Hiya

Or maybe carbon dioxide isn't the reason why it was warmer then? You have to look at all sides!

But why should inserting a "foreign" gene into a genome not be permitted? There are examples of the transfer of genetic information in nature. The HIV virus will stick its genetic information into your genome, or bacteria can get genes for useful traits like immunity to antibiotics from other bacteria. Yes the inserted gene can spread to other members of the same species or those which it can readily produce hybrids with (these often have low fertility), but the roundup gene isn't going to spread to all green leafed plants for the same reason humans won't get a tail from a dog.

Oh yes, I must be completly mad! "I am sorry sir you cannot have any drought resistant crops because it upsets some people thousands of miles away who have enough money to buy so much food that they can be obese." Let's have your list of reasons why we should not use GM plants.

No I would not like to comment, why? Because I don't know anything about groundwater, or who said what to whom. I am a published research scientist, I know about the science of genetic engineering, I feel quite comfortable explaining that to the public. Talking about the politics or the companies who sell the stuff and misdeeds they are supposed to have done is not my place. If other people on this forum are happy to talk about things they don't really know about then that is fine.

I am not interested in talking about politics, only science. There is no point in judging science on the reactions of various political groups and governments, they do what suits them and if that disregards scientific advise - "oh well." Yes that was what I was implying. Conflict of interest when presenting scientific data is actually quite a serious matter and must be taken into account, when you publish a paper for peer review you have to declare that sort of thing. I didn't need to mention that, he discredits himself enough with the misinformation on his page. I have said it time and time again, people can put any rubbish they want on the internet for whatever reason they want.

Ok, perhaps I was a bit mean to say that, you are obviously a professional person with qualifications, you are entitled to your opinion. That website is presumably the source of your previous misinformation. The author gives no evidence to back up his claims, no name to check his claimed qualifications and has a conflicting concern in that he runs a website selling "real seeds." Terms like "poison gene" don't really stand up very well in a scientific debate.

Maybe someone could make a new thread and move these posts across? There are two different ways to get rid of potato blight, either we poison it with fungicides or the potato kills it with its immune system. There aren't any "toxins" involved in the potato blight example I gave. The new strain of potato has a gene (from the resistant potato) which makes a protein which will recognise the potato blight fungus, stick to it and alert the plants immune system that it is being attacked and it will then fight the blight off in the same way we fight a cold off. When you eat the GM potato you eat this new gene and protein, however it cannot harm you. Your body just digests it like any other of the millions of protein's you eat. Which potato would you rather eat? The one sprayed with fungicides or the one which naturally fought off the blight?

*off topic but either his post gets deleted or I am allowed to say my piece* See that isn't really true. I bet you don't understand genetic modification. Now you've gone and said that and laserguy believes you, now he will tell his friends and family, and so the misinformation spreads. To take the example of last night’s television show, potatoes resistant to blight do not "produce toxins" ie the fungicides which we spray on them. (I know this seems logical to the general public.) What actually happens is that you take a few genes from another member of the potato family which is naturally resistant to the blight and put them in the ordinary eating potato. This potato is now resistant to blight also. Therefore you don't need to spray it with these nasty toxins anymore.

You can check the reputation of a journal by looking at its impact factor. Google it to find many lists of these, compare with other journals in its class.

Do you have evidence that this is a bunk patent apart from that created by you not understanding the science behind it or how biotechnology patents are created?

Very interesting, I shall read that over lunch. To explain some of your questions you need to understand how biotech patents work. You have to be very, very careful if you want to submit and article to a peer review journal then hope to patent something mentioned in the artcle. Nor do you go about "fully explaining" your technology to anyone. During the patent process the office will hire relevent academic consultents to review your work, then it is published on the patent database like above in enough detail that anyone can read it and object to it. If it went through patent it must do what it says. Edit: it comsumes enough carbon dioxide to make the hydrocarbons, then that carbon goes back into the atmosphere when you burn them. Carbon neutral, like trees.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you asked "did this really happen?" I'm sure someone with some time to spare could calculate the angles and figure out how much ice was lost in 1 year in order for this to happen. Fairly simple I should think. Then explain why it only happened this year. And no this is not a defining event because the layman doesn't understand what climate change has to do with the sun coming up earlier and thinks they are being lied to or deceived.

