There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998

[bigfish]

... That sounds like interesting research. There's a lot we don't know about the sun, and it may well have a large part to play in global climate change - whichever direction it heads in.

However, the basic science of the greenhouse effect is undisputable. You can shine various wavelengths of light through a box of CO2 and see for yourself how some are transmitted and some are absorbed or reflected. There is no argument about this mechanism. The only argument to be had is how strong is this effect?

What is also "indisputable" is the fact that when an object (like the Earth) is close to a heat source (like the Sun), then the object will absorb heat from that source. What is also "indisputable" is should that heat source (the Sun) grow warmer or cooler, then so too will the object - hence the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

WORLD CLIMATE HISTORY ACCORDING TO IPCC IN 1995

WORLD CLIMATE HISTORY ACCORDING TO IPCC IN 2001

(MBH98)​

Both of these climate histories cannot be true - one of them must be a fake.

 

[bigfish]

(deleted double post)

 

[bigfish]

 

[Crispy]

WORLD CLIMATE HISTORY ACCORDING TO IPCC IN 1995

WORLD CLIMATE HISTORY ACCORDING TO IPCC IN 2001

(MBH98)​

Both of these climate histories cannot be true - one of them must be a fake.

Two graphs, with differently labelled axes, one without even a scale. Not very useful.

Yes, the sun has an effect.
But do you deny that CO2 also has an effect?

 

[bigfish]

Two graphs, with differently labelled axes, one without even a scale. Not very useful.

Nonsense! Both graphs are the property of the IPCC. Both depict a millennial global climate history. The first one (1995) clearly shows the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. The second one (1998 -published 2001) does not.

Yes, the sun has an effect. But do you deny that CO2 also has an effect?

No, but I think the effect of CO2 on global temperature is negligible compared to that of solar activity - bearing in mind also that CO2 levels are known to have been much higher in the Miocene - the period in Earth's evolution when our mammalian ancestors first appeared on the scene.

Now here's a question for you: do you deny that average global temperature was hotter during the MWP than it is today?

 

[Jo/Joe]

Here's another "undeniable fact" - the Sun affects planetary temperatures.

Is that a yes to my question?

 

[bigfish]

Is that a yes to my question?

No, as I make clear above, I think that the effect of CO2 on global temperature is negligible compared to that of solar activity (and we can add water vapor too).

So which of the two graphs would you put your money on being the more accurate, Jo - IPCC 95 based on multiple studies from the 4 corners of the globe, or IPCC 2001 based on a single statistical climate model study (MBH98) that no other research team so far has been able to duplicate?

 

[laptop]

Two graphs, with differently labelled axes, one without even a scale. Not very useful.

Indeed.

The first appears to be a badly-faxed image taken out of context from a 1990 IPCC report. The caption is quoted here as:

Schematic diagrams of global temperature variations since the Pleistocene on three time-scales: (a) the last million years; (b) the last ten thousand years, and (c) the last thousand years. The dotted line nominally represents conditions near the beginning of the twentieth century.

My emphasis. Schematic. Hence the lack of temperature scale. It doesn't claim to represent any particular temperature change.

The second is a version from a Mann et al. paper - not an IPCC document at all.

So they don't even have the same status.

I took the trouble to superimpose the schematic and line up the time-scales:

I've emphasised the Mann trend line. Anyone who has any idea will see that it's not a bad fit even to the schematic at arbitrary scale.

But since it's a schematic the scale is arbitrary and it's equally valid to do this:

So, there's some disagreement about the Med. Warm Period. Science is like that. It goes on.

What there is not disagreement about is the red bit at the right - the actual measured temperatures.

The Mann graph is not central to the case for human-induced climate change. It is seized on by those who wish forwhatever emotional, delusional or financial reason to argue that humans are not causing climate change.

Why?

Because they know that politicans like pictures and don't understand science.

Bigfish's use of the two graphs out of context is dishonest - a lie. (It's still a lie even if the reason is not having the faintest idea what he's on about.) The misattribution is a plain lie.

Might as well argue that because one graph's in colour it can't be about the same world as the one in grey.

