And getting rid of the government doesn't get rid of the corporations. On the contrary, many times it just leads to the corporations having more direct control with even less recourse for the person.
Seeing that a corporation exists as a legal entity enabled by laws enacted by the government if the government ceases to exist the corporation ceases to exist as a legal entity at the same time. (Which doesn't mean the people running the corporation stop, they just lose the legal protections that incorporation grants them.)
The Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses are among the worst provisions with these trade deals. They're a direct assault on national sovereignty. Why should investors be guaranteed profits especially over a nations environmental laws or measures they take for the welfare of their citizens? Corporations exist to serve the people, not the other way around.
Trans-Canada is suing the USA for $15 billion under the ISDS terms of NAFTA because the Keystone XL pipeline was not approved.
You're on the right track but actually plants and fossil fuels (which after all are largely derived from plants) have similar isotopic ratios. This is because organic processes prefer the lighter 12C to 13C isotope. But in the non-organic area there is no such preference so the 13C/12C ratio is higher than in organic sources. The dropping 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere is an indication that much of the extra CO2 comes from fossil fuel burning. Sources of non-organic CO2 include volcanoes and making cement.
This sounds like a very plausible source for the extra heat that's causing what environmentalists/leftists like to call "Global Warming".
These environmentalists/leftists have been blaming humans the whole time, yet now it turns out that it's undersea volcanoes that are responsible, and not people.
It actually makes a lot of sense that volcanoes would be responsible.
A single volcano can have a greater environmental impact in a single day than millions of people have over their entire lives.
When there are many of these volcanoes, and they have ongoing eruptions day after day, they'd of course have an absolutely massive impact, far beyond even what billions of humans could ever do.
Undersea volcanoes heat the water. The water melts the polar caps. The polar caps add more liquid water to the oceans, which is heated by these volcanoes. The water heats the air.
This explains all of the "Global Warming" that has been blamed on humans by environmentalists/leftists. It explains the sea level changes. It explains it all.
The question you need to ask is has the rate of eruptions on the mid ocean ridges changed significantly over the past century. The mid ocean ridge in the Atlantic has existed since the breakup of Pangaea 150-175 million years ago. There have undoubtedly been times of greater and lesser activity over that time period but to postulate that all of a sudden 100 years ago or so the activity increased enough to force the changes we're seeing is pushing it. You will definitely need some scientific evidence to back that up.
The thing about volcanoes is yes, they are spectacular from a human perspective but the amount of CO2 they emit and heat they release is relatively insignificant compared to human emissions and the amount of heat pouring on to the Earth daily from the Sun. Even a 40,000 mile long volcano is not going to release much heat compared to daily insolation.
I've seen work from Nir Shaviv before. Right now his solar magnetic variability work is just a hypothesis. There is no known causative factor for that to drive climate. Come up with the causation link and you have a theory.
So I went and read the IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers. (Errata) As an aside I found this statement in it that supports my contention the the MWP wasn't globally well coordinated in time.
Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century. These regional warm periods did not occur as coherently across regions as the warming in the late 20th century (high confidence). {5.5}
Maybe I'm dense but you'll have to explain to me why the "SPM is at odds with the bulk of the document". If it's about natural climate forcings they get mentioned in the SPM although not particularly prominently. Section 8.4 of the WG1 report is titled "Natural Radiative Forcing Changes: Solar and Volcanic".
The fact that the RWP exists shows that NATURAL VARIABILITY is greater and faster than what we've seen over the last 200 years.
You're going to have to justify that statement scientifically for me to give it any credence. I've never seen any evidence for that.
What the global mean temperature should be is an irrelevant question. The issue is the rate of temperature change is far faster than natural and human systems can adapt to easily. If you took the temperature change expected over the next 200 years with BAU and spread it out over 2,000 years or more it wouldn't be nearly as big a problem.
To bring this back to a single thread I'll respond to your 2nd message here.
Denier is a perfectly good descriptive word that can apply to many types of denial. Holocaust deniers, climate science deniers, anti-vaxxers (vacine science deniers), creationists (evolution science deniers), moon landing deniers and many more. I'll continue to use it when I think it's appropriate.
