shoggoth

The physics they mention is already known. But claiming that it shows raising co2 levels cannot raise global temperatures is just ridiculous. Not only would that be physically impossible, but their counter-argument doesn't even make any sense. Their claim quoted above is totally off the mark. They are saying that co2 cannot cause warming if co2 rises because of warming, otherwise the positive feedback would lead to catastrophic warming, and it didn't. But not all positive feedbacks lead to runaway events as they are claiming here. If a rise of 1C temperature causes a 50% rise in co2, and a 50% rise in co2 causes a 0.5C temperature rise (example numbers), then do the math. There will be no runaway warming, but the co2 will amplify any temperature increase. Raising co2 independantly of temperature (as has been done over the last century) will equally cause a warming. 1) Initial conditions: 20C 100ppm 2) Raise temperature 1C indepedently of co2: 21C 3) 1C increase in temperature causes co2 levels to increase by 50%: 150ppm 4) 50% increase in co2 causes additional 0.5C warming: 21.5C 5) additional 0.5C warming causes co2 levels to increase by 25%: 187.5ppm 6) 25% increase in co2 causes additional 0.25C warming: 21.75C 7) additional 0.25C warming causes co2 levels to increase by 12.5%: 200ppm 8) 12.5% increase in co2 causes additional 0.125C warming: ~21.88C etc 21.9375 Overall temperature has risen 2C. 1C of that rise was due to some independant factor. But the other 1C was due to amplification effect of the added co2. There was no catastrophic runaway warming as the authors of this article imply must occur.

I don't know where you get that from but the temperature rise in the past 100 years has actually been less than half of that - about 0.8C. Also it is likely that as much as a third of that amount - in the early 20th century - is due to natural causes.

Different regions have different trends. Even if all regions in the world had perfect measurements over the past 100 years, they would not show the same trend over that time period. So there is no reason to expect the US land record to match the global land record any more than any other record. Here is the distribution of global warming over the past 120 years. Some regions have cooled, and some have warmed. But more have warmed than cooled, which is why the mean trend is a warming. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/...emp_anomaly.gif The satellite record is a statistical composite from satellites throughout the past 30 years. The US land record is a statistical composite from station records all over the US. A statistical composite from station records all over the world is a composite record You could just as easily pick holes in the satellite records (if not more easily), but you don't, because it's only the surface record you don't like. Meteorlogical stations around the world are pretty capable of taking temperturature measurements. If not the surface trend would not match the satellite trend. Besides the satellite record over the past 30 years matches the surface record over the past 30 years quite well. The issue of urban growth affecting the record has been covered in lots of detail by the scientific community. They have compared the record of just rural based stations and found it doesn't differ much from the record of urban stations. They have done all sorts of statistical analysis to try and see if there is bias from urban stations. The consensus today is that urban growth has only affected the 20th century record by 0.05C max. Plus the satellite record for the past 30 years confirms the surface record is not an artifact of urban warming. Also you said yourself that the US satellite record matches the US ground record (I disagee). If urban warming skews the data then the the US ground record should be one of the most affected, given US urban growth in the past 100 years. So how, in your opinion, do you claim that it matches the satellite record? By accident? Yes, and the post 1980 warming is widely regarded to have not been caused by the warming sun. Here's the current up-to-date GISS graph of the US: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D_lrg.gif Again - regional trends are different. The global trend is the average of all regions. There's no reason to expect the global trend to match the US trend. That is wrong on a number of levels. First once again - one region does not represent the world trend. Second the UK and western europe for example has a just as well maintained network of weather stations. Yet the trend in the UK (http://www.metoffice.com/research/hadleyce.../Annual/cet.gif) and western europe does not match the US trend. It's because different regions have different trends. If all regions on the earth had perfect measurements they would not all show the same trend Third if yout accept urbanisation has been more successfulyl corrected for in the US, then by extension it would have been corrected for the rest of the world. Because the correction is statistical and can be applied to any countries data. The global surface record agrees with the satellites too.

I don't understand why you post links to media op-ed articles that have no bearing at all on the post you replied to, but I might join in posting links. Here for example is the excellent correlation again between the global surface record, and global satellite records for the lower troposphere: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satelli...emperatures.png And this one is a bit more on topic - It's called "Climate Fraudit" http://www.scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/0...ate_fraudit.php

So they don't match and they do match...? It's global warming. Reliable at telling you the temperature trend of the US only. They cannot tell you the temperature trends over other regions. Temperature trends of different regions differ. Some regions warm, some cool. Overall more regions are warming than cooling - ie the average is a warming. That's what global warming is. More closely match than what? And what are these US satellite records? Don't you mean global satellite records? And what relevance do US ground records have alone when it represents less than 2% of the earth's coverage? Why ignore the bigger picture?