 

[Crispy]

Thanks laptop, I'd just junked a very badly worded version of that reply

 

[laptop]

Meanwhile:


David Attenborough comes out fighting -


on BBC1, at 9pm tonight

 

[Jo/Joe]

No, as I make clear above, I think that the effect of CO2 on global temperature is negligible compared to that of solar activity (and we can add water vapor too).

So which of the two graphs would you put your money on being the more accurate, Jo - IPCC 95 based on multiple studies from the 4 corners of the globe, or IPCC 2001 based on a single statistical climate model study (MBH98) that no other research team so far has been able to duplicate?

My question was - do we release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? You are exactly like pbman was in response to this question.

 

[bigfish]

Indeed.

The first appears to be a badly-faxed image taken out of context from a 1990 IPCC report. The caption is quoted here as:

Try this, it's linked at the same site: (PDF) http://www.climatechangeissues.com/files/PDF/conf05mckitrick.pdf Page 5 reproduces the image in question - the caption below reads "Figure 3: World Climate History According to IPCC in 1995."

My emphasis. Schematic. Hence the lack of temperature scale. It doesn't claim to represent any particular temperature change.

Nevertheless the graph asserts that during the Medieval Warm Period temperatures were higher than they are today. Also in the PDF document that I've linked to you will see that McKitrick points to a further study by a group led by Shaopeng Huang of the University of Michigan. This group.. "completed a major analysis of over 6,000 borehole records from every continent around the world. Their study went back 20,000 years. The portion covering the last millennium is shown in Figure 4 [See PDF Page 6]. The similarity to the IPCC’s 1995 graph is obvious. The world experienced a “warm” interval in the medieval era that dwarfs 20th century changes. The present-day climate appears to be simply a recovery from the cold years of the “Little Ice Age.”"

So if the Medieval Warm Period was much warmer than it is today -with zero man made CO2 industrial emissions -what is so unusual about it being warm in modern times? Furthermore, if both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were caused by variations in the sun, is it not likely that the increased solar activity observed in the 20th century accounts for most, if not all, of the claimed 20th century warming?

So, there's some disagreement about the Med. Warm Period. Science is like that. It goes on.

Yes, that's right, the "disagreement" is of fairly recent vintage and lies in the fact that climate modelers like Mann et al. are trying to magic it out of existence.

Here's another snippet from the PDF I've linked to...

In the mid-1990s the use of ground boreholes as a clue to paleoclimate history was becoming well-established. In 1995 David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, published a study in Science4 that demonstrated the technique by generating a 150-year climate history for North America.
Here, in his own words, is what happened next.


With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. So one of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

What there is not disagreement about is the red bit at the right - the actual measured temperatures.

The rising blade of the hockey stick, you mean, relative to its rather low slung shaft? All Mann appears to have done here is crudely graft the surface temperature record of the 20th century (the red bit marking the blade of the hockey stick) onto the pre-1900 tree-ring record (the shaft), in order to create the impression that the climate is spiraling out of control. Is it really credible science grafting two data series (temperature and tree-rings) together into a single series like this? personally I have doubts about that... and I must say, laptop, I really am 'surprised' to see something that crude get past a highly trained Oxbridge wonk like yourself.

The Mann graph is not central to the case for human-induced climate change...

No, of course not - that's why it became a central feature of the IPCC 2001 report and a favourite icon of the rent-a-global-boiler crowd...

It is seized on by those who wish forwhatever emotional, delusional or financial reason to argue that humans are not causing climate change.

Why?

Because they know that politicans like pictures and don't understand science.

Yet more patronizing pap from someone holding a first in the subject from Balliol - "because ... politicans like pictures and don't understand science." Only Oxbridge trained global-boilers like laptop are able to grasp the finer complexities of "climate science", don't you see.

Bigfish's use of the two graphs out of context is dishonest - a lie. (It's still a lie even if the reason is not having the faintest idea what he's on about.) The misattribution is a plain lie.

