The Battle Over Climate Science

To all climate scientists:

It is a shame that some attack you because they find the solutions to climate change inconvenient to their financial or political world view. Your research informs our elected leaders, health officials, and the military and is critical for our national security and economic competitiveness.

Turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to those that send hate messages because they are not the ones that will be involved in the discussion. Keep doing your great work and know that there are many out here who will support and defend you in your time of need.

Thank you for your continued courage.

This is a form of the climate "debate" that deserves more attention. Thank you Tom for writing this article. Why do some deniers, skeptics, critics, what ever term you prefer to use, prefer to make their arguments through intimidation and personal attacks? I would imagine that these same people get their share of harrassing emails and other crap. These absurd tactics are not about finding the truth, but about contro...their control, which they want to force onto everyone else by silencing dissent. How do we move the debate away from the extreme polls and to the middle where reasonable people want to discuss serious issues.

Hats off to the harassed climate scientists who keep at it despite the attacks, and writers like Tom who, after writing a ballsy article like this, are putting their own well-being and inbox in harm's way.

Muller’s conclusion was most likely not what the Koch brothers had in mind. Last October, his team announced that the global mean temperature on land had increased by 1.6 degrees since 1950, a result that matched the numbers accepted by the mainstream climate-science community.

Actually, it doesn't take a Berkeley physicist and a team of professional analysts to demonstrate that the published global-mean temperature results are correct. A simple (almost "back of the envelope" simple) averaging approach that uses programming techniques that first-year compsci students typically learn will do the job very nicely. And you can do this with *raw* (not "adjusted" or "homogenized") data.

In fact, the global-average results are so robust that you can reproduce them quite nicely even if you use just a few dozen (out of thousands) of temperature stations.

I was able to reproduce the NASA global-average results surprisingly closely even when I used *raw* temperature data from ~70 (or even fewer than 40) *rural* stations.

Disproving all of the major claims that so-called "skeptics" have made about the global temperature record is surprisingly straightforward. UHI? Easy to disprove. Warming requiring "adjustments"? Easy to disprove. Warming exaggerated by the "dropped stations" effect? Easy to disprove. You could teach on-the-ball college freshmen how to do all of this themselves with nothing more than publicly-available *raw* temperature data and free software development tools.

Look at www.facebook.com/caer.bannog.9, where I not only show some pretty interesting results, but I also tell you how to reproduce them. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page and work your way up, the material will be easier to sort out.

It is amazing how smalls holes in the evidence can be used to totally demerit a theory like climate change. But theories like creationism with little (to no) evidence are often championed by the same people who "deny" climate change.

As a child in the early 50's, I visited The Museum of Science and Industry and took a little interactive electronic cancer questionnaire. It gauged your percentage of risk for developing cancer over your lifetime. To my surprise, one of the questions was ""Are You a Commercial Flight Crew Member?" If you answered yes, it raised your risk level percentage.
Later the explanation was that cancer risk increased because the crew's ionizing radiation exposure was well above the general population.

Now remember jets were about only 1 year into the industry, so these values were based mostly on low altitude propeller airplane travel.

Fast Forward to the 90's when I started flying wide body Jets overseas and I became interested in the risk of cosmic radiation exposure for high altitude long haul flight crews. Out of curiosity I subscribed to Rice Universities Solar Flare project. Rice U would send me email alerts every time there was unusual solar activity.

During solar flares crew cosmic radiation exposure can increase 10 fold. I was interested in getting info about solar activity during my long all night flights . Not sure what I could do about it, but I wanted to know.

What did I notice? Almost 1 to 2 times a week I would get a Red Alert or Yellow Alert email from Rice. This was unheard of. This was not normal. This went on for months and years during the mid to late 90's.
It was very unusual( No I didn't buy a lead helmet). But why do I tell you this?

The reason I bring this all up is to say that during extreme solar wind activity the sun runs hotter than normal. Hotter Sun means more heat radiation reaches earth as well.

So is there Global Warming? Yes!
But it's not your SUV that's doing it.

A story that needed to be told and that helps put a face to the true "voices of unreason." The anti-science crowd never prevails for long, no matter how much they squeak or spend. Well done, Tom.

@skycaptain,

You just pointed out something that contributes to global warming. You did not do anything to prove that humans have no impact.

If a pool has a leak (carbon sink) and a hose that constantly fills it (ghg production + sun) at a roughly similar pace, the pool will have roughly the same amount of water in it at all times. Now if you start pouring cups of water into the pool (your SUV reference), eventually the pool will overflow. Yes, one SUV does not matter. But we've had 150-200 years of pollution at a regularly increasing pace. Do you not think that has an effect on the concentration of our atmosphere?

@skycaptain

I like how an increase in solar activity "in the mid to late 90's" is going to refute the evidence. Don't you think that the researchers consider the suns activity when gathering data?

Unstable minorities like this don't do the rest of us any favors. But I don't see how simply questioning a scientist's legitimacy (data collection, funds, documentation, etc.)is anywhere near related to threatening their children. I wouldn't trust a climatologist's research if that research was funded by BP any more than if it was funded by Green Cross. Likewise, I would expect proper documentation and data collection before letting one single finding effect global policy.

Scientists are humans, and I'm tired of seeing them elevated to infallible demigods. Questioning the validity of climate change is hardly barbaric or "dark ages", but we don't see articles like this detailing what happens to "climate change deniers" in some parts of the world.

The day we put blind faith in humanity is the day we enter the "dark ages". Think. Ask questions, get answers. Don't take anything for granted. What's wrong with that? That is science!

While I look upon any personal attacks on scientest or anyone else who disagrees with me with great disdain, I emphatically disagree with a lot of those who were talking about global warming but now refer to it as climate change. As TommeyND indicated, the real problem is not with SUV's but with other factors that beyond our control. Throughout earth's history there have been heating and cooling cycles which will continue. Solar flares have been a significant problem that has heated not only earth but other planets in our solar system. We cannot control volcanic emmissions yet these emmissions far outstrip anyother CO2 source. I disagree with what I perceive as Popular Science's position which I believe is the same as the proponents of global warming, climate change or whatever you want to call it! Radical reaction from any source is unacceptable but from whatI have seen, most of the radical reaction and outright distortion has come from the proponents of man-made climate change. Further, proponents such as Al Gore have made a mint from their participation. Because we do not agree with the climate changeologists neither makes us wrong or radical. You just have no scientifically proven you position. Have a nice day!

@bruce banner

If nature is as fantastic as atheists/naturalists and scientists would have you believe, don't you think it would be slightly more complex than a pool? No seriously, even a human could build a pool that would detect any overflow and adjust the outtake to counteract it, and if geological data is any evidence, the earth has gone through tougher times than this.

So my question to you is this: Does nature posses built in countermeasures? If so, what are they?

After watching Earth 2100, reading this, and hearing about the sad results of Rio+20 and can't stand the bullshit of people who don't believe in Climate Change

If your "science" is settled then please explain the sudden change from global warming to climate change.

http://dailycaller.com/2012/06/20/professor-fired-after-expressing-climate-change-skepticism/

Funny how the frauds avoid stories like this. Furthermore the enviro-fascists have been engaging in death threats and terrorist activity for years. Yet somehow I am supposed to feel pity for a fraud.

@Bruce banner Obviously they did not consider solar activity. In fact they've gone so far as to say solar activity has no bearing. Not to mention they have no answer as to why there has been no warming in ten years.

@Scott_Mandia Maybe the cry babies should not engage in those activities themselves. Typical liberal cowardice. You throw punches then whine when you get a bloody nose.

Never mind that it was warmer during the Viking era than it is now.

@flameaave I can't stand frauds who when exposed decide that it is easier to redefine terms rather then just admit they were wrong. Anyone who doesn't buy what you're selling is a climate change denier. That does not even measure up to cowardly.

Here's a news flash for you fawning retards. Science is never settled, period. Maybe instead of name calling and inflammatory rhetoric you might try exercising rational debate. Better yet head to Walmart and buy some big boy panties and take what you've got coming.

jdkchem said,

If your "science" is settled then please explain the sudden change from global warming to climate change.

The "sudden change" from global-warming to climate change?

Consider the IPCC, which was established in 1988. Can you guess what the "CC" in "IPCC" stands for? (Hint: It isn't "Cat Chow").

On a serious note, the terms "climate change" and "global warming" are standard and well understood terms that have been in wide use for decades -- nobody is trying to pull a fast one here.

@NoOneYouKnow

The Earth's response is not the issue. First, I didn't even use the pool issue ti begin with. Second, the Earth's response is not the issue. It is about controlling the way we behave to minimize the impact

@jdkchem

Please check out the photo behind this link.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/media/52397/temp_rise.png

That would explain your last ten years. Basically, there was a big drop one year (probably due to normal weather patterns - my opinion only), and now it is reaching that point again.

It isn't that the Earth has stopped heating over the last 10 years, it is that the Earth's temp is the same as it was 10 years ago.

Would you say that the stock market has not risen because it is the same now as it was in late 2006? Would you say that we should think that the stock market will never rise again because it has shown not to rise over that given period, even though there have been so many advances in marketing, technology, and business practices during that period?

@NoOneYouKnow

Obviously the Earth is more complicated than a pool. That is why analogies are used. So that a complicated picture can be presented in a simple form for general understanding. If you don't like the pool analogy because you think it doesn't apply, then say so. If you think it over-simplifies, that is its goal.

@jdkchem

I did not know that they don't consider the sun's activity. Does someone have a reputable source to show this? I just assumed that a climate scientist would consider the effects of the sun.

@Bruce

Here is an article that popped up when googling "does the ipcc consider solar activity?"

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/06/ipcc-consensus-on-solar-influence-was.html

Obviously this website has a bias, but I would hope the article is truthful.

That would back up jdkchem's claim.

Here is another article on sunspot/climate change relation. It is kind of interesting but glazes over almost everything. It says that sunspots don't effect climate change but there is no evidence offered.

http://www.geekosystem.com/sunspot-climate-change/

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/glob-warm.html

He is a much more detailed article laying out in depth analysis of the relationship to sunspots and climate change. It may have bias, but the graphics seem to speak for themselves.

Adrian Vance, science teacher, author, film-maker, broadcaster, US Patent holder (7,855,061)

CO2 is a “trace gas” in air, insignificant by definition, 1/7th the absorber of IR, heat energy, from sunlight as water vapor which has 80 times as many molecules captures 560 times as much heat making 99.8% of all "global warming." CO2 does only 0.2% of it.

Carbon combustion generates 80% of our energy. Control and taxing of carbon would give the elected ruling class more power and money than anything since the Magna Carta of 1215 AD. Anthropogenic "global warming" is about money and power. It is not science.

Search for The Two Minute Conservative for science, politics and analysis. When you speak ladies will swoon and gentlemen will weep.

Is the Earth getting warmer?--quite likely, if you had a time machine and a thermometer you would soon discover that for most (not all) of its history the Earth has been warmer than the Earth we have known. As the ice was two miles thick just a few thousand years ago it should surprise no one that it is getting warmer. Odd, isn't it, that nobody accuses humans of causing the Ice Ages--just ending them. Now know this: at the end of the Dark Ages Vikings colonized Greenland--they lived there for over 500 years--farming for their food. About 1400 it got so cold they all died. Today, with whatever the climate may be doing, it still isn't warm enough to live by farming in Greenland--and certainly not using the farming methods they had a thousand years ago--The total amount of carbon dioxide humans produce amount to less than 3% of the total annual carbon dioxide that happens every year. Were we to go back to the Old Stone Age--before man had fire--that "Less than 3%" would be the most we could possibly remove from the amount of carbon dioxide that the Earth, herself, produces every year.--are we going to go back to the Old Stone Age? of course not--so the amount of carbon dioxide that any of our efforts eliminate will be far, far to small to measure--
Stan

Global warming is more than a product of just CO2. NOx and SOx contribute as well as many other more gasses like methane. No one is debating whether carbon should be controlled. Just whether it is a viable theory or not.

What? And there aren't tree hugging groups burning down and blowing up scientists who disagree with this?

Oh....not to mention the more acceptable violence, blacklisting dissenters from publishing....just because they came up with a different conclusion than the one getting you your grant money.

Follow the $$ climate exaggerators are raking it in.

I’ve posted this before and I will continue to post.

Man made global warming is a hoax. Yes global warming is real but that’s because of increased solar activity. Every planet in the solar system is heating up…who is driving their SUV’s on Mars and Venus??
This is political, eg. Koyoto accord…a scam to de-industrialize nations. Just read agenda 21 for more info on that.
Also “carbon tax”. Do they realize all life on earth is carbon based?? A tax for breathing. That’s where the sheep need to wake up..they will collect trillions on a fake tax, but where is the money going and what purpose will it be used for 9 times out of ten its going into wealthy people’s pockets. Does anyone find it strange people like Al Gore talk about energy consumption yet they have mansions, boats, planes and use more energy than all of us. No one wants to call them out on that? Or Ted Turner talks about overpopulation and praises china’s 1 child policy but has 5 kids. These people are hypocrites.

There are plenty of scientists who say climate change is not man made, but their work gets ignored by pop sci. Come on pop sci how about you print 1 article showing the other side..start here

http://www.globalwarminghoax.com/news.php

Also the author seems to have a problem with the “freedom of information act”….guess he wants to keep the population delusional.

@stan301 read agenda 21, that’s exactly what the elite want, for us to be de-industrialized
@sky captain great points….I never considered the effect the sun might have on rising cancer rates.
@adrianvance you are right on. Think about how many billions they stand to make and all the rights they will take away in the name of mother earth.

Remember that banks fund all of science so they fund projects that reflect their agenda.

I love the hypocrisy and irony in this. There is so much ignorance on both sides of this issue and people just blindly yelling what they are told to yell. It is time to have a rational and sane discussion on climate science.

First off, since the 4th report from the IPCC they have clearly stated that CO2 is at MOST, responsible for 25% of the warming. Even a person who has had general chemistry can prove these numbers to be too high. Water (vapor) is responsible for a minimum 65%. Chemical thermodynamics supports this. Then you must factor Stefan-Boltzmann's law into to the mix from the Sun's viewpoint. The "increased/decreased" energy Earth receives does matter.

Chemistry of the atmosphere matters greatly, yet how many climate scientists have chemistry backgrounds? Only a few that I have come across and they are working hard to distance themselves from the CO2 Warmers. Dr. Nate Lewis, Cal-Tech, has done a great deal of work on energy and realistic climate models.

Personal attacks are coming from both sides. Heaven help you if you try to challenge warming extremists with real science. They go crazy and start attacking you verbally calling you stupid and sending hate emails. I don't care which side you believe in, this is unacceptable. Keep in mind that people are still trying to prove Einsein was wrong with his thoeroy of relativity and using the smallest data flaws to do it. This is real science people, you should not get offended and should not get violent.

Climate science as we know it is still in its infancy. However, climate change has been a centuries old concern. Some of what we thought was true 30 years ago has been disproven. The current models are not accurate and everyone in the "climate business" knows it. We also know that before every "ice age" there was rapid extreme warming followed by rapid cooling. We would be foolish to not start planning for a changing climate, both hotter and colder.

stan0301 said,

The total amount of carbon dioxide humans produce amount to less than 3% of the total annual carbon dioxide that happens every year.

It looks like someone has confused gross with net. It is true that humans are responsible for about 3 percent of the *gross* annual emissions, but that represents over 100 percent of the net.

Think about this analogy -- a well-to-do upper-middle-class household has a total income of $100K per year, and it spends $100K each year. Now, think about what would happen if one of the parents were to sneak out to a local tribal casino and gamble away 3K per year (putting the balance on a credit card), and doing this year after year.

According to stan0301's logic, that would be no problem at all. After all, that 3K is only 3 percent of the family's annual income. Gambling away just 3 percent of your family's income year after year -- how could that possibly impact the family's finances? Just like putting an additional 3 percent CO2 into the atmosphere year after year -- what impact could that possibly have?

adrianvance said,

CO2 is a “trace gas” in air, insignificant by definition, 1/7th the absorber of IR, heat energy, from sunlight as water vapor which has 80 times as many molecules captures 560 times as much heat making 99.8% of all "global warming." CO2 does only 0.2% of it.

If CO2 is so insignificant, then why did the Air Force spend so much money investigating the effects of CO2 on the performance of heat-seeking missiles? This research goes back the post-WWII years. (If fact, it was Air Force research into the impact of CO2 on infrared sensor performance that helped "seal the deal" scientifically with respect to CO2 and global warming).

I am really disappointed in Popular Science writing articles like this. Seriously, the debate over climate change is completely pointless. The entire argument has been ruined by bandwagon fools who believe anything they are told.
There are numerous non-human variables that alter the temperature of the Earth, many of them are natural cycles that have been in process for millions of years. For example, the Milankovitch Cycles which dictates the Earths movements and those movements relation to the climate. Independently the cycles have s significant affect on the climate but when the cycles coincide, they have an extremely significant affect on the climate. This diagram en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:MilankovitchCyclesOrbitandCores.png shows that we are currently experiencing a time when cycles coincide. Now if you compare that to the average temperature at the time you can see that those also coincide with the cycles, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vostok_Petit_data.svg. Though it may not fully account for changes in climate, it certainly has a significant affect.
Furthermore, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has little affect on the climate of the planet. Yes, it works with the other Green House gases to create the Global Warming Affect, which, if you have not bothered to do your research, is a necessity for the Earth to sustain a habitable temperature. To display that point here is another diagram, if you can read the graph you’ll see that the amount of radiation absorbed by CO2 is significantly smaller than that absorbed by the other Green House Gases, mainly Water Vapor.
This debate is pointless. As mentioned many times earlier the amount of CO2 produced by humans is minuscule in relation to the amount of CO2 produced by the Earth itself. How do you think the Earth came to be in Ice Ages before than warmed to a habitable temperature again? It is clearly a cycle, for more proof you can look at the Thermohaline Cycle en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation , which is altered when ice is melted from the glaciers in the Polar Regions. This changes the salinity and the temperature, which then affects global temperatures. As the Earth warms the ice melts until it has changed the climate, enough at which point it starts to reverse which brings us into an Ice Age. It has happened several times in Earth’s history.

In the end we need to stop meddling with the Earth, it will still be here regardless of what we do, so instead we should live with it and grow instead of trying to control it and change it. I still think we should reduce pollution but it has little to no affect on the current Climate Change issue.

To avoid the arguments over semantics, valid and invalid science, honest presentations and outright lies and deception.

Let's just assume the Earth is getting warmer at a rate that has some people alarmed. Maybe even for what they believe is good cause. I'm not one of the people who is alarmed. Put me in the camp of the Earth being a self correcting system. And let's also concede things are incredibly Cleaner now than they were 100, 50 and 20 years ago. Pittsbugh in early 1900's required street lights during the day from the output of the steel mills as a brief example.

Ok to the point. Let's embrace the change. If we going to spend money, let's spend it getting ready for the changes instead of uselessly taxing people etc etc and coming up with nonsensical ideas like burying CO2. Not everyone is on board with it anyway. "Everyone" being developing nations that are the biggest 'offenders' as you think of them. They want a better life and could care less about your dream that Jimmy Buffet and friends will never have to move away from Key West due to rising oceans. I do not believe in any significant ocean rise even if all the ice melts. Water changing from ice back to water contracts, taking up less space. So the only ice we're talking about having an impact is the ice currently above the water level above the amount that would overcome the contraction of the water from ice melting below the surface.

And Who the hell do people think they are that feel
perfectly justified in deciding what the natural climate of the Earth should be? That's insane. That's the kind of stuff you read Neanderthals doing and thinking about.

I don't believe for a nano-second that there is sufficient knowledge to predict the Earth's climate 20 or 50 years from now. I've also never heard a 10 year out prediction about Anything that even came close in my 60 years.

Finally, let's remember that 99.9%+ of all the "Science" presented to mankind since the beginning of time is in the trash can.

Embrace the change. Do something good for mankind if you're going to tax needlessly and spend in the wrong direction chasing your tails.

Wow, First no one should receive a death threat for convictions that they hold. Period. That being said I am what many would call a climate change denier. The irony of this is of course that I do not deny that climate changes nor that man changes the climate. I simply am skeptical of the conclusions that have been presented in order to force an emotional and visceral reaction.

To place this into context, how many GOOD things do you hear reported about increases in CO2? There are many benefits, yet no one ever seems to mention them. Instead it is all about impending doom. This is going to die, or that is going to die, or this will be destroyed, or this is connected to climate change, etc and so on.

Second, I dislike the discourse from people like Mann. To be honest he is about as open minded about challenges to his 'science' as someone who is a religious zealot. I prefer the phrase, 'When the facts change I change my mind, what do you do sir.'

Third, I have no doubt that CO2 changes the temperature of the planet. I have no doubt that land use does the same. What I do doubt is that the results are a BAD thing. What if they are not bad? What if instead they are one of the best things that we can possibly do for and to the planet in the long term? You see I am not skeptical of the science, though I do admit that far to many people are closed minded. I mean think about Mann, how hard has he denied the MWP ( Medieval Warm Period ). Not to way that the temperatures are due to natural variations alone but seriously, I have been called a denier ( of which I chuckle ) yet that is one thing that he denies or ignores. Whatever.

In the end I am most upset about the religious connotations that many 'believers' in AGW. Not in the science but in the hypothetical conclusions that are advanced by that science. Again I do not deny that the planet SHOULD warm with an increase of CO2, only that the conclusions reached about 2100 or any number of other fallacious reasoning we hear from a panicked press or sensational press should be payed more than a jot of attention toward.

I see no evidence which causes me to be worried of the future of man. I see little evidence that would cause me to stop using fossil fuels. I see little evidence to fear the future at all. I expect to live to see 2100 and at that time, if I am wrong I will be the first to spend all my time energy and effort to 'right' the wrong that I have perpetrated on my children. Until that time, I simply do not see the reason articles like this are written.

P.S. I have received death threats for being a 'denier' does that mean I am as noble as Mann?

PS, just to be clear, anyone threatening anyone or taking actions like even sending harmless white powder to anyone should be locked away.

@skycaptain: Solar activity and irradiance has been decreasing since the late '70s, while temperature has been rising: http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm

@rcdwltd: Volcanic emissions of CO2 are dwarfed by our own: http://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm

@jdkchem: "Science is never settled, period." Sorry, but that's just wrong. The earth orbits the sun, not the other way around. Evolution is real. CO2 absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation. Those are settled.

@adrianvance: Your estimate of the relative effects of water vapor and CO2 is off by an order of magnitude or so. Also water vapor concentration is high dependent upon temperature, making it an amplifying factor rather than an initial forcing mechanism: http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm

@stan0301: The "greenness" of Greenland during the Medieval Period is somewhat exaggerated: http://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm

All: The Skeptical Science website (http://www.skepticalscience.com/) is a great resource. It's got answers to a lot of questions about the climate with links to scientific papers to back up what they're saying. If you don't trust what they're saying, follow the links and read the original papers.

This article seems to me to be very biased.
First the use of the woes denier instead of the more appropriate scientific term skeptic. Denial ism is about religion skeptism is about science. Second clearly the article gives more time to the proponents of AGW and much less to the skeptics.
Third there is no mention of how skeptical scienctists have been harassesed and even lost there jobs over their beliefshttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/16/another-skeptical-university-professor-fired-related-to-carbs-pm2-5-air-pollution-regulation-scandal/#more-65743 .
Fourth the example of false reporting of scientist harasseent in Australia this last year was ignoreed.
Fifth the fact that many leading pro AGW environmentalists such as James Lovelock have recently announced they no longer beleive in the AGW theory.
I would have expected a more balanced article from a magazine like pop sci.
Mark

@rcdultd

The term "climate change" was coined by GOP top strategist and consultant Frank Luntz who thought it sounded better than "global warming," since climate has always changed. He felt it took the teeth out of the phrase "global warming," which indicates exactly the type of climate change.

Somewhere along the line, the right-wing managed to blame this change on the environmentalists.

@BobF

"And Who the hell do people think they are that feel
perfectly justified in deciding what the natural climate of the Earth should be? That's insane. That's the kind of stuff you read Neanderthals doing and thinking about."

Survival is something that Neanderthals thought about. You are correct. And survival is what we are talking about here too. No one thinks that the Earth is going to explode as a result of climate change. They think that plants, animals, and most importantly, humans will die as a result. The earth has no natural temperature. Life as we know it does.

Sure, some great possibilities could occur from climate change. Animals and plants could adapt and it could be very exciting times. Or we could all die (over time, obviously, i don't just mean bodies in the streets). That is a big risk.

What we KNOW is that if the climate remains similar to what it is now, things will continue to live. At the very least, if we can slow down the warming as much as possible (mostly just reducing our own contribution, should you believe that it exists) should prolong the time frame in which life as we know it continues.

@Aldrons Last Hope: The "other planets are warming" argument is bogus: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-other-planets-solar-system.htm
"There are plenty of scientists who say climate change is not man made": I'd hardly say plenty, but there are some, just as there are a few scientists who dispute relativity or evolution. You could probably even find a few scientists who insist on geocentrism. But among the scientists who actually study the phenomenon, there's a strong amount of unanimity on the basic questions. See here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-scientific-consensus.htm

@mike13323: The Milankovich cycle operates on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, far slower than what we're seeing. Also, current Milankovich forcings suggest that we should be very slowly cooling rather than warming. Thirdly, the effects of the Milankovich cycle are very small compared to the CO2 forcing we're currently responsible for. And finally, the Milankovich cycle has been able to produce the ice age cycle only with additional feedbacks, such as CO2. It's one of the reasons paleoclimatologists know as much as they do about the effects of CO2.

Gee whiz, I really want to be sympathetic, but at the point that you leave the realm of academic discourse, in which the work and data speak for themselves, with reasoned individuals making their judgements, and instead, bluster into the political -- and even entertainment arena with mass market "documentaries" -- then these people opened themselves up to criticism from the hoi polloi.

As they say, if you can't stand the heat...

Bruce Banner

The links you provided are on the old side and are very biased. Climate science is changing almost daily. SOHO data has just started influencing climate thought patterns in those scientists that have open and questioning minds. What the graphics in the links mentioned by Mr Banner don't explain is the uncertainty although they do show the wide swings.

Sun spots really do impact the Earth's atmosphere. We cannot discount UV rays that heat the upper layers. We cannot ignore that Mars has been warming since Viking landed in 1976. So how ever small, engergy changes from the Sun are, they are significant.

Here are climate model things that are not widely known. Due to computer limitations, the models are known to be incomplete wtih very large uncertainties. Parameters that are BELIEVED to be statistically insignificant ARE NOT included in the models. Many of these left out parameters are now found to be significant. Then there are the parameters which are difficult to measure accurately so they are simulated on what WE think they SHOULD be, not always what they really are. Gaps in data are filled with made up data, again, using informtion we think should be correct. To judge if these models are "good" we run them backwards, so to say. This means that we take data from yesterday and then go back in time while the model runs. If you are +/- 25% off from what really happened, then you have a good model. 25-50%, then the model is ok. Where else would this type of variation from truth be accepted?

There really are too many people running around claiming to be climate scientist/expert that never had a climate science class. The media is not staffed with qualified scientist writers, so what happens is garbage gets thrown out there for mass consumption. The public does not question these stories because journalists are supposed to report the truth.

There is so much politics wrapped up in global warming that one can't tell where one ends and the next begins. And as for all the hateful stuff being said? It is a two-way street. It comes from both sides.

The entire global warming subject was bungled from the very beginning by mixing it with politics. My gawd, can you even conceive of a politician more divisive than Al Gore, who is basically the godfather of the whole movement?

Science should have approached the public directly rather than channeling it through the politicians. Now your climate change runs hard down the lines of political polarity... and the nation, as well as the planet, is split asunder.

No good guys. No one who doesn't hurl insults at those who dare disagree. No honorable opponents, no chance to have civil discussion.

It's a lost cause...

It is no wonder that Mann has sought out Popsci for a forum. I do not believe any self respectiing peer journal, except one he acts as editor on, would touch his work these days. Unfortunately the article proved a couple of things. 1) Popsci is athe science equivelent of National Enquirer and 2) you are behind the times.

