also, remember that we are discussing discrete measurements made on unique devices with unknown accuracy/errors which are NOT duplicated, but are for unique locations which we may or may not accurately know, at varying intervals, under conditions which can have huge impact on measurements. You may be able to normalize away some of these variables in some cases, but when you do this for multiple variables, your data set does not improve in accuracy.

Every thermometer makes random errors in individual measurements, and every thermometer can have a systematic error, but I'd really like to see a reason why this per-instrument systematic error should be biased in average. Calibrating processes for measurement instruments surely don't work this way.

But the issue here is NOT accuracy but TRENDS. Given that we are NOT using the same devices for the last 200 years, there will be little you can do with the data in regards to trend information.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm pretty sure our local stations keep records of major instrument overhauls which can be taken into consideration. In addition, if we're looking for trends, as you say, the additive systematic error of temperature measurements is automatically cancelled and the importance of the multiplicative systematic error is diminished given that we're looking at small deltas and the measurement error is going to be similarly small, by virtue of being proportional to the delta, so (unless something is eluding me here) the trends shouldn't be obscured by either systematic additive error or systematic multiplicative error of any given measurement instrument.

For instance, Say you measured temperature data in the middle of a grassy field for 200 years. What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago?

Again, fortunately, we happen to have records of these things so that we can make informed decisions as to which measurements are candidates for exclusion due to human development introducing local environmental biases.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

wrong, they are not filtered out, instead a correction factor is applied

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

because they owned the western hemisphere at the time including north and south america? oh wait, they did not.

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why additional methods are used to verify: tree rings and ice cores, for example.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[bobbied]

Such equipment records surely don't exist back to 1880.... So, my argument stands.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

In some cases, this correction can be probably be calculated. But even if we come to the conclusion that the correction doesn't actually allow us to filter the bias out of long-term trends, there's no reason not to filter them out completely. Where I live, there's plenty of meteorological/climatological stations out in the boonies that have been in operation for quite some time, something like one station every fifteen miles or so.

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

True. Do you know how accurate those methods are, and how that was measured? (This isn't an attempt to discredit your point; I'm just curious.)

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

By the 1880s, the English Empire alone was more than capable of providing a fair sampling of global temperatures.

Yes, using thermometers that were accurate to +/- 1 degree F and with effectively useless precision. It wasn't until around WW2 when we got to an accuracy of +/-0.5 C (quick, how much of an improvement is that). Nowadays we are generally working in the field with thermometers that are accurate to +/-0.2 degree C in the field (assuming electronic, not mercury-based) with precision up to .01 dC. In the lab, where we can check and recheck calibration, the numbers are better, of course. Then we run into issues of sampling time, and device maintenance, etc...

Hmmm, +/-0.2C accuracy.... how much warming are we talking here? And what exactly does 'statistical significance' mean again?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's a station here that's been continuously recording the daily data meticulously since the 1780s. In the first half of 1800s, there were up to twenty daily measurements there (before the international custom of three measurements per day became established). Of course everything relevant gets recorded and logged. Don't underestimate the power of the Force^H^H^H^H^HOCD.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[msauve]

Shhh. Admitting to chaos isn't deemed "scientific." Likewise, a one month period is climate when it supports your view, and merely weather when it doesn't.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Cuz I'll take heat any day of the week so long as it's not drought. I'd rather not starve.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[GoChickenFat]

So, given all that, what has science landed on as the "correct" or "perfect" temperature average for the globe?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

By the 1880s, the English Empire alone was more than capable of providing a fair sampling of global temperatures.

That is a laughable claim on its face. Please provide the data sampling for the Pacific Ocean by any agent of the British Empire and explain how a value that comes closer to zero than meaningful qualifies as a fair sampling of that body of water. Then look at how the Pacific Ocean effects not just weather but climate, particularly for the Northern Hemisphere for homework.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

After a bunch of people blow the fuck out of your dumb arguments, you still post that?

For fucks sake

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm really not sure the whole issue is about temperature rather than heat flux balance. For example, it seems that most new energy absorbed in the climate nowadays goes into the oceans, which may not get immediately reflected in what we perceive as local (or even global) contemporary climate. Better ask your friendly neighborhood qualified climatologist for a more erudite response.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

So you've never heard of Canada, Belize, Bermuda, Guyana, or the Falkland islands? All of these were British possessions in the 1880s, and they cover a nice range of latitudes.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[AthanasiusKircher]

Such equipment records surely don't exist back to 1880.... So, my argument stands.

Just because you think something couldn't possibly be true doesn't mean it isn't.

Thermometer manufacture was precise enough to produce very high quality instruments by the late 1800s. The issue, as GP points out, isn't random errors popping up (thermometers were about as accurate as rulers could be in the late 1800s), but rather whether we know how the instruments were calibrated and how older scales might match up to instruments that were calibrated against modern international standards.

And, at least in the U.S., standard regular calibration standards had been agreed upon by the first couple decades of the 1900s. Good instruments even decades before then should have very little random error -- the question is only whether anyone bothered to check new equipment calibrated to international standards against the old equipment (or sent the old equipment to be tested once such standards were developed).

So, then you have to ask yourself: people who are bothering to meticulously record scientific data continuously for decades on end -- and they're not going to even bother to check whether their old instruments line up properly with new calibration standards?

Sure, I'm positive there are plenty of places that don't have such records. But we have continuous logbooks going back for centuries in many places. The idea that people taking meticulous records wouldn't even bother to check new equipment against old just seems a little ridiculous... not saying it wouldn't happen, but we have plenty of data points where it did happen to extrapolate estimates for error distributions.

You're acting like temperature measurement in the late 1800s was people guessing random numbers or drawing them out of a hat. But that's not what it was like, and there were lots of places with VERY detailed records.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have failed your stats 101 course in college. Let me educate you: any random sampling has limited accuracy. A randomly sampling of real temperatures that is made using low quality thermometers will probably have a very limited accuracy. But as you take more samples, you will either find that the measurements are biased or that they are normally distributed. If they are biased, you should be able to model the bias and apply a correction to achieve a normal distribution. Once you have a normal distribution, you know that an increase in the number of samples allows to say with a greater degree of confidence that the real value is within a certain range of the mean of those samples. So, even if you have shitty thermometers, you may be able to draw useful conclusions from them if you have thousands of measurements. This is the kind of stuff that the big boys talk about when they prepare journal articles for peer review. You know, p 0.05 and all that.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Maxo-Texas]

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFoss...

It's been hotter 4 times in the last 400,000 years.

This particular heat wave looks to be 10,000 to 20,000 years "early".

If it goes up just a little bit more, then we are in record breaking territory.

Every time it's been this warm in the last 400,000 years, the temperature plunged by about 10c (that's almost 20f) within a few thousand years.

We won't know the answer in our lifetimes. The likely result in our lifetimes is 10" higher water. The likely result in the lifetimes of children being born today is 20" higher water.

I can say, I don't enjoy the "tropical" bugs working their way northward into formerly temperate zones.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Or not. Depends on the distribution of the errors.

No it doesn't. That's the whole point of the law of large numbers, it doesn't matter what the distribution looks like.

It doesn't even matter that the measurements were all taken by separate instruments which might have their own distinctive error distributions. The entire ensemble of thermometers around the world taken together constitutes "an instrument" in itself, and as long as we don't introduce bias in the manner of selecting the individual measurements the results can be averaged together to get a good estimate of the mean temperature.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you've solved the problem! Asphalt only changes the temperature near the thermometer and has no other effects on the environment! It's not as if literally millions upon millions of acres of CO2 consuming grass, shrubs, and trees were paved over with that asphalt. It's not as if that asphalt disrupts the natural daily heating/cooling cycle by absorbing heat through the day and releasing it at night. And it's not as if any of those new highways or offices or houses or airplane takeoffs have led to more CO2 emissions. All they did was change the temperature of the thermometer and nothing else! Wow, you are really a genius! Thanks for single-handedly debunking global warming!

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Fjandr]

Your argument has no factual basis, as you don't have any data to back up a systematic bias in error rates that only goes in one direction. Absent that data, there's no reason to believe there was a biased error rate.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[gweihir]

You are clueless what properly applied statistics and physics can achieve. Or maybe you do not want to know.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, since when did /, become a haven from inbred redneck retards and those who simply hate science. This has become the most pathetic website full of libertarian rhetoric and science deniers. /. is no longer News for Nerds. It is Lies for Libertarians. Simply pathetic.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

They dredged the Thames to improve shipping. That's why it doesn't freeze anymore. It had nothing to do with global warming.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody thinks that the temperature numbers have lately been "improved" so that they more resemble the computer modeling numbers.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

How does dredging the Thames prevent it from freezing? It doesn't have to freeze all the way down, you know, and probably didn't, even when the ice was thick enough for them to hold ice fairs in the winter.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[itzly]

So, when deniers love to bring up the fact that "the earth has been warmer before" this is also beyond ludicrous ?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[CaptainLard]

Of course looking at that we would find that the Earth is in a fairly moderate area between much cooler global temps and much higher global temps

So why rock the boat? How bout we use this time of plenty to fuel epic expansion of the human condition instead of burning everything up and causing a shitload of problems.

The earth some day will get much more tropical again. The earth will again see Ice Ages. These are true statements.

We're all gonna die. This is a true statement. Whats the point of a good diet and exercise?

Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.

You're right, we can do it all right now! The solar panels about to go on my house are going to cost me 10 years worth of electricity bills (at the most). Of course, they'll provide all the electricity I need for at least 20 years. Even when you take away the tax credit, its still cheaper than the cheap coal electricity in my region!. The past 50 years produced the once unfathomable gift of giving every moron on the planet a chance to be heard by anyone with 10 seconds to spare. Perhaps the next 50 will produce a technology (education?) to shut all those morons up. Your prediction for technology in 2064 is the opposite of, yet just as valid as Kurzwiel's singularity.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[itzly]

There has been shown a good correlation between temperature anomalies up to 1500 km apart, so 40 km is perfectly fine. But why take my word for it ? The temperature records for all the stations are on-line, so feel free to do your own statistical analysis if you don't believe it.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

taking measurements from inaccurate thermometers and scant coverage from over a century ago, and claiming we know global average temperatures in the 19th century is beyond ludicrous. No amount of massaging of data can make credible comparison to today's grid of sensors.

The coverage was fairly scant at the time but accurate thermometers have been around since at least the 1700's.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

Yes, to bring it back to a concrete example that most can understand in baseball your batting average is composed of measurements that are either a 1 or a 0. Yet they commonly calculate batting averages to 3 decimal places. Even if a thermometer is only accurate to +/- 1 degree it's still reasonable to calculate to several decimal places when you combine thousands of measurements.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

I repeat what I posted just above: http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

Yes, to bring it back to a concrete example that most can understand in baseball your batting average is composed of measurements that are either a 1 or a 0. Yet they commonly calculate batting averages to 3 decimal places. Even if a thermometer is only accurate to +/- 1 degree it's still reasonable to calculate to several decimal places when you combine thousands of measurements.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

Even if the thermometers are biased one way or the other it is still possible to discern how temperatures are changing over time.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Jane Q. Public]

wrong, they are not filtered out, instead a correction factor is applied

Steve S. Goddard has made it his career to track these "corrections" and missing data points for the USHCN (Historical Climatology Network). He has uncovered a lot of "corrections" where there should be none, and inappropriate "filling in" of missing data points. Not to mention that the "missing" data points have been overwhelmingly in areas of colder climate. He has easily 100 examples of deliberate distortion of the data in USHCN, and he has even tracked this progressive re-writing of history over the last couple of decades.

Here is just one of a great many examples.

Steve has also found many historical records that directly contradict what modern "climate scientists" have been saying about the past 200 years. And make no mistake: these are scientific papers, and government's own data he has been collecting.

Not to mention that through May of this year, not only were large parts of the Northern hemisphere experiencing record cold (including the averaged United States temperatures), but the Antarctic sea ice in the Southern hemisphere was also setting records. That is hardly my only source... I have been following the climate reports because my own region was experiencing record weather.

And please don't give me this "weather vs climate" guff, because we are discussing a single month, which is by definition weather.

It hardly seems credible that with all that world record cold virtually everywhere (except for the Pacific El Nino event), that May could have ALSO been a "record warm" month. It just doesn't add up. Just like so many of NOAA's other figures.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

After surfacestations came out with their list scientists decided to check it out. They compared the temperature trends for well sited weather stations to the temperature trends for poorly sited stations. They found that the poorly sited stations actually have a slightly lower temperature trend than the well sited stations.

Is the US Surface Temperature Record Reliable?

NOAA used the site ratings by surfacestations.org to construct two national time series. One was the full data set, using all weather stations. The other used only Class 1 or Class 2 weather stations, classified as good or best.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[mpe]

It's weird how those old thermometers were always inaccurate in the negative direction.

Also that a modern thermometer in close proximity to large (and moving) gas turbine engines is incapable of being inaccurate in a positive direction :)

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Orgasmatron]

The difference, of course, is that 0 and 1 are integers. They have infinite precision. Batting records are not +/- x, they are discrete; the records never indicate that a batter got 0.97 or 0.05 hits during an at bat.

We could adopt the convention of saying that a given batter has hit 60-of-200 or whatever, but it is more useful to normalize that down to .300 batting average so that we can compare him to the guy that has 221-of-743. But in the end, the batting average is really just shorthand for the actual ratio of discrete events.

A temperature measurements is not a discrete event and temperature "averages" are not a simple ratio of them.

The average of 14 +/-1 and 31 +/- 1 is not 22.500, it is the range [21.5-23.5].

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

I imagine that a number of those centuries old thermometers still exist so it's easy to measure their accuracy. Accurate thermometers have existed since at least the 1700's. We may be able to measure with more precision now-a-days but I don't think the accuracy is that much better (I'm talking about repeatable accuracy, even if a thermometer is off by 2 degrees it can still accurately show how temperature is changing over time).

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

There's also the fact that many historical temperature reporting stations have had civilization build up around them over the years. A few decades ago they were surrounded by grassy fields. Now they're surrounded by concrete.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Barsteward]

Christopher Booker is a shit journalist of the Rob Enderle mold, i.e. take what someone says and don't do ANY investigation to see if its true.. here's an example of booker's shit http://www.theguardian.com/med...

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Truth_Quark]

taking measurements from inaccurate thermometers and scant coverage from over a century ago, and claiming we know global average temperatures in the 19th century is beyond ludicrous.

The coverage was a lot smaller than today's but it was so much cooler then, that the error is less than the change.

No amount of massaging of data can make credible comparison to today's grid of sensors.

Yes it can. It's just that the error bars are larger back then.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

When you combine a bunch of stations to get a global average temperature the law of large numbers applies.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comparison is flawed. Your baseball numbers are exact, and calculating an average from exact numbers gives you an exact average. That has nothing to do with calculating an average from numbers that may be off by a few degrees.

If your baseball numbers were +/- 1 (i.e. a 0 can turn into a 1, and a 1 can turn into a zero), your average would be garbage.

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[itzly]

For the last century, you can compare the data to modern temperature records to get an idea of the accuracy. For older data, you can compare the different measurements to each other. Note that in addition to ice cores and tree rings, there are dozens of other temperature proxies.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[itzly]

What happens when part of the field gets paved about 70 years ago?

What you'll see is a step change in the temperature data compared to the temperature data from surrounding stations. Once you identify such as step change, you add a correction.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[TapeCutter]

All well and good, but we're not looking at the absolute temperature, we're looking at the change in temperature. A thermometer is quite likely to give you an inaccurate spot reading but the error will be consistent across all the spot reading from that thermometer. ie: There is much less room for error when looking at the variance over time, which is what we are interested in.

You can demonstrate this quite easily as many others have already done, take the "best" 100 stations listed by the contrarian Anthony watts and compare it to his "worst" 100 stations, the upward temperature trends for both sets are almost identical and match the trend for the entire data set of ~1100 stations, precisely because the absolute reading need not be accurate to get good idea of the variance.

Watts and his followers are actually doing us all a favour by pushing for better climate monitoring, but the data he has does not support his claims, nor has he ever attempted to publish his claims in the peer-reviewed literature.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

What is worrying is the speed with which temperatures increase (the delta), not how much they are at the moment. While there have been bigger increases in Earth's geological history, they didn't happen in the space of 100 years.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[dargaud]

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'm pretty sure our local stations keep records of major instrument overhauls which can be taken into consideration.

I used to work in climate science and we had a saying: "If you give a thermometer to a meteorologist, he knows what temperature it is. If you give him two, he's confused."

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[TapeCutter]

and the idea of using those records to get a global temperature that's accurate to .1 degree Celsius from measurements that were, at best, accurate to half a degree is just plain ludicrous.

The central limit theorem is ridiculous, who knew? Seriously, for what you claim to be true you must demonstrate that the errors of measurement are not normally distributed across the independent samples, pretty sure there's a nobel prize waiting for whoever saves the world by solving that "conundrum".

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[TapeCutter]

Nothing we can do in the next 50 years will give us the technological expertise needed to do much of anything about warming or cooling.

It has been known for a while now that CO2 has been the "thermostat of global climate", for the at least as long a multi-cellular life has been around. In the past CO2 was a natural positive feedback wrt the direction of change, thus amplifying the ice ages changes that are driven by orbital cycles. This effect is still at work today and it's perfectly feasible to control the CO2 concentration to ward of the extremes of these changes. We have been doing this for a while now but in wrong direction, over the next 40yrs we will add half a trillion tons of CO2 into the air, the same amount as what we have put into the air over the last 250yrs, the spike in CO2 due to man is not the highest in the geologic record but it is almost certainly the most rapid change in levels (up 30% in 250yrs and accelerating exponentially ).

It's been clearly shown to all independent observers that we have already significantly altered climate with the first half trillion tons, we can easily observe the North pole melting over the last few decades. So given all that, what makes you think the next half trillion tons won't have an accumulative effect on climate? We could, if we so desired, start scrubbing CO2 from the atmosphere today to restore the climate to the equilibrium our agriculture and civilizations have evolved to suit, the technology is there to do whatever the politics wills with CO2 levels over the next 50yrs.

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[ed1park]

Can you cite where these records are that will show how grassy fields that have become urbanized with concrete and asphalt affect temperature readings over a 200 year period?

Interesting podcast with Joe Rogan discussing this topic with Randall Carlson. Sounds a lot like winter is coming Game of Thrones style!

http://www.youtube.com/attribu...

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't that it hasn't been warmer; We all know it was warmer when the dinosaurs were around.

Our society (7 billion people) depend on climate stability (it takes time to adapt). Sea levels will rise, which will threaten cities near the ocean. Those cities were not there with the current population during the prior warmer periods. Warmer climate (may) lead to a more extreme weather (hurricanes).

Climate change, will create instability and uncertainties in the world (potentially leading to death, migration, wars).

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[American Patent Guy]

The number of measurements taken and the level of precision are irrelevant if the reference standard used to set those thermometers is off. If you'd passed your stats 101 course, you'd have been able to figure that one out, Coward. We can do without your "education".

There are records of a guy by the name of Noah surviving a worldwide flood in the Old Testament: just because you've got "records" back for centuries does not make your information reliable.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I guess that must be a reason why meteorologists aren't entrusted with this task today. Still, I'd argue that the historical data we have is better than no data at all, provided that it gets used by people with brains.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Ginger Unicorn]

A cursory googling doesn't paint Steve S. Goddard as someone that has a rigourous approach to statistical analysis.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Eunuchswear]

I don't understand how it is that in all these discussions, no one ever talks about the problems with the monitoring stations.

What are you talking about? Anthony Watts wrote a peer reviewed paper about it:

Fall, Souleymane; Watts, Anthony; Nielsen-Gammon, John; Jones, Evan; Niyogi, Dev; Christy, John R.; Pielke Sr., Roger A. (2011). "Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends". Journal of Geophysical Research 16 (D14). Bibcode:2011JGRD..11614120F. doi:10.1029/2010JD015146.

The opposite-signed differences of maximum and minimum temperature trends are similar in magnitude, so that the overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.

Whoops.

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I'm not really sure I understand your question. Where are the early records that show the effects of urban heat islands? Obviously, it is those records that were kept in large population centers that will show these effects. But given the social and technological realities of the time (no remotely operated automated stations in the middle of nowhere in the 19th century, and given the "practical" interests of the period), by the time these records started being kept in the early industrial era, these areas were already urbanized to a large extent, so I'm not sure how pronounced this effect is in these particular parts of the data set and how it fares compared to the "from grassy fields to Manhattan" kind of development.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[nctritech]

I have not read (nor do I ever intend to read) every single peer-reviewed paper on this subject (it's honestly not a very interesting subject). I also have yet to see this paper come up in any of the AGW post discussions on Slashdot. In any case, thanks for bringing it up.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rtb61]

It kinda is when it involves the whole globe rather than a particular region (they even showed the colder than average bits). Look at the end of the day, you know you are lying, I know that you are lying, you now know that I know you are lying and all I will do it point you to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., hope it works out for yah. In fact all everyone should do when caught up arguing with a climate change denialist is show them that video and walk away laughing.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

the idea that the temperature measuring devices back then were somehow significantly inaccurate is nothing but BS.
you are not a scientist (obviously), nor are you familiar with proxy measurements and how they are derived, so anything you say about the data going back into history is invalid.
short: shut up troll

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Goddard is a worthless pile, as is the stuff you keep saying about this topic.
He's wrong. You're wrong.
And trying to disparage NOAA of all things is sheer idiocy.
Go away troll.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

"It was cold someplace on earth, therefore it's not warming"
Individual places is the definition of weather.
Just because it was cold in New York due to the vortex oscillations does not cancel out the overall upward. While it was slightly colder than normal in NY, it was tremendously hotter than normal in Australia. The overall picture is that January, in the middle of the dreaded vortex, that January was STILL the 4th warmest on record.

