Inconvenient facts such as the planet Mars also heating up or previous warming period are simply ignored with the argument that "this time it is happening faster". Martian warming is demonstrably unrelated to Earth warming; it is not correlated well in rate, magnitude, or timing with either changes in solar activity or Earth's own climate.
There have been previous warming periods, but the natural causes of warming at those times are not present now, and, as you note, the current warming is inexplicably (without anthropogenic causes) faster than any warming over similar periods of time.
Then inexplicably over a relatively short period of time - about 2,000 years - the ice melted. The end of the last ice age has to do with variations in the Earth's orbit, and deglaciation events are slower and demonstrably not what is going on right now.
So climate change can be rapid. If you want to argue for "rapid" climate change, you want to talk about Dansgaard-Oeschger events, not the ice age cycle. (They also have nothing to do with the present warming.)
Similarly in the mini ice age of the 1700s the Thames in London froze. This mini ice age lasted about 50 years. The Little Ice Age lasted for hundreds of years and its end was, again, not as rapid as the current warming.
The goal posts are always moving. We can NEVER get a fixed set of predictions to hit or miss to prove or disprove the warming and/or human cause.
You're complaining because predictions improve? Sheesh. There's no pleasing you.
The central predictions for temperature change have remained largely the same, within the error bars, for 10-20 years. The predictions Hansen made back in 1988 have been borne out, if you pick the most accurate emissions scenario. A lot of the long term uncertainty is not in the climatology at all, but in forecasts of world economic growth. The climate predictions ARE testable and have been tested. And the evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming has only increased.
The most-recent version of this is that we are NOW told there will not be any real heating until 2009 (AFTER the next US presidential election...so democrats can wave headlines around with doomsday predictions and not worry about being proven wrong before the election. hmmmmmmm)
That's not a different "version"; until now, nobody has tried to do a short term forecast with global climate models at all! Before now, the answer for the next two or three years would be "hard to say; we can only predict on decadal scales".
And spare me the conspiracy theories. This new prediction has nothing to do with long term climate policy, and wasn't even made by U.S. researchers.
2. "Warmest year ever", "Coldest year ever", "Warmest year on record", etc. Since modern weather measuring equipment has only existed for a brief flicker of time in the geologic scale, these phrases are just plain silly.
Scientists don't speak of "warmest" or "coldest" year ever. "Warmest year on record" is, however, meaningful. Geologic scale is not terribly relevant; whether it was hotter 100 million years ago has little to do with the current warming.
Even the thermometers used a few hundred years ago may not have been calibrated to todays standards,
That's right, and thermometers a few hundred years ago are not even used; the direct instrumental record only goes back about 150 years.
and while indirect things like sediments and tree rings may give clues they are even less-well calibrated.
They're less informative, but they're not useless, either. And even if we knew nothing at all about the pre-instrumental climate, that still wouldn't change the evidence that the modern warming is due to anthropogenic causes. Today is when we can most accurately measure the natural and human inputs into the climate system, after all.
If you cannot explain the past, your predictions for the future are just well-funded guesses. Until supporters can tell us what EXACTLY caused all previous warming and cooling patterns, they cannot honestly claim to understand the mechanisms well enough to properly predict the future.
That is an absurd requirement. As noted above, you don't have to have a perfect understanding of the past in order to have a good idea of what is happening now. No one will EVER tell you EXACTLY what happened at all times in the past, nor do they need to. The mechanisms operating on geologic time scales are only tangentially relevant to the present climate on centennial scales. Understanding paleoclimate events helps, but it's not a necessary requirement.
Supporters of the global warming claims want to force entire societies to change in dramatic ways. They want political changes and societal changes that will have sweeping effects. Many average citizens will lose jobs, and homes, and marriages. Industries will be halted/moved and allocation of resources will be shifted.
You are grossly exaggerating the impacts/costs of mitigation (and ignoring the impacts/costs of climate change).
We are told the US is the biggest contributor (the BIG SINNER) but as soon as problems are found with the US data, we are told that the US numbers have lit
Soon and Baliunus? Their work was severely flawed; see here. They managed to get it published in Energy and Environment, which is pretty bottom of the barrel; when they got a similar version through peer review in the more respectable Climate Research, half the editorial board resigned in disgrace (here). It should never have passed peer review.