The hacked emails that have been around now for several years have proved that Mann and his cohorts are in no way deserving of the name "scientist". Rather they are the worst sort of self promoting agenda driven charlatans.

As a geoscientist of 30+ years experience, I know what makes good science and what Mann and his co-conspirators have been foisting on the public for years is nothing of the sort.

I didn't find anything compelling when so-called man-made global warming hit the news and the released emails and other revelations about Mann and his egregious violations of ethics and the scientific method have only confirmed it.

While teaching in college, I helped expel students for less heinous ethics violations that Mann and his cabal have committed. It goes to show that money and politics is the driving force behind so called anthropomorphic climate change. It is nothing more than a tool with which they can drive their agenda of social engineering and wealth redistribution. Thankfully, Americans are catching on to the lies, falsified data, and out right fabrications committed by Mann and his stooges. It grieves me to see how scientifically illiterate our legislators and general public are, and that the hoax has been perpetuated as long as it has. Thankfully Europe is ahead of us on this and more and more scientists there are speaking out and showing Mann for what he is, and the pseudo-science he is peddling.

Kudos to Popular Science for exposing and quoting 3 of the scoundrels most personally responsible for the degraded state of our public understanding of climate science and its implications. It is deeply chilling to hear the thoughts of these men who rise each day to auction their talents to any group seeking high gloss counterfeit economic & scientific support for their agenda.

Myron Ebbell, Steve Milloy,and Joe Bast are 3 men whose ability to safely operate within civil society absolutely confounds me, given the implications of the violence they do to our capacity to employ and respond to science. I struggle to analogize another group whose expert disinformation and propaganda will cause more suffering and destruction, though I can think of a few surrounding periods of war.

After debating top deniers like these and studying their sociology for a decade, I’ve come to learn that they truly have no inner moral struggle or qualms with the concept that their prescriptions on climate will very likely lead to mass suffering and death. These facts just don’t emotionally animate them at all. The reasons for their total loss of what we’d call humanity or moral decency are manifold, but we must accept the horror that these people feel nothing at all for other people.

These conscience-free men are examples of the of the banality of evil.

If you want to read a lucid and balanced account of the political corruption, money, greed and the perversion of science behind Mann's hoax, read "Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax. It rips the lid off and shows exactly who is making $$$ Millions, how the US is being singled out by the climate accords to cripple our economy and how the data show no global warming whatsoever, but just the opposite. It show how the agenda was pushed forward by Gore, how he made hundreds of millions for himself and his backers trading carbon credits and stands to make more under cap and trade.

According to solar physicists, the sun emitted a third less energy about 4 billion years ago and has been steadily brightening ever since. Yet for most of this time, Earth has been even warmer than today, a phenomenon sometimes called the faint sun paradox. The reason: higher levels of greenhouse gases trapping more of the sun's heat.

www.newscientist.com/article/dn11650-climate-myths-global-warming-is-down-to-the-sun-not-humans.html

And the Cambrian Mass Extinction was volcanism and clathrate escape. Methane is seeping ever more strongly from the melting polar ice. The tipping point nears.

Milloy says. “I have yet to see an environmental scare that is remotely true when it comes to human health. Secondhand smoke, air quality, ozone depletion, pesticides, superfund sites—you name it.”

Seriously? Does Milloy not understand there is are worsening epidemics of cancer, heart disease, emphysema, asthma due to environmental toxins? He is simply revealing his ideologically-driven agenda - profits for corporations without responsibility for polluting the commons. Unfettered capitalism for fat cats, and socialism for the rest of us who pay with our health and the stability of the climate for our children.

Not to minimize the trauma climate scientists have endured, but still I WISH somebody would sue me! Maybe then it would be harder for deniers to completely ignore the largest elephant in the room - the nitrogen cascade and inexorably rising tropospheric ozone - which is killing trees and diminishing annual agricultural crops as well. Ocean acidification is the other issue that deniers dread. In fact, most climate scientists avoid those topics too, because there's no techno-geoengineering fix for either of them.

The culprit is industrial civilization - our level of consumption, and over-population.

A book about ozone's role in causing a global decline in vegetation can be downloaded for free here: www.deadtrees-dyingforests.com/pillage-plunder-pollute-llc/

Now please somebody sue me!!

thanks.

Yeah Right!!
IPCC is infallible, The sun is the only source of warming heat. There is no such thing as radioactive decay heat. Planetary gravity can't cause warming because it does not radiate solar warming energy. A cznnonball will not get energy from gravity as it falls from the tower of Pisa so it won't cause damage. The Atomic bomb is impoossible. The Moon and planets do not cause tidal energy. More CO2 creates warming energy out of thin air. All coke cans are are going to explode from added CO2 warming energy.
Has anyone ever told you you all are NUTZ? That you do NOT believe in what science has taught us?
As for PolSci. You expect us to believe you when you write such fairy tales?
Maybe you will just go away if we ignore you.

@Jack Walden...well put, it is telling that the dispicable people behind defending cigarettes (which have sentenced millions to a slow and lingering death) and big oil (who obviously benefit from unrestricted release of CO2) are behind the denier campaign, anyone who can't see through this farce for what it is are not worthy of a response, cheers

@toomeyND. Thanks for your calm argument and your concern for life on the planet. No sarcasm, honestly thanks.

To be brief though, What I'm mainly saying here is that China and India, which make up a lionshare of the population on the Earth don't care. Other developing nations don't care. They want a better standard of Living. They're not going to help with this. TATA motors is/will be producing a $2500 retail price internal combustion car for the Indian population, there are over a billion people in India and a significant # will migrate to these vehicles.

China can't get enough oil. Or coal.

Many country's standard of living isn't great and few have any interest in paying more for energy to 'save the planet'. Businesses are not going to go 'green' unless it pays to do so. Aside from just 'profit' they answer to their shareholders.

This has to be in balance. Push the blue button down the red one comes up, push the red one, the yellow once comes up.

And as far as damage to people, the doubling of the price of corn, which caused many other food commodities to increase in price(why grow soybean at 3 /bushel when you can do corn at 6?) is causing people to starve. Today. Right now.
This effort is responsible for some amount of genocide already.

Is all I'm saying. After all this time and all the information presented, it is a waste of time to argue 'the science', so I don't bother, though I like to toss in a little steam for fun at times.

@tod/Mark - Excellent points all.

@Bob_F

No doubt that India and China not joining the cause makes this a tough pill to swallow. What, politically, would we potentially be giving up as we purposefully weaken ourselves while they steam ahead? That is definitely a concern, let alone the amount of pollution they will contribute in the near future.

However, they will do what is cheapest. They also will not be the innovators to get there. It really is up to the Western World/Europe to come up with economic, environmentally viable solutions to growth. The problem is that, if it isn't economic right now, no company can viably do the research. It would require government incentives to get something like this going. This is a cost that is already difficult to justify to a weak economy. Tack on that there are so many parties pushing mis-information (and maybe those parties are the people I listen to, not you), and funding something like this becomes almost impossible.

I know that was going on a bit of a tangent, but when you bring the participation of other countries into the mix, this does become political.

Real systems typically do not respond in a linear manner to input. Many think of this as the "tipping point" concept. This concept can be illustrated by examples such as that of the sand dune slip face that remains stable as more and more sand is added. At some point the addition of one more sand grain causes the slip face to collapse in an avalanche.

That CO2 is a less effective greenhouse contributer than other gases or vapors is really not so important as how much additional CO2 input does it take to upset the equilibrium of the system. It would appear that the amount contributed by human activity is enough to upset the balance.

The concept of "punctuated equilibrium" describes the tendency of a system to come to a new equilibrium state after having a previous one disturbed. Adding increasing inputs to such a disturbed system may make it more difficult for a system to establish that new equilibrium.

It only takes the wings of a butterfly in China to affect the weather in the US.

In the early 60's people were talking about another ice age. Worried that the earth will freeze over.

While I am not sure about global warming's cause I am sure that global deforestation is part of the issue. Plants are not air conditioners, they absorb and convert energy. Buildings and streets do not. Fossil fuel is part of the issue. Maybe even solar winds. I hate to say it but nuclear plants may have been a solution. Who knows, above ground nuclear tests (hundreds of them) may be behind this too.

It is also true that everyone ought to be concerned about clean air and water and solar activity and such. Simple mistakes have been made in the past on laws that were worse. The 70's gave us emission laws when they should have been mileage laws. We wasted more fuel and made more pollution by demanding emission standards that were stupid. They were based on PPM and not on yearly pounds.

@jefro: In the '70s a handful of scientists suggested, based on aerosols, that cooling was a possibility. The popular press jumped on those suggestions and blew them out of proportion, thus the Time magazine cover suggesting we were heading for an ice age. But even then most scientists thought that the effects of CO2 would outweigh the aerosols and that warming was more likely: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm

Thank you all for taking the time to explain yourselves rationally. Now I have a clearer understanding of both sides of the argument.
And thanks to Tom for a great article.

Superb article, Tom. Well done.

Climate change, or global warming if you prefer, is definitely happening. It's obvious to me at 63. I've seen a lot of change. OK, it's happening. There are those who blame Mankind, there are those who realize that the climate on this planet has been changing since long before human intervention. Another natural, recurring phenomenon becomes a topic for heated discussion. It's a new religion for some. Thousands of years ago the High Priest would select newborns or virgins or young men, depending on the local superstition, to sacrifice to appease their local gods. Now we encourage people with degrees in various sciences to sacrifice the minds of our children by filling them with eco-babble.

The superstars of the Church of the Sky-Is-Falling, the esteemed Dr. David Suzuki and Al Gore as high priests, are making fortunes. Large fortunes. Hundreds of other wealthy socialists (they used to be socialITEs until tree hugging became the sport of kings) descend with them on a city in Brazil, burning tons of jet fuel to attend a conference. The theme of the conference is getting the riffraff (that's us, btw) to stop burning tons of jet fuel. Oh, I almost forgot: many of them will be arriving in their own jets - it's just impossible to fly commercial, after all, with all those common people. I mean, really!

Global warming, or climate change if you prefer, is a business. It's exactly the same as the businesses run by the TV preacher set. It's for-profit (their profit), and it holds as much truth as creationism, parting of seas, walking on water, or any of those myths. Believe what you want, just don't try to influence me or my children. We'll believe what we want.

One last thing: I have two daughters. One believes everything Suzuki and Gore preach, the other laughs at it - but not at her sister - and I didn't have the opportunity to influence either of them as I was not in their lives for a long time. I am now, I love them both (and they love me), but they have their own beliefs and I respect both of them. Maybe if Suzuki and Gore respected others we'd have a very civilized debate. Not gonna happen. Sadly.

Isn't it just like these Climate Change phoneys to whine about imaginary persecution. For years they have worked to destroy the careers of any legitimate scientist who dared to present the facts regarding the nonexistent "threat" of global warming.
Now that the tables have turned and the media (in most quarters outside the PopSci Earth Worship fortress) has started to report the facts on the climate non-issue, these guys are acting all hurt.
It wasn't enough that the Climate Cabal was caught with their pants down in England with the revelation of hundreds of damning emails SHOWING how they were deliberately ginning up this bogus issue. They STILL refuse to admit they have been caught at their game. They need to move on to the next big Grant Grab.
Maybe it won't be as big as their pipe dream of tapping into the global "Carbon Credits" scam but I'm sure these counterfeit-scientists can put their heads together at their next beer blast and come up with another siphon plan to tap the public trough.
Thank you PopSci for keeping me informed with the latest lunacies of the Modern Luddites of which you have become the standard bearer. There was a time when I couldn't wait for the next issue of Popular Science to arrive in my mailbox. But, about a decade+ ago you followed the same path as Time Magazine and just became nothing but a water carrier for the Left.
Sad.

Great article. Thanks. Science doesn't strain a gnat and swallow a camel. Neither do people...most of the time.

I love this article.

Rather than dispute actual evidence that is being debunked daily- play the "im being attacked - believe me" card.
Really?

1- It was always called "global warming" (especially by some of these Berkeley nuts around the corner - ).
2- Then they changed it to "climate change" and then bald faced LIED about doing so and claimed they called it both before. Research shows they were insistant it was "warming".

The Earth is warming - there is little debate on this.
The CO2 levels are raising - there is little debate about this.

Whether is the CO2 alone, whether its humans causing the level to rise, and even if that rise is responsible - IS DEBATABLE. And there has been little evidence to address this - only "im being attacked" or "how dare you dont believe me - your stupid" and then point back to the previous evidence that is not being debated - as if that were a logical argument.

This article is a pathetic attempt to, again, argue a point that is not at the debate. No one wants violence, you win.
You still have not answered:
"Whether is the Co2 alone, whether its humans causing the level to rise, and even if that rise is responsible - IS DEBATABLE. And there has been little evidence to address this"
You still lose !!!

Attached is a link reporting the salary of the head of the IPCC as studied by KPMG.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/08/26/206638/ipcc-chief-pachauri-kpmg-review-telegraph-apologizes/?mobile=nc

You are all so mad about Al Gore and David Sazuki making millions. Go ahead and dislike them. However, they didn't do this science, they are just megaphones for it.

I don't recall, except for Mann, many scientists earning millions of dollars for their research or gaining "house-hold name" status.

I suppose I just find it hard to believe that a large amount of researchers all got together and said, "hey, i think i know how to make a buck."

@Oskar Mazerath
Nice arguments and read the rest of the arguments as well that leave out a huge bit of unformation.

Most scientist keep on pointing back to arguments that are true but do not address the debate.
The biggest BS of them all is the editing of data.
The ice core samples which are at the heart and soul of this debate are conveniently clipped by a 10,000 years.

Most SCIENTIST know that the larger the data sample the better view/understanding you will have.
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/
The "hockey stick" argument which the author tries to use as the reason for retaliation because who else would retaliate unless they can't argue - is flawed.

And there lays, as well as doctored evidence by removing of data, the debate. As well as how the Earth actually dissapates excess energy - this is why they now call it "climate change" instead of global warming. It seems the earth has its ways of dissapating the excess energy in the form of clouds and storms. We have also had record snowfall in many areas.

why do people always have to blame the scientists seriousely!? they only research and discover this stuff and bring it into the public eye basically by attacking scientists your shooting the messager almost literally infact!

Does anyone recall "The population Bomb"?
Better data and better science.
It was all wrong due to the use of linear projection.
Climate science cannot predict this year let alone decades.
When they say "no doubt we are in global warming" then it is time buy warmer clothes.

Tom has written two of my favorite articles for PopSci, thank you Tom!

As for the climate change, it's a bit too late to reverse it now so enjoy your fast-food and cheap gasoline while it is there for the taking. Soon you'll learn to use your legs and bicycles, hanging plastic bags of algea for fuel and food on the sides of your homes. Good luck humanity, this new darwin event will breed only the rich and the ignorant.

I'm happy to see a robust discussion here. I never liked the way Popsci assumes AGW is a given. I believe the truth that drastic measures require more justification than a "what if" or "better safe than sorry" is winning.

The holocaust that Global Warming will cause will be far worse than the Nazi holocaust. It will be Billions rather than mere Millions of deaths. That is why we want strong action to stop GW and that is why the term "denialist" or "denier" is appropriate. Mother Nature is far better than the Nazis were at killing, so don't anger Mother Nature. 99% of all species that ever lived are extinct. Homo Sap is no exception.
Denialists are called denialists because what they are advocating is GENOCIDE. Make no mistake. Global Warming can make humans extinct. Under BAU [Business As Usual], agriculture and civilization will collapse some time between 2050 and 2055 due to drought caused by GW [Global Warming].

Is there "Climate Change"? Of course there is! (I like how the advocates shifted gears away from "Global Warming" when that one didn't sell....) There has been climate change SINCE THERE WAS A CLIMATE!, long before mankind sullied the earth. So, the real question is, is the "climate change" caused by man? I'd like to answer that one with another question: Why is it that all the "solutions", i.e., the destruction of the Free Enterprise system, EXACTLY what the world's Socialists and Communists have been advocating FOR DECADES?? As far as the "scientists" are concerned, let one of them apply for a grant to study something that would DIS-prove the "Gospel" and see how the money rolls in.....NOT!!

@Jabberwolf: I'm not quite sure what you're talking about when you say that ice core samples "are conveniently clipped by a 10,000 years." We have much older core samples that that. Some Antarctic ice cores date as far back as 750,000 years. And as for the famous "hockey stick" graph, it's been vindicated over and over again. Just about every reconstruction of temperature over the last few hundred or thousand years shows the same pattern. Even Muller shows it.

As for clouds and storms "dissapating the excess energy", sorry, but no. Energy is dissipated from the earth via infrared to space. Clouds can act as a negative feedback by blocking incoming visible light, or as a positive feedback by blocking outgoing IR, but they don't themselves dissipate energy. CO2 upsets the energy balance of the earth by slowing the radiation of IR. Given higher CO2 levels (and the accompanying higher water vapor levels), in order for the outgoing IR to match the incoming energy, the temperature of the earth must be higher (the higher the temperature of an object the more IR is radiated).

Thank you for your courage in printing this story, and risking subscription cancellations and your mailing privilages to do it.
So far I've seen one skeptic state that the deiners behavior is inappropriate, lots of flaming responses and false equivalance claims from deniers, and no questioning of the tactics of denying politicians. That should say something about the denier position right there.
There's so much more than just climate change going on here. There is a concerted drive to convert this nation into a worship of bullying ignorance.
While Europe and China go about policy reform and work towards sustainability, however slowly and piecemeal they do(and China will no doubt call it the 'Great Transition,')here the deniers and their like will force us into Fortress World, where their children will pay the price with short brutal lives as indentured workers providing labor for the nations that heeded the warnings. If the human race survives, and the chances are that it will, it will be with a lot fewer people and great extremes in quality of life among the survivors. Perhaps Welles was getting it right in 'The Time Machine' and we're becoming Morlocks and Eloi. It seems to me that I remember that he wanted his epitaph to be "Damn you all, I told you."

@Oskar, I went to your link, this is what I found.

The fact is Jupiter is a strong case for solar driven climate change. The Great Red Spot is a singular weather event without a peer or analog on any of the other known worlds. Some people insist on describing it as a hurricane. This is incorrect. A hurricane is a low pressure zone funneling surrounding warm air to the ground. The Great Red Spot is a high pressure zone, forcing hot air out of the middle of the planet. It rises 8 kilometers above the surrounding methane cloud deck, like a turkey timer that is popping out to tell us that the thanksgiving meal is ready.
And now we have another great red spot, which will probably be with us for a very very long time.
Neptune is changing in a spectacular and miraculous way which a cut and dried pdf file will not impart to you.
Have a look at it in color. Neptune's orbit is 164 years long, and Voyager only visited it once back in 1989, so we have no baseline to judge if this change is the natural effect of Neptune traveling through it's orbit, or if it is the result of an augmented solar effect.
But either way it is the sun driving Neptune's weather.

So if you don't believe climate change is real or if real we are not causing it, forget it. Realize, though, that our use of fossil fuel is:
*Allowing other countries to make us tenants in our own land as they buy up our infrastructure, businesses, main street and wall street.
*Trashes other countries as the obscene level of wealth allows mafias in these countries to subject their own people.
*Causes thousands of deaths from pollution.
*Causes massive death due to wars as we try to protect far flung fossil fuel resources.
*Brutilizes our own people involved in these wars who return home and behave as they did overseas.
*Supports and makes rich the industrio-millitary complex which is now enslaving our own people (patriot act for instance)
*Gives justification to terrorists, necessitating a huge wasteful effort to counter them.
And so forth.

This comment is leveled at ASTEROID MINER.

You sir, are equating people who refute the ideas of anthropogenic global climate change with genocidal maniacs and I take extreme offense. The way I see it, it is the climate change pushers that have spent millions to install the Georgia Guidestones and billions on electing government employees to do their bidding over the last half century while trying their damndest to destroy modern civilization, human rights, and the sanctity of human life. Do you even know what statistics the climate change supporters are proposing? How about that they say the earth can only support 500 million of our species? According to this tidbit that is widely accepted by people like yourself and as it is listed as the first bullet on the Guidestones, supporters of anthropogenic global climate change believe whole-heartedly that 95% of the human population must be eradicated from this earth.

Please keep in mind that this is not a new idea at all. Back in the early 1900's, a nation called the United States was nearly overrun by eugenicists whose goals were population control. Luckily, we influenced the warped mind of Hitler and he carried out plans that certain Americans had wanted to do for some time and the majority of the American population's eyes were opened to the horrors of genocide and eugenics.

You can even go back all the way to the times of the Roman empire and find philosophers who wanted population control because of over crowding even then. To people like myself you are the person hoping and wishing for genocide. Men and women have been supporting population control and the elimination of "undesirables" for millenia and now is no different. What is different is that they now have to hide their intent and disguise it to convince people to kill themselves and institute the population reduction schemes upon themselves because an overt act of eugenics or genocide would be met with far greater resistance in our culturally diverse society than at any time in the past.

If you address me do not use straw man arguments. We are talking about the legitimacy of the climate change agenda, not "geocentric". You cannot refute what I said about agenda 21 (you probably don't know about it). So you make up bogus arguments about evolution and relativity.

Go to this link and read about reputable scientists, accomplished professors who say its not real. Please educate yourself so you don't have resort to strawman arguments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

^^ Comment for Oskar

@SgtB that was beautiful

@William Huge-Games..everything you said is legitimate. But how is ed-industrializing us, taking our freedom, becoming a socialist society, and taxing us going to help? Look at the men perpetuating these lies...all they are after is power.

@Asteroid Miner, you are the a typical archetype of he global warming crowd. It is a religion for you, and everyone else is "unclean". You use the main argument of everyone that looks to stifle truth, you call names, and make outlandish claims. But none of your arguments are based on fact.

With all the arguing and huffing/puffing going on here, folks should note one important thing: Not a single skeptic here has actually done anything with any of the available *data*. Not one skeptic has presented any of his/her own analysis results showing that climate scientists are wrong.

Folks, there are *mountains* of freely-available climate data out there, just begging to be analyzed by skeptics. With Just minute or two with Google and a few followup mouse clicks, you can download reams of data (depending on how fast your internet connection is) to your laptop/PC.

Start with the easiest stuff -- the raw surface temperature data. Google up GHCN and follow a few links to find it.

If you read what I posted here earlier, you will learn how to compute your own global-average temperature results from that raw temperature data -- no need to depend on secret NASA/NOAA algorithms and data "adjustments". You'll will see how straightforward it is to get results very similar to what NASA/NOAA publish, and you will see how to do it with, like I just said, raw data and *no* adjustments/homogenization/whatever -- just plain old averaging.

To save you the trouble of scrolling up to find my earlier post, I'll just repeat it below:

Actually, it doesn't take a Berkeley physicist and a team of professional analysts to demonstrate that the published global-mean temperature results are correct. A simple (almost "back of the envelope" simple) averaging approach that uses programming techniques that first-year compsci students typically learn will do the job very nicely. And you can do this with *raw* (not "adjusted" or "homogenized") data.

In fact, the global-average results are so robust that you can reproduce them quite nicely even if you use just a few dozen (out of thousands) of temperature stations.

I was able to reproduce the NASA global-average results surprisingly closely even when I used *raw* temperature data from ~70 (or even fewer than 40) *rural* stations.

Disproving all of the major claims that so-called "skeptics" have made about the global temperature record is surprisingly straightforward. UHI? Easy to disprove. Warming requiring "adjustments"? Easy to disprove. Warming exaggerated by the "dropped stations" effect? Easy to disprove. You could teach on-the-ball college freshmen how to do all of this themselves with nothing more than publicly-available *raw* temperature data and free software development tools.

Look at www.facebook.com/caer.bannog.9, where I not only show some pretty interesting results, but I also tell you how to reproduce them. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page and work your way up, the material will be easier to sort out.

@Bruce Banner
The earth’s response is not the issue, no, but it is something that needs to be considered when talking about “the impact”. You said the optimum word: control. Americans in particular are not fond of that word, and that is what this global debate is all about. It’s a big deal when a private company or citizen is denied a right because of a policy that was written based off what some scientist said (true or otherwise). As this article points out (in all its popular bias), some people blame the scientists and are less civilized in their grief than others.

AdrianVance (who commented on this article) says it far better than I could. While you’re at it read jeltez42’s comment as it is very intelligent.

And yes, I think knowing how the earth responds to our actions is a BIG part of figuring out how or if we should limit those actions. Thanks for answering the question BTW.

@ToomeyND
Thank You Toomey, I’m well aware of what an analogy is. I was simply taking Banner’s analogy and expanding upon it to make my point.

POPSCI should really consider a dedicated forum page. 77 comments is a lot to go through.

The greens have been using lawless acts, nuisance lawsuits, misinformation campaigns, etc to further their agenda of shutting down industrial society since the 1970's. Heck, they pioneered these tactics. Jimmy Buffet had a hit song lauding the "environmental terrorist". Almost funny that they would complain now.

Speaking of the 1970's, back when I was in college in those bygone days, I noticed that the undergrads going into environment related fields were glassy-eyed fanatics who basically despised American middle class society. I guess a few of them now have PhD.s and expect us to listen to them.

Silly fanatics. We just aren't going to obey you. Get used to the idea.

It's sad that Popular Science is now just part of the green propaganda machine.

American jihadist is a sad thing to have in this country but it seems its fine by the far right.
As the attacks on scientists and GYN doctors prove this is true

If anyone makes it down here, do yourselves a favor and read Steve McIntyre's website, Climate Audit. He is the person responsible for a lot of those freedom of information requests that Mann and others have refused to comply with. Be prepared to delve into the arcane world of statistical analysis; it gets extremely tedious.

Interestingly, environmental issues author Tom Clynes never thought to interview McIntyre, Mann's most visible, outspoken, and disciplined opponent.

The bottom line is Mann's "hockey stick" is bogus and no one has been able to reproduce it with the data set he claims to have used by normal methods of statistical analysis. Though many have defended his work and claim they reproduced it, Mann has refused to supply the data or his methods, so in fact they haven't reproduced anything. We simply don't know how he generated his miraculous graph. Look at any of the global historical temperature data sets published online and none of them show the same trend as Mann's hockey stick.

The only way McIntyre was able to approximate Mann's graph was to purposely exclude tree ring data that didn't fit the hockey stick trend that others apparently showed.

That's right, tree ring data. This whole to-do that Mann inspired is about tree rings. Climatologists use them as proxies for temperatures; fully ignoring the fact that all kinds of environmental factors influence tree ring growth besides temperature. You would laugh if you realized how small a data set of global temperature proxies those tree rings represent. Go to Climate Audit and read all about it.

Once you realize the so-called science behind the hockey stick is bogus, you will quickly figure out what a hatchet job of "deniers" this article is. Basically it boils down to 2 points:

1. Nutballs and fanatics are threatening climate scientists so ALL "deniers" must be nutballs and fanatics.

(Never mind that the most prominent climate scientists have been colluding for years to blacklist researchers and prevent--it's called censoring--publication of research that contradicts their "consensus", as the Climategate e-mails proved.)

2. Prominent "deniers" like Steve Milloy and Myron Ebell are funded by Big Oil, the Koch brothers, or Big Business so their motivation is evil and so are their arguments.

(Ignoring of course that Big Oil also funds research that favors the views of Mann and others, and the fact that most climate science research is sponsored by public funding--taxes--and that there is a strong liberal, Big Government bias among Mann and his cohorts. Also ignoring the fact that if the scientific argument against anthropogenic global warming is valid--and it is--who cares who supports it?)

The only thing useful Clynes says about the actual science is "the case for anthropogenic climate change has only strengthened; 98 percent of actively publishing climate scientists now say that it is undeniable."

Problem is, it's untrue. The case for anthropogenic climate change continues to weaken, both scientifically, as more and more research that contradicts the conclusions of Mann and others comes to light, and in the public consciousness, as polls show each year more people think it's a minor issue.

Fact is, people are wising up to the "sky is falling" story of the climate Chicken Littles and the science shows that it really is much ado about nothing.

