That graph of sea level changes came from HERE.

What about the cryosphere? Is it shrinking? Do its changes match up with the "relatively flat [decadal] period" assertion? Visit HEREto get some idea of the answers. Northern hemisphere snow cover continues to decline through 2006. Same for global glacier thickness. Permafrost is just now starting to get measured on a global basis so it's too soon to tell. Arctic sea ice:



I've got other things to do today. Also, I'm no expert and I don't want to press my luck. I think I've made the point that one has to be careful about the conclusions one reaches by looking only at small changes in thermometer readings.

Arctic Sea Ice may or (more likely) may not have anything to do with global warming but rather all sorts of stuff to do with the oceans. Temps have not risen in the arctic as a whole (some regions yes, some regions no) so warming temperatures are not part of the problem. Rising sea levels have been happening for a few hundred years and no significant increase has been seen over the last few decades compared to previous trends.

Glaciers are being lost in some areas while are gaining in others and most of the retreating glaciers are affected by regional changes such as a vast increase in farming around those areas. Warming may play a part certainly but to conclude all is due to warming and further, to insist all warming is due to CO2 increases due to mankind is more than stretching the imagination.

tom

Excuse me, you are now changing your position. You stated there was zero debate, not "Significant" but zero. I did mention you could in fact claim the overwhelming majority but you said no, it was zero. I proved you wrong and you still fail to admit your statement was wrong, that sir is arrogance supreme.

You know Tom, to check this I just scroll back on the thread and read this...You posted...
RickyP

However there is no debate within the climate science community of any significance about whether or not warming is occurring.

Tom

This absolute arrogance is part of the problem. We have posted enough dissenting opinions to claim there is "little" debate or claim "near unanimous agreement" or something along those lines but no, this type of posting shows the sheer arrogance and/or ignorance of any who dare oppose their position. So there is "no debate"? then what is this all about? And this is exactly the problem, this is not "settled science" as some propose, it is in fact "consensus science" and to ignore opposition simply flies in the face of good science and starts to smell more and more like a religion

Maybe you can only remember what you type. Since it was you who started using the term No without the qualifier "of any significance within the climate science community" .

GMTom wrote:oh, Danivon, your statement was:

There is no way that you can claim that the last 10 years were not warmer than the preceding 10. That's what my use of comparisons was about.

...I believe you owe us something???

You claimed the last ten years were warmer, the facts say this is not true!

Which facts? I've asked you several times which decades you are talking about. No answer. I've shown which ones I am talking about, and how I concluded that the last one (2000-9) is warmer than the earlier two (1990-9 and 1995-2004). I asked if you could show where I was wrong. No answer.

You cling on to the cherry-picked trend of 2002 to 2009. You seem to not realise that this is a 7-year trend, and is not a comparison between decades. That the trend is also not statistically significant also seems to have given you a headache, but that's by the by.

I do owe you something, Tom. I apologise for assuming you have the basic math skills to understand the debate.

Hey, you don't even have the reading comprehension skills to notice that the thing I say you and Ricky have in common is not a point of view, but the dumb-headed approach to the debate.

Now, on Min X's posts, and Tom's response.

Do you realise that sea levels will not rise when the Arctic Sea ice has melted? You can do a simple experiment with a beaker with iced water in to prove that the level will not rise when the ice melts.

Sea levels would only rise for a few reasons, prime amongst these are:

1) less water in land-borne ice which has melted and flowed into the sea
2) less water in the atmosphere

I'm not aware of a reduction in humidity (and one aspect of rising sea levels would be increased water surface, which would increase the amount of water that evaporated into the air from oceans). I'd love to see how you explain a consistent trend of increasing sea levels another way.

You think that glaciers are moving back due to farming? Have you ever been to a glacial area? You can't farm on them, you really can't. Now that does stretch the imagination.

And Tom

to insist all warming is due to CO2 increases due to mankind is more than stretching the imagination.

Who says this? All that the IPCC say is that it is very likely that most of the warming is down to anthropic causes, amongst which CO2 is one major factor.

It's easy for you to attack a straw man, but try and argue against what people are actually saying, instead of what you say that they say (cf also, ricky pointing out that by removing his caveat and changing the words, you have altered the meaning of his sentence).

Dishonesty, thy name is Thomas.

