Except the flooding in the past was a lot slower, and there were no people living there anyway. And we are between floods, so it shouldn't be flooding, and yet it is. And it's flooding faster than in the past. And it turns out all the evidence points to the tap.
Some scientists claim it's humans and our activities. Others have evidence showing it's the sun. Yet others have evidence showing it being from cow flatulence. And others have evidence showing it's just normal variation.
No, this is nonsense. The consensus among the vast majority of scientists in the relevant fields is that it's caused by human activity. Hardly anyone believes otherwise, and those that do, are unable to show that to be the case through actual reswarch.
For example, it is not the sun. The sun is at a low point right now, so it is causing less warming. And less the planet is getting warmer. You fail.
The fact is that the climate should be getting cooler now, especially due to the current solar minimum. And yet it is getting warmer.
Climate change in the past has been much slower, and/or there haven't been a lot of humans around to suffer from it. Today, the planet is over-populated, and the rapid climate change we are seeing today will indeed cause major problems.
And every time it gets hot there's a press release saying "GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, DOOM IS IMMINENT, HOTTEST YEAR EVAH!"
Show me some of these press releases, please.
Then someone checks the data and it turns out it was actually hotter in some much earlier year, and that's buried on page 10 (though it still makes the front page of Slashdot).
When you have to continuously find reasons to believe in something, and continuously tout that you've just proven (for the 600th time) that it's real, you've invented one of two things: Politics or Religion.
You are getting it all wrong. Those who accept the scientific facts don't continuously have to find reasons to continue to accept the facts. The continuously have to refute denialist bullshit. Furthermore, more research is coming all the time, shedding new light on the issue. That research is talked about, obviously.
So it's not about finding reasons to believe. It's about countering denialist bullshit.
You, on the other hand, seem to be desperately looking for reasons to reject the scientific facts that show AGW.
Give me something real: Impact assessments that aren't "ZOMG ZEE APOCALYPSE!"; correlated facts that aren't "CARS AND CIGARETTES MAKE THE EARTH A BOILING DEATH SPHERE!!";
It's already there. The science is cold and factual, and clearly shows that human activity is causing warming.
No, I don't believe the data's being handled correctly at all. There's "no" evidence because any counter-evidence is suppressed or ridiculed.
This is of course complete and utter nonsense. You are clearly not very knowledgeable. A lot of things have been proposed as counter-evidence, but one found that it did hot hold up when analyzed further.
Look, the levels of CO2 are rising, and the temperatures are going up! CO2 is causing global warming! Humans produce tons of CO2, humans cause global warming!
Nice straw man. Is it a result of ignorance or dishonesty on your part?
We switched some data, instead of using core samples we use tree ring analysis. That whole "Medieval warm period" was like a half degree warmer; the bathtub curve is now a hockey stick. See? Global warming is a new thing! We're causing it because of the industrial age polluting the atmosphere leading us to a firey apocolypse!
More misrepresentation. The MWP was a local phenomenon, and the hockey stick is perfectly valid.
We're calling it Climate Change now.
No, it's still called global warming.
This isn't a progression of study. This is a progression of justification.
No, the science is clear: AGW is here. You are the one with the justifications for rejecting the scientific facts at hand.
And it's the dominant religion in power now, so any counter-claims are ridiculed because they go against consensus and against the well-known and publicized understandings. Truth is relative to propaganda.
Considering that you are merely parroting denialist propaganda, I find your comment to be quite amusing. And counter-claims are not ridiculed. Scientific ones, that is. Yours aren't.
Because of this, it's impossible to know what's going on.
Oh, we know what's going on. Those of us who paid attention to the actual science, and the facts, you know?
Scientists are simply stating it as it is: Human activity is warming the planet. Skeptics are skeptical of the facts for some reason, and denialists outright deny them. They are the ones with the political agendas.
But it is likely the medieval warm period was warmer, and the Roman warm period, and most of the early Holocene. Planet and people somehow managed to survive those cataclysms.
The MWP was local. The global climate was not warmer overall. The Roman Warm Period is a lie. Humanity may have survived, but we have been on the brink of extinction before. Furthermore, changes didn't happen as rapidly as they do now, and the population was only a fraction of today's over-populated world.
