How Bad Is Global Warming?

[Ben D]

Hi jfshade, that's paper is not new, and it's been thoroughly debunked. Marcott himself admitted in an email to Steve McIntyre, that the primary finding of the paper, the alleged rapid rise of temperature from 1890-1950 is "probably not robust."

Some debunking of this paper for you to read...

http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/15/marcotts-zonal-reconstructions/

http://climateaudit.org/2013/04/02/april-fools-day-for-marcott-et-al/

http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/14/no-uptick-in-marcott-thesis/

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/author-admits-blade-of-new-hockey-stick.html

[Ben D]

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=31261

Ironic that you are trolling this thread with that post, how about redeeming yourself by constructively showing us your grasp on the scientific reason for the current cessation of warming despite the ongoing linear increase in CO2 emissions?

[Iamwhomiam]

~~ The End ~~

[Sounder]

Sorry Iamwhomiam, this is not the end.

Iamwhomiam, try this maybe.

climate change concern creates a meme among the general population that says ‘our leaders’ have great concern for future generations.

This meme happens to counter and cover for several of the duplicitous needs of power.
First off, it provides a facile reason for calling another person ‘pro-polluter’.
It’s also an excellent antidote to deep politics in general, well because the club of Rome clearly has the best interests at heart for humanity in general.
Was there ever any MSM coverage of the total chemical decimation of Fallujah?
How bout Fukushima? Any news? Corexit? What about the state dept big wigs being sales agents for Monsanto?
Do people who ‘care’ about future generations salt a sizable portion of this world with depleted uranium?

So, this is put to the lie when we see the variety and extent to which power will resort to in order to maintain itself.

Part of that image maintenance involves throwing all kinds of money at various ‘good’ causes. And I’m not being facetious, as quite a lot of the money does seem to do good work.

Yet as Rockefeller, and many megalomaniacs before and after him have found, one can define the agenda if one has a good enough hook.

Rockefellers hook was ‘modern medicine’. Yes, the practice of medicine at the time deserved a fair bit of criticism and there was need for better standards, but what we have at this point is a VERY polluting system, to both individuals at all levels and to the larger environment. We have grown to rely on many long-chain molecules to provide ‘cures’ and to control and design our surroundings.

This was not a ‘necessary’ occurrence; we could live much of even modern life without, or with better formulations and control of the toxic materials.

We are not in control of our situation because as a general population we are passively unaware of the larger forces that shape our psyches.

Our psyches are built around coercion. One might control its effects in ones personal life, but in the big world, it’s fucking everywhere and is indeed quite sickening for both the individual and the entire system. Coercion is the death blood and soul of Thantos.

CO2 is not making the system sick, coercion backed by a vertical authority distribution system is the element that could crash the system.

Think about it, common sense says the system would ‘work’ better if more people had critical thinking abilities, yet a vertical authority distribution system demands that ones thoughts be inhibited so as to show preference the ‘authority’ or mental fashion of the moment.

Now you are welcome to argue with points I make but it is not at all ‘critical thinking’ to mock what is said or to deflect by avoidance, derision or other tricks, so that you do not address the basic assertion that climate change concern (among its sponsors) is a fig leaf that effectively covers some very sordid examples of anatomy.

The preceding sentence references a video posted by a member suggesting that I lacked the critical thinking skills of a two year old.
This sort of thing may discourage other weak willed people from considering the perspective I present, but it’s really quite silly and some folk around here are really quite old enough by now to have grown up more than what it sometimes appears.



After which you posted:
Just wanted to pop-in to let you know I've read your comment, appreciate your sharing it and look forward to sharing my response later, when time allows.


Since then, no response. Which is fine if you so choose.

In regard to your most recent post, the idea being presented in my post was that there is clear precedence for scientism and progressive politics combining to produce some fairly dour results.

So, I made an assertion and backed it up with solid and common knowledge.

This is quite distinct from the cut and paste style where no perspective or comments are included with the polished propaganda.

sounder wrote...