The most intelligent point made in the entire article was by Myron Ebell: "What they’re saying (Mann and the climate Chicken Little's) is, we’ve got to throw huge, scarce resources into what is essentially a non-problem."

Exactly.

I am disappointed that PopSci would publish a politically charged "puff piece" such as this article. While it follows the politically correct script in current vogue,it lends nothing to an understanding of the "real scientific issues". Might as well have just said "Bush did it". There are REAL issues to be explored that have been left unexplored, e.g. a comparison of current circumstances with those of prior heating cycles. On another front the "unintended consequences" of all the knee-jerk feel-good measures being thrown at the politically popular target, the "carbon footprint", e.g. the MASSIVELY (reference EE Times circa July 2012) larger impact of the gaseous emissions associated with the production of solar cells and indeed even of simple water vapor (OK not "massive" in this case but MUCH larger than the CO2 impact. No sane person wants to wreck the planet, BUT neither do we want a politically driven pseudo-science club used to beat us into submission to the "progressives" dream of an Animal Farm elite driven state. One thing is certain, the Earth is either cooling or warming - take your pick. The real questions are: a) how quickly? b) why? c) how to mitigate the process IF necessary. All things considered, I think the "warming" prospect would be MUCH easier to deal with than the "cooling" prospect, as surely we could devise some means to control the amount of radiant heat reaching earth MUCH more easily than finding ways to increase it.

It short PLEASE let PopSci focus on the scientific aspects of an issue and let the hordes of the MSM rule the realm of demagoguery and political correctness.

Regarding the "unintended consequences" of various "global warming feel-good initiatives", consider:
a) as recently as about 10 years ago (OK, update needed) it took about 27 years for a solar cell to generate the amount of power needed to make the solar cell;
b) the gases emitted by solar cell production are 12000-30000 times more "effective" than CO2 in trapping radiant heat, and there's a lot of the stuff - a big "whoops";
c) a typical wind turbine will NEVER supply enough energy to replace that used to make them - whoops! Note that a wind turbine rated 1 MW puts out 1 MW with a 30mph wind - a 15mph wind results in only 1/8 MW - a dramatic drop off. Sans government subsidies (OK, they just print the money), wind power is both a financial and environmental bust.
d) would someone (hello PopSci!) please examine the REAL impact of hybrid cars production, use and disposal? Bet it's not a pretty picture - the batteries alone are environmental nightmares.

Water power does deliver a return, both environmentally and economically - hurray!

Clean nuclear power is a real alternative sacrificed to PC politics. Anybody recall the work on pelletized small scale reactors - "melt down proof" and clean?

Please no more political stories in PopSci - there's a whole bunch of important real science to discuss.

By the way, what Steve McIntyre did manage to do was use the data set of tree ring proxies that it appears Mann used--the same ones available to all climate scientists--and incorporated ALL the tree ring data. The result? A graph that, on the left side looks a lot like Mann's hockey stick but on the right? No hockey stick. It's just repetitions of the same up and down temperature variations you see through the 1800's and early 1900's.

If any of you looked at the video in yesterday's post "The Magnificent Power of Earth's Magnetosphere" you would be struck, as I was, by the difficulty of trying to establish global temperature trends when the earth's atmosphere is so complex and dynamic that temperatures in any region of a few square miles can vary by 20 or 30 degrees (or more!) at the same time of day, 24 hours apart, due to natural phenomenon: ocean circulation, weather systems, El Nino and La Nina.

All the evidence taken together and analyzed over thousands of years shows irrefutably that the earth is warmer than it was during the last ice age. We all know that. There are fewer glaciers, the sea level is higher. The relatively sparse temperature data and temperature proxy data (like tree rings) correlates with a multi-thousand year warming trend. Before the 20th century, the measured temperature data is pretty sparse. In the 20th century the measured data is much richer but now you have to factor out the "urban heat island" effect as more people populate areas around those measuring stations and more ground is paved, which artificially elevates local temperatures.

The only truly global temperature measurements are satellites that have been monitoring earth for the last 30 years. What do they show? Go look for yourself. Warming and cooling. In fact, for the last decade, there has been no appreciable "global" warming at all. That certainly doesn't jibe with Mann's silly hockey stick.

Mann has refused to supply the data or his methods, so in fact they haven't reproduced anything. We simply don't know how he generated his miraculous graph. Look at any of the global historical temperature data sets published online and none of them show the same trend as Mann's hockey stick.

Mann's data and code have been freely available on-line for *years*. Linkies here: www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/research/MANNETAL98/ and here: www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/supplements/MultiproxyMeans07/

Regarding replication? Other scientists have replicated Mann's results -- link here: thedgw.org/definitionsOut/..%5Cdocs%5CWahl_ClimChange2007.pdf

And yes, Ammann and Wahl (the dudes who independently replicated Mann's hockey stick) have made all of their code and data available for independent scrutiny. Link here: www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/WA_supplement.html (includes a link to a tarball of all source-code and data).

In the 20th century the measured data is much richer but now you have to factor out the "urban heat island" effect as more people populate areas around those measuring stations and more ground is paved, which artificially elevates local temperatures.

The UHI effect hardly changes global-average temperature results at all. In my own processing of the GHCN raw data, I compared the results I got when I processed only *rural* stations with the official NASA results. Got virtually the same results that NASA get with *all* the stations stations. If UHI were a real factor, my results would have differed significantly from NASA's. But they don't.

Take a look at this link:
www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=136798749783514&set=a.136798463116876.27706.100003601706555&type=1&theater

It shows official NASA results for all stations vs. my own results for just a small number of *rural* stations.

Also look at this image www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=136800876449968&set=a.136798463116876.27706.100003601706555&type=1&theater, which shows Google-Earth imagery of all station locations.

Compare it with this image www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=136801226449933&set=a.136798463116876.27706.100003601706555&type=1&theater, which shows the locations of the tiny number of rural stations that I used to replicate very closely the results that NASA gets when they use *all* of the temperature stations.

Nice comments on here. I was so upset over the article that I just cancelled my subscription. Bunch of BS to endorse a theory without giving the opposite views equal space in the article. Very liberal loony article, Go on and believe your ideas, to bad you won't live long enough to see how wrong you are. Earth cycles and variations take many years to materialize and NO ONE has it figured out yet. Go sit out in far eastern Oregon and think about it.

What's the deal with people here talking about socialism and government control? What does the development of decent battery technology and replacing coal plants with nukes have to do with socialism?

I know plenty of people that have gone green + added solar panels so that they could be off the grid and be controlled LESS by outside influences.

Believing a popular scientific idea doesn't make you a liberal. Doubting a popular scientific idea doesn't make you smarter than people who don't.

Why am I an idiot for listening to a group of scientist who have a few with questionable intentions, but the skeptics are super smart for listening to another group of scientists with a few with questionable intentions?

Is it that in-american of me be willing to give up some comforts for what I perceive to be a common good? Is it naive of me to think this is a no brainier when factoring in that the same actions will reduce pollution, improving air quality, and reducing illness?

Please, someone explain to me why these ideas make me such a socialist.

Un-American, not in

Toomey, your instincts are sensible. It's foolhardy to ignore such a large problem when the scientific academies of the world are sounding alarms about multiple risks. Keep in mind, energy companies have enormous funding to hire people to post messages to boards like this in response to bad press... I wouldn't be surprised if more than just a few of the contributors to this discussion are shills assigned to reply.

Anyway, there's much we can do to cut energy use and generate energy in new ways. We should solve the problem so we don't leave our own kids in the lurch-- it could really be bad for them if we ignore the problem.

Just one last thought-- deniers amount to just 12% of the US population according to studies by Yale, and the US is extreme on this issue. Folks who agree with scientific consensus or at least accept that we're exposed to risk and support doing right could easily overwhelm them. While the deniers may be well-funded, will argue tenaciously and play to win, the majority has the power to rule on this and can exert its will.

Let me simplify this for some of you. Pollution bad. :)

Here is how the deceivers spread their misinformation about climate change and "wipe the oil" off the money, by funneling it through groups like these and others.

These 32 conservative 'think tanks' (really industry front groups) have all been involved in the tobacco industry's campaign to deny the science showing the dangers of tobacco.

They are all now involved in the campaign to deny the science of climate change.

1. Acton Institute
2. American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
3. Alexis de Tocquerville Institute
4. American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
5. Americans for Prosperity
6. Atlas Economic Research Foundation
7. Burson-Marsteller (PR firm)
8. Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW)
9. Cato Institute
10. Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI)
11. Consumer Alert
12. DCI Group (PR firm)
13. European Science and Environment Forum
14. Fraser Institute
15. Frontiers of Freedom
16. George C. Marshall Institute
17. Harvard Center for Risk Analysis
18. Heartland Institute
19. Heritage Foundation
20. Independent Institute
21. International Center for a Scientific Ecology
22. International Policy Network
23. John Locke Foundation
24. Junk Science
25. National Center for Public Policy Research
26. National Journalism Center
27. National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI)
28. Pacific Research Institute
29. Reason Foundation
30. Small Business Survival Committee
31. The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC)
32. Washington Legal Foundation

#5 and #9 were created by the billionaire oil and lumber tycoon Koch brothers, who fund all kinds of anti-enviromental PR. They also fund denial of the science saying formaldahyde causes cancer. This is no surprise, since they are major owners of Georgia Pacific lumber company.

#24 Junk Science, which is aptly named, is run by Steve Milloy, who Fox News like to feature as an "expert" on climate change. Milloy is NOT a scientist. He's a paid lobbyist for fossil fuel interests and a professional PR man. Fox ever divulge that to you? I doubt it.

"Forty public policy groups have this in common: They seek to undermine the scientific consensus that humans are causing the earth to overheat. And they all get money from ExxonMobil."
Chris Mooney at Mother Jones
"The global warming denial PR machine and the GOP"

Climate Denial Astroturf

Oil and coal industry money is funneled through different foundations to bury the money trail, and "wipe the oil" off of it.

They set up organizations like Policy Communications, The Western Business Roundtable, Partnership for America, and Americans for American Energy, to make it seem like there is this groundswell of grassroots organizations opposing the scientific theory of man made climate change and opposing the move to sustainable energy.

These are actually all the same people from the fossil fuel industry and mining industry.
They are all staffed by the same executives.

Astroturfing is setting up shell organizations to make it seem like a grassroots movement. Often uses Orwellian names that make these groups sound beneficient, good citizens, stewards of resources etc.

----------

Another example of "wiping the oil' off the money is how the inaptly named Friends of Science(FOS), had money funneled to what they called the Science Education Fund. The money came from the Alberta oil and gas industry through the Calgary Foundation, who funneled it through the University of Calgary and ultimately ending up at FOS.
FOS has funded Fred Singer, Sherwood Idso, Robert Balling and Pat Michaels.

Is James Inhofe Shilling For God, or Oil? The Correct Answer is “Both”

{read it at Desmogblog}

Senator Inhofe;

"Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

God Help us if we don't vote out the deniers.

Rush Limbaugh's favorite skeptic scientist is Roy Spencer

"I view my job a little like a legislator,
supported by the taxpayer, to protect the
interests of the taxpayer and to minimize
the role of government."

-- Roy Spencer

No, Roy. You are paid to do science, period.

Roy Spencer is on the board of directors of the George C. Marshall Institute, a decidedly anti environmental group of hard right ideologues.

Spencer is also a CREATIONIST

Almost all of the skeptic climate scientists you have heard of, are paid by the fossil fuels industry, either directly or indirectly.

And most of them hold to hard right, anti regulation political ideology, like Spencer.

Hey, it's okay with me if somone is a creationist, and a conservative, but not when religous beliefs and political ideology effects their 'science'.

Are we ready for comic relief?

Welcome to the alternate universe of GOP climate science

Remember; These are some of the politicians who think they know better than
97% of active climate scientists, every National Academy of Science in the world, and virtually every other major science organization in the world, with any relevance to climate and earth sciences.

GOP congressman Rohrbacher suggests trees cause global warming

This is a man, who by his own words, doesn't know the difference between carbohydrates, hydrocarbons or CO2.

Speaker of the House Boehner says CO2 emissions nothing to worry about because humans breathe CO2 in and out.

Excuse me speaker, ever hear of the greenhouse effect?

Michelle Bachman says there have been no scientific studies showing CO2 is harmful.
I guess she missed the 10,000 (up to about 2006) published research papers that show that CO2 causes global warming. There are thousands more research papers since then. Hundreds of papers are published every week relating to climate

Rick Perry likens himself and other deniers to Galileo.
Sorry Rick, but Galileo was correct and had the evidence.
You are wrong and have no evidence, while ignoring the mountain of evidence for AGW. (AGW = anthropogenic global warming - man made)
Perry and the rest are more like the religious authorities who persecued Galileo.

GOP Rep Fred Upton says there can be no global warming because God won't allow it to happen.

Sen Inhofe says its all a big hoax.

Sure Senator, the entire world scientific community is just trying to get more grant money.

And of course, Sen Inhofe (R Oklahoma) liked to invite science fiction writer Michael Crichton as an "expert witness" on climate change.
Apparently all you have to do is a write nonsense novel to be invited as an expert.

Senator Inhofe;

"Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."

Senator Inhofe is outrageous.
God Help us if we don't vote out the deniers.

more fun at the Mad Mad World of GOP climate science

Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI)

"CO2 Is A Natural Gas. Does This Mean That All Of Us Need To Put Catalytic Converters On Our Noses?"

Ever hear of the greenhouse effect? Apparently not.

Republican Joe Barton introduced Monckton to a U.S. House committee hearing as an expert witness on climate change

Barton (R-TX) describes Christopher Monckton

"as being generally regarded as one of the most knowledgeable, if not the most knowledgeable, experts on the skeptic side."

Monckton is NOT A SCIENTIST

Viscount Monckton as he likes to be called, who the GOP loves to call as an expert witness on climate change, is not a scientist of any kind. His only higher education is in journalism. Monckton is a complete charlatan, who has been completely and devastatingly debunked on many occasions by real scientists.

The GOP has at least twice had him as an expert witness on climate change, at important House Committee hearings.

Monckton had been told twice by the British House of Lords, to stop claiming he is a member. Yet he intoduces himself to U.S. congress as an emissary from Parliament. He embellishes all his fake temperature charts, etc and other publications, with a very close facsimlie of the seal of Parliament, the crowned porcullis. They have told him to stop using their seal.

He claims to have discovered cures for HIV, the flu, the cold, Graves disease. He claims to have been a science advisor to Margaret Thatcher. He never was.

Monckton is also a "birther"

He is looney beyond belief, IMO. And he is well paid by the Koch brothers and others, to spread confusion. Monckton is a showman, very persuasive in front of an audience and knows how to sound scientific, while spreading complete nonsense.

Barton and Inhofe get more oil money than any other legislators, in the House and Senate, respectively.

But wait, there's more fun in the GOP Science Fun House

Minnestota GOP state senator, Michael Jungbauer, claims to have studied all 13 fields of science related to climate change. Just so you know, no climate scientist would make such an absurd claim.

Jungbauer is the leading global warming denier in the Minnesota state senate. Turns out he doesn't even have a bachelor degree in ANY field of science.

Ron Paul wonders why scientists changed the name from Global Warming to Climate Change.

Really? The Intergovernmental Panel on CLIMATE CHANGE was named and founded 24 years ago, in 1988. And scientists have used both terms since the mid 1970s.

Speaker of the House - John Boehner
"The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical"

No Mr Speaker. What is comical and pathetic is that you believe than any scientist would ever say such an absurd thing. Either that or you are playing to the low information voter.

Rep. Shimkus:
"Man will not destroy this Earth. This Earth will not be destroyed by a flood."

God Help Us.

The GOP won't

9 out of 10 leading skeptical climate scientists are linked to Exxon

The Carbon Brief (TCB) has a nice analysis on the not-very-startling coincidence that at least nine of the top 10 'skeptical' 'scientists' who are publishing on climate change have direct links to Exxon.

Analysing the ‘900 papers supporting climate scepticism’: 9 out of top 10 authors linked to ExxonMobil
15 Apr 2011
In a second instalment, TCB also took a closer look at both the quality and content of the purported "900+" science papers identified by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) as somehow skeptical of the science of climate change. The news, for the skeptics as for the climate, turns out to be all bad.

Only a small number of the papers actually appeared in reputable publications (eg., 34 in Nature, 33 in Science), and many of those either don’t address the climate question directly or do NOT come to the conclusion that the GWPF attributes

97% - 98% of active climate scientists agree on man made global warming, or AGW - anthropogenic global warming.

If 97 out of 100 neurologists and neuro surgeons told you you needed brain surgery or you would die, what would you do?

3 of the 100 doctors are telling you not to worry about it, and that the other 97 are scamming you.

Now imagine that the 3 doctors, who say not to worry about it, are paid by the industry that makes the product that somehow caused you to need brain surgery.

Uninformed climate change 'skeptics' are like someone who would trust the 3 doctors

climategate was a phony scandal, as 8 different investigations found.

The scientists were reprimanded for not answering Freedom of Information (FOI) Requests in England. That's because they were being intentionally harrassed, with 60 FOIs in just one weekend, for example.
It takes a whole day's work for a scientist to answer 1 of those FOIs

The data was available elsewhere. No one was hiding anything

Some of the data was not theirs to release, but is the property of another institution.

Skeptics claim one of the hacked emails shows the scientists were suppressing peer reviewed papers by skeptics.
The paper being discussed was so bad, that 6 editors of the peer review scientific journal that published it RESIGNED in protest.

When you hear Republican politicians claiming climate scientists faked the science, they are referring to the FAKE SCANDAL of climategate.

Seven different investigations found no wrong doing, no faking the science. NONE
-------
This is mostly what it was about. nothing.

Watch out for the scary hockey stick

Deniers hate the so called hockey stick chart of historical global temperatures. That's because it is so startling to look at. The 20th century warming looks like the blade of a hockey stick, with previous centuries being the handle.

They hate it because it has become an iconic image of global warming.

even if it were invalidated, that would not invalidate AGW. The science would still stand on it's mountain of evidence.

Michael Mann's hockey stick temperature chart has been reconstructed by dozens of other scientists, using the same data and with the same result.

The National Academy of Science investigated the issue and found Mann's work valid.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research also validated Mann's work

All seven investigations of the fake scandal of climategate found the same. Nothing.

The "trick" that Mann spoke of in one of the hacked emails was nothing like what has been alleged by deniers.

Mann is a paleoclimatologist, who used tree ring data going back something like 2000 years for the chart. He also used ice core data, coral records etc. These types of paleo-climate data are called temperature proxies

We have measured temperature records that are pretty reliable back to about the mid 1800s. The tree ring data correlated well with these measured temps, up until the last 30 years of his chart, about 1960. and it correlated well with other proxies up to then.

The tree ring data, for some reason was inaccurate for that 30 year period after 1960.
How do we know? Because we have the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE from both land based and satellite stations.

So Mann patched onto his tree ring chart, the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE for those years.

This was all explained in the IPCC report, where Mann's research paper and this hockey stick chart were published. Nothing was hidden.

And that is the "trick". Not a trick like to fool, but a technique for patching the measured temps onto the chart to represent last 30 years after 1960.

And that non issue, is what all the nonsense is about.
That was the trick.

But the deniers turned it into a worldwide conspiracy by climate scientists, to "hide the decline".

In other words, the skeptics are saying that Mann should have used the tree ring data, that he knew was wrong for those last 30 years, instead of the ACTUAL MEASURED TEMPERATURE.

Get it?

@Sailrick...glad you took the time to show how foolishly fooled the deniers are, but it won't matter, they don't look at the facts, just the propaganda from big oil and the far right, cheers

Sailrick, buddy, its the "comments" section, not the "second article" section. But I'm sure that everything you assert is completely true.

BTW, even if all the AGW hype were true, and not a transparent hoax, it would be far better to live in a warmer world than to live under the collective thumb of the millions of Sailricks out there.

caerbannog points out that Michael Mann's data and methodology have been available online for years. It his computer program which generated the hockey stick that the National Science Foundation has deemed beyond the purview of FOI requests.

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick demonstrated that using Mann's methodology, you can produce a hockey stick from "red noise". Their analysis was attacked (or rebutted, depending on your point of view) but their assertion that the methodology generates a hockey stick from basically random data has not been refuted.

My mistake in confusing Mann with someone else on FOI withholding. It is Keith Briffa of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK who has been withholding data and methods, despite repeated freedom of information requests. It was Briffa's hockey stick graph (even more drastic than Mann's) which Steve McIntyre was unable to reproduce except by cherry-picking trees in the Yamal bristlecone pine data set. In fact it all boils down to ONE tree, YAD061, that demonstrates the hockey stick and skews the results.

All of this comes back to that pesky tree ring data from various locales in the Northern Hemisphere (not the entire world) that are used as proxies for temperature data. That's what the IPCC used as its foundational premise that humans are causing unprecedented warming of planet earth.

Global warming alarmists will puff about it being only one of thousands of other studies that support the notion of anthropogenic global warming, but it's simply not true. Ocean level studies, glacier studies, CO2 measurements, and other studies show LONG TERM warming trends consistent with earth being in an interglacial period, but none of them show the dramatic warming that the tree ring "hockey stick" graphs show, which would indicate that human activity is responsible for a dramatic increase in warming in the 20th century.

All the alarm stems from the hockey stick graphs from tree rings. That's it.

As I pointed out, tree ring data from an incredibly sparse series of locales is a weak reed indeed to lean on to make the outrageous claim that humans are causing catastrophic warming.

The only truly global temperature data set is from satellites in the last 30 years and they show no such warming trend as Mann and Briffa have. In other words, nothing to see here.

Sailrick, as you pointed out, the last 30 years of tree ring proxies did not match the measured temperature record so Mann stopped using the tree rings when they indicated a DECLINE in temperatures. Do you see any problems with this?

Here are the obvious questions:

1. If the tree ring data closely tracked temperature measurements through the 1800's and early 1900's when there were fewer stations, then suddenly diverged in the last 30 years, what's wrong? The tree ring data? The measured temperatures?

2. Is the premise that tree rings are consistently accurate proxies of temperature flawed? After all, lots of localized environmental factors influence tree ring growth besides temperature.

3. Is the fact that the tree ring data is from a remarkably small set of tree cores from several geographically limited areas a problem? In other words, is the data sample so small as to be a poor representation of "global" temperatures (setting aside the problems of tree rings as temperature proxies)? Were there local environmental influences that modified tree ring growth for the last 30 years? If so, what does that say about their utility as samples of global (not local) temperatures?

Again, it all ultimately comes back to tree rings. No other temperature data shows the dramatic uptick known as the "hockey stick". Are we really seriously claiming unprecedented warming in the 20th century based on an incredibly small set of tree ring proxies...that show COOLING in the last 30 years of the sample? Are we really blaming humans and committing egregious, expensive, and poverty-inducing public policy for an imaginary temperature spike from tree ring data?

For those of you who would like to see the data on current and past temperature measurements yourself and draw your own conclusions, Steve Milloy of Junk Science keeps updated data from numerous sources on one page:

junksciencearchive.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html

These sources include NASA GISS, Hadley CET, UAH MSU, etc.; the sources universally recognized as reliable. Most of the graphs show current temperature readings and trends. The famous Jones/Mann hockey stick graph used by the IPCC is also included. It is notable for the fact that none of the other graphs that extend back to the 1800's show the same sudden spike in temperatures in the 1900's as the Jones/Mann graph.

I feel that the green agenda has a nobal beginning but has been compromised with political agenda's.

quote:“Weird is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face."

Quote: "Those crude acts of harassment often come alongside more-sophisticated legal and political attacks. Organizations routinely file nuisance lawsuits and onerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to disrupt the work of climate scientists."

What this article doesn't say is that scientist who have a polar opposite view also get the same treatment from radicals on the other side of the spectrum. But do not have the support of politicians or main stream media because they have a different view or agenda. There is no concrete evidence for either side. All there is data that we have speculated on and not proven. The Ice caps melt and then freeze again. Nature is full of different cycles and the caps melting is just another instance of this. While all this confusion is going on, governmental policy and regulation is being written in the name of "saving the planet" while politicians and higher education are filling there bank accounts with tax free dollars at the tax payers expense. The truth is quite clear! The public is being scammed.

quote: "In 2005, before dragging Mann and other climate researchers into congressional hearings, Texas congressman Joe Barton ordered the scientists to submit voluminous details of working procedures, computer programs and past funding—essentially demanding that they reproduce and defend their entire life’s work."

Heaven forbid these men and women be held accountable for what they say and do with taxpayer money.

quote: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included Mann’s graph in its Third Assessment Report in 2001. Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim then included it in their 2006 climate-change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The film galvanized both the pro- and contra-climate-science camps, propelling the issue of human-caused global warming into the culture wars—and Mann along with it."

It's quite funny that you bring this up as even Al Gore has changed his view on this and admitted it was all BS. Just another piece of inaccurate propaganda used to achieve a political agenda.

This article is just another leftist bias opinion and doesn't tell the whole story. When Popsci stops being bias and decides to tell both sides of a story I will believe it, until then I will continue to be amused by how many one sided stories they publish, they are quite entertaining. I like the bit about the sun light beaming into the room. It's quite laughable and disgusting at the same time.

The sheep may believe your nonsense but those of us who are aware will never believe anything other than common sense and truth.

Isaac,

Being "under the thumb of millions" is a pretty solid definition of democracy. Obviously millions doesn't necessarily mean the majority, but as other posters have commented, the majority of people do accept the idea of AGW.

It's not about climate science, it's about oppressive laws. Persuasion creates allies, force creates enemies. Force is the difference between seduction and rape. You can make people do what you want, but they will hate you for it. If you want a revolution, just keep on pushing.

Stevenw,

The quote that you included about gore is the definition of truth. Gore DID include the graph in his movie. The movie DID galvanize the two sides (you being upset that gore was even mentioned proves this). And Mann Did become part of the culture war.

What is wrong about that statement?

You are ignoring truths cause people you don't like are involved.

It's interesting to me that a discussion like this for a report about threats and harassment of climate scientists and deception in the media by organized denial think tanks, gets swarmed by deniers, who amount to just 12% of the US population.

laurenra7 said,

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick demonstrated that using Mann's methodology, you can produce a hockey stick from "red noise". Their analysis was attacked (or rebutted, depending on your point of view) but their assertion that the methodology generates a hockey stick from basically random data has not been refuted.

It *has* been rebutted. M&M screwed up when they generated their "random noise". Their screwup caused their "random noise" to be contaminated with "hockey stick" signal statistics because they did not process the tree-ring data properly before they used it as a noise model. When you use real tree-ring data as a model to construct noise from (which M&M did), you first must remove the (hockey stick) climate signal from your real data first! If you don't (and M&M didn't), your noise model will be contaminated with "hockey stick" signal and as a result will be useless for "noise only" analysis.

And yes, I looked at M&M's R code and confirmed for myself that they did indeed commit this blunder.

There were other problems with their work, as well, namely that they didn't compare the *size* of the noise hockey-sticks with Mann's tree-ring hockey stick. (The noise hockey-sticks are *much* smaller).

If you were to give me the full hockey-stick outputs of Mann's procedure applied to tree-ring data vs. random noise, I could tell them apart in about 2 seconds.

If you want to make a graph of a hockey stick, just plot the number of glaciers at Glacier National Park. When the park opened in 1910, and probably 10,000 before that, there were 125 glaciers. In 2010, there were only 25 glaciers. So, in 100 years, the park lost 100 glaciers. That's the hockey stick everybody should be looking at because it's so simple compared to tree rings, etc. Is it man-made warming that caused this? Probably not. But that doesn't mean the government won't be taxing cow farts sometime in the future. There's a lot of money in taxing cow farts.

Here's the problem as I see it...legislators take this science information and use their magic pens to legislate people out of jobs. Thanks to science, people think they understand the dangers of excess CO and CO2, but do they also understand the impact of not using the resources we have on hand to millions of people’s jobs? Do they understand the economic impact of demanding the we capture all the CO2 ?