My use of the graphs is not out of context. The first graph reflected the IPCC understanding of millennial climate history, such as it was, in both 1990 and 1995. The second graph is taken from Mann's famous hockey stick series. My mistake was to attribute that particular graph to the IPCC when in fact an almost identical graph, also produced by Mann, was actually reproduced in the report 4 times. Mann also wrote part of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report. The part that asserts that almost all of the climate change seen during the last two millennia occurred during the 20th century and that it is due to human activities. One should wonder how it was that Mann et al and there now discredited studies came to be featured so prominently.


Actual

Replica

Calling me a liar on such a pathetic and pedantic basis, points to a desperate man.

 

[laptop]

Try this, it's linked at the same site: (PDF) http://www.climatechangeissues.com/files/PDF/conf05mckitrick.pdf Page 5 reproduces the image in question - the caption below reads "Figure 3: World Climate History According to IPCC in 1995."

So did McKitrick got the attribution wrong, then? I note he reproduces the crap faxed graph. (Which is itself suspicious in terms of document analysis... that's the sort of thing that conspiraloons do. Proper researchers get permission and a high-quality copy.)

I found the proper schematic as part of a set of three from a 1990 report. Here's the whole thing:

Nevertheless the graph asserts that during the Medieval Warm Period temperatures were higher than they are today.

It only goes to 1970-ish. It's a schematic illustrating the kind of variation.

* Long bit about McKitrick - an economist, not a climatologist - snipped *

* BTW, McKitrick doesn't know the difference between degrees and radians *

Yes, that's right, the "disagreement" is of fairly recent vintage and lies in the fact that climate modelers like Mann et al. are trying to magic it out of existence.

Mann is a palaeoclimatologist. He attempted to reconstruct past temperatures using statistical methods to combine various proxy data sets.

There is no actual modelling work in his list of publications. He's looked at the statistics of model output, but that's not modelling.

Knowing the difference is important - or would be to someone who actually wanted to understand.

* Random abuse deleted *

Mann's graph is, again, not central to the case and only its critics have claimed it is. It's merely been picked on - by people who are interested only in nit-picking, and are sloppy with it - for example leaving out bits of the data Mann used.

McKitrick has been challenged to produce a better temperature series - a "what really happened" - and declined. Ring any bells?

E2A: For anyone who's actualy interested in what's going on, here's a list of 50-odd different temperature series from NOAA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

 

[laptop]

The Mediæval Warm Period

Many other researchers agree. "The Little Ice Age is primarily a European and North Atlantic phenomenon," says Keith Briffa, a tree ring analyst from the University of East Anglia, UK. "And the geographical extent of the Medieval Warm Period is still massively uncertain, because data is sparse."

Indeed, the proxy records suggest that high temperatures in one region tend to be balanced out by low temperatures in another. The tropical Pacific, for instance, appears to have cooled during the Medieval Warm Period and warmed during the Little Ice Age. "The regional temperature changes in our reconstruction are quite large; it's simply that they tend to average out," Mann says.

Fred Pearce

New Scientist subscribers and ATHENS users click here

In the meantime, three groups had been scrutinising the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick. Hans von Storch of the GKSS Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, concluded that McIntyre and McKitrick were right that temperatures should be analysed relative to the 1000-year mean, not the 20th-century mean. But he also found that even when this was done it did not have much effect on the result. Peter Huybers of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts came to much the same conclusion.

The work of Eugene Wahl of Alfred University, New York, and Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, raised serious questions about the methodology of Mann's critics. They found the reason for the kink in the McIntyre and McKitrick graph was nothing to do with their alternative statistical method; instead, it was because they had left out certain proxies, in particular tree-ring studies based on bristlecone pines in the south-west of the US.

 

[bigfish]

So did McKitrick got the attribution wrong, then?

Maybe, you could always drop him a line and ask him.

I found the proper schematic as part of a set of three from a 1990 report. ... It only goes to 1970-ish. It's a schematic illustrating the kind of variation.