Perhaps you could learn some statistics and look at the respective probability distributions and look at the expectation values. If you can. 'Cause at the moment you statement shows a clear ignorance of the significant difference. Furthermore, you don't seem to be aware of the evolution of the IPCC's position from insane back somewhat to observational reality as shown by Lewis and Curry.
I went to the WG1 report (it's big, took me over 10 minutes to download) and looked at what it has to say about climate sensitivity. On page 1110 there is a graph of different measurements of equilibrium climate sensitivity. The give the likely range at 1.5 to 4.5 C. They included "Lewis, N., 2013: An objective Bayesian, improved approach for applying optimal fingerprint techniques to estimate climate sensitivity. J. Clim., doi:10.1175/JCLID-12-00473.1." in the graph. The range for that is still mostly within the IPCC range. That apparently isn't the Lewis & Curry paper you are referring to but as I said the range for L&C is 1.04 to 4.05 K, largely within the IPCC likely range.
I'm well aware that the IPCC's position on ECS has evolved over time but an ECS of about 3 C has always been near the middle of the range.
Actually, there was FAR less ice 70 years ago. But you don't know anything about the newspaper reports of the time. This is at the same time that the US experienced its 'dustbowl' conditions that were far hotter and more extreme than temperatures today (based on the real data before NASA and NOAA cooled the past to produce 'Mike's Nature Trick').
In looking at major El Ninos 2015 is clearly analogous to 1997 and 2016 will be analogous to 1998. 2016 will likely set a new record even in the satellite records.
On top of that I live on the surface, not in the troposphere so I pay more attention to the surface temperature records.
Maybe you can say there's a correlation between solar magnetic variability and climate (I have my doubts) but now you need to come up with the method of causation before you can really call it a theory.
But hey, anyone who believes in anything other than CO2 as climate driver is called a "denier" by the warmistas. That makes you a denier.
That makes all the scientists who worked on the IPCC WG1 report deniers too. I'm in good company:)
My confusion about your mention of the RWP was that you mentioned it in the context of the hockey stick graph when the start of the HSG is 1000 years after the RMP.
BOOM ! A second time you demonstrate a complete ignorance of the argument that YOUR side makes. The Hockey Stick is *essentialy* to the argument that the cause of the warming after the LIA is principally due to humans. This is why the Hockey Stick *must* have a flat blade or AGW is falsified (which means warmunists MUST deny the LIA and WMP and RWM and even older warming in the Holocene), That is why I post this graph, because it shows that the hypothesis advanced by the warmistas CANNOT be true: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com... [amazonaws.com]
So now you're claiming the record from one ice core in Greenland is a suitable analog for the whole planet? Cherry picking at its finest.
Oh... your feelings are hurt being called a climate science denier. All you're trying to do is co-opt the word denier so it only applies to Holocaust deniers. Actually in the long run I think climate science deniers may be found more wanting morally than Holocaust deniers because they're actively trying to thwart taking action against anthropogenic global warming rather than simply denying a historic fact.
The latest IPCC report gives an ECS range of 1.5 to 4 K. Lewis and Curry give a range of 1.04 to 4.05 K. Looks pretty similar to me. I've never seen anything from the IPCC that said 4 K is extremely likely. Perhaps you could cite the section of the report that says that.
As far as ice goes, Arctic sea ice minimum extent was the 4th lowest after 2012, 2007 and 2011. The 9 lowest years of Arctic sea ice extent minimums have all been since 2007. Link. Greenland continues to lose ice by all measurements including the GRACE satellites which measure changes in gravity. Antarctic sea ice did not set a new record this year although it was still higher than before the recent spate of record high years. The GRACE satellites continue to show net loss of ice from the Antarctic ice sheet although a recent paper shows gains in some areas.
To say that total ice cover is at record levels is absurd.
Don't be ridiculous. Of course other things besides CO2 drive climate. Volcanoes, changes in albedo and solar variation (driven more strongly by Milankovitch Cycles than variation in solar output) being some of the big ones. The question is can you find a current natural process other than CO2 to account for the bulk of the current warming.
In the original hockey stick graph the period from 1000 to 1200 was the warmest before the current warming. How is that denying the MWP? The period from about 1400 to 1900 is the coldest shown on the graph. How is that denying the LIA?