"climate change concern creates a meme among the general population that says ‘our leaders’ have great concern for future generations."

jingofever wrote...
How does that happen when our leaders haven't done and don't intend to do shit about climate change? The only "meme" I'm picking up is that they care about the short term profits of corporations over everything else.

Awhile back someone posted about (an unsourced and possibly spurious) 190 million dollars that has been dedicated to ‘climate denial’. My thought was; gee that’s not much. So I googled Rockefeller- climate change and find that that one foundation alone gave 850 some million in one year to set up the Kyoto meetings.

So are these folk ‘good’ guys, or do they expect to find value for their money in being able to ‘own’ the science community in a way similar to their ownership of our medical community.

The medical community example shows the clear march of scientism in that the drug model excludes alternative avenues of research.

[jfshade]

Hi jfshade, that's paper is not new, and it's been thoroughly debunked. Marcott himself admitted in an email to Steve McIntyre, that the primary finding of the paper, the alleged rapid rise of temperature from 1890-1950 is "probably not robust."

Hi Ben. I understand that minerals industry vet McIntyre is a darling of the hoaxers, but the Marcott team as well as Mann, Tamino and others have convincingly debunked his debunking of this peer-reviewed paper.

The "probably not robust" quote is actually from Marcott's paper itself, and refers to the fact that ocean sediment samples (which constitute the bulk of the data sets considered by Marcott) are not very good for assessing temperatures for the last 60 years (prior to 1950). But there is no shortage of other data for that period, so it has no bearing at all on the "alleged rapid rise of temperature" which is well documented. You're either sadly misinformed here, or intentionally misleading.

Your characterization of the "primary finding" of the paper is simplistic and erroneous. Here's the abstract for your reference:

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

Feel free to respond, Ben, but I won't engage you further. I took a look at your blog and your enthusiasm for the helical or vortex theory of the solar system over the heliocentric theory tells me all I need to know about the level of sophistication you bring to discussions of scientific issues.

[Ben D]

jfshade, attacking skeptical scientists and hand waving doesn't change the facts, the global warming trend has stopped for the last 16/17 tears while the CO2 emissions have been growing linearly.

That's what is getting the attention of people on the planet everywhere, and the IPCC is trying to put on a brave face while lowering the amount of projected warming rate in the future. Iow, all the previous IPCC climate models failed in their predictions.

The winners in this debate will never be determined by name calling, ultimately it is those whose predictions better match the planet's actual climate reality in time who will expose the real hoaxers.

So far as your comment on the solar system, you really need to improve your understanding in matters scientific. The solar system is indeed heliocentric, but because it is moving as a whole, the planets are seen to spiral in a corkscrew manner around the sun when viewed from outside the system. If you have a problem understanding this, please do comment on the blog and we can resolve it there. Or, if you prefer, engage me here in the presence of actual astronomers...Is our Solar System heading North or South direction?

[Rory]

[/url]

You get em, bendi

don't let being (repeatedly) completely discredited and defanged stop you from going on the attack again there me old drongo galah

[Iamwhomiam]

Sounder, on the 8th I composed a lengthy response to your personal projections, but my computer crashed and I lost it. Frustrated, I felt it not worth the effort to reconstruct as nothing I could offer you would change your view. It is difficult to argue facts with one when one's pre-conceived beliefs get in the way, so reluctant they are to yield to reason an abundance of evidence demands.

Regarding your remark about cut & paste articles without any contributor-added commentary:

Sometimes it's best not to guide one to some conclusion you may hold by adding personal opinion, but better to present the information and let them come to the only conclusion rationally possible by themselves, through their own thought process without having to weigh the possible bias of another.

I can't argue with someone so divisive as to separate the thought of humans into categories, left-right, for example. Talk about elitists... follow that path and next you'll wind up separating humans, with one or the other feeling superior in thought, Stormy weather-Front-like, and frankly, that's ridiculous.