So yes, its very much that you are confusing weather with climate.
The average picture, the global trend, is still up.
Every month of this year so far has been in the top 5 warmest for that month in history.
The only reason it doesnt add up is because you fail to recognize that the world is a lot bigger than just the couple places where it happened to be cold.

In short: you are an idiot.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Pino Grigio]

It's actually worse than that. They "adjust" the past record to make it look cooler and therefore to make current temperatures look even more "unprecedented". NOAA has done this with the US land temperature record with gusto.

Also, you'll get modded down for doubting AGW here on slashdot. It's a wedge issue for Marxists you see.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Pino Grigio]

Yes, there's no question that cannot be truthfully answered with a cursory googling is there Ginger.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

actually water pretty much does have to freeze all the way down, or nearly so.
you see, water gets denser as it gets colder, down to about 34deg or so (after which it gets less dense again, hence ice floating)

consider a lake: as the surface water chills and approaches freezing it sinks, bringing warmer water to the surface. which then gets colder, and sinks. its a mixing effect. the overall effect is that a body of water as it heads towards freezing attains a very evenly distributed temperate.
the surface may snap freeze due to wind chill effects, but this is "thin ice" and different from a body of water actually freezing.

with moving water the dynamic is more convulted, but generally the same.
the end result is, the deeper a body of water, the harder it is or longer it takes to freeze.
hence: dredging the Thames makes it harder to freeze.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

as a calibration tech myself, you're spot on.

plus another point of consideration i like to bring up, is for an instrument in good working order, even back then, the variation isn't going to be all that large. they act like these things arent even accurate to +/-1 deg, but realisticlly, these arent grandma's meat thermometers, these are top of the lne scientific instruments. some of which were accurate to the hundreths, even back then, so even a couple tenths of a deg was both unlikely to occur (in a scientific device), and even if it did, wouldnt throw off the data all that much.

and for scientific measurements rarely is a single instrument used, but multiple, so that any malfunctions or errors can be caught just by seeing how they all stack up against each other.

so the arguments against the devices as unreliable is simply hogwash.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Every thermometer makes random errors in individual measurements, and every thermometer can have a systematic error, but I'd really like to see a reason why this per-instrument systematic error should be biased in average. Calibrating processes for measurement instruments surely don't work this way.

Yes, but the idea that you can calibrate a thermometer by placing it in ice water or boiling water is a relatively recent discovery. Probably no older than 1930, and you'll notice a distinct rise in "average temperature" coincident with this new method of calibrating thermometers. Previous calibration methods probably introduced a systematic downward bias.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Your statements about NOAA are lies.
Believing in science does not make one a marxist.
Nor does believing in facts.
Youre simply trolling.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

It hardly seems credible that with all that world record cold virtually everywhere (except for the Pacific El Nino event), that May could have ALSO been a "record warm" month. It just doesn't add up. Just like so many of NOAA's other figures.

Oh yes, all the world record cold - in the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile Australia simultaneously suffered record heat waves.

It's almost as if the temperature differentials over seasons are increasing. Possibly due to increase in energy in the global climate system.

But that'd be crazy talk.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[bobbied]

If you know the device is the same one, does not loose it's accuracy or change over time and if the observations are consistently made. I'm not saying you cannot normalize data, I'm saying that there are more variables here than just the observed temperature, more reasons for the observed temperatures may have changed. I'm guessing nobody has attempted to consider all the variables here and when you normalize the data, you are possibly changing the observed results.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

What? You think scientists are so stupid they haven't thought about all these problems long before you came up with them? Not likely. They've been wrestling with the problem for decades.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

When you combine the readings from hundreds of weather stations the law of large numbers comes into effect. My comparison is apt.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

I do not see him as arguing that the Climate does not change. It does. It will. With or without man.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

Solar is all good and everything. It will not stop the earth climate from change when ever it wants to though.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

After you are done with that we can kill off all the pesky humans that constantly exhale CO2.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

I was rather clear about the whole thing. I understand what climate change will bring. I know that the Earths climate has and will change.

Why worry about the cities near the Ocean. We just rebuilt New Orleans! A city that sits below the Ocean and A Huge Lake. A city that will see more hurricanes.

If we as people were planning on making any intelligent decisions we would have started by not rebuilding that city in the same stupid place. Worry about things that you can do something about. Preventing the Earth from changing is not one of them.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

A very ingenious response. It's a shame you spent so much time working out the wrong answer. I take it that you've never heard of the thermocline.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh huh, and Steven Goddard is a liar too right? He just 'made up' his findings right?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

sure, but that's hardly a decent grid. Have you seen the records from that time for USA and UK, they are online. Time of temperature taking sometimes just "morning, noon, evening", gaps of years or even decade at station....most the data is thrown own, small percentage used

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[bobbied]

They've been wrestling with the problem for decades.

Great, so can we see what their approach to these issues might be?

Personally, I don't think most of these people know much more than how to make cool looking graphics out of existing data, and the "existing" data isn't what we are being told it is... But hey...

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[cyberchondriac]

Y'know, in my younger days, I pretty much hated winter, the cold, and short days and long nights.. I loved summertime, beaches, sunshine, long days.. but oddly, as I approach middle age (some would say I'm there already) I find myself preferring wintertime now. As you said, it's easier to get warm than it is to get cool. Also, I hate having to mow my lawn at least once a week every week, and I'm tired of the incessant drone of lawnmowers and chainsaws all weekend long, every weekend. (Obviously I live in the 'burbs). And the mosquitoes. And constant thunderstorms, which knock out power (sucks being in IT when UPSes fail, and we have stations spread out all over the state)
Things just seem more calm in the winter, there's just less static background buzz, and snow is pretty. (well.. literally speaking, there's more static - zap). I should move farther north. A blanket, a fire, a book, and a mug of hot chocolate, life is good.

But there's still one thing to be said for summertime that winter will never match. women in tank tops, shorts and bikinis. Guess I'm not that old yet.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[CaptainLard]

I agree 100%. But I'll expand your point by adding that when the Earth climate changes naturally it takes many thousands of years. Thus I refer you back to my first point: "Why rock the boat?". There currently exists a better option so the sooner we transition away from our coal/oil energy economy, the less painful everything else will be in the long term. Of course a meteor could always wipe us out or yellowstone could blow it's top but if you're really worried about that off topic possibility then you're better served with my second point: "were all gonna die so fuck it".

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Ralph Wiggam]

Every ice fisherman knows you're wrong.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[danbert8]

Deeper water, increased flow. Both add thermal mass and the increased flow velocity could slow or halt freezing on the surface. I'm not saying anything about temperature differences, just pointing out that there is a scientific argument to be had that dredging a river could make it less likely to freeze given constant temperature.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[danbert8]

I agree, when people say "what will we do with cities like Tampa and New Orleans?" and I reply, 200 years ago, they were just a few maybe 2-3 story buildings. How many cornerstones in those cities are marked pre-1814? Not many important ones. People migrate over time due to the environment, it's a natural process.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

London Bridge was demolished in 1831 and replaced with a new bridge with wider arches, allowing the tide to flow more freely; and the river was embanked in stages during the 19th century, all of which made the river less likely to freeze. It's easily verifiable fact.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[itzly]

The CO2 that is exhaled by humans was recently captured from the atmosphere by plants. It's a short term cycle, with no net effect on CO2 concentration.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Jane Q. Public]

Yes, there's no question that cannot be truthfully answered with a cursory googling is there Ginger.

Yes, it's really quite amusing. GP's first link is to a site that is full of ad-hominems, but more to the point tries to use GISS data to refute Steve, when GISS is one of the data sets Steve has quite exhaustively shown to have been deliberately manipulated. So much for "cursory glances".

The second link, also full of ad-homimen, points out a flawed graph, but fails to acknowledge that Steve himself acknowledged it was a mistake right after it was published.

So it amounts to somebody making a mistake and publicly admitting it right away, and even being pointed out in the blog post linked to, yet they come along later and saying "Look! Misinformation!" Which is, itself, misinformation.

What a load of BS.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[itzly]

Great, so can we see what their approach to these issues might be?

Yes, of course. That's why they publish scientific papers.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Jane Q. Public]

Just because it was cold in New York due to the vortex oscillations does not cancel out the overall upward.

Way to BS-up your argument. The entire continental U.S., even when you factor in the areas in the Pacific that were experiencing El Nino, experienced record cold for the entire first 5 months of 2014. USHCN's own raw data.

And the same time, Antarctic sea ice was also setting new records.

Was it warmer in the Arctic? Probably not. Sea ice extent was perfectly normal this year, after several years of shrinkage. That argues that the temperatures in the Arctic were normal, too.

When you have huge areas of the globe showing normal to historical record lows, then in order for the Earth to be "warmer than normal", much less record warm, you would also have to have large areas that were extraordinarily hot during the same period.

I have seen no evidence of such.

Do you have some? TFA certainly did not provide any.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

There currently exists a better option so the sooner we transition away from our coal/oil energy economy, the less painful everything else will be in the long term.

So what is this better option? Name something that is as easily available, transports well, has a high energy density and does not involve going back to the dark ages.

Nuclear is great for the power grid. Problem is the greens hate it. You just can not build a Nuclear power plant in the US. Solar, Wind and Hydro all have their places. None of which is on the road and to top it off ... Greens (hate Hydro, now bitching about windmills killing birds and they want no more bird deaths from the solar plant near Vegas. Can not make them happy.)

We could do a lot. Want to do good things for the earth and not kill off the rise of developing countries? Lest build Nuclear power plants here in the US. Lots of them. We can keep putting solar on the houses and businesses that want them.Wind farms for those areas where it makes sense. Remove subsidies from all energy. Oil and Green.

But we will not. What we will do is hate the energy we have, fear that which we could have and punish the world for breathing. Also ... Very important here.

Does anyone one really think that allowing a government agency to regulate the gas we breath out while we live is a good idea? Really? Because there is no way that a government agency would ever take the powers they start with and expand them till it is just silly. Right?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[mpe]

Nobody in their right mind is saying that it wasn't cooler 200 years ago; there are enough accounts of both the Thames and Hudson rivers routinely freezing over back then, even if you completely ignore temperature readings.

The typical "warmist" response to well well documented cold (and especially warm) periods in the past is to claim that these are "local" but the current warm period is "global". (Very rarely are these people able to give an objective definition of "local" or "global". Or for that matter "weather" and "climate")

However, thermometers back then were nowhere near as accurate as they are now, and the idea of using those records to get a global temperature that's accurate to .1 degree Celsius from measurements that were, at best, accurate to half a degree is just plain ludicrous.

Even with modern thermometers 0.1 C might well be "pushing it" when it comes to real world temperature measurements. Yet you will see 0.01 C, even 0.001 C as claimed accuracies...

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[mpe]

Which is why additional methods are used to verify: tree rings and ice cores, for example.

Tree rings are a measure of how good growing conditions were for the tree at the time. Temperature is only one contributing factor. Along with rainfall there is likely to be an optimal range for the plant too.
Also what you'd be measuring by such techniques would, at best, be some kind of long term averaged temperature. Not necessarily "averaged" in the same way that thermometer readings are. (Often a combination of the midpoint of extremes and arithmetic means.)

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[DedTV]

Farther north and your weekend is filled with the sounds of snowblowers and chainsaws, the ping of salt and gravel bouncing off of undercarriages and windshields, the scrape and roar of plows etc...
I started in the central valley of California but temps up to 120F in Summer, where opening your front door felt like getting punched in the face by an angry fire god, got annoying. So I moved to Northern Pennsylvania and found that shoveling 2 feet of snow every morning to get the car out of the driveway, spending all night listening to the sound of trees exploding from -20 temps and having to don 80lbs of clothing before opening the front door got annoying even faster.
So I moved to the midsouth. Temps rarely go beyond 100F for more than a couple days at a time in summer, very rarely go below 0 in winter and a couple inches of snow shuts down the entire region. And if bikinis are your thing, you can always find a fat woman in a bikini at 3am in the local Walmart winter or summer! :)

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[cyberchondriac]

And if bikinis are your thing, you can always find a fat woman in a bikini at 3am in the local Walmart winter or summer! :)

Well thank ya very much for that lovely imagery! May as well put a thong on a snowman. Actually, that sounds less horrific.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[khayman80]

It hardly seems credible that with all that world record cold virtually everywhere (except for the Pacific El Nino event), that May could have ALSO been a "record warm" month. It just doesn't add up. Just like so many of NOAA's other figures. ... When you have huge areas of the globe showing normal to historical record lows, then in order for the Earth to be "warmer than normal", much less record warm, you would also have to have large areas that were extraordinarily hot during the same period. I have seen no evidence of such. Do you have some? TFA certainly did not provide any. [Jane Q. Public]

The linked NOAA article certainly did provide maps of May temperature anomalies and May temperature percentiles. Far from showing "world record cold virtually everywhere" they show absolutely no "record coldest" grids, and quite a few "record warmest" grids.

The entire continental U.S., even when you factor in the areas in the Pacific that were experiencing El Nino, experienced record cold for the entire first 5 months of 2014. USHCN's own raw data.

Again, no. I've previously told you that we're not experiencing El Nino yet, but obviously you ignored NOAA in favor of your uncited "neighborhood meteorologist". NOAA still states that "ENSO-neutral conditions continue" but forecasts a 70% chance of an El Nino this summer.

And again, May temperature percentiles show that only Louisiana and south Texas were even "cooler than average" (not "much cooler than average" or "record coldest"). The rest of the continental U.S. was either near average, warmer than average, or much warmer than average (especially Alaska).

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[mpe]

For example, in my hometown other than the terminal, there were no buildings within a mile of the weather station at the airport and only five scheduled flights a day when I was born. When I went with my father to maintain the weather station, it was rare to see any planes.

In the earliest days of aviation "airfields" literally were fields. Now even a fairly small airport is an urban area.

Also, there was only one concrete runway. Now there's an Interstate, about 4,500 houses, 35 office buildings taller than two stories, twenty-five acres of asphalt parking lots, and nearly three miles of asphalt runway all within a mile of the weather station.

The point of airport weather stations has ALWAYS been to help with aviation. Ideally pilots would want the temperature at wing height in the middle of the runway, but it's obviously impractical to put measuring station there. Possibly the only reason that the air there is warmer compared with the surrounding area is having been through a few 900C internal combustion engines :)
Only a fool would expect an airport to be anythng other than warmer than typical for it's location.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[mpe]

So, then you have to ask yourself: people who are bothering to meticulously record scientific data continuously for decades on end -- and they're not going to even bother to check whether their old instruments line up properly with new calibration standards?

You'd think so. Except that when members of the public went to look at the USHCN sites only a minority of them were sited correctly. Something far simpler to check than any sort of calibration.

Re: records go back to 1880, very funny

[TwoEyedJack]

Put some error bars on those measurements and your snr drops to the point of meaningless. Ice cores are essentially meaningless for measuring temperatures, and tree growth is far more a function of precipitation than small variations in temperature.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[AutodidactLabrat]

So, let me get this straight. The observation of tree rings over the last 50 years, when we have global IR temperature readings along with reliable precipitation does NOT co-relate with tree ring / climate 50,000 years ago (assuming fossilized wood here)?
Talking about pushing it!

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Beck_Neard]

At this point, there's actually no need for century-old data (although it does add to the increasing pool of evidence). Weather satellites have been up in space for long enough now to establish warming beyond any reasonable doubt.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[david_thornley]

You know, people die every day, and hardly anybody lives a full century, with or without human actions.

Now, just ignore that red spot on your forehead, please, and we can provide a conclusion to this argument.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

...
When you have huge areas of the globe showing normal to historical record lows, then in order for the Earth to be "warmer than normal", much less record warm, you would also have to have large areas that were extraordinarily hot during the same period.

I have seen no evidence of such.

Do you have some? TFA certainly did not provide any.

A cursory glance at Australia's weather records for the same time period would have shown you that they suffered record heat waves.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

And what effect did this have on the Hudson River, which stopped freezing over at about the same time?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

Let's not mix apples and oranges here. I was writing only about calculations based on recorded readings of thermometers. And, while I'm thinking of it, do you happen to know how accurate the tree ring records are, when compared to readings from thermometers? I'm not trying to imply that they're inaccurate, it's just that I don't know how much accuracy you can get from those readings and wondered if you might know.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

The first semester statistics course is intended to be a preparation for several follow-on semesters of statistics, and several semesters of research design courses. It doesn't qualify you to understand research.

In reality, many of the claims made regarding the normal distribution are misleading, even erroneous. It's not uncommon to find other distributions appearing, or data not matching a normal distribution, sometimes even in situations where some of the intro textbooks tell people to expect a normal distribution.

The people teaching intro stat courses often don't have enough real world research experience to understand these issues, unfortunately. Their intentions may be good, but their lack of experience taints the presentation they give their students.

It is important to remember that mathematics always takes place in a fantasy world, with the basic rules of the fantasy world being set by the axioms used as a starting point. In the real world, there are no points, no lines, no circles, and so forth. Similarly, many of the assumptions underlying basic statistics either a) are wrong, or b) are unprovable (i.e. we can't determine whether they actually apply), when applied to real situations.

Remember the words "independent and identically distributed" from your stat class, in the context of the central limit theorem? Now turn on your brain and think about how you would determine that those two assumptions are actually valid for a given real world situation...

One of the biggest amateurs make in using mathematics is in blindly applying mathematics to real problems, without checking that the underlying assumptions behind the mathematics actually apply.

Worse, many people -- even many professionals -- don't even understand the assumptions that lie behind the statistics!

There is NO mathematical procedure that allows one to take a bad data set, IN GENERAL, and turn it into a good one. In very specific and narrowly defined cases -- where certain assumptions are valid -- yes, we can do this. But not in general. Otherwise we could fire all the world's scientists and replace them with mathematicians! Systematic error is a huge problem, and very hard to detect, model, or resolve.

In practice, we generally don't understand many real systems enough to be able to "model the bias". Further, ALL real systems are non-linear, which means the concept of a "correction" -- which really means a "linear correction" in those intro stat courses, something they don't discuss in those intro classes -- isn't applicable in general.

Going from samples to the full population is equally difficult, for the same reasons.

Take a research design class, read a textbook, or at least talk to some professionals.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rtb61]

Regardless of the cause, the way we build our numerous coastal cities, our ports, our coastal airports, our coastal power stations etc. Means our society can not tolerate any substantial changes in sea level and must take equal substantial steps to stabilise global climate otherwise we risk societal collapse in the event of major climate change. So temperatures are rising we must take what ever steps are required to reduce that, so white roofs, white roads, less CO2, less methane etc. One of the technological advances of mankind should be steps to control and moderate weather, potentially high risk but the payout is the elimination of weather extremes.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

As itzly said the information you seek is in the published scientific papers. Why should we listen to someone like you unless you can demonstrate that you're familiar enough with the literature that we're not rehashing old news?

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Dishevel]

No. You do not try to slow the inevitable. That is fucking stupid. You end up with flooded cities a few years later.

You get ready to adapt to the things you know are coming. You do not rebuild New Orleans.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rtb61]

What is inevitable is psychopathic insatiable greed but that doesn't mean you let them do what they want, you just get rid of them and their inevitable greed is avoided. Just as you don't try to hold back the flooding you seek to prevent it occurring in the first place.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

The Hudson River never stopped freezing over. It continues to do so with regularity, although these days Coast Guard icebreakers keep it clear. Here's an article about ice yachts on the Hudson from when it froze over this past winter: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2014/03/07/as-the-hudson-river-freezes-over-classic-ice-yachts-emerge/ and this one: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/deadly-arctic-blast-sweeps-u-s-temps-rise-article-1.1569539

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent links, thanks. I had heard of this Steve Goddard, but I didn't realize how humorously childish his scientific understanding is. There is much speculation that he receives hefty checks from the oil industry, and I'm pretty sure this plays right into those speculations.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

you are the one who has failed stats 101 with your assumptions
. look at the real data from say the US stations for 19th century the same thermometer wasn't used at a station, and there are gaps of years and sometime decades in records. Time of measurement wasn't even precise ("morning", "noon", "evening")

  statistics become meaninlessl, but you show what the problem is

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

wrong, for periods of millions of years it is known that co2 rises AFTER warming

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

we don't even know if the same thermometer was used for the decades at each station (and there are gaps of years and decades), we don't know the time of measurement in half the cases ("morning", "evening")

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

bad assumption the same thermometer used for decades at a station, there are gaps of years and sometimes more than decade per station

you are silly thinking "statistics and physics" can overcome that

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[rubycodez]

invalid assumption that same thermometer even used at a station over the decades (with the huge gaps of years), and the time of measurement not known "morning" "noon" "evening"

building a house of cards on rubbish is what has been done

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[AutodidactLabrat]

All we need are a current baseline comparing current tree-rings to precipitation / temperature for more than a hundred years (which we have) and then we only need look at local fossilized remains to backtrack.
Like I said, good all the way back to 50K BCE.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[techno-vampire]

Thank you. Asked and answered.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[riverat1]

The scientists are aware of all of those problems and have taken steps to mitigate the problems and have explained it all in the scientific literature. If you think it's all rubbish you need to publish some scientific evidence to show that. Otherwise you're just blowing smoke.

Re:records go back to 1880, very funny

[FirstOne]

"40 years, another 1/2 trillion tonns of CO2".. is a significant under estimate!

