your most accurate description EVARRR

....lived happily, if nastily, brutishly....

i used to be one of those people who believed 'people are basically good' . well, no they are not.

Hey guys, I lurk here often, but this time you real went too far. I am taking a class on global warming at the University of Washington. The professor and colllege are very liberal and Al Gore had a lot of bullshit in his movie, but anthropogenic global warming is a fact. The climate Is warming, on average. There will still be cold weather, even unusually cold weather in some places. This is because weather is variable; but the average temperature is shifting upward. If it is colder than usual some place, then it is warmer than usual some place else; law of thermodynamics. The warming that has occurred can not be caused by anything except human forcing; the activity of the sun is not up, and it never varies by very much, only 0.1% of its total output. Carbon dioxide levels are at about 380 parts per million, 100 ppm higher than pre-industrial levels. The "hockey-stick" of warmer temperatures sinse 1976 is accurate; much of the CO2 that has been emitted has been emitted since then. There has not yet been much warming but if business as usual occurs it could be very bad in 100 years.http://www.atmos.washington.edu/2008Q4/111/Lecture_Slides.htm- facts? The science is solid and eventually people will not be able to deny it. But ya, Day after tomorrow was nonsensical and Al Gore made some unscientific claims

Welcome, fellow educator! As I was saying to my colleague Prof. Ayers the other day, "Education must not be politicized. Say... shouldn't a bomb-maker be an engineering professor, not an education professor?"

Seriously, if our very survival depends on it as Prince Albert of Cannes claims, shouldn't he be a little more careful with his "facts", so that others might be convinced?

I do know that Al & Co. pushed taxes, regulation and UN-rule long before anyone mentioned Global Warming. And those just happen to be the exact cures they now propose. Either they are the luckiest guessers in the world, or they created a problem to match their favorite solution. Given that they've lied to me my entire life...

I see that you're convinced, but I'm still stuck on Horse Poo, cos' their Horse Poo's stuck on me.

ps; I'm glad you didn't use the "Climate Denier"-meme, which is a dime-store attempt by ethical slugs to leech some blood and moral stature from the Holocaust.

Mr. Peterson: The solar variability figure has only been measured for about 30 years. The CO2 lead versus lag is also of interest -- lead is predicted, lag is what is observed. Tell us -- how many of the fifty or so variations on the Global Climate Model can even backcast accurately?

Reasonable minds can still conclude that your statement that "anthropogenic global warming is a fact" is premature.

Nortius Maximus, to answer the first part of your post, it is true that the sun's activity has only been directly measured since 1978, and very little variation has been recorded in that time, there is still some information about solar activity in the past. Sunspots are associated with more energy coming from the sun, and there are (somewhat) reliable records of sunspots, dating to about 1600. It is known that during the little ice age in Europe, especially between 1650 and 1700, there was very little sunspot activity. In the 2007 IPCC report, estimates were given that relate to the past solar constant (it varies about 0.1% or so) that are extrapolated from direct insolation-sunspot number relationship, modeling the solar magnetic flux; C-14 and Be-10 measurements in trees (cosmogenic flux), and observing the range of luminosity in other Sun-like stars.

As for the CO2 lag and lead thing, all I can say is that when the temperature gets colder (as in an ice age) the CO2 goes down for some reason; this is a feedback that contributes to the cooling. However, CO2 levels were about 280 ppm before humans started putting CO2 into the atmosphere. The Earth was in a carbon cycle equilibrium; a large amount of CO2 was given off, and a large amount was put back in. However, the planet has not been able to re-equilibrate with the extra CO2 that humans have been putting in for the last 150 years; so the PPM goes up and the temperatures rises; it is aided by ice-albedo and water vapor positive feedbacks.

There are a lot of climate models, because there is a lot of uncertainty in some of the feedbacks, especially in the cloud feedback, owing to the different effects of high and low clouds and the unpredictability of which clouds will predominate. However, circa "Fifty million years ago during the Eocene the climate was globally warm with atmospheric CO2 levels much like those predicted for our future warm world. Polar regions were free of permanent ice caps but instead were covered by forest vegetation, now preserved in the rock record as fossil plants. In the northern high latitudes in the Canadian Arctic broad-leaved deciduous forests were dominated by the deciduous conifer dawn redwood (Metasequoia) along with pines, spruce and larch"-http://www.cprm.gov.br/33IGC/1343838.html. I couldn't find the lecture slide. However, there were palm trees in Wyoming, not that that will actually happen this time.

None of what you're saying actually addresses the question, Sean.

I'll restate it.

Increased C02 is predicted ahead of temperature increase. In fact, this is a major point in Al Gore's little propaganda piece "An Inconvenient Truth".

But the real inconvenient truth is that C02 increase occurs approximately 800 years behind temperature increase.

C02 increase is an effect, not a cause.

If climate scientists (and I use the term very loosely in most cases) can't even get that right, then how can we expect them to be right about anything else?

Here's another question for you: If water vapor is a positive feedback, then why did temperatures go up in the days following 9/11 in those areas affected by the no fly order?

Finally, since we know for a fact (as proved by evidence presented in the previous question) that contrails actually create a cooling effect, is it not highly probable that most anthropogenic global warming is simply counteracted by anthropogenic global cooling?