But wait, you just did that in your preceding paragraph. For my part I like to see right and left as stay or go people.

Actually, I didn't. I continued to use the terms used by the author of the article you posted, which I was commenting upon. I was criticizing the divisive bias of the author, which you too obviously hold, considering your many caustic remarks about those whose political views fall to the left of yours, meaning they have a more liberal ideology than you.

If you're trying in some abstract way to proclaim environmentalists are as bad as Nazis, or that thousands of scientists have banded together in a world-wide plot to halt commerce to secure future 'research' funding, I really do not feel it's in my interest to attempt to persuade you to shed such foul views.

Do you refer to your Caucasian friends as being white? And other people as being 'black' or 'Hispanic'? Why must one want to stuff another into a box and then apply whatever label to this sort of 'different' individual they feel like classifying them as? We're all people, male and female or some combination of the two, aren't we?

Are you equating climate change activism with socialism? It's a bit off topic in this thread.
It would be peculiar for someone to equate the Rockefellers with being the instigators of a worldwide socialistic movement, imo.

That day will come sooner if folk from both sides realize just how big the budget is for the manufacturing of divisiveness through the bending of narratives and other more drastic means.

sigh!

jfshade posts the climate science "Hockey stick" graphic and Ben's ridiculous response:

Hi jfshade, that's paper is not new, and it's been thoroughly debunked. Marcott himself admitted in an email to Steve McIntyre, that the primary finding of the paper, the alleged rapid rise of temperature from 1890-1950 is "probably not robust."

"Thoroughly debunked" my ass!

You've been thoroughly debunked repeatedly, for years on end. seems appropriate to repost this,

That day will come sooner if folk from both sides realize just how big the budget is for the manufacturing of divisiveness through the bending of narratives and other more drastic means.

And please don't accuse those you disagree with of being trolls. It's a violation of our blog rules to do so.

[Ben D]

Hi jfshade, that's paper is not new, and it's been thoroughly debunked. Marcott himself admitted in an email to Steve McIntyre, that the primary finding of the paper, the alleged rapid rise of temperature from 1890-1950 is "probably not robust."

"Thoroughly debunked" my ass!

You've been thoroughly debunked repeatedly, for years on end. seems appropriate to repost this,

That day will come sooner if folk from both sides realize just how big the budget is for the manufacturing of divisiveness through the bending of narratives and other more drastic means.

And please don't accuse those you disagree with of being trolls. It's a violation of our blog rules to do so.

Anyone who just posts on this thread to name call or make snide remarks without providing some constructive scientific basis for their opinion is trolling,..ok.

Now concerning the Marcott paper, you obviously did not read or understand the McIntyre debunking I posted above. Surely you understand that when I say it has been debunked, I don't mean I did it, I refer to papers/essays/etc., that put the science technicalities into laymans language where one can assess it personally. I have read most of the analysis done by McIntyre et al on the Marcott paper and post this good summary of what came out of it. Now I know you will be disappointed that the paper is flawed wrt the hockey stick appearance, but that's the way science is meant to work, a paper is put forward, if it survives the scrutiny then it is accepted, if not it isn't.

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/04/01/were-not-screwed/

11,000-year study’s 20th-century claim is groundless

On March 8, a paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science under the title A reconstruction of regional and global temperature for the past 11,300 years. Temperature reconstructions are nothing new, but papers claiming to be able to go back so far in time are rare, especially ones that promise global and regional coverage.

The new study, by Shaun Marcott, Jeremy Shakun, Peter Clark and Alan Mix, was based on an analyss of 73 long-term proxies, and offered a few interesting results: one familiar (and unremarkable), one odd but probably unimportant, and one new and stunning. The latter was an apparent discovery that 20th-century warming was a wild departure from anything seen in over 11,000 years. News of this finding flew around the world and the authors suddenly became the latest in a long line of celebrity climate scientists.

The trouble is, as they quietly admitted over the weekend, their new and stunning claim is groundless. The real story is only just emerging, and it isn’t pretty.

