Wayward Son

1) You do realize that BT is one of the most common pesticides used by organic farmers. 2) Any pesticide results in pests eventually becoming resistant to the pesticide. This goes for conventional farming as well as organic farming. 3) BT toxin being found in human blood does not mean that BT toxin has been found to affect human health. BT toxin generally works on specific sites. Those sites are found in certain groups of insects - not humans. Along a similar line: only a tiny percentage of viruses can harm humans, even though many of those viruses that can not harm humans are often found in the blood stream of humans, and even though those viruses do harm other species.

Carepov already pointed out that nicotine is used as an insecticide for organic farming. You didn't seem to respond to it. Organic farming does use pesticides, nicotine being a frequent one, and because they ban synthetics, and their pesticides are not routinely replaced by newer/safer ones, some of the pesticides they use are among the worst ones out there.

You are probably correct. I don't claim to understand how most people come to the conclusions they do, but I do know that they do not have a tendency to track down the best down the best evidence and evaluate it in an unbiased way. It is true that scientists do not have a perfect understanding of anything. However, people should question things based on the degree of evidence available and the consensus or lack of consensus of the relevant experts. Scientists do not have a perfect understanding of evolution or gravity. However, people accept these theories unless they have an overwhelming ideology against it. The difference with climate change is that a small number of people with an overwhelming ideology against it have managed to convince a large percentage of people that a controversy exists even though no legitimate controversy exists.

Theories are never proven, they can only be disproven. Muller's project was embraced by deniers until the very second that his data confirmed what dozens of other studies had also found. At that point those deniers - including the likes of Watts who said that he would accept the findings whether they agreed or disagreed with his position - went on the attack using their usual crap. That the likes of hardened deniers like Watts, McKitrick and Orlowski reacted in the way they have is not surprising. The deniers can yabber on they want about Muller (someone who I don't care for, but who I have been using because he because he was on the other side, and his results are recent) and his findings, but the reason they are concentrating on him on right now, is because they don't want their dupes to understand that his results simply confirmed what so many others had already found.

Actually there is a shit load of evidence. Just because you haven't looked for it doesn't mean that it does not exist. We understand the historical forcing factors. We know that they are non factors at the moment. Could there be other forcing factors that we don't yet know of? Yes, but it is highly likely that any unknown ones would be small. We also know how ghg's work as forcing factors. To argue that natural causes are a major player would require: 1) human ghg emissions to not work the way we know they work. 2) an unknown forcing factor being strong and yet unknown. It would make more sense to believe in unicorns and fairies. Earlier you showed a link to a study showing that we are constantly learning more, and we are, but there is a big difference between the very complicated science of how heat is transferred throughout the oceans (something that we already knew was happening, but need to learn more about), and the most less complicated science of understanding what forcing factors are. You know that changes humans are making are small how? You know that the significant increase in ghg's into the atmosphere over a very short period of time is nothing compared to natural changes how? A whole lot of certainty based on no evidence.

Based on what? What evidence? You don't have a clue, but just because you don't doesn't mean that everyone else is equally clueless. Climate scientists didn't just use a hunch, like you did, they started with an understanding of science, and used methods to determine forcing factors. You guessed. They didn't. You are wrong. They are not.

The second is based on peer review, needs to conform with basic scientific laws and principles, is built on evidence, needs to be challenged and replicated by other scientists, and so on. The sad part is that models themselves play a small role. The basic science was there first. Muller's BEST results for instance have nothing to do with models. The IPCC reports have only a little mention of models. The mast majority of it is about the scientific understanding of climate change without models. Models enhance what we already know. If the models are off one way or the other, the basic science still stands. Because of the denier concentration on models, some have said that the scientific community would have been better off without them. I disagree, and feel that deniers would have just latched on to something else.