Yes, but the kind of variation being illustrated is a temperature variation, is it not? The graph clearly illustrates how Medieval Warm Period temperatures dwarfed those of the modern industrial era. Can I also remind that I drew your attention to the Huang et al. (1998) multi-continental bore hole study (See PDF Fig. 4 P6 in my previous post), wherein the vertical axis of the accompanying graph shows average anomalies calibrated in Centigrade, with the horizontal axis tracking the signal from AD 1000 all the way to 1990. This graph also clearly illustrates how Medieval Warm Period temperatures dwarfed those of the modern industrial period, though I note that you have avoided acknowledging the existence of the study by the rather idiotic device of pretending that you haven't read it - muttering instead something about McKitrick being an economist and not being a member of the climatology clergy. I also note that you neglected to answer my previous questions.

Allow me to repeat them for you:

If the Medieval Warm Period was much warmer than it is today -with zero man made CO2 industrial emissions -what is so unusual about the planet warming now, given that the present-day climate appears to be simply a recovery from the cold years of the “Little Ice Age”? Furthermore, if both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age were caused by variations in the sun, is it not then likely that the increased solar activity observed in the 20th century accounts for most, if not all, of the claimed 20th century warming?

* Long bit about McKitrick - an economist, not a climatologist - snipped *

Only "climatologists" are worthy of testing statistical models created by "climatologists," it would seem - not withstanding the fact that skilled economists also know a thing or two about statistical modeling - as we can see from McKitrick's demolition of Mann et al.. I suppose next you will be calling for "trial by family" on the grounds that a defendants relatives know their kinsmen better than any jury ever can and therefore are far more likely to reach the proper verdict.

Here's a more detailed critique of the IPCC's review process that was recently submitted to the Stern Review.

http://www.staff.livjm.ac.uk/spsbpeis/Stern-Review-19-12-05.htm#_ftnref2

Evidence Submitted to the Stern Review
Ian Byatt, David Henderson, Alan Peacock and Colin Robinson
...
The IPCC process is far from being a model of rigour, inclusiveness and objectivity. In particular:
...
The built-in process of peer review, which the IPCC (and the British government with it) view as a guarantee of quality, does not adequately serve this purpose, for two reasons. First, providing for peer review is no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions if the peers are largely drawn from the same restricted professional milieu. Second, the peer review process as such, here as elsewhere, may be insufficiently searching. As Ross McKitrick has pointed out, its main purpose is to elicit expert advice on whether a paper is worth publishing in a particular journal. Because it does not normally go beyond this, ‘…peer review does not typically guarantee that data and methods are open to scrutiny or that results are reproducible.’[6]

In response to criticisms that have been made of published and peer-reviewed work that the IPCC has drawn on, the authors concerned have failed to make full and voluntary disclosure of data and sources. A leading instance of this, referred to in Ross McKitrick’s evidence to the Select Committee, is the much-publicised ‘hockey-stick’ study which featured in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. The issue has been raised, with reference also to another case, in evidence which David Holland has submitted to the Review.* In evidence to the Select Committee, Holland pointed to the need ‘to elevate auditing or replication above peer review and reputation’.

The response of the Panel’s directing circle and milieu to informed criticism has typically been inadequate or dismissive, a fact that was noted by the Select Committee and is well illustrated by the hockey-stick affair.[7] The Response itself provides an up-to-date and conspicuous example: it does not so much address the arguments made by the House of Lords Select Committee as restate, reflex-like, the Whitehall and IPCC party line

Mann is a palaeoclimatologist. He attempted to reconstruct past temperatures using statistical methods to combine various proxy data sets...

Yes, but it has now been clearly demonstrated that his "various proxies data sets" were combined in such a way that if just one series was removed then the hockey stick shape disappeared! Isn't that incredible! But, not only that, it also transpires that Mann actually did this experiment himself and therefore he has known all along that the hockey stick is not a global pattern!

Mann's graph is, again, not central to the case and only its critics have claimed it is...

I can understand your wish to reframe the debate and quickly sweep the entire hockey stick affair under the carpet now that Mann has been exposed. However, the study is still in active use misinforming people. For example, both the MBH99 reconstruction and the Mann and Jones (2003) reconstruction appear in spaghetti graphs showing collections of climate reconstructions on the Wikipedia website...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

We had better not forget, also, that... "MBH has been directly used to benchmark other studies. For example, Mann and Jones [2003], while purporting to be a different method, benchmarked against MBH98-99. Virtually all subsequent multiproxy studies benchmark themselves against MBH, which thereby has almost certainly influenced proxy selection in these later studies. This may even extend to any detection and attribution studies which have been influenced by MBH98-99."