The unremarkable finding of the Marcott et al. paper was that the Earth’s climate history since the end of the last ice age looks roughly like an upside down-U shape, starting cold, warming up for a few thousand years, staying warm through the mid-Holocene (6,000 to 9,000 years ago), then cooling steadily over the past five millennia to the present. This pattern has previously been found in studies using ground boreholes, ice cores and other very long-term records, and was shown in the first IPCC report back in 1990. Some studies suggest it was, on average, half a degree warmer than the present, while others have put it at one or even two degrees warmer. A lot of assumptions have to be made to calibrate long-term proxy measures to degrees Celsius, so it is not surprising that the scale of the temperature axis is uncertain.

Another familiar feature of long-term reconstructions is that the downward-sloping portion has a few large deviations on it. Many show a long, intense warm interval during Roman times 2,000 years ago, and another warm interval during the medieval era, a thousand years ago. They also show a cold episode called the Little Ice Age ending in the early 1800s, followed by the modern warming. But the Marcott et al. graph didn’t have these wiggles, instead it showed only a modest mid-Holocene warming and a smooth decline to the late 1800s. This was odd, but probably unimportant, since they also acknowledged using so-called “low frequency” proxies that do not pick up fluctuations on time scales shorter than 300 years. The differences between the scale of their graph and that of others could probably be chalked up to different methods.

The new, and startling, feature of the Marcott graph was at the very end: Their data showed a remarkable uptick that implied that, during the 20th century, our climate swung from nearly the coldest conditions over the past 11,500 years to nearly the warmest. Specifically, their analysis showed that in under 100 years we’ve had more warming than previously took thousands of years to occur, in the process undoing 5,000 years’ worth of cooling.

This uptick became the focus of considerable excitement, as well as scrutiny. One of the first questions was how it was derived. Marcott had finished his PhD thesis at Oregon State University in 2011 and his dissertation is online. The Science paper is derived from the fourth chapter, which uses the same 73 proxy records and seemingly identical methods. But there is no uptick in that chart, nor does the abstract to his thesis mention such a ­finding.

Stephen McIntyre of climateaudit.org began examining the details of the Marcott et al. work, and by March 16 he had made a remarkable discovery. The 73 proxies were all collected by previous researchers, of which 31 are derived from alkenones, an organic compound produced by phytoplankton that settles in layers on ocean floors, and has chemical properties that correlate to temperature. When a core is drilled out, the layers need to be dated. If done accurately, the researcher could then interpret the alkenone layer at, say, 50 cm below the surface, to imply (for example) the ocean temperature averaged 0.1 degrees above normal over several centuries about 1,200 years ago. The tops of cores represent the data closest in time to the present, but this layer is often disturbed by the drilling process. So the original researchers take care to date the core-top to where the information begins to become useful.

According to the scientists who originally published the alkenone series, the core tops varied in age from nearly the present to over a thousand years ago. Fewer than 10 of the original proxies had values for the 20th century. Had Marcott et al. used the end dates as calculated by the specialists who compiled the original data, there would have been no 20th-century uptick in their graph, as indeed was the case in Marcott’s PhD thesis. But Marcott et al. redated a number of core tops, changing the mix of proxies that contribute to the closing value, and this created the uptick at the end of their graph. Far from being a feature of the proxy data, it was an artifact of arbitrarily redating the underlying cores.

Worse, the article did not disclose this step. In their online supplementary information the authors said they had assumed the core tops were dated to the present “unless otherwise noted in the original publication.” In other words, they claimed to be relying on the original dating, even while they had redated the cores in a way that strongly influenced their results.

Meanwhile, in a private email to McIntyre, Marcott made a surprising statement. In the paper, they had reported doing an alternate analysis of their proxy data that yielded a much smaller 20th-century uptick, but they said the difference was “probably not robust,” which implied that the uptick was insensitive to changes in methodology, and was therefore reliable. But in his email to McIntyre, Marcott said the reconstruction itself is not robust in the 20th century: a very different thing. When this became public, the Marcott team promised to clear matters up with an online FAQ.