You do understand what a scientific theory is? The theory consists of countless facts. Of course you would. You have a couple questions that if only someone would ever get around to explaining them - although they have been explained long ago - then you may start to change your mind. Conspiracy theorists don't change their mind when one of their straw dummies is knocked down, they just build another one and commit the same argument from incredulity logical fallacy. I guess you will have to see why Muller's BEST results found such a great match between surface temperature and CO2 concentration going back in 1750 - and that match gets stronger and stronger as time goes by and the ever greater concentration of CO2 overwhelms other factors that had previously contributed to natural variability. From 1750 to 1950 the correlation is very strong. From 1950 until 1990 it is very very strong. From 1990 to present it is probably the strongest correlation I have ever seen in nature. And this is what one would expect as the CO2 concentration increased the correlation grew stronger and stronger. Maybe you will find him wrong and then publish your results in a peer-reviewed journal. Then you can come back here and I will personally congratulate you on proving me wrong. On the other hand, it could be you that is wrong. No one on here has made the claim that only CO2 levels affect climate. People have long understood that there are multiple forces that can and do cause climate change. However, scientists have tested those forcing factors and none of those forces are a factor today. One forcing factor does exist - ghg gases - and we are pumping more and more of it into the atmosphere every year. So your position is that you understand very well that forces can affect climate change, but refuse to accept the ONLY forcing factor that is present today. That makes sense. And furthermore the Arctic is not the only region that is warming. Have you even bothered to look at the pictures of the globe which show heating (red) and cooling trends (blue)? That regional area you speak of spans the whole globe. Muller's results which dealt with land surface temperatures have showed that when you remove the fluctuations of El Nino there is no evidence of this so called temperature stagnation. As as Muller states you could use the years 1980 through 1995 to show cooling, just as people falsely use the years 1998 through 2010. But we know that during those 3 decades temperatures increased big time. That shows the dishonesty of cherry picking specific dates. So let me get this straight....you know that the planet is warmer because of natural climate variations due to a warming cycle...yet the scientific community managed to miss that? If that is not the most arrogant thing I have ever read, I don't know is. No one has ever said that there could not be natural causes. What we have said is that the scientific community has looked into natrual causes and none of them have been impacting this period of warming, at the same time there is an obvious anthropogenic cause - ghg gasses that does fit the data. If you are going to use this line of reasoning, you should at least go for a supernatural cause: astrology, an angry god, something like that.

Denier is the proper term. Whether you object to being placed in the same category as others who deserve the term is irrelevant. The term skeptic/sceptic that is often used is completely incorrect for those who deny climate science. Skeptic magazine (produced by the skeptics society) made this point starting in about 2007 with a multi-day conference in which they invited prominent proponents and prominent "skeptics" of climate change. Those who were proponents brought the science and evidence and showed why denier claims were baseless and pseudo-science. Those who called themselves skeptics brought forth no evidence or science to support their position, but complained that science has been wrong before and being skeptical about things is good. They could not use their normal ridiculous claims that they use to dupe the general public because those easily debunked claims would have been shot down instantly by people who actually knew what they were talking about. The position of the skeptics society is that until those who doubt the scientific consensus can come up with something that is not complete nonsense the proper skeptical position is to favour the evidence and science. I am sure that this was not an easy position for them to take. The head of the organization, Michael Shermer, is a Libertarian who doubted the scientific consensus for many years, but had the integrity to accept the science despite the difficulty that meant for his libertarian political philosophy. Skeptic Magazine has published 3 editions on climate change (vol 14-1; 15-4 and 17-2) showing what the science is, why denier claims are wrong, and why deniers are not skeptics. CSI's magazine Skeptical Inquirer has also had several issues on climate change (31.3 and 34.2) coming to the same conclusion: skeptics accept the best science and evidence, and skepticism does not mean falling for baseless, conspiracy mongering nonsense. At this point it is on basically par with creationism.

That is going to require a link. It is unbelieveable that people still attempt to pass off the 10 year lull horse crap. No one should take you seriously. I am not going to bother responding to it, as undoubtedly people have shown you that this was a lie countless times and you ignored reality each time. What the hell are you even talking about? You are the person who is spreading the completely incorrect meme that it changed from global warming to climate change. I would perfectly expect that informed posters would have been using both terms in earlier threads as both terms applied in the past and both terms apply now. No we should not be arguing for one over the other. Just because you fall for the stupidity of the claims that Limbaugh and Beck spout doesn't meant that the rest of us are as gullible. The BEST study by Muller specifically looked at surface temperature. It was a study that looked only at the global warming part of climate change. Muller worded his statement that way for two reasons. 1) scientists always accept that all explanations are provisional. All results no matter how solid can always be overturned by a stronger explanation. Every finding is only the best we have found, and is always open to a better explanation. Evolution, gravity, the earth going round the sun. However, just like for gravity and evolution, the bar is set extremely high. Not only would an alternative explanation have to fit better than the current explanation, but it would also need to explain how exactly it is that human released ghg emissions are not following known basic physical laws. So any alternative explanation would have to prove two things: first that an as of now unknown force or group of forces, is causing global warming at almost the exact rate that human ghg emissions should be and second that human ghg emissions are not affecting the climatic system even though well established basic science says that it must. If you want to side with that pile of stupidity that is fine, but at least be honest about the ridiculousness of such a position. 2) Muller was also trying to save face in arguing that his past skepticism was justified, when in reality the the data was already there but he had been duped by denier scams and misinformation. Muller: "Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause." What data has been tossed out? I base my positions on the best available evidence. Not on whether or not the evidence agrees with a political ideology. It is hardly a prediction to accept that ghg emissions released 10 years from now will behave in the same manner that ghg emissions always do. You on the other hand doubt things will continue along as usual. Bravo. Solid evidence based argument. This is completely irrelevant. There is the discussion of science, which is completely different from the discussion of policy decisions. Government policy decisions do not change scientific reality. I have said absolutely no such thing. I have made no statement as to whether or not society will or will not develop alternative energies or alter fossil fuel use. Nor have I made any statement as to whether or not disaster, famines or die-offs will occur. None, nadda, zilch. You should be ashamed that your position is so devoid of evidence that you have to completely make up positions about your opponents to attack. My posts have been about the science - the thing that you completely ignore.