I accept the presence of "global warming" but I have not yet seen any proof of "man-made global warming".
Science deals with evidence, not proof. And there is a huge amount of evidence that the warming is man-made. In fact, all the research points to that.
However, there is undeniable geological evidence of at least four Ice Ages that predate man's presence on this planet.
Yes, but our position between ice ages means that the climate should have been cooler, especially since the sun is warming the planet less. And yet it is warmer.
Mankind has also had enough technology and record-keeping to log climatic events for maybe three hundred years at the most, or "a blink of an eye" in geological terms.
But there's proxy data for millions of years of climate on earth.
CO2 levels and global average temperatures have been higher and lower at many points in history
But not with humanity around.
There have been times when the icecaps disappeared, and life somehow went on. Sea levels have varied by hundreds of feet, without Americans to blame for, well, everything. There have also been ice ages, and somehow the world didn't end.
But that took a lot longer than the changes we see today. And the population was much smaller during the ice ages humanity has been through.
So here's a question. If civilization had arisen 10,000 years earlier, and someone observed how quickly the ice sheets were retreating, would there be a clamor to protect the glaciers that blanketed pretty much everything north of 50 degrees latitude? Would THAT climate change be seen as the Armageddon that the proposed climate change is being presented as? Would rising sea levels lead to a frothing panic about the loss of the Bering land bridge?
You mean when the number of humans on the planet were a fraction of what it is today? Never mind the fact that humanity has been on the brink of extinction before...
So once again, I ask: If the climate is changing, so what? Climate is not a constant, things aren't automatically evil just because it's a human doing it, and I fail to see how this is any different from any other climate change in the four billion year history of everything on Earth.
The changes took longer. There were a lot fewer humans, and they were moving around, and there was no overpopulation. And so on.
There are more differences. For example, the population is much, much bigger now. And the changes took a lot longer, of course. And it's not like humanity hasn't been close to extinction before...
Predictably enough, Anthony Watts is at it again ([1][2]). Haven't looked too deeply into his claims, and I'm really not too tempted to do so either. So has anyone else looked at it? Any comments?
Well, it's an established term with a legal meaningthat is well understood. Attempting to substitute a more neutral term like "act of nature" would open you up to all sorts of confusion over what, exactly, constitutes an act of nature in legal terms.
No more confusion than what "acts of God" means now, really.
More importantly, I doubt you'd be able to seriously claim that that term imposes an ideological view. You don't have to believe in any god or gods to use the term, any more than any of the dozens of words in modern language that are derived from Greek/Roman/Norse mythology.
Yes, I can claim that it imposes an ideological view. It clearly refers to God. Language shapes society. This kind of language justifies forcing religion on people.
You are the one trying to silence people. I'm the one explaining to you that easily accessible lists of comon creationist/denialist lies is a good thing to have.
These lists specifically refute the idiotic claims from the crazies with calm, factual information.
Your last sentence is just pure idiocy. You are misrepresenting my statements just like a dishonest creationist or denialist would. Good job.
And you have still failed to address the fact that other sites are doing for AGW what TalkOrigins does for Evolution. You are just trying to change the subject, and you are spewing red herrings all over the place.
No, the science side is not distorting and cherry-picking the facts. Your comment about "condescending one-sided" is very revealing, though. Clearly, you think "there has to be more than one side". What you are basically saying is that just because someone makes a claim, that claim must hold some merit, and anyone who refutes that claim is "condescending and one-sided".
In other words: Rejecting claims about a flat earth is "condescending and one-sided".
That's just insane.
Other sites are doing for AGW what TalkOrigins does for Evolution. You failed to address that.
TalkOrigins lists responses to common creationist lies. Some sites are doing the same for AGW, and denialist lies. These "accessible articles" of yours are usually buried somewhere, without an easy way to look it up. There's a reason why TalkOrigins and such sites exist: They provide you with a quick reference of the common lies and talking points of the anti-science crowd.
I don't have to have a lot of expertise on climate to know that hiding the decline is not acceptable science.