It finally appeared over the weekend, and contains a remarkable admission: “[The] 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”

Now you tell us! The 20th-century uptick was the focus of worldwide media attention, during which the authors made very strong claims about the implications of their findings regarding 20th-century warming. Yet at no point did they mention the fact that the 20th century portion of their proxy reconstruction is garbage.

The authors now defend their original claims by saying that if you graft a 20th-century thermometer record onto the end of their proxy chart, it exhibits an upward trend much larger in scale than that observed in any 100-year interval in their graph, supporting their original claims. But you can’t just graft two completely different temperature series together and draw a conclusion from the fact that they look different.

The modern record is sampled continuously and as a result is able to register short-term trends and variability. The proxy model, by the authors’ own admission, is heavily smoothed and does not pick up fluctuations below a time scale of several centuries. So the relative smoothness in earlier portions of their graph is not proof that variability never occurred before. If it had, their method would likely not have spotted it.

What made their original conclusion about the exceptional nature of 20th-century warming plausible was precisely the fact that it appeared to be picked up both by modern thermometers and by their proxy data. But that was an illusion. It was introduced into their proxy reconstruction as an artifact of arbitrarily redating the end points of a few proxy records.

In recent years there have been a number of cases in which high-profile papers from climate scientists turned out, on close inspection, to rely on unseemly tricks, fudges and/or misleading analyses. After they get uncovered in the blogosphere, the academic community rushes to circle the wagons and denounce any criticism as “denialism.” There’s denialism going on all right — on the part of scientists who don’t see that their continuing defence of these kinds of practices exacts a toll on the public credibility of their field.

[Iamwhomiam]

This is worthy of its own thread...

NASA map illustrates air pollution mortality rates

By Mike Krumboltz, Yahoo News | Yahoo News – 22 hrs ago

Want to know where people are most likely to die prematurely due to air pollution?

NASA recently recently released a map (below) showing the average number of deaths per year per 1,000 square kilometers (385 square miles) that can be attributed to fine particle matter pollution.

Researchers compared pollution levels over a 150-year span, beginning in 1850 and ending in 2000. The dark brown areas on the map, shown prominently in Asia, India, Europe and parts of Africa, indicate locations with the highest rates of premature deaths due to air pollution.

Blue areas, as seen in the southeast United States and parts of South America, indicate areas that have seen air quality improve and the number of deaths due to air pollution decline.

Why are so many areas getting worse? According to NASA, that can be attributed to increased industrialization and urbanization. As to the areas in blue that have seen air quality improve from 1850 to 2000, researchers suggest that a decrease in biomass burning is the cause.

The research used to create the map comes from University of North Carolina professor Jason West. Published in Environmental Research Letters, the study estimated that roughly 2.1 million deaths per year could be attributed to fine particle matter pollution alone.

