millennia

Strangely for a sceptic (or should I say heretic as my real fight is not against science but the hijacking of science by an idealism) I broadly agree with you . The sudden drop from 2007 to 2008 is no more an indicator of trend than the precipitous drop from 1998 to 1999. If you stand well back a general upward trend from the Victorian period is clear to see - but of course overlaying a CO2 graph and citing correlation means causality is where the real debate lies. Not many on these threads deny we are warmer now than 150 years ago, but why is the big question. I would counter the suggestion that you should ignore 1998 as this is just as valid as the rapid warming observed in the 1870s - it is as dangerous to start excluding data as it is to modify it to make it support your case. My personal opinion is that we are at a turning point, but have not yet conclusively made that turn. Should the temperature graphs only show negative anomalies for the next year and then turn back on their previous path it would be very compelling as we should now have a decent period of cooling from solar and ocean cycles. Unfortunately I feel the pressure to act drastically may pre-empt the confirmation of the 21st Century trend and I am as afraid of the consequences of incorrect actions as any global warmer - just in the opposite direction.

That is going to have to be one HELL of a spurt... http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/..._timeseries.png

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?Fus...c9-8a90fcb5569a While we continue to beat ourselves up about whether to cut emissions by 50, 60, 80 percent India has quiently done it's own piece of climate change research. The result? They see no reason to abandon the fight against poverty to tackle a perception of climate change they can find no evidence of on the Indian subcontinent. India are second only to China in growth potential and both have the ability to dwarf the USA, which in turn dwarfs our output. At what point will we wake up and smell the coffee and realise that the only real beneficiaries of such draconian cuts in our emissions, and the damage it will do to our advanced economies, will be the Chinese, Indians, and every anti-capitalist hater of the West?

Actually the 1998 spike is overstated in it's effect on averages, the actual peak came around 5-6 years ago and 1998 didn't add much to that peak as it was such a short event but if you took it off we'd still be heading lower than before Hansens 1988 testimony. Note also from this just how useless a linear trend is as well in giving you any proper interpretation, it relies so much on where you start it from whereas higher orders at least react to the warming and cooling cycles. Couldn't have put it better myself SB

As regards global warming, I believe that ... It is 90% natural and 10% man made, like my pants

...actually why I gave you search terms rather than a single link, but apparently everything those search terms throw up are pants - must remember that next time I put climate change into Google.... OMG! It was the Democrats through Al Gore that pushed biofuels into the limelight without thinking of the consequences of where you get 20 billion barrels of biofuel FROM. That is equivalent to Labour banging on, 11 years later, that all the country's woes are due to the last Conservative Govt. I say again, culpible, responsible, one lot starts it and the other lot capitalises on it. If it wasn't there you couldn't capitalise on it and with GWB being firmly rooted in Texas vegetable oil was NOT one of his original thoughts. You ain't kidding.

Try not to grab the wrong end of the stick Dev, it quite clearly means it shouldn't be branded evil but wrong because the debate has got so heated some people - on the extreme sceptic side - are calling it evil. I would agree this is not a helpful stance as it reinforces the dogma into a good versus evil battle, which is ridiculous. Really? Then try putting these keywords into Google and see how "ineffective" DDT is: malaria death africa ddt Yep, and I recognise that fact, but the MEDIA blames the capitalist corporates for biofuels when they would NEVER have got the idea if it hadn't been rammed down their throat by environmentalists. How can Tesco be responsible for the EC directive to put up to 10% biofuel in all their diesel? They have to get the bloody stuff from somewhere, there isn't enough room to grow it so rainforests get chopped down. Tesco are culpible but the greens are responsible. Apologies everybody, going wildly off topic so I'll shut up about the DDT angle. I'm just hoping the film is more balanced than The Great Global Warming Swindle, and particularly more balanced than AIT, because God knows we need it.