Randy Rager, are you banging on all cylinders? Where are you getting your information? How do you know that CO2 is an effect and that temperature increases 800 years before CO2 increases? Water vapor is indeed a positive feedback- it is the main greenhouse gas on the planet; this is evidenced by day and night time temperatures in the dry desert (Arizona) and the wet swamp (Louisiana)- the temperature goes down more at night in the dry desert because ther eis little water vapor in the atmosphere; it goes down less in the wet swamp because there is more water vapor. Water vapor is a positive feedback because warmer temperatures from CO2 causes more evaporation of water, which causes warming, and more evaporation, and so on. Contrails and coal smoke etc do produce aerosols which block sunlight, reduces the temperature, this is known and measured. I doubt jets give off more water vapor than contrails. In East Asia, where the Chinese produce lots of aerosols, the temperature is cooler than would be expected in these areas otherwise.

I retract the question are you banging on all cylinders, I am sure you are. Thing is, it is known that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Even if CO2 were following temperature under normal circumstances, the fact that we are putting more up than the planet can recycle means that CO2 is warming the globe, because none of the other natural forcings (solar, volcanic, tilt of Earth etc.) can account for the observed warming. As I said earlier, the current warming is insignificant in most places, except the arctic. But by 2100 if business is conducted as usual, CO2 ppm levels will be at 900-1000 ppm, much higher than the 380 ppm today. If CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes warming and positive feedbacks, then it must warm in sufficiently large quantities (from a supposed baseline value).

From UK Telegraph:

"The world has never seen such freezing heat By Christopher Booker

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought."

I believe the correct scientific term here is "Horse Sh*t".

Sean Peterson
11/16/2008 | 1:27 am

Sean, what you say here is a little misleading. The higher altitude of Arizona with it's less dense atmosphere allows more heat loss at night (and more heat gain during the day) than that of the sea level environment of Louisiana. Also, Louisiana stays warmer at night due to the large heat reservoir of the Gulf of Mexico waters. Yes, relative humidity plays a part, but let's tell the whole story.

I don't have your advantage of "a class on global warming at the University of Washington", where the "professor and colllege are very liberal" (sic); thus disadvantaged, I'm forced to use common sense. It would be easier to entertain AGW were it not for the farce of 'carbon credits', the hipocracy of al gore's lifestyle, or the fact that the scientific community of weather prediction cannot accurately tell me if it will rain next week, let alone predict temperatures 50 or 100 years into the future.

With all due respect, Bullshit.

Sean, you are welcome to argue you're case here--don't be put off by our scatology.

Come to think of it, though, doesn't the Goracle also blame the Evil Bovine Executives at Big Flatulence for stinkin' up the joint?

Two questions: What made the North American glaciers melt 10,000 years ago--Fred Flintstone's car? And how will we cook our Mandatory Soy-Burgers after Al confiscates our grilles?

"it is known"? Really? By whom, and by what method did they arrive at such knowledge?

More importantly, is their saying so in any way attached to receiving another fat government grant check for their "research"?

Questions all students should ask.

re: the artic

anyone ever look up Gakkel Ridge? (Woods Hole scientists)

This seems to be a pretty good summary of the state of play re AGW from Robert Carter, climate scientist:

"Climate change knows three realities: science reality, which is what working scientists deal with every day; virtual reality, which is the wholly imaginary world inside computer climate models; and public reality, which is the socio-political system within which politicians, business people and the general citizenry work.

The science reality is that climate is a complex, dynamic, natural system that no one wholly comprehends, though many scientists understand different small parts. So far, science provides no unambiguous evidence that dangerous or even measurable human-
caused global warming is occurring.

The virtual reality is that computer models predict future climate according to the assumptions that are programmed into them. There is no established Theory of Climate, and therefore the potential output of all realistic computer general circulation models
(GCMs) encompasses a range of both future warmings and coolings, the outcome depending upon the way in which they are constructed. Different results can be produced at will simply by adjusting such poorly known parameters as the effects of cloud cover.

The public reality in 2008 is that, driven by strong environmental lobby groups and evangelistic scientists and journalists, there is a widespread but erroneous belief in our society that dangerous global warming is occurring and that it has human causation."

The most depressing part of Sean's participation here is his convincing presentation of how far scholarship has declined in the modern university. Science is, if nothing else, skepticism. A true scientist ALWAYS questions conventional wisdom. After all, without skepticism we would probably still believe the sun revolves around the earth, since no meaningful scientific advances would have been made since the dawn of civilization.

There are many, if not most scientists, who question the assumptions of catastrophic AGW. Son, you need to ask your professors how they can call themselves scientists if they do not, in an unbiased manner, present these contrary, even if "unpopular," positions and the evidence for them.

The biggist amount of HOT AIR around is from the eco-freaks starting with AL GORE and the various eco-freaks they should all duct tape their mouths shut and stop the HOT AIR their producing

Um, Sean, how about a little research. Open a new tab, and google 'sunspot activity'. Correlate these findings with what your professor told you about the 'little ice age'.

Now go have a beer and try to forget another inconvenient truth.