Wrong, the globe is not warming, weather is not static, AGW is a religion, not science.

SuitePotato:

Are you still arguing for AGW Carrick? Will you ever give it up?

My response: “The facts aren’t changed by our feelings about them.” Address the facts, not me.

Excellent question J.L.

One would be economic impact, and it is my opinion that a bit warmer with higher CO2 levels than we have now is better:

Warming the Earth increases the expected precipitation levels, expands the belts of arable land, is expected to decrease weather fluctuations not increase them (the claim that hurricanes get more frequent and more intense is another howler from Fabrication City, IMO…weather intensity is driven by temperature differences between poles and equator, with global warming, the differences get smaller… you do the math), more people die from cold weather illnesses than warm weather (even the evidence for increased hot-weather mortality simply points to a displacement in time of death, in cold weather death from illnesses dramatically increases, it is a fabrication that malaria is a hot weather disease, it occurs at all latitudes, including Alaska/Siberia).

The biggest danger to warming I can see is not the swamping our coast lines that are trumped by doom and gloomers: again the danger is way over stated, and the warming will happen gradually enough for us to be able to adjust, coral atolls actually adjust their levels to remain above mean sea level, beautifully piece here from Willis Eschenbach.

The biggest danger is rapid climate change and it’s impact on biodiversity. But even there… I simply don’t trust these people. They are in bed with the WWF and Greenpeace to the extent that they receive income and funding support from them. I’m not saying there isn’t an issue here, I just don’t know how important it is.

It may well be that wildlife flourishes from a new Holicene Optimum. Post industrialization it is expected that human population will decrease to something around 2-billion people (the reason to reproduce in such large numbers in developing countries is that children are currently an economic asset there, if they become a burden as in industrialized nations, birth rates plummet).

Anyway, without getting carried away, I’d like the science to get sharpened to the point where we can confidently modify our climate, end this cycle of glaciation and return the planet to a more “normal” state. It won’t be paradise because we humans don’t get along with each other all that well, but with good judgement, the AGW people in two centuries will get as strong a chuckles from people reading about that flakey, whacked out social movement as we get in reading about the goofy Y2K nonsense.

This had the effect making it appear temperatures were steadily rising when in fact they were oscillating.

This is patently not true.

The way the stations are averaged corrects for station drop-out. D’Aleo and Watts combined the data in a very sophomoric manner to make a false point.

Secondly D’Aleo knows why the station data is missing, and he’s just lying out of his a$$ here. Everybody in the field is fully aware that the station data is not really missing, it just hasn’t been incorporated into the US Global Historical Climate Data database. Believe it or not there aren’t people assigned or paid to assimilate manually entered records onto the computer nor people to chase down station data that are already computerized that aren’t automatically fed into the US database. Again D’Aleo is very much aware of this, he’s just manipulating the facts (and you).

Thirdly nearly 3/4 of the world’s temperature record comes from sea surface temperature records. These are obviously unaffected by land surface records, and dilutes by a factor of four any error in the land surface record.

Back story, a group of researchers published an updated analysis of the urban heat island (UHI) effect on GHCN data using a analysis of US surface stations performed by Anthony Watts that he posted on surfacsestations.org. They downloaded Watt’s data and have used it without his permission twice now in publications.

This is nothing more than a emotional response by Watts to that paper (which itself is deliberately misleading to the point of just being wrong, as well as lazy intellectually dishonest in using Watt’s analysis rather than redo it themselves). But the 114 page paper of Watts and D’Aleo is little more than a hastily strung together series of blog postings, and what little knew that is in it is embarrassingly poorly done.

Yes there is a UHI effect, it adds about 0.1°C/century to the warming trend, GISTemp corrects for it (Watts and D’Aleo’s discussion of GISTemp errors is borderline lying here, Watts at least knows the UHI errors that were pointed out by Steve McIntyre have long ago been corrected), if you subtract the HadCRUT (Phil Jones’s version) from GISTemp you get about 0.03°C/century, most of that associated with Jones’s decision to not correct for UHI.

That said, Jay, I agree that GISS, James Hansen’s group, is heavily politicized, but the people who are responsible for the surface reconstructions (Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato and. Ken Lo) seem to be very solid and even Hansen, for his obvious bias, is driven to make the temperature record as accurate as he can make it. Thanks in part due to efforts by Steve McIntyre, their data and methods are all public record, and GISTemp has been independently tested and verified by a number of different groups, most notably by the Clear Climate Code effort, which is a completely refactorized implementation of GISTemp in the Python language.

In the end the problem here isn’t so much the physical basis for climate change (so called IPCC Working Group 1) but the politicization of the impact of climate change (IPCC working group 2). That is a hot mess.

IPCC. Intra-Planetary Criminal Conspiracy.

“These are supposed to be non-political entities. The idea that they would willingly subvert science to support a political agenda should be a red-hot story.”

I’ve got a bridge to sell you, Rob.

Jay W:

Sorry for taking so long to reply. Family stuff, gone most of the day, etc. Thanks for the link to the “Skewed Views of Science” video. I did watch it. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were telling me to shut my pie hole. Besides, if one was only allowed to comment on subjects in which one were an expert, what fun would that be?

Actually, I’m not. Quite the opposite.

The speaker kind of losing it at the end, but the general notions about how science should function are worth taking notes on. These principles apply to all people arguing on a subject, like AGW, not just people who are critics.