Hmmm - I wonder if this little piece of cinematography will make into all of our schools courtesy of our taxes? http://noteviljustwrong.com Obviously needs to be viewed first, but I've been reading quite a bit on the environmentalists part in the needless illness of 50 million African children, and deaths of hundreds of thousands, because of another now forgotten panic - DDT. Putting this in context of the potential damage AGW hysteria is now causing across the world (Guardian, Friday, food prices up 75% just due to biofuels) will make interesting viewing. Of course it will be dismissed out of hand....

Yep, thought this might happen - last month it was all about graphs showing we were exceeding the melt from last year and then this month suddenly nobody wants to see that rapid melt completely failing to show up: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/NSIDCICE7608.JPG so instead we talk about pools of water in a web cam image - per-leese! Here's a graphic that may show it a little more clearly. This is a smooth of the average melt (lowess with f=.2) for the average of the period with online daily information from this source(http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/plot.csv), 2007 and 2008. It seems that 2007 already has an insurmountable lead over 2008 and we ain't breaking any records this year. The x scale is Julian days, BTW, and the graph shows a pretty good profile of the excessive melt and then excessive freeze of 2007. Next panic please.... Like the signature GW - boo to you too

Missed that - sorry.

GW - this graph is the one the media hacks at the Independent and BBC reproduced in the last week to make a story about "No Ice at the North Pole". Zoom into the picture and you now see the departure of this year from last year's anomalous melt. However, as I get fed up of pointing out, early July is too early to make a forecast! However, why don't I just join in and extrapolate the 2008 data and assume it holds the same percentage below the average. I therefore predict :lol: an extent of 7.5m sq km at the end of this month. Anybody wanna start a sweepstake (any takers should post to Arctic Ice)?

This is an advance warning to all those ready to pounce on a bad hurricane season this year and immediately link it to AGW - this article may also interest GW, who I know has particular interest in these beasties... http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=135

Y'know if you took out all the constant climate change drip drip drip and took it at face value on energy conservation and the need to start earnest research now for viable (note I said viable, not thousands of buzzard shredders) alternative to fossil fuels then yes, it's a good piece. Hansen is losing it and needs to be sidelined as he'll not do the movement any good at all. If you were to be pragmatic about AIT then you could say it was a story contrived to get an energy hungry population to start being more efficient and prepare them for difficult choices ahead in the transition to the post fossil (or if you like post carbon) energy era, and the only way to do that is to scare the bejeebers out of them because otherwise they won't listen. Maybe that's the way it started and then too many people saw a career in it, and now it's gone too far and people are becoming more suspicious and science will suffer because you can only cry wolf so many times before nobody listens - and that's when we'll have a REAL crisis.

Yeah - about 1.5million square kilometres http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IM...t.365.south.jpg and rising!!!! So now we even have studies on ice cover disgareeing with each other. The Internet is great in that you can try and research something you don't agree with but at the same time it's such a potential source of bull it creates most of the disinformation you don't agree with in the first place - perpetual motion has been discovered.... Apologies - 1.3m sq km - don't want to appear to be exaggerating http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IM....anom.south.jpg

Well,yeah, exactly - so I wish they would lay off the hand wringing doom mongering until we really have something to discuss. I'll be only too happy (if that's the word) to enter into a discussion of a new record melt AFTER it happened - especially if it all melts with a normal weather pattern and not an anomalous late summer like last year. However if it doesn't and even half that first year ice goes into a new winter we then have a load of multi-year ice next year to watch drifting about. As the quotes from 100+ years ago indicate, it's actually not an unknown event for the NP to go ice free and a polynya could form in the 90 deg area due to pack drift and the amount of first year ice up there - surely nobody expected it would take 1 year to restabilise after a record melt? Not even me

Propaganda or defence? If I were accused of producing something that was destroying the planet I'd pretty much want to defend myself. I'm no purveyor of rose tinted specs with regard to the energy industry, what Big Coal is doing to the Appalachian mountains is absolutley appalling (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/am...top-831037.html) but I would be VERY careful to automatically dismiss a defence as propaganda on the basis that the accused might benefit. This is a dangerous precendent that does not need to feed into courtroom decisions or we really are screwed. Yes, I'm quite happy to accept that you can find as much bull and spin on the sceptic side as the climate change side, and somehow we have to sift through all the trash to come up with the nuggets of truth - and good luck on that one!