It would be nice if we saw these scientists and politicians riding bikes and using those Gilligan’s Island pedal powered generators to do their research and run their data crunching laptops. But all of the scientists and legislators sit in air conditioned offices, and go home in their gas powered cars to homes connected to the grid and espouse the evils of real electricity production.

And who pays the salaries of scientist and legislators? They are leaches that are paid by taxing people that are involved in real production. That’s not to say they don’t serve a function. That is to say they have their place and these days it seems as if they love to overstep their boundaries.

The frog and the scorpion story applies here. Let’s not sink the ship over fears of global warming.

The topic of the CRU being hit with a bunch of FOI demands was mentioned above. I'm familiar with what happened (as well as being familiar with the data involved), so I thought I should follow up on that...

It should be noted that the FOI'd raw temperature data was all released by the CRU *nearly a year ago*. That's right -- the CRU released all of the raw temperature data that skeptics were demanding **last July**.

And what have the skeptics done with that data since? As far as I can tell, practically nothing. Have they produced their own global-average temperature results from that data? I haven't seen any. Have they submitted any papers for publication based on that data? None that I know of.

And another item -- a couple of days after the CRU released all that raw data, I downloaded and crunched it myself. Guess what the results looked like -- yep, you guessed right -- almost exactly like the results that NASA (and NOAA, and the CRU) have been producing.

Here's a plot of the results I got when I processed the CRU data on my laptop: http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/2210/mycrumyghcnnasaghcn.jpg

That plot shows my results computed from raw CRU data, raw GHCN data (along with the official NASA/GHCN results). Mind you, my code implements a straightforward area-weighted averaging procedure that I could guide 1st-year programming students through.

This is an embarrassing article that exactly proves the point of climate skeptics.

A one-sided article that does not encourage scientific debate but attempts to demonize one side of the debate that they don't agree with.

Science is not the search for consensus, science is the search for truth. And the IPCC and Michael Mann are not following the scientific process by suppressing debate and not allowing balanced criticism of their work.

Scientists around the world should be ashamed of people like Michael Mann.

@Meekrat

The more things change the more they stayed the same.

You said

"Just one last thought-- deniers amount to just 12% of the US population according to studies by Yale"

What do you think about the ground breaking study "Limits to Growth" published by Yale. This study was championed by the media and had everyone hysterical. But guess what its 2012 and Billion haven't died of starvation and we are not in the middle ages again. So if that study is totally bogus what makes you think any study on population or climate coming out of Yale holds weight? They obviously have their conclusion before the research even starts. They make outlandish claims and try to scare everyone into following them.

Climate change is a religion and here are there commandments. This is written in stone as a guide in Georgia

1.Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2.Guide reproduction wisely - improving fitness and diversity
3.Unite humanity with a living new language.
4.Rule passion - faith - tradition - and all things with tempered reason.
5.Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6.Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7.Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8.Balance personal rights with social duties.
9.Prize truth - beauty - love - seeking harmony with the infinite.
10.not a cancer on the earth - Leave room for nature - Leave room for nature.

If you can read between the lines, they are calling for massive depopulation, eugenics, a world government, socialisim, loss of rights. This spits in the face of Americans, how can you guys stand for this?

You want to lose your constitution? Your freedom, your right to reproduce? Come on, all these “climate scientists” are paid shills.

I thought Michael Crichton demonstrated back in 2003 that Mann was a best a poor scientist and at worst a complete fraud:
www.http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/commentaries/crichton_3.pdf

Consensus is not fact ask Galileo.

Didn’t Al Gore recently buy a beach house in Santa Barbara? Guess it’s a short term investment.

"Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT. Crichton's 2004 bestseller, State of Fear, acknowledged the world was growing warmer, but challenged extreme anthropogenic warming scenarios. He predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C. (His conclusions have been widely misstated.)" From his website.

>Being "under the thumb of millions" is a pretty solid definition of democracy. Obviously millions >doesn't necessarily mean the majority, but as other posters have commented, the majority of >people do accept the idea of AGW.

Someone is actually silly enough to think this is compelling argument? This is exactly why the U.S. does not have and should not seek to be governed by a "Democracy". Pure Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Its also called "Tyranny of the Majority".

I realize that the same educational system that distorts science also distorts history and civics so that most people are now too ignorant to realize this. Sad that "Popular Science" is part of this system.

You may want to read a little history on your own to correct the distortions in your thinking.

ron hansing md

AGW is just a symptom of a newly recognized medical disorder, MMMHHS (mad manic millennial hysterical hyperbolic syndrome.)

The basic problem is that this is considered to “Scientific Authority” ie, case closed. No further discussion warranted. Scientific Authority often in the past history of science has slowed progress, and sometimes perhaps many times caused a great amount of harm.

There is no scientific authority… only scientific expertise, which continually refines, adjust, change and sometimes rejects dogma.

There are many reasons to questions AGW.

1. How and where and at what height to you measure temperatures. How does on take in consideration temperature changes which can be as much of 15 degrees on one side of a cold front. How fast is the cold front moving. Or is it stalled. I could go on and come up with a thousand of ways this can affect the data.
2. AGW is baaaaad… period. But melting of the permafrost in the Yukon and Siberia could provide approximately four USA’s in fertile farming.
3. It is easier to adapt to warm over cold. Think about it, in the middle east when temps can reach 120 degrees… people live quite well. And are thriving.
4. Vostok temp cores show that we are headed to a freezing phase of the graph. Currently we are at the peak of the warming phase.
5. The entire history of man has been adapting not changing the weather. Adaptation should be the watch word. Don’t worry man will adapt…
6. CUI BONO… look up this term… and you will get the answer for this hysteria about global warming.
7. Ethically, there is this since that we should kill 75% of the people in the world. Huh??? Is this the eugenic II movement?
8. Hockey stick temp measurements of tree rings is ??? accurate.
9. What is the evidence that there were major climate changes when the glaciers melted. And if so, what happened, man adapted, and thrived.
10. The last issue is cost verses benefit… Is it more beneficial to raise heating costs to 500 dollars a month to sequester 1% of the CO2?
11, What about other factors that cause global warming? Deforestation, non-AGW CO2, How do we measure this. Rather than just say, it is all AGW…

12 What is the reliable of computer modals… Which were supposed to prevent the economical collapse, and the 1988 model that said that in ten years, every hospital bed in the country would be filled with an AIDS patient?

I could go on and cite at least a hundred more problems.

Ron hansing md 6.22.12

Didn’t Al Gore recently buy a beach house in Santa Barbara? Guess it’s a short term investment.

Here in California, we have mountains -- Gore's place is a couple of hundred feet above sea level... The East Antarctic ice sheet would have to melt off completely to get his place. That's probably a few thousand years off....

Scientifically, there exist now and for a long time a long history of the Earths temperate cycles being in sync with the fluctuations of the suns rays. This is not new.

Also is scientifically know and being currently monitored the sudden leap in Earths global temperatures, being in parallel with human man made hydrocarbons. On a side note of human induce global warming comes the additional global warming effects of the methane gas, as the worlds perma frost melts and this extremely potent gas is put into the atmosphere.

Ok, I findally got my 2 cents in... See ya.;)

.............
Every day is a new day!

the reason why "global" warming exists is because of the cosmic alignment. its more of a "cosmic warming". it effects OUR WHOLE universe. and most likely the rest of the multiverse and dimensions(11 in existence). every time our solar system and our galaxy align then we start to see major earth changes(pole shifts, ice ages, super earthquakes etc.) its a reality that most scientists refuse to accept. the Mayans were correct on there being a "rebirth" of human civilization. 2012 will see many great changes that most Humans have never experienced and can't explain one bit. politics just needed a fancy word/propaganda tool to scare the masses(climate change) and it has worked for the most part. its funny how popsci never mentions man made weather control(HAARP). a staged alien invasion is the next step in the NWO agenda. "project blue beam" will confuse the masses and think that the return of christ is near. the men behind the curtain have everything down to a t and are really precise when planning attacks and blaming others.

"You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes." -Morpheus

The way I see it, people who deny climate change are cowards at heart, like a man who accidentally starts a fire and wishing it wasn't true, spins all sorts of stories to himself to avoid responsibility, doing nothing, knowing there are children sleeping upstairs.

The worst thing about deniers is what they're afraid of-- merely changing how we do things and figuring out a different way, bullying and accusing their more creative, forthright counterparts of all sorts of bad things because they are afraid of change. It's past time for deniers face up to the situation as it is, to stop lying to themselves and each other or to shirk responsibility, and instead put their shoulders to the wheel to help turn a very big, burning ship around.

quoted by ToomeyND: "SteveW The quote that you included about gore is the definition of truth. Gore DID include the graph in his movie. The movie DID galvanize the two sides (you being upset that gore was even mentioned proves this). And Mann Did become part of the culture war.

What is wrong about that statement?

You are ignoring truths cause people you don't like are involved."

@ToomeyND

Al Gore lied to achieve an agenda, more control over our lives. His Graphs was studied by a Judge who found that he was way bias and proven to be inaccurate. I do not take the word of any politician as truth. Anyone who does is just another useful idiot. Anybody can make a graph, I do it all the time for work. Most people are sheep and follow whatever the popular trend is. The movie from the start I could tell was mostly hype and propaganda.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/oct/11/climatechange

Your right I do not like politicians because they lie for a living and have no soul. As far as ignoring them because I do not like them, that is wrong. I see it this way Politicians are servants of the people, they are representatives and hold an office they swore an oath to uphold. A political office is not a popularity contest it is a job position and should be treated as such. I could care less if I like a politician, my question is can he do the job he was elected into. If he has done his job he would not need to lie. See it's not about like or dislike, I'm not going to hang with this guy or deal with him socially. So what do I care if I like him or not, where does he stand on an issue and what does he plan on doing to come up with an honorable solution that will uphold or founding documents and principles. From what I see of this green movement it is all about communism and statism and leaves very little room for freedom. What we need to focus on is integrity and merit. When you have an honorable society the rest will fix itself including doing right to keep our planet safe, charging people money for carbon credits is just another fascist ideal.

As a little boy I grew up in Ft. Churchill Manitoba Rocket Research center. Polar Bears were a menace then, and today they have doubled in population, putting pressure upon the resident population of the town of Churchill.
Later as one of the first to do circumpolar research my observations were that cycles are just that. When Pennsylvania is having an unusually warm winter, Alaska was having an unusually cold and snowy one. Anchorage at one point had over 100 inches of snow in-between freezes. This brings to mind the sinusoidal waves of analog temperature fluctuations which picture terra firma climate. Quite normal. In other words, the entire climate does not show anything out of the ordinary with the historic and non-historic core sample world.
I get ancy whenever anyone puts science and consensus into the same sentence. There is no such animal! This sounds like the church inquisitions of yesterday or flat earth societies today. Whatever, the answer, the Shakespearian line about, “me think thow doeth protest too much,' begins to carry the aroma of dead fish.
In any case, the NSA should have a recording of every email transmitted, and that alone should prove this case. No review or redundant articles are ever going to change the science. We will leave 'Science Change' to consensus thinkers!

The powerful fossil fuel interests along with their extreme right wing ideological friends leave me asking 'Is this the America I grew up In'? Where science under JFK too a preeminent center to our lives as a means of progress to a better future. Now we have these so called extremists saying that 'science is out to threaten the American way of life'.

Dr. Mann and other climate scientists are presenting data, facts and observations that tell us we are near the point of creating a future climate that will be dangerous to us and future generations. Yet we have a group of selfish greedy people with narrow interests who attack scientists like some kind of witch hunt from a past age.

The longer we wait to do something about climate change- the more cultural and economic change will have to happen- and we have perhaps crossed the line when those changes will be huge.

Death threats and intimidation happen on both sides of the debate. It disgusts me that Popular Science chooses sides. The fact is these "climate scientists" will always confirm catastrophic climate change theories because their jobs and government funding depend upon it. Just like water fluoridation, you can twist the facts, whether intentional or just delusional, to scare most people.

SouthernSteel87,

If deniers were subjected to the same sorts of death threats/intimidation that scientists have been subjected to, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc. etc. would have told us, and told us, and told us, and told us... **all about them*. And then they would have told us again.

Now for a preemptive note: refusing to publish skeptic papers full of schoolboy errors that scientists would flunk their undergrad students for is *not* intimidation or repression. It's *professionalism*. So don't try to bring up out-of-context "climategate" email excerpts of scientists complaining about lousy papers getting published. The papers mentioned in those email excerpts *were* lousy and should never have been published.

jdkchem
from Lafayette, CO
06/21/12 at 12:07 pm

'...If your "science" is settled then please explain the sudden change from global warming to climate change. ….'
You seem confused.
The science isn't settled and it never will be. Please try and understand that science is a never-ending search for the scientific truth and science builds upon what went before. The science of climate change dates back over 150 years. If you were to actually read some of the science with an open mind, you might actually understand what it means.

You appear to be claiming that the switch from global warming to climate change was a deliberate ply to deceive. Well, it was, FYI it was a deliberate ploy introduced by Frank Luntz to help the Republican pull the wool over the eyes of the US electorate.

Luntz advises that, “’Climate change’ is less frightening than ’global warming.’ ... While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge”

By and large, scientists are a herd of cats incapable of anything other than arguing over the best facts and best thinking, and arrive at some general agreement over what that is. They are truth machines-- finding truth is what they do, even if has unpleasant implications (such as re-engineering things we depend on and like to do).

Accusations that climate scientists "will always confirm catastrophic climate change theories because their jobs and government funding depend upon it" is paranoid thinking that originates from think tanks. Just imagine thousands of scientists from around the world conspiring to falsify results. Never mind that companies who earn revenue from polluting our atmosphere invest in think tanks to develop PR strategy like this one.

Propaganda does work, particularly if the target population is isolated within an extreme ideological echo chamber that doesn't challenge the audience with dissonant ideas, confirms bias after bias, chipping out pieces that "fit" the picture, leading victims to believe illogical things "fit" the desired worldview that is advantageous to funders. Victims of a chamber like this have the thinking done for them.

I'm quite sure some contributing to this board are part of that chamber, perhaps others "paid to surf the internet" so to speak.

The weather is going to change in the far distant future. Want to stop this from happening? No problem. Just send me your money and obey my every command.

What's that? You are sceptical? But I can prove the weather will change. I am a politician. Would I lie to you? Obviously, you must send me your money and obey my commands. It's the only way.

Still don't believe me? You must be some sort of conspiracy nut. We will get you a tin foil hat. We will punish you until you confess. Now just sit down, shut up and send me your money.

You are getting sleepy... very very sleepy. You must obey. Resistance is futile. Repeat after me... I must obey... Resistance is futile.

rhansing, a response:

1. Global average temp is taken via thousands of surface stations, by satellite (troposphere, stratosphere, sea surface), ocean heat content (various means). Don't mistake weather for climate. Climate is the average of weather. The theory of AGW is not based on one daily measurement; AGW is based on basic physics of gases and radiative transfer.

2. Melting of the permafrost could indeed open up cropland in Siberia. There are several problems with this, though. One, thawed permafrost is unstable. Two, thawed permafrost means more methane release, which means more warming, which means more rapid change. Three, thawing permafrost doesn't mean more sunlight. The growing season isn't going to lengthen in Northern Siberia. Four, will it be wet or dry in Siberia? Right now, Siberia is burning (it's in the news).

3. People are not thriving in the middle east. It's desert. Populations were quite modest and clung closely to the rivers until oil was discovered. It is easier to adapt to warm, but simple additional warmth is not the problem and never was. The problem is the rapid increase in temp. In recent geologic history, only the sharp rise that follows a glacial max comes close to the current rate of warming, and it's not really that close. Further, the most recent such period was 15,000 years ago, when the vast majority of humans were much more able to adapt to changing conditions.

4. The interglacial optimum was probably about 10k years ago. Temp has been declining slightly since -- until now. The current spike is on top of the broad interglacial max. See Archer (2005) for the outlook for the next glacial.

5. Adaptation is one watchword. Yes, humans have been adapting for their history. Seven to ten billion humans wrapped up in a complex and fragile economic system have never had to adapt to rapidly changing climate. People living in cities are highly dependent on the stable delivery of food, water, and energy. Those three basics will be anything but stable over the next century--partially due to AGW, but also due to the decline of cheap energy and other stresses on the agricultural system.

6. Do you have children?

7. Not sure what you're talking about. Sounds like you're constructing a strawman, but the sentence isn't parsing well.

8. See Briffa (1998), Cook (2004), and D'Arrigo (2008). Short answer: very well until 1960, when NH, high-alt tree rings began to diverge.

9. See no. 5. Comparing humans now to humans 20k years ago is somewhat useless in this regard.

10. Do you have a source for "$500 a month"?

11. You haven't actually read what you're condemning, have you? Please, if you think of yourself as intelligent and fair-minded, read it: ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html. Keep in mind it's 5 years old (AR5 is due soon). A whole lot of research has been done since. If you're passionate enough to post on here, surely you're willing to spend some time going through the evidence yourself.

12. Computer models provide projections, not predictions. They say, "given known physics and this set of conditions, what is likely to happen?" Read the IPCC chapter on modeling to see what goes into the IPCC projections. It's not simple. One element that no computer projection can accurately account for is the human response, and that is why there are so many scenarios modeled. Will we do nothing? Will we develop a miracle technology? Will we decrease emissions? Will we wait and then run mitigation programs (spraying aerosols throughout the stratosphere)? Will it be a combo?

Please do, but try not to assume that science hasn't already considered those problems.

Greystone, why don't you accept the theory of AGW?

tssstein, it sounds like you're looking at a graph of temp, seeing ups and down, and concluding that recent warming is just another up in the eternal cycle of nature. If you're a scientist, you should be asking why these cycles occur. Scientists have, of course, been asking these questions for over a century. We have a fairly good handle on what causes long-term, climate scale cycling: combinations of Milankovitch forcing, continental position, and solar output cycles (add movement through the galaxy as a fourth).

None of those cycles is responsible for recent warming. Insolation and temp have diverged significantly over the last 30 years. And an increase in insolation wouldn't cause the kind of stratospheric cooling observed over the last 30 years. Give me a mechanism that accounts for current climaate-scale trends in observed insolation, observed stratospheric temp, observed surface temp, observed ocean heat content, and observed global ice mass loss, and accounts for the well-established physics of atmospheric H2O, CO2, CH4, O3, various HFCs, and atmospheric radiative transfer, and doesn't involve changes to atmospheric concentration of GHGs (I'll give you H2O), and I will photograph the look of surprise on my face and send a copy to you (and post it on FB).

I do accept it... therefore you must send me your money and obey my every command.

Outstanding article. The comments are equally fascinating. I've gone back and forth on this debate for years, once convinced global warming is strictly cyclical, not convinced we're speeding the process. I just wish we could divorce politics from this debate, or it seems nothing will change.

--He not busy being born is busy dying.

I meant "now convinced," not "not convinced". Big difference.

-He not busy being born is busy dying.

I agree wholeheartedly. Force has no place in science... and politics is force.

In The Battle by Tom Clynes you ask: "Climate scientists routinely face death threats, hate mail, nuisance lawsuits and political attacks. How Much worse can it Get?"

That's a good question considering that NASA's James Hansen wants to put "skeptics" on trial for "high crimes against humanity", and since Robert F. Kennedy has stated that "skepticism" of the anthropogenic global warming theory is "...treason, and we need tro start treating them as traitors" before declaring that the CEO's of coal companies are engaged in a criminal enterprise and "should be in jail...for all of eternity". Some have even floated the possibility of "Nuremberg Trials" for climate "skeptics". Heidi Cullen from the Weather Channel suggested that weathermen/meteorologists be "decertified" if they were "skeptics" of anthropogenic global warming.

How much worse can it get indeed!

There's more than a little hysteria on both sides of the aisle on this subject, and - regrettably - Poplar Science is just as responsible for the hysteria by steadfastly refusing to acknowledge the fact that there is reasonable "skepticism" on the other side of this debate.

I would recommend that everyone reading this article also read the article in the recent Toronto Sun paper on James Lovelock, the man who postulated the theory of Gaia. In that article he points out that computer models did not accurately predict global temperatures since the turn of the millennium, and stated just weeks ago that “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.”

Just google James Lovelock and "Green ‘drivel’ exposed" and you'll find the article. Per Mr. Lovelock, “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

I first read of the possibility of "global warming" in Future Life #12 (August 1979)in an article titled "Future Climate: Ice Age or Heat Death". Of course this was after years of scientists insisting that a new ice age was on it's way. To be fair to them, average global temperatures had been dropping since the 1940's so it seemed like a real possibility.

The "future" in magazines such as Omni and Future Life was exciting because differing points of view were presented. I truly wish that Popular Science would step out of it's comfort zone, and excite readers with legitimate viewpoints from across the spectrum. That'd be a refreshing direction for Popular Science to consider taking for future issues.

Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations

Live Long and Propsper.

Respectfully,

WolfNCC1701 !

Sometimes upon further study we find that the world isn't flat, after all. Too bad about all those folks we burned at the stake for saying otherwise.

Greystone, I see. No answer. Engage the science. Tell me where the theory fails.

By the way, science is force as well. Ask your religious friends. As long as different epistemologies are at work in the human world, scientific work will express force visibly across the social world.

And I haven't asked you for a dime or a dollar, nor will I. I'm asking upon what basis you form your opinion on this issue, an opinion that will drive your political engagement. All I'm getting in response are simplistic insinuations of totalitarian regimes that could easily be applied to talk radio and opinion-making organizations like Heartland.

Set aside the politics and talk about the science.

Wolf, you seem to be citing Lovelock as an argument from authority rather than presenting Lovelock's scientific work. I don't want to engage in sparring with authority figures, especially since most scientific organizations that have anything remotely to do with climate science have issued statements in support of both the theory of AGW and the potential dangers.

I challenge you to provide what you call "reasonable skepticism" from the "other side." I don't think you're going to find anything. I've seen no challenges to the fundamental theory. There are people who claim that GHG "warming" violates the 2nd Law, but these are semantic trolls who want the phrasing to be "slows the rate of cooling." There are people who claim it's cosmic rays influencing cloud formation. Even Svensmark admits that the GCR theory is nowhere near well-evidenced, and cloud forcing is still a somewhat unknown quantity, with studies showing clouds as a slightly positive or slightly negative "forcing."

As I said upthread, give me a mechanism that accounts for current climaate-scale trends in observed insolation, observed stratospheric temp, observed surface temp, observed ocean heat content, and observed global ice mass loss, and accounts for the well-established physics of atmospheric H2O, CO2, CH4, O3, various HFCs, and atmospheric radiative transfer, and doesn't involve changes to atmospheric concentration of GHGs (I'll give you H2O), and I will photograph the look of surprise on my face and send a copy to you (and post it on FB).

What you refer to as a "skeptic" is actually someone who hasn't read the literature but has latched onto an idea so tightly that they just can't let go -- like the idea that GW is due to microwaves from satellites and ground communications. If Popular Science published that theory, readers would destroy it pretty easily and then ask why in Sam Hill PS would publish such nonsense. Attempts to establish cycles by extrapolation without addressing the underlying physics are in the same category (this is a WUWT favorite).

As I see it, politics is the messy process of agreeing to the right thing to do. The science is the process of settling the truth so it may provide the basis for decisions. Decisions are also based on the values the citizenry hold dear, such as a sense of responsibility to future generations and stewardship for our only home.

Here's an interesting report just out. Gee... what is the right thing to do here?

West Coast sea levels: New report estimates greater rise by 2100

If greenhouse-gas emissions continue unabated, the expected additional warming could raise sea levels by up to four or five feet all along the US West Coast by 2100, according to an analysis released Friday by the National Research Council (NRC).

Beyond any real estate permanently inundated, such an increase would bring some $100 billion worth of facilities that currently are high and dry into a new 100-year flood plain, according to previous studies that assumed a comparable increase in sea levels. Those facilities include power plants, airports and seaports, and other big-ticket pieces of infrastructure.

The council, the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, produced the report at the request of the state of California.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2012/0622/West-Coast-sea-levels-New-report-estimates-greater-rise-by-2100

I will be renewing my subscription to PopSci. This was an outstanding article for a popular magazine. It represents the type of journalism that is so sorely needed.

DSL, did I say the theory fails? No, I didn't. I'll fix it. Just give me your money and your obedience. That's the price.

meerkat, better get packing. You only have 88 years to get out of California.

Here's a good read for you Greystone:

"If they were intellectually honest these folks (deniers) would say, yes this is happening, but the costs to the economy or personal freedom etc. of changing it are too high, so we shouldn’t even try. Problem is, with most people that’s a losing argument, so instead these folks try to undermine public understanding of the science and deliberately waste the time of scientists and journalists."
http://www.theworld.org/2012/06/on-climate-deniers/

He didn't mention the facts outlined in the Popular Science article that deniers threaten violence too, and launch harassing lawsuits to waste people's time.

Anyway, I'm one of those who agrees we should lay down the law, eliminate carbon from our energy mix and let the economy adjust creatively to it. The point of this isn't to punish people and make life miserable as you seem to think Grey, but merely to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, to reduce future risks. We can accomplish great things, and could probably build better systems than what we have now if we were to try. IMO, this is what laws are meant for and I hope it happens sooner rather than later, as the problem will only get worse the longer we ignore it.

To end this non-sense, is for the people who have been damaged by these Tornadoes is to start to sue the Airlines and also the oil companies for putting all this dirty filthy Cancer producing JP4 and JP8 which contains Napon Diesel fuel in the Jet Stream. 80,000 TONS PER HOUR! Over the United States, FAA Figures.

Not only this is happening, The Government is now Steering hurricanes Go to presscore, Hurricane Irene, and read about it. In fact this website was shut down for 2 weeks by Obama.

To bad there are too many people and political parties who have there heads in the SAND. You will pay now or you will really pay later, maybe with your life! If we don't get those filthy Jets out of The Jet Stream. I live in Vermont and they steered half of Irene over Vermont.

How much more can the Environmental Protection agency COVER up? Who are they protecting, you and me, or the Oil companies and Airline Industry?

WILL THERE BE A LIVABLE EARTH IN 20 YEARS?

There are over 7000 aircraft flying over the US at any given hour, FAA figures, and they are releasing from jet exhausts over 80,000 tons a hour of Co2 in the Jet Stream. Co2 creates oxygen from trees at ground level, but there are no trees at 20,000 feet, The life of Co2 can be up to 98 years. All this bad HOT weather including Tornadoes, draught, flooding, I credit to Co2 in the Jet Stream, as weather follow the Jet Stream. Why doesn’t the EPA do something? Because they are only authorized to monitor Co2 around the airports and particles that are 250cm or more, and no where else which Congress allowed due to the heavy LOBBISTS from the Air Line industry and the Oil Companies. These people don’t care if the BURN UP THE EARTH, as long as they show a profit! In 50 years or less the earth could look like their sister planet Venus. The Co2 level on Venus is about 88% and cloud cover over 95% Have you been wondering where your Blue Skies are more and more disappearing? The surface temperature on Venus is from 300-600 degrees. Nature is showing us Global Warming, are we to dumb to see it or doesn’t the Green house industries want us to see it?

The campaign issues this year should be to save the Earth, before their is no Earth that is livable. It is interesting That Texas is burning up because if the don’t know it is the Co2 that they are dumping into the skies and the Co2 that are coming out of the skies above them. If I lived in Joplin Missouri and that tornado tore my house apart, I would be one of the first people to sue the Airlines and the oil industry, and let the courts decide. That Jet Stream was smack over Joplin Missouri along with that Tornado, last spring. The same thing can happen next year only worst. As long as those Airlines are flying the jet Stream we will have those Weather disasters. In Europe they have Carbon tax per ton on the Aircraft. USA is the biggest polluter than any nation in the world for Co2 in the Sky!

Here are the figures 1 gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of Co2. 100 gallons of gas produces 1 ton of Co2 600 pounds of jet fuel(diesel) produces 1 ton of Co2. Jet fuel is 4 times more dirty than gasoline.