How much of that gas reaches the surface?

Not sure of where to put this, but seems as good a place as any! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12130970

In an average there generally tends to be numbers above and below the average value over a given period, yes it is on the average just now. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png Look at the anomaly line, if we were to calculate a new average from that the average value would increase and the anomaly line would shift downwards. Since the sea ice in Antarctica is increasing: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png So the average increases and there will be a greater probability of a negative anomaly just through ordinary variation. Yet I bet you still crow about below average.

You need to look at it from the layman's view as well. If the coming summer was to see a record breaking hot month nobody in the media or climate change research would have any qualms in letting loose with the "global warming strikes" lines. Over the last 15 years there have been many, many predictions on the effect global warming would have on the UK, and the problem is that many of them are completely contradictory, eroding away the reputation of the people who make them. I take the example of the met office who have on the record in the last few weeks talked about the influence of the solar minimum but yet on the frontpage of their website you can still see a banner that declares "It was the sun - myth" in reference to climate change. If they are willing to accept the idea that the sun can cause a record cold month, why not a record warm month? There has been something akin to a scramble to affix the recent downward trend in temperatures in northern Europe to something that was caused by a warming trend. In my view it is a tad too late, we have had the cause and the effect, now it is a case of pinning one to the other. We had the cause years ago, if someone had published a prediction about the effect it would have had a lot more credibility. Although (tongue in cheek) I doubt a paper on how northern Europe was going to get colder would be received fairly. It is Dr Serreze btw.

http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=bluethroat ?

Was a CET day record broken a few days ago? http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_act_graphEX.gif

Could be a record cold month for Scotland then, record being -2.4 °C Feb 1947.

Always good to hear a fellow scientist's take on things, you put it across nicely. I don't have an IR, after reading your posts in the last few days, use of your IR will probably give you enough data to tackle some things from the bottom down. If I had access to one I could think of a few simple experiments which might put things in perspective.

I think both of you two need to read the article, instead of accusing other people of not reading it. A picture tells a story all in itself but you both have the jist wrong and have both come to the conclusion "that chart isn't good evidence for what he is trying to say." Take graph 1 of temperature in Greenland, clearly a very low starting point for today’s warming. If you had already accepted that temperature had "bottomed out" when taken over 10k years, why would you bother hiding that in an anomaly chart? Of course it is going to be warmer, there has been warming, he doesn't deny that, in fact gives a nice graph in support of that. But that isn't the point of the article either. The point is that the pattern of the positive temperature anomaly in Arctic Canada/Greenland and negative anomaly in continental US is not unusual, and indeed similar magnitudes have been witnessed in the past, even taking a static point of reference and a background warming trend. I am neither agreeing nor disagreeing with his analysis of the data.

I have made mention of this some time in the distant past but comparison of the ozone depletion and AGW is like scientific chalk and cheese. About the only similarity is that they both happen in the atmosphere!

Yes he is. He is using the instances of a given occurence in 50 year intervals to generate 6 new data points. He could have used 20 year intervals, or 15 and generated more data points. The sample size isn't big enough to infer the conclusions he would like to make, especially since the subject - climate - is known to be dynamic. Plot up those 6 points and you get graph 1: The conclusion is that number of instances of <8.99C CET years will remain very low in the future.* However your data set is too small to come to that conlusion, take graph 2 for example: That is my own backwards extrapolation of a possible dataset from which the data for graph 1 could have been taken from. Now go back and look at your conclusion for graph 1, is it still valid? Does anyone who has read this think that graph 1's 6 points is enough? * He used the >10C data, but I didn't notice until after I had made the excel sheet with the other data, however I presume that since trend of >10C is "very worrying" the <8.99 will also be similar.

I am not sure you can draw a valid conclusion with 6 data points like that. Perhaps 20 or more would be more appropriate to determine trends and extremes?

That is exceptional praise for a paper which was rejected for publication!