Thanks for again proving my point
I rest my case, your continued refusal to admit anything and changing the goalposts over and over is so very clear to all but yourself.

hahaha, again ... so very easy
http://timeforchange.org/cause-and-effe ... rming-ipcc

The report does not really reveal new information about the causes and effects of global warming. This report however confirms that mankind through the emission of greenhouse gases (in particular carbon dioxide, CO2) is the cause of global warming. Mitigation of global warming will only be possible with a drastic reduction of the world-wide emission of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Nobody claims anyone is farming in the freaking shadow of a glacier. But I assume you deny farming has increased in the AREA nearer and nearer to glaciers? Killamanjaro The Alps, Pakistan, India, China? Or do you want us to believe our actions do not have consequences? Oh wait, that's what this whole issue is about (unless it doesn't suit your opinion?)

GMTom wrote:Nobody claims anyone is farming in the freaking shadow of a glacier. But I assume you deny farming has increased in the AREA nearer and nearer to glaciers? Killamanjaro The Alps, Pakistan, India, China? Or do you want us to believe our actions do not have consequences? Oh wait, that's what this whole issue is about (unless it doesn't suit your opinion?)

I want to know how it would affect glaciers in remote areas well away from farming. Or in areas like the Alps where farming has been going on for thousands of years and simply can't be intensified much due to the terrain.

And even where it does happen nearby, what it is that farming does that would cause a glacier to retreat. Are farmers going up to the mountains to collect massive quantities of snow?

GMTom wrote:Thanks for again proving my point
I rest my case, your continued refusal to admit anything and changing the goalposts over and over is so very clear to all but yourself.

You rest your case? I'd love to come up against you in a court of law...

I have not changed any goalposts. I made a statement about the average temperature for the last decade compared to the previous one. I've backed it up by showing how I got there. You deny it, but have not explained why. Your only contrary evidence is a seven year trend that is not statistically significant, which does not disprove it for the following reason:

The 2002 to 2009 trend does not compare a decade with another. It doesn't even use a decade's worth of data. So it cannot disprove a statement that is about comparing one decade with another.

For the absolute very last time, Tom. Do you understand the difference between a seven year trend and comparing between two whole decades?

GMTom wrote:hahaha, again ... so very easy
http://timeforchange.org/cause-and-effe ... rming-ipcc

Dearest Tommy,

Please note that quoting a third party commenting on an IPCC report is not the same as quoting the IPCC report. The link you provide is from a website run by Ann Petersen, who works as a "self-employed company consultant for team work, personality development and efficiency improvement" and who "integrates processes for conflict-solving, crisis management and alternative healing methods into her consultancy work and seminars", and her partner Jürg Rohrer who is a "self-employed entrepreneur in the fields of environmental technology and IT" and "[h]is main concern is the integration of high ethical values into the everyday commercial world ". So you found two people who say it. But who are not actually climate scientists, just a couple of kooks trying to make stuff out of it. The heart of the warmist conspiracy they are not.

If you want to read the IPCC summary (which is what I was thinking about), it's here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_dat ... spms2.html

Some quotes for you from it (my bolding)

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG. Its annual emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. The long-term trend of declining CO2 emissions per unit of energy supplied reversed after 2000

They do not say that CO2 is the only human-caused warming factor.

It is very likely that the observed increase in CH4 concentration is predominantly due to agriculture and fossil fuel use. CH4 growth rates have declined since the early 1990s, consistent with total emissions (sum of anthropogenic and natural sources) being nearly constant during this period. The increase in N2O concentration is primarily due to agriculture.

Other gases have been identified that may also contribute, and have been observed as increasing as well as CO2

There is very high confidence that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming.

Note two things:

1) It is not a statement of absolute certainty, but it is one that they are very confident of (and for scientists, that is a very strong statement).
2) This does not say that all warming is anthropogenic, just that they think that some warming is anthropogenic.

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.[7] It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica)

So:

1) They do not say all of the warming is down to humans, but most of it
2) They say that Greenhouse gases as a whole, not just CO2) are 'very likely' to be the cause of that warming
3) They use the slightly weaker 'likely' in the last sentence

Now, kindly try not to use the trick of proving that 'A' said 'X' by pointing to 'B' telling us that what 'A' meant, when we can clearly easily find that 'A' said 'Y'.