As I have said in other threads on the subject, I do believe that the study of humankind’s effect on climate is a worthy area of study. I just wish there was more evidence that the debate was driven by pure science and less by a desire to be “right”.

I’m there with you. It is a fact that the science is heavily distorted by people’s political agendas, and the left deserves most of the credit for this.

I’m just cautioning you to separate out the science from the political aspects.

The science of GW, “physical basis”, just describes how our climate has changed in 150 years and how we’ve contributed to that. This is valuable to know, and the more accurately we can understand this, the better our policies addressing this in the future will be.

The second part, “impact of GW”, as I mentioned is a hot, steamy mess ripe for composting. It is so packed full of fiction, fantasy and confabulation, it’s almost not possible to sort out what is real from what isn’t. Seriously, I’m talking “extraterrestrials are visiting Earth” or 911 truther level of schizophrenic break from reality here.

You’ve hit on the Himalayan glacier melting, the problems with Pachauri withholding the knowledge that this was wrong until after Copenhagen, but that’s just tip of the iceberg here, unfortunately. The Working Group 2 report is full of passages that rely on advocacy group “gray papers”, to the extent that I don’t see how anybody can trust any of it right now.

I just wanted to alert you that there is a grudge match going on in the surface temperature measurements. There is a remarkable amount of disinformation being passed around on the right on this as well as the left.

In particular, the thing everybody argues the strongest over, the warming from 1850-1980 is not diagnostic, because it is the general consensus in the community that prior to circa 1980, that all of the warming, whatever it was, was natural (prior to 1980 it is believed human generated CO2 was offset by the cooling effects of human generated sulfates).
Given this realization, comparisons of glacier melt from 1850 to 1970 that you often see in the press, for example, simply illustrates what natural fluctuations look like, as the Earth came out of the longest, coldest period—the Little Ice Age—since the end of the last period of major glaciation.

Oddly we see advocates in the AGW working hard to make the warming up from the end of the Little Ice Age to 1980 as big as possible, without realizing it undercuts their thesis (if the warming is more significant it undercuts the relative significance of the post 1980 warming period). And people like D’Aleo are trying to make that period from 1850-1980 as flat as possible…which when they do that, all they are doing is emphasizing the post 1980 warming period. Here’s an illustration (blue is D’Aleo/Watts version, gray is original series):

Figure.

Which looks more threatening? The one where we’ve been warming since 1850 (and the post 1980 warming looks much like a continuation of the previous warming), or one where the temperature is more or less constant until 1980, after which it shoots up dramatically?

Note: I’m not arguing we should twist the facts to fit our agendas. For me, we need to understand what the warming really is for that period, then let the cards fall as they may. In this overheated debate, I just find it remarkable how the two camps can become so separated from reality that they end up fighting for each others positions!

Post 1980 we have satellite measurements to corroborate ground based observations, so there isn’t really any question we’ve warmed since then.

Propagandize, Politicizd, Criminalize, Communize.

Ize see the pattern.

Not the argument, carrick, and you know it. We are still coming out of the last Ice Age, and there is no demonstrable amount of warming beyond that amount. Furthermore, the data faking scandals illustrate that AGW was being promoted for political reasons, not scientific ones. The data was being manipulated and cherry-picked, and possibly manufactured, to promote a conclusion that is politically desirable for certain factions.
Instead of data in search of a conclusion, we got a conclusion in search of data.

The facts have been addressed, and many many times. The real facts, and not the manufactured facts which makes them falsehoods. The real facts, and not the hypotheses couched in leading statements and inferences of things as fact without proof, and done without cogent logical rationales that stand up to scrutiny.

It isn’t up to the world to disprove the AGW theory, it’s the AGW theorists’ job to prove it. To date, they’ve failed to do so, and been caught repeatedly leaving out, fudging, faking, or entirely fabricating data as well as making gross statements of fact that are themselves theory, and refused to do the sort of research we would demand out of particle physicists and chemists. On top of this, they have flagrantly lent themselves to the politicians, and attempted to influence political actions on the basis of a theory that they have not only not proven, but pointlessly thrown away most of their believability in attempting to do everything but the hard work that they should have if it was actually as important as they claim. Their actions belie their intentions and motivations. Leaving out data from wherever didn’t produce the numbers they needed is not scientific honor, it’s dishonesty on par with plagiarism.

The fact that cannot be argued with is that there is a clear record in the geology of repeated glacial advances and retreats almost like clockwork going back for over two and a half million years. Man has been around barely two hundred thousand. Man has had fossil fueled industry for barely one hundred and fifty years. To date, the weather and temperature records are well inside statistical noise boundaries. There is not the slightest evidence so far of anything that they have claimed, and studious pointed dismissal of anything that works against them.

The ice cores that the AGW people used to hold up and now quietly ignore tell the tale. Local oscillations up and down are shown very clearly. It goes up for a little, then down for a little as the overall averages go up to the peak of an interglacial and then down again into the next glacial. You’re arguing that mankind has caused something that has been proven to have happened over and over for over 2.5 million years.

And… you’re willing to support massive government take overs of giant chunks of human society in the name of fighting something that has been happening without human involvement, on the theory that they might be making it marginally worse?

Like i said, you’re arguing infinitesimal degrees and not whether it’s going to happen at all.

AGW=BS