Humanity is currently dumping 36 billion tonns(2013) of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Projecting out using 2.1% yearly growth rate, humanity will hit that 1/2 trillion tonn mark in 2025. Just 11 years from now.

Wording...

[ndogg]

Records go back to 1880. Experts say there's a good chance global heat records will keep falling, especially next year because an El Nino weather event is brewing on top of man-made global warming.

That's not a confusing sentence at all...

No

[bugs2squash]

No, no it didn't happen. La La La La La - I can't hear you

Re:No

[mtrachtenberg]

No, no it didn't happen. La La La La La - I can't hear you

Please consider running for office as a GOP candidate -- you've got that special je ne sai quoi.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Please climb under Obama's desk tonight.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got that highfalutin ass thing about you. The type of snarky puke holier than thou that makes me want to not do whatever totalitarian police state crap you come up with.

FU.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

How cute, someone pretending the dems and repubs are different camps. I guess you really do have fingers in your orifices.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't believe I am being a grammar nazi in French ;)

it's sais, not sai. Pronunciation is of course without the s

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

If you attempt to make a stupid joke in French, and you obviously can't speak French, at least use Google to check your spelling. Otherwise, stick to what you know.
(Not a French person).

Re:It's about time

[Ol Olsoc]

You talking about Phil Jones?

How interesting, Tell me all about the science.

Re:It's about time

[bunratty]

I wonder what's making all that ice melt then.

Re:It's about time

[MightyMartian]

How many times does this cherry picked claim have to be posted. Warming did not stop for 15 years, for chrissakes, and you're either a liar or a moron for restating it.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

No temperature increase? Only if you're ignoring ocean temperatures. Measurements have shown a lot of the temperature increase has been going into the oceans over the past decade or so:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/09/what-ocean-heating-reveals-about-global-warming/

not a record

[rubycodez]

Earth provably warmer in the "recent" (less than 12,000 years) past, and moreover that higher peak held for 3,000 years from 7500 B.C.

The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd, so is basing billions of euros and dollars of cap and trade scams upon them

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the earths population wasn't as large 'way back when'.

The coastline ending up a few more miles inland didn't matter as much when there was room for the population to move back from the edge.

Now ?, well, a large proportion of the worlds most densly populated areas may well become uninhabitable, and really, no where for large numbers of people to go.

The only 'easy' fix is less people, and I imagine one way or another, that will be the outcome.

Re:not a record

[timeOday]

So before continuing, your position is that the earth is warming, but is unavoidable, or will cost more to correct than to let happen, correct?

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because reverting to the population and civilisation levels of 6500 years ago is absolutely something we want to do.

Seriously, what are you trying to argue here?

Re:not a record

[zippthorne]

Those statements have been conceded on both sides of the issue....

Re:not a record

[quantaman]

Great news if you want to live in the holocene.

Not so good of news if you think a significant environmental change in the middle of a mass extinction is a bad idea.

Re:not a record

[bug1]

"The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd"

Understanding reality is not hysteria, trying to deny it is.

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

Denying "the coming ice age" in the 70's was understanding reality, denying "global warming" today may also be. Your confidence in your position is closer to hysteria than it is to reality.

Re:not a record

[riverat1]

Earth provably warmer in the "recent" (less than 12,000 years) past, and moreover that higher peak held for 3,000 years from 7500 B.C.

You won't be able to say that in 2100 unless we get real serious about the problem.

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

and really, no where for large numbers of people to go.

Siberia.

One day, people will be saying how cold this place used to be.

Nebraska... think "Sahara".

Probably import some camels back over here.

Besides, there used to be camels here ...

Re:not a record

[Namarrgon]

Nope. There are still a number of "skeptics" claiming that the earth is not warming, and most scientists believe we can still avoid the worst of the warming yet to come (though some significant warming is now inevitable). Also, most economic studies of climate impact & mitigation (e.g. the Stern Review) have concluded that it will be much cheaper to mitigate CO2 emissions ASAP and avoid the costs of adaption.

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Earth as a whole was NOT warmer in recent past. There is ZERO data to back up that assertion. You're simply making things up.

Cap and trade isn't a scam, its a free market based solution....kind of like how the exchanges are a free market based insurance solution...but hey, you people have shown your true colors, you dont REALLY like the free market...at least not when you dont come up with it.

Oh, and those climate models? They're so accurate, that at this point they can reproduce all recorded observations from 1900 to present.

The only absurd thing here is your level of ignorance, which is simply staggering.

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

the only fix is less people - neither easy nor popular, but inevitable.
if you want to identify deniers, it is those who don't admit population is the underlying global problem.
there are many pressure points, one of which is GW
food and energy are probably greater and more immediate unavoidable issues.
The way I see it is farmers wont be able to afford to grow crops... game over.

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

"The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd"

Understanding reality is not hysteria, trying to deny it is.

Global warming is a fact based on empirical evidence...

The theory that humans are a significant contributor is the real question, and its a question that the current models are not able to answer without a dose of speculation and assumptions. All of our current computer models have "blind spots", but they are our best-guess.

The Earths temperatures, to the best of our knowledge, has always waxed and waned. The question is: are we causing it this time?

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the earths population wasn't as large 'way back when'.

The coastline ending up a few more miles inland didn't matter as much when there was room for the population to move back from the edge.

Now ?, well, a large proportion of the worlds most densly populated areas may well become uninhabitable, and really, no where for large numbers of people to go.

The only 'easy' fix is less people, and I imagine one way or another, that will be the outcome.

What about if everyone moved "distance_coast_moved_inland_in_meters" meters inland at every point? I know, it's ridiculous, but only slightly more than your idea there is "no more room" left on the Earth.

Re:not a record

[Anonymous Coward]

"The hysteria and FUD and the billions of dollars and euros wasted on "climate modeling" is absurd"

Understanding reality is not hysteria, trying to deny it is.

Denying reality is exactly what climate scientists do when they receive new data contradicting their current models. Denying reality is what climate scientists do every time they propose an improvement to the model and are shouted down because it means revisiting old assumptions.

Re:not a record

[Whorhay]

What kind of fantasy bollocks is this?

There are certainly a lot more people living on the Earth today than in past millenia. But we also know how to sustain way more people on far less land than was necessary then. Remember world hunger problems are not actually a food production problem, it is a financial and political problem. In fact here in the US one of our more energy and land intensive crops to farm is subsidized heavily to prevent over production and we still turn a lot of it into Ethanol pretty much just for a feel good effort.

There may not be any unclaimed land left, but there is more than enough space to resettle every single coastal city futher inland. And that isn't even taking into account the extra land area that would be made more habitable in every way by the rising temperature.

Maybe we'll end up with wars between nations which have extra dry land and those that need to relocate entirely, but I don't see any reason that this has to be the case.

Re:not a record

[micahraleigh]

You're saying the only fix is murder.

Is everyone here posting from prison?

Re:not a record

[MrBigInThePants]

Nope - not in the way you mean.

If action was taken right now, with current technology, we could make a meaningful long term impact. The fact that this will not happen is due to lack of will, not lack of ability.

Now when being pessimistic, people refer to the above as "unavoidable". But this is quite obviously the wrong word since it could be.

Re:not a record

[rubycodez]

you are very funny, you imagine people are going to stand in place for over a century while the ocean rises few millimeters a year? what is the lifetime of typical house or office building?

Re:not a record

[rubycodez]

most of the thousands upon thousands of climate models are discarded. trivial to cherry pick one that matches past events, that's called "cooking the books". Note the models and approved from ten years ago have been proven to be complete rubbish. we can't model climate, we've proven that. And the IPCC has been backpedalling on its dire predictions with every report to the UN in the last 15 years

Re:not a record

[im_thatoneguy]

All this silly "Volcano Warning" FUD. Why, 100,000 years ago, this whole land was covered in Ash and lava from a giant super volcano. Why should I evacuate or worry about this "volcano warning"? Billions of dollars on Volcano Warning systems when people used to co-exist just fine with volcanos without freaking out every few decades about "imminent death". /s

Doesn't matter to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I have property in both Canada and Costa Rica. Hot or cold, I don't care, as long as it kills the fucking mosquitoes.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, he made some sort of font, *and* a website! He's super qualified to talk about global climate change.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad it isn't possible to mod a post "Flamebait" and "Insightful" at the same time.

Still cooler than the MWP

[Anonymous Coward]

And, the coldest period in geologic time came at a time when the CO2 concentration was more than 20 times what it is today.

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[BenSchuarmer]

Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?

As for the the earth being colder during the Devonian period when CO2 was higher, the Sun was significantly dimmer back then.

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[Bartles]

So, the sun is getting brighter...

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[Curunir_wolf]

Do you have a citation saying that the MWP was warmer world wide?

Yep. There's one right here. And here is another one you won't like.

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[Anonymous Coward]

Brighter and hotter (well, emitting more heat). Mercury has also seen a little global warming of its own.

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[riverat1]

Yes, as the Sun ages it gets brighter. Graph

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[Anonymous Coward]

The first one of those links only deals with the north pacific/antarctic waters which, while certainly a large area, does not say anything about global temperatures. It's worth noting that it's generally accepted, and certainly in line with what that paper suggests, that those areas were the most effected by the medieval warm period.

The second link is from a rather dodgy seeming lobbying group, and poses as a literature review. I say poses as without any critical review, which I do not have the expertise nor time to perform, it's reliability is unknown. Although the fact that the first sentance reads: "Climate alarmists claim that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations due to the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, gas and oil, have raised global air temperatures to their highest level in the past one to two millennia." certainly gives the impression that this was not written as an impartial review of the evidence, but as justification for their jobbying efforts. If it was written as a serious attempt at science it is certainly poorly done as it consists almost solely of isolated exerpts from papers devoid of their context, it has none of the analysis or explanation of the state of the field necessary in a literature review.

In short the first link looks like a genuine and well done paper but it doesn't say anything about the global temperature. The second link is suspicious as hell, and is either deliberately written to push an agenda, or is a terrible attempt at science that would never pass peer review.

Re:Still cooler than the MWP

[Curunir_wolf]

In short the first link looks like a genuine and well done paper but it doesn't say anything about the global temperature. The second link is suspicious as hell, and is either deliberately written to push an agenda, or is a terrible attempt at science that would never pass peer review.

Your ad-hominem was highly predictable. Try responding to the content, instead of looking for nefarious motives. It's a meta-study of other papers. It's well-referenced and you can go read all the papers they cite yourself.

The point is, there are MANY studies (go find your own citations, if you don't like mine) that show that the MWP was, indeed, a global phenomenon. I won't even try to explain why that's not widely reported, nor the entire history of scrubbing the episode out of the IPCC reports.

It's hard to keep the stories straight these days

[dbraden]

And at the same time, there's a story that the NOAA has been fabricating their temperatures for years: The scandal of fiddled global warming data

No problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Just turn up the AC.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You have confused a lack of statistical significance with a lack of warming. I can't tell if that's deliberate obfuscation or you're just a moron.

Warming continues unabated. Nonsense from liars and morons can't change that.

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

I dunno.. Do you?

http://www.techtimes.com/artic...

Re:It's about time

[narcc]

I know I was worried. When they changed the name from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" and then "Climate Disruption" I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't get the warming I was promised.

An El Nino plus extra warming? Sign me up! I can hardly wait!

Full disclosure: I'm a rabid pro-global-warming zealot.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

Shameless adjustments of the data set to suit the global warming models or just trying to make the observations fit the theory?

Your choice...

Re:It's about time

[bunratty]

I believe it to be the heat trapped by greenhouse gases released by humans burning fossil fuels. I don't think there are suddenly volcanoes popping up all over Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic.

Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[Hussman32]

The question is not only if the climate is changing, but if it's directly related to CO2. Robert Essenhigh's point is quite interesting. http://bit.ly/11IsUri

Re:Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[drinkypoo]

The question is not only if the climate is changing, but if it's directly related to CO2. Robert Essenhigh's point is quite interesting. http://bit.ly/11IsUri

It was quite interesting until he failed to explain how heat produces CO2, after claiming that it was easily explainable; when he claimed that a ~5% increase in CO2 release from burning fossil fuel for energy was "statistical noise" and implied that it was the extent of industrial production of CO2, he became a denialist liar. There are numerous other industrial sources of CO2; for example, the production and curing of concrete alone (not accounting for the CO2 release of burning the energy, already accounted for here) accounts for approximately 2.5% of our CO2 emissions. Iron and steel production are likewise carbon-intensive processes, even putting aside the energy consumption. He also doesn't back up his statement that only two possible causes deserve explanation, nor what the four possible causes are, etc etc. He also blames the entire thermal forcing on water vapor, but relative humidity (the only kind of humidity he mentions in the linked page) is decreasing due to rising temperatures.

tl;dr: Essenhigh is trivializing human CO2 production, which exceeds volcanism, and also failing to back up his statements.

Re:Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere 130% modern levels. CO2 is 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. Temperature a WHOLE 3 DEGREES C over modern times â" Oh noes!! The Jurassic DGW, Dinsaurogenic Global Warming, shows that those Dinosaurs with their Airplanes and Cars and stuff, you know, those Dinosaurs and their DGW destroyed THE WHOLE PLANET!! With their DGW! Look, who wants 26% atmospheric oxygen? More air to breathe? Who wants that! And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2! Who wants that! And we DON'T want the massive biodiversity of the Jurassic, no, we don't want more plants and animals and trees, no.

Any time period they want to "prove" this they just cherry pick ranges. And they have the perfect example, the Dinosaurs and their horrible DGW, Disnosauric Global Warming, destroyed the Jurassic - wait, no , it didn't, it was the best time for life on earth with 1950 ppm CO2!

Another Cult of the Church of Climatology propaganda piece.

Re:Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue isn't the ppm. It's the rate of change. We're still a couple orders of magnitude away from equalling the largest volcanic outgassings the Earth has ever seen...which means we're on target to equal them in ~10^3 years. For comparison, the Deccan Traps formed over millions of years. We do about one Yellowstone supervolcano's worth of CO2 per year. The rate of change is entirely unprecedented. Volcanic sources of CO2 are otherwise the biggest driver in the change of atmospheric composition. We have them beat by a factor of hundreds. I know even you are not so dumb as to think that if we jumped it up to 1950ppm tomorrow, we would have the same 10-meter high ferns as the Jurassic the next day. If you'd like to test that idea, you can get a CO2 generator, and pick the plant of your choice. Depending on the plant, you will stop seeing increased growth between 1000-1500ppm of CO2, and signs of CO2 toxicity at higher levels. On a global scale, you would also have a higher percentage of carbonic acid in the oceans. Also, high levels of atmospheric carbon are associated with increased runoff and plankton blooms. Go look up "global anoxic event". We're working on recreating the same conditions that the oil was formed in. And there's no sign that we're going to stop at 1950ppm either.

Talk about cherry-picking your facts. Hold on to that one gem, even though it's been debunked. That way you don't have to deal with the consequences of being wrong.

Re:Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[Hussman32]

It's not a mystery. The solubility of CO2 in water decreases with increasing temperature (dissociation constant of water increases, increasing hydrogen ion concentration, which pushes the equilibrium of carbonate towards molecular H2CO3, then CO2). Anyone who has opened a can of cold soda and let it get to room temperature has seen this.

Regarding inventories: The ocean inventory is 155,000 gigatons with 1,000 gigatons in the thermocline, and there is 150 gigatons annually of exchange. Human contribution is 10 gigatons annually, which would be in the measurement error of the other sources.

We need to reduce pollution, so if the climate change arguments will drive a large population that is generally uninformed towards greater efficiency, then great. But don't slaughter legitimate scientists for being appropriately skeptical. That is, after all, the fundamental tenant of the scientific method.

Re:Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[Anonymous Coward]

So we caused the last global anoxic event too? Even though we weren't here?

Re:Is it if A then B, or is it if B, then A?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you fucking nimrod, that wasn't his claim.

Re:It's about time

[bobbied]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

OR for the article's sources you can look at.

https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/author/stevengoddard/

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[schwit1]

Be careful. Speaking truth to power with this administration means a visit from the IRS or the climate change police.

Re:It's about time

[bobbied]

But it seems to have stopped in the USA for that time... Globally might be another story.

Has the data been modified? Some have done that in the past and seem to be doing it now in some cases. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

Does that invalidate your view? Perhaps not, but it does add to the case that you might be wrong.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[bhlowe]

What, was that posted on FauxNews or the Sludge Report? /sarcasm

NOAA, please shut up.

[sk999]

In my area, our records predate the NOAA. We had the coldest season ever for Dec-March. We had snow in April. We had freezing precip. in May. June has been pretty nice, but we are about to head below normal once again. For anyone who has the idea that we need to cool the Earth back down, just go away.

Re:NOAA, please shut up.

[MightyMartian]

Because regional conditions represent global conditions.

Re:NOAA, please shut up.

[hackus]

and because global conditions do not represent regional conditions?

That is equally insane.

Re:NOAA, please shut up.

[ColdWetDog]

Excellent. We'll all move over to your house. Recall the first word in the phrase "Global Warming".

Re:NOAA, please shut up.

[riverat1]

Obligatory xkcd.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Mashiki]

People seem to have this reality problem, when they can't figure out that drudge is an aggrigator and posts news from all spectrum's of the isle. From Alexjones to Motherjones and everything in between. I guess reality has a factual bias for you.

Re:It's about time

[ultranova]

Warming did not stop for 15 years, for chrissakes, and you're either a liar or a moron for restating it.

Not really. Notice the word "warmists" there? It's used as a tribal identifier. In other words, symbolset's post is actually a boast against a perceived other tribe - no different than "your mom's fat". The actual content of the message is not about your mother's body composition, nor Earth's climate, but rather "this is our territory!". It's only an unfortunate accident of evolution that we use the same mechanism for establishing dominance than we use for problem-solving.

It's quite fascinating how much of human communication is utterly unrelated to its nominal content. And it also explains why these discussions tend to degenerate into poo-flinging contest in short order.

Re:It's about time

[MightyMartian]

The Telegraph and a denier's site. Yes, so very convincing.

Your argument is invalid

[BadPirate]

1. Decide your position
2. When findings are presented that call into question your position, find any flaw with said findings. Preferably one that can't be verified.
3. Present flaw as proof that the findings are not only invalid, but through being invalidated prove your position

Re:Your argument is invalid

[Anonymous Coward]

You ARE a Bad Pirate! That was one weak ass attempt at hijacking this thread.

Re:Your argument is invalid

[ColdWetDog]

1. When the law is on your side, pound on the law.
2. When the facts are on your side, pound on the facts.
3. When neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound on the table.

Re:Your argument is invalid

[Anonymous Coward]

Number 2 is a part of "the scientific method".

Which is hated by the political group supporting "manmade global warming" pseudo-science, who will rather silence critics rather than go back to the drawing table when someone points out flaws in their "theory".

pfft

[Anonymous Coward]

really dont give a shit about a 200 year old record. Get a dog, find somebody to love.

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

Sigh..

What has significantly changed in the oceans so that they do not play a role any other year except when it appears to be cooling or the warming lapsed?

Here is the problem with blaming the oceans. The effects we see aren't new. they were present in the past, they will be present in the future. Separating them when it is convenient is misleading and outright dishonest because you do not separate the effects at other times. It is like saying 2+2 is 4 except when you have less than 5 and some weird unknown rule kicks in and you add 1 but it is still accurate because you want it to be.

Now it is true that the oceans do absorb and release heat. It is true for measurements in 1999, 1918, 2006, 2014 and it will be true for measurements in 2025 and 3000.

What is true also is that the entire "Ocean did its thing so the lack of warming all the sudden is not real" is impossible to test because of decadal oscillations and rotational current patterns. The temp and effects of the temps in the Sargasso Sea for instance will naturally change with deviations in the North Atlantic decadal oscillations as well as the migration of the currents which pretty much guarantee changes in temps from year to year.

The importance of the linked article is for climate modeling, not debunking the lack of observed increases in warming.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

What sources? I see assertions and name-calling, but no actual data.

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

I believe I will believe the science being done by scientists. Granted, they are from Texas and Texas is an oil state, but it's up for peer review in the journal "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" and I have yet to find anyone challenging it.

http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...

But then again, I believe in sky fairies as long as we are confessing our beliefs in things.

Re:It's about time

[geekoid]

You know that 'scandal' was completely shot done as a media created event, right? Did you fail to notice that as soon as actual facts came out Fox et. al. stopped talking about it?

i don't care about this stuff.

[NemoinSpace]

As long as all you blowhards die along with me, I will consider entropy the most effective form of government. Seriously, you guys need to die NOW. I don't wanna wait till the poles melt.

Re: i don't care about this stuff.

[NemoinSpace]

ALL of the Chinese care less than I do. I don't have real evidence to back up this claim. But the cloud is making backups obsolete. Thankfully for you, I think that Slashdot rate limiter is going to kick in soon.

What planet are these people from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it's not like there are regional variations in temperature. If it's cold where you are, it must be cold everywhere, right?

NOAA, please shut up.

[Anonymous Coward]

And in my area, it's been a much warmer winter and spring than usual. We had heat waves back in January when the rest of the country was in that polar vortex. Stop thinking that your area represents the entire world.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Goddard = not scientist but expert on global climate change? Think I'll consult him about my bone cancer. He's just as qualified.

Re:It's about time

[Muros]

Full disclosure: I'm a rabid pro-global-warming zealot.

You burn as much coal and oil as you can?

Re:It's about time

[geekoid]

No, it has not been modified, you should look deeper into that story.