There's nothing wrong with scientists having zeal, as long as their science is sound. However, their peers do calibrate their statements to separate opinion from fact. I personally take Hansen seriously, but I'm also aware that he's on the more "alarmist" end of the spectrum and that lots of people disagree with him. One also must be aware that while he's entitled to his opinion about societal impacts, he's not an economist or political scientist or anthropologist.
So... what happened to the Coming Ice Age? Did we have that already? I forget. Nobody was predicting a coming ice age (meaning something within our lifetimes, or even our grandchildren's). See here.
Oh, then there is/was Acid Rain. Whatever happened to that? We reduced air pollution and largely solved the problem. Same with the ozone hole. (Well, that's not solved yet, but on its way to getting better.) Oh, wait, that wasn't the answer you were expecting, was it? I was supposed to agree that environmental problems never amount to anything and that no action is ever needed, right?
either way, i still say you're blind to what i believe are much more tangible, and more obvious, causes of their problems. i'll admit that the heat changes are a stress for the corals, but it's one I believe they can handle; even over 5 years let alone 100. We're potentially getting 6 degrees F of warming or more in 100 years. That's pretty high stress, even on geologic timescales. And it's not just the rate of warming (that has happened a few times with thermohaline circulation restarts), but the absolute temperature as well. It's been warmer before, but the combination of being significantly warmer than now and at a rapid rate is worrisome.
Not to mention that ocean acidification is a real worry: experiments indicate that corals are sensitive to that too, and that will happen as long as CO2 goes up (and for a while after).
My concern for them, and honestly the thing that I think humans are responsible for their decline, is the the effect of run-off on the oceans; particularly farm runoff. Farm runoff is a problem for a lot of aquatic species, but for corals worldwide in particular, climate change is a serious threat; they appear to be particularly sensitive to that.
there is still no guarantee that the 2 degree rise will happen in the next 100 years; You mean the 3 degree (C) rise? That's the mainstream estimate.
there is no agreement in the models; it could be more or less, and the latest IPCC report lowered it. It's called insurance. If it could be less, but it could be more, you want to hedge against the worst outcomes.
If they can't get the next year hurricane model more accurate than it has been the last few years, Why does the accuracy of hurricane forecasts have anything to do with climate prediction.
I'm having trouble believing the climatologists, who have their own agenda; funding; are any better. The whole "funding agenda" argument is stupid. In general, you can't just publish obviously biased science and expect your peers to let you get away with it. People arguing for extremes on both sides get attacked. (Yes, even Hansen has detractors: many think he's being too alarmist.)
Well, those are pretty graphs...if you believe the error bars. Color me a skeptic. And what is your basis for arbitrarily dismissing the model results?
Even if the skeptics are right and the feedback effects aren't as strong as climatologists think, that still wouldn't turn cooling into warming, it would just turn it into less cooling (just as the skeptics argue that CO2 causes less warming). The direct evidence is simply that the natural radiative forcings have been net negative.
Cooling trend over what time scale? What's the long-term trend, over say 10,000 years? Going by the ice age cycle, probably also a cooling trend. Not that that's terribly relevant.
Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven? I've read Fallen Angels. No, we are not going to see ice sheets covering Canada in the next century without global warming. Ice ages are not that abrupt. They take, as you note, on the order of 10,000 years. If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age.
At any rate, I submit that 1) more data is needed before taking drastic measures, The "wait and see" argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.
If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be worse than is currently believed.
The sensible course of action is to work out a sliding policy: start doing something capable of addressing the issue using mainstream estimates. If things turn out better than expected, scale down the mitigation; if they turn out worse, scale it up. Simply doing nothing increases the risks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: there are high potential costs to procrastination.
2) technology will inevitably become more capable of providing mitigation, That's true and mitigation will become cheaper, but again, that's not a reason to not start doing it. But CO2 has a long residence time, and the more we can keep from getting into the atmosphere in the first place, the cheaper mitigation becomes. If anything, mitigation now creates the market incentive for that technology improvement, the necessity that is the mother of invention.
and 3) the main area of concern at this point is in the 2nd and 3rd world, in other words China, India and the other rapidly rising polluters of record. Don't forget the "Asian brown cloud", recently anointed as a GWC (Global Warming Contributor). I am well aware of 3rd world emissions, but yet again, that is not an excuse for the 1st world to do nothing, and if the 1st world does nothing, it is all but guaranteed that the 3rd will not either. It is too easy for them to politically say "Look, you guys created the problem in the first place, if you're not getting on board, then screw you". Not only does the 1st world bear responsibility, but their future emissions are still a very significant fraction of the total. Effective mitigation can only take place if everybody does something: if either the 1st or the 3rd world drags their feet, mitigation becomes much harder. You can't simply place all the responsibility on the 3rd world; their emissions are not that much larger.