Too bad (but unsurprising) that facts are unimportant to you. First of all the media as whole has changed very little. 1) Frank Luntz working for the Bush administration advised the administration to use one term over the other. 2) Ignorant deniers like Limbaugh and Beck being the dishonest hacks that they are ran with the change coming from Luntz and spread the false meme that the scientific community had changed the term. 3) This filtered down to deniers in the general population who further spread the false meme. 4) This group of deniers now claim that the meme is found throughout the media, when the reality is that honest media has not changed, but the dishonest ignorant denier media like Fox news have. 5) When the deniers are shown that they are wrong, they just make up excuses. Not true. Science is the emphasis. Who pays? The IPCC? The Government? Who paid for climate change skeptic Muller to run his BEST research, which convinced him and his team that the world was not only warming along the exact same lines as the IPCC, but that humans were responsible for almost 100% of that warming? (Hint: it was neither the IPCC nor the Government). SO WHAT???? I do appreciate the deniers though. Making sure at least one of them was on the jury kept me out of prison. The prosecution may say that I murdered this person, but people die from natural causes all the time. Sure they may say that this death was obviously not natural, but people die from natural causes all the time. Sure all the stacks of evidence may show that the person was actually murdered and that I was the person who did it, but people die from natural causes all the time. How is it even possible that I could have murdered this person? The world is really big and I am just a person, the whole idea of it is just ridiculous. People die all the time from natural causes and because dying does naturally occur that means that all dying must be natural and people can never be the cause of it. And look at the people who arrested me, charged me and are prosecuting me - all of them have their salaries paid for by the government. Their jobs depend on blaming people for things that happen naturally all the time - like people dying. Walked free. Not really that difficult as it has been done. Starting with the basic sciences going back more than hundred years that showed how greenhouse gases trap heat, combined with the reality of humans spewing copious amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere every year. Beyond those basics hundreds upon hundreds of studies have expanded our knowledge and understanding. While a group of deniers plugged their ears, covered their eyes and shouted long debunked stupidity day after day.

I probably shouldn't, but I still hold out hope for intellectual honesty to develop.

Michael Hardner subsequently mentioned that there were good reasons to change the name. You are both wrong, because there has never been a name change. This is simply a meme that has developed and was pushed by the likes of Limbaugh and Beck after their darling Luntz (in the Bush administration) pressed for a change within the administration to only refer to climate change/global warming as climate change. This was because Luntz found, through studies, climate change to be the term more likely to pacify people from feeling that action must be taken. There is nothing controversial about that. Luntz has openly admitted his role, and the meme only developed after Luntz. The meme is, like every meme spread by the deniers of climate science, completely wrong. The IPCC was founded in 1988 not as the Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming, but as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Furthermore going back to the initial journal articles in the 1970s the naming has been completely consistent: with climate change refering to all effects (including global warming) that result from changes in GHG concentration, and global warming refering specifically to surface temperature increases caused by increased GHG levels. So in the scientific literature global warming is a subdivision of the whole. The terminology has never changed. People have been taken for a ride by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk - a group of people who know almost nothing about climate science, and what they do know is wrong.

William Ashley, While I agree with the need for more spots in medical school in Canada. The frequently referenced number that only 12% of applicants are accepted is bogus. If you compare medical school spots to medical school applications then it comes out to about 12%. However, most applicants apply to more than one medical school. Among the medical schools in Ontario roughly 25 - 28% of Canadian applicants each year are accepted. Some of those rejected students are accepted elsewhere in the country meaning that the most likely number is 27 - 30% of Canadian applicants are accepted at a medical school somewhere in the Country. Opening up more medical school spots may increase that percentage, but that depends on the cutoffs which need to be met for your application to be reviewed at each medical school. If the average medical school added 10% more spots, but at the same time lowered their cutoffs then the percentage of successful applicants may fall, simply due to their being more applicants. As an example UofO has a GPA cutoff of a GPA of 3.87 (for english speaking applicants who grew up outside of the Ottawa area). But Mac has a cutoff of 3.0 and a verbal reasoning score on the MCAT of >6 (although realistically your chances of an interview, let alone acceptance, are very tiny if you are below 3.7 and 10). Mac always has thousands more applicants than Ottawa, but in turn rejects far more applicants. Edit - On page 7 you will see that percentage of Canadian Residents at Ontario medical schools over the more recent 5 years for which there was data ranged from 26 - 29%. Ontario and BC are considered the toughest two provinces to get into medical school.