Look at the record since 1880 it rise, levels, rises. levels and so on.
If there wasn't man made global warming then there would be rise and a return.
Look,m the global warming science is fairly simple. Certain actor in the industry are paid to intentionally make it seem confusing.
Pay attention:
1) Visible light hits the earth. Falsifiable, and tested.
2) When visible light strikes something, IR is generated. Falsifiable, and tested.
3) CO2 is transparent to visible light. Falsifiable, and tested.
4) CO2 absorbed energy from IR. Falsifiable, and tested.
5) CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Falsifiable, and tested.
6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.

That's it. That is global warming. If you disagree with that, then you need to prove where the science is wrong. I look forward to your noble prize winning paper.
If you read that and still think it doesn't impact the climate(climate change) then you need to show where the absorbed energy is going.

Seriously, stop being a dolt.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

Telegraph is a climate denier site.

Re:It's about time

[ArmchairGeneral]

Absolute rubbish! This 'story' goes alllll the way back to 2007 when they realized the measurements were incorrect. Goddard is recycling old news to spread FUD. He's an idiot for not doing the proper research!

Read it here http://www.geotimes.org/aug07/...

Re:What planet are these people from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, another pseudo-intellectual that is deluded into believing 'xe' is smart because of what 'xyrs' liberal professors told 'xem' in college. How very 'tolerant' of you to judge someone on the merit of disagreeing with you.

According to Yale professor's Dan M. Kahan recent analysis, it is the type of person that is attracted to "the drudge report" that have better scientific literacy and comprehension then those like yourself.

Re:It's about time

[geekoid]

They never changed the name. Please stop being so freaking stupid.

Global warming = Energy captured by excess CO2
Climate change = how global warming impact the climate.
Climate disruption= Economic change do to climate change.
Te first two came int' use almost at the same time.
They are all related but different things. No one is changing anything. I understand the the media confuses the terms, and some pundits use that as some sort of ad hom attack, but you need to be better then that.

Who cares?

[WaffleMonster]

Outcomes from surveys where technology, sensor placement and encroachment of cities even if super careful have error bars on the same order of signals from multi-decade surveys... are... mostly... useless.

They always result in the same tired predictable rumblings of fools who see what they want.

All the while very important and relatively uncontested facts such as continued decrease of ocean pH and sea level rise are summarily ignored.

GLobal warming scien is simple

[geekoid]

why are so many people her suckered by pundits?

Pay attention:
1) Visible light hits the earth. Falsifiable, and tested.
2) When visible light strikes something, IR is generated. Falsifiable, and tested.
3) CO2 is transparent to visible light. Falsifiable, and tested.
4) CO2 absorbed energy from IR. Falsifiable, and tested.
5) CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Falsifiable, and tested.
6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.

That's it. That is global warming. If you disagree with that, then you need to prove where the science is wrong. I look forward to your noble prize winning paper.
If you read that and still think it doesn't impact the climate(climate change) then you need to show where the absorbed energy is going.

Some of you are very disappointing, falling into ad hom attacks and bad science. Scien that can trivally be checked out. But no, some of ypu moron keeps spouting the same crap.
AGW is a scientific fact.

Re: GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep and can measure the co2 levels in the air trapped in the article ice. And it's at it's highest concentration

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[drinkypoo]

6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.

While I agree with your point, we can't track CO2 molecules to find out where they came from (yet? maybe someday. advances in physics? not today.) so this statement is unsupportable, and it's not _strictly_ true anyway. Human release of CO2 doesn't exceed "natural" release overall, from things like decomposition. What it does is push beyond the planet's ability to sink the CO2. IMO, you should say instead that "Excess CO2 is a result of human activity exceeding the Earth's ability to dispose of it" or similar.

Not at all trying to detract at all from your post, which I agree with completely, only fiddling with wording to make it less potentially objectionable to denialists. I'm sure it won't help, because they can deny anything, but anyway.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

While I agree with your point, we can't track CO2 molecules to find out where they came from (yet? maybe someday. advances in physics? not today.) so this statement is unsupportable, and it's not _strictly_ true anyway.

I've got bad news for you, because we can. Not all carbon atoms are the same. This is trivial science, so find your own reference.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[drinkypoo]

I've got bad news for you, because we can. Not all carbon atoms are the same. This is trivial science, so find your own reference.

We cannot tell precisely where they came from. We can tell if they potentially could or could not have come from a particular source, but not if they actually came from that specific source. This is trivial science, so find your own reference.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[khallow]

And how much warming does that "simple" phenomena cause? It's interesting how much effort is devoted to debating the radiative model and how little to whether global warming is a serious threat or not, or if it is, what, if anything we should do about it.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Uberbah]

'6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Speculative and not agreed'

Nice try, unless you're sitting on a supermassive volcano that nobody knows about, one that's been building for the last 50 years or so. But, that's the easy thing about being an anti-science troll...you just move on the to next canard, no matter if it's one that's been debunked a hundred times over. Because those debunkings haven't been reposted in this conversation. And when they are....you just move on to the next canard. Next in the rotation: scientists were worried about a new ice age in the 70's, so you can't trust anything they say!

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Kaenneth]

Some of us just don't care about some One Percenter's waterfront mansion.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

The Jurassic period. O2 in atmosphere 130% modern levels. CO2 is 1950ppm, 5-7 times modern levels. Temperature a WHOLE 3 DEGREES C over modern times â" Oh noes!! The Jurassic DGW, Dinsaurogenic Global Warming, shows that those Dinosaurs with their Airplanes and Cars and stuff, you know, those Dinosaurs and their DGW destroyed THE WHOLE PLANET!! With their DGW! Look, who wants 26% atmospheric oxygen? More air to breathe? Who wants that! And who wants more CO2 @1950 ppm, you know, to make all those plants and trees convert that CO2 into a higher O2! Who wants that! And we DON'T want the massive biodiversity of the Jurassic, no, we don't want more plants and animals and trees, no.

Any time period they want to "prove" this they just cherry pick ranges. And they have the perfect example, the Dinosaurs and their horrible DGW, Disnosauric Global Warming, destroyed the Jurassic - wait, no , it didn't, it was the best time for life on earth with 1950 ppm CO2!

Another Cult of the Church of Climatology propaganda piece.f

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I suspect people are suckered because the pundits oversimplify complex things and state things that are true, but not the truth. In the same way that you grossly oversimplified the complex system that dictates the temperature of the earth. If it were as simple as this, the effects would be obvious (linear), and short term variations would simply not exist, as there are no drivers, according to the model you describe, for them. Since there are short term variations, we must logically conclude that your model is insufficient.

I am amazed that anyone would think that the climatological system would have fewer variables in it than something like aerodynamics. This is a little like predicting the position of an object due to gravity and ignoring the effects of the atmosphere on the object. Well, it might be accurate enough if you are talking about a steel ball dropped from a small tower, but doesn't account for the flight of an airplane or dirigible with a mass of many of tons. The affect of gravity is the likely the most important component of objects' behavior, but not necessarily the dominant one, likewise with CO2.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[angel'o'sphere]

Natural CO2 releases are irrelevant as they build a cycle of release and 'absorbtion'. E.g. your example of decomposting is wrong, decomposting is a zero sum game. Exactly the same amount of carbon is released that originally was incorporated into the plant during its growing (and actually one learns that in school in third or fourth grade ... )

So bottom line the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere is 100% man made. Well, 95%? Not sure if there was an event in recent history that had a natural release.

Re: GLobal warming scien is simple

[mpe]

Yep and can measure the co2 levels in the air trapped in the article ice. And it's at it's highest concentration.

The problem here is that ice does not immediatly (if ever) form an inert gas tight container. So comparing air "trapped" in ice with current air samples is somewhat "apples and oranges".
Indeed the "elephant in the room" with "climate science" is a frequent inability to understand concepts like the need to compare "apples with apples". Or even the physical limits of the methods used in general.
Typically the closer one looks at it the worst things look.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[rrohbeck]

The carbon increase in the atmosphere can a) be compared with the amount of fossil fuels burned and b) has a different isotope isotope composition because 14C has only a few thousand year half life so fossil carbon is practically devoid of 14C. Not speculative at all, falsifiable and tested.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[riverat1]

While I agree with your point, we can't track CO2 molecules to find out where they came from (yet? maybe someday. advances in physics? not today.) so this statement is unsupportable, and it's not _strictly_ true anyway.

While we can't track the source of individual CO2 molecules we can measure the ratio of 12C to 13C in the atmosphere. Because photosynthesis prefers the 12C isotope the fossil fuels from plants have a higher ratio of 12C to 13C than the atmosphere. The measured ratio has been changing as expected if the source of the added CO2 is fossil fuels.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[tp1024]

Congratulations, you've acurately described what happens when you put a couple of glass panes on the moon. Your "atmosphere" isn't an atmosphere.

An atmosphere consists of gasses. You may want to review the properties of gasses. One of them is: they are not solid. This means, when a part of a gas attains a higher temperature than the surrounding gas within a field of gravitation, the hot gas will rise up. The hot gas is rising up, it takes thermal energy with it, regardless of how much CO2 is in the gas. The amount of heat thus carried by a given amount of gas depends linearly on the temperature of the gas. The amount of gas actually carried depends linearly on the temperature gradient of the atmosphere (that is: the temperature difference between the cold upper part and the warm lower part). The stronger the effects you described the a) higher the temperature of the gas and b) the larger the gradient.

Beyond that, the surface of the earth consists to a fairly good approximation entirely of water. Under the conditions of our atmosphere, water will evaporate. Its rate of evaporation depends on the temperature of the water surface and the relative moisture content of the atmosphere. The relative moisture content of the atmosphere is controlled by precipitation. Hence, a rise in temperature will lead to increased evaporation. Evaporation "consumes" energy which is "released" when the water condenses again. Evaporation happens in lower areas of the atmosphere than condensation. Heat is being released in the upper atmosphere, that came from the lower atmosphere. (That's true even when rain evaporates before reaching the surface.) Heat is being transported and CO2 didn't have anything to do with it.

In both cases, the higher the temperature at the surface, the higher the heat transport. And you know how much heat is already being transported in those two ways? 60% of the total.

Science is when you don't ignore stuff that is important.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

If only scientists were as smart as you, we would have much simpler radiative transfer equations.

Heat is not "released" in the upper atmosphere. It is radiated. We call this outgoing long-wave radiation. Evaporation has fuck-all to do with energy transfer to space, unless you think that Earth is continually boiling off its atmosphere. The effect of a higher partial pressure of CO2 is to expand the CO2-rich region further into space, which means that OLR takes a longer path to escape the atmosphere. It is a relatively small effect, but multiplied by the immense amount of solar irradiation and a couple centuries, it results in significant warming. This was first calculated by Arrhenius in 1896.

Congratulations, you've just described the lower atmosphere. If you want to make up shit in order to assuage your cognitive dissonance, invent a new method of heat transfer to space.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Eunuchswear]

So bottom line the increase of CO2 in our atmosphere is 100% man made. Well, 95%? Not sure if there was an event in recent history that had a natural release.

Actually the CO2 increase is about 200% man made - i.e. we're releasing around twice what the increase is. Turns out that natural sinks can take up about half of what we release.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Pinatubo and Mt St Helens both released about the same amount of CO2 per hour as humanity, for a short time. We do two Pinatubos per day (one every 12.5 hours), and "one or more" Yellowstone supervolcanoes per year.

Pinatubo is apparently the largest release of CO2 since 1912, for what that's worth.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[PortHaven]

Curious, how much CO2 is released to form an island?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

How much during earthquakes?

Truth is, all this talk of natural balance of CO2 is hogwash. Read up on the Cretaceous period. CO2 levels were much higher. Temperatures were up to 20 degrees higher.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you pay attention:

1. Plant life begins to die at 150ppm CO2. Falsifiable and tested.
2. All human life on Earth will die without plant life. Falsifiable and tested.
3. Atmospheric CO2 reached a critically low point of 180ppm before we started to turn it around. Observed.

Burning fossil fuels bought us a few more years before CO2 starvation wipes out everyone on the planet.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[tp1024]

When water condenses, it heats up the air or makes it cool down more slowly than completely dry air. When air is warmer or less cold than in a comparative case, it will radiate more heat to space. The water itself will proceed to precipitate back down to the surface. That's what you call the water cycle and I don't care who was the first to describe it, because it is a basic enough phenomenon that I don't need to refer to higher authority to say it's true.

Also, if you had actually read the piece by Arrhenius you would have noticed that he assumes away the processes which I described and said that nothing about the convective heat transfer changes, because those things are much harder to calculate.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[REALMAN]

Really? Falsifiable and tested??

Says who? You?

You never did mention that CO2 is only about 0.039% of the atmosphere and is just a TRACE gas. You forgot to mention that the IPCC has stated publicly that there has been no significant warming in over 17 years.

Never mind. The sky is still falling. Eat your bug protein and pay your carbon credits while Al Gore and those like him laugh at you in their million dollar carbon spewing mansions, eating Steak and Caviar while they drop your money into their bank accounts to pay for seaside properties they claimed would be inundated by the flooding waters due to global warming.

Stay asleep and stay stupid.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoiler, no one is arguing that point. Everyone is arguing about the possible feedback loops created by CO2. CO2 by itself is incredibly weak as a greenhouse gas. The who theory (has anyone even read an IPCC report?) is based on CO2's warming causing an increase in humidity, which is much more powerful and plentiful as a greenhouse gas. We haven't seen and increase in humidity and the satellite data shoes we are warming at 1C/Century.

I'll trust the hard data over the computer models of people interested in getting their grants renewed if they are willing to find the politically correct science.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Hussman32]

why are so many people her suckered by pundits?

Pay attention: 5) CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Falsifiable, and tested. 6) The VAST majority of excess CO2 in the air is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.

That's it. That is global warming. If you disagree with that, then you need to prove where the science is wrong. I look forward to your noble prize winning paper. If you read that and still think it doesn't impact the climate(climate change) then you need to show where the absorbed energy is going.

Some of you are very disappointing, falling into ad hom attacks and bad science. Scien that can trivally be checked out. But no, some of ypu moron keeps spouting the same crap. AGW is a scientific fact.

Re 5: The CO2 concentration is controlled by the temperature and pH of the oceans. The pH is not driven by CO2 as it's a weak electrolyte, and the overall pH of the ocean is about 8.0 (which is alkaline). CO2 equilibrated water pH is about 5.5. If air CO2 concentration is rising, it's because the ocean (which may be warming from something like undersea volcanic activity or dozens of other natural phenomena) belches it out.

Re 6: False. Check the data (http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/the-carbon-cycle_a224#). Natural sources are 90 gigatons from the ocean interactions, 60 gigatons from land based sources. 10 gigatons at most from human interaction. There are 750 gigatons in the air.

Nobody said the climate isn't warming, we're in a 10,000 year warming period compared to recent history. The question is what humans have done to influence it, and that question is far from resolved. I agree it warrants further study, and the overall the effects of reducing pollution are positive, but let the questions be answered by the scientific method, not rhetoric and politics.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Uberbah]

Truth is, all this talk of natural balance of CO2 is hogwash. Read up on the Cretaceous period. CO2 levels were much higher. Temperatures were up to 20 degrees higher.

The next canard: hey we've had climate change before, so this is no big whoop! Read up on your drivel, as periods of rapid climate change happen after big events, like the asteroid that took out the dinosaurs, or the eruption of a supermassive volcano - and are accompanied by mass extinction events. Dinosaurs didn't choose to put a big rock on the path to their planet, though.

But that's the great thing about being an anti-science troll - you'll just move on to the next Big Lie. Up next: hey, it's really the sun getting hotter!

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

What a pis weak analysis of the situation.

Almost everyone knows the facts that you have outlined. Woo. Woo.

The question is whether the global feedback loop is negative or positive. If positive then we are in trouble as the effect of the warming is amplified. If negative then the effect is damped down. The core argument is around the feedback loop.

Most natural systems have a negative feedback loop and tend to dampen the long term effect. Most models CMIP5 group tend to assume a positive feedback to a greater or lesser amount.

And no AGW is not a scientific fact. GW is a scientific fact. There are still heated (no pun intended) discussions around feedback.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[angel'o'sphere]

Turns out that you are wrong. There are no natural sinks that suddenly get triggered and where off-line before mankind started to produce so much CO2. The only 'sink' is the accidiation of the oceans (and ordinary lakes ofc) ... so we have a bit less in the atmosphere but what we have less there is in the water now

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[micahraleigh]

Then why are there so many shenanigans here?

1) Heavily fudged East Anglia Institute records 2) Discredited IPCC papers (discredited by the IPCC 3) Discredited NOAA records

If it was a scientific fact, then why are the scientists working so hard to cook the books?

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Methadras]

You neglect massive oceanic water vapor evaporation that does effectively the same thing and far an away exceeds the levels of CO2. Even still, if AGW was a scientific fact, so what? Adaptability here will be the key to overcome it. Normally cooler locked geography will experience some warming and may provide arable land after decades if not millennia of non-usability possibly. Furthermore, outside of your backhanded ad hom on the rest of us, please, tell us what you want the nominal surface temperature of the earth to be after your rant? It's nice that you can ply scientific facts on us all (thank you captain obvious) but you offer no viable alternatives nor solutions to this horrific menacing scientific fact horror. Oh the huge manatee!!!

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Your forgetting that the energy that is absorbed by the CO2 is no longer being absorbed by what the CO2 blocked. Economists call this an opportunity cost.

So, more CO2 means more heat absorbed by CO2, but less heat absorbed by whatever the light would have struck had the CO2 not been there.

If we were to only get heat from CO2 absorbed energy, then you would be correct. To further your "proof" you need to show that the amount of energy absorbed by CO2 is greater than whatever it would have struck. If it is less, and if the CO2 reflects some of the heat energy, then the manmade CO2 would actually be fighting against the rise in temperatures. If it's the same, then there is no point in regulating the CO2.

Now you might point out that the CO2 prevents the earths surface from emitting the energy back out into space, but don't forget that by the atmosphere absorbing the heat to begin with, the surface should be less warm, and have less to emit back out.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

Really?
A. Introduction
B. Observed Changes in the Climate System
C. Drivers of Climate Change
D. Understanding the Climate System and its Recent Changes
E. Future Global and Regional Climate Change

Do you know what this is? Its the table of content of the IPPC WG1 fith report SPM which stands for 'Summary for Policy Makers'.
Want to hear more about the risks? Here is the table of content of the WG2 fifth SPM report:

A: Observed impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation in a complex and changing world
B: Future risks and opportunities for adaptation
C: Managing future risks and building resilience

Thses and more in depth reports that explain the underlying science are available at the IPPC site (www.ipcc.ch).

Either you decide that all this science is just crap (like many climate denialists seem to do) or you have to accept that global warming is a serious problem that is created by men for which the scientific comunity has provided huge amounts of evidence, warnings and pointers to possible causes of action.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[khallow]

And this is the same report which has a factor of three difference between the low and high estimate for carbon dioxide's effect on global mean temperature. Argument from obfuscation combined with confirmation bias is just as scientifically invalid as all the other games that get played with climate change arguments.

Either you decide that all this science is just crap (like many climate denialists seem to do) or you have to accept that global warming is a serious problem that is created by men for which the scientific comunity has provided huge amounts of evidence, warnings and pointers to possible causes of action.

No, I think I'll decide instead that the case just hasn't been made yet. All this verbiage from the IPCC wastes my time. Nail down the key problems and parameters, don't just merely assert that there are problems in a huge number of pages without any underlying evidence to back it up.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron. Water vapor is negligible above the tropopause. And yes, we have more descriptive equations today than Arrehius did. You're just claiming -- based on assertions and error -- that your own equations are better, and not disclosing them.

But yeah, I'm sure that you know more than every atmospheric scientist, even though you very obviously know nothing about the atmosphere.

Re:GLobal warming scien is simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you don't understand the effects at all. Increased CO2 means that the CO2-rich region extends further from the planet. Outgoing long-wave radiation is absorbed and re-emitted many times on its way out of the atmosphere; the mean free path is I think a few meters. Google it if it matters to you. More CO2 means heat energy takes a longer time to escape, not that it doesn't escape at all. Everything warm is going to radiate heat. TFP, HAND, read science instead of making up shit.

Re:What planet are these people from?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is global warming, not the local weather in a denier's backyard.

Godless progressives

[Bodhammer]

I don't get you proglodytes. You hate people, hence your support of abortion (murder) even though there is a "scientific consensus" that life begins at conception. So the earth warms and kills off a few billion people and in 500 years the earth recovers and reverts back to the mean. What is the problem? So a few species go extinct, new species will form ala Darwinism. Get over it, global warming is natural, people came from evolution so if we caused a change, it is "natural" and the "natural" system will fix it.

You can't have it both ways - either humans are part of the system or above the system - which is it?

Re:Godless progressives

[drinkypoo]

You can't have it both ways - either humans are part of the system or above the system - which is it?

With a relatively low (Sub-1M) UID, I expect a better troll from you. How much did you pay for it?

Re:Godless progressives

[Bodhammer]

your mom gave me some extra cash...

Re:Godless progressives

[gweihir]

There is no such consensus. In fact it is completely wrong. Both the egg and the sperm are alive before conception. The question is actually a different one, but you are likely unable to even understand it: When does a human being begin to exist.

You are stupid, dishonest, disgusting. Go kill yourself, which is about the only way you could contribute something positive.

Re:Godless progressives

[Khashishi]

Actually, your spermatozoa or ova are also alive, and so are some of the skin cells you are shedding, so it doesn't follow that life begins at conception.

Re:Godless progressives

[Sarius64]

...and you they said you couldn't be courteous or civilized!