I'm confused by you mentioning RWP since it was 1000 years before the start of the graph. Which makes me wonder have you ever actually looked at that graph?
The hockey stick graph has absolutely nothing to do with as you put it "C"AGW theory. It is a reconstruction of past temperatures, not a theory of how climate changes. Therefore it has nothing to do with supporting or falsifying current climate theory.
I have heard this asserted, however stalactite formation in the Southern Hemisphere (where I live) was affected. I suggest you look at the stalactite data (which comes from numerous sites around the globe).
Yes there were warm episodes scattered around the world during that time but research indicates they weren't well coordinated in time so the global temperature was probably less driven by them.
I fully expect temperatures to continue to rise for a little bit, since the oceans have stored so much energy from previous heating. Plus, the CO2 level is going up. Everyone understands this. What it will not appear to be, is *catastrophic*. The question really is - if temperatures continue to show natural variability and a rise consistent with CO2 concentration alone (no 'enhanced' greenhouse effect), which is what has been seen in the satellite data for nearly two decades now, what will YOUR response be? or is your CAGW hypothesis non-falsifiable? (and thus, not actually a scientific theory).
You should really drop the "C" in CAGW. I just marks you out as being on the climate science denier side of things. Whether something is catastrophic or not is a pretty subjective measurement.
I take the satellite measurements with a grain of salt. The complexity of sussing out atmospheric temperatures by measuring microwave emissions of O2 molecules in the atmosphere makes it a difficult process. On top of that I live on the surface, not in the lower troposphere so I'm more interested in surface temperature measurements which even Carl Mears of RSS considers to be more trustworthy.
Yes, the Lewis and Curry analysis is two years AFTER the IPCC. Please note also that Lewis and Curry use observational reality. The IPCC use GCM models - which don't appear to match the observational reality. So the choice is before you, do you go with philosophy and chose an axiomatic approach that ignores data you don't like; or do you do science and change your hypothesis based on the data? since I have a PhD in physics I was FORCED to change my hypothesis from a CAGW believer into someone who now considers ALL the data.
Lewis and Curry's estimated ranges for climate sensitivity isn't that far off from the IPCC's estimates. You just cherry picked the low end of their range. Also while 150 years of observations may be long enough to determine the Transient Climate Response I'm not sure that is long enough to determine the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity because among other things it doesn't take into full account albedo changes from melting ice.
I don't consider Nic Lewis and Judith Curry to particularly be unbiased sources so I guess we're even on that score.
Regarding changing my mind about CAGW as I said I don't accept the "C" in it. Whether it becomes catastrophic depends on what we do in the way of mitigation and adaption. As long as we keep increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere temperatures will continue to increase. If someone comes along and demonstrates that statement isn't true then I'll change my mind.
The "graph" you are referring to in the first IPCC report was a schematic diagram from Hubert Lamb with no scale on the y-axis. You can see it described as a schematic diagram in the IPCC's first archive report on page 202, Fig. 7.1. Also it is now known that the MWP was not a global phenomenon but was mostly limited to the the North Atlantic and Europe. Current science indicates the Little Ice Age was driven largely by volcanic activity with a small added impetus from the Maunder minimum. Solar activity has been low for a decade now yet temperatures continue to rise. What will be your response if as some predict solar activity remains low into the 2030s yet temperatures continue to rise?
I don't know where you got your 1.2 K ECS from (I suppose from Lewis & Curry) but the latest IPCC report give a range of 1.5-4.5 K for ECS. Gavin Schmidt has an interesting commentary on Reconiciling estimates of climate sensitivity over at RealClimate talking about the recent Kate Marvel paper in which he had a part.
That doesn't matter. When you are combining the results of thousands of thermometer readings you're going to get an accurate result to several decimal places even if your readings were only integer values.
An example that makes this clear is baseball batting averages. In each at bat you either get a hit or you're out, a 1 or a 0. But baseball batting averages are commonly reported to 3 decimal places.
While I'm sure the climate is warming, and I'm sure that humans are exacerbating the trend, it is hard to be impressed with the alarmist rants when the models used and raw data are not made available.
