"Yes there is a flattening in global ground surface temperature over the last 10 years."
There is simply no evidence to support a flattening of the global mean temperatures in the last 10 years, especially when 2010 was tied as the hottest year on record. The fact that the oceans are also heating and most of the heating is going on in the oceans is scant comfort, when one recognizes that warmer water will only melt arctic and antarctic ice only not slower.
All the Muller did was reevaluate data that previously he had said was inaccurately evaluated and then reached the same conclusion as the scientists who correctly interpreted it in the first place. Whether or not he was previously a skeptic or not is largely immaterial.
The only problem is that for denialists he was honest enough to admit it and now its news that is making the denialists have to face the one reality that they assiduously try so hard to avoid admitting, that the earth is heating up as the result of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Not true. If we get off of fossil fuels entirely within 20 years, humans will have an uncomfortably warm period of a hundred years or so before temperatures begin to return to their natural baseline. Wait and the only justice possible will come from burning the Kochs and the rest of the denialists alive, which will be scant solace for a planet that is destined to become unfit for human habitation.
This simply is not true. Put yourself in a room with 100% or even 20% carbon dioxide and prove it to yourself. Just have a friend you can save you when you pass out.
Wouldn't we all, but unfortunately humans produce about 300,000,000,000 mT of carbon dioxide annualy, which means we can expect a lot higher temperatures in the future, even though 2010 was tied as the hottest year on record.
There is little point being so scientifically illiterate to hope that "a climate cycle like a super volcano eruption". Assuming that there was a super eruption it would add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere although it would cool the climate for only a decade at most until the dust precipitated out of the atmosphere. Also it would likely have to be so large and centered on the equator that it would probably produce more economic dislocation, loss, and turmoil, not to mention human deaths, that it would hardly be considered beneficial.
The notion that there are no "controls" is climate science is to be totally unaware of the use of Monte Carlo methods and the ability to use computer simulation to test the probability distribution functions. The rest of your rant doesn't make enough sense to bother to discredit.
"If you do this, you will see that the data has been flat for 10 years."
Except this doesn't explain how 2010 could have tied for the highest global mean temperature on record. There is simply no data that suggests that the data has been flat for the past 10 years. None, whatsoever.
And it would seem that your favorite is towards anarchy and planetary death, which is rather revealing.
No doubt one of the "on net negative" effects you speak of would be pulling an oil company CEO away from a dollar he thought he could make at someone else's expense.
"There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
"From that, I think it is pretty clear that she is indeed saying that the warming has stopped over the last 10 years."
First of all, it is impossible to say what exactly will happen tomorrow as one can always posit that some unappreciated reality is about to reveal itself to us tomorrow. One can, however, speak in terms of probabilities given conditional observations.
If she is trying to claim that the warming has stopped over the last 10 years, then simply put she is wrong. 2010 is tied as the hottest year on record, with 2011 not that far behind.
"warming is as likely to be beneficial as it may be harmful."
There is simply no evidence for this statement, yet a tremendous amount of evidence that it is false. Although there is evidence that plants can grow more in high carbon dioxide environments, the relationship is not linear but rather has an optimum above which productivity declines toward zero. Also, there is little evidence that the soils in high latitude environments could be improved sufficiently to replace soils lost to droughts and heat at lower latitudes. Also there is little reason to believe that most crops would grow at higher latitudes simply because of more carbon dioxide, since the amount of daylight and darkness would be dramatically different making it impossible for most of these plants to survive during periods of low light for months at a time or to support known pollinators.
As for sea level rises not being a sufficient argument "to do anything", what you are saying is that as ports, jettys, breakwaters, etc. become inundated we should simply close down maritime activity so that we can "do nothing" is hardly going to be something that will not have serious adverse impacts on the economy. You can't use a dock that is underwater unless you rebuild it. To suggest otherwise is only to reveal that your position regarding the effects of climate change have moved from merely living in denial to living in delusion.
Life being as perfect as it is for you, no doubt you are among the lucky 1%, who are perfectly happy at the perfect state of the status quo.
Your rant sound more as if delusion will be just as suitable as denial in your world view. The problem of course is that regardless of how much denial is undertaken, it will do little to slow the warming of the planet that results from increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
As for the often used phrase "Please, point to a time in history when the climate wasn't changing." its largely irrelevant. The problem is not that the climate is changing, its just that because of forcing produced by pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by humans it is changing faster than at anytime in the history of the planet. Changes that previously required millions of years of earth history are now being seen to occur within a few centuries.