Re:Godless progressives

[Bodhammer]

Ahh, the tolerance of progressive fascists for conflicting ideas is so refreshing! Praise Gaia!

https://www.princeton.edu/~pro...

'Earth smashed record for heat'

[Snufu]

Pssh...steroids.

Re:It's about time

[thaylin]

You are way off base there. You have to separate the ocean data because its temperature changes MUCH slower then everything else, ask your neighborhood chemist about specific heat. The problem is that because of this it has a longer lasting effect then the ground or air temps, because it is going to retain that heat into the fall and winter months, keeping those temperatures higher.

Deniers can't make up their minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that the global warming deniers can't decide whether warming isn't happening, it is happening but it isn't human-caused, or it is happening, it is human-caused, but it isn't economical to do anything about it? It can't be all 3, yet the deniers can't seem to get their story straight.

The truth is that it's the 3rd option. Deniers first argue that it isn't happening. When science proves them wrong, they then argue that it is happening but isn't human caused. When science proves them wrong again, they fall back to their real position that despite it existing and being human caused, it isn't worth doing anything about because that would take work and cost money. It's very dishonest.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[Bodhammer]

Please stop confusing the issue with facts. Are you new here?

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[Livius]

You answered your own question.

They go through the different versions until they reach the one that convinces their target audience, and as a last resort fall back on economic reality.

And of course it's dishonest.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[Anonymous Coward]

One could make the same claim about "claimers" - cooling is warming, no significant change is warming, warming is warming, timeslice 15 years, timeslice 5000 years, timeslice 100 years, formula "data massage" accurate, raw data is accurate, raw data is inaccurate, raw data with formula #2 "data massage" is accurate, global is local, local isnt global, weather isnt climate, "global warming", now "climate change", and so on.

Try picking an argument and sticking with it.

Better yet, stick with the raw temperature data and base the supposed "settled science" fact claims on that, instead of statistical sampling and extrapolation and rationalized elimination/modification of locations/times/etc of raw data.

Its "funny" how difficult it is to find any straight published raw temperature data that hasnt been "modified/re-normed" etc from the same sources and at the same time "modified" and "massaged" and "statistically resampled historical data" of some period are published.

I wonder why that is.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[iggymanz]

science has proved what?

this isn't the hottest year on record, and artic ice levels are greater than last years which were greater than the year before

antarctic glaciers not melting because of global average temperature rising, but volcanoes

in fact, science says the hottest years in the last 13,000 years for a whopping 3,000 year stretch occured over 7,000 years ago, hotter global average temperatuer than now.

what is it with the guilt over progress, the hysteria you warming alarmists have?

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, stick with the raw temperature data and base the supposed "settled science" fact claims on that, instead of statistical sampling and extrapolation and rationalized elimination/modification of locations/times/etc of raw data.

Do you think they didn't normalize any of the data they used to show that smoking was correlated with lung cancer? Or the data that they used to prove that DNA and not protein was the genetic material? Or the data they used to prove the presence of the Higgs Boson? All three had "massaged data" according to your definition. If you don't believe in global warming that is proven by "massaged statistics," you might as well stop believing in these other things as well. Get a clue: Modern science was born from statistics.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[riverat1]

They go through the different versions until they reach the one that convinces their target audience, and as a last resort fall back on economic fantasy.

FTFY

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[angel'o'sphere]

Arctic ice is not more than in recent years, how do you come to that braindead idea?
No, the antarctic glaciers are not smelting because of vulcanoes! For fuck sake, if you see an article with the words: ice, antarctic, volcano - then perhaps you should actually READ IT?
The vulcanoes let the ice shelfs 'flow faster' than originally. expected, that is all.
Of this not the 'hottest year on record' on many places of the world. After all we had a strong countering El Niña effect the recent years ...

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[serviscope_minor]

science has proved what?

Global warming is happening.

what is it with the guilt over progress, the hysteria you warming alarmists have?

Why do morons like you confuse facts with feelings. Fact: the earth is warming very fast due to all the CO2 being dumped in it.

That fact has nothing to do with whether this is a good thing or bad thing, whether progress is good, whether it will "matter" in some universal sense (ultimately, no, of course not), and etc.

So basically your argument is: science hasnt prooved anything because it was warmer in the past and your a anti progress poopyhead

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[dave420]

It's still June. The ice *area* might be increasing, but ice *volume* is steadily decreasing. The Antarctic glaciers are being partially melted by geothermal heat, but the majority of the melting is still from the climate.

At least get your facts straight before trying to single-handedly debunk an entire field of science. That way you won't look quite so stupid.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[iggymanz]

yes, arctic ice went to a minimum in 2012, then a little more in 2013 and (thus far) 2014...the "braindead idea" is straight from NASA,must hurt to hear something that conflicts with your religion

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it that the global warming deniers can't decide whether warming isn't happening, it is happening but it isn't human-caused, or it is happening, it is human-caused, but it isn't economical to do anything about it? It can't be all 3, yet the deniers can't seem to get their story straight.

The truth is that it's the 3rd option. Deniers first argue that it isn't happening. When science proves them wrong, they then argue that it is happening but isn't human caused. When science proves them wrong again, they fall back to their real position that despite it existing and being human caused, it isn't worth doing anything about because that would take work and cost money. It's very dishonest.

Non-scientists should educate themselves and become scientists, or should not make judgements about "what science proves".

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I think it's the opposite.

Wow it's hot outside. Climate change.
Wow it's cold outside. Climate change.
A hurricane destroys a town. Climate change.
A tsunami hits an island. Climate change.

Why can't the conspiracy theorists make up their minds? So if the weather is anything other than average, they cry "climate change!"

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[angel'o'sphere]

You are simply wrong :)
In summer there is often no ice at all, and that there is ice in winter is normal. Different coverage areas in winter are not called climate but weather.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[MutualFun]

Why is it that the global warming deniers can't decide whether warming isn't happening, it is happening but it isn't human-caused, or it is happening, it is human-caused, but it isn't economical to do anything about it? It can't be all 3, yet the deniers can't seem to get their story straight.

The truth is that it's the 3rd option. Deniers first argue that it isn't happening. When science proves them wrong, they then argue that it is happening but isn't human caused. When science proves them wrong again, they fall back to their real position that despite it existing and being human caused, it isn't worth doing anything about because that would take work and cost money. It's very dishonest.

Well said. The question is this, IMO:

a) If warming/climate change is a myth *and* we do something about it, what is the cost? As stated above, economic impact. We pay more for solar, alternate fuels or vehicles, etc.

b) If warming/climate change is NOT a myth and we do *nothing* about it, what is the cost? Well, we all get permanent sunburns and move inland.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[SomeoneFromBelgium]

it is happening, it is human-caused, but it isn't economical to do anything about it

The truth is that it's the 3rd option [option mentioned above].

Well if you read the IPPC report you would find out that it's the oposite. It's not economical NOT to do anything about it.
The costs incurred by letting GW continue and fighting all the resulting changes are much higher than trying to minimize the impact as much as possible.

Re:Deniers can't make up their minds

[iggymanz]

there is always ice in arctic, there is ice-free area around pole. The minimum of september "average extent" was in september 2012.

Re:It's about time

[symbolset]

This was going to be a poo flinging festival no matter what.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

About what I would expect to find here on /. Same people that go to AOL, YAHOO, HuffnPuff Post, PMSNBC and CNN and would rather throw the stones at Fox or Rs than offer something constructive.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

The problem is you take something like the paper you cited and act as if it's the only thing causing ice melt rather than one factor among several. Also, do you have any idea how long those geothermal heat sources have been active? Unless they just became active in the last decade or two how can you say they have much to do with the current melting?

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

Ok, then separate the oceans from the other readings and claims of warming. That is the point, it is either built in, meaning you walk outside and take the temp and it is accurate despite the oceans, or it is not and needs separated completely.

The problem is that the oceans also contribute to the recorded heat. Only considering them separate when it is convenient or when the temp readings are inconvenient is misleading bordering on fraud.

NOAA Findings

[hackus]

So what?

Whether you believe the alarmists like Al Gore telling every one you need to live in a card board box, for the sake of his elitist friends and pay all of your income in carbon taxes, or the outright liars who claim Humans have zero affects on climate change:

One thing is for certain, postulation about whether or not it is actually a bad thing to have the earth warmer or colder isn't something either side seems to acknowledge because obviously the earth during the last 250,000 years of human existence has been way hotter and way colder than it is now.

Further more, I am more worried about plans to INTENTIONALLY overload the biosphere with idots thinking a complex multi billion year old planetary biosphere is as simplistic as what they create in the lab and draw conclusions on.

I mean crazy bat shit conclusions like spraying the atmosphere with aerosols or sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere on purpose.

THAT is what scares me, not global warming or cooling or whatever you believe.

Re:NOAA Findings

[drinkypoo]

I mean crazy bat shit conclusions like spraying the atmosphere with aerosols or sucking the CO2 out of the atmosphere on purpose.

What's crazy about fixing the CO2 that we've released?

Re:NOAA Findings

[Anonymous Coward]

Its most definitely a bad thing.
Its most definitely getting warmer.
And it most definitely has not been hotter in the past, deinitely not "obiviously" so, unless you want to go back to before life existed.
Eevn if life survives, humankind won't, and that alone is reason to work to correct it.
Again: the denier falls back on making up things without proof, and then says theres nothing we can do, and it doesnt matter

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe climate exists either.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

That depends on what you mean by modified. The data have been adjusted to account for a sorts of things that cause problems with the temperature record such as changes in instrument, changes in weather station location, changes in the time of day of observations, changes in the environment around the weather stations. Scientists wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't account for and make adjustments for those issues.

If you think they modified the temperature records just to produce a result they wanted then it's up to you to prove it scientifically.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

Sigh..

What has significantly changed in the oceans so that they do not play a role any other year except when it appears to be cooling or the warming lapsed?

Sigh ...

Are you on about that again? Nothing has significantly changed in the oceans. They still do what they do. What's changed is the level of data we have about them since the Argo floats were deployed starting in 2002.

Smash?

[jklovanc]

I am not so sure you understand what "smash" means. The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces in 2010 was 0.72C. The same data for this year is 0.74C. I would hardly call 0.02C as smashing.

Re:Smash?

[the eric conspiracy]

0.72C?

Surely that must be a relative measure.

Re:Smash?

[jklovanc]

It is a relative measurement from the 20th century average. Still, 0.02C is a small number. I wonder if that is within the margin of error of the readings?

Re:Smash?

[digsbo]

Agreed. The text is this:

"With records dating back to 1880, the combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces reached a record high for May, at 0.74C (1.33F) higher than the 20th century average. This surpassed the previous record high anomaly of 0.72C (1.30F) set in 2010."

You would expect records to be broken by small margins from time to time. I wonder if there was a record cold month in the past 15 or 20 years?

Re:Smash?

[digsbo]

To answer my own question, definitely not. But realizing that there's a bit of variability in the data set, this certainly qualifies as an inflammatory description of expected data. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/...

Re:It's about time

[bobbied]

Hmmmm... Guess I won't argue with you given your mind is made up but #6 is a bit dogy for some and #1 isn't exactly what's happening... But Ok..

The assumption you make at the end though is breathtaking.... Is the data showing global warming in a manor that equates it to man made C02? Ummm, not so much. Indications are that warming/cooling has been gong on for billions of years before man started burning anything more than trees, and the levels of C02 in the atmosphere don't seem to have anything to do with those cycles. (By your logic, they COULDN'T have anything to do with it.). Yet you just out and connect the dots here anyway.

Good luck and prepare for Armageddon, because if you think your huffing and puffing about the man made part of this will matter to the geopolitical realities of this world, you have some really harsh lessons coming. Global warming or no, Man made or no, you can bet that countries like Russia, China and the like who would rather see you dead anyway will simply not care about your proofs or your science and methods or the world's greater good. They are going to burn their fossil fuels at greater and greater rates, and even if the rest of the world stopped now (which is unlikely) there isn't anything you can do... Better start digging shelter and stocking it with food, water and ammo.

Habitat Destruction is a Bigger Issue

[Mars729]

Global warming is clouding the bigger issue of habitat destruction. Human beings have altered the planet significantly. We have taken a significant proportion of the planets biomass to devote to agriculture. The fact that aerial insectivores are doing badly suggest that flying insects are in significantly lower numbers and biodiversity. Bees are in trouble due to colony collapse disorder leading to losses of crops because flowers are not getting pollinated as often.

We have made great cities. Aside from the land these cities take, a substantial amount of resources are required to sustain them. Wood, fossil fuels and minerals are all required in vast quantities. Forests get altered, the air and water get polluted.

The oceans are in trouble due to overfishing. For most commercial fish there is only 10% or less of its original abundance. Plastic is accumulating in the ocean.

MInor in comparison are street lights. Nocturnal bugs get trapped by lights and are easy prey in the morning. Many nocturnal species of bugs are getting reduced in numbers or going extinct.

Massive habitat change will cause climate change ... and the consequences are complex and unpleasant.

Re:It's about time

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Ummm, not so much. Indications are that warming/cooling has been gong on for billions of years before man started burning anything more than trees, and the levels of C02 in the atmosphere don't seem to have anything to do with those cycles.

Major logical fallacy here. If we know that A causes C, it doesn't automatically mean that B doesn't cause C as well.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

no you need to prove your absurd comments. sun spot activity and volcano's are the driving force in climate change.there is no scientific evidence to prove otherwise.
theories,conjecture and,pre-programmed computer models are not proof.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You made sure of that, didn't you? Oh, I almost forgot....you're a poo-head!

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

The source of heating is believed to be a tearing apart, or rifting, of the crust under the Antarctic ice sheet. This allows movement of magma and creates volcanic eruptions, melting the ice. Liquid water and geological activity under the sheet allows the massive feature to slip off the continent.

So yes, it does appear that it is recent as in happening now. Otherwise tearing would have been replaced with something like torn apart and allows would likely have been allowed. So even if they were active in the past, the wording suggest it is happening recently.

Not quite that simple

[Sycraft-fu]

The big spoiler that makes models a bit more difficult is water vapor. It is both more prevalent than CO2 in the atmosphere and more variable in the amount (CO2 is pretty uniform, water vapour varies a lot based on location, time of year, etc). Also when you look at the absorption spectra, water vapour absorbs larger bands of IR than CO2, particularly in the thermal IR region.

That's not the only extra bit of complexity, but it is one that confounds the situation.

Now before you fly off the handle and start screaming and ranting: I'm not challenging the validity of the theory here, I'm just saying you are oversimplifying things. Going after people for being stupid, but then showing ignorance of the complexity of the issue is rather silly.

The problem is that it is complex. If it were a simple system, we'd likely have a very accurate model for it. The complexity is precisely why despite general agreement on the theoretical mechanism of action there are such wide error bars on the predictions.

Re:Not quite that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

Water vapor isn't a spoiler - the bands that it absorbs are different from the bands that CO2 absorbs. That's all there is to it really. There's so much water in the atmosphere that water vapor bands are essentially entirely absorbed. We can't reduce the amount of water in the atmosphere, and we wouldn't want to even if we could, so any gains that we make have to be outside the water absorption spectrum.

Re:Not quite that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not challenging the validity of the theory here, I'm just saying you are oversimplifying things.

To paraphrase: I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying you are wrong.

Everything, everything is more complex than how it is explained. That can't be changed. All we can do is use words and numbers to describe thought about something somewhere that happens to be probably real. That is the entirety of human communication and understanding. That is it. Saying someone's explanation is 'showing ignorance of the complexity of the issue' can always be used to derail any debate into philosophical naval gazing about how specific we need to get in order to derive meaning. It is a cheap tactic when you have nothing tangible to say except a spirit of 'I might disagree', and yes, I realize I am doing the same thing.

Re:Not quite that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you are oversimplifying with misleading handwaving about absorption spectra, without providing any comprehensive explanation or reference on the subject. The fact that water quickly precipitates out of the air, for instance, is a crucial aspect of the sub-topic that your handwaving conveniently omitted. The GP was far more justified in omitting water vapor than you were in omitting its role.

In fact, even the RealClimate site has presented AGW in (count 'em...) six steps!

Water creates a positive temperature feedback in the Earth's climate, but not a forcing. You're trying to suggest it may be the latter. This subject was beaten to death last decade and its settled.

If I were the GP my list might be seven deep instead of six, to account for the fact that feedbacks exist although positive ones are stronger than negative ones. It would still only be a caveat to what is a pretty decent overview.

Re:Not quite that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

This.The amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is essentially constant because 70% of the earth's surface is water. If there could be more there would be. Yes the atmosphere will hold more water when it's warmer but if you look at the curves that's not going to be the main driver, CO2 is.

Re:Not quite that simple

[Anonymous Coward]

we do have very accurate models.
these models have recreated all recorded observations from 1900 to present.

water vapor is not a poiler as such. its part of the natural cycle. just like the natural CO2 cycle can be accounted for (animals/plants breathing), leaving behind our contribution to the atmosphere. the only really variable thing about water vapor is that as the planet warms up, there will be more in the atmosphere. but compared to the warming contribution of our CO2 (and other) emissions, its barely even a blip on the radar screen.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

as they have done in the past and will do in the future.

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only the atmospheric temperatures which leveled off. Water and ground temperatures continued to rise, as expected.

Re:It's about time

[bobbied]

That depends on what you mean by modified. The data have been adjusted to account for a sorts of things that cause problems with the temperature record such as changes in instrument, changes in weather station location, changes in the time of day of observations, changes in the environment around the weather stations. Scientists wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't account for and make adjustments for those issues.

If you think they modified the temperature records just to produce a result they wanted then it's up to you to prove it scientifically.

So you accept that the data is modified. Problem for your clean argument is that it seems that the data has been modified in such a way that increases the global warming trend, by increasing the bias of the data upwards as it gets newer. Without "correction" there is no global warming (or it is minimal at best). I would LOVE to see how that is justified.... I suspect that what we have is circular logic by the activists, mainly because the RAW data is not usually used by most of these studies...

So, it is really not my question to answer given that the unmodified data supports my view. Why was the data adjusted and what was the logic for these adjustments? My side hasn't adjusted the data, your side has, you have the burden of proof here.

Re:It's about time

[bobbied]

Ummm, not so much. Indications are that warming/cooling has been gong on for billions of years before man started burning anything more than trees, and the levels of C02 in the atmosphere don't seem to have anything to do with those cycles.

Major logical fallacy here. If we know that A causes C, it doesn't automatically mean that B doesn't cause C as well.

So burning trees caused global warming back in the stone age?

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course no one can duplicate this. No one can refute it. And no one doubts it.

Listen to the fool, become the fool.

Listen to slashdot, become a fool.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

i am 58. this is the third time elnino has been blamed for the ruin of all mankind.of course brought on by are own actions.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

They never changed the name. Please stop being so freaking stupid.

Global warming = Energy captured by excess CO2 Climate change = how global warming impact the climate. Climate disruption= Economic change do to climate change. Te first two came int' use almost at the same time. They are all related but different things. No one is changing anything. I understand the the media confuses the terms, and some pundits use that as some sort of ad hom attack, but you need to be better then that.

You can try and argue that all you want if it helps you believe it. That doesn't make it true and everyone knows it but you. They did from a marketing standpoint move away from Global Warming to now it's known as the generic of generics "Climate Change". They figured out that umbrella term can now be the cause of any local weather related event.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure you would be quick to quote skepticalscience.com.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

bullshit.when one is disproven changing the goal post wont help.bs is bs.

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty soon a new name will be coined: Global Warming Induced Ice Age because that's what the massive tinkering with the atmosphere to offset imaginary warming is going to trigger.

Re:What planet are these people from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone should have told those enviro-nazi's that got stuck in the ice growth trying to prove ice decline.

So east coast central US is a region that can be overlooked, eh? One million square miles makes a hell of a region.

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

And you do not seem to understand.

Regardless of what the oceans are doing at this moment, unless they all the sudden started doing it, it has been happening for all of time. Well, with it's variations within the system. So either the temp measured today is as valid as the temp measured yesterday, or 150 years ago, or the temps measures yesterday and 150 years ago are invalid also- due to the oceans.

You see, you cannot change mid stream and trot something that has always existed out when it is convenient or the temp record becomes inconvenient. The data as presented needs to be at least congruent with the calculations within it. Otherwise it is smoke and mirrors trying to hang onto belief that doesn't appear to be true any more.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Get serious. There is nothing in that paper about increasing geothermal flux. Nothing. Any rift under West Antarctica has been there for many glacial cycles. You really have no clue what you are talking about. Read my link. It has quotes from the authors of the paper you are spreading lies about.

Re:It's about time

[ColdWetDog]

You do have a point, but it must be realized that ocean currents (and structure) have changed over time. The Atlantic conveyor has formed and collapsed and reformed - the continents move around which obviously changes currents as does raising and lowering of mean sea levels. So you can't add the same numbers into the mix - it's complicated and poorly understood.

four significant figures?

[Anonymous Coward]

really?

Re:It's about time

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I don't think so. Trees aren't made of fossil carbon extracted from reservoirs that don't partake in the short-term carbon cycle, there aren't all that many of them anyway, and any increase of CO2 caused by wildfires gets re-sequested fairly soon in form of new vegetation in those places.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, he didn't delete the data after ignoring 5 years of FOIA requests and then claim that he didn't have enough storage space for it? Because that is exactly how Phil Jones tells the story.

How has that been shot "done" as a media created event? Oh, I see, you can't explain the actual facts so attempted to make up your own so you can ignore it.