The law of conservation says nothing can be destroyed, it can only change form. All that oil that they are pump out of the earth, is now going up into your lovely Blue or is it Gray skies, have you notice how your puffy clouds, are now getting little Black bottoms, well if they start getting real black and a little black spout starts dropping down out of it, you better find a cellar. There is only ONE livable planet in this solar system, we destroy this, everything, and anybody and anything,becomes NOTHING!

Mr. Clynes:
I am not sure why you are unaware that the "threat to climate scientists" was a misquote by an Australian journalist, published as fact, and that the physical threats to climate scientists had not been made. There is no nuance here. This was just made up stuff.
Michael Mann is a climate catastrophe advocate. He published what has been termed a "Hockey Stick" with data that he knew before hand was false, which required obscuring tree ring data that showed the hockey stick was indeed wrong, and applied a statistical method which demonstrated his statistical naiveté based upon inappropriate assumptions. What did you miss on all this?
Subsequent attempts at duplicating Mann's Hockey Stick in other paleoclimate proxies have had mixed results to say the least. One can't say yea or nay. What one can say is that Mann's Hockey stick is a fraud; there was a Medieval Warming Period, there was a recent Little Ice Age, and the instrument data from 1880 to 2008 all falls within a "natural" variance. Nothing unprecedented. Indeed, recent data from Lake E in Russia says the Arctic has been 5 Celsius warmer than now, several times in the last 2.5 million years.
If you have an agenda and want to use Popular Science as a vehicle to advance that agenda, that is fine. Just realize, you are not a journalist and you have no credibility as one.

So meerkat... which category Am I? Am I a believer?... denier?... intellectually honest?... intellectually dishonest?... someone who isn't even trying?... which of these neat little stereotyped molds do I fit into?

Greystone, your comment, coming as it does within the context of this stream and within the context of the entire rhetorical mess surrounding the science, strongly implies that you think the theory of AGW is a plot to extort money from taxpayers and establish a totalitarian state.

There are quite a few libertarians who accept the science and realize that it is unethical to refuse to be part of the solution yet still take advantage of the externalization of carbon costs. Yes, billions have had their free lunch and dumped the tab on you and me. You could just shuck your responsibility and pass on the savings to the next generation, with interest.

As far as what you are goes, the answer is "someone who posts very short public posts that contain hints of paranoia but are useless for engaging in serious dialogue, strongly suggesting that this person knows all the answers but is unwilling to share them even when asked, on a public forum, point blank. In other words, a brick wall with graffiti."

Riho08, take a gander at the evidence:

www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/116404/response/288373/attach/4/Appendix%20A%20Data%20file%20072.pdf

Enjoy.

As for the hockey stick, Mann did no such thing. Indeed, it's a bizarre claim. The "decline" refers to the post-1960 divergence from the temp record in NH high altitude tree rings. That divergence is well established in the literature. Global temp was flat from 1960 to the mid-1970s. Was Mann attempting to replace declining temps with a flat run? What a goofy claim.

Climategate cracks me up in general. 5000+ emails are hacked and made available to certain individuals. These individuals comb through the emails (once assumed to have been private by senders and receivers) for a couple of days, looking for text that fits their assumptions. Out of the entire email collection, they find only a couple of phrases that, if pulled from context and re-contextualized carefully, might suggest scientific fraud to anyone unfamiliar with . . . well with the scientific process in general. The individuals then used their media connections to blast the message of fraud across the internets. It worked. It's absurdly wrong, but it worked. An excellent test of critical thinking, and a depressing number of fails.

If you, RiHo08, think you have the evidence, some to skepticalscience.com and present it. If you stay away from evidence-free rants, you'll be fairly engaged. I can almost bet, though, from your tone, that you'd rather not get into the science.

"Wolf, you seem to be citing Lovelock as an argument from authority rather than presenting Lovelock's scientific work." - DSL

Thank you for your comments! I do appreciate your feedback.

I'm just citing Lovelock's recent comments on the subject in which he says this about the "science being settled": “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. You don’t know it.”

When I first started paying attention to "climate change" in the early 70's, the scientists were certain that another ice age was around the corner. One of the computer models they cited as proof was written by NASA's James Hansen.

In a 1971 issue of The Washington Post we got this: "...On July 9, 1971, the Post published a story headlined "U.S. Scientist Sees New Ice Age Coming." That was an article about a prediction of a coming ice age by NASA and Columbia University scientist S.I. Rasool. Guess who developed the computer program Rasool used? Well, per the Washington Post it was a "computer program developed by Dr. James Hansen"! What I've noticed is that whether the threat is from an ice age or global warming, James Hansen is lurking somewhere nearby! Of course it is clearly an interest of his so I guess that's not surprising...perhaps his views are "evolving"!

In observing how the average global temperare has not gone up in the last decade as predicted by computer models, Lovelock noted just weeks ago: “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.” We probably knew even less in 1971.

What "skeptics" can't help but notice is how the debate went from the "ice age" to "global warming" and now - once it has been shown that the climate was not acting as predicted by computer models, the term has been changed to "climate change". We've "evolved" to the point where the climate can do anything and the pro-AGW side would say "see! we were right!"

In a February 28, 2007 article in National Geographic titled :"Mars Melt Hints at Solar, Not Human, Cause for Warming, Scientist Says" you get this: "Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced—cause, according to one scientist's controversial theory. Earth is currently experiencing rapid warming, which the vast majority of climate scientists says is due to humans pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."

With simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars, how is it "controversial" to wonder why we would see such simultaneous warming given that there are no humans on Mars? Given this, why would a "majority of scientist" then say with certainty that the warming on Earth is due to human activity? Shouldn't the curious wonder "well, why is that?"

It's always warming up or cooling down at any given point on the globe. The climate has changed since the dawn of time. There was climate change before man. There is no doubt that the activities of mankind have an impact the climate, but there is legitimate debate over how much of an impact, and how much climate change is driven by the activities of mankind. THAT is the debate. As Zappa would say, that's "the crux of the biscuit".

Since CO2 is often cited as being the main "culprit", how do CO2 emissions from humans compare to CO2 emissions from nature? Even stats provided by the pro-AGW side of the debate show that nature - by far - emits far more "greenhouse gasses" than mankind. Does that mean we should act irresponsibly and pollute the planet? No, but it does mean that we can tone down the hysteria and rancor and consider the possibility that nature and the sun may be bigger contributors to climate change than mankind.

When you write "What you refer to as a "skeptic" is actually someone someone who hasn't read the literature but has latched onto an idea so tightly that they just can't let go", are we to think that people like Freeman Dyson (Professor Emeritus of the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study; Fellow of the Royal Society), Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusettes Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences) people who "haven't read the literature" who have latched onto an idea so tightly that they just can't let go? There are many legitimate scientsist who are skeptical of the claims made relative to climate change.

There are plenty of legitimate scientists who don't feel the sciene is settled on AGW...er, Climate Change, and they do not need to be subjected to "nuremberg trials", treated as "traitors" by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or "decertified" by Heidi Cullen of the weather network.

I'll admit that the idea that "global warming GW is due to microwaves from satellites and ground communications" is a new one to me! I would simply suggest that it would be nice to see legitimate articles from legitimate scientists, from differing viewpoints, and less anger on the subject.

"Climate experts say we should tell villagers in developing countries to reduce the amount of cooking smoke they generate to help fix global warming. You know, it's as if these people don't hate us enough already. I mean, they live in mud huts, they have thatch roofs, their clothes are made of straw. We pull up in a bunch of Humvees and SUVs going, 'Hey, you want to cut the smoke out of here?'" --Jay Leno

Anyway, we should all at least agree to disagree, and appreciate the fact that we're all here because we all have some interest in science, and in the future. As Criswell said in Plan 9 from Outer Space: "Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!"

Anywho, thank you for your comments, I hope you have a good day!

Live long and prosper!

WolfNCC1701

Hmmm... Is the theory of AGW correct? I don't know and I'm not sure you do, either.

Is AGW a plot? Probably not, but I could be wrong. When like minded people work together for a common cause, is that a plot?

The way it is being presented certainly has the trappings of a scam. Name calling, guilt trips, accusations of intellectual dishonesty and/or ulterior motives, ridicule, attempts to silence opposition. These do nothing to lend credence to your cause and in fact just the opposite. Silencing opposing viewpoints is unscientific, don't you think?

Do politicians use science to fleece the public? You bet. It's what they do best.

A totalitarian state? Governments always seem to evolve in that direction and we are well on our way.

When popular movements switch tactics from persuasion to force, they cross over to the dark side. Persuade all you want, don't pass laws. We form governments to protect us from tyrants, not to become tyrants.

Since CO2 is often cited as being the main "culprit", how do CO2 emissions from humans compare to CO2 emissions from nature? Even stats provided by the pro-AGW side of the debate show that nature - by far - emits far more "greenhouse gasses" than mankind.

Well, it looks like yet another "skeptic" doesn't understand the difference between "gross" and "net".

It's pretty darned easy distinction -- it's something that even a business major with a C average should be able to comprehend.

RiHo08
06/23/12 at 10:10 pm

You claimed: '"threat to climate scientists" was a misquote by an Australian journalist, published as fact'

Well actual threats have been made to climate scientists:
Google 'somebunny FOIA abusive Valentines playmates Phil Jones'
and follow the links.

The claim that no threats have been made to climate scientists is a bare-faced lie.

RiHo08
06/23/12 at 10:10 pm
Results of a FOI request about threats to climate scientists.
www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/threats_to_life_or_of_bodily_har/download

I used to think that global warming was exaggerated or made up. I used to avidly read WattsUpWithThat, Climate Audit and many others. I thought that the science on display there was of better quality than what I understood of the IPCC reports and the fraudulent Hockey Stick, with no exaggeration, no "hidden decline" and lots of inconvenient facts.

I think my eyes opened when Richard Lindzen encouraged Anthony Watts to start questioning the trend since 1995 as the longest period for which no statisitically significant trend could be established. I knew what that meant and so did Lindzen - not that there was no trend, but that the available data was insufficient to establish one with 95% certainty. The best response from a scientist is to include extra data if it is available NOT to whittle down the data until the significance test fails! It was a massive cherry-pick and used as a kind of "gotcha" for Phil Jones, which what I knew to be an accurate representation of the data turned into a warped headline admission. Suddenly I felt sympahthy for someone I'd previously understood to be a villain, and everybody proclaiming that temperatures had flatlined (or were even declining) was simply deluded. I saw for the first time how the "party line" of the skeptics was repeated like a mmantra, in contravention of all efforts at persuasion or evidence to the contrary. Once I saw these tactics applied to something I knew myself to be wrong, I started revisiting old discussions with a more genuiinely skeptical eye and - harsha as it was to admit - I realised I'd been on the wrong side of reason for a long time. I witnessed first hand revisionism and censorship at WattsUpWithThat, in stark contrast to my own previousl crowing that there was none, and that it was a haven for open scientific debate. I checked and found wanting the arguments presented, and it is sad to see so many of those same arguments appear in these comments, recycled again and again and impervious to rational argument. For those commenters, I feel sympathy and recognition - having once been there - but also frustration at the rote and unquestioning repetition of false lines of argument.

Wolf, see Peterson (2008). That study found that of the 68 studies on global cooling published from 1968 to 1979, 62% predicted warming, 28% made no prediction, and 10% predicted global cooling. To the extent that Hansen is a scientist, his views are evolving.

Surface temp shows a positive trend on all major surface and lower trop records from 2001 to 2011, the last full decade. That's the simple analysis. Remove the signal from the decline in insolation over the 2000s, and the trend becomes significant. Remove aerosol cooling, and the trend is even more significant. Read Foster & Rahmstorf (2011).

Why would Mars be warming when solar forcing is clearly not causing recent Earth warming? Mysterious psychic connection or differences in Mars' orbit/tilt/wobble?

Actually, the crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe.

You write: "There is no doubt that the activities of mankind have an impact the climate, but there is legitimate debate over how much of an impact, and how much climate change is driven by the activities of mankind. THAT is the debate."

Yes, that is the debate, but the bulk of that debate has been concluded. Human CO2 emissions and land use changes are the direct cause of rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2, and I haven't seen any debate on that one in ages. Climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is an ongoing debate but within a narrow range. There remain few outliers above and below that narrow range.

The simple form of the mass balance argument: we know, with pretty high confidence, that the Earth has been in carbon equilibrium since interglacial temps stabilized about 10k years ago. Atmospheric CO2 has been at 270ppm +/-10ppm for most of that time span. No long-term trend. Sources = sinks. Relatively suddenly, we begin dumping fossil CO2 into the atmosphere. Coincidentally, atmospheric CO2 begins to rise at an increasing rate. Conclusion? Natural sinks can't handle the increase in CO2. If they could, why didn't they over the last 10k years?

There are no alternative theories that cover the data and physics. There are few scientists even willing to try to find an alternative (and probably only willing to do so for the glory factor -- because it would be glorious). Consensus occurs when scientists decide to move on to the finer details (i.e., when it becomes a waste of time to establish an idea just. one. more. time.).

Freeman Dyson hasn't read the literature (or hadn't when he opened his mouth on that one). Assuming really smart people know everything is usually a mistake. Lindzen simply argues a low sensitivity, except when he's in the "right" crowd. Then he's liable to say anything. That's something a lot of non-experts don't seem to understand. I can't think of any working scientist in the general area of climate who rejects the basic theory. Not Lindzen, not Spencer, not Pielke, not Michaels. Most of those scientists get press time and seem "important" because they've been used by opinion-makers to make opinions via mass media and congressional trottings out.

Leno's argument that those who benefit the most should take most responsibility is spot on.

As for the future, you and I and my 18-month twins.

I was very excited to read your article on Climate Change, expecting to get a balanced viewpoint of the debate. I can't tell you how dissappointed I was to read such a one sided bias. Science is about skepticism and questioning the prevailing wisdom, especially when the prevailing wisdom you are questioning is coming from the likes of Al Gore. Shame on you Popular Science, in the future, I will not be renewing my subscription with your politically correct "science" propaganda machine.

One thing I can say about the climate scientific community is that it lacks sufficient skeptics. Remember that use to be one of the pillars of science.

Long story short they were wrong about "the coming ice age" in the 70's and they can't produce a climate model that validates their theory of global warming. That in itself should create a planet full of skeptics.

At this point it appears that most of ther "evidence" is political correctness and a firm belief that they (the alarmist) are right.

I will be the first to become a believer when a properly peer reviewed climate model shows that AWG exists. Until then I remain with the growing legion of skeptics.

One thing I can say about the climate scientific community is that it lacks sufficient skeptics...

In a way, that is quite true. The skeptics really aren't "sufficient".

If the best that skeptics can do is repeat the myth that scientists were predicting a coming ice-age back in 70's (journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1) or repeat claims that climate models can't validate global warming when in fact the opposite is true (model backcasts can even reproduce the glacial/interglacial transitions initiated by Milankovitch orbital forcings -- www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-6-1.html), then yes, one can make a solid case that the skeptics aren't sufficient.

When that's the best that skeptics can do, it's a good indication that global-warming theory is on a very solid scientific footing.

When the creator of the Gaia Theory turns on global climate change, you know you've got a few holes in your argument. I'll believe it in 30 years if we haven't gone back to people claiming we're heading for a new ice age.

Do I "know" anything? I accept what the evidence tells me, always understanding that as new evidence arrives my fundamental understanding may be completely changed. Right now, the evidence is overwhelmingly supportive of the theory of AGW, and no other comprehensive theory has been offered.

The way it is being presented certainly has the trappings of a scam.

Name calling - since when is name calling a feature of scams? In any case, the name calling is a feature of the general rhetorical snafu: denialist, "skeptic," alarmist, fraud, hoaxer, etc. (I'll resist posting the labeling drawn from hate mail sent to Jones and Mann). As for myself, I've tried to refrain from labeling even when the potential target does everything possible to self-categorize.

Guilt trips - a rhetorical strategy present on both sides of the snafu. Responsibility is a part of the equation, though.

Accusations of intellectual dishonesty - come now: you're not that naive, are you? What does WUWT exist for if not to provide a forum for unevidenced claims of intellectual dishonesty directed at scientists? Meanwhile, the intellectual dishonesty of the large majority of attacks on the theory of AGW is legendary. Using 1998 as a starting point of surface temp analysis with full understanding that it was an El Nino spike? Read through 15-20 of tamino's posts at Open Mind, and make sure to read the comment streams where the authors attempt to defend their intellectual dishonesty (at worst) or incompetency (at best). And where is intellectual dishonesty on the side of science? Climategate? What a joke, as I've pointed out above, and another example of dishonesty on the part of whoever crafted the misinterpretation of the few snippets from that large collection of emails.

Ulterior motives - what do scientists have to gain by pushing a failed theory? Failed theories do not last very long, especially in areas where there is intense scrutiny and a huge payoff for discovery of failure. On the other hand, what do those attacking the science have to gain? Whenever I argue with people about this, the robustness of the science is almost never an issue. The issue is economic reward/risk. In other words, the science is irrelevant. People don't want to be held responsible for the external costs of atmospheric carbon, and so as long as there is a sufficient level of doubt, they can claim that it's not settled enough to act responsibly. Then there's Heartland and the organizations that serve as opinion-shapers for industrial interests. What ulterior motives could there be for the large majority of scientists who don't go on speaking tours, don't write books, would have jobs regardless of climate crisis, and would probably do what they do for half the money because they love it? Scientists also are not uniformly left in politics. Richard Alley, for instance.

Ridicule -

Attempts to silence opposition - show me the evidence. Did Jones make a mistake in letting his feelings be known in a semi-private email? Yes. Did he prevent publication? Should bad science be published? Tough call for you, because you don't know the difference. You're forced to place all claims in a box and then come up with a method of determining good and bad that doesn't rely on logic, appropriate statistical methodology, and knowledge of the historical development of the science. Where, then, is your opinion formed, and why not trust scientists? Of course, there are forums in which to publish. Even if Jones somehow had control over all the major climate-related journals (including Science and Nature), the scientists who felt suppressed could publish in Energy & Environment (lovely journal) or other journals. Of course, if the science is actually bad, it doesn't reflect well on the journal, as we saw in the Soon and Baliunas affair. If S & B were the standard for scientific work, I would take a huge grain of salt with anything a scientist had to say on anything. Why people rip into Mann's work and give S & B a free pass is beyond me . . . unless there are ulterior motives.

"Silencing opposing viewpoints is unscientific, don't you think?" Yes. And the broad attempt to put the chill on climate science is unethical. Views that oppose the dominant theory are routinely addressed in journals and certainly in the blogosphere. If you have what you think is an legitimate problem with the theory, let's hear it. As I requested of you initially, "tell me where the theory fails."

"Do politicians use science to fleece the public? You bet. It's what they do best." Is it? If you think so, then you do not accept science as an epistemology and/or your haven't benefited from scientific progress.

"A totalitarian state? Governments always seem to evolve in that direction and we are well on our way." If so, then the current mode of production is leading the way. Governmental expression of power is a candle in the wind of economic interests.

"When popular movements switch tactics from persuasion to force, they cross over to the dark side. Persuade all you want, don't pass laws. We form governments to protect us from tyrants, not to become tyrants."

What do you mean by "force"? If I allow you to pick and choose the information you find acceptable, with no basis for the decision other than what you think "should be" right, then I kick the legs out from under whatever remains of the legitimacy of the democracy. I demand that you hold yourself to a higher standard of engagement for high-stakes issues. I demand that you yourself consider all the evidence, and during that period in which you don't yet understand it, don't mislead people by publicly assuming that you do, through absolute statements and insinuations about the integrity of the people who have dedicated their lives to studying the issue. Instead, be open about what you do accept and what you haven't really looked at yet. If I don't demand these things, then my own integrity is in question.

pop777, you came in expecting to get a balanced view of the debate? What led you to believe that such balance was pre-existing?

The title of the article is very true and the article itself says it all although not how the author intended it to.

The debate is brutal because anyone who has an opposing (to AGW theory) view is immediately labelled as uneducated, corrupt or both. The global warming has become a church; existence of the messiah cannot be questioned no matter what and facts matter little. Those who do question any element of the church official standing are heretics, evil and destined to be burned at stake on a pile of public opinion.

If this site wants to claim anything in common with science it should examine the authors posting here.

This article is oozing with bias clearly in favor of the pro global-warming side. The author doesn't even make an attempt at objective reporting or at least hiding his own opinion on the matter. Every skeptic mentioned is introduced neck deep in innuendo alluding to some nefarious connections or intent, while the pro-warming characters are all presented pure as the driven snow. No mention is made at all of all the harassment that the anti-warming skeptics endure, which occurs on a massive scale. The arguments of skeptics, what few are even mentioned, are downplayed and dismissed. This is not what REAL scientific debate looks like. Using the author’s stated litmus test for the validity of information, his own article should be dismissed because it wasn't written by a scientist. That unsavory personal attacks occur on both sides of this war is a sign of our declining culture, but this article is also a classic example of the decline of journalism. I can remember when Popular Science used to have very professionally written articles. They might as well change their name to Popular Culture now.

Back in the 1980's the environmentalists approached the refrigeration industry with a proposal to phase out CFC refrigerants at the manufacturing level, based on the theory that they would cause an increase in ground level UV, thus an increase in skin cancers. There was virtually zero opposition from the refrigeration industry, including the manufacturers, everyone considering this to be a reasonable precaution... just in case the theory might be true. End of problem, right? Wrong.

Not satisfied with the reasonable solution and encountering no opposition, the environmentalists/politicians proceeded to implement the unreasonable solution. They descended upon the refrigeration industry like a school of sharks sensing blood in the water.

The refrigeration industry was heavily regulated, not just at the manufacturing level, but at every level, right down to the person repairing your fridge.

Taxes upon outrageous taxes, licencing, fees, fines, bounties, step by step mandating of precisely how everyone in the industry was to perform their job, right down to the finest detail... and endless paperwork. The word "micromanagement" doesn't begin to describe the government involvement in the refrigeration industry.

Fleecing the public? Totalitarian government? You tell me.

BTW, where is the expected increase in ground level UV?... much less the Mad Max, scorched earth, end of civilization as we know it scenarios predicted by the media?

One of the major problems with the Global Warming debate is the bad journalism involved. It's either the far left of the far right trying to distort and mis-characterize the facts, to justify their views.

This article is no different. It focuses on the persecution of one side while completely ignoring the other side. There is no end to attacks on anyone that doesn't agree with the findings of Climate Change. A professor at Oregon State was just fired for his skepticism of climate change and Forbes columnist Steve Zwick has called for the burning down of skeptics houses. (I wonder how that would affect his carbon footprint.)

I became skeptical of the Global Warming hysteria after seeing An Inconvenient Truth, and being disturbed by the propaganda aspects of it. While watching it I was astounded by how there was much more scare than there was science.

And the sad thing is, I'm still scared and concerned about Climate Change and the damage being done to the environment. But I'm also scared of the direction and tactics of politicians and media when it comes to the issue. Science is about questions, so anytime someone says "Debate Over" I immediately become skeptical. And any scientist that doesn't also become skeptical, is probably just hearing what they want to hear.

professor at Oregon State was just fired for his skepticism of climate change and Forbes columnist Steve Zwick has called for the burning down of skeptics houses.

Let's see -- an adjunct professor, funded by "soft money" at a university that has suffered multi-year 10+ percent cuts in funding, does not have his contract renewed. That's happening all across the country; are the many thousands of other junior, untenured faculty who have lost their jobs due to budget cuts victims of repression as well?

As for Zwick -- he said no such thing -- you've taken him completely out of context and twisted his words.

The scientific community lost a great deal of it's credibility when they climbed into bed with the politicians, as did the media. Politics taints everything it touches. Much of the opposition stems not from the science, but from the fact that oppressive laws will be enacted as a result of the science. Reasonable solutions play no part in the environmental movement. Kiss your freedom goodbye... and say hello to knee jerk mob rule aka unfettered democracy.

"Persuade all you want, don't pass laws."

Passing laws is the whole point though. Laws are meant to demarcate those things we should not do and then enforce those demarcations in a fair and impartial way. Oil and coal companies don't like this idea at all, but they don't boss us, and they can't force us to destroy.

The only way to stop global warming and acidifying our oceans is to stop polluting our atmosphere with carbon, and of course we should do this-- it's just common sense.

In the NW, oysters are already getting wiped out because seawater is getting to acidic, caused by fossil fuel combustion/pollution. This is the start of a collapse that we would be wise to avoid.

Peter Gray: "The debate is brutal because anyone who has an opposing (to AGW theory) view is immediately labelled as uneducated, corrupt or both."

I and others have repeatedly asked that the "debate" be moved where it belongs: to the science. Instead, all that pops up are arguments from authority or arguments from ignorance. Is that "opposition"? If I say, "vaccines cause autism. Vaccines are just a fear-based big government scam," would you say, "good argument!"? Maybe you would if you felt the same way, but a good critical thinker would say, "I don't know. If you could give me the evidence that led you to this conclusion, I'll consider it." (and maybe, "by the way, what led you to post such an absolute and damning claim without pointing to any evidence?")

To the extent that you can't argue from the science, you are uneducated regarding this issue. I am uneducated on this issue when it comes to a number of the finer points (cloud feedbacks, permafrost dynamics, ocean acidification chemistry, et al.). Everyone should have access to the discussion, but a little integrity would be nice: openly admit your level of knowledge, and engage others without assumptions about "ulterior motives."

Start from the science, unless you openly admit to the rejection of science as an epistemology. The best way to avoid being taken for a ride is to start with the fundamentals, ask questions, and let your reason do the work. Engage the science.

"Laws are meant to demarcate those things we should not do and then enforce those demarcations in a fair and impartial way."

Really? You make it sound so benevolent. We are not talking about friendly guidelines reflecting current public opinion. We are talking about real laws with real punishments. We are talking about one group forcing it's will upon another group, based upon theoretical projections of future events. We are talking about the forcible marginalization of opposing viewpoints. We are talking about might makes right.

There is a huge difference between persuasion and coercion. Persuasion creates allies, coercion creates enemies. The legitimate purpose of laws is to help defend us against those who would force their will upon us. We form governments to protect us from tyrants, not to become tyrants. Legitimate laws are defensive.

Greystone, even though I lived through the CFC-reduction situation, I was oblivious. I haven't studied the history, and I don't know what people were told, nor am I much up on what actually happened. My word of caution would be to not lump every scientific warning into the same category of fraud, or, if you do, at least ask yourself why you're doing it.

Science has been wrong about many ideas, but it has been right orders of magnitude more often. It is the most successful epistemology humans have ever developed, by a long shot. The process can be temporarily corrupted by politics, and the interpretation can certainly be corrupted by politics (hello "climategate"). The truth will out, though, eventually. Yet just because a theory is dominant, that doesn't mean it's destined to be replaced. And just because people claim the science is flawed, it doesn't mean it is. Most successful theories eventually become part of the landscape, and we tend to forget how we used to think something different.

If somehow science could be separated from politics, it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. Science should influence, not dictate.

If the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming, the empirical evidence must be written up many times in peer reviewed literature. Is that correct?
Where would I find the peer reviewed paper or papers showing this empirical evidence?

If there is no empirical evidence, why is there a battle over climate science? All scientists know that empirical evidence is necessary for scientific confidence in a theory.

I should add that I did not/do not consider the ozone depletion theory to be fraudulent, although it may or may not prove correct.

The original proposal to phase out CFC's at the manufacturing level was reasonable, sufficient and best of all, voluntary. It was all that was needed.

The rest was heavy handed political BS.

Here's a suggestion to you climatologists that are being sued or harassed by politicians:

Fight back by suing them back! Pursue criminal and civil actions at them and let them know there are consequences to their actions. No, they can't plead immunity. Simply argue the Proxmire ruling.

To you global warming skeptics: why don't you go and meet the cattle ranchers that had to slaughter their livestock or the homeowners that lost the homes to global warming related wildfires? Also, think about telling your grandchildren or your descendants about having fresh meats and vegetables at a family reunion over Soylent Green.

OK, folks -- Do you know what happens when you get serious, roll up your sleeves, make an honest effort to learn some basic programming/data-analysis techniques, and actually crunch some data yourselves?