While you may be an expert in radiant heat transfer, you clearly have little knowledge of biology and the already real and dramatic changes what global warming forced by carbon dioxide has already caused and the likely consequences of what it will continue to cause if not halted. If we get to 2000 -3000 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you can pretty much kiss most higher cellular life on the planet good bye.
I would be amused to learn what you call mathematicians who deny that 2+2 = 4. Are they to be called truthers to? One really has to wonder how taut the bubble that protects the world view of republicans can get before it bursts.
and just how exactly are seawalls going to work if unless you damn up every river that drains into the sea? So in addition to advocating raising the global temperatures to the point that they can no longer sustain life, now you want to exterminate every anadromous and catadromous species of fish on the planet too.
Tell me again exactly how do seawalls prevent summer time temperature rising so high in the continental US that they will reach a point when it will be impossible to raise food crops? There are probably a lot of cattlemen and ranchers in West Texas, who will doubt the effectiveness of the seawalls built to date. A lot of Russian farmers and consumers lost big time as massive droughts in Central Asia caused wheat harvests to decline dramatically causing prices to rise precipitously.
"The studies I've read about recently (albeit mostly summarized in articles in magazines like Newsweek) seemed to indicate that even if we could somehow stop ALL of our CO2 emissions tomorrow, we'd be looking at many hundreds of years before we'd see temperatures fall back into the "normal" range, globally. That tells me it's pretty illogical to make costly changes in our behavior in a hurry. "
To make the thrust of your argument more clear lets use the analogy of you being the driver of a car. In the front seat with you is your family, in the back seat are your banker, who holds the note on your car, and the CEO of your auto insurance company. You are doing 80 miles an hour and you are a few hundred feet from a brick wall that you will hit if you don't stop. According to your argument there is no point in taking your foot off the accelerator or hitting the brakes because to do so may prove costly. The reality is that trying to establish what the "sensible price point" is after you hit the wall is largely irrelevant once you have killed everyone in the car is rather meaningless.
Clearly, the last thing the fossil fuels industry wants is to settle on a number as it would give lawyers who would then seek damages based upon the level of destruction they are causing to seek monetary relief for their clients.
As for the rest of your rant, it has little to do with either cause and effect or causality. It is clear that the ability of greenhouse gases to reflect infrared light back toward the surface of the earth and elsewhere in the atmosphere thereby trapping heat causes global warming, so the cause and effect are well established, particularly in absence of any realistic alternative theory to explain where all the excess heat is coming from (certainly not from the sun since variations in solar irradiance are too small to account for the dramatic rise in temperatures; certainly not from volcanoes producing carbon dioxide, since a;; volcanoes combined only produce about 200,000,000 mT of carbon dioxide per year. while average annual human output of carbon dioxide due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels is about 3,000,000,000 mT).
If you want to propose a fantasy alternative explanation of global warming not linked to carbon dioxide you had better get busy producing some evidence.
Well Mueller's problems are of his own making because he "had issues" with the Mann results when he should have regarded them as accurate. There is a hockey stick and all evidence points to a hockey stick with respect to global mean temperatures.
Now the question is no longer whether global warming is real. The question is what are we going to do about it. Advocating the burning of more and more fossil fuels is clearly not the answer. We need to get out of the business of burning fossil fuels as rapidly as we can, lest we see the planet become increasingly inhospitable to human life within the next 300 years.
" For sceptics with an agenda (I'm not saying he has one), saying there's nothing we can do is as effective as saying it isn't happening."
Not really as once one recognizes that the warming is occurring and that it is real and has a measurable rate one must begin to consider the consequences. As one does that it becomes harder and harder to make the case that we should just sit back because there is "nothing we can do about it". As people become more scientifically literate and begin to assess just how fast the natural world will change as a result of the evident warming and its adverse impacts upon humans, the argument that we should just keep on burning fossil fuels becomes more and more like the right to yell "More gasoline", when there is a fire in a crowded theater.
Slashdot Mirror
"Yes there is a flattening in global ground surface temperature over the last 10 years."
There is simply no evidence to support a flattening of the global mean temperatures in the last 10 years, especially when 2010 was tied as the hottest year on record. The fact that the oceans are also heating and most of the heating is going on in the oceans is scant comfort, when one recognizes that warmer water will only melt arctic and antarctic ice only not slower.
Nonsense.