Well the chances of your prediction being right appear extremely slim. The same thing can't be said about global warming as global cooling because in the case of global warming it appears in thousands of peer reviewed articles each year in all of the major scientific journals. In fact I can't remember the last weekly edition of science or nature which did not have at least one article on global warming. In the case of global cooling or an imminent ice age there was maybe a half dozen articles between all of the major science journals over a decade and they were mostly dismissive of the idea. The one didn't come from the scientific community, had almost no real science behind it and was mainly only considered in the popular media, the other comes from the scientific community, has tons of real science behind behind it and gets far more attention in the scientific journals than any other issue. If you honestly for a second think that these two are in any way related then you should do some research. When the likes of Tim Ball and Fred Singer bring up comparisons they know they are completely full of it and probably can't believe their luck that people are still stupid enough to pay them to speak nonsense.

I stand corrected. I only looked at civilian.

Do I really need to provide links when Riverwind agreed that “no one really disputes” it directly below your post and when all of the major skeptics such as Lindzen, the Pielke’s, Lomborg, Christy and Spencer have all agreed as well. There is really no dispute that increases in CO2 leads to heat trapping and therefore higher temperatures (I mean even skeptic Patrick Michaels in 2006 admitted that "Record temperatures will continue to be set every couple of years or so." - his position is that is good thing. And another skeptical author Ronald Bailey, who in 2002 wrote a book titled “Global Warming and other Eco-Myths” was by 2005 saying “Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, surface, and balloon—have been pointing to rising global temperatures.” Bailey by the way wrote 4 articles for Reason magazine about the Bali conference and although I disagree with him on several issues they are definitely worth reading, as is his most recent book “Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution”) . The disputes really are how much warming will result, the role that negative and positive feedback loops will play, and how best to deal with the problem of global warming. So the issue isn't that I can't provide a link, more that I don't have much free time and don't really want to spend it searching for the most appropriate explaination. I will start off by mentioning one thing as you mention Spencer and his criticism of climate models below. It seems almost every GW skeptical blog (like this one of hundreds: http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/2007/...ed-for-in.html) on the net uses quotes from Spencer and Lindzen to say that climate models can’t understand clouds so they ignore them completely. Whether Spencer and Lindzen have actually said that or whether they are being misinterpreted I can’t say. But surely they know that in fact all climate models that the IPCC includes do take cloud effects into account (both positive and negative feedbacks). Yes there is a large amount of uncertainty with clouds but models are currently attempting to reduce that uncertainty by using different sets of cloud modeling parameters – one for instance has been running over 60,000 different simulations, so that is definitely not ignoring clouds. But as for your reference to catastrophic warming and that they rest entirely on computer models. You are probably right. It depends on what people refer to when they say catastrophic warming – I don’t use the phrase myself. However we don’t need models to know that CO2 traps heat or to know that the poles warm much faster than the equator (we know that because the atmospheric layer is much lower at the poles). We don’t need models to know that if the permafrost melts in the arctic it will release a lot of methane. We don’t need models to understand that warming leads to alterations in ocean currents and those can lead to alterations of weather patterns such as long-term droughts or increased rain in areas. There shouldn’t be much dispute about that as many of the major skeptics actually use those changes to provide examples of positive changes that will occur. They believe that the positives will outweigh the negatives, others such as myself believe that seeing as both nature and humans have adapted to our current climate and weather systems then the negatives will outweigh the positives. Furthermore several skeptics do accept the computer models, the most well known would probably be Lomborg, who in his recently released “Cool It” endorses accepting the IPCC middle of the road climate predictions. He doesn’t endorse following Kyoto, but he does promote spending billions through research and development towards the development of alternative fuels and energy efficiency, along with spending billions more towards tackling third world problems like malaria, illiteracy, clean water, ending hunger and so on. Lomborg has an issue with the lack of ability of much of the environment to assess risks and I agree with him on that. I will have to check to see if Christy and Spencer ever released their data and computer source code. Last I checked they hadn't. As for NASA not explaining how they removed UHI, well I disagree, they explained how they did it. They adjusted trends in urban stations around the world to match rural stations in their regions. We recognize that cities are hotter, but seem to forget that most stations are not actually in the cities (they are normally in a park which is much cooler than downtown) and have a tendency to not be greatly affected by the increased heat in the city. Studies I have seen have shown that UHI has only minimal effect on the records - both present day and historical. Skeptics have a tendency to have an issue with those studies, but I have yet to see them do their own study. I mentioned McIntyre twice. The first time was actually an accident, I meant Milloy, but McIntyre was appropriate in that place too. I have read McIntyre’s blog off and on for a couple years as time permits, consider him to be a hard worker and have had the odd exchange over the internet where I found him to be very reasonable. I don’t agree with many of his positions, like his demanding of source code be released to the public. I just don’t see why that should be warranted. If he has issues with the results that NASA gets then he can do the same thing they do. Take the data available freely online and calculate it. If his results are different from theirs than other groups can attempt to reproduce the results and if there appears to be fraud then that can be investigated. My problem with the releasing of source code is that it allows others who are attempting to reproduce the results to do so by copying instead of doing original work. I think that it will lead to less scientific accuracy, not more. And as I have said, the skeptical scientists on the whole don’t release their source code either. I understand why