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The oceans are warmed by the sun and insulated by the atmosphere. You could throw in stuff like volcanoes and friction from boats, but afaik it's the first two that are the most important. But don't take my word for it.

I've been burnt using this argument before. What happens when they reply "YES"? Some skeptics are simply over the top and set the bar too high. They won't accept anything unless it is "Proven in a lab". So often they will also be quite skeptical of evolution too.

Well yea. That's such a basic fact of physics that if you are denying that you are not a lot different from the people who go around claiming evolution is a myth.

Whoops icecap.us have just shot themselves in the foot imo. That's a ridiculous analysis and a ridiculous prediction.

Over the last few weeks I have been watching as southern hemisphere SST anomolies have climbed. There are some quite intense areas, some coral bleaching warnings have been made. This is one to watch possibly. http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/climo.html

we'll be lucky to reduce co2 to 2030 levels. All the targets are pipe dreams as governments are totally incapable of the organisation required.

The anomoly doesn't show (clearly) the "highest level". The anomoly graph does show that for some part of 2008 sea ice levels were higher than they've ever been for that part of the year in the satellite records. But the highest level of ice area reached in 2008 was lower than the highest level of ice area reached in many other previous years, so claims to the contrary by that news article are incorrect. 2007 winter is the record holder for the highest level reached so my assumption was that the author has recalled that story and assumed it is a 2008 one. My link is also from Cryosphere Today and shows the absolute ice area, which is necessary to see the maximum levels for each year.

Temperature of the 1930s and 1990s are compariable in the US record. The global record shows the 1930s were signficantly cooler than in the 1990s. So the telegraphs claim isn't true globally even though they are clearly talking in context of the globe. So that's a print error, or rather ignorance of the author who is clearly just parrotting arguments without understanding, including citing another author's article as if it is a source. Good grief! Edit: Wow it's worse than I thought. There are several of these errors in the article. It claims "Additionally, Antarctic sea-ice this year reached its highest level since satellite records began in 1979" which is false. They even link to the website where this can be looked up (http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IM....area.south.jpg). So they didn't think of verifying the claim? There are problems with just about every heading.

There's a very good explaination for warming on mars, including the possibility that it isn't even occuring. http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-warming-on-mars.htm Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov has just ruled out his credibility on this issue. He claimed Mars warming must be due to solar irradiance as if he wasn't even aware of these other possibilities. Besides solar irradiance hasn't increased enough to explain that amount of warming on Mars, let alone on Earth. This is not an easy mistake for someone like Abdussamatov to make. You have to wonder how he made it so publically.. But are they scientists researching in the field of climate? Or are they people with degrees who have no formal or background training in the subject of climate and who have got all their info on the subject from Michael Crichton's State of Fear or the Internet? For example there are a large number of TV Meteorologists on the senate list - what do TV Meteorologists have to know about climate drivers, the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle in order to do their job? What insight can they have? Yet I bet they are asked about global warming frequently by the public, so some of them will go off and research global warming. I visited one of the blogs of a meteorologist in the list and they they confessed they are not an expert on the issue and they got their info from junkscience.com if the names on the list are just forwarding stuff from sites like that then are they really scientists in the sense that they are somehow more authorative than a man on the street who also gets his info from junkscience.com? Compare it with the IPCC author list which contains people with strong backgrounds in climate research.

it sources watt's blog. It might as well source the moon. I just went over there and saw some nonsense about co2 rise and temperature. Watt's just throws things out without understanding them, allowing even the most ridiculous concepts to appear as valid as solid facts. People don't learn anything there, in fact judging from the comments the readers are actually getting regressed in their understanding. I suspect that blog has just become a big of a hit count target. In fact the latest post is about getting 250,000 readers or something. It's just an internet version of a rant. I find it kind of irking how it pretends to be doing science and people actually believe that, when in fact it only really boils down to an op ed column making up a number of disconnected strange theories about different aspects of the climate. And that's my movie review.