All the Muller did was reevaluate data that previously he had said was inaccurately evaluated and then reached the same conclusion as the scientists who correctly interpreted it in the first place. Whether or not he was previously a skeptic or not is largely immaterial.
The only problem is that for denialists he was honest enough to admit it and now its news that is making the denialists have to face the one reality that they assiduously try so hard to avoid admitting, that the earth is heating up as the result of accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Not true. If we get off of fossil fuels entirely within 20 years, humans will have an uncomfortably warm period of a hundred years or so before temperatures begin to return to their natural baseline. Wait and the only justice possible will come from burning the Kochs and the rest of the denialists alive, which will be scant solace for a planet that is destined to become unfit for human habitation.
So how does this fact change the reality that global warming is real?
"CO2 isn't a pollutant"
This simply is not true. Put yourself in a room with 100% or even 20% carbon dioxide and prove it to yourself. Just have a friend you can save you when you pass out.
Wouldn't we all, but unfortunately humans produce about 300,000,000,000 mT of carbon dioxide annualy, which means we can expect a lot higher temperatures in the future, even though 2010 was tied as the hottest year on record.
There is little point being so scientifically illiterate to hope that "a climate cycle like a super volcano eruption". Assuming that there was a super eruption it would add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere although it would cool the climate for only a decade at most until the dust precipitated out of the atmosphere. Also it would likely have to be so large and centered on the equator that it would probably produce more economic dislocation, loss, and turmoil, not to mention human deaths, that it would hardly be considered beneficial.
The notion that there are no "controls" is climate science is to be totally unaware of the use of Monte Carlo methods and the ability to use computer simulation to test the probability distribution functions. The rest of your rant doesn't make enough sense to bother to discredit.
So now that the BEST team has verified that Mann is correct your rant is largely meaningless.
"If you do this, you will see that the data has been flat for 10 years."
Except this doesn't explain how 2010 could have tied for the highest global mean temperature on record. There is simply no data that suggests that the data has been flat for the past 10 years. None, whatsoever.
"Free men pull in all sorts of directions"
And it would seem that your favorite is towards anarchy and planetary death, which is rather revealing.
No doubt one of the "on net negative" effects you speak of would be pulling an oil company CEO away from a dollar he thought he could make at someone else's expense.
Keep up with your current line of argumentation and someone closer to the cutting edge will take it upon themselves to load your dice.
"There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’
"From that, I think it is pretty clear that she is indeed saying that the warming has stopped over the last 10 years."
First of all, it is impossible to say what exactly will happen tomorrow as one can always posit that some unappreciated reality is about to reveal itself to us tomorrow. One can, however, speak in terms of probabilities given conditional observations.
If she is trying to claim that the warming has stopped over the last 10 years, then simply put she is wrong. 2010 is tied as the hottest year on record, with 2011 not that far behind.
"What they've confirmed is that there was indeed a warming trend from about 1970 (or so) through about 2000."
You obviously didn't look at the graph in their article did you?
Your hubris in thinking that it will only be "poor people" who will be dying really shines a light on your point of view.
Perhaps the bonfire of the vanities. Where people seize the deniers in disgust for the plight they find themselves in and then burn them alive.
"warming is as likely to be beneficial as it may be harmful."
There is simply no evidence for this statement, yet a tremendous amount of evidence that it is false. Although there is evidence that plants can grow more in high carbon dioxide environments, the relationship is not linear but rather has an optimum above which productivity declines toward zero. Also, there is little evidence that the soils in high latitude environments could be improved sufficiently to replace soils lost to droughts and heat at lower latitudes. Also there is little reason to believe that most crops would grow at higher latitudes simply because of more carbon dioxide, since the amount of daylight and darkness would be dramatically different making it impossible for most of these plants to survive during periods of low light for months at a time or to support known pollinators.
As for sea level rises not being a sufficient argument "to do anything", what you are saying is that as ports, jettys, breakwaters, etc. become inundated we should simply close down maritime activity so that we can "do nothing" is hardly going to be something that will not have serious adverse impacts on the economy. You can't use a dock that is underwater unless you rebuild it. To suggest otherwise is only to reveal that your position regarding the effects of climate change have moved from merely living in denial to living in delusion.
Life being as perfect as it is for you, no doubt you are among the lucky 1%, who are perfectly happy at the perfect state of the status quo.