McIntyre wants the source code released. That is because it is very easy to criticize, but much harder to create. Again he could do the same thing that NASA does. He could take the same data (available for free from the NOAA) and create the same kind of computer program to calculate the same results. But there are a couple of problems with that: It is a lot of work and because the program required is so large and complex McIntyre will undoubtedly have small errors in his program (as he has already found when doing such things) When the end result is a difference between results that is almost immeasurable, no one will pay any attention and he did all of that work for nothing. He recognizes this and he understands that if he does his own work he will be just as open to criticism and that the differences will statistically insignificant almost every time. He is not a stupid man so he knows that if instead he can get the source code then he can spend a lot less time to find a tiny error and then he can exploit the error and not end result – which is most often that the corrected error is statistically meaningless. He recognizes that there is far more gain with far less work, but I like scientists to actually do work. The global warming skeptics really behave in much the same way that the creatists/intelligent designers do. They do very little original work and they instead concentrate on getting media attention. But, anyways that doesn’t mean that I don’t like McIntyre, I actually think that the field of climatology is better off with him around then without. But I certainly wouldn’t use him as a primary source of information about climate change. However, I really don’t like Milloy. As for tree rings, you have issues with the IPCC on that issue, I have issues with Lohle (sp?), but overall I don't really think it matters much. Whether or not the MWP was as warm or even warmer than today means little. The cause of the MWP was different than the cause of current warming. I am not an expert on ice ages. My understanding is that the causes have to be the same as the traditional causes of warming: Milankovitch cycles, atmospheric gas concentrations, solar energy levels and volcano emissions. As for there never being run away global warming (not that I am claiming that runaway global warming will happen now) well for the records we have going back 600,000 years CO2 levels only increased from 200 ppm to 280 ppm over a period of 30,000 - 80,000 years. Our current level of CO2 is already much higher than that and we have the ability to increase the CO2 levels by 80 ppm in a period of a decades. I think that kind of attitude is rare among most of the scientists actively working in the field. But for instance should those scientists have any time for those who are making outrageous claims? Not long ago there was a media story that made the rounds about a russia scientist who was a climate skeptic and head of their major observatory - turns out the scientist was not the head of the observatory or even any of the departments within. Turns out that he had never published any work related to his claims. He was out for glory and attention and the unskeptical media lapped it up. How much time should scientists take to explain how ridiculous his claims were? I often here people and even some well known skeptics who are as shady as they come say that humans only produce 3% of the annual CO2 emissions and that 97% of the emissions comes from natural sources. Those scientists know that they are being completely dishonest and that natural sources actually take in more CO2 than they emit. Why should any scientist who says such baloney be given the time of day by real scientists who are busy? Nuclear energy can't replace all of our energy but can replace a lot of them for a very long time. What you have read about the waste problem is most likely incorrect. It has been said that if a person like me living in Canada could get all of my energy from nuclear power over the course of my lifetime the waste would fit in a pop can and only a fraction of that waste would be highly radioactive. We get radiation from everywhere - you would most likely get more radiation standing outside a coal plant than a nuclear one. As far as I know no one in the US, Canada or western europe has died from nuclear energy - in fact the worst incident was three mile island which resulted in no injuries at the plant or in the community. You can't say that about other sources of energy - coal, oil, natural gas, dams - for instance if my memory serves me right 160,000 people died after a dam burst in China. Like anything else there are risks with nuclear power, but I think that the risks have been vastly blown out of proportion compared to the benefits. Still that is just my opinion and I am no way saying that Nuclear energy is a utopia, but I encourage anyone to read a book in favor and a book opposed. (I recommend "Power to Save the World" as the pro book). I disagree with that statement. There is a wide range of computer model predictions and the IPCC has been honest about the uncertainties. I also disagree with your assessment that those models have done a poor job predicting trends. Hansen's computer model predicted the changes from the effects of Pinatubo extremely accurately. As for predicting the future climate only time will tell, but I certainly have less confidence in the predictions of the likes of Michaels and Lindzen who as Ronald Bailey has pointed out have already turned out to be wrong on their predictions from the 90's. I rarely see scientists remark that a weather event was due to global warming. I often see non-scientists declare that daily that events are proof that global warming either does exist or doesn't. I don't promote catastrophic anything, but I will say that the idea that CO2 traps heat is not a hypothesis. The idea of an imminent ice age in the 70’s didn’t come from the scientific community. In fact it is almost impossible to find any mention of it, especially a positive one, in any of the major scientific journals. A couple scientists, who were widely dismissed by the rest of the scientific community, got far more mainstream media play then their research warranted. Holocaust denial is actually a great example of what can happen if you spend two weeks reading arguments from one side. There are a couple world renowned historians who write holocaust denial material. They concentrate on a couple areas where generally accepted knowledge turns out to be wrong or exaggerated and they exploit those discrepancies to try to convince readers that if anything we know about the holocaust is wrong than everything we know about the holocaust must be wrong. That doesn’t mean that I am associating global warming deniers with hitler, what I am saying is that we need to read both sides of an issue, and not the best of one side and the worst of the other side. And because of all the mentioning of skeptical thought I felt it was appropriate as skeptical organizations discuss holocaust denial frequently and Michael Shermer (the founder of the skeptical society) has written a book on it. In fact if you go to skepticforum you will see that it is has its own category.