Re:It's about time

[sumdumass]

Read my orignal link.
http://www.techtimes.com/artic...

I can see how they would back down from that.

http://www.americanthinker.com...

http://gawker.com/arrest-clima...

It's not like they are free to say anything about anything they find without fear of repercussions.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]Good luck and prepare for Armageddon, because if you think your huffing and puffing about the man made part of this will matter to the geopolitical realities of this world, you have some really harsh lessons coming. Global warming or no, Man made or no, you can bet that countries like Russia, China and the like who[/quote]

When exactly did China and Russia tell you they want to ensure our mutual assured destruction? Ever heard of The Kyoto treaty? I dont think it was China or Russia that caused that to fail. That propaganda for the simple minded. People are people, regardless of those imaginary lines on the globe.

Your huffing and puffing is more than likely funded by the biggest profiteers in the destruction of the future of mankind, oil companies.

Nice moderation, dbag

[drinkypoo]

Here, maybe this will help. You can tell whether it's a fossil fuel or not, but not whether a person burned it, or where it came from. You can't even tell it if came from coal or oil, since both are made of C13. You simply cannot determine the original of an individual atom of carbon once it has been released into the atmosphere, only what kind of course it came from.

When you find an individual C13 molecule, you do not in fact know that human activity released it.

Note that I have argued passionately in favor of the AGW theory in this thread, so if you are moderating me down because you think I don't believe in global warming, you're an idiot.

Re:Nice moderation, dbag

[mpe]

You can tell whether it's a fossil fuel or not, but not whether a person burned it, or where it came from. You can't even tell it if came from coal or oil, since both are made of C13. You simply cannot determine the original of an individual atom of carbon once it has been released into the atmosphere, only what kind of course it came from.

IIRC where the carbon ratios of oil, coal and (petro) methane have actually been measured they have been found to vary. Even in some cases including C14. AFAIK nobody is currently monitoring the carbon ratios of what comes out of the ground, never mind fuels which wind up being burned.
Other fractors which could easily affect observed ratios in atmospheric carbon dioxide include agriculture and even temperature.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

No one (except maybe some extreme fringe scientists) has ever claimed that El Niño is the result of human activity. Stop conflating this with global warming. Why is it that global warming deniers never understand even the most basic facts about climate science?

Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the reason why I rarely read Slashdot anymore. Commentators are shrills for the agenda and so full of themselves they can't even debate.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

If anyone is responsible for a marketing change, it's the Koch brothers. Global warming sounds scary. But climate change? Hell, that might even be good for us. Quick, let's double our oil consumption so we can get more climate change!

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

He got you. Just admit it.

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello Dr Roy Spencer ?

Still passing off that cherry picked analysis with over stated importance as science ?

Or is this Rog ? Congrats on being published in a extinct journal for skeptics and bad research. Very proud.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

The data was largely not produced by that institution -- It wasn't his to give away.

Re:It's about time

[khallow]

There is nothing in that paper about increasing geothermal flux. Nothing.

Fortunately, we have other places where we can look. It's well known that volcanoes are not constant in behavior or nature. They have spurts of activity. This is universal behavior for any volcano we can observe, even for relatively well-behaved volcanoes like Mauna Loa or Stromboli.

So for volcanic activity in Antarctica, we would, like any other volcanic activity on the planet, expect it to have periods of greater and lesser activity. So while it hasn't been shown that there is increasing geothermal flux (it may well be ice melting in the face of decreasing geothermal flux), this is something that has a greater effect than previously thought on the current situation in Antarctica.

About effin' time

[Opportunist]

Can't wait to finally get Summer from May to October. To hell with southern Europe (well, they might have matching temperatures at least).

And no, that's no invitation for either side of the fence on the Global Warming war. To hell with both of you. You, the global warmer deniers and you, the "the sky is falling" heaters. I don't give a shit anymore whether this planet goes to hell in a handbasket. Basically, the sooner the human race wipes itself from this surface the sooner the planet can start regenerating and maybe eventually even host intelligent life.

Re:About effin' time

[Windwraith]

Yet you are happy to use products created by other humans. I don't believe your anti-human charade.
Remember that the only reason you are here writing against humans is because humans allowed you to do it. Since it was not your invention, I think you owe humanity an apology. Know your place.

Re:About effin' time

[Opportunist]

Just working on humanity's downfall from the inside.

Re:It's about time

[cheater512]

Thats strange. The appearance of facts generally doesn't stop Fox at all.

Re:It's about time

[cheater512]

"I believe" at the start of your sentence? Slashdot doesn't generally tolerate religion very well you know.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

Here is a graph of raw data vs. adjusted data from the GHCN. The difference isn't large enough to affect the conclusions.

Why the data was adjusted and the logic for it are available in the scientific papers on the subject. Here is a document that discusses the reasons and methods of adjustments for the USHCN. I you want more detail you'll have to dig for it yourself.

*GHCN/USHCN = Global/United States Historical Climatology Network

Calling would-be Nobel laureates!

[Anonymous Coward]

All you have to do, apparently, is to codify the brilliance of these hundreds/thousands of Slashdot comments, and falsify the conclusions in NOAA's and/or the IPCC reports. Why are you just sitting here bloviating instead? There's actual $$$ rewards for this sort of thing.

Posting anonymously because I have no interest in the regurgitated shit shoveling that always accompanies these stories. I expect instead of making relatively modest changes to our energy portfolio, we'll continue burning hundreds of millions of years worth of fossilized vegetation (because, sure burning all that in a century or so can't have any effect whatsoever) and arguing about this until the economy collapses due to environmental degradation.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

What the ocean have do they have done for all of time (at least as long as we care about). But on short time scales there are periods when more of the heat goes in the oceans and periods when more goes into the atmosphere. Quasi-cyclical things such as ENSO, the PDO. the AMO affect how much heat is absorbed by the oceans vs.the atmosphere. In the long run though they average out to zero effect.

English Empire?

[rossdee]

It was the British Empire back then, The Scotch and the Welsh went out and conquered the world too.
Remember the 24th Regiment singing Men of Harlech as they fought off the Zulus at Rourke's Drift in 1879

Re:English Empire?

[funwithBSD]

No I don't remember, even my great grandfather was but a gleam in my great great grandfather's eye.

Re:English Empire?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are "Scots" you insensitive clod.

Scotch is the national drink

Gold stanard

[rossdee]

"Uh why is mercury thermometers, baromiters, and sphygmomanometer's considered the gold standard then?"

Because if you have actual molten gold in the tubes of your measuring devices you know its getting too hot...

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

The warming and cooling of the past million years was largely driven by orbital changes collectively known as Milankovitch Cycles. But those cycles operate on scales of 10,000 to 100,000 years. The changes in them over the past 200 years have almost zero effect and what effect they do have is trending toward cooling after they reached a peak about 10,000 years ago.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't stop you from quoting the fat fuck Gore back in the day, did it?

Don't lie. You know you did.

Re:It's about time

[funwithBSD]

Goddard's site shows the current NOAA chart, and the previously published NOAA chart.

The "smoothing" to fit the AGW story is pretty evident, and he is using THEIR data, so there is no "denying", just your projection.

Re:What planet are these people from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, it's "global warming" again? Seeing how there has been none over the last 18 years, what evidence do you have to support this warming? Not one of the models produced over the last decade, certainly, as they were all proven vastly inaccurate.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

> People seem to have this reality problem, when they can't figure out that drudge is an aggrigator and posts news from all spectrum's of the isle. From Alexjones to Motherjones and everything in between. I guess reality has a factual bias for you.

According to this statistical survey of stories on Drudge from 2002 to 2008, the hard-right breitbart.com was the largest source of links at drudge with 14.45% - sources with mild-left tendencies like WaPo and NYT only make #4 (6.26%) and #6 (3.38%) - hard-right sites like motherjones don't even crack the top 10 list.

who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

everyone is wasting energy trying to get people to change their behaviour, it's not going to happen. only an engineering solution can lock in the environment that currently best serves the nations in power.

Re:It's about time

[funwithBSD]

Obviously you would not look at the actual article and graphs presented, or you would know the smoothing is done on pre-1970s data, not 2000-2007 data.

 

Feel the Fear

[Curunir_wolf]

WooHoo! We're back baby! It's on.

Feel the fear, shitizens. Feel the Fear. Buhahahhaha!

Re:It's about time

[funwithBSD]

Beans. Lots of beans.

Methane is more powerful than CO2

Re:drone convention

[Anonymous Coward]

you would hope to see a little more healthy skepticism toward government-funded "science."

In the 21st century, 99% of all research is government funded. Diabetes study at Johns Hopkins? Money came from the NIH. Robotics research at Carnegie Mellon? Funded by NASA. Particle physics at Fermilab? NSF. This is even more true abroad.

Particularly when consensus is not so much a word as a fucking chant

It became a chant after the Koch brothers spent millions astro-turfing to raise "independent thinkers" (i.e. disgraced fringe scientists) with "insightful questions" (press statements written by Kock & Co.). What do you think would happen if five scientists at CERN (pockets lined with cash) started claiming that Higgs-Boson research was a massive conspiracy after ten years of conspicuous silence. Yeah, there would be plenty of "consensus" chanting then too. And before we get too far into accusing special interest groups of cooking up global warming, let's not forget that a Koch brother funded study actually came out in favor of the global warming theory.

the solution is always to give over more of your money and freedom to the governments who fund these findings

This is the same shit cigarette companies pulled when NIH-funded research started to show links between smoking and cancer. They're just trying to sell you nicotine patches, they said. They're just making excuses to raise cigarette taxes, they said. And for decades, idiots like you believed them.

What we do know is there have been warmer periods, colder periods, and CO2 has been around through all of it.

This is a perfect example of the inane bullshit that denialists say as if it proves a point. Guess what, there have times where there were lots of droughts, times when there were very few droughts, and there have been lakes and evaporation around through all of it. Does that prove that lakes and evaporation have nothing to do with droughts? No, you idiot. There are more droughts when lake water-levels and evaporation levels fall. Likewise there is more warming when CO2 increases.

false

[Anonymous Coward]

enjoy your hockey stick graphs fagot, lap them up like a good little bitch

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

> Climate change = how global warming impact the climate.

The phrase "climate change" was specifically cooked up by a republican spin-meister to make the phenomenon sound less scary.

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

The problem is you take something like the paper you cited and act as if it's the only thing causing ice melt rather than one factor among several.

Hmmm... that sounds familiar.

Re:It's about time

[JimSadler]

Climate disruption may also refer to human lives splattered all over by wind storms created by warming whether man made or nature made or both. If a hurricane or tornado scrambles your poop before it leaves your body you will feel disruption more acutely than if your wallet blew away.

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

When exactly did China and Russia tell you they want to ensure our mutual assured destruction? Ever heard of The Kyoto treaty? I dont think it was China or Russia that caused that to fail.

China agreed to it because they were exempted from everything, and they are now the largest producer of CO2 on the planet. Besides, it was actually the Kyoto protocol itself that failed, regardless of who did and didn't sign up for it.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.nature.com/nclimate/focus/slowdown-global-warm/index.html

Re:It's about time

[khallow]

No, the term was in use long before him. As I understand it, he proposed use of the term for propaganda purposes. And it looks to me like that term actually is being used for propaganda purposes, just not by the US GOP or the former Bush administration.

People have tried hard to rationalize why using a generic umbrella term for a very specific set of phenomena is scientifically appropriate. But it isn't. Terms are more scientific when they are more descriptive not less.

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

They never changed the name. Please stop being so freaking stupid.

Please, people, PLEASE just stay on message. It's important that we use the proper terminology to maintain more intense worry about the issue, and instill in the shitizens a greater sense of personal threat.

Re:It's about time

[Fjandr]

You mean, 15 consecutive years before all of the other previous records.

Here, try to hide this one too

[drinkypoo]

You're modding me down because I pointed out the stupidity of what someone said. Hell, maybe this is even a second account for that person. Well, mod me down some more. I'll get more karma tomorrow.

Re:Here, try to hide this one too

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you're not getting modded down for pointing out "the stupidity of what someone said," you're getting modded down for being an asshole. Stop it and try having a civilized conversation instead.

Re:Here, try to hide this one too

[drinkypoo]

Dude, you're not getting modded down for pointing out "the stupidity of what someone said," you're getting modded down for being an asshole. Stop it and try having a civilized conversation instead.

The moderation is gone now, so either you were the moderator and thought logging out would be sufficient to prevent your moderation being erased (hint: it wasn't) or the moderator thought better of their moderation, and posted somewhere else to remove it. Unless, of course, you were the moderator, thought better of the moderation and removed it, yet still felt the need to call me an asshole. I hope it's the second option, because the former and latter cases both boggle the mind.

In any case, like likes like, and I gave what I got. I said precisely what was said to me, except it was actually applicable when I said it.

I don't think I'm infallible. Call me out when I'm wrong. Just be sure I'm wrong. I'll try to extend you the same courtesy, even if you're afraid to log in and have your opinions associated with your account.

Prediction

[Michael Woodhams]

When El Nino leads to a new record high temperature by a large margin (for argument's sake, in 2015), the denialists will quietly adopt this as their new standard for 'normal' and in 2025 they'll be saying "warming is a hoax because temperatures haven't risen on average since 2015."

http://xkcd.com/1321/

Re:Prediction

[Eunuchswear]

Global warming ended in May 2014. You heard it here first.

Re:Prediction

[REALMAN]

When you refer to those who disagree with your THEORY as "denialists", your credibility drops to zero. People with sound arguments don't have to demonize others who disagree.

Re:Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

When you overemphasize the word THEORY, as if that somehow indicates a weakness in the science and not your ignorance of the meaning of a scientific term, your credibility drops to zero.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Telegraph? Was that next to that article about that two-headed baby?

Global Warming = Vietnam War

[Anonymous Coward]

NOAA fights back to claim the "high ground" in the war.

In NOAA's war as Nixon's, the citizens of the United States of America ... Think !

In a counter move, NOAA will demand that all USA citizens be inoculated with ... "Agent Orange."

Agent Orange will maintain Zombietification of the drugged citizens to fulfill the sexual urgings of Obama and his Junta.

After all, NOAA is just "Jim Jones at the cool-aide stand" to help the plight of the "Mourners" of the demise of "Climate Warming hysteria".

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

> No, the term was in use long before him.

Sure, for very small values of "use."

> People have tried hard to rationalize why using a generic umbrella term for a very specific set of phenomena is scientifically appropriate.

Words have the meaning that people give them. You sound like one of those autistic geektards who thinks their own personal definitions are the one and only true definitions. Good luck with that.

Not again

[Anonymous Coward]

The denialist morons will be all over this thread, unscientific swill they are.

Re:It's about time

[itzly]

#6 isn't dodgy at all:

1) CO2 has been gently swinging between 200-300 ppm for at least a million years, and all of a sudden it jumped to 400 ppm since we started the industrial revolution.

2) At the same time, oxygen levels have decreased slightly, enough to explain O2+C -> CO2

3) Carbon dating the CO2 shows it is based on old carbon, so it's not coming from the biosphere

4) Total fossil fuel use is more than enough to explain the rise in CO2

5) Ocean acidity has increased, showing that oceans are absorbing CO2 rather than releasing it.

6) CO2 graph shows a smooth rising slope, consistent with human CO2 production, but not consistent with volcanic activity.

Everything points to human origin. If you have a better way to explain where the CO2 is coming from, while at the same time explaining where all the CO2 went that was produced by fossil fuel use, let us have it.

tl;dr version

[Uberbah]

Denialist trolls: explain why Venus is hotter than Mercury despite being much farther from the sun, if CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas with higher concentrations leading to higher temperatures.

Re:tl;dr version

[Anonymous Coward]

Two can play that game:

AGW Trolls: Explain why the US is still not under water, if global warming was true.

Hint: Nobody claimed that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas, and nobody claimed that the US would be under water by now.

Re:tl;dr version

[Uberbah]

Two can play that game:

Then you just ran the ball into your own end zone.

Hint: Nobody claimed that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas

Hint: it's the first step in denying AGW, before moving on to the "it might not really be humans" or "it might not be that bad" canards.

Re:It's about time

[itzly]

Problem for your clean argument is that it seems that the data has been modified in such a way that increases the global warming trend, by increasing the bias of the data upwards as it gets newer.

If the evil overlords controlled the data, and they wanted to show a rise, why did they allow the so called "warming pause" ?

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Uberbah]

Speaking truth to power with this administration means a visit from the IRS

You mean from the one group that was actually denied tax-exempt status? You know, the liberal one?

or the climate change police.

Do you still use leaded gasoline or paint because you don't think the science behind lead poisoning is "settled"? If not, why not?

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm sure you would be quick to quote skepticalscience.com

And why not, the articles on skepticalscience.com extensively reference the original peer-reviewed science. If you don't believe skepticalscience you can go back to the original papers and if you don't believe them you can examine the maths.

That's actually what a reputable site looks like.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Mashiki]

Protip: Motherjones is far-left.

Your bias is showing.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

By the way - are you a denier? Attacking the references is a great denier tactic.

References must always be questioned. First question: are they to a peer reviewed article appearing in a recognised journal. Second question: has this just been published, or has it been around long enough for the expert community to shoot holes in it. That's a start at least.

How does the Telegraph's article stack up against these two questions?

I'll be dead why shouldn't you be?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll deny until it happens and then I'll still claim it is "just nature". What do I care? I'll be dead in a couple of decades hopefully the whole world will go with me!

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[CaptainLard]

Thanks for pointing that out. Its a good thing Christopher Booker (author of your "story") is here to report on NOAA data fabrication.

AND ALSO to let us know that 2nd hand smoke and lung cancer are not related, asbestos poses no risks and the /. favorite...get ready, its a doozy... Evolution is based on BS assumptions and BLIND FAITH and Intelligent Design is the truth!. If you include that last bit when you quote him it will be much easier to keep the stories straight. Your welcome!

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Kaenneth]

I used to set lead type in my parents print shop as a kid, and I'm perfectly fine, even after setting lead type in my parents print shop, it had no effect on me, just like setting lead type in my parents print shop.

Re:It's about time

[sjames]

We have a number of research stations out there. Got any seismograph data to support your theory? There certainly should be some.

Re:It's about time

[symbolset]

You may find this paper interesting. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Re:It's about time

[sjames]

Did you ACTUALLY just claim that visible light isn't hitting the Earth, or did you get confused?

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[CaptainLard]

How the hell did you get a +4 insightful?

Speaking truth to power

Holy smokes are you president of the Christopher Booker fan club?? From his wikipedia page "...he speaks truth to power...". From the 2 minutes of research I've done on him I'd say he speaks truthiness to power. He makes his living as a professional contrarian. All of his pubilished views are the opposite of scientific consensus in a vast variety of subjects. Its possible he could be smarter than all climate scientists, cancer scientists, infectious disease scientists, and Evolutionary Biologists. But there is a much higher likelyhood that he is just full of shit.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

LOL, maybe so but I'm willing to adjust my veiwpoint when I get new information.

Re:It's about time

[sjames]

Perhaps briefly, soon to be reversed by the new trees growing to replace them. But since the trees wouldn't burn completely, some of the carbon would get sequestered long term under layers of soil, so over-all the cycle of burnming and re-growth sequestered carbon and caused global cooling.

We are now busy digging up many tons of that sequestered carbon and burning it.

Re:It's about time

[Khashishi]

You know, when you combine many statistically insignificant measurements together, you can get something that is statistically significant. That's how statistics work.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

And before it was Global Warming it was Climate Change clear back to at least the 1950's.

Plass, G.N., 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change, Tellus VIII, 2. (1956), p. 140-154.

Of course the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was created in 1988.

It doesn't matter what you call it. It matters what the effects are.

Re: It's about time

[riverat1]

ROTFLMAO! We've added so much CO2 to the atmosphere that there's no chance of that for thousands of years.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

Yes, long before him. Gilbert Plass published a paper in 1956 titled:

Plass, G.N., 1956, The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change, Tellus VIII, 2. (1956), p. 140-154.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

Third option, the author of that story is full of shit.

Watermelons!

[blindseer]

The problem I have with global warming alarmists is not so much about the shaky evidence they have but the solutions they propose. These people are watermelons, "green" environmentalists on the outside but "red" communists on the inside. They're solution to every problem is more government, it's just that global warming is a convenient bogeyman to scare everyone into accepting more government.

Whether or not global warming is real is, IMHO, irrelevant. The problem is too much government. If the goal is reduced fossil fuel consumption then the solution is to get the government out of the way. I can get behind less fossil fuels because that means less reliance on foreign sources of oil. Many of the problems we have in this world is because of oil. Those that have the oil tend to be brutal dictators. Those the have the money to buy the oil tend to be in nations free from those dictators. Oil is the means by which wealthy free people can be convinced to give that wealth to murderous dictators.

What we need is nuclear power but, here in the USA at least, the government does not seem interested in an energy source that is low in carbon output, inexpensive, reliable, and safe. To those that will reflexively scream "NUCLEAR WASTE!" I suggest looking up waste annihilating molten salt reactors. With molten salt reactors we would not only not produce more nuclear waste we'd be able to destroy the waste we already have.

Not only does the government hold up nuclear power they hold up solar and wind. The subsidies to "help" solar and wind power do not help any more, they only hurt. We've been subsidizing wind and solar for decades to assist in its development. The problem with continued subsidies is that there is no incentive to improve. The people in these industries know that so long as they can prop up the global warming bogeyman that they will make a profit from government subsidy. At some point they have to sink or swim on their own. Allowing them to continue like this means they need oil and coal to make the money so they can skim off the top to line their pockets.