A truly outrageous piece of alarmist "journalism" in the Independent (yeah, if only) today: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/c...ole-855406.html The journo has been truly flamed in their have your say section - the best comment I saw is quoted below. Sometimes it's so hard to counter things like "North Pole never known to be clear of ice in human history", and "northwest passage opens for first time in recorded history". Both statements, apparently, are untrue.... (I love the way the posting changed my original "bllx" to "dog biscuits" - a replacement profanity checker, what a brilliant idea :o )

Oh I don't doubt it - it would be amazing if there wasn't. Every time somebody tries to voice an opinion that doesn't follow the "consensus" view then people almost kill themselves to dig up some dirt to discredit it. Unfortunately human nature being what it is you can never get a whiter than white arguement from either side, and never will. How about this guy then: http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/doc...Corrections.pdf Dunno, maybe he has a pile of oil shares, he mentions Steve McIntyre and look at how many times he's been flamed for his attempt to make sense of station data feeds. Fact is though there are hundreds of scientists out there actively trying to make themselves and their theories heard and they are being drowned out by sound bites and blatant ridiculous alarmism like Hansen's anniversary testimony. And to give a voice to "Big Coal" before free speech is removed completely here is a response to Hansen's testimony from Vic Svec, senior vice president for Peabody - the largest private coal producer in the world:

I'm sorry but this guy is only 1 step outside the assylum doors. NASA make thousands of "adjustments" to their data, mainly up, and yet even they cannot show the kind of warming that would lead to such a calamity in a short space of time. He talks for putting Big Oil and Big Coal on trial for crimes against humanity, well I reckon it is high time this WAS put into a court and then we can get some proper testimony from scientists that now feel less cowed in coming forward with their dissention on the IPCC dogma - as the Oregon Petition with 31,000 signatures of concerned scientists showed.

...and that bit is where warmer is shoehorned into the debate with absolutely no justification, which was the point of me posting the article. It seems that there are ever more desparate articles trying to pin some problem or other on GW as the great temperature uplift refuses to play ball. Only last night there was the Springwatch Sea edition which just couldn't help itself pinning the species movement in the North Sea to climate change - didn't even TRY and hint that this kind of free movement of species has been going on for millions of years and they will just as quickly clear off again if the temperature drops back. My rant is not and has never been an AGW denier, won't look at any possibility of human induced warming stance, it a rant against lies peddled for the benefit of the peddlers, the twisting of good research to come to a conclusion that reinforces the dogma, and the untold damage that can be done if we blindly go along with this without question. We should all have smelt a rat the day the Govt started taxing it, since when have they EVER had our best interests at heart?

...and how much of it is total media insanity http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-whitloc...death-doom-fire

Global warming appears to be affecting the temperature of these boards again , I think I'll duck out for a few days - maybe go skiing in Aspen!

Exactly, cheers Andy, how many times do we see an item on the news ending with "... and you can expect more of this due to global warming..." - it is starting to be come a bolt on phrase for anything and everything observed to be changing. This is why after a measure of controlled debate we end up spiralling into tetchyness again - it's not just GW, politics in general has me lobbing things at the TV , but GW has now reached dogma status and reasoned debate against a theology has never been taken seriously. I'd be happy to give up sit in the wait and see camp if it wasn't for all the terrible decisions like biofuels and cap and trade being barfed from knee jerk glory hunting politicians on a daily basis. The world will continue to do what it wants while we continue to scare ourselves up our own backsides - we really are our own worst enemy sometimes.

What we need less of is baseless assumptions from jump on the bandwagon scientists like this: http://www.livescience.com/animals/080612-...in-species.html Gosh, I thought, has Madagascar really warmed up that much? Something like this certainly makes a good case for biodiversity problems caused by warming events.... then I took a look at the temperature profile of Madagascar for the last 100 years or so: Hmmm, perhaps those critters are just trying to get away from all those crazy camera wielding scientists!