Lesson for the unscientific: don't take someone else's word for it if you can check things directly.

Tom asserted that "Rising sea levels have been happening for a few hundred years and no significant increase has been seen over the last few decades compared to previous trends." No link or citation, but very interesting data if true. It took me all of ten minutes to track down something a bit more solid. HERE (as a PDF) is the scholarly paper and here's a graph I've clipped from it:



Now here's where it gets fun. Everything you said that I quoted is technically true. Sea levels have indeed been rising for a few hundred years - see the top graph. And the current rate of growth (lower graph) is not greater than it was in the first part of the 20th century. So... YOU'RE RIGHT! But not really. Everything you imply with your assertion is wrong. The rate of rise is going up. Sea level was actually falling 225 years ago; the rate of rising since rising began just after that has increased. But it's not increased consistently. There's a 60-year to 65-year periodicity to the rate of increase. Presumably, that periodicity would reflect rising and falling sea levels if part of a larger-scale stability. Instead, it's superimposed on a general rise - with the rate increasing all the time if you factor out the periodicity.

The periodicity noted is apparently related to a 60-year periodicity in an assortment of related dynamics, including sea surface temp, sea level pressure, air temps, and various "paleo proxies from different locations around the world." What's going on? What explains this 60-year cycle? According to the article - are you ready for this? - it "may be related to an underlying variability in the thermohaline circulation, perhaps through advection of density anomalies or combinations of gyre and overturning advection."

Oh, yeah. We're all really qualified to interpret this stuff and come to reasonable independent conclusions. NOT. It's a sentence like that one that makes me say, "Let's just read the executive summary of the IPCC report and live with it." It's not just that real science is simply too freaking complicated for laymen - we can work out most of it if we're willing to invest the time - it's that Tom's assertion looks for all the world like he's quoting some blogger who read the exact same paper but either saw only what he wanted to see or chose to "spin" what he saw. The blogger (or whoever - I'm speculating) may have been a true expert. Even experts are subject to bias. (Right?) That's yet another reason to trust the IPCC report - it's far more than just one guy's read, or even one group's, or one discipline's.

To summarize: the linked paper isn't really that hard to comprehend, but it would be easy to extract from it only Tom's one-liner, which seems to contradict any assertion that sea levels are rising, more now than ever, as would be true if the globe was warming. Frankly, I was lucky to stumble across this particular paper. Can we Redscapers really expect to independently verify all the bits of data that go into the conclusions made by the IPCC? I don't think so.

Now clear your mind of all that and consider this: there's a 60-year cycle in all sorts of dynamics closely tied to global warming. The guys in lab coats aren't sure what causes this cycle(s). And this cycle is but one of many that have been detected in the geo-sciences. I don't know about you (i.e. Ricky) but I'd feel a lot more confident about the AGW hypothesis if we could make a better accounting of all these cycles and if we had a better feel for what could happen simply because they stack up in a certain way. What I mean is this: once you get beyond a handful of cycles with different periods you get a situation where at any point in time you can have a combination of cycle stages that's never ever been seen before. Is it not possible that a peculiar combination could yield, as an emergent property of the combination above and beyond the simple summing of cyclical effects, the phenomena we're seeing and ascribing to AGW?

Thank goodness that speculation is way too complex to be employed by deniers with nothing but political motives. But it's got me wondering.

Here is an interesting article that I found: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/n ... arm11.html

Please note the research cited whereby 1,000 peer reviewed articles from 1993-2003 were randomly picked and not a single one challenged the theory that man-made activity was contributing to global warming of the earth.

If you do not believe in the global warming theory, you need to think about the implications of that study reviewing peer reviewed articles. These are experts--they have put in many years of education and training to get to a position to where they could get funding for studies on climate change. Yes, some of them could be blinded by ideology, some of them could be wishing to support global warming theory in the hopes of getting grant money (I guess). But not a single one challenged global warming? This indicates that scientists have reached such a consensus on global warming that it is essentially as close as scientific "truth" as you're ever going to get.

Now, that does not mean that these scientists are right--they may be all missing an essential piece of the puzzle. However, how are we as non-scientists to judge the complexities of global warming and take issue with the conclusions of scientists that have much more expertise on this issue than we do?