Please stop mindlessly parroting denialist propaganda, and educate yourself instead. "Decline" is not referring to temperature, but to the decline in reliability of tree ring proxy data since the 1960s. The problem is extensively covered in the scientific literature, and there is nothing about it that's "bad science".
If those thousands of scientists defend that practice, then I see no reason to trust their recommendation to spend trillions to reduce co2 output.
Defend what practice? To look at the decline in tree ring proxy data reliability, then producing large amounts of research to cover that? Geez.
I understand science and have tremendous respect for it, but it looks like climate scientists may be environmentalists that have left behind science and shifted to advocacy.
This is a conspiracy theory. You are saying that thousands of scientists from across the world have all come together to fool us all. Quite insane, really.
Before the climate gate emails were released I had heard of the "hockey stick" but I didn't look into it because I thought it was probably just anti-science oil company propaganda.
That's interesting, because before Climategate, I actually believed the nonsense denialists were spewing about the hockey stick. I actually thought scientists had been manipulating data and making up stuff. I didn't really care, so I didn't bother to look into it. Then Climategate hit, and I did look into it because it made me curious.
I found that the hockey stick is indeed valid, and has in fact been validated by later research. And I found that denialists are lying about everything else I've looked up too.
But after hearing about the trick to "hide the decline", I looked into it more. Climate scientists wanted to get rid of the medieval warm period because if temps were just as warm in the recent past, then there couldn't be much worry about today.
Huh? The "trick to hide the decline" was about tree ring data diverging from other proxy data around the 1960, wasn't it? So what are you talking about? The MWP wasn't global anyway.
So they found some tree rings that showed temps were cool back in the medieval warm period. Problem was that some of these trees were saying that temps were also cool during the last 50 years. Instead of eliminating these lying trees from the data set, they covered up the inconvenient data for the last 50 years from the lying trees with thermometer measurements and left us to think that these lying trees were telling the truth about the temperatures 1000 years ago.
No, this is not what happened. What happened was that the tree ring data perfectly matched other proxy data until the 1960s. This has been extensively described in the published literature, so you have obviously fallen for the typical denialist BS propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the flooding in the past was a lot slower, and there were no people living there anyway. And we are between floods, so it shouldn't be flooding, and yet it is. And it's flooding faster than in the past. And it turns out all the evidence points to the tap.
What new facts have you introduced into the discussion?
No, this is nonsense. The consensus among the vast majority of scientists in the relevant fields is that it's caused by human activity. Hardly anyone believes otherwise, and those that do, are unable to show that to be the case through actual reswarch.
For example, it is not the sun. The sun is at a low point right now, so it is causing less warming. And less the planet is getting warmer. You fail.
So... because people are going to die in plane crashes anyway, there's no need to work on improving safety and security on planes?
Climate change in the past has been much slower, and/or there haven't been a lot of humans around to suffer from it. Today, the planet is over-populated, and the rapid climate change we are seeing today will indeed cause major problems.
Actually, we should be in a cooling trend now, and yet it is warming. Oops.
Human activity is accelerating the warming, while it should be slowly cooling. That is bad.
Show me some of these press releases, please.
Again, examples please.
You are getting it all wrong. Those who accept the scientific facts don't continuously have to find reasons to continue to accept the facts. The continuously have to refute denialist bullshit. Furthermore, more research is coming all the time, shedding new light on the issue. That research is talked about, obviously.
So it's not about finding reasons to believe. It's about countering denialist bullshit.
You, on the other hand, seem to be desperately looking for reasons to reject the scientific facts that show AGW.
It's already there. The science is cold and factual, and clearly shows that human activity is causing warming.
No. Unlike the massive amounts of evidence for AGW, of which you are apparently ignorant.
This is of course complete and utter nonsense. You are clearly not very knowledgeable. A lot of things have been proposed as counter-evidence, but one found that it did hot hold up when analyzed further.
Nice straw man. Is it a result of ignorance or dishonesty on your part?
More misrepresentation. The MWP was a local phenomenon, and the hockey stick is perfectly valid.
No, it's still called global warming.
No, the science is clear: AGW is here. You are the one with the justifications for rejecting the scientific facts at hand.