As you can see, it is still very much central to the case, not withstanding your hollow objections to the contrary.

McKitrick has been challenged to produce a better temperature series - a "what really happened" - and declined. Ring any bells?

Yes... it's ringing the "straw man" bell.

 

[bigfish]

Laptop: Psssst! “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

 

[laptop]

Bigfish has clearly not read Fred Pearce's article, nor understood the extracts posted.

It was scrupulously fair. It did mention what I forgot to note this time around: McKitrick's collaborator Stephen McIntyre is a mathematician and oil industry consultant.

And, no, Mann's picture never was central. McKitrick and McIntyre sought to define it as such before attempting to knock it down. There is a phrase that describes this abuse of argumentation.

Go. To. The. Library.

 

[bigfish]

Many other researchers agree. "The Little Ice Age is primarily a European and North Atlantic phenomenon," says Keith Briffa, a tree ring analyst from the University of East Anglia, UK. "And the geographical extent of the Medieval Warm Period is still massively uncertain, because data is sparse... blah, blah, blah"

Post 83: Statement Prof. Zbigniew Jaworowski written for the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
The question arises, how such methodically poor paper, contradicting hundreds of excellent studies that demonstrated existence of global range Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age, could pass peer review for NATURE?

3,000 years of climate in the Sargasso Sea

Sea Surface Temperature off West Africa, last 2,500 years

Climate change at Lake Naivasha, Kenya

Oxygen Isotopes from the Quelccaya Glacier, Peru


Post 87: So what's going on here? The answer is that a vast repository of empirical findings from an array of scientific disciplines is being ignored by a small coterie of climate scientists who are focused almost exclusively on developing computer models of how they believe earth's climate system operates. Any observation that fails to harmonize with that belief system is generally ignored by its adherents, while those who champion their approach to the subject often question the judgment and/or motives of scientists who place greater confidence in real-world observations.


By 1965, the great British climatologist Hubert H. Lamb had synthesized indications of past warm and cold periods spread over the world:
. . . [M]ultifarious evidence of a meteorological nature from historical records, as well as archaeological, botanical, and glaciological evidence in various parts of the world from the Arctic to New Zealand . . . has been found to suggest a warmer epoch lasting several centuries between about A.D. 900 or 1000 and about 1200 or 1300. . . . Both the "Little Optimum" in the early Middle Ages and the cold epochs [i.e., "Little Ice Age"], now known to have reached its culminating stages between 1550 and 1700, can today be substantiated by enough data to repay meteorological investigation. . .

 

[bigfish]

.... Go. To. The. Library.

Go to a library yourself, you ignorant little man!

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I just came across quite an interesting article on the global warming sceptics.

Ten years ago, Fred Smith says, the Competitive Enterprise Institute had contributions from companies across the board in the petroleum industry. It still gets money from Exxon Mobil, the biggest and most hard-line oil company on the climate change issue, but many of its donors have stopped sending checks.

"They've joined the club."

The club of believers in global warming.

The executives don't understand "resource economics." They lack faith in the free market to solve these issues. And they go to cocktail parties and find out that everyone thinks they're criminals.

"Or their kids come home from school and say, 'Daddy, why are you killing the planet?'"

Smith never sounds morose, though. He's peppy. He thinks his side is still winning the debate. Look at the polls: Americans don't care about global warming.

He'd like to get people believing once again in good old-fashioned industrial activity. CEI has created a new public-service TV spot. Smith and several colleagues gather round as we watch it on a computer monitor. The ad begins with images of people picnicking in Central Park on a beautiful day. A child is shown blowing the seeds of a dandelion. A woman's voice, confident, reassuring, says that all these people are creating something that's all around us:

"It's called carbon dioxide," she says, "CO2."

There's an image of an impoverished woman hacking the ground with a hand tool.

"The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a life of backbreaking labor."