Interesting coming someone who says later that you have read parts of the IPCC report. Maybe you should read the whole thing. They argue that because there IS NO EVIDENCE THAT THE SOLAR VARIATIONS ARE CAUSING THE CURRENT WARMING TREND. That is because they have actually read the evidence. Sami Solanki is the world’s leading expert on solar variations. In fact he was also included in the National post “denier” series where they did an article on him in which the author managed to completely misrepresent every single thing that Solanki actually says. Solanki has shown that solar variance is most likely largely responsible for global temperature variances starting at least a couple hundred years ago until about 1970. Very solid data that is peer reviewed and reproducible. He has also shown with solid data that is peer reviewed and reproducible that solar variance can’t be responsible for anymore than a minimal percentage of any of the global temperature variance since then, because solar variance has not increased, not even a small blip. Solanki, despite being labeled a “denier” by the National Post has repeatedly said that human ghg emissions are likely the only possible explanation for the vast majority of the increase in global temperatures since the 70s. The NP has never retracted those lies as far as I know. Seeing as gas laws and experiments show that increases in CO2 in the atmosphere must trap heat and trapped heat must raise temperatures then it is common sense to believe that gases humans emit will follow the gas laws in the exact same way as the natural greenhouse effect. Laws are true until they are disproven (good luck on that one) so it is you that is trying to overturn a well established and always reproducible law of nature and I say “you” because almost all of the “skeptics” you are relying on understand the gas laws. That is true. There is no scientific evidence that proves anything. Of course almost none of the well known “skeptics” believes the BS you just said. A total load of rubbish. Again a total load of rubbish. You really need to stop swallowing whatever “deniers” say as gospel. There are a ton of reasons why most scientists believe that human ghg emissions are the main cause of current global warming. Computer models are just one reason and a reason that is almost never provided as evidence. Again a total load of rubbish. I am tired of wasting my time. There are almost a dozen papers over the 20 years published in Nature about the Vostok ice cores. I suggest that you read them before continuing to embarrass yourself. Those ARE human emissions. How is that not obvious? Data such as? No, the IPCC has said over and over that the majority of observed warming over the last couple decades can only be explained by CO2 emissions. In no way do they dismiss other sources as contributing sources. Again, you would know this if you actually read the reports. Most GW activists have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. Same goes for most GW “skeptics.” There are many scientists who know exactly what they are talking about. Unfortunately they are being ignored. Uh, OK. 2005 was warmer than 2001. Average sunspots in 2005 about 25. How about 2001? About 120. Solar cycle 19 was the highest solar maximum. It peaked around 1960. Temperatures? Frigid by 20th century standards. Fact is for the last couple months we have been recording an average of almost zero sunspots so this year should be way colder than 1960, but it is not. I would suggest actually reading about cosmic rays and the earth’s magnetic fields and their effects, instead of believing what a couple GW skeptics say about them. Baloney. The use of the word “skeptic” for deniers is ridiculous. I am a skeptic. I have been a member of skeptic’s societies for years. What do Skeptic Magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer, The Skeptics Society and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry all have in common? They all support the scientific consensus that global warming is real and that the evidence overwhelmingly points to man being the major cause of current global warming. If you deny the evidence you are not a skeptic, you are a denier. Ah yes those large urban heat islands in the Arctic and the west Antarctica coastal areas. Why would they agree if, as you have said repeatedly, there is no evidence to support CO2 affecting temperature? Or did you already change your mind on this? No they don’t justify these claims by using computer models. They try to use computer models to simulate the effects of known gas laws. They understand that their models are approximations using the best available data to them. But the knowledge of feedbacks is not due to computer models but due to an understanding of the natural world. The earth had no ice caps because there were no landmasses at or near the poles. Life evolved over millions of years to exist in conditions with much higher CO2 levels. Current life has evolved to exist in current conditions. Changes in conditions will not lead to an absence of life on earth. Rapid changes of conditions can lead to much chaos and extinction as current life tries to adapt to rapidly changing conditions. Examine the fossilized plants of the Jurassic period and compare them to the wild plants of today, neither would likely survive in the climate of the other. That is a hand drawn replication, and not a very good at that, of the original hand drawn example. Futhermore, the graph in the 1990 IPCC report was not meant to represent accuracy in any way – in fact there were no numbers in the graph for the obvious reason that it was just a non-scientific representation of how a future graph of data might look when the data becomes available. It says as much in the damn report. The fact that skeptics have taken to displaying it as a scientific representation of the 1990 IPCC reports shows the depth of their depravity and why they can’t be trusted. No it is not. You are saying that if in the past the temperature has increased as fast as it currently is then the cause of the current temperature increase must be normal and caused by the same forcing factors that caused the earlier increases. That would be a reasonable argument if we didn’t understand Milankovitch cycles and can measure solar intensity. Since we can measure both and can show that neither are the cause for the majority of the warming we are currently experiencing it would be ridiculous to assume that they still must be the cause. Especially when we know that is another factor present today which was not present in the past. That factor is the massive amounts of ghg gasses that we are spewing into the atmosphere. Ghgs that every scientist knows traps heat. No they don’t agree. You probably won’t believe this but this a type of energy they have found that we can use called….”nuclear energy.” That would be a far better argument if most skeptics released their raw data and computer programs for peer review. But most haven’t and refuse to. Nor do I really think that it is necessary for them, in fact demanding that organizations release their code that they have spent months or longer developing, as McIntyre demands would never fly in any other field. Does Microsoft release their source code? No. So why should the source code be demanded from scientists? It is known where the scientists get their data from and it is freely available at NOAA. If you question the results then create your own program input the data and publish your results. The idea of science is that it must be reproducible for it to be accepted. I feel far more comfortable if other scientists can reproduce the results on their own – which shows that independent models agree, than if they are just examining and copying the raw data and source code of others. We know that the intensity of the sun at that time was much lower than it is today. Therefore more trapping of heat would be necessary to produce the same temperatures as we have today. The sun is more intense today, therefore CO2 levels as high as they were in the past are not necessarily going to produce the same temperatures, and in fact should result in higher temperatures. Well that is a relief. Your two weeks of studying what “skeptics” think about global warming leaves me very reassured about your conclusions. No irony at all that this is written by someone who has done nothing but read and post nothing but skeptical and “big science is a conspiracy” nonsense that is on the net. If you spent the time to first learn and understand the basics of science and climate science you would be in a far better position to realize that the scientific consensus is made up of people who have read most of the same things you have, but have dismissed them because they understand science. You must have evidence to support such a claim, but none of examples you cited had a thing to do with funding. If you only realized how ridiculous most of the evidence you have presented is. In fact they have showed almost nothing except that you are willing to believe without question almost anything a skeptic says.