sea levels are rising, glaciers are in retreat around the world, the models reflect current human understanding of the climate. They aren't going to be completely accurate of course, but that's reflected in the results - it's something like between 1.5C to 4.5C due to co2 doubling, which is a wide range of error reflecting uncertainty in the models. But that uncertainty doesn't support co2 having a non significant warming effect. Remember that noone has managed to make a model of the climate that shows the recent warming was natural, nor has anyone made a climate model that shows rising co2 has an insignificant warming effect. For AGW to be false requires two independant discoveries to be made: 1) Discovery of a yet unknown significant climate driver to explain the last 30 years of warming, which would require experts to have missed something quite obvious. 2) Discovery that doubling co2 leads to far less warming than expected, which would require understanding of the atmosphere to be in serious error.

And a pond with 50% 1cm ice cover will freeze over faster than a pond with 100% 10cm ice thickness.

I saw it best summed up elsewhere by someone who pointed out that the last two words of the acronym IPCC is "Climate Change". They didn't 15 odd years ago or however long it was call it IPGW. Climate Change is broader than Global Warming. For example Climate Change covers ocean acidification wheras the title "Global Warming" seems to only refer to temperatures.

Here's a graph of the temperature trend in CRN 1+2 stations, and the temperature trend in CRN 5 stations, compared to GISTEMP. This is as of September 2007: From: http://opentemp.org/_results/20070922_CRN12vsCRN5/

The americanthinker article is pseudoscience. The americanthinker also has articles attacking "Darwinism" as well containing equally specious arguments and so-called experts (John Coleman, again, is clearly no authority on this subject displaying quite startling ignorance of basic climate concepts)

Given the lack of noise in each trend, I am suprised they are that far apart. Why are successive Octobers so much warmer in the middle of the graph than successive Septembers for example? And the beginning of the January trend just looks odd. Why would an artibary 31 day segment of the year have such a different trend than other 31 segments around it? The lack of noise suggests it isn't chance.

Back to topic, have a read of this by John Coleman: http://media.kusi.com/documents/REMARKS+OF...MAN+FINAL6c.pdf A lot of it is just unfalsifiable conspiracy stuff about the UN, but from the small section about facts and data, it's quite clear that his arguments are flawed, his knowledge very limited. He doesn't know what co2 forcing is, he doesn't understand climate models. His arguments against the surface record don't make sense. It's particularly misleading in places and there are strawmen. In short he's no authority on this issue of climate change he sounds more like a shock-jock than a scientist.

"One day back in February on a ski-lift, I commented to the others that 2008 would be the year when the "Anthropic Global Warming" (AGW) bubble would burst. My prediction seems to be coming true." There's so much wrong with this. For a start what on Earth is the relevance of telling us he was on a ski-lift? We all know full well that AGW will stand or fall depending what temperatures do. Skeptics have lined up for flat/cooling over coming decades so their position will be severely compromised and AGW reinforced if temperatures resume climbing. On the otherhand if temperature is flat over coming decades them AGW will be just about disproven. It's silly to think that some error at GISS has "unravelled" AGW as if a scientific theory can be unspun by mere day to day events that have nothing to do with the theory or what it predicts.

Ah so it's all about World Government...

Whenever experts pile what we know about climate into computers to run through the physical calculations the results back up AGW. That's a big reason why so many of us think it's on the right track. The reason why many people don't take skeptics complaints about models seriously is that they aren't taking the steps necessary to demonstrate their arguments to the scientific community. They are just subjective pot-shotting from the sidelines rather than taking up the gauntlet and joining in the scientific debate. It's all very well to claim climate models are doing X wrong and are "ludicrous" like so many big-named skeptics state in opinion articles, but where are the climate models that do it better? On a very much related subject skeptics complain bitterly about the global surface temperature records, claiming that they are not adjusted properly, etc. But again notice the glaring lack of any "correct" global temperature record from the skeptics which does it "properly". If they think they can do it so much better then why haven't they just done it? That would be a scientific challenge right there. Try to establish a "better" temperature record. In both cases of models and surface records I have to conclude skeptics don't really have decent arguments, and they know it and this is why they shy away from doing anything substantial with their arguments that could be scrutinized.