If you think the models and raw data are not available you haven't looked very hard. Of course I doubt you'd know what to do with them if you got them.
Thermometers (as we would recognize them) were developed in the mid to late 1600s and by the 1720s they were making accurate mercury thermometers. By the mid 1800s making accurate thermometers was a well developed skill. You may not have been able to read them with the same degree of precision (decimal places) as modern thermometers but there's no reason to believe they weren't as accurate (within the limits of their precision).
2015 is going to blow 1998's record out of the water and chances are 2016 will be even hotter. But never fear, 2017 will be cooler than 2015 or 2016. New meme: No warming since 2016!
Except this interglacial reached its peak forcing from Milankovitch Cycles around 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and has been slowly cooling since then. From Milankovitch Cycles alone you would conclude that the cooling would continue. But it isn't.
So throw out Michael Mann's 1998 hockey stick graph. Since then more than a dozen studies by other researchers using different techniques show essentially the same thing. So much so that if you put Mann's 1998 graph in with the others you couldn't pick out the original hockey stick graph from the rest of them. Mann's 1998 graph is old news. You've got a bunch of other hockey stick graphs to debunk. Better get to work.
Trying to find a "top ten" list of the hottest and coldest years. Can't find it on NOAA's website. Anyone?
Here's a page that has a table that ranks the years from 1880 to 2014 with 1 being the coldest and 135 being the warmest. You can suss out the bottom and top ten from it. It doesn't have 2015 yet because the official numbers haven't come out yet but you can bet that 2015 will be ranked 136.
Maybe the problem is that the private sector pays so little compared to the public sector. If you want to have a strong economy people need money to spend.
Slashdot Mirror
The provision I object to the most is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement section. It can allow corporations to override national sovereignty.
And getting rid of the government doesn't get rid of the corporations. On the contrary, many times it just leads to the corporations having more direct control with even less recourse for the person.
Seeing that a corporation exists as a legal entity enabled by laws enacted by the government if the government ceases to exist the corporation ceases to exist as a legal entity at the same time. (Which doesn't mean the people running the corporation stop, they just lose the legal protections that incorporation grants them.)
The Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses are among the worst provisions with these trade deals. They're a direct assault on national sovereignty. Why should investors be guaranteed profits especially over a nations environmental laws or measures they take for the welfare of their citizens? Corporations exist to serve the people, not the other way around.
Trans-Canada is suing the USA for $15 billion under the ISDS terms of NAFTA because the Keystone XL pipeline was not approved.
This is about Global Warming.
Prepare to be disappointed. It isn't about global warming in any way. Talk about motivated reasoning.
You're on the right track but actually plants and fossil fuels (which after all are largely derived from plants) have similar isotopic ratios. This is because organic processes prefer the lighter 12C to 13C isotope. But in the non-organic area there is no such preference so the 13C/12C ratio is higher than in organic sources. The dropping 13C/12C ratio in the atmosphere is an indication that much of the extra CO2 comes from fossil fuel burning. Sources of non-organic CO2 include volcanoes and making cement.
This sounds like a very plausible source for the extra heat that's causing what environmentalists/leftists like to call "Global Warming".
These environmentalists/leftists have been blaming humans the whole time, yet now it turns out that it's undersea volcanoes that are responsible, and not people.
It actually makes a lot of sense that volcanoes would be responsible.
A single volcano can have a greater environmental impact in a single day than millions of people have over their entire lives.
When there are many of these volcanoes, and they have ongoing eruptions day after day, they'd of course have an absolutely massive impact, far beyond even what billions of humans could ever do.
Undersea volcanoes heat the water. The water melts the polar caps. The polar caps add more liquid water to the oceans, which is heated by these volcanoes. The water heats the air.
This explains all of the "Global Warming" that has been blamed on humans by environmentalists/leftists. It explains the sea level changes. It explains it all.
The question you need to ask is has the rate of eruptions on the mid ocean ridges changed significantly over the past century. The mid ocean ridge in the Atlantic has existed since the breakup of Pangaea 150-175 million years ago. There have undoubtedly been times of greater and lesser activity over that time period but to postulate that all of a sudden 100 years ago or so the activity increased enough to force the changes we're seeing is pushing it. You will definitely need some scientific evidence to back that up.