Considering that you are merely parroting denialist propaganda, I find your comment to be quite amusing. And counter-claims are not ridiculed. Scientific ones, that is. Yours aren't.
Oh, we know what's going on. Those of us who paid attention to the actual science, and the facts, you know?
Science deals with evidence, not proof. And the evidence clearly shows "A" to be the case. All the research out there.
Because people don't realize the deep shit we are in, and that's to a large degree thanks to misinformation from the denialist industry.
Scientists are simply stating it as it is: Human activity is warming the planet. Skeptics are skeptical of the facts for some reason, and denialists outright deny them. They are the ones with the political agendas.
The MWP was local. The global climate was not warmer overall. The Roman Warm Period is a lie. Humanity may have survived, but we have been on the brink of extinction before. Furthermore, changes didn't happen as rapidly as they do now, and the population was only a fraction of today's over-populated world.
Science deals with evidence, not proof. And there is a huge amount of evidence that the warming is man-made. In fact, all the research points to that.
Yes, but our position between ice ages means that the climate should have been cooler, especially since the sun is warming the planet less. And yet it is warmer.
But there's proxy data for millions of years of climate on earth.
But not with humanity around.
But that took a lot longer than the changes we see today. And the population was much smaller during the ice ages humanity has been through.
You mean when the number of humans on the planet were a fraction of what it is today? Never mind the fact that humanity has been on the brink of extinction before...
The changes took longer. There were a lot fewer humans, and they were moving around, and there was no overpopulation. And so on.
MWP and LIA were both local. The global climate was still exactly what the models show.
There are more differences. For example, the population is much, much bigger now. And the changes took a lot longer, of course. And it's not like humanity hasn't been close to extinction before...
Predictably enough, Anthony Watts is at it again ([1] [2]). Haven't looked too deeply into his claims, and I'm really not too tempted to do so either. So has anyone else looked at it? Any comments?
No more confusion than what "acts of God" means now, really.
Yes, I can claim that it imposes an ideological view. It clearly refers to God. Language shapes society. This kind of language justifies forcing religion on people.
These lists specifically refute the idiotic claims from the crazies with calm, factual information.
Your last sentence is just pure idiocy. You are misrepresenting my statements just like a dishonest creationist or denialist would. Good job.
And you have still failed to address the fact that other sites are doing for AGW what TalkOrigins does for Evolution. You are just trying to change the subject, and you are spewing red herrings all over the place.
In other words: Rejecting claims about a flat earth is "condescending and one-sided".
That's just insane.
Other sites are doing for AGW what TalkOrigins does for Evolution. You failed to address that.
TalkOrigins lists responses to common creationist lies. Some sites are doing the same for AGW, and denialist lies. These "accessible articles" of yours are usually buried somewhere, without an easy way to look it up. There's a reason why TalkOrigins and such sites exist: They provide you with a quick reference of the common lies and talking points of the anti-science crowd.
co2science.org? McKitrick? LOL. That's like referring to the Discovery Institute or Ken Ham for information on Evolution.
Please stop mindlessly parroting denialist propaganda, and educate yourself instead. "Decline" is not referring to temperature, but to the decline in reliability of tree ring proxy data since the 1960s. The problem is extensively covered in the scientific literature, and there is nothing about it that's "bad science".
Defend what practice? To look at the decline in tree ring proxy data reliability, then producing large amounts of research to cover that? Geez.
This is a conspiracy theory. You are saying that thousands of scientists from across the world have all come together to fool us all. Quite insane, really.
That's interesting, because before Climategate, I actually believed the nonsense denialists were spewing about the hockey stick. I actually thought scientists had been manipulating data and making up stuff. I didn't really care, so I didn't bother to look into it. Then Climategate hit, and I did look into it because it made me curious.
I found that the hockey stick is indeed valid, and has in fact been validated by later research. And I found that denialists are lying about everything else I've looked up too.
Huh? The "trick to hide the decline" was about tree ring data diverging from other proxy data around the 1960, wasn't it? So what are you talking about? The MWP wasn't global anyway.
No, this is not what happened. What happened was that the tree ring data perfectly matched other proxy data until the 1960s. This has been extensively described in the published literature, so you have obviously fallen for the typical denialist BS propaganda.