It's just a curiosity but I had time to waste so daily minlow and highmax record counts attached. I put a running mean in which is not all that exciting. Can't even remember what it is now, 200 days I think. I realised lowmax and highmin records only go back to 2004 so I haven't bothered attempting to graph those two. The drop in the highmax trend is a better argument for being cooler recently, although perhaps not too suprising given that national temps are lower this year than since 2001: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/resea...10092008_pg.gif Perhaps a fall from peak temperature has more impact on reducing record highmaxs than it does increase record lowmins. Again the image dimensions suck but other than one day per pixel I don't know how to represent 2500+ days where the day-to-day values can have such variation.

There are 4 types of daily records on the site, high minimum, high maximum, low minimum and low maximum. I guess one of these might contain an significant trend, but as the data only goes back to Sep 2001 it's possible they don't. I might as well plot the other 3 seeing as I just have to change the URL to get the different data. There is a far easier way of determining how cold the US was in October. Sometimes I feel global warming skeptics don't like where such shortcuts lead and prefer to get lost in the details of a longer route. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/resea...10092008_pg.gif There are 4 types of daily records on the site, high minimum, high maximum, low minimum and low maximum. I guess one of these might contain an significant trend, but as the data only goes back to Sep 2001 it's possible they don't. I might as well plot the other 3 seeing as I just have to change the URL to get the different data. There is a far easier way of determining how cold the US is (edit: this is september, october isn't there yet). Sometimes I feel global warming skeptics don't like where such shortcuts lead and prefer to get lost in the details of a longer route. http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/resear...rrentmonth.html

Wanting to see the even larger picture I graphed the number of new or tied low temperature records for each day from 2001 to 2008. Any day that has over 100 new or tied low temperature records gets a date label. You can see quite a few days have over 100, in fact two have over 900.. Be warned the image is quite wide, at one pixel per day the X dimension is over 2500 pixels.. If you squint or zoom in on the right hand side you can just make out 28th October 2008 having ~115 new or tied low temperature records. I notice that blog post is being pushed out in other places as evidence for global cooling now.. http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/10/n...global-cooling/ When asked why he had focused on a single days set of low min records the blog author replied: How does someone who owns a blog which is evidentally read a lot from the number of comments manage to make such an error and noone spots it? I can't begin to understand how someone can think a daily count of anything must be unusual just because it sounds high without checking whether it actually is unusual.

From the link: What I find amazing is how the blog author and many of the commenters just take it for granted that this is unusual. Noone thinks hey where does this fit in with the bigger picture? I didn't look for long, and only really checked 2005 and 2006 3rd May 2005 514 new or tied low temperature records http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=mint&month=5&day=3&year=2005&submitted=Get+Records 27 July 2005 367 new or tied low temperature records http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=mint&month=7&day=27&year=2005&submitted=Get+Records 5 December 2005 463 new or tied low temperature records http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/index.php?ts=daily&elem=mint&month=12&day=5&year=2005&submitted=Get+Records 18 February 2006 419 new or tied low temperature records 24 March 2006 165 new or tied low temperature records 26 April 2006 160 new or tied low temperature records Then I stopped

From the link: What I find amazing is how the blog author and many of the commenters just take it for granted that this is unusual. Noone thinks hey where does this fit in with the bigger picture? I didn't look for long, and only really checked 2005 and 2006 But take a look at this 3rd May 2005 343 171 That is amazing. It's amazing how the blog itself nor all those comments on the blog don't look for other dates breaking. I see on October 29th, 2001 there were 133 new or tied low temperature records: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/resear...ted=Get+Records New: 77 + Tied: 56 = Total: 133 Including the same place in Alaska besting the previous record by 5 degrees. There's a few more besting the previous record by 5 degrees. The day before, October 28th, there were 156 new or tied low temperature records.