If you ever wonder why forums like this one are dominated by global warming skeptics vs the scientific community where the consensus that humans are causing global warming is one of the strongest ever achieved the answer is simple. Understanding global warming requires a lot of knowledge. Most of these scientists have spent years, often their entire career working on these issues. Whereas a skeptic can spend two weeks reading some poorly formulated blather on skeptical websites, and despite not even understanding the basics of climatology, or even basic chemistry, biology and physics, he can actually believe that he knows more than the scientists who spend so much time on these issues. That takes a special kind of arrogance. Thankfully it really doesn’t matter that a small percentage of people and scientists reject the evidence, just like it wouldn’t matter a hoot to the aviation industry if someone was posting post after post about how the current understanding of aerodynamics is completely false. The scientific community will move on evaluating the evidence as it appears and the world will make the necessary changes, just as it always has despite there always being those who are screaming conspiracy theories. The changes will not be painless, but for the most part they will be automatic for most people and 100 years from now people will look back at the naysayers and the doomsayers and wonder how each group could be so completely clueless. You could spend a couple weeks reading through a lot of material written by holocaust deniers or “truthers” who believe that 9/11 was a white house organized inside job and finish absolutely convinced that their arguments are sound and the responses to them inadequate and nonsensical. That doesn’t make either correct, in fact you would be dumber after reading them than you were before. As climate change is a much, much more complex issue than either of the two I mentioned it is easier to be duped by the pseudo-science they promote. I am not a climatologist, nor do I have a fraction of the understand that most of them do on these issues. But I have spent 10 years reading both sides of the issue. I have read each IPCC report from start to finish. I have read hundreds of peer-reviewed papers. I have read at least 2 dozen books on climate change, mostly written by skeptics (for instance every book by Patrick Michaels, Lomborg, Svensmark, Avery etc). I have a good deal of respect for many skeptics, mainly the Pielke’s, Spener and Christy, and Lomborg but little respect for many others. Incidently US Climate Change Science Program is the group the Bush administration appointed because they didn’t want to listen to the IPCC. Like the IPCC, prominent skeptics have been involved at all levels and they have released a couple reports so far (all available for free online). They seem to be saying the exact same thing as the IPCC – I guess they are wrong too. So as I have said I have spent easily several thousand hours on this and I consider myself to be a novice. Good to see that in a couple weeks someone else can learn enough to be convinced that the scientific community is completely wrong. Especially when you are espousing views that most of the highest profile skeptical scientists reject. I don’t have hardly any free time and I rarely waste my time on forum’s like this one, but seeing as Riverwind had made some of the most outrageously ridiculous and completely faulty statements I have read in the longest time and no one had to countered much of the nonsense I decided to reply. When I first read this I fell off my chair, then each additional time I have read it I fell of my chair again (don’t worry I have placed padding around it now so I don’t hurt myself). Seems that Dr. Evans (or some other ignoramus) has served up a double whopper with cheese and you have swallowed it whole. Funny enough I took a class in climatology BEFORE 2003 and we used a textbook which I will have to assume was published before the class started (although maybe big science is involved in so elaborate a conspiracy that they have built a time machine and sent textbooks written after 2003 back into the past) and it talked about this well known fact that has been understood by scientists before they started doing ice cores. Quite simply there needs to be a forcing factor to start the planet warming. In the past that was Milankovitch cycles resulting in the orbits where the distance between the sun and earth were closer together and therefore the earth got hotter (or other changes in the cycle such as insolation curves which are more complex), that increase in temperature would lead to a decrease in ice cover and increase in