Subsidies on wind and solar are only holding them back. I don't believe that solar is a viable energy source, wind is something I can see as making a lot of people wealthy. Wind, nuclear, and hydro are what I see as the future. But the government is in the way. No more subsidies, that means for oil too. Get out of the way of nuclear power and let people build some nuclear power plants.

I don't care if the world is getting hotter. I want to see some solutions to the problem that does not involve more government involvement in my life. I don't want the government telling me what kind of light bulbs to buy or where to set my thermostat, I want my government to tell me that they are serious about the problems and will issue permits for the construction of some nuclear power plants.

Re:Watermelons!

[Indigo]

I didn't know it was possible to stuff that many conservative hot-button phrases into such a small amount of text. "I don't care if the world's getting hotter, just end the subsidies and get the government out of my way so I can get rich, you damned Oreos, I mean Watermelons." Beautiful. *Slow clap*.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[mpe]

And at the same time, there's a story that the NOAA has been fabricating their temperatures for years: The scandal of fiddled global warming data

Typically the kind of "fiddling" which goes on are poorly explained "adjustments". Rather than outright fabication. Even without that there would still be unresolved (and quite possibly impossible tor resolve) issues with the accuracy and precision of the data gathered.

Re:It's about time

[Barsteward]

you are obviously "comprehension challenged"

Re:It's about time

[Barsteward]

the journo who wrote that article has history of being a shit journalist http://www.theguardian.com/med..., a bit like Dan Enderle of SCO fame where he does no investigation and takes someone's word for it.

so don't be surprised if no-one takes the telegragh rant seriously

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Barsteward]

Christopher Booker is shit, never trust his articles.... http://www.theguardian.com/med...

Re:It's about time

[TapeCutter]

Google "Frank Lutz memo", that's where this stupid "change of name" thing originated. The term "global warming" was coined in the seventies to describe observations of climate change, the phrase "climate change" goes back to the 50's. People in the 1950's were not looking for global warming they were trying to explain the ice ages, which cannot be done without understanding the role of CO2. The detected AGW as a consequence of that investigation. It was not until the 1950's that spectroscopes (for heat seeking missiles) became good enough to separate the H20 and CO2 absorption spectra. Until that time the H2O absorption spectra was assumed to overlap the C02 absorption spectra and thus CO2 was thought to have no effect on climate.

Thermal sink

[Anonymous Coward]

Making a body of water deeper makes it a larger (by volume) body of water - which then changes the amount of energy the must be removed (by exposure to cold winter air and the reduced sun exposure of winter in this case) to chill it to the point where its surface can freeze. Any change of depth in a body of water can also change the flow of the water (both volume and velocity) which can further alter the ease in freezing the surface. There's nothing magic here. I'm not the earlier poster, not endorsing his post, nor am I making an argument about the magnitude of the effect (like EVERYTHING in the real world, there's a lot of complexity and anybody claiming an accurate computer model is more-likely lying than not). I'm only pointing out that this is a valid issue.

Well, THAT's settled now...

[Anonymous Coward]

"What, was that posted on FauxNews or the Sludge Report"

You clearly had nothing valid to contribute, so like a good jackbooted little leftist, you goose-stepped directly to the slurs and epithets.

The biggest worry of any leftist revolutionary is that his followers will "cool-off" and stop supporting the revolution, often by hearing any contradictory information. It therefore becomes imperative to denounce alternate information sources and convince the "useful idiots" to not listen to anything not approved by "the new order". Let me offer you some comfort, comrade: Big Brother still loves you. Big Brother appreciates your rejection of Fox News. As long as you keep seeing exactly what Big Brother wants you to see, and saying exactly what he wants you to say, it's all double-plus good...

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I find most flamebaits to be insightful. I will always mod them insightful because they provoke heated discussions which I enjoy reading.

The only thing I consider off limits are attacks on things like sexual orientation, races, or religions. Slashdot is not the place for that kind of hate mail.

No Global Warning at Fox News

[Kalium70]

It has been awfully hot outside. I'm thinking about switching over to Fox News, where global warming isn't happening and the summer is as cool as ever.

Thanks to USHCN adjustments every year will warmer

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, for the first 3 months of 2014, NOAA suddenly decided that the average temperature of the USA was over 1 degree too cold and applied an adjustment to get rid of that anomaly. Gee. I wonder what weather event happened during winter 2014 across the USA that required they have to adjust the temperature data upwards by a over whole degree. Surely it was just a coincidence!

Citation please

[Namarrgon]

Depends which temperature proxy you look at, but on average, nope.

Of course there may have been warmer days in the "recent" past, but we have no records of that, so the article's claim stands. And your claim requires ignoring most of the various proxy reconstructions that have been done, so it doesn't hold up either.

Sorry, FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Ice is one of the worst substances imaginable for accurate storage of trapped gasses. I know there are lots of "climate science" guys with careers based on it, just like there are "UFOlogists" with careers that are dependent upon Roswell and Area 51... but that just does not make it valid no matter how many PhDs are on the line. Ice sublimates. Ice also absorbs gasses. Anybody with an icemaker in his freezer is perfectly-aware of this. Ice is not the same even two days after it forms... it absorbs other gasses (often "food smells" in refrigerator ice makers); put another way: ice PROVABLY changes over time. Ice changes even over very short periods of time. SOME uses of ice cores (like measuring layers of ash or dust) are reasonably valid (though the use of the measurements of gaps between such layers is dubious), but gasses in ice are a big wobbly area.

The biggest problem though is that there exists no calibrated standard against which any ice core data can be calibrated: If you want to claim you know how much a chunk/block/core of ice has or has not changed over a thousand years, you need to have calibrated measurments of that ice from a thousand years ago which you can compare to the current ice... and there is simply NO scientific way to escape this problem. You do not get to make assumptions about what conditions existed when the ice formed (if nobody was there to make the measurements, then you are in fantasy land and your presumptions are as valid as a chapter of "snow white and the seven dwarves"). You do not get to make assumptions about what rates of loss or accumulation of any particular components have ocurred during the elapsed millenia, no matter how convenient and useful to your career and your political agenda such blatantly-unsupported manipulations might be. If you do not KNOW with certainty the exact state of your ice core when the ice it includes formed, you cannot accurately deduce things from what you find in it now... but of course if you HAD that data you would not be reduced to trying to "intuit" the data from the ice cores in the first place, right?

No matter what touchy-feely garbage is being chovelled now in the name of garbage like "social justice", the fact remains that WHERE you get your data, HOW you collect it, and HOW you measure it still matter. You cannot do real science if you have no fixed data and measurement standards and you mishandle the data you have by mixing together datapoints from different sources that lack a common calibration.

Geeze. Science education has apparently taken a NOSEDIVE in the past several decades... but I guess I can draw SOME comfort from the idea that younger people will probably reproduce at a reduced rate by virtue of having EXCELLENT education into the proper deployment of condoms, and they'll be less likely to do "bad" things with the hard sciences they manage to play with (like physiscs and chemistry) because they are well -indoctrinated into various feminist, social and minority studies. Older geezers on the other hand, are likely less "sensiitve" but still want REAL data before surrendering to the collective.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Namarrgon]

This is the same guy that denies the link between passive smoking and cancer, and that asbestos is dangerous. I should introduce him to my friend with mesothelioma. He certainly can't be relied on for the facts.

Here's what's crazy about it

[Anonymous Coward]

"fixing" anything that is not "broken" is crazy, particularly if fixing it requires damaging the lives of millions of middle-class people who are just managing to get by in the absence of those very-expensive "fixes".

You have not proven:

[1] that anything is "broken". (People are not artificial creations of evil scientists on planet Vulcan, who were artificially-placed here and are wreaking havoc; they're every-bit as natural on Earth as birds and fish and whales and spiders)

[2] that people "broke it". (We have no design specifications for planet Earth; we do not KNOW what the "proper" temperatures and CO2 levels are.)

Even if you show that humans HAVE put "excess" CO2 into the atmosphere and are warming the planet (even over some "tipping point") you have failed to demonstrate any evidence that this is not precisely what humans, collectively as an evolved lifeform, are SUPPOSED to do. Our job in the grand scheme of things might well be to live on this world for a few millenia between the age of the dinosaurs and some future age of gigantic super-intelligent insects using our particular skills to convert the ecology of the planet from lush-and-green (plus ice caps) to toxic and brown (with primordial sludge pools) where the bugs might thrive. If the planet stayed so cool and green, its "toxic" (from the perspective of the future giant bug race) conditions could prevent their evolutionary rise! Preventing this conversion of the Earth could well be a crime against the interests of all future occupants of this planet. Of course, if you happen to have the original designer's specs for the planet and can document what constitutes "ideal", then we can talk about what CO2 levels are "bad" or "excessive"

Re:Here's what's crazy about it

[drinkypoo]

"fixing" anything that is not "broken"

Well, I should have said fixing the carbon. As opposed to releasing it.

Even if you show that humans HAVE put "excess" CO2 into the atmosphere and are warming the planet (even over some "tipping point") you have failed to demonstrate any evidence that this is not precisely what humans, collectively as an evolved lifeform, are SUPPOSED to do. Our job in the grand scheme of things

You are making an appeal to religion. There is no purpose. There is only matter interacting with matter. If we want to continue to exist as matter organized into something identifiable as human, we need to preserve our environment in a state which can support us, and from our study of the past we know that we are creating conditions which have not existed since before the planet was habitable for our kind. All the rest of your argument is just decoration and excuses.

The READ the whole Luntz paper to see how libs lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Luntz was telling right-wingers how to deal with left-wing propaganda. He was warning them that the left-wing propaganda was reaching a tipping point at at some point the right-wing positions on certain things would become untenable POLITICALLY because it would fall on "deaf ears" propagandized not to listen. Lefties twist those words to make people think Luntz was warning that the time of scientific uncertainty was ending when what he was ACTUALLY warning was that the minds of the population were being closed.

He was NOT saying "you have a limited time to lie about reality before the truth catches up" he was saying "you have a limited time to speak to a population that is persuadable and has doubts, before the left-wing propaganda takes over and people will not absorb contrary information". With each passing year, another group of kids graduate from the Democrat-run schools with their certificates-of-indoctrination. Our schools USED to teach kid HOW to think (reading, writing, math, geography, history, civics, art, music, chemistry, physics, biology) but now our schools are pumped-full of social lessons of "justice", "multiculturalism", "ecology", etc and even the courses that used to be solid content are now thoroughly-riddled with indoctrination (even in the details of word-problems in math classes and reading assignments in English classes)

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with the term "global warming" is that idiots who do not understand how a global mean value is calculated think that any instance of cooling disproves it. "That was a old winter, global warming must be fake". A 12 year old with basic maths education could explain why they are wrong.

"Run, Forrest: RUN!!!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Why're you running from simple questions troll? http://yro.slashdot.org/commen...

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

As one cave man said to another "I don't get it. There's no air or water pollution. All the food we eat is organic and free range. We get plenty of exercise. Yet we only live to 30."

Re:It's about time

[nospam007]

"Actually, I find most flamebaits to be insightful. I will always mod them insightful because they provoke heated discussions which I enjoy reading. "

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I had modpoints to mod you up. Instead, I'm posting as an anonymous coward to show my appreciation.

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You just revealed yourself partisan. By invoking the Koch brothers, everyone now knows you care naught about the science but wholly are invested in towing the party line of the most extreme form of progressivism.

FTP the raw data and run the numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Run the raw numbers yourself and compare against the past data for the station's location by date. Then group them.

Climate myth

Re:FTP the raw data and run the numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to exclude all the data from any sensors that are too warm due to heat islands. Nobody knows how they form (clearly humans can't make temperatures go up) but they skew all the numbers the wrong way.

Re:It's about time

[serviscope_minor]

Christ what a moron.

Words mean things dumbass.

Global warming means what it says on the tin. Global average temperature is going up.

Climate change means what it says on the tin. Climate not the same as before. I.e. the climate changes.

The former cause the latter becaue you know, physics.

So you can take your crackpot ranting about "shitizens" and what not and cram it, preferably while reading a dictionary to confirm what well-known words actually mean.

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

You mad, bro?

Did you even bother to read the link? It's from the experts at Yale. So before you accuse ME of crackpottery, consider that I am only passing on the knowledge from the experts. Yell at them, if you don't like the facts.

Thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

More climate lies on slashdot!

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

So where did the extra carbon come from? In a balanced zero sum cycle, zero carbon would end up buried under the ground for us to bring it up. That carbon was part of the cycle back in the day. If you take the cycle over the really long haul, we (humans) can't be adding carbon to the cycle because we are just bringing up carbon that happened to get swept under some geological feature. We aren't getting it from anywhere off earth.

One possibility is that the carbon in the environment was much higher back in the day, but then that implies that the ecology worked with it back then too. Granted we may be (are) causing a relatively short term and sudden impact that the ecology must adjust for, and this may cause conditions that some (most?) of us consider uncomfortable.

So what happened? Is it zero sum, or is there some incoming source of carbon that requires that some carbon be sequestered over the billion year cycle? Can the source and sink be shown to be balanced?

(I really want to know, I'm just an engineer and have little expert knowledge, but I enjoy reading the articles you guys dredge up.)

Serious Question

[dcw3]

I see many posts pointing to the burning of fossil fuels, and the subsequent release of CO2 as the source of global warming. Presuming that the fuel was once fossils, and the fossils were once something entirely different. Where was the CO2 back then?

I'm not a "denier", and haven't honestly taken a stand in this area, though I'd tend to believe it when I read things like this http://climate.nasa.gov/scient...

Re:Serious Question

[david_thornley]

Way back when the fossil fuels were formed, the planet was a lot hotter and there was more CO2 in the air. That's the short version, anyway.

BTW, I can respect somebody who hasn't dug into the science himself and doesn't take a stand. Skepticism is good.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

yes...the telegraph.
that's a real scientific authority there.....
let me clue you in: nothing they have to say about this is true.

Re:It's about time

[serviscope_minor]

So before you accuse ME of crackpottery,

It was "shitizens" which gave it away. At least you've moved on from "sheeple". Using either of those in earnest will, however, get you firmly on the crackpot list.

Oh yeah and I did read it. The article seems to be about public perception not OMG U SHUD USE THIS TO MAKE TEH SHEEPAL F33R TEH GLOBALZ AWRNINGS OMGLOLOLOL!!111!!!1 rantery that you seem to be going on about.

In other words:
1. Words mean things (seem my previous post)
2. People think stuff.

This doesn't change the fact that the effect is global warming and the result of that is climate change.

If you don't believe me, try reading a dictionary. You will also find that "shitizens" is not a real word.

Credibility....

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is, the credibility of NOAA and NASA is marred. They are both controlled (politically and financially) by a Federal government who time and time again proves that they are untrustworthy and are motivated by that which has absolutely nothing to do with the welfare and economics of the general population.

There is not a SINGLE person in this forum who can lay claim to any data supplied by the Scientific Community and say with all confidence it is unblemished by political motive and/or Governmental self preservation.

As long as you keep electing idiots like the current ones running Congress and the Exec, the only people on this planet who believe this shit are the like minded leftist psychos and the hopelessly gullible.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Goddard is a well known fraud.
Not that that stops you fools from quoting him.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

your nonsense about the oceans was already debunked in the other thread.
we keep giving you information, but you keep just ignoring it or selectively paying it attention as it suits your needs.
you provide no constructive input to this discussion, you only serve to spread your brand of ignorance to others.
youre just another ignorant denier.

Re:It's about time

[dywolf]

yes. a texas (oil state) researcher (funded by oil companies) thinks the reason the ice sheet is melting is underwater volcanos.

which totally explains why the ice sheet is losing mass from its boundaries and upper surface, instead of the bottom surface directly and in closest contact with said theorized volcanoes....totally logical right?

do your part to stop the spread of misinformation: stop posting.

Re: It's about time

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There are multiple carbon cycles around us. One is the obvious, atmospheric one, where rotting plants and animals release CO2 and growing plants sequester it again, on a timescale of dozens of years. Another is a long term one, in which carbon contained in marine sediments gets transported deeper in the tectonic subduction zones, the hydrated carbon-containing rocks then get into areas of high temperature where their hydration decreases the melting point of those rocks and the surrounding environment to the extent that the rocks melt, form magma, and volcanism and CO2 outgassing ensues. That happens on a timescale of millions, or tens of millions of years.

There seems to be a number of feedback loops in this latter process that increase the absorption of CO2 if there is too much of it in the atmosphere and decrease its absorption if there is too little of it, while the volcanoes dump the CO2 back at some random but I guess roughly stable rate (dictated by how fast the tectonic plates deliver the carbon to be outgassed, and this process doesn't care much about what happens on the surface).

And here's the problem: The carbon we're digging up and burning right now had been slowly deposited from the atmosphere into coal and oil over a long period before we started mining it, while these feedback mechanisms had enough time to continuously keep the atmospheric CO2 at some level using these deep crust reservoirs. But now we've been burning the coal and oil quickly, so even though the total amount of carbon in the air, water, continental rocks, marine rocks and generally, the Earth's crust stays the same, and while these feedback loops are stil in effect, we're pumping it from continental rocks (coal, really) into the atmosphere way faster than these long-term cycles can re-deposit it back into the deeper crust.

(But I'm Not A Geologist, so if there is one around and I got it wrong, please correct me on anything.)

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is zero sum, but you are confusing "carbon in the environment" with "carbon in the atmosphere". Carbon sequestered in the ground causes no harm at all and that's where a LOT of it is/was. Sure when before the atmosphere was breathable it had a lot more CO2 in it. But that started to change once plants evolved and began to photosynthesize. By taking the carbon from CO2 in the air, and absorbing it while releasing the O2, plants radically changed the atmosphere (in our favor). When those plants died, most of that carbon that they absorbed stayed with them in the ground (or the animal which ate the plant, which ended up in the ground or another animal, etc...).

Think about it. Almost all of the material which a tree is made of (the carbon) come from THE AIR, not the ground. We are currently undoing that on a grand scale. Millions of years of carbon being absorbed from the atmosphere and being sequestered into the ground is being undone in the course of hundreds. There is still the same amount of carbon in the system (so yes, it IS a zero sum game), but we're changing the location of it and rapidly.

Re: It's about time

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Oh, and I forgot...

One possibility is that the carbon in the environment was much higher back in the day, but then that implies that the ecology worked with it back then too.

That is true, but also consider that Sun's radiative output is continuously increasing at a rate of about 1% every one hundred million years or so (and that has been happening throughout billions of years, and will do so for roughly the same period in the future), which essentially means that the higher CO2 levels in the past were really just a compensation for the lower solar irradiation to keep the temperature in balance. The young Earth would have frozen solid without large quantities of CO2 in the atmosphere. (In fact, some people think it did just that a few times, since it would explain some peculiar geological features. My understanding is that this is still far from having been resolved, though.)

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

Oh yeah and I did read it. The article seems to be about public perception not OMG U SHUD USE THIS TO MAKE TEH SHEEPAL F33R TEH GLOBALZ AWRNINGS OMGLOLOLOL!!111!!!1 rantery that you seem to be going on about.

Hmmm... let's see what they say:

We found that the term "global warming" is associated with greater public understanding, emotional engagement, and support for personal and national action than the term "climate change."

This report provides results from three studies that collectively find that global warming and climate change ... activate different sets of beliefs, feelings, and behaviors, as well as different degrees of urgency about the need to respond.

[global warming generates] A greater sense of personal threat, especially among women, the Greatest Generation, African-Americans, Hispanics, Democrats, Independents, Republicans, liberals and moderates

By contrast, the use of the term climate change appears to actually reduce issue engagement by Democrats, Independents, liberals, and moderates, as well as a variety of subgroups within American society

The first use of either term that respondents were exposed to was a measure of their positive or negative affect – feelings of good or bad – associated with the term they were given. We found that the two terms evoke different affective reactions by the public.

Well, I'm not sure where you get the idea that this is nothing more than an academic exercise in etymology of terms. You'd have to be a pretty naive to think this report won't be used by engagement groups to sway public opinion.

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's make this simple.

If most deaths occur in the first two years, and the average life span was 30 years, then we know that adults lived to almost 70.

Global Something Crisis

[Anonymous Coward]

Tue 6/24/14 9:41 am. Then how come they changed the name from Global Warming Crisis to Global Climate Change Crisis? Huh?

Volcanism vs Human Emissions

[Tenebrousedge]

Humanity is emitting about one Yellowstone Supervolcano per year, or two Pinatubos per day.

Even assuming that the CO2 is natural, the forcing would still be a problem. The idea that the natural CO2 cycle is little-studied is lunatic. Aside from laboratory experiments on CO2 absorption spectra measuring the "global scale CO2 cycle" is practically the entirety of climate science.

Ice on Great Lakes in June

[freak0fnature]

I saw the map they published. They have the western Great Lake region just slightly below normal, and the eastern great lakes above average. Lake Ontario is currently at 46F in June, well below normal...yet this map has the Lake Ontario region as "above average".

Odd. April and May were cool across Canada

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Yes, I know local phenomena != global measure. But Canada covers a big chunk of real estate. I guess I'm only considering the region that "the weather channel covers, which is Ontario, the Atlantic provinces, and the southern half of everything else. Maybe it was above average in the territories.

Re:It's about time

[bobbied]

No, I'm claiming IR is too, but I'll stipulate #1 because it's not a major problem in the list. It's that last logical leap being made that I dispute mostly.

Funny....

[PortHaven]

Everyone I know has been complaining that this summer is unsually cool. I've heard several complaints throughout June that so many days have been barely warm enough to go swimming.