Now IANAC, but I would think that any good station list would include stations that had been urbanized according to the percentage of area of urban sprawl vs. the percentage of "rural" land. Actually, they count "urbanized" by how much light at night is observed in the region by satellites.
OK..it was in the 70's they were touting off about Global Cooling. You got me.
If you bothered to read the link, you would find that the scientific community was not claiming any such thing.
Same mentality people, chicken little
In other words, not the same people.
Yeah..we know EVERYTHING there is to know about physics don't we?
As far as climate is concerned, we know the underlying laws of physics: it's Newtonian dynamics.
Lets not EVEN get started on climate dynamics.
Please, let's.
Climate dynamics and meteorology in general are best guesses.
"Best guesses" with predictive skill. The fact that they are not certain does not mean that their predictions are useless. And you're still confused between weather and climate.
My local weather guy isn't even close to being right 50% of the time.
Get a better one. My weather guy gets the highs and lows quite well and most of the major precipitation events. Only really falls down on the quicky rain events, the ones where you get 15 minutes or rain and then it disappears. Now push that out to a week ahead and the precipitation isn't so good, although the temperatures are still decent.
Contrary to belief we know VERY little about the world around us....
We know a great deal about the weather and climate. It's not enough to make perfect predictions, but it is enough to make useful predictions.
thus the reason that most of what we believe are THEORIES and not FACT.
Not that canard again. "Theory" doesn't mean "we have no idea what's going on and can't make any useful predictions".
Temperatures have been going up since the 1800's after coming out of a cooling period...they have been going up since then. That was BEFORE the Industrial Revolution.
The end of the Little Ice Age was nothing like the current warming.
Temperatures are on average COOLER today than they were in the Middle Ages.
That's also false; there is no record of the Medieval Warm Period being warmer than today, not even in the northern hemisphere, let alone globally.
For every piece of "scientific" information you throw on Global Warming I could most likely counter it with another piece of scientific evidence.
Go ahead. You can start with the claims you just made.
I'm saying that my opinions are directly opposed to the AGW-supporting conclusions I'm paid to prove. You are not paid to prove "AGW-supporting conclusions". You are paid to develop models. Your grants don't say what conclusions you have to reach.
Their relation to the real world is orthogonal. That statement is directly opposed to both the model results themselves and to the conclusions of your peers.
All simulations are based on "thesis" + "adjustments to make past predictions substantiate thesis". That, quite frankly, is B.S., and if that's what you're doing, you should be fired.
Yes, model parameters are calibrated against real data, but that is a far cry from your implied "models are just curve fitting which can produce any result" or your "models are intentionally rigged to prove AGW".
And of those measurements, I think only satellite measurements are unbiased enough to be worth spending any time on. And they show no significant trend line. Another false claim.
Just for the record. I have read very respectable papers on both sides of the man-made warming argument. Really? Which ones? Because it sounds like you're just repeating Internet talking points, not published research.
But the ice-core data does not show that CO2 drives climate. To the contrary,
It shows, very clearly, that variations in temperature precede rises in atmospheric CO2 - not the other way round. This does not show that CO2 does not drive climate, and in fact, you can't explain the cycles without CO2 warming. (Well, they can't be fully explained at all, but the discrepancies are even worse if you leave out CO2.)
Temperature changes cause CO2 increases, and the CO2 in turn amplifies and prolongs the warming.
Well, I *am* claiming to be a top simulation author Unless you're a top climate simulation author that counts for jack squat as far as your claims about the motivations of climate simulation authors. And even then, it would only count for your own simulations.
Accept that, or don't, it doesn't affect me either way, whatever your opinion is I don't give a shit about confirming or denying it. Nice to see you admit that your opinions are worthless.