What's fine particle matter? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines it as "a complex mixture of extremely small particles and liquid droplets." Particle matter that is 10 micrometers in diameter or smaller is particularly worrisome "because those are the particles that generally pass through the throat and nose and enter the lungs," according to the EPA.
~~~~~~~~~~
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=82087&eocn=home&eoci=iotd_title

Occasionally, short-term meteorological conditions merge with ongoing human emissions to produce extreme outbreaks of air pollution. In January 2013, a blanket of industrial pollution enveloped northeastern China. In June 2013, smoke from agricultural fires in Sumatra engulfed Singapore.

In most cases, the most toxic pollution lingers for a few days or even weeks, bringing increases in respiratory and cardiac health problems at hospitals. Eventually the weather breaks, the air clears, and memories of foul air begin to fade. But that’s not to say that the health risks disappear as well. Even slightly elevated levels of air pollution can have a significant effect on human health. Over long periods and on a global scale, such impacts can add up.

But exactly how much exposure to air pollution do people around the world get? And how much health damage is it causing? Since there are gaps in networks of ground sensors, University of North Carolina earth scientist Jason West is leading an effort to answer those questions using computer models that simulate the atmosphere.

In 2010, West and colleagues published an estimate of the global health effects of air pollution based on a single atmospheric model. More recently, West and colleagues thought they could improve their calculations by using results from a range of atmospheric different models—six in all—rather than relying on just one. In 2013, they published their results in Environmental Research Letters, concluding that 2.1 million deaths occur worldwide each year as a direct result of a toxic type of outdoor air pollution known as fine particulate matter (PM2.5).

The map above shows the model estimate of the average number of deaths per 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) per year due to air pollution. The researchers used the difference in pollution levels between 1850 and 2000 as a measure of human-caused air pollution. Dark brown areas have more premature deaths than light brown areas. Blue areas have experienced an improvement in air quality relative to 1850 and a decline in premature deaths. Fine particulate matter takes an especially large toll in eastern China, northern India, and Europe—all areas where urbanization has added considerable quantities of PM2.5 to the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

A few areas—such as the southeastern United States—saw PM2.5 concentrations decline relative to pre-industrial levels (shown in blue). In the southeastern United States, the decrease in PM2.5 is likely related to a decline in local biomass burning that has occurred over the last 160 years.

References

* Anenberg, S. et al, (2010, April 9) An Estimate of the Global Burden of Anthropogenic Ozone and 
Fine Particulate Matter on Premature Human Mortality Using 
Atmospheric Modeling. Environmental Health Perspectives, (118), 1189-1195.
* Discover (2013, July 17) Air Pollution Kills More Than 2 Million People Every Year. Accessed September 16, 2013.
* Institute of Physics (2013, July 12) Researchers estimate over two million deaths annually from air pollution. Accessed September 16, 2013.
* Silva, R. et al, (2013, March 23) Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change. Environmental Research Letters, 8 (3).

Earth Observatory image by Robert Simmon based on data provided by Jason West. Caption by Adam Voiland.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change (1.80 Mb .pdf)

Direct link to download .pdf:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3 ... 034005.pdf

Abstract:
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034005/article

Map:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/v ... iotd_title

Please note: The map and its footer (key) are two separate images.

Pardon my including the poorly written Yahoo news article, but it was from this I learned of the map and report.

[Iamwhomiam]

Ben wrote:
Anyone who just posts on this thread to name call or make snide remarks without providing some constructive scientific basis for their opinion is trolling,..ok.

Ben, with all due respect, one could fairly claim you've yet to produce a constructive, science-based argument for your claims and opinions. An opinion piece published in the Financial Times or Forbes by a supporter of free market capitalism unfettered by regulations meant to protect our health and that of our closed ecosystem can be considered as nothing more than biased propaganda. Ross McKitrick is professor of economics and CME fellow in sustainable commerce at the Department of Economics, University of Guelph.

Ironic that you are trolling this thread with that post, how about redeeming yourself by constructively showing us your grasp on the scientific reason for the current cessation of warming despite the ongoing linear increase in CO2 emissions?

How about your sharing with us "your grasp on the scientific reason for the current cessation of warming despite the ongoing linear increase in CO2 emissions?"

I'd love to learn this from you in your own words.