The thing about volcanoes is yes, they are spectacular from a human perspective but the amount of CO2 they emit and heat they release is relatively insignificant compared to human emissions and the amount of heat pouring on to the Earth daily from the Sun. Even a 40,000 mile long volcano is not going to release much heat compared to daily insolation.
I've seen work from Nir Shaviv before. Right now his solar magnetic variability work is just a hypothesis. There is no known causative factor for that to drive climate. Come up with the causation link and you have a theory.
So I went and read the IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policymakers. (Errata) As an aside I found this statement in it that supports my contention the the MWP wasn't globally well coordinated in time.
Continental-scale surface temperature reconstructions show, with high confidence, multi-decadal periods during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (year 950 to 1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th century. These regional warm periods did not occur as coherently across regions as the warming in the late 20th century (high confidence). {5.5}
Maybe I'm dense but you'll have to explain to me why the "SPM is at odds with the bulk of the document". If it's about natural climate forcings they get mentioned in the SPM although not particularly prominently. Section 8.4 of the WG1 report is titled "Natural Radiative Forcing Changes: Solar and Volcanic".
The fact that the RWP exists shows that NATURAL VARIABILITY is greater and faster than what we've seen over the last 200 years.
You're going to have to justify that statement scientifically for me to give it any credence. I've never seen any evidence for that.
What the global mean temperature should be is an irrelevant question. The issue is the rate of temperature change is far faster than natural and human systems can adapt to easily. If you took the temperature change expected over the next 200 years with BAU and spread it out over 2,000 years or more it wouldn't be nearly as big a problem.
To bring this back to a single thread I'll respond to your 2nd message here.
Denier is a perfectly good descriptive word that can apply to many types of denial. Holocaust deniers, climate science deniers, anti-vaxxers (vacine science deniers), creationists (evolution science deniers), moon landing deniers and many more. I'll continue to use it when I think it's appropriate.
Perhaps you could learn some statistics and look at the respective probability distributions and look at the expectation values. If you can. 'Cause at the moment you statement shows a clear ignorance of the significant difference. Furthermore, you don't seem to be aware of the evolution of the IPCC's position from insane back somewhat to observational reality as shown by Lewis and Curry.
I went to the WG1 report (it's big, took me over 10 minutes to download) and looked at what it has to say about climate sensitivity. On page 1110 there is a graph of different measurements of equilibrium climate sensitivity. The give the likely range at 1.5 to 4.5 C. They included "Lewis, N., 2013: An objective Bayesian, improved approach for applying optimal fingerprint techniques to estimate climate sensitivity. J. Clim., doi:10.1175/JCLID-12-00473.1." in the graph. The range for that is still mostly within the IPCC range. That apparently isn't the Lewis & Curry paper you are referring to but as I said the range for L&C is 1.04 to 4.05 K, largely within the IPCC likely range.
I'm well aware that the IPCC's position on ECS has evolved over time but an ECS of about 3 C has always been near the middle of the range.
Actually, there was FAR less ice 70 years ago. But you don't know anything about the newspaper reports of the time. This is at the same time that the US experienced its 'dustbowl' conditions that were far hotter and more extreme than temperatures today (based on the real data before NASA and NOAA cooled the past to produce 'Mike's Nature Trick').
In looking at major El Ninos 2015 is clearly analogous to 1997 and 2016 will be analogous to 1998. 2016 will likely set a new record even in the satellite records.
On top of that I live on the surface, not in the troposphere so I pay more attention to the surface temperature records.
Maybe you can say there's a correlation between solar magnetic variability and climate (I have my doubts) but now you need to come up with the method of causation before you can really call it a theory.
But hey, anyone who believes in anything other than CO2 as climate driver is called a "denier" by the warmistas. That makes you a denier.
That makes all the scientists who worked on the IPCC WG1 report deniers too. I'm in good company :)
My confusion about your mention of the RWP was that you mentioned it in the context of the hockey stick graph when the start of the HSG is 1000 years after the RMP.