If, as you said, "The evidence is overwhelming", then how come it is easily refutable as an increase in solar activity? Solar activity is not responsible for any significant portion of the post-1970 warming, although it is responsible for some of the early 20th century warming. See here and here and here among many others.
There is evidence to suggest carbon dioxide increase is directly correlated to the increase in temperature I assume you're referring to this misleading argument.
This completely demolishes the Al Gore and NOAA argument that increased CO2 levels are increasing the average temperature of the Earth. Guess again.
Sometimes an "open mind" means an "overly suggestive" mind. Tell me about it .
The problem is that people build weather stations out in the country where urban heat isn't an influence, and then cities grow, and they have to be moved. It was in correcting for this effect that Hansen's software was wrong for a while. Eh, the correction didn't actually go wrong, it's just that they combined the wrong datasets.
I'm a strong believer in reproducible science, so I would like it if Hansen's procedures and the data he used were published and available for anyone to review. But as far as I know from what I read (and trust) on Slashdot, they are. It's a little murky. The data is downloadable, and the procedures are published. However, GISS hasn't publicly released the source code which implements the procedures.
This is kind of a gray area: scientists use their code as intellectual property. Their competitors are free to use the procedures and data to reproduce the results, but many scientists want to keep the actual code they've spent man-years developing as their competitive advantage: let others write the code if they need to. Well, I kind of see the point — you need to give out enough information for the results to be reproducible, but it sucks for other people to use your hard-won labor to turn around and scoop you on results. And McIntyre has irritated a lot of scientists because he doesn't publish any new results himself, he just attacks other people's work. That's perfectly legitimate in science but doesn't win friends.
However the bottom line is, especially for a government researcher, I feel they need to release their source code. Particularly if there are problems in replicating the published procedure.
Well, yes. There's still large uncertainty, but it's only through very hard work that they can make these predictions at all with the confidence they do. And while you may call them "mediocre", they are good enough to rule out possibilities like "no further warming", which have important policy implications.
The original graph from this guys data was so completely off that once the bug was reported, a quick look could confirm that it was wrong. Did you even look at the graph? The change is minor (and not even visible on the global scale), and "a quick look" only confirms something once you know where to look.
Now the graphs are smooth and much less frightening and yet somehow this doesn't change anything? They are neither smoother nor "much less frightening". Look again. The global graph doesn't even have a visible change on it.
The guy should just admit he has egg on his face. He admitted he was wrong, and he also correctly noted that the error is not as major as people such as yourself are making it out to be.
Great, you respect the statistical opinions of non-statisticians more than you do professional statisticians. Nice to see you're at least consistently irrational.
First of all, 20 years ago it WASN'T Global Warming, it was Global COOLING. We were all going to freeze to death. No.
Now those exact same scientists are letting us know that we are all going to BURN to death. Really? The exact same ones? Which ones?
Lets take out all of the computer computations and biological / meteorological babbling out of this and look at FACTUAL science. Yeah, sure, let's toss out those pesky laws of physics and everything we know about climate dynamics.
Geological studies have shown that the Earth has cycles of cooling and warming. There is no geological study which indicates that we are "due" for a cycle of warming which looks like what is happening now.
As a matter of fact, temperatures are cooler today than periods in our recent past using the data that some of the babbling is about. That depends entirely on what you mean by "recent", but that aside, it has nothing to do with the evidence that the current warming is not largely natural in origin.
ABSOLUTELY NOT, I feel that we HAVE contributed to a very small degree some of what is happening. Really? How much? How do you know it's "a very small degree", and not "a small degree", or "a large degree"? What scientific evidence is your conclusion based on?
Which was pretty much my point, you're not going to research anything that might conceivably question your funding source. The National Science Foundation doesn't say "we only fund studies which prove manmade global warming". In fact, they would toss any grant proposal which claimed ahead of time what conclusion it was going to arrive at. You write in something like "I'm going to improve estimates of lapse rate feedback effects with thus and such method", and if it's a good idea you get the money. You find out whether your results support or contradict AGW after you get the money and do the study.
Weird how many people think that blindingly obvious principle automatically invalidates all anti-AGW papers The oil companies actually do pay people to write papers that agree with the conclusions they want. On the other hand, there are anti-AGW papers which are funded by the NSF and the like and are published in legitimate journals, which, whether wrong or right, are at least honestly come by.