surface plant cover plus it increased the temperature of the oceans which released CO2 (a well known gas law – Henry’s) which together lead to increased CO2, methane and water vapor in the atmosphere. However it was well understood that the Milankovitch cycles could not account for whole temperature increase (the effect and duration of changes far exceeds the cause if ghgs are not taken into consideration) and the temperature would increase for 5000 to 10000 years which was much longer than could be expected by the Milankovitch cycle. The answer was simple. The Milankovitch cycle lead to increased temperature, which lead to increased ghgs which in turn lead to increased temperature, which lead to increased ghg, which lead to increased temperature, which lead to increased ghg and that trend continues until there is another forcing factor that was also generally part of the Milankovitch cycle providing an opposite forcing factor. What this means is simple. There are multiple forcing factors and increased ghg concentrations in the atmosphere is one of them. I can't believe that anyone could make a statement like “we likely would not be talking about GW today if the data collected in 1985 has shown the trailing CO2 levels” and expect to be taken seriously. Scientists always knew that historically the first forcing factor in the chain was an increase in temperature. They are also smart enough to understand that the chain can just as easily be started by any of the forcing factors, for the simple reason that forcing factors are forcing factors. Prior to humans there wasn't a way for the earths cycles to produce a large enough increase in ghgs to start the chain. Now there is. The original hockey stick did have errors – as the original authors expected and noted in their paper, why do you think they titled the paper: “Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations”?? This is not unusual for an original piece of extremely complicated research. For instance for many years the satellite records of Christy and Spencer were the darlings of the denier world. Their original satellite data was so riddled with errors and has been significantly altered so many times that today it bears almost no resemblance to the original. That is how science works. You collect data and publish it so that others can examine it and attempt to reproduce it so a more accurate understand can evolve. The general trend of the hockey stick curve has been reproduced countless times, although most “skeptics” ignore that and instead only talk about Mann’s original kind of like the intelligent design folk who claim evolution is bunk because there are inaccuracies in Darwin’s work while ignoring the mountains of evidence produced since. Antarctica may or may not be increasing or decreasing in mass. Certainly sea levels are not decreasing – there is no evidence to support that what-so-ever, in fact the satellite data that you are refering too states that it is increasing at 1.88 mm/year over the 20th century. So you are completely wrong there. The GRACE satellite measurements showed that Antarctica is losing mass – lots of it - and this was shocking to scientists who believed it would be at least a hundred years before this would happen. The Wingham study showed that Antarctica was gaining a bit. The two studies covered different times (Wingham 1993 – 2003 I think and GRACE 2002 – 2005). I will assume that you are talking about the Wingham study seeing as he and it were profiled in the National Post “Deniers” series. I am wondering if they will update that article with Wingham’s newer study published in Science in March in which he showed that just like GRACE found his newer satellite evidence shows Antarctica losing mass. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5818/1529 Irregardless if you were to actually read the IPCC reports (instead of just the excerpts that McIntyre and friends show you) you would know that scientists had always expected Antarctica to gain mass due to warmer Antarctic air leading to higher moisture levels and therefore more snow fall (the height of Antarctica above sea level is so high that it should be damn near impossible for it to melt). And of course the sea level rise predicted by the IPCC has always been almost entirely due to a warmer ocean expanding through simple laws of chemistry and physics. Wingham’s and GRACE’s satellite results show that things are worse than scientists predicted. For once you are right: none of those examples disprove human caused GW theory. In fact scientists have long known all of them to be true, but they are twisted by “skeptics” who recognize that most people won’t bother to research.