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archi...ays-for-a-spin/

Temperature proxies, such as ice cores give an idea of temperature trends extending back hundreds of thousands of years further than man-kept records of temperature. Eg the vostok trends: http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/vostok/g...s/tempplot5.gif Yes it could be a blip in which case there is nothing that can be done about it (personally even if it is man caused I dont think there is anything we can do about it). That's the point of the science now - to see what could explain the recent warming, and find out what has caused it - natural or not. Enhanced greenhouse effect just happens to be one of the better explainations, and if it is true it would imply tempertures will continue rising.

Yes it is huge, but it's accounted for. Otherwise how come your US temperature chart doesn't show as much as two degrees of warming? What do you mean by US satellite measurements. The graph is of global lower troposphere temperatures from satellites. The satellite trends are not that different from the surface trends at all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satelli...emperatures.png In fact the surface trend shows about +0.17C per decade. The UAH (which is the graph you posted) finds about +0.13C per decade. While RSS finds about 0.19C (using the SAME satellite data). The global satellite trends don't match the US temperature trend graph you posted at all - because it's comparing apples and oranges. The US tempeture trends over the past century do not reflect the entire global trends.

The question is whether the warming will continue, and that can only be answered by understanding what has caused the past 30 years of temperature rise. If it is mainly caused by an enhanced greenhouse effect then that implies the temperature will continue to rise over the coming century (as greenhouse gases, notably co2, is going to continue rising regardless of any government policies). A rise of 2C over 100 years is therefore possible. That might not sound much, but the warming that led us out of the last ice age was 9C over 8,000 years. So the recent warming is very rapid compared to that. And rapid climate change leads to little time to adapt (that goes for humans as well as all life on earth), and that leads to problems.

Lets look at the US historical records. http://www.john-daly.com/usa-1999.gif Why are you ignoring the global trends? It's called Global Warming not US Historical Warming The US is part of the globe. Part of a globe which is overall is warming. Not true. The consensus in the climate community after looking into that issue in detail is the trends are not affected significantly. With the heat island effect thought to contribute just 0.05C over the last century. Besides some of the areas warming most on the earth are the least inhabited. More closely reflect than what? I haven't posted any US surface temperture records (you did that)

The vast majority of glaciers are receeding, which reflects global warming. More has occured since 1980 than 1900-1940 A cooling since 1940? The 5-year mean temperature trend has continued to rise after 1998. 1998 was exceptionally warm due to there being a very strong el nino. That's why it sticks out. Recent years have been just as warm without a strong el nino (in fact both NASA and NCDC put 2005 as hotter than 1998). There is no indication that the warming has stopped yet.

30 years?,100years,1000 years,1,000,000 years,10,000,000 years. What relevance does 30 years have on a place that is billions of years old and has changes it's appearance and temperature constantly? That is offtopic from what I said. Bob Carter claimed there has been no warming since 1998. The graphs I posted refute that. The warming trend has never gone up year after year. There was a flat trend from 1987-1992 for example. But the fact that tempertures in the past few years have been about the same as 1998 temperatures when there was a very strong el nino that year, shows that tempeture has indeed gone up since 1998.

Lets look at the US historical records. http://www.john-daly.com/usa-1999.gif Why are you ignoring the global trends? It's called Global Warming not US Historical Warming

MSU stands for Microwave Sounding Unit http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_docu...instrument.html They are built onto satellites and can be used to measure temperature at different height ranges in the atmosphere. The problem is that over the last 3 decades the measurements are spread across multiple satellites and these satellites drift which affects the data. So to compile actual 30-year satellite based temperture trends you have to splice together the seperate measurements, and adjust for the drifting. UAH (university of alabama in huntsville) is the term given to one group that has done this to generate a satellite temperature trend. Another group who have compiled a trend from the data is Remote Sensing Systems (RSS). You can compare the trends each group has generated side by side here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satelli...emperatures.png You'll notice the RSS trend is higher. Junkscience on their site consistantly emphasizes the UAH trend. There is no good reason to favor one over the other. But perhaps you like me can imagine a reason junkscience might want to emphasize the lower trend... You might also notice from the link above that the UAH graph trend does not match the junkscience.com one that B.Max posted. This is because the UAH graph on wikipedia is lower-troposphere (ie near surface) wheras the junkscience.com one is mid-troposphere. In fact here again there was a choice for junkscience.com because there are actually two mid-troposphere trends from UAH. The basic one also includes part of the lower stratosphere which dampens the warming trend because the the stratosphere has an overall cooling trend (as expected by climate models). The more complicated mid-troposphere trend from UAH attempts to remove the influence of the lower stratosphere in the data, to better represent actual mid-troposphere trends and therefore the trend shows more warming. So that said, guess which mid-troposphere UAH trend junkscience.com decided to use in their graph.