We see kids jumping out of a minivan. There are politicians out there who want to label CO2 as a pollutant, the narrator says. We return to the child blowing the dandelion seeds.

"Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."

The Tempest

 

[Jo/Joe]

That extract is so contemptuous of rational thinking it's beyond belief. It's methods of persuasion are no better than those employed by religious extremists (Xtian or Muslim).

What motivates anyone to ally themselves with such people if they don't profit directly from the use of petroleum? Bigfish? Are you able to answer this question in a straightforward manner? You were rather disappointing last time, though I am impressed by all your graphs.

 

[bigfish]

"Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change"

http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?ide=3

 

[bigfish]

[....]
Loughead says American satellite monitoring of world temperatures has shown a very slight overall cooling since 1998. In response to the lack of evidence for a heating planet, he comments, the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its green activist allies have subtly changed their rhetoric.

"They talk far less about global warming now. Instead the emphasis has switched to climate change. In a marketing sense, that's clever since every type of weather - droughts or floods, heat waves or severe winters, and so on - can be ascribed [by green advocates] to anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] climate change," says the society vice-president, who worked as a geologist for major petroleum producers in Canada and the North Sea.

In fact, climate is always changing, sometimes significantly. In 1000 AD, during a warm period that affected much of the planet, grapes were cultivated in England. Even Greenland could produce crops. Conversely, a lengthy cooling period ended in the late nineteenth century. (The painting above shows the frozen Thames in London during that time, known as the Little Ice Age.) Loughead suggests the very slight rise in global temperatures over the past 100 years is quite normal for an Earth still emerging from a cool period.

Climate Catastrophe Cancelled critiques research like the famed "hockey stick" graph. Its plot shows a rather flat temperature line over the last 1000 years until in the late 1800s. At that point, the graph veers sharply upward, presumably due to rising quantities of industrial greenhouse gases.

"The hockey stick was developed in 1999 by Michael Mann and others. It immediately became the IPCC's most prized illustration," Loughead says. "The hockey stick has had a tremendous impact on the basic climate perceptions of the media and public, and its influence endures to this day."

In 2003 two Ontario researchers, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick from the University of Guelph, double checked the data used in the computer model that produced the hockey stick. "They identified many errors, really serious stuff," Loughead asserts. "They found that temperatures were actually higher in the fifteenth century than the twentieth, which confirms the historical record. The IPCC itself has backed off on the hockey stick, yet you can still find that graph in publications produced by Environment Canada."

Albert Jacobs, a geologist who has served as a society director, says no reliable correlation has been established between carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and planetary temperatures. On the other hand, there is an apparent relationship between sunspot activity and periods of global warming. (See graph below.)

"The scientists who believe in anthropogenic climate change do not explain away the evidence that temperature is almost certainly related to total solar radiance," Jacobs charges. "They simply ignore it and continue promoting their own research.

"In much the same fashion, they continually base their conclusions on computer models," he continues. "Yet every informed observer knows that those computer models are not reliable. There are too many factors affecting climate - literally millions, with a great many of them involving serious uncertainties. It all amounts to guesswork more than science."

Public opinion is apparently growing more skeptical about anthropogenic climate change. An IPSOS Reid poll reported in the National Post on May 29 indicated that 39% of Canadians do not support the science behind man-made global warming, believing that any warming trend may have natural causes.

That's a big shift, according to communications specialist Morten Paulsen. In earlier years, surveys showed public support for the Kyoto Accord was riding well over 80%. But Paulsen warned the society's annual meeting that many of global warming is still broadly accepted among the mass of Canadians. Many of those adherents, he says, believe in imminent environmental catastrophe with a fervour that borders on religion.

http://www.dobmagazine.nickles.com/...gazine/columns/060612/MAG_COL2006_UC0000.html

 

[free spirit]

The executives don't understand "resource economics." They lack faith in the free market to solve these issues.

seems even the sceptics are accepting that there are issues that need to be solved then?