But here I will do some of your dirty work for you: Before you use dust storms as an excuse consider that weather is driven by the sun on earth
That is a meaningless statement. The Sun provides energy input to the climate system, but you cannot simply wave your hands and ascribe all temperature changes to the Sun. Unless you're prepared to argue that dust storms on Earth are responsible for global warming, you haven't got a point.
I do read RealClimate. And, once again, you have not supported your statements regarding the climate community as a whole, nor even anything about Schmidt, Hansen, etc.
You have no problem with wiping out large pecentages of all species?
If the coral polyps survive they will eventually re-form into reefs.
Yeah, in thousands of years. In the meantime, say goodbye to the species which depend on them as well as all the tourism and humans who depend on reef fishing.
But if you embrace the changes they can be very beneficial! Just imagine all the beach side property that will be created! The opportunities abound for ice cream vendors and jet ski rental outfits! It is all good!
Slashdot Mirror
There have been previous warming periods, but the natural causes of warming at those times are not present now, and, as you note, the current warming is inexplicably (without anthropogenic causes) faster than any warming over similar periods of time.
The goal posts are always moving. We can NEVER get a fixed set of predictions to hit or miss to prove or disprove the warming and/or human cause.
You're complaining because predictions improve? Sheesh. There's no pleasing you.
The central predictions for temperature change have remained largely the same, within the error bars, for 10-20 years. The predictions Hansen made back in 1988 have been borne out, if you pick the most accurate emissions scenario. A lot of the long term uncertainty is not in the climatology at all, but in forecasts of world economic growth. The climate predictions ARE testable and have been tested. And the evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming has only increased.
The most-recent version of this is that we are NOW told there will not be any real heating until 2009 (AFTER the next US presidential election...so democrats can wave headlines around with doomsday predictions and not worry about being proven wrong before the election. hmmmmmmm)
That's not a different "version"; until now, nobody has tried to do a short term forecast with global climate models at all! Before now, the answer for the next two or three years would be "hard to say; we can only predict on decadal scales".
And spare me the conspiracy theories. This new prediction has nothing to do with long term climate policy, and wasn't even made by U.S. researchers.
2. "Warmest year ever", "Coldest year ever", "Warmest year on record", etc. Since modern weather measuring equipment has only existed for a brief flicker of time in the geologic scale, these phrases are just plain silly.
Scientists don't speak of "warmest" or "coldest" year ever. "Warmest year on record" is, however, meaningful. Geologic scale is not terribly relevant; whether it was hotter 100 million years ago has little to do with the current warming.
Even the thermometers used a few hundred years ago may not have been calibrated to todays standards,
That's right, and thermometers a few hundred years ago are not even used; the direct instrumental record only goes back about 150 years.
and while indirect things like sediments and tree rings may give clues they are even less-well calibrated.
They're less informative, but they're not useless, either. And even if we knew nothing at all about the pre-instrumental climate, that still wouldn't change the evidence that the modern warming is due to anthropogenic causes. Today is when we can most accurately measure the natural and human inputs into the climate system, after all.
If you cannot explain the past, your predictions for the future are just well-funded guesses. Until supporters can tell us what EXACTLY caused all previous warming and cooling patterns, they cannot honestly claim to understand the mechanisms well enough to properly predict the future.
That is an absurd requirement. As noted above, you don't have to have a perfect understanding of the past in order to have a good idea of what is happening now. No one will EVER tell you EXACTLY what happened at all times in the past, nor do they need to. The mechanisms operating on geologic time scales are only tangentially relevant to the present climate on centennial scales. Understanding paleoclimate events helps, but it's not a necessary requirement.
Supporters of the global warming claims want to force entire societies to change in dramatic ways. They want political changes and societal changes that will have sweeping effects. Many average citizens will lose jobs, and homes, and marriages. Industries will be halted/moved and allocation of resources will be shifted.
You are grossly exaggerating the impacts/costs of mitigation (and ignoring the impacts/costs of climate change).
We are told the US is the biggest contributor (the BIG SINNER) but as soon as problems are found with the US data, we are told that the US numbers have lit
Soon and Baliunus? Their work was severely flawed; see here. They managed to get it published in Energy and Environment, which is pretty bottom of the barrel; when they got a similar version through peer review in the more respectable Climate Research, half the editorial board resigned in disgrace (here). It should never have passed peer review.