You haven't shown that it hasn't increased. http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/UAHMSUglobe-m.htm http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jh...4/09/do0907.xml You only have to look at the last 30 years on these graphs to wonder what the hell Bob Carter is going on about http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/resea...ded-temp-pg.gif http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif

You haven't shown that it hasn't increased. My bet is you can expect a telegraph article by Bob Carter to be linked to now...That article was what started this widespread myth that temperature hasn't increased since 1998

The false data is the figure of 15% of the contribution of man to the recent co2 rise. The "man-made additions" column has been added to the table without mentioning that the figure does not come from the DoE. It's based on both. The knowledge of climate that the models are based upon is partly derived from historical temperature records. Here is a popular contrarian website: http://www.friendsofscience.org/index.php?ide=4 One of their arguments is: Computer models can be made to "verify" anything by changing some of the 5 million input parameters or any of a multitude of negative and positive feedbacks in the program used.. They do not "prove" anything So which is it? Can computer models be made to verify anything? Or are they unable to match the known temperature record? It can't be both, so why are both being claimed?

Who is doing the distortion though? Junkscience.com or GISS? Or perhaps there is simply a misunderstanding on junkscience.com's part. The links given on the the junkscience.com page to the two New York Central Park Station graphs which start in 1820 are dead links. It looks like in the last 2 years GISS has moved it's pages around. Here are the images as they are located now: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/...num_neighbors=1 http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/csci/csc...&data_set=2 Notice the graphs on the Junkscience.com site start in 1820 while the GISS graphs start in 1880. Two possibilities for this discrepancy: 1) the GISS graphs once started in 1820, but they have since changed them to start in 1880. 2) the GISS graphs never started in 1820, and Junkscience.com modified thier copies of the graphs to contain earlier data [side note: It wouldn't be the first time a contrarian site has modified data from an authority, without mentioning it has been modified when presenting it - a good example can be found in Table 1 here http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html which is attributed to the U.S. Department of Energy, but the table has been modified to contain the additional column "Man-made additions" which contains flat out wrong data. It gives the misleading impression that the that DoE are saying only 15% of the recent co2 rise is anthropogenic, when in fact that figure (along with others on that page) has actually been plucked out of who knows where] Another interesting problem: The New York Meteorological Observatory in Central Park, which is the source of the data shown on the GISS site, was established in 1868. So while the post-1968 data can have come from this station, where did the pre-1868 data in the junkscience.com graphs come from? Therefore these accusations made by junkscience.com are not as clear cut as they seem. There is all the possibility that junkscience.com is doing the distorting, or has made an error rather than GISS doing that. Unless junkscience.com can show: 1) There were reliable 1820-1860 measurements taken in the New York Central Park area 2) These measurements are accurate enough that they can be combined with post 1868 New York Meteorological Observatory measurements to give a meaningful trend. Then they simply don't have a case based on what they have presented. Even if we assume GISS did have in fact cut their graphs from 1820's onwards to 1880's onwards since 2004, junkscience.com would not only have to show that this wasn't done for a good data reason, but would also have to show it was done deliberately to mislead. For example perhaps GISS decided to show a plot for only the last century of data because 100 years is a nice round number - there's nothing wrong with that and it's not "distorting data. Especially when you realise that the "Common Sense Climate Index" is not about hyping warming at all. That is the GISS page on the "Common Sense Climate Index" is not about making the case for global warming at all. Neither does junkscience.com's graphs, assuming they are reliable, make a case against global warming. This is a single station giving measurements for a single region. The Common Sense Climate Index is a measure of whether local temperature change is pronounced enough to be noticable to people living in the a local area. As the site says: "If the Index reaches and consistently maintains a value of 1 or more, the climate change should be noticeable to most people who have lived at that location for a few decades." So even if it was warmer 150 years ago in New York Central Park, all the CSCI is telling us is (correctly) that people back then would have defintely noticed the later drop in temperature. The CSCI is not an "index giving a completely false impression" as Junkscience.com claim.

Evidence of what? I'll give you there is no proof of man-made global warming. But I do think there is evidence. It's not like owl-made global warming, which truely does have no evidence going for it.

Technically that is correct: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Satelli...emperatures.png But it looks like nitpicking to me: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7...emperatures.png No evidence...right..