All of the economic views you've shared simply claim it's too expensive to effectively combat anthropogenic global warming and the effects of its consequential changing of our climate, while admitting it is occurring, as science has proven.

Glad you're doing your best to help those who control our world to destroy all life upon the earth. And I'm glad there are millions of folk like me, doing our best to rectify the damage industrialists' propaganda like yours has and continues to cause.

Reminds me of Christians who feel they'll be redeemed and absolved of all sin, so hey, why hold back. Sin away.

[Ben D]

How about your sharing with us "your grasp on the scientific reason for the current cessation of warming despite the ongoing linear increase in CO2 emissions?"

I'd love to learn this from you in your own words.

All of the economic views you've shared simply claim it's too expensive to effectively combat anthropogenic global warming and the effects of its consequential changing of our climate, while admitting it is occurring, as science has proven.

Glad you're doing your best to help those who control our world to destroy all life upon the earth. And I'm glad there are millions of folk like me, doing our best to rectify the damage industrialists' propaganda like yours has and continues to cause.

Reminds me of Christians who feel they'll be redeemed and absolved of all sin, so hey, why hold back.

The pause in global warming is due to a change in natural forcings, some major forcings include solar radiation, volcanic activity, changes in earth's orbital parameters, cloudiness/albedo, ocean and and atmospheric composition and feedback activity.

Humans who think they can control the climate of planet earth are, imho, mistaken. That doesn't mean I don't want the very best climate appropriate for the thriving of mankind, it's just that mankind can't control the global climate and the alternation of ice ages and interglacial periods will continue into the future. If some of those major forcings outside the control of man move in the direction of creating a warmer planet or a cooler planet, then it will be, a carbon tax under the pretext of CO2 being an atmospheric forcing that if regulated, could in turn regulate the world's climate is a scam, simple as that.

[Iamwhomiam]

The pause in global warming is due to a change in natural forcings, some major forcings include solar radiation, volcanic activity, changes in earth's orbital parameters, cloudiness/albedo, ocean and and atmospheric composition and feedback activity.

It would be nothing than ignorant to entirely exclude human contributions to our closed ecosystem as a contributing cause for our warming climate.

I do not believe anyone believes we can completely control our climate. What we can control is the amount of carbon black, common soot we all inhale. We can control the amount of 'things' we introduce into nature that we know has many time the warming potential of methane, which over a 20-year period has a warming potential 105 times as great as CO2. Like sulfuryl fluoride, for one, with 4,300 times the warming potential of CO2. Why release dangerous gene-altering chemical pollutants into the air our children breathes? Sure sick children are good business, but hey, there are better ways to grow wealth. Some 200 chemicals out of the 63,000 in use are regulated, though many more are extremely dangerous and their manufacture and use should be regulated as well.

Your free market school of thought believes a polluting industry should be unregulated. Pollution controls are costly and a burden, we hear. But to provide a few stockholders a bit of profit at the expense of public health is obscene, especially when pollution controls cost so little in comparison. Talk about fucking Nazis!

Take another look at the map I posted. A child could see the concentration of excess deaths from airborne pollutants is in all our industrialized areas.

Excess deaths are those beyond what would be expected from permitted source releases and actuarial tables.

Now I'll be honest with you Ben, I haven't the foggiest idea why our temperature after spiking upward over the last 170 years, more suddenly than any time before in the past 15,000 years, has slowed its warming over the past decade. There could be several reasons, but I'd be speculating, just as you have in the text I've quoted, without any sound science verifying your claims. But I do appreciate you offering your remarks and what you think it is that is causing our climate to warm. But what you offer doesn't have any explanation for our momentary pause either.

I do not see a 15 year period to have any significance. As I've before said, you want to call it a maunder minimum you'll need to wait another 60 years to verify that it is.

[Rory]

All eyes on IPCC AR5...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/climate-scientists-face-crisis-over-global-warming-pause-a-923937.html

Warming Plateau? Climatologists Face Inconvenient Truth

Data shows global temperatures aren't rising the way climate scientists have predicted. Now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change faces a problem: publicize these findings and encourage skeptics -- or hush up the figures.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environment/article3877171.ece

Met Office’s climate model is exaggerating warming effect’

The Met Office method of predicting climate change contains flaws that cause it to overestimate the warming Britain will experience, according to a think-tank that opposes urgent emission cuts.

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/09/23/lawrence-solomon-lets-play-chicken-little/