There's nothing wrong with scientists having zeal, as long as their science is sound. However, their peers do calibrate their statements to separate opinion from fact. I personally take Hansen seriously, but I'm also aware that he's on the more "alarmist" end of the spectrum and that lots of people disagree with him. One also must be aware that while he's entitled to his opinion about societal impacts, he's not an economist or political scientist or anthropologist.
Visible. You don't necessarily want to go by infrared, because there can be warm rural spots (depends on where they are, of course).
Not to mention that ocean acidification is a real worry: experiments indicate that corals are sensitive to that too, and that will happen as long as CO2 goes up (and for a while after). My concern for them, and honestly the thing that I think humans are responsible for their decline, is the the effect of run-off on the oceans; particularly farm runoff. Farm runoff is a problem for a lot of aquatic species, but for corals worldwide in particular, climate change is a serious threat; they appear to be particularly sensitive to that. there is still no guarantee that the 2 degree rise will happen in the next 100 years; You mean the 3 degree (C) rise? That's the mainstream estimate. there is no agreement in the models; it could be more or less, and the latest IPCC report lowered it. It's called insurance. If it could be less, but it could be more, you want to hedge against the worst outcomes. If they can't get the next year hurricane model more accurate than it has been the last few years, Why does the accuracy of hurricane forecasts have anything to do with climate prediction. I'm having trouble believing the climatologists, who have their own agenda; funding; are any better. The whole "funding agenda" argument is stupid. In general, you can't just publish obviously biased science and expect your peers to let you get away with it. People arguing for extremes on both sides get attacked. (Yes, even Hansen has detractors: many think he's being too alarmist.)
Even if the skeptics are right and the feedback effects aren't as strong as climatologists think, that still wouldn't turn cooling into warming, it would just turn it into less cooling (just as the skeptics argue that CO2 causes less warming). The direct evidence is simply that the natural radiative forcings have been net negative. Cooling trend over what time scale? What's the long-term trend, over say 10,000 years? Going by the ice age cycle, probably also a cooling trend. Not that that's terribly relevant. Is it possible that anthropogenic warming might save us from an Ice Age, a la Pournelle/Niven? I've read Fallen Angels. No, we are not going to see ice sheets covering Canada in the next century without global warming. Ice ages are not that abrupt. They take, as you note, on the order of 10,000 years. If you're worried about ice ages, that's an argument for conserving our fossil fuels to use when we need them the most, not emitting them into the atmosphere now and having half or more of them scrubbed out of the atmosphere by the next ice age. At any rate, I submit that 1) more data is needed before taking drastic measures, The "wait and see" argument is an excuse for indefinite inaction with no real criterion for how long we need to wait before actually doing something.
If projections really were as uncertain as you believe, that would be an excuse for MORE action, not less: skeptics always make the classic mistake that uncertainty will always err on the side of less impacts, but uncertainty doesn't favor one or the other: it's equally possible that the impacts will be worse than is currently believed.
The sensible course of action is to work out a sliding policy: start doing something capable of addressing the issue using mainstream estimates. If things turn out better than expected, scale down the mitigation; if they turn out worse, scale it up. Simply doing nothing increases the risks. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure: there are high potential costs to procrastination. 2) technology will inevitably become more capable of providing mitigation, That's true and mitigation will become cheaper, but again, that's not a reason to not start doing it. But CO2 has a long residence time, and the more we can keep from getting into the atmosphere in the first place, the cheaper mitigation becomes. If anything, mitigation now creates the market incentive for that technology improvement, the necessity that is the mother of invention. and 3) the main area of concern at this point is in the 2nd and 3rd world, in other words China, India and the other rapidly rising polluters of record. Don't forget the "Asian brown cloud", recently anointed as a GWC (Global Warming Contributor). I am well aware of 3rd world emissions, but yet again, that is not an excuse for the 1st world to do nothing, and if the 1st world does nothing, it is all but guaranteed that the 3rd will not either. It is too easy for them to politically say "Look, you guys created the problem in the first place, if you're not getting on board, then screw you". Not only does the 1st world bear responsibility, but their future emissions are still a very significant fraction of the total. Effective mitigation can only take place if everybody does something: if either the 1st or the 3rd world drags their feet, mitigation becomes much harder. You can't simply place all the responsibility on the 3rd world; their emissions are not that much larger.