 

[free spirit]

[....]
Loughead says American satellite monitoring of world temperatures has shown a very slight overall cooling since 1998.

http://www.dobmagazine.nickles.com/...gazine/columns/060612/MAG_COL2006_UC0000.html

I think we already dealt with that back here post 27
please stop recycling old points that have already been comprehensively dealt with... or go learn something about climate science and come back and actually argue the point fully rather than abandoning the arguement, posting up a load more random articles you've found then returning to the same point as if it had never been discussed.

 

[bigfish]

Earth's Terrestrial Environment is Becoming "More Like a Gardener's Greenhouse"

... n spite of a century or more of global warming and the IPCC's "consensus wisdom," there is ever-accumulating evidence of worldwide long-term increases in both soil moisture content (Robock et al., 2000, 2005) and biological productivity (see Biospheric Productivity (Global) in our Subject Index). In describing this happy situation, Roderick and Farquhar say "it is now clear that many places in the Northern Hemisphere, and in Australia, have become less arid," and that "in these places, the terrestrial surface is both warmer and effectively wetter." In fact, they say in their concluding sentence that "a good analogy to describe the changes in these places is that the terrestrial surface is literally becoming more like a gardener's 'greenhouse'."

Yes, the greening of planet earth continues, aided not only by the aerial fertilization and anti-transpirant effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, but by the atmosphere's changing temperature and moisture characteristics as well.

Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/articles/V9/N24/EDIT.jsp

 

[Jo/Joe]

What motivates you to align yourself on the side of oil corporations bigfish?

And where is the harm in being cautious on global warming and taking steps to alleviate the effects mainstream scientists believe it will have?

 

[free spirit]

We conclude that the observed decrease in pan evaporation is not a paradox after all. In-stead, the decrease is to be expected given the decreases in solar irradiance and the associated changes in DTR and vapor pressure deficit that have been observed. Further, the observed de-crease in the DTR is itself qualitatively and quantitatively consistent with the observed de-crease in global solar irradiance. These results highlight the fundamental importance of evaluating the direction and magnitude of changes in the surface energy balance resulting from greenhouse forcing as opposed to the direction and magnitude of changes resulting from aerosol loading (8). Such an evaluation is also important when estimating the biological and ecological impacts of changes in climate, because clouds and aerosols scatter light and thereby reduce the shade within vegetation canopies, markedly affecting the structure and productivity of terrestrial vegetation (24, 25). The inter-actions between global solar irradiance, diurnal temperature range, and pan evaporation, which have been highlighted here, are all related to variations in the transmission of solar irradiance through the atmosphere and appear to be very general features of the climate and the climate-vegetation systems.

source : The cause of decreased pan evaporation over the last 50 Years
RODERICK & FARQUHAR / Science v.298, 1nov02

ok that's an slightly interesting subject relating to several of the multiple potential feedback mechanisms that, and influencing factors that affect the climate change models and make it impossible to accurately predict the precise effect of any given level of co2 on global temperatures, and how this will impact vegetation growth etc.

On further investigation it would seem this might well be caused by global dimming - the reduction in sunlight actually reaching the earth's surface as a result of increasing levels of aerosols / clouds in the atmosphere.

Not really arsed enough to investigate this further, seeing as you're not willing to actually debate any issue you post up about, but if you were posting this up as evidence against global warming happening then as far as I can see it does no such thing. It's a process that's happening concurrently with global warming, possibly partially as an affect of global warming, partially as a result of the sheer volume of particulate matter going into the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuel burning, forest fires etc. etc. AFAIK this has been being fed into climate models for years, though the precise effect has probably been fairly difficult to estimate accurately.

eta... just wondering what the impact might be if we actually managed to seriously reduce emmissions from both fossil fuels and forest fires, coz presumably we'd see an increase in the amount of solar energy actually hitting the earth, and presumably more warming???

 

[bigfish]

... And where is the harm in being cautious on global warming and taking steps to alleviate the effects mainstream scientists believe it will have?

"Mainstream scientists" like our very own laptop and Michael Mann and his fraudulent hockey-stick, do you mean?

 

[Jo/Joe]

Shall I tell you why your efforts are little more than bullshit bigfish? You won't answer simple questions. That's the behaviour of the insincere and untrustworthy.