You end up confirming what the climate-science community has been saying all along.

A perfect case in point is the surface temperature data network. For *years*, skeptics have been attacking the global-average temperature results computed from surface temperature data, without making even a token effort to learn how to process the temperature data themselves.

When it comes to computing global-average temperatures from surface temperature data, you really can get 95 percent of the answer with less than 1 percent of the effort.

If you code up a straightforward gridding/averaging procedure and apply it to *raw* temperature data, you will get results that are amazingly similar to the results published by the climate-science community.

Below is a plot of the results that I got when I computed straightforward averages from 4 global temperature data sets: GHCN versions 2 and 3, and CRUTEM versions 3 and 4.

img834.imageshack.us/img834/1282/myghcnmycrunasaghcn.jpg

As you can see, my "hand rolled" program, when applied to all 4 data sets, produced results very similar to the official NASA/GHCN results every time.

Remember -- I got these results by running raw (not "homogenized") data though a straightforward gridding/averaging procedure that does not involve *any* data adjustments or "manipulation" -- all done on a "legacy" 5-year-old laptop.

All the data and documentation needed to do this are freely available to the public, and are just a few mouse-clicks away.

cyberwarrior, are you referring to those grandchildren whose every waking moment will be dictated by the government, told how they must walk, talk, look, act and think, throughout their financially destitute lives? Are those the grandchildren you are talking about?

I'm betting my scenario is closer to the truth than yours.

Need to follow up with a quick correction. The CRUTEM Version 4 station data is actually "homogenized" (not raw) data. For CRUTEM Version 4, the CRU decided to use data that had been adjusted/homogenized by the various NWS offices.

The GHCN V2/V3 and CRUTEM V3 data sets are still *raw* station data, however.

But look at the results! The homogenized CRUTEM4 data produces results that are *very* similar to the results that you get from the other (raw) data-sets. So it should be absolutely clear that for global-average computations, the data adjustments involved in "homogenization" almost perfectly cancel each other out!

So let me repeat: CRUTEM4 homogenized -- CRUTEM3, GHCN2, GHCN3, raw. And when you look at the above plot, you almost need a magnifying glass to tell them apart!

Your scenario Greystone1 is what you get when you feed your kids all the right wing garbage against them learning to think for themselves.

The scenario I posted is the one your descendants will be facing if nothing is done about global warming.

Since you didn't mention the other items, I would say you have nothing to say about them just like any "conservative" with their holier than thou attitude.

WAKE-UP AMERICA
The Simple solution is to Get ALL JETS out of the JET STREAM!
80,000 TONS per hour of DIRTY, FILTHY, CANCEROUS, DIESEL jet exhausts is burning up and destroying the planet.

I am glad to see that Popular Science has the GUTS to take on this situation, ARE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T!

Now if the Government and Congress would get their heads out of the sand, and face reality, before there is NO turning point, And I told you so, and Where is the E.P.A. we don't hear a word out of them, Are they DEAF,DUMB,& BLIND?

I won't have to go to Florida next Winter, Florida weather will be right here in VERMONT! What will it be in your State,if it isn't BURNED OR FLOODED OUT.

Where is Obama or Romney, are they like the E.P.A., DEAF,DUMB & BLIND!

Cyberwarrior, you blame wild fires on global warming (and a thousand other things no doubt just like all the other dupes out there), and then brag about being able to think for yourself? You and jdlaughead should get together and smoke a few dubes.

Pyronaught - check out http://tinyurl.com/7h6739d and http://youtu.be/r_qdETSYcDM - both very informative about wildfires and duping about global warming.

This observation is noteworthy (referring to Colorado) "Of the 10 largest fires in the state’s history, only one hasn’t occurred in the last decade".

It's just common sense that we should lay down the law and eliminate carbon fuels before it's too late.

cyberwarrior, you assume I am a conservative, Wrong again. Is jumping to conclusions your idea of thinking for yourself?

It might surprise you to know that I have solar panels on my roof as well as a rainwater recovery system... neither of which was subsidized by the government. But you will not see me putting a gun to my neighbor's head and forcing him to do the same.

I think for myself, not for you.

I make decisions for myself, not for you.

I am not and never will be a dictator... and that is where you and I differ.

No I don't jump to conclusions Greystone1, however you exhibited the same train of thought on climate change conservatives do.

Commendable you use solar panels and a rainwater recovery system. Your choice not mine. I support nuclear, geothermal, wind, and solar btw. I also advocate fracking as well.

You do not think for me. I think for myself.
You say the difference between us is you're not and never will be a dictator.
No.
The difference between you and me is if any of the aspects of global warming come to pass ( we'd all be winners if they don't ) is I can show clean hands should I be accused of not warning anyone and if I'm wrong, it would be for the right reasons.

As a friendly suggestion, track the amount of rainwater you're getting. Not just for a year. For at least ten years, including the weather temperature, humidity, etc. This is how real research (not just in climatology) works.

Ameoba & DSL,

a) I have been at SkepticalScience, RealClimate and other consensus blogs and learned that data manipulation, data deletion, and just out right misrepresentation are the norm in dialogues that do not follow the consensus catechism. My head is sore from beating it against a brick wall.
b) Climategate illustrated that a small elite can and has influence climate science research, funding, and publications; all with a specific agenda in mind.
c) The original accusation of death treats to climate scientists was suppose to have occurred in Australia and a journalist misrepresented the actual conversation. Needless to say, the story went viral, but the substance was based upon an intentional mis-statement. There have been subsequent vile behavior, words and threats. But the original was a fraud.
d) When the IPCC was developed, climate research altered focus to document the influences of man upon climate and not what are the components of climate and how do they interact. As we have observed there are abrupt climate changes after periods of relative homeostasis. Ocean phenomenon like El Nino Southern Oscillations and atmospheric pressure variances at time will "resonate" with one another and a new climate regime will abruptly emerge. Global Climate Models have not been able to either hind cast let alone forecast these abrupt changes (1901, 1939, 1970's and more recently the 1998/2001) as described by Swanson & Tsona 2009. The reliance upon Greenhouse gases as an explanation for the driver of climate change leaves all current GCM wanting. A recent paper by Melles et al describing core samples going back 2.6 million years call for new climate models to be developed, especially since the Arctic was 5 C warmer than now and the atmospheric CO2 was <330 ppmv. CO2 is not likely the drive or climate, contributors to be sure, but its effect is minuscule in comparison to... that is yet to be defined.
e) As the Mann predictions made back in the 1980s has not come true; as the other modeler's models do not follow one another and diverge measurably, and as the modelers reliance upon the "assemblage" of models have shown them to not understand the very statistics they employ, we will likely see a further disconnect between what the models predict, observational reality, and the rhetoric used to explain this chaos.
f) I believe as long as climate models assume that CO2 is a climate driver as opposed to be a bit player in this drama, not only will the public and their reluctant representatives distance themselves from the entire climate controversy, there will be less and less resources made available to study and understand what makes weather, and by extension, our climate. That is in my estimation the real catastrophe.

I believe as long as climate models assume that CO2 is a climate driver as opposed to be a bit player in this drama...

There is no "assumption" about CO2 involved -- the fact that CO2 is a climate driver derives from basic physics *and* hard paleoclimate data.

To get the paleoclimate perspective, watch this video: www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml

The video is about an hour long -- but since you have demonstrated from your activities here that you have plenty of spare time on your hands, you have no excuse not to watch the whole thing.

RiHo08--

It's easy to claim fraud and walk away from a comment stream. Where is the evidence for your point (a)? I eagerly await.

(b) No, that's not what Climategate illustrated. Again, where is the evidence? What did Phil Jones do? How was the science corrupted? Who tried to publish what, and why was Phil Jones worried about the integrity of the science? Do you find it absolutely impossible to believe that people try to publish garbage and, when they fail, get bitter? You should see what happens when garbage does get through (Soon and Baliunas, Roy Spencer, etc.). Do you want an "anything goes" scientific process? No more peer review (yes, it's elitist, and a good thing too)?

(c) Did you read the email collection? Or had you read it already? Whatever the details of the outing, the threats exist, and I don't think those are the only ones.

(d) GCM is General Circulation Model. Your ENSO claim is bizarre. New climate regimes from ENSO? Nothing is coming up in Google Scholar for Swanson and Tsona. I searched for Tsonga as well. Is it an Energy & Environment publication? As for models, no one has constructed a climate model that remotely comes close to 20th/21st century observed reality without including CO2 forcing. The models that the IPCC used in AR4 have done remarkably well. Here is analysis from a pretty good statistician: web.archive.org/web/20100322194954/http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/models-2/

And here is skepticalscience's rundown of AR4, showing both successes and failures: www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm.

I think you're taking Melles a little too far. Which Melles paper, btw?

(e) What Mann predictions? Model projections? Or Mann's personal predictions? CO2 a bit player? Start with the physics, RiHo. Puckrin (2004) is easy enough. If you accept H20 as the major GHG, you're going to have a tough time calling CO2 a "bit player." www.cccma.ec.gc.ca/papers/jli/pdf/puckrin2004.pdf

Climate change has been talked about for centuries, arguably way before the United States began: http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Climate_change_talk.pdf

DSL
Getting late in my neighborhood, enjoy:

https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/kswanson/www/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf

Woods Hole also has articles on abrupt climate change. The idea has been around for quite a while, just not in the consensus mindset, so it doesn't exist to them.
You have an opportunity to see what climate scientists who are not involved in the elite have to say.

my roomate's aunt makes $83/hr on the laptop. She has been without work for 8 months but last month her pay was $8682 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read more on this site...NuttyRich.com

RiHo08, you have strong opinions but they seem to me to be mostly without merit. This is my take on each point.

a) I’ve visited SkepticalScience and RealClimate often too. I’ve found them to be fair with all visitors that want to make a valid point on either side of the climate issue or want to ask questions, dumb or otherwise. On the other hand, if you are trolling for trouble, out to make political rant, or claiming some extraordinary explanation for warming that goes against basic physics, then expect to deleted or get an unwelcome reception. Try to knock politely instead of banging down the walls.

b) One of the unpaid duties of scientists is to peer-review and prevent publication of bad science. The hacked email example you refer to a well-known case of poor science being published. If non-consensus author such as Lindzen publishes something and it well-researched as his work usually is, they don’t object to it being published, though they may not agree with his conclusions.

c) Who cares if the original reported instance of a threat was false? This article is, in part, about the large number threats that are ongoing.

d) The purpose of the IPCC is to report to the nations of the world what all the independent researchers are finding but in a single (very large) report. Just about everyone that had something published has to sign-off that the report fairly represents their views. There might be abrupt weather changes based on internal variability of the climate system, but the climate does not seem to change without some kind of external forcing, which scientists mostly understand now. I haven’t heard of any abrupt changes in 1998/2001 or the other dates you mentioned, just some larger instances of internal variability that are/will be short-lived.

Global Climate Models don’t and aren’t intended to replicate exact instances of observed internal variability, just as they can’t predict volcanic eruptions. But if a hindcast is run and the model is told the timing of the events, they do replicate the expected temperature and other climate responses. This gives us confidence that they have predictive capability. Swanson & Tsona 2009 has been well-refuted at this point and even the authors say skeptics have misrepresented it.

You didn’t say which Milles et al paper you mean so I can’t address this point. However, CO2 and climate generally correlate over geologic history with a log one way or the other depending on which came first (glacial cycle versus volcanic increase). It’s not the only thing going on. Continental positions affect ocean currents which allow tropics move or not at times to the polar areas. The continents have moved recently.

e) Mann is a paleoclimatologist, a sort of temperature historian. I don’t think he made any predictions so I don’t see that you could say some predictions of his did not come true. Both the Hockey Stick and Mann have been independently investigated and vindicated more times than any other facet of climate science or any other climate scientist, including a congressional committee under Bush. Many (12+) subsequent temperature reconstructions by independent researchers worldwide have reached the same conclusions. Despite efforts by many to disprove his work, no one has. The “Hockey Stick” is one thing we have very high confidence in now.

f) Climate models do not assume that CO2 is the primary climate driver. They just calculate the climate’s response to added CO2 as they would for more insolation according to known and lab tested physics. Physics further decides what falls out from that including various feedbacks. It is scientists that conclude CO2 is the primary climate driver based on the model output (and this agrees with the findings of other scientists using empirical observations). I really don’t know what more you expect of science. This is the way all science works. I think you just don’t like what science is revealing in this case.

One of the good things of being a little older than most who appear to leave comments here is that I have some perspective about what came before and the shifting stance that so called climate scientists have taken on where we are headed. The consensus in the 1970's of the climate science world was that the Earth WAS headed toward another period of glaciation. Some here may not like to admit this but it is in fact truth. As we know, in a few short years, using for the most part the same data, decided we weren't cooling we were warming. Go figure...

Next, there is no dispute that the current climate models do not work. That is an absolute fact that those who believe in AWG freely admit. If you don't believe me Google "climate models".

Can you say East Anglia emails. Isn't East Anglia University one of the major sources of and evaluation of climate data for the IPCC? Yes I believe it is! If you want to stick your head in the sand feel free but these emails refute the very existence of increased warming of the Earth for over the last decade and completely obliterated the "Hockey Stick" fraud, and exposed the breathtaking manipulation and destruction of data to keep the truth about AGW hidden.

Face it, climate science is little more than a religion. Based on faith and hope and little else. There currently is no grand theory that explains even a fraction of why the climate changes. The only thing we can say is we haven't, as yet, got a clue! All we currently have are little more than guesses about why the Earth cools and warms, Forget about trying to predict the future of when and how much climate change we will have. We CAN NOT! Maybe when we come to an understanding of the "when" and "where" of weather we can concentrate on climate issues...

Climate science predictions have ALL been wrong. Go ahead an plug in historical climate data in the current climate models and check the results. Oh.. They have already done that. Guess what? They weren't even close...

Betting on a horse to win that always finishes last is a fool's errand. AGW adherents appear to be on such a quest.... Saddle up the donkey. Grab your lance. The windmills are over there...

Typo fixes:

... with a lag one way or the other ... Continental positions affect ocean currents which allow tropical heat to move or not at times to the polar areas. The continents have not moved recently.

RiHo08 slightly garbled Swanson & Tsona 2009.
It’s actually Swanson and Tsonis 2009

Paper here:
pantherfile.uwm.edu/kswanson/www/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf

Beautiful sign, I have saved the image.

Dculton says: “Forget about trying to predict the future of when and how much climate change we will have. We CAN NOT!”

But it IS ALREADY BEING DONE. We do it for our planet’s volatile weather days in advance with great success now. Climate is more stable over time so it’s a bit easier to predict climate over very long periods (to project actually), compared to forecasting weather.

We do climate hindcasts that start with a “blank” planet, run for millennia, cross though glacial ages and arrive at something that looks quite like the pre-industrial climate we had – this is called “spinning up” the model. From there the models track the last century’s climate up to present based on the changes modern civilization caused to the atmosphere and land, and then sometimes centuries into the future. Note that the model gets there all on its own using just the fundamental rules of physics or approximations of the rules.

No they aren’t perfect but they aren’t bad and they give us a range of outcomes that we can be confident about. All those outcomes are warmer if continue on the present emissions path.

Obviously people change their environment and have for over 10,000 years. This isn't necessarily a problem. Some may drown but others may get rich. Doing something about it is only worthwhile if the solution IS convenient, or at least more convenient than inaction. And the affect on government and society would outweigh any imaginable affect of environmental change per se no matter what the environmental impact, so long as it was short of racial extinction. Let Bangaldesh drown.

Dculton said,

One of the good things of being a little older than most who appear to leave comments here is that I have some perspective about what came before and the shifting stance that so called climate scientists have taken on where we are headed. The consensus in the 1970's of the climate science world was that the Earth WAS headed toward another period of glaciation.

Sorry, but you are completely wrong. See http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2008BAMS2370.1 for details.

@caerbannog- You're right. The conservative talk show hosts inform the public every time militant lefties attack and intimidate us "deniers". Sometimes to the point of exhaustion.

Climategate is insignificant when compared with the overwhelming evidence disproving man-made global warming. I doubt there's anything anyone can say to change your mind, I'm just glad you are in the minority. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to respond while relying on electricity from wind power when its not windy or solar when its dark out.
Come on that was clever wasn't it?

Guilt is a powerful influence of science, community and facts. We humans many times feel guilty, when some natural even happens and blame ourselves for the destruction. Biblically, there is a lot of history of people who were destroy, because they were sinners and ignored the facts of it being a natural Earth result.

Manipulative world leaders, politicians and the owned paid for media could be protecting an idea, we humans naturally fall victim too. We feel guilty for all the pollutions in the world and so it is our fault the Earth is getting warming. While it may be an emotional truth, it is not necessarily a scientific fact.

Disasters, chaos, large group emotional hysteria does make for a few good business profits.

..........................................
See life in all its beautiful colors, and
from different perspectives too!

To cyberwarrior

"Let's see -- an adjunct professor, funded by "soft money" at a university that has suffered multi-year 10+ percent cuts in funding, does not have his contract renewed. That's happening all across the country; are the many thousands of other junior, untenured faculty who have lost their jobs due to budget cuts victims of repression as well?"

Well, the University announced hiring four new professors right before they fired him, so the budget argument doesn't work. Fellow U of O Professor Kari Norgaard, on the other hand, wishes to have any critics of climate change theories "treated for a disease." I guess, because anyone that disagrees with her must be crazy or sick.

"As for Zwick -- he said no such thing -- you've taken him completely out of context and twisted his words."

You've got me there, he didn't say that. He said to track them and let their houses burn. But I'm not the one who twisted his words, it was another article in Forbes that did. I made the mistake of trusting that source and I apologize. However, it further reenforces my argument that the media distorts the facts for it's own purposes.

I think deniers exhibit the most guilt of all, the reaction to guilt being to disbelieve commonly-accepted facts, opposition to common sense solutions, and extreme defensiveness over the matter/ taking on the role of mind guards to defend the group think in discussions such as this one. It makes me chuckle that deniers comprise 12% of the US population but come out of the woodwork to disrupt a discussion board like this, for a news article about bullying by organized climate science deniers. If deniers can accept the truth of the matter and forgive themselves for what they've done, we can move on to responding to the problem-- but this requires self-forgiveness to accept things as they are.

Another facet of denier psychology I think is important is the cowardice in being unable to face up to the situation squarely, simply over fear of changing how things are. The salve here is to have faith in ourselves-- that change is possible, that we've got it in us to do just fine without burning oil, coal and gas. They are not sacred things to be defended, and besides, we would have run out of these fuels anyway, leaving our children in the lurch, with systems that are collapsing all around-- and that would have been wrong.

RiHo08, Swanson & Tsonis do not propose a non-CO2 explanation for recent warming. Rather, they explore apparent short-term temp regimes on top of AGW: "Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing."

Again, Foster & Rahmstorf (2011) (behind a paywall, but discussion by one of the authors is here: tamino.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/the-real-global-warming-signal/)

Dculton, you sound like an old-timer in this particcular rhetorical game, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Even if you are one of the paid, the lurkers may profit from discussion of the following scenario:

The following scenario is a hypothetical. Imagine that I wanted to hurt your reputation, Dculton. Somehow, I managed to find 5000+ of your work emails somewhere on the net. I did some work to verify that they were actually yours. Then I spent a few days combing over them, trying to find something damaging. I managed to find two short strings that could work, if radically recontextualized. One string was "I like to sleep with children." Another was "I like to cheat on my wife with children." I can find nothing else that remotely implies that you are a pedophile, but I have to work with what I've got. I blast the texts across the internet with the help of a few like-minded friends. Your locals explode. Law, police, and neighbors are called upon to remove you from the community. Your inbox is filled with hate mail and death threats. You try to explain yourself, giving the full contexts of the snippets: "Oh sure, I like to sleep with children, but when they stay up all night jumping on my head, eating my books, and soaking the mattress with 'accidents', I tend to be a little irritable in the morning," and "When we play UNO, I like to cheat on my wife with children in full complicity. She tends to think she's the UNO master, so we like to take her down a few notches." Six independent investigations clear you of any wrongdoing. Few believe it. Most think it's some sort of cover up. Others don't like to think they've been hoodwinked so easily. Your life is changed for the worse. I sit back and watch it all unfold, laughing. Am I a criminal?

Yes, the above hypothetical is analogous to the "climategate" email joke. Jones et al. were found not guilty of scientific misconduct. No data was faked. Indeed, one investigative body found that such fakery was impossible, given the process followed.

The suggestion that Jones et al. were suppressing publication (they desired it) was responded to by several investigative bodies, but no evidence was found that the suppression actually occurred. I concur with Jones: garbage should not be published just because it challenges the dominant theory. Science would move at a snail's pace if that were allowed (and now that we have pay-for-play, theory-as-commodity, and industry-supported faux journals, we may be entering that regime). If you can show me something significant that should have been published but was suppressed by "AGW believers," I may consider it.

I can't say why you fell for "climategate." Plenty of smart, well-intentioned people did. It was a piece of rhetorical genius, even if it did rely on theft and the luck required to find those bits of text that could be recontextualized. Non-experts should have fallen for it, because the news is filled with revelations of corruption in all areas of life. Still, once even the basic details were finally revealed, reason should have kicked in.

Apparently it still hasn't in some cases.

Snowman, I don't want to get tangled up with the argument over Drapela, but I will point out that universities do hire even while making budget-driven faculty cuts. Departments have to have profs who can teach the core classes for the majors. When one retires, that position is high priority fill, and it's actually a savings (the new hire will probably have a smaller salary to start). Other departments may have been waiting for a while to add a position. Other positions may be driven by long-term project/program or curricular change. Now, if four hires were made for the same position as Drapela, then he must really suck for some reason. Was he not a member of AAUP or an adjunct union?

DSL, I don't want to get into an argument either. But, can you explain why he would be cut before the end of the term, if it was a budget issue?

For all I know he was fired for something un-related to his stance on Global Warming. I just won't buy the "budget cuts" excuse.

It's not about the science, it's about the solutions.

If the proposed solution is to beat the crap out of Joe Blow, he will oppose the science, with an understandable sense of urgency. It doesn't take a computer to predict this.

If the proposed solution is to beat the crap out of everyone, expect a revolution.

Propose reasonable solutions (minimum disruption/maximum benefit) and then you can get back to nitpicking the science.

This is what constitutes debate in America these days. We and the media accept debates between scientist and PR firms, political ideological attack dog backers all funded by corporations with a vested interest in manipulating the debate. The debate should be between equal parties with similar basis of knowledge, experience and interests. The PR world is unleashed against science with special interest money. It is all just a subterfuge to create uncertainty and doubt. Why does the media participate and allow it? Tight deadlines and slick sound bites doesn't cut it. If you can't do the job of fulfilling the civil responsibilities of the forth estate, stop talking, don't make it worse.

"Why does the media participate and allow it?"

Follow the money: Special interest money > campaign funds > media advertising

The media gets the bribe money.

CO2 has radiative properties which may influence weather/climate. My description is: the trace gas radiative transfer model. CO2 influence in proportion to its atmospheric concentration. Trace. Its signal has yet to be discerned from the noise.

By far and away water is the dominant, greenhouse gas. Water in all its phases influences the incoming radiation as well as the outgoing. Clouds play important roles not at all described sufficiently to determine an overall positive or negative influence. Likely clouds play various roles depending upon latitude as well as altitude.

Swanson & Tsonis 2009 are important for their construct of oceanic and atmospheric pressure oscillations merging to transition points (phase state) resulting in abrupt climate changes. Anthropogenic Global Warming may influence a trend. Again its signal as separated from noise has not been observed.

Atmospheric pressures change is influenced by UV radiation upon ozone primarily in the Stratosphere at both poles. The Polar Vorticies and in particular their influences upon jet streams, blocking highs, etc are receiving the attention they deserve regarding weather and climate.

Current temperature trends are difficult at best as the raw data is being adjusted, sometimes invisibly which makes such adjustments suspicious, not necessarily wrong, just suspicious. If we see influences on temperature trends by PDO, ENSO, AMO, NAO, this would suggest that CO2 is a weak forcing. Again, the trace gas radiative transfer model.

Regarding Melles et al, the latest: From Russia with Love:

http://www.geo.umass.edu/lake_e/Mellesetalscience2012.pdf

Is this core record a game changer? Time will tell. There is a lot of information in those cores yet to be uncovered.

In any case, there is a lot more to learn about weather/climate before estimates of future climate will have any substance.

RiHo08: "Again its signal as separated from noise has not been observed."

Yes, it has. Foster & Rahmstorf (2011). Abstract:

"We analyze five prominent time series of global temperature (over land and ocean) for their common time interval since 1979: three surface temperature records (from NASA/GISS, NOAA/NCDC and HadCRU) and two lower-troposphere (LT) temperature records based on satellite microwave sensors (from RSS and UAH). All five series show consistent global warming trends ranging from 0.014 to 0.018 K yr−1. When the data are adjusted to remove the estimated impact of known factors on short-term temperature variations (El Niño/southern oscillation, volcanic aerosols and solar variability), the global warming signal becomes even more evident as noise is reduced. Lower-troposphere temperature responds more strongly to El Niño/southern oscillation and to volcanic forcing than surface temperature data. The adjusted data show warming at very similar rates to the unadjusted data, with smaller probable errors, and the warming rate is steady over the whole time interval. In all adjusted series, the two hottest years are 2009 and 2010."

The signal became quite evident when insolation diverged sharply from temp about 30 years ago.

Greystone: "It's not about the science, it's about the solutions."

Agreed -- it should be, anyway. As far as solutions go, I change my opinion on a daily basis. I continue to try and do what I can on the personal scale, but my role in the democratic process needs a good plan to latch onto.

Unfortunately, I suspect that the mitigation/adaptation process will be slow slow slow until the environmental changes become impossible to ignore. That is where the problem is "about the science"--or at least the communication of the science and the antagonism of the misinformation industry.

If people don't understand the problem as a real problem, then democratic solutions will never get off the ground, and power will shift to smaller entities (of various political persuasions).

That this even has to be discussed is a tribute to how far back we have moved form enlightenment to a darker age ... very strange. Science was the one thing everyone could pretty much agree on, but the charlatans of the world see fit to turn lies and bad science into wedge issues with little care what damage may be done. Anyway, the sun experiences higher levels of activity (and "sun spots") every 12 years, but the effects on earth have much more to do with electromagnetic radio and electric interference (and auroras!!)than any global heating effect. High points in the sun's activity are very predictably cyclical. The demonstrably continuous and accelerating warming of the global climate does not track at all with the cyclical nature of increased solar activity. It does however coincide rather exactly with the exponential rise of "greenhouse gases" just as predicted by the VAST majority of serious climatologists for several decades now(Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding). Every estimate of the effects of warming have not only been on the right track, but have actually fallen somewhat short of the ACTUAL pace of events, which like glacial melts have been accellerating ever faster and more so than predicted. Don't expect natural gas to assist in this matter very much. While natural gas is "cleaner" than most other hydrocarbon fuels in terms of particulates and exotic byproducts, it still produces carbon dioxide "a mainline greenhouse gas" in great abundance as THE principle byproduct of burning it (check the formulas). People, religion and talk radio serve their purposes during these troubled times, but literally for GOD's sake, don't rely on them as your primary source of scientific truth! There's just too much at stake.

In an earlier post, I described the sequence of events, as I recall them, in the ozone depletion debacle.

I would offer that the original proposal of CFC phaseout at the manufacturing level was an example of a reasonable solution (minimum disruption/maximum effect), resulting in minimal opposition.

I would further offer that the betrayal of the refrigeration industry in breaking that agreement was a lesson not lost on other industries... and could possibly even mark the birth of opposition to environmentalism in general.

The clear message was: Environmentalists cannot be trusted.

I had suggested earlier for those interested in why a focus on solutions and not on the science is premature by looking at Woods Hole.