BOOM ! A second time you demonstrate a complete ignorance of the argument that YOUR side makes. The Hockey Stick is *essentialy* to the argument that the cause of the warming after the LIA is principally due to humans. This is why the Hockey Stick *must* have a flat blade or AGW is falsified (which means warmunists MUST deny the LIA and WMP and RWM and even older warming in the Holocene), That is why I post this graph, because it shows that the hypothesis advanced by the warmistas CANNOT be true:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com... [amazonaws.com]
So now you're claiming the record from one ice core in Greenland is a suitable analog for the whole planet? Cherry picking at its finest.
Oh... your feelings are hurt being called a climate science denier. All you're trying to do is co-opt the word denier so it only applies to Holocaust deniers. Actually in the long run I think climate science deniers may be found more wanting morally than Holocaust deniers because they're actively trying to thwart taking action against anthropogenic global warming rather than simply denying a historic fact.
The latest IPCC report gives an ECS range of 1.5 to 4 K. Lewis and Curry give a range of 1.04 to 4.05 K. Looks pretty similar to me. I've never seen anything from the IPCC that said 4 K is extremely likely. Perhaps you could cite the section of the report that says that.
As far as ice goes, Arctic sea ice minimum extent was the 4th lowest after 2012, 2007 and 2011. The 9 lowest years of Arctic sea ice extent minimums have all been since 2007. Link. Greenland continues to lose ice by all measurements including the GRACE satellites which measure changes in gravity. Antarctic sea ice did not set a new record this year although it was still higher than before the recent spate of record high years. The GRACE satellites continue to show net loss of ice from the Antarctic ice sheet although a recent paper shows gains in some areas.
To say that total ice cover is at record levels is absurd.
Don't be ridiculous. Of course other things besides CO2 drive climate. Volcanoes, changes in albedo and solar variation (driven more strongly by Milankovitch Cycles than variation in solar output) being some of the big ones. The question is can you find a current natural process other than CO2 to account for the bulk of the current warming.
In the original hockey stick graph the period from 1000 to 1200 was the warmest before the current warming. How is that denying the MWP? The period from about 1400 to 1900 is the coldest shown on the graph. How is that denying the LIA?
I'm confused by you mentioning RWP since it was 1000 years before the start of the graph. Which makes me wonder have you ever actually looked at that graph?
The hockey stick graph has absolutely nothing to do with as you put it "C"AGW theory. It is a reconstruction of past temperatures, not a theory of how climate changes. Therefore it has nothing to do with supporting or falsifying current climate theory.
I have heard this asserted, however stalactite formation in the Southern Hemisphere (where I live) was affected. I suggest you look at the stalactite data (which comes from numerous sites around the globe).
Yes there were warm episodes scattered around the world during that time but research indicates they weren't well coordinated in time so the global temperature was probably less driven by them.
I fully expect temperatures to continue to rise for a little bit, since the oceans have stored so much energy from previous heating. Plus, the CO2 level is going up. Everyone understands this. What it will not appear to be, is *catastrophic*. The question really is - if temperatures continue to show natural variability and a rise consistent with CO2 concentration alone (no 'enhanced' greenhouse effect), which is what has been seen in the satellite data for nearly two decades now, what will YOUR response be? or is your CAGW hypothesis non-falsifiable? (and thus, not actually a scientific theory).
You should really drop the "C" in CAGW. I just marks you out as being on the climate science denier side of things. Whether something is catastrophic or not is a pretty subjective measurement.
I take the satellite measurements with a grain of salt. The complexity of sussing out atmospheric temperatures by measuring microwave emissions of O2 molecules in the atmosphere makes it a difficult process. On top of that I live on the surface, not in the lower troposphere so I'm more interested in surface temperature measurements which even Carl Mears of RSS considers to be more trustworthy.
Yes, the Lewis and Curry analysis is two years AFTER the IPCC. Please note also that Lewis and Curry use observational reality. The IPCC use GCM models - which don't appear to match the observational reality. So the choice is before you, do you go with philosophy and chose an axiomatic approach that ignores data you don't like; or do you do science and change your hypothesis based on the data? since I have a PhD in physics I was FORCED to change my hypothesis from a CAGW believer into someone who now considers ALL the data.