It seems reasonable and prudent to rely on the overwhelming scientific consensus unless and until someone comes up with another theory that can explain the evidence of global warming without relying on man-made activity as contributing to it. I think it is very clear that there is no such theory out there.

We know that there are going to be business interests who oppose reductions in carbon emissions. It is reasonable to assume that they will fund scientists who will look for evidence for weaknesses in the global warming theor. Given the complexity of the issue, these scientists are bound to find some counter-vailing trends.

Global warming makes intuitive sense to me; maybe it does not make intuitive sense to you. But I don't think a layman (at least without spending hundreds if not thousands of hours of study) can make an independent judgment on global warming. Ultimately, he or she is going to rely on some scientist. And, if we are going to rely on scientists, then I think we have to rely on the scientific consensus. Is this not the prudent thing to do? I tend to rely on what my doctor says to do with regard to my health and not rely on what I can find on the internet....

The only real question is how serious a threat does global warming pose and whats steps do we have to do about it? Here, I think there is much less of a consensus and my layman's understanding of the models that scientists use to project future effects of global warming indicates that these are educated guesses at best. But we should be acting to do something now to reduce carbon emissions and more and more as the effects of global warming become clearer and clearer. Do we want to be remembered in human history as the generation that did nothing while a catastrophic effect on civilization was looming?

Minister X wrote:Now clear your mind of all that and consider this: there's a 60-year cycle in all sorts of dynamics closely tied to global warming. The guys in lab coats aren't sure what causes this cycle(s). And this cycle is but one of many that have been detected in the geo-sciences. I don't know about you (i.e. Ricky) but I'd feel a lot more confident about the AGW hypothesis if we could make a better accounting of all these cycles and if we had a better feel for what could happen simply because they stack up in a certain way. What I mean is this: once you get beyond a handful of cycles with different periods you get a situation where at any point in time you can have a combination of cycle stages that's never ever been seen before. Is it not possible that a peculiar combination could yield, as an emergent property of the combination above and beyond the simple summing of cyclical effects, the phenomena we're seeing and ascribing to AGW?

Indeed. it is not impossible that there is a natural factor behind these cycles and the changes to them. Certainly that's why I think we need more research.

It is interesting to see how the graphs you show put Tom's claim into context, particularly the lower one.

The graphs show us nothing but a rise that began before CO2 was a supposed problem. You want to go back that far and claim they were dropping until that point is meaningless as far as CO2 goes and what were they doing 100 years before that? Was this just a tail end of one of those many ups and downs? I have never said we should do nothing about the warming, I agree we should stake steps just in case this is in fact a real threat. What I did say is this is in no way 100% accurate and settled, we are learning more every day and to dismiss any and all who oppose is foolish. I also think we should take great care to not go overboard on the solution such as Kyoto, killing the worlds economy is not the answer, going back to horse and buggy is not the answer, carbon cap and trade is a stupid economy killer as well. Incentives to switch to clean energy is the answer, it reduces such environmental impacts while it reduces our dependence on foreign oil, win-win. I am not in denial of the warming, I do however have my doubts and am skeptical of everything. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, just as MX points out, he trusts what his doctor says, but I would hope he would get a second opinion and even do some research of his own and listen to all other opinions, same here. This is like taking what the one doctor had to say (one side) and ignoring all others. We simply can not dismiss all others, especially when we see so many reasons to question them.

X is right, we laymen can throw graphs back and forth all day long and still not grasp humanity's full effect on global climate. Like them or lump them, the climate scientists are at the forefront of understading weather vs. climate vs. emissions vs. sunspots vs. blah blah schmakity blah. Tom's graphs will never convince Dan and vice versa.

So let's change this up a little. We've been assured by many august and unimpeachable sources that there can be no disputing the evidence. Groovy. That being the case, there ought to be no trouble in coming up with scenario breakers. For instance, a scenario breaker for gravity would be my monitor spontaneously levitating off my desk. We all know that's not going to happen. So if AGW is as sure as gravity...what are some "pah! that could never happen because of all the AGW!" moments? What are they? Would anyone care to list some?

Are there any? If there are not then that makes AGW a universal truth. And that would mean this discussion belongs more in a philosophy or religion thread.

Looking at it philosphically, if I remember my Hegel correctly then AGW proponents are in a big mess. If a thesis contains no flaw then there can be no antithesis. Without the antithesis...no synthesis.