as for the name climate change, that came from the skeptics. global anthropogenic warming is the correct title. climate does, has done and will do change. We are of course part of this system, but in our current state, we have become a forcing factor.

i laugh at this leftist conspiracy. what has it to do with the left? are communist and socialist countries known for their environmental records? hmmm not really.
or maybe it is a liberal agenda? who cares
the way i see it, by conserving our resources, reducing waste, reducing demand, and inequality of living standards , the world can only gain.

“rvastar:

I will write replies to Michaelyi, Rvstar and Mike soon.

Still waiting for you to explain why – with “irrefutable” evidence on their side – MMGW proponents absolutely refuse to publicly defend their views against skeptics with similar educations and backgrounds.”

i don’t know who you are talking about, and which people are said to have the same backgrounds? i hope it is not one of those big oil front scientists who as a PhD in something irrelevant to climate science and wishes a debate with someone who has better things to do than talk with someone paid by proagandists of the worst kind?

What evidence do the skeptics have? of course there are faults in the science, but if you read the IPC or any decent science publication, the results are calculated in terms of certainty and error. it is the skeptics ands media and some environmentalists who star chucking about ‘facts’ as absolute truths. We are supposed to work evidentially, and the burden of evidence is on anthropogenic global warming being the only explanation for the warming in the last 60 years, despite exhaustive modelling with natural factors only.

“National research bodies like NASA and CERN are now looking at solar interactions with earth’s climate as the direct cause of recent changes.” are they? since when, could you send me the links please? my current knowledge of CERN’s focus is the new collider coming online, hoping to prove the existence of higgs boson etc

i think people should remember how science works. theories, hypotheses, testing, discussion, revision, testing, advancement. It is up to you to believe whether things are ‘true’ or ‘fact’ or to think that on the basis of peer review and my own interpretation
X is likely to be a good explanation.

“Hmm, now let’s see…what would be two of the biggest results of adopting all of these GW proposals? 1) It would represent the largest confiscation and redistribution of wealth IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, and 2) it would result in the severe weakening and erosion of Western economies and lifestyles.”

oh no. imagine if we reduced inequality in our own and other countries….what is so good about our lifestyles and so divine that we have the right to pursue at the economic, social and environmental cost of others?

I quote:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
* “no convincing”
* “greenhouse gases”
* “catastrophic”

This is different from what sceptics, probably including the author, like to portray the petition as proving: that 30000+ ‘scientists’ have outright rejected the proposition of global warming and/or the greenhouse effect. Neither does it deny AGW or the possibility of some degree of warming (albeit not “catastrophic”).

And then we have:

“Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Well, if we’re going to get down to high-school geography and biology, so be it.

CO2 is great. Without it, plants couldn’t photosynthesise and produce the oxygen that we all need. So a certain level of CO2 is great. In fact, I’m very glad of its existence, overall. Some sceptics seem to think that proponents of the global warming theory (I said “theory”) recoil in horror at the very though of CO2, much as others seem to visualise them as tree-hugging hippies who go around keying cars and want everyone to return to hunter-gathering and living in mud huts. There: I saved you the bother of saying it.

(Technically, the petition could be comparing areas possessing no CO2, which of course cannot sustain any plant and consequently animal life, against ordinary areas which do possess it.)

Similarly, the greenhouse effect, is great within normal parameters; it ensures that the planet is not 30+ degrees colder and that we have heat at all. Of course, this heat-retaining ability can go the other way.

If there’s a conclusion to be drawn from this, it is that the Oregon Petition seems, whether deliberately or not, misleading in its wording and assertions, and that I grow weary of its citation.

So-called “man-made global warming” – or the more recently adopted “climate change” (Leftist Tactic 213: “If you can’t convince’em the first time around, just change the wording!”) – is every bit as much a political issue as it is a scientific issue.

Now, pick any political topic you want, and do a simple search for “debate”: you’ll find endless examples. Yet, try the same with MMGW…crickets.

Now, why would that be? Probably because they’re afraid of results like this.

But in the meantime…

“Ignore the man behind the curtain!”

Eh?

Sorry for the delay…

The very short version is that that kind of set-up isn’t the way science gets done.

The place for the scientific debate is among scientists in the peer reviewed literature.

The public and political debate is and should be ‘What should we DO, if anything, about the scientific consensus, as expressed in the peer-reviewed literature, on global warming?’

Setting up a ‘scientific’ debate that ignores the consensus, by starting out with the idea that in order to have proper balance we need to give both the consensus and the fringe equal weight would be misleading to the non-scientists trying to make sense of it. Usually this is precisely what the media does about scientific issues related to health and public welfare. It doesn’t seem to be doing it so much recently about global warming.

Why is this? A plot? The Glodfingers of the AAAS pulling the strings?

No. Usually the fringe is telling a more dramatic story than the consensus, and this gets it airtime even when the science is terrible. In this case the consensus has the weight of ‘scientific authority’ (I have problems with that phrase) AND it is the party telling the more dramatic story.

However, I have very conservative views on the relation between science and the public debate. There are other views on this.

Still waiting for you to explain why – with “irrefutable” evidence on their side – MMGW proponents absolutely refuse to publicly defend their views against skeptics with similar educations and backgrounds.

“Global warming stopped in 1998.” is something I have heard quite often recently. This would be, to understate, a good thing if true so I decided to check. I downloaded NASAs global land-ocean temperature data-set.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt

It gives global mean tempertaures with the mean 0f 1951-1980 as zero in 1/100 C units.

I plotted three-year annual meansfrom 1980 to 2007 (mean of 1980-82, mean of 1983-85 etc). Here are the recent years:

1985 9
1988 26
1991 28
1994 25
1997 42
2000 38
2003 53
2006 57

Still going up by these measures. This is a shame. 1998 was a vey hot year though. There has only been one year hotter since 1998 (2005), maybe this is the source of the claim. But there have been fewer cool years and this has kept three-yearly averages on an upward trend

David Evans says you can’t trust these numbers because of the urban heat island effect. Multiple peer reveiwed scientific papers say that there is no significant effect from urban heat islands on global temperature trend estimates. David Evans simply claims the opposite without refference to any evidence.

Not just any scientist a Rocket Scientist. It says so on his CV (www.sciencespeak.com/DavidEvans.doc). He has published too. Twice!

D.M.W. Evans An Improved Digit-Reversal Permutation Algorithm for the Fast Fourier and Hartley Transforms, IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, pp. 1120–25, Aug. 1987.

D.M.W. Evans A Second Improved Digit-Reversal Permutation Algorithm for Fast Transforms, IEEE Transactions on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, pp. 1288–91, Aug. 1989.

Not a climate scientist then.

Strangely his CV mentions his work for the Australian Greenhouse Office, but not his more recent work for the Lavoisier Group: http://www.lavoisier.com.au/

This is a group with the avowed aim of exploring climate science that was set up by an Australian coal mining executive (Ray Evans). Though why Ray did this when he should be busy maximising the value of Western Mining Corporation shares is not recorded.

I wrote about David Evans ‘no smoking hotspot’ yesterday. On re-reading it I think I was too kind to him.