Lewis and Curry's estimated ranges for climate sensitivity isn't that far off from the IPCC's estimates. You just cherry picked the low end of their range. Also while 150 years of observations may be long enough to determine the Transient Climate Response I'm not sure that is long enough to determine the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity because among other things it doesn't take into full account albedo changes from melting ice.
I don't consider Nic Lewis and Judith Curry to particularly be unbiased sources so I guess we're even on that score.
Regarding changing my mind about CAGW as I said I don't accept the "C" in it. Whether it becomes catastrophic depends on what we do in the way of mitigation and adaption. As long as we keep increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere temperatures will continue to increase. If someone comes along and demonstrates that statement isn't true then I'll change my mind.
Current science indicates the Little Ice Age was driven largely by volcanic activity with a small added impetus from the Maunder minimum.
Really? for a hundred years? citation required.
The original paper:
Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks
Or:
Volcanoes May Have Sparked Little Ice Age
Don't be silly. It's trivial to show that they used different data sets.
The "graph" you are referring to in the first IPCC report was a schematic diagram from Hubert Lamb with no scale on the y-axis. You can see it described as a schematic diagram in the IPCC's first archive report on page 202, Fig. 7.1. Also it is now known that the MWP was not a global phenomenon but was mostly limited to the the North Atlantic and Europe. Current science indicates the Little Ice Age was driven largely by volcanic activity with a small added impetus from the Maunder minimum. Solar activity has been low for a decade now yet temperatures continue to rise. What will be your response if as some predict solar activity remains low into the 2030s yet temperatures continue to rise?
I don't know where you got your 1.2 K ECS from (I suppose from Lewis & Curry) but the latest IPCC report give a range of 1.5-4.5 K for ECS. Gavin Schmidt has an interesting commentary on Reconiciling estimates of climate sensitivity over at RealClimate talking about the recent Kate Marvel paper in which he had a part.
That doesn't matter. When you are combining the results of thousands of thermometer readings you're going to get an accurate result to several decimal places even if your readings were only integer values.
An example that makes this clear is baseball batting averages. In each at bat you either get a hit or you're out, a 1 or a 0. But baseball batting averages are commonly reported to 3 decimal places.
While I'm sure the climate is warming, and I'm sure that humans are exacerbating the trend, it is hard to be impressed with the alarmist rants when the models used and raw data are not made available.
If you think the models and raw data are not available you haven't looked very hard. Of course I doubt you'd know what to do with them if you got them.
Thermometers (as we would recognize them) were developed in the mid to late 1600s and by the 1720s they were making accurate mercury thermometers. By the mid 1800s making accurate thermometers was a well developed skill. You may not have been able to read them with the same degree of precision (decimal places) as modern thermometers but there's no reason to believe they weren't as accurate (within the limits of their precision).
2015 is going to blow 1998's record out of the water and chances are 2016 will be even hotter. But never fear, 2017 will be cooler than 2015 or 2016. New meme: No warming since 2016!
Except this interglacial reached its peak forcing from Milankovitch Cycles around 6,000 to 8,000 years ago and has been slowly cooling since then. From Milankovitch Cycles alone you would conclude that the cooling would continue. But it isn't.
So throw out Michael Mann's 1998 hockey stick graph. Since then more than a dozen studies by other researchers using different techniques show essentially the same thing. So much so that if you put Mann's 1998 graph in with the others you couldn't pick out the original hockey stick graph from the rest of them. Mann's 1998 graph is old news. You've got a bunch of other hockey stick graphs to debunk. Better get to work.
Trying to find a "top ten" list of the hottest and coldest years. Can't find it on NOAA's website. Anyone?
Here's a page that has a table that ranks the years from 1880 to 2014 with 1 being the coldest and 135 being the warmest. You can suss out the bottom and top ten from it. It doesn't have 2015 yet because the official numbers haven't come out yet but you can bet that 2015 will be ranked 136.
"The new record was caused by the long-term warming of the planet due to human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide"
Do you like flame wars???? Because that is how you turn the comments section into a flame war.....
And heaven knows we don't need any more flame wars. The planet's getting warm enough as it is. /s
Maybe the problem is that the private sector pays so little compared to the public sector. If you want to have a strong economy people need money to spend.
Well, she got caught didn't she?