Woods Hole is a believer in Anthropogenic Climate Change and have a contract out to Liu and others at University of Wisconsin to use the Oakridge peta-speed computer. Now the data is not out but their rationale and prior work is known.

http://www.environmental-expert.com/news/oak-ridge-supercomputers-provide-first-simulation-of-abrupt-climate-change-58423

What is evident, that the current data and computer model simulations are not fit for purpose. There are significant gaps in modeling past climate. Concocting solutions to address inadequately modeled past climate seems hardly wise.

What ever the IPCC says in WG1, WG2, or WG3 should be taken with a large dose of skepticism as this is primarily a political body with a smidgen of science used as justification. There are other climate scientists who view sensitivity of a doubling of CO2 to be @ 1, in which case, there is likely to be a benefit to global warming and the catastrophe would have been the wasting of resources on CO2 mitigation.

RiHo08, 1C? Seriously? Have you read Knutti & Hegerl (2008)? Abstract: www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v1/n11/abs/ngeo337.html

Of course these personal attacks against Mr. Mann and other AGW proponents are not right. But it is a very emotional subject. Most arguments contain no or only little science. My overall impression is, from another forum, that the AGW crowd is quicker with personal attacks then the anti AGW crowd, and that on an internet forum, where they really know nothing about the person behind the comments. So if Mr. Mann gets a lot of flak, his disciples probably brought it onto him. This is not an excuse but maybe part of an explanation.

DSL

Would a sensitivity range of 0.8 to 1.2 be more accurate?

Nice, African Rover, but wrong. Spend some time in the comment streams at WUWT, ClimateAudit, and Curry's blog. Spend some time in the comment streams of any online news publication concerning AGW. Then compare that to the comment streams at SkepticalScience, Eli Rabett's blog, and Open Mind (tamino). Yes, Open Mind can be harsh on garbage, but it's a well-evidenced harshness.

RiHo08, are you talking straight CO2 forcing--no feedbacks? If not, I'd like to know who gave you the 1C.

DSL

Short answer: Forest et al 2006.

As you know a doubling of CO2 in 100 years would give a rise in Global Mean Temperature (GMT) of @ 1.2 C, per IPCC WG1 calculations. They already accounted for the logarithmic saturation of CO2 IR spectral absorption/emission so that every added molecule of CO2 added to the atmosphere had less and less impact.

To get to 3.5 C rise in GMT the IPCC authors speculated that water vapor feedback would all be positive and no negative. There is no science data to support that conjecture. Its just a conjecture.

For AR 4 the climate sensitivity calculations relied upon were primarily those of Forest et al 2006. Forest et al 2006 came up with a climate sensitivity of 3. The problem with this calculation, it can't be reproduced. It seems that when requested, two data sets are provided (to two different researchers). One data set gives the climate sensitivity of 3 that you like. The other data set gives a climate sensitivity of 1 that I like. Which of us are correct? Well, gosh darn, we can't tell since the original raw data is lost and there is no way to go back and replicate either data sets, the infamous data adjustments.

Question: what is the probability that two iconic IPCC WG1 assumptions were based upon raw data that now has been lost? Mann's Hockey Stick and Forest's climate sensitivity. Pretty ironic, huh?

Here is another statistical puzzle: what is the probability that Forest works for Mann? Weird, right? What a coincidence that two iconic pieces can't be reproduced because.... the dog ate my homework. But that's science, isn't it? at least climate science.

Frankly, most of the skeptics/naysayers either have a vested interest due to their financiers; or worse, are in denial about climate change and are unable to educate/unwilling to educate themselves out of their own ignorance. This coupled with the paid shills on most mainstream science/news sites, the TPP trade agreement, and the sheer power of century old oil interests do not bode well for our planet.

The fact is, phytoplankton populations have decreased 40% since 1950. There is only one reason one of the most prevalent and well adapted staples of the food chain is rapidly declining -- they cannot adapt to the temperature changes that are occurring so rapidly. Outside of major extinction events (Permian/Cretaceous/etc) phytoplankton have successfully withstood catastrophic environmental changes -- including all the Ice Ages and former Warming Periods. Why does this concern us?

They provide 50% of Earth's oxygen, and if temperatures continue to increase (which more than 90% of marine biologists believe will occur if nothing changes soon), we will lose a vital organ of Earth's current ecosystem.

I say this irregardless of my political views or any other preconceived notions, as one informed individual to others.

Speak to anyone with a degree in marine biology about the state of phytoplankton -- there is an overwhelming consensus that global warming is causing the mass die-offs. One of my closest friends has a doctorate in marine biology (specifically microorganisms) and he regularly loses sleep thinking about the near future.

Well, gosh darn, we can't tell since the original raw data is lost and there is no way to go back and replicate either data sets, the infamous data adjustments.

RiH008,

Can you tell us specifically what original raw data was supposedly lost, and what sort of published results depended on that raw data?

Please be specific. If it's the data that I think it is, I'll be able to provide some useful information about it.

No - say rather that the direct forcing component of CO2 will yield 1.2C. That 1.2 will never happen, because feedbacks will occur, and they will be net positive.

Conjecture? Here's the abstract from Held (2006):

"The climate feedbacks in coupled ocean–atmosphere models are compared using a coordinated set of twenty-first-century climate change experiments. Water vapor is found to provide the largest positive feedback in all models and its strength is consistent with that expected from constant relative humidity changes in the water vapor mixing ratio. The feedbacks from clouds and surface albedo are also found to be positive in all models, while the only stabilizing (negative) feedback comes from the temperature response. Large intermodel differences in the lapse rate feedback are observed and shown to be associated with differing regional patterns of surface warming. Consistent with previous studies, it is found that the vertical changes in temperature and water vapor are tightly coupled in all models and, importantly, demonstrate that intermodel differences in the sum of lapse rate and water vapor feedbacks are small. In contrast, intermodel differences in cloud feedback are found to provide the largest source of uncertainty in current predictions of climate sensitivity."

From AR4: "Progress since the TAR enables an assessment
that climate sensitivity is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C."

IPCC modeling does not rely on one study of sensitivity, even if it is near the ensemble mean. A range of sensitivities are used. What you're saying appears to be a cheap way to try to connect the IPCC with something that sounds vaguely like scientific misconduct, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. And of course different sensitivity studies depend on the weighting of different data sets. There are scores of sensitivity studies, and each uses a slightly different methodology. What component do you think is being overweighted and why?

To scientists, RiHo08, those studies are not iconic. They are history. Science has moved on. Mann has moved on. Forest has moved on. Hockey sticks are now found in surface temp, CO2, ice mass loss (reversed), sea level rise, and ocean acidification. Whatever the data loss issues involved with those two studies (and I haven't encountered the details), they are irrelevant to current climate research except as historical notes.

The Mann-Forest connection conspiracy attempt is ridiculous. The buildup of Forest as a giant influence on IPCC projections is ridiculous and an insult to the thousands of other researchers who have taken part in the very large IPCC project. I'll look into the data loss issue, and I'll try to do it without any assumptions about your interpretation (or whoever's you found).

In addition to Exxon, the GM Foundation has withdrawn funding from the Heartland Institute. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/20/heartland-institute-future-staff-cash
So has beverage giant Diageo, the parent organziation to Guinness, Smirnoff, Johnnie Walker and Moet & Chandon, and automobile insurance company State Farm (Huffington Post)

caerbannog:

Mann's Hockey Stick represent paleoclimate reconstructions using tree rings. There have been several tree ring temperature reconstructions one of which was Briffa. Briffa's reconstruction raw data is lost. Mann said that he never used Briffa until it was pointed out to him that he had.

The raw data that was used for Forest et al 2006 is similarly lost per Forest.

DSL

As I stated before, there is no data that there are any feedbacks which amplify the CO2 radiative transfer effect. They can, they might, they ought to, and certainly the models we build show they do; but...as for imperial observations..ah..let me get back to you on that.

I would like to point out that models are not data; we can input data, but they are not data. One can feed all sorts of information and its errors and assumptions into a computer model and results from running such a model may help point a direction in which to further investigate. BUT models are not experiments, this is a virtual world where any similarity to actual observations is purely coincidental.

Regarding history, I hope you have read Melles et al 2012 core assessments as the caveats at the end are telling: New models will need to be constructed; greenhouse gas forcings will have to be reassessed regarding their impact upon temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctica.

Regarding Mann & Forest; Forest has certainly moved on, he is now a lead author for AR5. Mann is still getting awards for his bad science.

RiHo08, I'll read Melles when you read Puckrin (2004) and when you accept that evaporation increases with warmer temps, and when you read out scienceofdoom.com/2011/06/05/water-vapor-trends-part-two/.

Since you've admitted that H2O is a GHG, you can't really deny that adding more of it to the atmosphere doesn't slow the rate of cooling.

Mann said that he never used Briffa until it was pointed out to him that he had.

That's just plain wrong. Mann said that he didn't use the *Yamal* chronology in his original hockey-stick. He never claimed not to have used Briffa data. Mann made no secret about using Briffa data -- the Briffa data is included (and clearly labeled as such) in the MBH99 supplementary information that Mann made available on-line *years* ago, as a cursory examination (Google is your friend here) will reveal.

I have to agree with you African Rover, it can get emotional especially after hot-button propaganda like http://youtu.be/CZ-4gnNz0vc gets distributed to millions of viewers. I like the message of hope and working together that a presentation like http://tarsandsblockade.org/ represents... it's much better to keep it friendly, maintain a sense of faith for your fellow citizens and an attitude of courage in the face of uncertainty and emerging danger.

PopSci, it is interesting to take a look at the personal side of this debate, although I think this article is a little one-sided and veers away a bit from what the core of the climate change debate should be: science.

Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who provides credible citations to their claims. This debate has suffered dramatically from both sides spouting off hearsay without investigating the facts. And from extremely melodramatic "arguments" used on either side.

I find it ironic that the anti-climate change side calls themselves the skeptics when skepticism is an inherent part of the scientific method. Both sides should be skeptical of results published or put forth by either side. That is supposed to be at least partially enforced by the process of peer review. If it is true that review boards are corrupt with scientists who reject papers simply because these papers disagree with their own work (without actual scrutiny of the results presented in the submission), then the scientific community has a very vexing problem. Scientists are human, they aren't perfect--all they can do is try their best to understand this EXTRAORDINARILY complex universe in which we live, and we should give them credit for doing just that.

RiHo08 says “I would like to point out that models are not data; we can input data, but they are not data.”

There are two types of climate models.

Type #1 - There are physics-based climate models that take in facts about our planet and the external forcings that affect its climate. Output is a climate realization – sometimes a projection, sometimes a hindcast (e.g. AOGCMs, EMICs).

Type #2 - There are statistics-based climate models that take in temperature samples at many locations around our planet and attempt to stitch these incoherent measurements together and interpolate the missing values. Output is a climate realization - the one we think we experienced (e.g. HadCRUx, GISTemp, UAH).

It seems that RiHo08 puts all his faith in type #2 models, yet when there have been discrepancies, they more often in recent times have been resolved by finding and correcting errors in the type #2 models. This is especially true with type #2 models that use satellite data, which have been found to be erroneous due orbital drift, equipment changes, bad math, etc.

It even applies to type #2 models that use weather station data. Type #1 models tell us temperatures have been warming more in the 2000s and they tell us the 1940s temperature bump should not exist. Earlier this year the type #2 model called HadCRUT3 was replaced by HadCRUT4 and the new version agrees more closely with the type #1 models in these two respects (it went from coolest to warmest of the surface models, but just by a bit).

caerbannog,

You are right that Mann used Briffa in his reconstructions wiping out the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice age, hence, giving a straight handle to the Hockey Stick. He then removed tree rings after 1960 because... anyway tree rings showed a decline. Origin of the Climategate emails "hide the decline" and "nature trick."

I can't not put my finger on where I read that Mann had said he did not use Briffa, it may have been the part after 1960. that he didn't use. In any case, my original point that Briffa's raw data has been lost and his reconstructions can no longer be reproduced is valid. There is pre-processed data, just not original.

DSL

I am not sure we are at the same place as regards to the data verses its interpretation.

When I say there is no data for the amplification process I am correct, there is no data. A mechanism of amplification is hypothesized to give the IPCC's assertion of a climate sensitivity range of 2 to 4 C. This range remains the same as 25 years ago precisely because there is no data. This is an assumption, otherwise the CO2 trace gas radiative transfer model does not work.

Yes, water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Water in all its form including clouds, oceans, ice and snow are a more complex issue. The simple assertion that warm water evaporates just does not approximate what is going on re: water's role in climate. Ocean currents, transport of heat both in the atmosphere and oceans are just some of these issues. Arctic and Antarctic polar vortices, the influence of UV light on ozone in the stratosphere may play a bigger role in climate than currently accounted for in GCMs.

If you are not willing to read the several papers I have provided links to, that is your loss. These papers are current. In part, the more we know, the less we know. The more science we learn, the more climate demonstrates that it is dynamically complex, at least one of the reasons why Liu et al need much faster computers than those of the past. The equations are certainly not linear and any assumptions of linearity are incorrect, even as first approximations. The statistical treatment requires a rigor on a very high level. The grid cell to grid cell dynamics, particularly the infill, where there is no data is suspect and requires assumptions that have not been validated.

There are numerous other issues involved which have now been confounded by the loss of raw data; the homogenization and adjustments made to data that has not been articulated; the lack of archival data and computer code so that climate scientists research can be duplicated using their own data; and now the obvious issues of integrity of the individuals who have been involved in climate science, particularly as they have moved into their advocacy roles.

My statements stand: all models are wrong; the science surrounding climate science is not sufficiently mature to focus upon solutions; the integrity of some researchers, sentinel researchers is in question and needs resolution before preceding further.

I hope this helps.

Splunge, this article is focused on denial, not so much valid skepticism. Denial is cynical subterfuge, the deliberate muddying of science, instigation of anger and silencing of scientific debate using threats of violence, all to manipulate a political outcome and produce return on investment.

The issue of climate change is larger than the science, of course. Having a good understanding about the facts of the matter knowing the damage we're inflicting and an outline of risks we're magnifying, the issue evolves into developing a reasonable plan of action to respond to the problem. To do this, we must answer what it is that we truly value? What do we care about, what is important... what is the right thing to do and what is the wrong thing to do? These are fundamental climate change questions that need to be answered, but they're not scientific questions.

The denial strategy described in the Popular Science magazine is about hog-tying and strangling the science so it's impossible to progress to discussing values and responsible action, and it's refreshing to shine some sunlight on that facet of the scientific process.

It's fairly certain there are extremists on both sides of the issue who are willing to resort to violence (state sanctioned or otherwise). This neither proves nor disproves anything.

Which brings us full circle. The price is your money and your freedom, with no guarantees. Totalitarianism, here we come.

There's certainly proof of extremists who threaten violence on the denial side of the debate (which this article describes in detail) but I haven't seen extremism among those who agree with the scientific consensus. From what I can see, the people who want to respond to the problem consistently promote non-violence. The extremism appears to be quite one-sided.

Just exactly what do you think "laying down the law" means?

You are not going to eliminate mankind's carbon footprint, short of dominating mankind and crushing anyone who gets in your way. What will you do with those (individuals, companies, nations) who refuse to comply? At what point will you bring out the guns?

First, let me say that the people that are making personal threats of violence are despicable human beings.

However, even a cursory reading of this article shows that it is incredibly biased.

Stop trying to pretend that members of the scientific community are apolitical and driven solely by the love of discovery. Research is funded and pursued by people with big pockets and even bigger agendas.

When scientists are disingenuous with their biases and motivations, it unfortunately hurts people's perceptions of the reliability of scientific knowledge as a whole.

Want to help the public's perception of Science? Don't make the standard of true science any belief to which you agree, and be honest about your biases. Be willing to engage others in the world of ideas.

It is no wonder that the public distrust you when you point to abnormally warm weather as intuitive evidence for your beliefs, but then ignore abnormally cold weather, or worse, claim that it supports your position as well. You can't have it both ways. Then, when people begin to ask questions, you resort to name-calling and adopt a condescending tone the laments that the poor unintelligent rabble simply can't see what is obvious to all the educated people.

I guess there is a reason ''ignore'' begins the word ignorant -- as many of these posts have proven. They simply ignore science that conflicts with their ''beliefs''. Beliefs have no place in science. Science is based upon questioning belief until it can be sufficiently proven. So now I find that I am repeating myself.

Frankly, most of the skeptics/naysayers either have a vested interest due to their financiers; or worse, are in denial about climate change and are unable to educate/unwilling to educate themselves out of their own ignorance. The most despicable thing is that they seem to fling this ''scientists have a vested interest'' and ''green is a way to totalitarianism''. Totalitarianism is already here, that's why you pay interest on the issuance of your own currency. This coupled with the paid shills on most mainstream science/news sites, the TPP trade agreement, and the sheer power of century old oil interests do not bode well for our planet.

The fact is, phytoplankton populations have decreased 40% since 1950. There is only one reason one of the most prevalent and well adapted staples of the food chain is rapidly declining -- they cannot adapt to the temperature changes that are occurring so rapidly. Outside of major extinction events (Permian/Cretaceous/etc) phytoplankton have successfully withstood catastrophic environmental changes -- including all the Ice Ages and former Warming Periods. Why does this concern us?

They provide 50% of Earth's oxygen, and if temperatures continue to increase (which more than 90% of marine biologists believe will occur if nothing changes soon), we will lose a vital organ of Earth's current ecosystem.

Speak to anyone with a degree in marine biology about the state of phytoplankton -- there is an overwhelming consensus that global warming is causing the mass die-offs. One of my closest friends has a doctorate in marine biology (specifically microorganisms) and he regularly loses sleep thinking about the near future.

Ask all the questions you'd like -- but being so closely linked to marine biologists I've seen first hand the effects of a climate warming far too fast. So where is 100 years of exhaust/CO2 going then if not remaining as a greenhouse gas? Oh yea, space is a vacuum and sucks it all away derp derp

In any case, my original point that Briffa's raw data has been lost and his reconstructions can no longer be reproduced is valid. There is pre-processed data, just not original.

The raw data that Briffa collected can be downloaded for free from the ITRDB data repository (Google is your friend).

As for other raw data (i.e. data collected by his Russian collaborators), well, if you want that data, you will have to contact the Russians! It's their data, not Briffa's -- so if you want it, contact them.

From http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/

Briffa has also been attacked by McIntyre for not releasing the original ring-width measurement records from which the various chronologies discussed in Briffa (2000) and Briffa et al. (2008) were made. We would like to reiterate that these data were never "owned" by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and we have never had the right to distribute them. These data were acquired in the context of collaborative research with colleagues who developed them. Requests for these data have been redirected towards the appropriate institutions and individuals. When the Briffa (2000) paper was published, release of these data was specifically embargoed by our colleagues who were still working towards further publications using them. Following publication of the 2008 paper, at the request of the Royal Society, Briffa approached colleagues in Sweden, Ekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk and their permission was given to release the data. This was done in 2008 and 2009. Incidentally, we understand that Rashit Hantemirov sent McIntyre the Yamal data used in the papers cited above at his request as early as 2nd February, 2004.

The Climatic Research Unit has never been a prolific producer of tree-ring records, focussing mainly on the collaborative analysis of data generously provided by other institutions. We will continue to respect restrictions placed upon the dissemination of data by those colleagues who provide them. All of the data produced at CRU (sampled from living oaks or pines at various sites around the UK and Scandinavia) have been provided on request. (All of the data used or produced in the analysis described here are provided on the Data page.)

Any claims that Briffa somehow "lost" the raw data needed to confirm his work are just plain dishonest (par for the course for global-warming "skeptics").

WOOFIGHTER;

I glossed over your comments in pursuit of two other bloggers up thread and didn't acknowledge your points as I should have. I apologize.

Last things first:
Your description of two types of climate models does not address what I hoped to make clear: all models are wrong. Models can and have be used to assess assumptions about input parameters. Realizations, projections, whatever are outputs that might have some semblance of reality; however, the lack of verification and validation of these models precludes making statements about certainty of the output. If equilibrium climate sensitivity is altered in the models from 3 C per doubling of CO2 to 1 C, there may be warming, just not anything to write home about. If ECS is in a minus category, i.e., CO2 forcing is a trivial matter compared to let's say ocean currents, atmospheric pressures, polar vortices etc, as may have happened for the Younger Dryas, then we really do not know earth's thermostat and why earth's temperature range has been between 10 and 25 C for a very long time.

So my take on the climate models, they have no predictive validity as they are not verified nor validated. I am not disputing physics, I am disputing relevance. We simply, in my opinion, do not have a sufficient understanding what natural internal variability is, its extent, how it changes, etc for us to have any confidence in any predictive device.

Re: HadCRUT 4 I have said that I am suspicious of data that has been adjusted. I prefer transparency in all adjustment justifications. I prefer others, myself included, having a opportunity to work through the author's data set. There are smart people and methodical people who want to figure things out for themselves. Which brings us to the integrity of some climate scientists which at this junction has put everybody on razor's edge. Dialogue and engagement I hope will eventually win out and a better understanding of natural, internal influences of climate change will emerge. I believe we are far from discussing solutions to an as yet an uncertain issue.

RiHo08 said,

Re: HadCRUT 4 I have said that I am suspicious of data that has been adjusted. I prefer transparency in all adjustment justifications. I prefer others, myself included, having a opportunity to work through the author's data set. There are smart people and methodical people who want to figure things out for themselves.

Well, I just happened to have crunched the HadCRUT4 data myself recently, with a C++ program that I wrote from scratch and ran on my laptop.

In addition to the HadCRUT4 data, I also processed the raw HadCRUT3 data, the raw GHCN V2 data, *and* the raw GHCN V3 data. Here's a plot of my results (with the official NASA/GHCN results included as a comparison): img834.imageshack.us/img834/1282/myghcnmycrunasaghcn.jpg

As you can see, the HadCRUT4 data produces results that are *very* similar to the three *raw* data-sets (HadCRUT3, GHCN2/3). The results match the official NASA results very closely. So it's pretty clear that the "adjustments" that you are so suspicious of basically cancel each other out when you compute global-average temperatures.

Now mind you, the algorithm that I coded up is quite straightforward -- it implements a "vanilla" temperature anomaly gridding/averaging procedure that involves no data adjustments or modifications of any kind. Just straightforward gridding/averaging of raw data.

All the data and documentation I needed to tackle this project are freely available on-line.

Now my question to you guys is -- why, in all the years you've been questioning the validitity of global temperature data, haven't you ever bothered to roll up your sleeves and try crunching that data yourselves? For a competent programmer, knocking together a crude program to get some initial results out is just a few days' worth of work.

If you ever *do* get serious about analyzing the temperature data, you will find out what I found out:

1) Rural and urban station data produces nearly identical results (i.e. the UHI effect is minimal).

2) Raw and adjusted/homogenized data produces very similar results (i.e. the adjustments pretty much cancel each other out).

3) You need to process data from only a few dozen stations scattered around the world to get results that look very similar to the results that NASA gets by processing *thousands* of stations.

IOW, you would find that the global-warming signal just "jumps right out at you" no matter how you process the data (providing that you do it right).

So RiHo08 -- here's what I don't understand about you guys. You seem to have endless amounts of time to complain about the temperature data and take pot-shots at the hard-working scientists who analyze it, but you never seem to have the time to crunch the data yourselves and produce your own global-average results.

The basic gridding/averaging algorithm isn't that difficult -- I could teach first-year programming students how to code it up.

The equilibrium climate sensitivity of ~ 3 C per doubling of CO2 is not an input to or a setting that’s specified for a GCM run. It is an emergent property of a model run determined ultimately by the rules of physics and nonlinearities that follow from those rules.

As I said, models of any type are not perfect but they are useful. They are a simplification of reality that allows us to understand the major factors affecting climate. If models of completely different types by independent modelers all produce similar results, then that tells us that at least the major factors are being modeled correctly. Minor factors will make a minor difference and don’t change the big picture. We know that CO2 and H2O are major warming factors. Clouds not so much. Changing insolation, ice coverage and cosmic rays almost not at all over the time frames under discussion here.

You are making perfection the enemy of good enough. Models are now dominant tools in all branches of hard science. If you reject models as evidence, you reject a good deal of science. This just increases our uncertainty about the future and means we need take even more precautions, like reducing CO2 emissions sooner and faster.

CAERBANNOG

Thank you for your efforts to /Users/honicky/Desktop/6a010536b58035970c0167619adf70970b.png

"Totalitarianism is already here, that's why you pay interest on the issuance of your own currency. This coupled with the paid shills on most mainstream science/news sites, the TPP trade agreement, and the sheer power of century old oil interests do not bode well for our planet."

Pointing out that others are "bad guys" doesn't make you a "good guy". I am not partial to either brand of totalitarianism, yours or theirs.

caerannog

I copied and pasted your graph and am pleased that you chose the time from 1880 to @ 2008. In the past, March 2010 on Bart Vehenggen's blog a statistician calling themselves VS went through that very temperature sequence (1880 to 2008) and identified that all points fall within a natural variance. As I view your graph, unless I am mistaken, then all point in your graph fall within natural variation as well.

I am having a little computer brain lapse and posted just up thread what I hope is a graph with temperature record superimposed upon the scenarios from IPCC WG1. As is evident at least via the graph, the projections for various CO2 scenarios from business as usual to cessation of further CO2 emissions. I realize the title is a bit flamboyant, nevertheless, the idea is that as global atmospheric CO2 rises, their projections so far are not anyway near what the real world temperatures are.

I believe if you superimposed your graph upon the graph I have provided, you would come up with the same picture. Meaning of course, that IPCC projections as they embody their Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity values, are way too high and the current GMT corresponds to a ECS of @ 1.

Try it and let me know what you find.

Regards

Greystone, to me "laying down the law" refers to legislating the elimination of carbon-based fuels. My motive in this is driven by a personal interest in keeping my children safe. I like the idea of a feebate that incentivizes markets to try new ideas and that benefits the public, but doesn't bloat energy companies or add layers of government. Kind of like what James Hansen recommends in a speech at the TED conference, "Why I must speak out about climate change." I've heard arguments about funding revenue to poor countries who are suffering the brunt of the problem but who didn't create the problem, and I'd go along with that. I strongly advocate for removing politicians like senator Inhofe and rep Joe Barton-- I believe they pose a threat to everything I hold dear.

Fossil carbon-based fuels to be more exact.

woofighter

I concur that models can be useful particularly when questions are asked and a run then "sees what happens." What models don;t substitute for is observational data. Is the model true or false. Predictions are the hallmark of science in general and climate science in particular. When there are predictions, then we see if in the observational world, if the predictions come true. Models in no way are "data", they are virtual world runs. Models would have to be verified and validated something in the engineering world becomes paramount before committing resources to an endeavor.

We need to have models that have time frames which allow us to see observationally that the questioned asked has validity. Currently years, like 30+ years may be needed to determine if a particular question has an answer.

If there is a persistent plateau or decline in GMT for 17+ years, there is a likelihood that the model of rising CO2 causing rising temperatures is wrong. So 30 years is not magic, just that there needs to be some predictions and observations that concur and for us to make sense of the climate debate.

The failure to predict correctly has been why I am suspicious of models being tuned to hind cast and then claimed they hind cast very well and so they can predict some aspect of the future. Doesn't make sense to me.

RiHo08 - check out the video regarding global cooling at http://blogs.redding.com/dcraig/archives/2012/06/global-warming-11.html -- it has your answer regarding decline of GMT, and is quite humorous too.

Greystone --

There is a difference between being a productive member of society and a parasitic profiteer. They will get theirs eventually, as will we all unless something is done to curb the phytoplankton die-offs.

My point in posting here seems to be ignored for some reason. Hmm. So we are ignoring the most important and relevant piece of evidence of global warming. Even Scientific American and National Geographic printed sourced articles on the catastrophe that is occurring with phytoplankton -- and what their extinction would mean. 50% less oxygen, the death of the ocean, and a 50% decrease in the amount of CO2 able to be absorbed.

How old are you 15? Good guys and bad guys? Why would you insinuate that something of that nature even matters? I doubt Earth will care either way, it's been around long before us and will be around long after....albeit it might look like Arrakis in a few hundred years but it'll be here.