I joked the other day, not to worry, we'd still hear claims that it was one of the hottest years on record. And lo and behold, just a few days later and here be the claims.

Arr...

Can anyone say "grant standing"?

[RogueWarrior65]

Show us ALL the data and ALL the methodology.

Re:It's about time

[serviscope_minor]

Hmmm... let's see what they say:

I read what they said. don't fault me for your misrepresentation of it.

You'd have to be a pretty naive to think this report won't be used by engagement groups to sway public opinion.

You are a very confused person.

Just because people with an axe to grind will grind their axe doesn't make the terms any less accurate or appropriate.

Global warming still means that globally the average temperature is warming.

Climate change still means that the climate will change (duh).

Also, "shitizens" is *still* not a real word.

Re:It's about time

[Eunuchswear]

no you need to prove your absurd comments. sun spot activity and volcano's are the driving force in climate change.there is no scientific evidence to prove otherwise.
theories,conjecture and,pre-programmed computer models are not proof.

Sorry, not seeing it.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1980/mean:36/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1980/scale:200/mean:36

But, but, but, weather is not climate???

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how all you alarmists are quick to point out that weather is not climate whenever we have a record snowfall or the coldest winter on record. The second a weather event (one month average) supports your theory, it's definitive proof.

Even better is how the article blindly inserts "man-made global warming" in the tagline.

Please line up and give your money to whichever politician claims they are going to save the Earth for you. Sheep.

Re:It's about time

[Anon-Admin]

4) CO2 absorbed energy from IR. Falsifiable, and tested.
5) CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing. Falsifiable, and tested.

Well, yes but there is a limit to #4 and #5 I question to some extent.

So here is an experiment for you. Take a sealed room and add CO2 tell the concentration reaches 1500ppm, Add 2kw of Lighting and fill the room with plants. You will learn a few things, #1 the temperature does not increase much (.1c) #2 the plants grow much faster and larger, #3 The 1500ppm of CO2 is dropped to less than 200ppm in 48 hours, #4 You can breath just fine at 1500ppm of CO2.

Botanists and Weed growers have been augmenting CO2 in grows for years, It is common to bring the environment up to 1500ppm to increase plant growth.

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

You're really hung up on one simple typo, aren't you.

Typical warmist responses, of course. Name calling, shouting down, and ignoring facts obvious to everyone else, and denying all obvious attempts at social engineering as "misrepresentation".

Re:It's about time

[BobMcD]

Let's try this, then:

Pay attention:
1) Electric current encountering resistance generates heat. Falsifiable, and tested.
2) The VAST majority of heat from electrical resistance is generated by humans. Falsifiable, and tested.
3) Man's use of electricity correlates directly with the hockey-stick. Falsifiable, and tested.

Unplug your computer to save the planet!!!

(By the way, don't you mean VERIFIABLE? Wouldn't it weaken the argument to use falsified data?)

It could be that in a system as vast and complex as the Earth's atmosphere, you probably can't draw up a bulleted list to explain all the reasons we're observing what we're observing. Unless you're God, you're just guessing along with everyone else. It isn't like you have a series of scale model Earths you can use to run your tests.

Here's another list...
A) We've (supposedly) been hotter than we are before, when there were (supposedly) no humans around to blame.
B) The Sahara (supposedly) used to be fertile.
C) Humans are extremely resilient creatures.
D) The Earth is quite likely more resilient, and is unlikely to explode in a ball of fire if it gets too hot. It may require some adapting, but life WILL go on.
E) Polar bears are down, but sharks are up. See D, above.
F) The impact of changing the entire human energy experience is not insignificant, and could well upend society itself if not managed properly.
G) Every government on the planet is currently ran by complete idiots, and even if they knew EXACTLY what to do, they'd still fuck up the implementation.
H) It is entirely possible that 'humans > polar bears' is a valid opinion to have.

Lists are fun. I could go on and on... :)

Re:It's about time

[serviscope_minor]

You're really hung up on one simple typo, aren't you.

Was it a typo? If so that's a funny one to hit sh instead of c. But whateves.

Typical warmist responses,

I jumped in to correct you on a pedantic point of wording. Note I never stated anything about my feelings on the matter of whether warming is happening what the consequences will be etc etc.

But yet I must be a "warmist" because I don't agree with you 100%.

denying all obvious attempts at social engineering as "misrepresentation".

Yeah you misrepresented it. You claimed they were using the terms to induce fear whereas the article was a much more unbiased look at how people perceived the different terms. They made no recommendations as to which you should use, or whether in fact the terms referred to anything real at all.

I pointed this out to you and apparently this makes me a "warmist". I have no idea what you even think you mean by "warmist" apart from "someone who doesn't believe my obvious shit 100%". Honestly, I think you should try getting your talking points from timecube.com. You will actually gain credibility at this point.

Re:It's about time

[dave420]

The climate changes ("climate change"), in this instance by getting warmer ("global warming"), which causes increased droughts and worse storms ("climate disruption"). What's so hard to understand?

Re:It's about time

[dave420]

That works for some plants, but not all, including the ones humanity has a strong need for to survive. Trying to model the world's climate by comparing it to a vaguely-described room is, well, ridiculous.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Ceriel Nosforit]

Rather hilarious that anyone other than a rival nation state would seek to challenge the NOAA. Right or wrong, decision makers listen to the NOAA either directly or indirectly since they do most of the US's recce.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Climate disruption= Economic change do to climate change.

You for got:
Climate Evolution = what has been happening for the pas 20K years.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You burn as much coal and oil as you can?

Who doesn't?

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

No different than the tribal identifier known popularly as "deniers".

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Full disclosure: I'm a rabid pro-global-warming zealot.

Me too! For the last 15 years, I've been relentlessly farting my ass off toward that goal.

pft

[Anonymous Coward]

Breaking a monthly record for temperature does not suggest the global temperature is increasing. There is as yet no way to measure the entire planet's temperature with fidelity. Even if you could this would not suggest humans are the cause. Even if humans were a proven cause of climate change that would not suggest it was accidental. What's more likely is deliberate climate modification with geophysical weapons systems like HAARP and others.

Re: chicken little

[Anonymous Coward]

CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has broken away from temperature, proving there is no causal relationship between the two.

Re: bonehead

[Anonymous Coward]

Your model of the sun is wrong.

Re: wingnut

[Anonymous Coward]

You're hysterical

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

The people of the Amazon Rainforest.

It's faked

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been http://stevengoddard.wordpress...> "adjusted"

Really?

[locke.th]

From west coast to east coast Canada was a lot colder than normal for May. Every news channel reported colder than normal temperatures across the world...where the heck are they getting the numbers saying it was warmer than normal?

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, I'll always go with the "science" of someone named "Geek" on a website that lets anyone post pretty much anything.

We need open source science

[ohmiccurmudgeon]

Face it. You can't trust anything published on the internet or other media. Trying to dig to get the actual data is about hopeless. Most of the papers on global warming refer to other papers refer to other papers refer to papers by the same author based on a computer model. Scant attention is paid to validating the models against history. Actual data collected from the field gets locked behind for-pay firewalls. I've been tracking the CO2 issue since the 1970s when I was told we needed to solve the CO2 problem by 1980 or else its all over. I've witnessed reports on the internet reporting volcanic CO2 production revised to lower the production estimate by an order of magnitude without explanation and without acknowledgement it was altered. Much of the data you see on the Web is a lie on both sides of the issue.

We all have computers or else we wouldn't be reading /. Lobby your government representatives. If a scientist accepts money from the government they must digitally sign their data and make it publicly available. If they develop computer models, they must release it open source so they rest of us and review and run it.

Global warming is probably happening, but probably not for the reasons we suspect. One eruption in Africa released more CO2 than the entire annual industrial output of the United States. In the 1980s most CO2 came from "land use change" -- the burning of rain forests. The pollution of the ocean was still unevaluated so we have no idea how much CO2 is no longer absorbed into the ocean. We're stilling coming out of the last Ice Age so Earth is going to get warmer. Perhaps it is stupid to dump more CO2 when we're already getting warmer, but is that our only global warming problem? The science has become so politically obscured that I'm afraid we're missing other real dangers.

Fucking Twits

[Anonymous Coward]

Gawd, you are all such fucking twits, arguing about shit you really know nothing about and calling each other names.

Get a fucking life.

Global Cooling Since 1930's?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then there is this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

I have no idea, but there is not a consensus.

It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the same NOAA:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html

I guess they "adjusted" data again.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Uberbah]

I used to set lead type in my parents print shop as a kid, and I'm perfectly fine

Other than the side effect of dodging simple questions, unless that's a recent development for you.

set lead type in my parents print shop as a kid

Uh huh. Here's another simple question for you to dodge: since you were fine as a kid, and the science behind lead poisoning "isn't settled", do you give toys with lead paint to your nephews at Christmas?

If not, why not?

Except you're on the warming side LOL.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except you're on the warming side LOL...

Well, boys and girls, the cat is out of the bag and NOAA, NASA and many others, will now have to answer some very, very, hard questions. We now know data has been manipulated for a long time, we have been cooling since the 30's and as a result we are in the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the entire human race.

Now, go look it up yourself (all you naive and ignorant bastards.)
             

Re:It's about time

[Curunir_wolf]

Yeah you misrepresented it. You claimed they were using the terms to induce fear whereas the article was a much more unbiased look at how people perceived the different terms. They made no recommendations as to which you should use, or whether in fact the terms referred to anything real at all.

Thus my statement that you claimed it was nothing more than a big, expensive, academic exercise in etymology. Not really very credible. Sort of like claiming that geological studies funded by ExxonMobile are just neutral exercises to increase scientific understanding of earth processes.

I pointed this out to you and apparently this makes me a "warmist".

Duh. Because no one outside the influence of that religion would look at that document and not see the implications of manipulation by media and NGOs.

I have no idea what you even think you mean by "warmist"

Warmist A.K.A. anthropogenic global warming alarmist, engaged in evangelizing that religion and providing cover for the politicos using the issue for their own social agenda. The latter of which you have spent most of this thread doing. As well as the name-calling and shouting-down that other evangelists in your cult do a lot of lately.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

And on that same page:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10921695/May-was-the-hottest-month-ever-for-Earth.html

NOAA's manipulated data.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, boys and girls, the cat is out of the bag and NOAA, NASA and many others, will now have to answer some very, very, hard questions. We now know data has been manipulated for a long time, we have been cooling since the 30's and as a result we are in the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the entire human race.

Now, go look it up yourself (all you naive and ignorant bastards.)

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

Information about "Steven Goddard," the source for that article (who has no educational background in climatology) (republished from DeSmogBlog.com). Draw your own conclusions or cf. NOAA authors. My conclusion is that he's a wacko blogger who has a history of simply making stuff up. Those who desperately want to perceive a conspiracy gleefully cite his fabrications. Just imagine: What if the conspiracy theorists applied the same level of skepticism to his claims that they do to the findings of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists worldwide?

"Steven Goddard is a global warming skeptic and guest author at the climate change skeptic blog WattsUpWithThat (WUWT). The name “Steven Goddard” is a pseudonym used by Tony Heller, according to the Heartland Institute.

"Goddard is known for a 2008 article in The Register where he posited that Arctic Sea ice is not receding and claimed that data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) showing the opposite was incorrect. Goddard later issued a retraction on his statement.

"Goddard operates a blog titled “Real Science” blog, originally Real-Science.com, and now as the Wordpress blog Real Science. Goddard has gone to some lengths to keep his identity hidden and his blog's web domain has been blocked from any identifying WhoIs information."

Credibility

[EverlastingPhelps]

NOAA has the same credibility as the NSA, the IRS, the VA, and all the other government agencies -- NONE. They all lie, they all lie about everything, ESPECIALLY numbers and measurements.

Re:It's about time

[danbert8]

My problem is with 7... The assumption that a warmer climate will be catastrophic or even net harmful to humanity. Even worse is number 8, the assumption that we can or should attempt to keep the climate where it has been throughout the very recent period of human societal development.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

You just don't have the balls or the brains to prove Goddard wrong. Why? Because he's just showing the obvious, which Phil Jones and other frauds like Mann ar doing to utmost to hide. Bunch of mentals they are.

Re:It's about time

[TheRealLifeboy]

Steve Goddard is simply showing what the paid-for media shills are trying to hide. You obviously have no idea of anything judging by your remarks

New Math

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, there are no math majors or statisticians on /., but to fill you in why I scoff at the article....

In statistics and probability theory, the standard deviation (SD) (represented by the Greek letter sigma, ) measures the amount of variation or dispersion from the average.[1] A low standard deviation indicates that the data points tend to be very close to the mean (also called expected value); a high standard deviation indicates that the data points are spread out over a large range of values.

The minds on /. have told me that ONLY the average matters, to h___ with SD. Oh that cold be social disease, depending on the euphemism in current use.

Records will keep falling!

[Optali]

Indeed. El Nino seems very strong this year after a long period of injury and change of sponsor. He declared that he feels strong and well prepared and will attempt to PR this season.

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoosh!

Re:It's about time

[serviscope_minor]

Thus my statement that you claimed it was nothing more than a big, expensive, academic exercise in etymology. Not really very credible. Sort of like claiming that geological studies funded by ExxonMobile are just neutral exercises to increase scientific understanding of earth processes.

Aaaah so now you're attacking their motives with no evidence because you simply don't believe that people are interested in public perception of science. Well shit. You're wrong, I'm not and please provide evidence before launching personal attacks.

Because no one outside the influence of that religion would look at that document and not see the implications of manipulation by media and NGOs.

If you mean that the media has affected public perception, then no shit, sherlock. If you mean they are intentionally misrepresenting things, the put up or shut up.

Warmist A.K.A. anthropogenic global warming alarmist,

ooookkkkkaaay the crazy is strong in this one.

So because these people report on public perception of various terms that makes them "warmists" and it makes me a "warmist" too for pointing out that you're making shit up with no evidence.

The latter of which you have spent most of this thread doing.

[citation needed]. In other words I haven't. You're so wrapped up in your timecube-esque nutbaggery that you actually seem unable to read the words on the screen in front of you, instead preferring to lauch into a red mist of rage over what you believe people must be saying because (surprise!) they recognise for the incoherent nut bag that you are.

As well as the name-calling and shouting-down that other evangelists in your cult do a lot of lately.

In your case it's fair: you seem unable to read something without making up all sorts of conspiracy theories as to their motivations. That makes you a nutjob.

Seriously go join timecube, the material there is getting stale and you're sure to be able to give it a new lease of life.

What a coincidence

[MooseMiester]

The same day this comes out, the UK Telegraph runs a story about how NOAA has gone back and destroyed the temperature records by adjusting the data to prove that the computer models are working.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...

So who ya gonna believe? My advice... don't believe any of them, they are all liars with ulterior motives.

Deniers can't make up their minds

[Anonymous Coward]

A single Aunt Sally isn't enough for the name callers so a triple polemic is used to avoid intellectually honest discussion. LOL

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

A completely rational fear, given the number of loud and obnoxious deniers who have been arrested and put to death. On a related note, I hereby call for the arrest and death of Slashdotters whose posts get rated "offtopic."

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[micahraleigh]

You do realize there was thing identical situation where the East Anglia Institute in the UK not only fudged the corrections to "hide the decline" in global tempratures ... they were trying to keep out the people who were publishing research as they saw it.

And their problem was they couldn't find a way to discredit their opponents!

The IPCC has discredited their own reports several times as well.

People are not going to believe these global warming claims when there are so many shenanigans going on.

Re:It's about time

[khallow]

Words have the meaning that people give them. You sound like one of those autistic geektards who thinks their own personal definitions are the one and only true definitions. Good luck with that.

And you sound like you're projecting. Yes, words have meanings and they can change over time. But it doesn't take a social outcast to notice that there has been a propaganda effort in recent years to redefine climate change to mean the particular thing of AGW consequences.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Largely because the onus is not on the consumer to prove the speaker wrong; it is, rather, the responsibility of the speaker to back up his bullshit. The vast majority of scientists have come to the consensus, via many independent efforts/observations, that the globe is warming at an increasing rate. The nature of this warming aside for the moment, Goddard and his ilk have proposed that this data -- all of it -- is "fabricated," based on hearsay and conjecture about a single institution.

So, you fucking "prove it," Einstein. Put up, or shut up.

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you had read the very first sentence in AG's linked article, you would realize how stupid you sound.

Common responses from the fossilized minds

[AutodidactLabrat]

Reading up and down this thread, precisely as I might have anticipated, comes the shocking news that either there is a worldwide conspiracy of climatologists eager to get their $400 / year grants to study tree-ring O-14 ratios while passing up the Nobel Prize for proving 75 years of Climatology is a hoax OR there are a large number of otherwise capable brains here in Slashdot land who will NEVER accept the disaster of cheap fossil fuels until they themselves succumb to heat stroke.
Given human nature, and particularly the nature of psuedo-liberalism, I'm willing to place my faith in the 'conspirators' who point out that our children, not our grandchildren, are going to starve sometimes thanks to fossil fuel burning.

drudge's headlines are the bias, not the links

[Anonymous Coward]

What Drudge posts is not as important as how h chooses to title it. That's where the right wing bias is injected.

Re:It's about time

[funwithBSD]

Again, it talking about changes around the end of the 90 and the 00's, this shows a smoothing of the 20s to 40s spike in temperatures, erasing the heat wave of the 30s, and making the temperature record look like it slopes up in the 20th century, rather than spiking in the 30s, dipping in the 70s, and then climbing back up in the 90s and 00s.

You will also note that the EPA did not get the message about Global warming.

http://stevengoddard.wordpress...

Re: bonehead

[K. S. Kyosuke]

How exactly?

Re: chicken little

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That is no proof of lack of a causal relationship, that's at most a proof of lack of directly proportional relationship.

Re:It's about time

[i.kazmi]

Conservatives, no matter where they hail from, have one thing in common; they tend to deny any inconvenient facts. As an example just look at the case of climate change, despite the slew of peer reviewed, (almost) universally accepted (in the scientific community) publications, conservatives still somehow manage to deny climate change as just a hoax to get them to stop using their big ass SUVs and get them into unpatriotic dinky cars...

How do conservatives differentiate amongst themselves? Simple, they call conservatives from any other group (even if the differences are minor, superficial), terrorists and kill em!

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

Good point, I'm borrowing it.

Re: It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to be fair, the email message was sent to the EPA. But they didn't like the message so they deleted it. Forever. And ever.

hard to believe when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia is experiencing record low temperatures. I'm reading this article in Perth Western Australia; known for its heat in summer and mild winters. It's 10am and I am rugged up and still add cold as a popsicle.
I love irony, so reading about record heat in these conditions... :D
And it gets better: I said just yesterday how ridiculous global warming was with these freezing conditions! Obviously I didn't realize I was actually in a heart wave!

Forget May. What about January?

[iMactheKnife]

We had a record COLD winter this year. Will a one month record a few tenths of a degree higher make up for it? And how much money does the government propose taking out of the economy to fix a portion of a tenth of a degree?

Let me know when it's safe to assume this is not a political argument.

Re:It's about time

[riverat1]

There really aren't any research stations very close to this section of Antarctica near the Amundsen Sea. Map

Re: It's about time

[sjames]

While there is probably some carbon coming in from space and some escaping the atmosphere, I doubt it's at all significant. So it is close enough to zero sum.

The carbon was present in the gas clouds that formed the Earth. Back when more of it was in the atmosphere, there was a working ecosystem, but it worked for species that are now extinct. It wouldn't work very well for us or the other species on Earth now.

A big difference though is the rate of change. It was very slowly sequestered over millennia. There was time for evolution to do it's thing. We are freeing it again at a tremendous rate, much faster than it can be sequestered. I doubt it will be fast enough to wipe out all life, but it's quite possible it will wipe out all human life. Or at least make it quite miserable.

To put it in perspective, if we re-process our nuclear fuel, the nuclear waste (even that which escapes containment) will be gone long before the carbon balance is restored. Even if we stop all carbon emissions today, the zone of alienation around Chernobyl will be a forest ripe for human habitation before our existing emissions are sequestered again.

Re:It's about time

[sjames]

They look to be close enough to detect the seismic activity if there is any.

Re:It's about time

[dywolf]

Facts are not trolling.
Stop abusing mod points.

really!?!!

[crashinbrn]

OH NO!! say it isn't so!! run for the hills everybody!! the sky is falling, the sky is falling!!

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish you had some clue of how hilariously ridiculous you sound. Needless to say, your understanding of science is laughable, I'm sure you realize that. Hope you're being paid well to shill, we are all aware that is what you're doing. :)

Re:It's about time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, denialism is a bunch of smoke and mirrors, and they should be more intellectually honest and not pull stunts like that.

Seig Heil!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seig Heil! Science continues to be held hostage by fascist politicians controlling the conversation.

Re:It's about time

[sjames]

Well, if the CO2 is a problem, which is better: More or less?

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[dbraden]

I'm not familiar with Christopher Booker or his works (he might be full of shite the majority of the time, I just don't know), but it looks like he was right about the 1930s having the highest temp on record: NOAA Reinstates July 1936 As The Hottest Month On Record

I'm not a supporter or denier of "human-caused global warming/cooling/changing/whatever", I think people are a bit arrogant to think they have accurately modeled a system as complex as our planet's weather. To all of the fanatics on the subject, I say "tone it down, you don't know either". /shrug

Re:It's hard to keep the stories straight these da

[dbraden]

I would agree with that. "Fabrication" was used in the article, and was probably a bit of a stretch. I have no idea if there was intent to deceive at the NOAA, and am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.