Your rant sound more as if delusion will be just as suitable as denial in your world view. The problem of course is that regardless of how much denial is undertaken, it will do little to slow the warming of the planet that results from increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
As for the often used phrase "Please, point to a time in history when the climate wasn't changing." its largely irrelevant. The problem is not that the climate is changing, its just that because of forcing produced by pumping increasing amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by humans it is changing faster than at anytime in the history of the planet. Changes that previously required millions of years of earth history are now being seen to occur within a few centuries.
While you may be an expert in radiant heat transfer, you clearly have little knowledge of biology and the already real and dramatic changes what global warming forced by carbon dioxide has already caused and the likely consequences of what it will continue to cause if not halted. If we get to 2000 -3000 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you can pretty much kiss most higher cellular life on the planet good bye.
Republicans everywhere are out to slash science budgets no matter what their purpose or need. What does that tell you?
I would be amused to learn what you call mathematicians who deny that 2+2 = 4. Are they to be called truthers to? One really has to wonder how taut the bubble that protects the world view of republicans can get before it bursts.
and just how exactly are seawalls going to work if unless you damn up every river that drains into the sea? So in addition to advocating raising the global temperatures to the point that they can no longer sustain life, now you want to exterminate every anadromous and catadromous species of fish on the planet too.
Tell me again exactly how do seawalls prevent summer time temperature rising so high in the continental US that they will reach a point when it will be impossible to raise food crops? There are probably a lot of cattlemen and ranchers in West Texas, who will doubt the effectiveness of the seawalls built to date. A lot of Russian farmers and consumers lost big time as massive droughts in Central Asia caused wheat harvests to decline dramatically causing prices to rise precipitously.
"The studies I've read about recently (albeit mostly summarized in articles in magazines like Newsweek) seemed to indicate that even if we could somehow stop ALL of our CO2 emissions tomorrow, we'd be looking at many hundreds of years before we'd see temperatures fall back into the "normal" range, globally. That tells me it's pretty illogical to make costly changes in our behavior in a hurry. "
To make the thrust of your argument more clear lets use the analogy of you being the driver of a car. In the front seat with you is your family, in the back seat are your banker, who holds the note on your car, and the CEO of your auto insurance company. You are doing 80 miles an hour and you are a few hundred feet from a brick wall that you will hit if you don't stop. According to your argument there is no point in taking your foot off the accelerator or hitting the brakes because to do so may prove costly. The reality is that trying to establish what the "sensible price point" is after you hit the wall is largely irrelevant once you have killed everyone in the car is rather meaningless.
Clearly, the last thing the fossil fuels industry wants is to settle on a number as it would give lawyers who would then seek damages based upon the level of destruction they are causing to seek monetary relief for their clients.
As for the rest of your rant, it has little to do with either cause and effect or causality. It is clear that the ability of greenhouse gases to reflect infrared light back toward the surface of the earth and elsewhere in the atmosphere thereby trapping heat causes global warming, so the cause and effect are well established, particularly in absence of any realistic alternative theory to explain where all the excess heat is coming from (certainly not from the sun since variations in solar irradiance are too small to account for the dramatic rise in temperatures; certainly not from volcanoes producing carbon dioxide, since a;; volcanoes combined only produce about 200,000,000 mT of carbon dioxide per year. while average annual human output of carbon dioxide due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels is about 3,000,000,000 mT).
If you want to propose a fantasy alternative explanation of global warming not linked to carbon dioxide you had better get busy producing some evidence.
Sounds as if denying global warming has gone from denial to delusion like most other republican talking points.
Well Mueller's problems are of his own making because he "had issues" with the Mann results when he should have regarded them as accurate. There is a hockey stick and all evidence points to a hockey stick with respect to global mean temperatures.
Now the question is no longer whether global warming is real. The question is what are we going to do about it. Advocating the burning of more and more fossil fuels is clearly not the answer. We need to get out of the business of burning fossil fuels as rapidly as we can, lest we see the planet become increasingly inhospitable to human life within the next 300 years.
" For sceptics with an agenda (I'm not saying he has one), saying there's nothing we can do is as effective as saying it isn't happening."
Not really as once one recognizes that the warming is occurring and that it is real and has a measurable rate one must begin to consider the consequences. As one does that it becomes harder and harder to make the case that we should just sit back because there is "nothing we can do about it". As people become more scientifically literate and begin to assess just how fast the natural world will change as a result of the evident warming and its adverse impacts upon humans, the argument that we should just keep on burning fossil fuels becomes more and more like the right to yell "More gasoline", when there is a fire in a crowded theater.