[The Great Climate Change Debate- Continued]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/...al-warming.html

and for those who want a laugh.....read the piece yourself. One signatory, a professor in medicine, believes we caused the warming but signed anyway................

Ho Hum.

He doesn't say we caused the warming, don't put words into other people's mouths! This is what the article says. "One of the signatories, Frank Nuttall, a professor of medicine, said he believed the Earth was becoming warmer, "This issue is whether the major reason for this is from human activities. I consider that inconclusive at the present time," he said."

Also I was just making the point that it may well have been on the front page had it been pro agw

[The Great Climate Change Debate- Continued]

Came across a headline on page 11 of Saturdays Telegraph “ Humans not the cause of global warming, says petition of 31,000 scientists”. Now call me cynical but if the headline had been “ Humans are the cause of global warming, says petition of 31 scientists” it may well have been on the front page.

[Breathing space?]

I honestly don't wish to appear inscrutable, nor deliberately obtuse (just seriously busy and lacking time during the day for a fuller reply) but what on earth has the flooding this summer got to do with AGW? We have had similar/worse floods before, we will have them again, there is no proof whatsoever that this had any connection to AGW, now, in the past or indeed, in the future. The problems faced by many of those flooded had far more to do with questionable planning decisions re:building on flood plains, than anything else. Ditto Katrina, experts had warned for years that the defences were not strong enough, had been allowed to fall into a state of dis-repair; again nothing to do with AGW. Snow in Somalia; if I held that up as an example of global cooling, I'd be ridiculed and rightly so, it is proof of nothing. If it is, then the mammouth hail storm in Columbia, the anomously cold temps in the Southern Hemisphere and the large early snowfalls enabling the ski season to begin early this year in the Alps etc, is proof of the end of AGW and the onset of global cooling. It is the linking of each and every weather variation to AGW which causes huge amounts of damage to your argument.

Perfectly put, Agree 100%.

[The Nonsense That is Global Warming]

Jethro,

first up, I really don't think there's anything that anyone will ever do to convince you that we're warming - as opposed to going through a cyclical 'blip' - whether because you don't believe the science, or just don't want it to be warmer / less wintry, I do not know.

Re some of the links above - e.g. Roy Spence: to suggest that warming might be attributable to urbanisation around thermometer sites is nonsense of the most poorly researched order. It is perfectly easy to net out the UHI effect (which actually doesn't really derive from the too simpilfied layman's reason he offers) by comparing the trend in urban sites with those in nearby rural sites: precisely such correction has been performed on the Hadley series. And when he starts talking about "molecule of air" then I'm sorry, credibility erodes, something exacerbated when he starts to try to explain why continental interiors are dry and how the macro circulation works. His explanation of why air sinks from the tropopause, including a glib dismissal of all accepted science, stretches credibility I'm afraid. Best of all though, in his conclusion that precipitation might be causing warming he overlooks one blindingly obvious problem: precipitation needs cloud, cloud increases albedo, increased albedo means more energy reflected back to space. more reflected energy means COOLER EARTH. Sorry, this is just another example of cruddy science masquerading as expertise.

Re glaciers...let's trust people from a location with a strong technical interest...

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2006/2006GL026319.shtml

Re Kilimanjaro, climatic change, not deforestation. May or may not be attribuitable to the macro scale changes I'm describing (see bottom of p336), but I grant you not immediately a direct consequence of changing temperatures locally.

http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/kaser2004.pdf

And you miss my point re the macro circulation. I do not mean every weather event is consequent to GW. What I mean is the three global pressure belts, driven by the major interfaces of poleward energy flow and returning eddies, are being forced to move. It is these systems that drive the surface synoptics that give us weather.

Not sure what your point is re phases of increased precipitation coming to pass, though I assume you're logical conclusion is...'so that glaciers continue to grow'. Lack or precipitation of not the issue; it's lack of cold that becomes the issue. At present, in a warming world, the air can hold more moisture, hence we get more precipitation. In locations where warming does not take the boundary above freezing this means more snow, but as the boundary is stretched above freezing so snow becomes rain: that's what's killing the glaciers where they are in decline - which is, in the case of the Alps in fact, in all but the very highest reaches; as things are even their time will come.

This is my first post, but I have been reading the forum for quite some time, most of it I find very interesting but I do wonder if some of you ever bother to read the post you are answering or you just assume because its from this or that person they haven't got a clue so just humour them, like you S F, Jethro said and I quote, The climate is warming; I agree , but in your seemingly arrogant way you choose to ignore it and then go on, imo, to patronise them.