OK..it was in the 70's they were touting off about Global Cooling. You got me.
If you bothered to read the link, you would find that the scientific community was not claiming any such thing.
Same mentality people, chicken little
In other words, not the same people.
Yeah..we know EVERYTHING there is to know about physics don't we?
As far as climate is concerned, we know the underlying laws of physics: it's Newtonian dynamics.
Lets not EVEN get started on climate dynamics.
Please, let's.
Climate dynamics and meteorology in general are best guesses.
"Best guesses" with predictive skill. The fact that they are not certain does not mean that their predictions are useless. And you're still confused between weather and climate.
My local weather guy isn't even close to being right 50% of the time.
Get a better one. My weather guy gets the highs and lows quite well and most of the major precipitation events. Only really falls down on the quicky rain events, the ones where you get 15 minutes or rain and then it disappears. Now push that out to a week ahead and the precipitation isn't so good, although the temperatures are still decent.
Contrary to belief we know VERY little about the world around us....
We know a great deal about the weather and climate. It's not enough to make perfect predictions, but it is enough to make useful predictions.
thus the reason that most of what we believe are THEORIES and not FACT.
Not that canard again. "Theory" doesn't mean "we have no idea what's going on and can't make any useful predictions".
Temperatures have been going up since the 1800's after coming out of a cooling period...they have been going up since then. That was BEFORE the Industrial Revolution.
The end of the Little Ice Age was nothing like the current warming.
Temperatures are on average COOLER today than they were in the Middle Ages.
That's also false; there is no record of the Medieval Warm Period being warmer than today, not even in the northern hemisphere, let alone globally.
For every piece of "scientific" information you throw on Global Warming I could most likely counter it with another piece of scientific evidence.
Go ahead. You can start with the claims you just made.
Ok, I am asking you to substantiate your claim to be a "top [climate] simulation author".
Yes, model parameters are calibrated against real data, but that is a far cry from your implied "models are just curve fitting which can produce any result" or your "models are intentionally rigged to prove AGW". And of those measurements, I think only satellite measurements are unbiased enough to be worth spending any time on. And they show no significant trend line. Another false claim.
Temperature changes cause CO2 increases, and the CO2 in turn amplifies and prolongs the warming.
This is kind of a gray area: scientists use their code as intellectual property. Their competitors are free to use the procedures and data to reproduce the results, but many scientists want to keep the actual code they've spent man-years developing as their competitive advantage: let others write the code if they need to. Well, I kind of see the point — you need to give out enough information for the results to be reproducible, but it sucks for other people to use your hard-won labor to turn around and scoop you on results. And McIntyre has irritated a lot of scientists because he doesn't publish any new results himself, he just attacks other people's work. That's perfectly legitimate in science but doesn't win friends.
However the bottom line is, especially for a government researcher, I feel they need to release their source code. Particularly if there are problems in replicating the published procedure.
Well, yes. There's still large uncertainty, but it's only through very hard work that they can make these predictions at all with the confidence they do. And while you may call them "mediocre", they are good enough to rule out possibilities like "no further warming", which have important policy implications.
Great, you respect the statistical opinions of non-statisticians more than you do professional statisticians. Nice to see you're at least consistently irrational.
But here I will do some of your dirty work for you: Before you use dust storms as an excuse consider that weather is driven by the sun on earth
That is a meaningless statement. The Sun provides energy input to the climate system, but you cannot simply wave your hands and ascribe all temperature changes to the Sun. Unless you're prepared to argue that dust storms on Earth are responsible for global warming, you haven't got a point.
I do read RealClimate. And, once again, you have not supported your statements regarding the climate community as a whole, nor even anything about Schmidt, Hansen, etc.
Why so worried about the biodiversity?
You have no problem with wiping out large pecentages of all species?
If the coral polyps survive they will eventually re-form into reefs.
Yeah, in thousands of years. In the meantime, say goodbye to the species which depend on them as well as all the tourism and humans who depend on reef fishing.
But if you embrace the changes they can be very beneficial! Just imagine all the beach side property that will be created! The opportunities abound for ice cream vendors and jet ski rental outfits! It is all good!
Sigh.