However a new warmest year on record anytime in the near future pretty much disproves the argument that global warming stopped eleven years ago, wouldn't you agree?

I noticed that you slipped in the 'allegedly' in your statement this time as opposed to earlier statements in this thread which had no qualifier (i.e. replies #272, 287, 290 and 317).

AP/Independent Statisticians Debunk Climate Change Deniers Using Their Own Data

In reality this is not all that much different whether we agree about AGW or not. We still have the opportunity to reasonably discuss what should be done. As I've tried to say a number of times we are really not that far apart as to what we think should be done about it. I've gone on record to say that I do not favor Cap and Trade nor do I favor payments made from developed countries to developing countries to get them to not pollute.

The problem is that people seem far more focused and interested in arguing about the science than they are in discussing what should be done about it. I think it's because there is more disagreement in the science than there actually is in the solution and people enjoy a good fight more than they enjoy a reasonable discussion. If we agreed on the science then it's more likely we could focus on the solution and not the problem.

Personally I favor building a few thousand nuclear power plants and that in conjunction with a decent electric car would solve one hell of a lot of problems. This is technology that we have or are very close to having today. Of course there's the "not in my backyard" problem and the disposal problem but these are workable. Can you imagine how eliminating the need for foreign oil would benefit our balance of payments. Lot's of good things would happen based on this. However we'd have to fight the ExxonMobils of the world to get this passed. It would make healthcare reform look like a cakewalk.

I don't deny either.

Denying would be saying that they're not happening.  For that, I would need to provide compelling evidence to support that and there isn't any evidence that I find compelling to indicate that the world isn't warming or that man is definitely not causing it.

Ok, but you believe that the globe is warming right?

Interesting discussion. I didn't think there was much debate about if global warming was happening, according to the temperature reads which I know contains some errors, so much as what was the cause of it.  But let's say, for the sake of argument, that we don't know if global warming is happening, our response should be what then, throw as much polluntants into the air and shrug at species struggling to survive and just say well we didn't do it?

Forget the political chest puffing about global warming and let's focus on more general ideals like pollution is not a good thing so creating less of it is good, and maybe it would be nice if some of the animals and other wildelife we see now is still available for viewing longer after we are gone. As for science, well I've experience enough science first hand and through study to know it's not a a perfect endeavor.

Hell there are an endless list of scienctific "facts" that have been disproved in the end, and in general, we're still better off (as a whole) with what the field has gotten right than what they've messed up on.

I am persuaded that the recorded temperatures have been on the increase since 1976 with a peek in 1998 and have largely leveled off since there.

I tend to take the better safe than sorry approach.

My new house I'm building uses geothermal. 100% LED lights, foam insulation throughout, and a 20KW solar array.

But that's a personal choice.

I don't think the government should get into forcing people to pay money based on what it believes is "best for them". That's not the role of government imo.

A better question is how far is your commute?

I drive a 91 Buick, and an extreme greenie professor here drives a Prius. I'm less than 3 miles from the university and he's about 40. Care to guess which one of us uses less gas?

Well I understand your point, and sort of share it, but I sort of don't. The government sometimes has to step in and force people to do what is best or we would see more rivers combusting, and salmon on the west coast would be completely depleted. We wouldn't have national forests, select cutting would just be snickered at still, we'd have segregation and discrimination in the work place, because let's face it, if you are paying someone less than their due, someone else is getting more. The government has a role in guiding society to the best course of action. It doesn't have to be heavy handed in all cases, but in some cases, it needs to be firmer. I live in a valley where the air quality is crap and occasionally dangerous. We can't have industries in this valley that over pollute, guess who makes sure they don't locate here, our local government. Yes, it sucks because jobs are hard to come by, especially right now, I am sure people would love vote to bring them in and then a handful of decades later, get amnesia and forget it was our fault and not the government's that our lungs are in peril and we're dying and our kids all have asthma.

The problem with the whole global warming debate is it's too political. It had to become political to get anyone but some scientist to get involved in it, but then the talking heads needed to walk away and they didn't. Now that people are more aware of the enviroment on a global scale, I don't think it has to be such a political puff piece anymore. I don't care what side of the political spectrum someone stands on, most people aren't going to giggle at the idea of polar bears starving to death.

If the science is wrong, then it is wrong. If we were only allowed to talk about and work with scientific data that is 100% correct all the time for forever, then we wouldn't have so many things we have right now, even omitting the "accidental" discoveries. Seriously though, look around and get used to what we know today as being wrong tomorrow. Facts are disproven all the time. The fact that there is a so called "hoax" in a political arena is certainly not a big surprise to me. Show me a political hot topic, and I will show you a dozen liars on each side of the debate and all the holes in their supporting data too because facts can be written and derived in a way that prove your point instead of the more organic less fun to read studies that let the data tell the tale.

Business has nothing to lose.  Business always adapts, either by following the money or folding up & doing something else.  Only individuals have anything to lose, because any costs involved in whatever business does are passed along to us.  Otherwise there is no business.  This whole idea that 'big xxxxx' is anything but people is what's nutty.

Sorry, horse shit, the lot of it.

Rivers combusting is bullshit first of all, it's an exceedingly rare capability and unrelated to industrialization entirely.  The Cuyahoga catching fire was first recorded by white man in 1868.  Yes, that's before the industrial revolution.  Moral of the story?  Don't dump shit in slow moving water.  It took Uncle fucking Sam over a century to actually do something about it.  If enough animals lived there, the same problem would exist.  Swamp fires are, after all, a natural event.