OK folks, I showed that the data adjustments don't change the results, and that it's easy to reproduce the NASA/CRU global-surface temperature results with raw data that hasn't been "adjusted".

And what happens? The subject gets changed -- now, it's claimed that the warming showed by the surface temperature record simply "falls within a natural variance".

But the results I showed are the same results that skeptics have long claimed contained a fake warming trend due to "data adjustments". But when I show how you get the same warming trend without any "data adjustments", the warming trend gets redefined as "within a natural variance".

To summarize: First, it's "the warming trend is due to data adjustments". Now it's "the warming is within a natural variance".

There's really no point in continuing this.

Anyway, I hope that some "on the fence" lurkers have taken a look at my global-temperature results and are now convinced that the global warming shown by the surface temperature record is the "real deal".

It was very hard to force myself to read the climate articles in this issue. Although I may fall somewhat on the disbelieving side I always try to keep an open mind. The name of this magazine is Popular SCIENCE! I still can't tell if any of this is real science or not.

When you have heros like Al Gore and Michael Moore I think you lose credibility. Convince me with SCIENCE not by saying "It's Settled global warming is real!" Convince me that is worth while for the U.S. to pay for global warming remediation (Kyoto Treaty?) while China and other countries pollute unhindered and pay next to nothing.

Now it's climate change and not so much global warming any more. I've watched the climate CHANGE for over 50 years. Prove to me scientifically that our climate is in danger... or not in danger for that matter.

It might be in danger.

As astrophysicist Dr. Abdussamatov, head of the Russian segment of the International Space Station, discusses, there is reason to suspect potentially onset of "the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7500 years in 2055 [A.D.] ± 11 [years]":

http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754

Don't expect CO2 variation to stop that if it gets started.

In the Modern Warm Period, like prior ones in the Holocene, most temperature change has occurred is in the arctic, with lower latitudes having had much less. As the following nasa.gov graph shows (copy and paste link into a browser tab), temperatures were as high in the arctic in the 1930s as in the late 20th century:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ArcticIce/Images/arctic_temp_trends_rt.gif

Both temperature peaks are near peaks in the 60-year ocean cycle, although there are other influences too including what figure 7 of Makarov et al. highlights for trends in the aa index meanwhile.*

Regarding the arctic having the most temperature change, in the following for MSU satellite data by zone for 1979->2012, the tropics from 20N to 20S had not more than 0.1 to 0.2 degrees Celsius at most of meaningful temperature rise (unlike how a 5-year average of arctic temperature went up by 0.7 degrees 1979->2000):

http://tinyurl.com/6qbtwpt

Sea level rise rates, in recovery from the last LIA, declined in the second half of 20th century compared to the first half or to rise in the late 19th century:

"The first half of the century (1904-1953) had a slightly higher rate (1.91 ± 0.14 mm/yr) in comparison with the second half of the century (1.42±0.14 mm/yr 1954-2003)."

http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/Holgate/sealevel_change_poster_holgate.pdf

Jevrejeva et al. 2006 noted "it is apparent that rates in the 1920-1945 period are likely to be as large as today's."

Jevrejeva, S., Grinsted, A., Moore, J.C. and Holgate, S. 2006. Nonlinear trends and multiyear cycles in sea level records. Journal of Geophysical Research 111: 10.1029/2005JC003229.

Also see CO2 versus temperature in the following for the past 200-11000 years, different from the ice age graphs people are used to seeing because it is not so zoomed out to million-year scale (which means the lag time of centuries for oceans thousands of meters deep to warm to their depths, for warming to cause CO2 increase afterwards, is not a mere pixel or overlapping line on a graph):

http://tinyurl.com/3d4mrbt

The above is for official NOAA data, at:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/greenland/summit/gisp2/isotopes/gisp2_temp_accum_alley2000.txt
and
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc-co2.txt

The best bet in event of a 19th LIA starting in the middle of this century could be high-yield greenhouses, reducing land areas needed for farming and resistant to climate change. Based on http://settlement.arc.nasa.gov/75SummerStudy/5appendC.html adjusted for not 24 hour sunlight, around a factor of 20 times yield increase per unit area per year could be obtained over conventional outdoor agriculture, from increase to several seasons per year and also the vast benefits of CO2 increase on plant growth (discussed at http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/plantgrowth.php ). Potentially do that, and mass-produce, say, nuclear thorium reactors for power and heat to them if getting motivated, with fuel not a problem:

There is around 120 trillion tons of thorium in Earth's 3*10^19 crust. "Even common granite rock with 13 ppm thorium concentration (just twice the crustal average, along with 4 ppm uranium) contains potential nuclear energy equivalent to 50 times the entire rock's mass in coal, although there is no incentive to resort to such very low-grade deposits as long as much higher-grade deposits remain available and cheaper to extract."

* http://helios.izmiran.ru/hellab/Obridko/77381570.pdf

Some posting to this board will find the EPA's appellate judgment instructive:

"Industry groups had argued that the science of global warming was not well supported and that the agency had based its judgment on studies that were a compilation and synthesis of thousands of other studies, which made the conclusions unreliable.

But the three-judge panel, led by conservative Chief Judge David Sentelle, seemed to bristle at that contention.

'This is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.'"

RiHo08 says “What models don’t substitute for is observational data”
__________

What you fail to understand is that there is no ‘observational data’ without models, at least not globally. It’s model against model in the climate world. The goal is to see all the various types of models agree (synthetic and ’observational’) and they do agree quite well. That gives us confidence they are correct.

30 years is not magic but it is when the climate system’s internal variability cancels out sufficiently to see the underlying signal, which is a warming one. Measure less than 30 years and you measuring something other than climate. AGW-supportive climate models produce runs that show 20-year periods without any warming in the middle of this century yet still end the century with the same warming as other runs. Internal variability is very high in the climate system.

Again, it seems to me that you reject model projections because you don’t like the outcome, not because they are wrong.
__________

Nature Climate Change has a new paper by some big names in the field of oceanography. One of the main conclusions of that study is ...

We now know that the models never simulated the "observed and significantly large decadal variability" because it was mostly caused by the systematic errors in the XBTs, not known at that time.

Synthetic models 1
Observational models 0

kauaidan said,

"When you have heros like Al Gore and Michael Moore I think you lose credibility."

Why do you keep calling those guys *our* heros? You guys are the ones who keep bringing them up.

It's really amusing to see you "skeptics" accusing us pro-science folks of obsessing over Al Gore when it's you "skeptics" who always trot him out.

meerkat, you seem to have missed my point. You would like to believe that your side is non-threatening, but implicit in "laying down the law" is the threat of punishment, backed up by the full force of government... up to and including the use of violence. It is not an idle threat, but very real and credible.

The greatest danger to your children and my grandchildren is not from the climate, but from government micromanagement of every tiny facet of their lives. I would very much like my grandchildren to live in a free society, but I see freedom fading fast. The science/politics coalition has the very real potential of destroying the American dream. You are dancing with the devil. Environmental politics poses a very real threat to everything I hold dear.

MEERKAT

Thank you for the video clip, I agree its funny. Not stated by the Penn State scientist but is evident, choosing one's start point can give an impression of plateau, warming, cooling.

If we go back to caerbannog's temperature graph, it started in 1880 and ended in 2008, a period I do know something about and the temperatures all fall within natural variation. That is, we have been warming up from the Little Ice Age (LIA) (which seems to have ended @ 1850 or so) at 0.8 C per century.

If we borrow from another Penn State researcher, Michael Mann, in manufacturing his infamous Hockey Stick, he disappears both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming Period (MWP), that is, he makes the handle of the Hockey Stick straight and then states that the modern warming period is "unprecedented". I'm afraid not. The Medieval Warming Period was at least as warm as present Modern Day Warming if not warmer. So the only unprecedented item present is Mann's science is, chutzpah. Subsequent reconstructions have restored MWP and LIA, whew!

If we go back seven thousand years ago, during the so called Climate Optimum, then we appear to be in a cooling phase of the Holocene.

My point, choose your start point for temperature reconstruction to show what ultimately is one's bias. I don't think the good scientists from Penn State: Mann, Craig, and Forest are doing anything but, to use a sheep metaphor, pull the wool over the public's eye whom they call "deniers".

I am no ostrich. I see clearly when faced with con men who try to bamboozle me. Lincoln's message about fooling all the people some of the time... comes to mind.

woofighter;

I think you make my point. All models are wrong, even big expensive government models are wrong. Observational models in of themselves are not the Holy Grail. What science does say: predictions, and this is where models come in in helping make predictions, are the hallmark of science. Observation can help validate a prediction. However, even a stopped clock is right twice a day, so it is important that skepticism remains even when the observation seems to confirm the prediction.

All models need validation and verification. All GCM have neither been validated nor verified. Until such time GCM have had V&V, no cigar.

Greystone -- a paid shill.

Likewise, models mean nothing when the actual evidence is there and present -- the MASS PHYTOPLANKTON DIE-OFFS AS A RESULT OF TEMPERATURES RISING. But, as critical reading is not a strong point of the ignorant and financially empowered ''stupid'', I guess i can understand.

Neo... I'm confused. Are you confessing that you are a paid shill?... or are you accusing me of being one?

I am opposed to government micromanagement. If you can find someone willing to pay me for saying so, please let me know. I could sure use the money.

Perhaps this will help resolve your obvious confusion:

Tune in your favorite news channel... or for that matter any news channel... or read a newspaper, any newspaper... or just simply scroll up to the top of this page and read the article.

THAT'S WHAT A PAID SHILL LOOKS LIKE.

Hope this helps. :)

You're opposed to government micromanagement? So the macro-management they do in terms of wars for private interests (unocal/exxon/boeing/lockheed to name a few) and the bailouts to corrupt/disastrously run companies doesn't bother you? (This is not really the place to discuss any of that given the context of the article lol)

The point is: phytoplankton die-offs. I could care less what else you derive from what I type here. I was only attempting to relay first hand insights from a field of science that is frightened of what their extinction would mean for Earth.

I am opposed to non-defensive wars as well as bailouts, but what really yanks my chain is tobacco taxes. Thank you for asking.

I know absolutely nothing about phytoplankton. What I do know is that whenever someone says the sky is falling, there is a politician getting ready to bend us all over.

Oh... and I hate seat belt laws, too.

The strangest thing is Libertarian types fear government micromanagement yet refuse simple market measures that would rectify a common problem slowly over time. The consequence of ignoring this problem is it will grow larger until it inevitably requires the heavy hand of government in all facets of our lives to ensure the emergency is handled in the most expedited manner. Think in future terms of mandated electric cars or public transit, no jet travel without a special government permit, electricity rationing, shutdown of resource industries, prolonged recession as the economy restructures, etc. All this could be avoided for the about same price we pay to avoid water pollution today by building sewage systems. Or are you against socialistic solutions like sewage systems too?

The sky isn't falling as much as the sea is dying and with it 50% of our oxygen supply. Belief does not matter in the face of facts. Just look up ''phytoplankton decline''. I don't see how anyone would make money off such a catastrophe -- unless they could put a monopoly on air itself....hmmm...

Greystone, I made it clear where I stand, not that what I think matters much. But where do you stand? Do you think freedom is the absence of laws? Do you have the right to hurt other people, ruin property, and imperil life on earth, for freedom?

Net primary productivity is a gauge of how plant life is doing, defined as the net flux of carbon from the atmosphere into photosynthetic life per unit time.

Even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change#Vegetation mentions:

"Satellite data available in recent decades indicates that global terrestrial net primary production increased by 6% from 1982 to 1999, with the largest portion of that increase in tropical ecosystems, then decreased by 1% from 2000 to 2009.[50][51]"

(It goes up and down but mostly increased over recent decades).

Such gives its references:

[50] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/300/5625/1560.abstract
and
[51] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/329/5994/940.abstract

For part of a longer perspective than fluctuations over those 3 decades, a study by the U.S. government's ORNL estimated that estimated carbon in global terrestrial vegetation increased from approximately 740 billion tons in 1910 to 780 billion tons in 1990, major growth in biomass:

Post WM, King AW, Wullschleger SD, Hoffman FM (June 1997). "Historical Variations in Terrestrial Biospheric Carbon Storage". DOE Research Summary (CDIAC, U.S. Department of Energy) 34.

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/pns/doers/doer34/doer34.htm

One can see what is going on overall indirectly even from measurements of carbon dioxide change in the atmosphere. For example, during 1999-2009, human CO2 emissions averaged around 27 billion tons a year, which amounted to about 270 billion tons of CO2 emitted into to the atmosphere over a decade (not counting other CO2 sources/sinks, not counting CO2 going more in loops within the biosphere). Meanwhile, there was a measured increase in atmospheric CO2 levels of 19.4 ppm by volume, 155 billion tons by mass, an amount 57% of the preceding but only 57% of it. Around another 25% goes into the oceans. But the remaining gap goes into increased growth of biomass in plants (and indirectly sometimes soil), with the carbon fertilization effect of higher CO2 levels. As a study at http://www.int-res.com/articles/cr2002/19/c019p265.pdf notes:

"The observed increase in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is lower than the difference between CO2 emission and CO2 dissolution in the ocean. This imbalance, earlier named the ‘missing sink’, comprises up to 1.1 Pg C yr–1, after taking land-use changes into account." "Stimulation of photosynthesis at higher CO2 concentrations is repeatedly observed in short-term experiments at the single leaf level. A number of biosphere models take this effect into account for calculating the natural terrestrial sink. The results of such calculations are normally in close agreement with the magnitude of the ‘missing sink’."

We would see even in CO2 trends the effect if a huge portion of photosynthetic organisms died out, but we don't.

Incidentally, oxygen levels of Earth's atmosphere as a percentage of the total do not change much except over vast periods of time such as thousands to millions of years, as the atmosphere contains approximately 1000000 billion tons of oxygen, vastly beyond the level of parts per million change in CO2. The only reason we are able to affect CO2 concentration relatively much on a scale of decades and centuries is because CO2 is relatively a trace gas of orders of magnitude less total mass in the atmosphere. Oxygen is a totally different matter by orders of magnitude. For instance, at present levels of technology (and at basically any short of godlike sci-fi ubertech), we could not remove much of the total oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere in a thousand years if we tried, as a few billion tons/year industrial capabilities contrast to the 5100000 billion metric ton atmosphere. For practical purposes, we can only affect its composition in terms of trace gases like CO2, CFCs, and so on. See the mass and composition of the atmosphere given at http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html

For ocean plankton sampling over most of a century, there is a survey called CPR, the Continuous Plankton Recorder, which has operated in the North Sea and North Atlantic Ocean since way back near the World War II era. Such is referenced in the following study:

Raitsos, D., Reid, P.C., Lavender, S.J., Edwards, M. and Richardson, A.J. 2005. Extending the SeaWiFS chlorophyll data set back 50 years in the northeast Atlantic. Geophysical Research Letters

32: 10.1029/2005GL022484.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005GL022484.shtml

Raitsos et al. observe "an increasing trend is apparent in mean Chl-a for the area of study over the period 1948-2002." What they are referencing by "Chl-a" is Chlorophyll-a, essentially a proxy for primary productivity in this case, showing how the plankton have been doing.

Antoine et al., a reference given below, looked at global ocean data starting in 1979, and, in that study's case, up to 2002. Again, while levels fluctuate up and down year to year, they saw an increase overall, not a decrease, over such a semi-lengthy time period (which is not really surprising under factors like carbon fertilization):

Antoine, D., Morel, A., Gordon, H.R., Banzon, V.J. and Evans, R.H. 2005. Bridging ocean color observations of the 1980s and 2000s in search of long-term trends. Journal of Geophysical Research

110: 10.1029/2004JC002620.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004JC002620.shtml

Behrenfeld et al. data implies global net primary productivity fluctuated up and down over the 1998-2005 period; in terms of the starts of each year, it increased 1998 to 1999, went down relatively 1999 to 2001, went up 2001 to 2003, down again and up again ... but overall was higher in 2005 than in 1998, as seen in http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7120/images/nature05317-f2.2.jpg

For out to the year 2050 A.D., if one goes to http://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov/DOCS/ScienceTeam/OCRT_Apr2004/barber_ocrt04.pdf and then to near the end (pages 39-40) one can see their model results are a 0.7% increase in total global productivity by 2050, including a 5.6% change in phytoplankton biomass.

Such models have limitations, only as good as the assumptions and input data and programming, so mainly what is best is to rather focus on observations like those previously discussed. Still, though their future projection of a slight increase in primary productivity over that time period could be off, the point is it isn't anything like the amount of biomass halving. Such is no surprise if one sees indirect consequences of history like http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/Climate%20Change/PhanerozoicCO2vTemp.png where phytoplankton evolved long before the oldest time period depicted towards the right of the graph and lived through the times of thousands of ppm CO2 levels. The reference for the image's CO2 figures is Geocarb III which can be verified to be those on the NOAA paleoclimatology data server at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/climate_forcing/trace_gases/phanerozoic_co2.txt

Anybody can say anything on the internet (and, if not seeing an issue in auto-believing under-supported claims, I'm a space alien with twelve PhDs ;-), but the preceding may be verified.

There are always some media articles utterly BSing at any time, as can help sell stories and be from the ideologies of the writers,* but there has not actually been remotely like a 40% decrease in global plankton since 1950, more like a slight increase.

To really read the above, to check the multitude of reference links if in doubt (predominately quite a number of scientific papers where there are more beyond these samples), and even to learn anything whatsoever would require a level of intellectual honesty rather rarely seen on the internet in regard to matters like these, which are too often treated pseudoreligiously as
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ discusses rather than rationally and mathematically. Usually I expect a predictably clone-like dishonest response. But anyone should have one chance.

* A simple example in another context: Notice how many media outlets will spend thousands upon thousands of words talking about the implied terrible consequences of some isotopes in nuclear waste having half-lives of millions of years (favoring the standard binary thought fallacy, as if radiation then being non-zero was all that mattered), without ever even once mentioning some of the most basic quantitative facts including these:

"Since the fraction of a radioisotope's atoms decaying per unit of time is inversely proportional to its half-life, the relative radioactivity of a quantity of buried human radioactive waste would diminish over time compared to natural radioisotopes (such as the decay chains of 120 trillion tons of thorium and 40 trillion tons of uranium which are at relatively trace concentrations of parts per million each over the crust's 3 * 10^19 ton mass).[*][**][***] For instance, over a timeframe of thousands of years, after the most active short half-life radioisotopes decayed, burying U.S. nuclear waste would increase the radioactivity in the top 2000 feet of rock and soil in the United States (10 million km^2) by ≈ 1 part in 10 million over the cumulative amount of natural radioisotopes in such a volume, although the vicinity of the site would have a far higher concentration of artificial radioisotopes underground than such an average.[****]"

Of course, if such did much honest reporting of specific really relevant numbers like that, entire anti-nuclear organizations would lose funding, donations, and implode upon themselves on top of loss of face, for they don't themselves produce a physical product like electricity which sells in any case but rather have fully 100% of their millions of dollars of income dependent on public perceptions and on selling a story.

* Sevior M. (2006). "Considerations for nuclear power in Australia" (PDF). International Journal of Environmental Studies 63 (6): 859–872. DOI:10.1080/00207230601047255.
** Thorium Resources In Rare Earth Elements
*** American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2007, abstract #V33A-1161. Mass and Composition of the Continental Crust
**** Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 23:193-203;1998. Dr. Bernard L. Cohen, University of Pittsburgh. Perspectives on the High Level Waste Disposal Problem
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/Perspectives_on_HLW.htm

Have we become so brainwashed that we equate freedom with anarchy? We form governments to protect us from tyrants, not to become tyrants.

We have an inherent, instinctive (God given if you like) right to defend ourselves and we pass legitimate laws for that purpose.

The dividing line between just laws and unjust laws is clear and direct harm to others.

Crystal ball gazing is neither clear nor direct.

I'm asking about your morality based on what you say, irregardless of the facts of the matter. So, if we're doing something that directly causes harm, such as the flooding of other people's homes, loss of their land, loss of their crops and livestock, the burning of their forests and homes, destruction of, say, oyster raising operations, then the law devised to end such harm is just?

Apart from harm to other people, what's your opinion about actions that destroy nature and natural systems-- say, activity that directly causes the extinction of animal and plant species and collapse of ecological systems?

As a rule should we be free to choose which laws we prefer adhere to?

Should government have the authority to govern?

Animals and plants do not qualify for human rights.

Life is brimming with grey areas. The existence of grey areas does not invalidate the basic principles of human rights.

"As a rule should we be free to choose which laws we prefer adhere to?"

In point of fact, we do choose. There is civil unrest to the extent that people believe the laws are unjust. America has the highest per capita prison population in the world. What does that say about the perception of injustice in America?

Greystone --

"animals and plants do not qualify for human rights."

You do realize humans are animals right? This is clearly the basis for your ignorance to the importance of those useless phytoplankton. Humans can purport to ''deserve'' whatever rights they want, but ultimately the earth's ecosystem -- not humanity's, determines our ability to exist. With 50% of the ability to produce oxygen gone if global warming continues at the current rate, Earth will not be able to sustain most current life forms.

I am ashamed I wasted so many words on a mind so stupid. On the scale of complexity we don't even reach the 2nd tier, we have not even begun to meet our ecosystem at equilibrium. We are the lowest tier of what would be considered ''advanced life forms''.

Hopefully people like you will end up being sterile...though I doubt with your "mental prowess" you'd even be capable of finding a mate to reproduce with.

Humans are animals... but not all animals are humans. Get it?

Too late. I have great-grandchildren.

Neo... You would like to pretend I said phytoplankton were useless, or somehow implied such, but it just isn't so. Hopefully you are intelligent enough to not believe your own fiction.

In any case, this doesn't do much for your credibility.

Life is indeed filled with grey areas. I'd say this distinguishes reality from ideology. I'm finding myself agreeing with you on that one, Greystone but following your line of reasoning, it leads me to a conclusion that differs from yours, as if part of your moral maze is blocked by something. For me, the basic principles of human rights demand we eliminate a direct threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through the application of law. But you're not saying enough to convince me your thinking is anything more than an expression of selfishness. One question to clarify-- does your moral view extend to people in other countries not covered by our system of laws, or do you think they're not covered, or not worth thinking about?

As for the broader morality, I can certainly see that animals and plants are not people. Can you expand on what you think so it's possible for other people to know where you stand? Do you shrug it off as not worth thinking about, or only important if it affects, say food-- as a meat and potatoes matter? Or is more a view of "what will happen will happen" and freedom isn't worth the effort to consider such things?

Yes, we do choose anything we want, except perhaps those who are not free from addiction. But by asking, I'm curious how you think the system should work -- in your view, there should be no laws? Only voluntary laws? Please, explain.

And what do you mean when you say, "You are dancing with the devil"? The way I see it, I'm doing the work of God, protecting Creation from the Destroyer, not that I'm particularly religious this discussion fits that epic framework.

A discussion of morality should start with a moral premise. I would define "wrong" as the non-defensive use of force (against fellow humans). I would define "right" as your choice of not-wrong options.

As I see it, this is the instinctive seed from which value systems sprout (and deviate). If nothing else, it is a recipe for peaceful coexistence.

IMO, this is probably the closest we will get to an objective definition of morality, objective in the sense that it is based on objectively existent human instinct. When fellow humans attack us, we instinctively judge the morality of his/her actions.

As I see it, the alternative premise is "might makes right"... which renders morality entirely subjective.

Why would you exempt addiction? If people want to play Russian Roulette with addictive drugs, let them. It's their life, their choice, their consequences.

As a practical matter, I would simply issue refillable prescriptions to all confirmed addicts. This takes the profits out of drug dealing.

Do I extend my moral umbrella of defense to include all of mankind? Yes and no. We instinctively defend ourselves, our families, our communities, our nations, all humans everywhere. The closer to home, the more legitimate the defense. There are no clear cut lines, there are shades of grey.

We form governments to protect us from tyrants, not to become tyrants.

If the dividing line between just laws and unjust laws is clear and direct harm to others, then crossing that line and punishing people for actions which are not clearly and directly harmful to others, means we are clearly and directly harming others and it is we who are engaged in immoral behavior... we who are "dancing with the devil".

And yes, it's a big wide fuzzy grey line.

Am I opposed to laws? No... but they should be viewed as a last resort, not a first resort... a necessary evil at best and unnecessary at worst... just simply evil.

People tend to overestimate the effectiveness of laws and underestimate the effectiveness of persuasion. Persuasion creates allies, coercion creates enemies. Creating allies is better than creating enemies.

It's crazy to read about how easy it is to shout down scientific knowledge with rhetoric, especially when the public perceives a topic as particularly complex. I see this as analogous with the health care debate--it's understandably a complex law and as such its actual contents are so much more easily obscured by this kind of shouting of sound bites. Debate is a good thing--but rhetoric without depth or an intent to understand is certainly not.

Thanks for a great article, Tom!

@Greystone re: defense of others

You describe immorality as harming others without cause. Then you go on to say that you defend others based on their geographic location to you (or familiar location). These two ideas are incongruous. If harming others is immoral, it should not matter where they are in your mind's pecking order.

It is understood that you would defend yourself if someone out in the world attacked you. But if that is not the case, then you should be defending them. Location should not matter.

If it is proven that your high CO2 output is harming people in other areas of the world, like the Maldives, then you are acting immorally. They have not prompted you to use such amounts of CO2. They have done nothing to harm you. But your actions are harming them.

If you don't believe the science, that is one thing. But to say that the government should not be able to put into law that you use a restricted amount of CO2 (and that you believe the science is correct) is immoral. That law would be put in place in order to not cause further unjust harm to people in the world.

It's not about location, it's about relationships and relative justifications.

And where did I say people should not be stopped (by force of law if need be) from clearly and directly harming others? I believe I said just the opposite.

There are people all over the world, suffering at the hands of others... often at the hands of their governments. Shall we pass laws on their behalf? Shall we send out the troops to enforce those laws? Shall we become the police force of the world?

As to the science: If we are to persuade others, the science needs to be plausible... but if we are to punish others, a higher standard needs to be met, that of proving it beyond reasonable doubt.

Your conception of morality is spartan, spirited and rests on an indivisible premise, but it ignores all kinds of moral dilemma in the real world unrelated to force and the murder of the spirit, more like a bias born of frustration than morality to advance good. All that "isn't forced is fine" is unable adapt to new dilemmas never encountered, structural societal problems, large-scale matters that may demand technique to even comprehend, or subtler matters -- maybe like the upwind city dumping reactants into the air that increase the probability of cancer in your home town.

My moral conception is based on justice, which is also hard-wired by instinct, symbolized by scales of justice and capable of weighing any judgment without limit to complexity or subtlety. Its indivisible moral premise is quality, which includes your force on the one hand among other considerations-- quality is objective underlying reason. Quality is another instinct and you know it when you see it (or live it). This way of thinking puts no block in the moral maze, no scope limiting the kind of problem to which morality applies, and is adaptable to new and complex matters.

In the example, the harm is known through measurement, experimental observation of the reactant on similar living things, application of causative logic and mathematics but the harm is not directly witnessed or provable in individual cases-- it's a relationship and a probability. Like, in the real world you don't see a puff of smoke leave a stack, float over to a person who immediately sprouts boils of cancer and dies-- it's a slower and more insidious, but surely known problem. The upwind dumping is certainly harmful and demands corrective action to advance good, but your moral conception would be indifferent, as indirect and unprovable harm-- cancer would have happened anyway and a mere probability proves nothing in the individual case-- it's it's unknown despite being known. My conception applies reason to the societal matter, recognizes injustice and seeks to establish the highest quality (including the upwind city) with all its complexity. Yours shrugs and says, "not my problem".

Why focus on punitive solutions, when voluntary solutions are available?

For example, dig deep into your pocket, purchase a solar panel and donate it to Habitat for Humanity. Westinghouse has a plug-in system. You mount a panel on the roof and tie it into a breaker in the electrical panel. Subsequent panels can be added later. Panel #2 plugs into panel #1, panel #3 plugs into panel #2, etc. Possibly Habitat could make arrangements to purchase factory direct at a greatly reduced rate.

Just a thought.