Let’s play Chicken Little

Climate change models that claim the world will suffer great harm in future are “close to useless,” pronounces a prestigious new study by Robert S. Pindyck, a physicist, engineer, professor of Economics and Finance at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and true believer in perils from global warming.

Close to useless, eh?

The actual report, rather than the ramblings of free market cheerleaders

http://www.independent.co.uk/environmen ... 43573.html

IPCC report: Scientists are 95% certain humans are responsible for climate change

Most comprehensive report on climate change ever leaves little doubt that greenhouse gases are causing the world to heat up

Scientists are more certain than they have ever been that humans are causing global warming, according to the most comprehensive report ever conducted into climate change, which predicts "with 95 per cent certainty" that people’s greenhouse gas emissions are heating the world.

This is the main finding of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) fifth assessment report, known as AR5, which was published in Stockholm this morning.

The degree of certainty leaves little doubt that greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are responsible for climate change and compares to a finding of 90 per cent certainty in the previous - fourth - assessment six years ago. This, in turn, was a significant increase on the 66 per cent certainty reached in 2001's third assessment and just over 50 per cent in 1995.

AR5 has 840 main authors recruited from 38 of the IPCC's 195 member countries, with British and American scientists making the biggest contribution.

At more than 3,000 pages, the report is so big that it will be released in three parts over the next 14 months. The first part, released today, covers the physical science of climate change. The second instalment will concentrate on the impacts of climate change and how to adapt to them, while the third will examine ways to curb the warming.

As with the other IPCC reports, AR5 is a synthesis of the findings of thousands of peer-reviewed research papers from the past few years. It comes at a crucial time in global climate change politics since it will be the last IPPC report published before the Paris summit in 2015, when the world's governments have pledged to reach hugely ambitious and legally binding targets to reduce their emissions in a bid to limit global warming to 2C compared to pre-industrial levels.

Today US Secretary of State John Kerry backed the report's findings, and pledged action on cutting emissions.

He said: “Boil down the IPCC report and here’s what you find: Climate change is real, it’s happening now, human beings are the cause of this transformation, and only action by human beings can save the world from its worst impacts.

"This isn’t a run of the mill report to be dumped in a filing cabinet. This isn’t a political document produced by politicians.

"It’s science."

And UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said: "This new report will be essential for governments as they work to finalise an ambitious legal agreement on climate change in 2015.

"To add momentum to this process, I will convene a climate summit in September 2014 at the highest level. The heat is on. Now we must act."

The report’s launch follows intense last-minute discussions in Stockholm last night to finalise the wording of the summary for policymakers.

Governments around the world are exercising extreme caution to ensure that the report doesn’t contain a significant error that could be seized upon by climate sceptics to discredit the research. The previous report in 2007 mistakenly claimed that the glaciers of the Himalayas were very likely to disappear by 2035, a point which the IPCC was forced to admit was wrong.

Last night’s discussions were largely concerned with how to present and explain the slowdown – or hiatus – in global warming over the past 15 years. This is a development which climate sceptics have used to further their case, but which the vast majority of scientists believe is only a blip in a clear long-term trend.

Scientists involved in the talks said governments have been particularly careful about the wording of this report to make it as difficult as possible for climate sceptics to capitalise on any errors.

The report has hardened the calls from climate campaigners for action on emissions reduction. In the UK, executive director of Friends of the Earth, Andy Atkins, said: “Scientists are now as convinced that humans are causing climate disruption as they are that smoking causes cancer - politicians can’t continue to stand idly by while the world goes spinning towards climate catastrophe.

“Tough action is urgently needed to end the planet’s dangerous fossil fuel fixation and to develop the huge job-creating potential of renewable power – with developed nations like Britain taking the lead."

[brainpanhandler]

Governments around the world are exercising extreme caution to ensure that the report doesn’t contain a significant error that could be seized upon by climate sceptics to discredit the research. The previous report in 2007 mistakenly claimed that the glaciers of the Himalayas were very likely to disappear by 2035, a point which the IPCC was forced to admit was wrong.

I know, right. I mean if they got that wrong then what else did they get wrong. It's all a scam.

I say smoke 'em if ya got 'em, drill baby drill and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!