The Salmon on the west coast is being endangered by federal regulations that make it impossible for Alaska to stop people in other states from running Atlantic salmon farms in the bleeding ocean, where the tasteless and more agressive fish escape and compete for food.  Eventually, they'll probably end up wiping them out as more and more escape, no more good salmon despite the efforts of the local government in Alaska.  If you've noticed, the rest of the areas already have a distinct lack of Salmon despite government rescuing them.  The reason being Uncle hasn't actually done anything at all to protect the salmon from fishermen.

The national forests die from bug infestations and burn down instead of being cut down.  If the Tongas ever goes up during a drought, it will be the largest fire in recorded history, and probably sterlize the top soil.  Vastly more damage the economical logging could manage.  Most wood products are also produced on tree farms, it's more economical.  By controlled planting you can create straighter, more consistent timber of higher value in specific varieties.  Logging a forest results in mostly substandard wood.

Segregation and discrimination in the work place were already solved in the north before Uncle stepped on the south over it.  What is the current state of things?  Black people axe you questions and can't get hired because they can't speak english...  They really did a world of good with affirmative action, didn't they?  It's every KKK members dream, have them be ignorant, ill equiped, culturally bankrupt, second class citizens all because it's wrong to teach diction and rob them of their culture.  Meanwhile, you can't get shit done in government agencies because race and gender norming leads to idiots being hired more often than in the private sector.

Now this is sensible, every conservatives dream.  For those of you that think the Republicans in congress are conservatives and have no idea what I'm talking about, just keep reading and be quiet.  Local government handling a local issue.  You live in a valley with less than adequate air flow, if you build a bunch of power plants, you'll kill yourselves.  The EPA on the other hand forces Anchorage to add pollutants to the water just so they can take them out, because there aren't enough pollutants to meet the requirements.  The water is clean enough to be consumed straight from the source.  Local control is a wonderful thing.  You can fuck up your own city and it's all your fault.  If someone else fucks up your own city, you can't do anything about it.  It's the entire purpose of a limited federal government in the United States, that thing we used to have.

Having a world organization telling people what they can and cannot do, which is the obvious goal of the current nonsense, is the exact opposite of your local issue that was solved locally.  Even if the disaster scenario happens, it will be worse with the "help" than it would without it, just as the EPA and other national regulatory bodies have caused far more harm than good here in the US.

On the better safe then sorry angle,

Assuming

1) AGW as currently understood is an accurate model, i.e CO2/greenhouse gases are heating the earth with potentially catastrophic consequences by interfering with heat release to space by,

2) The greenhouse effect which is partially natural and partially additively increased via human industrial CO2

3) The pratical ramifications of attempting to resolve this include conversion to alternative energy sources like solar and wind power.

So to fix an issue that is caused by retaining more solar energy we will generate energy by increasing the amount of solar energy absorbed by the Earth using technology that currently converts 40% of the energy absorbed (maximum) to useable power, the remaining 60+% being converted to heat.  Since the greenhouse effect is real, this heat will be retained and by the same mechanism as AGW caused global warming which may or may not be equalized by the drop in CO2.

Large scale wind farms will remove significant amount of kinetic energy from the atmosphere, i.e. you must remove energy to generate useable energy.  Would it not be at least worth considering whether this would have significant local weather and/or climatic effects.

Nuclear energy falls under the huge risk/huge reward category.  It seems to have little environmental impact under normal operation however the examples of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl underscore the huge risk.

If we're making an environmentally motivated energy decision would it not be an idea to evaluate the potential environmental risks of the alternatives?

Among many points, precisely.

But I think nuclear energy's relative risks are overrated.  Consider France, and the fact that it (nuclear energy production, not France ) can be scaled to power a submarine or aircraft carrier.  I'm actually surprised that the potential for smaller-scale widely-distributed nuclear energy production hasn't gained some interest.  I don't know what the cost/megawatt threshold would have to be to make it viable, admittedly.

On a related note, it's hard for me to take AGW alarmists seriously when arguably the best currently available option, accelerating nuclear power development, is off the table.  Instead we're going to tax cow farts?

biomass is, will always be, and has always been more economically veasible and productive.

While I agree with the risk assessment as stated, for nuclear power to be a viable option someone is going to have to build and maintain reactors in Africa, the MiddleEast, South America.  I have reasonable faith that the French, Americans, and even us Canadians can safely run the system, I have less that reactors in "third-world countries" will be safely run.  And from the Canadian experience, nuclear power is rather expensive to run and the cost isn't much different based on size of the reactor, without hard data I can safely say the cost/megawatt definitely decreases with larger reactors.  Also from the local experience, downtimes can be significant with any maintenance due to the required safety protocols.

That kind of eloquence deserves karmic reward

Psycho, you are not sorry so don't pretend to be sorry. I've run into you enough tims to know you are incapable of having a civil discussion. The forest issue, the salmon, the combustible river and the air quality are ALL local issues. I live in the Pacific Northwest. And all these issues, river dumpings included, come up year after year. You think you know me, but you don't. I have no issues with select cutting, in fact, i have one branch of my family that is in the logging business and has been for years. Clear cutting, I do have an issue with, you can look at a hillside in WA that has been clear ut and you'll see why. See you go aroudn talking like you know everything, but you don't.

Local issues are fine to deal with, but these are issues that occur on a global scale. The salmon issue is a problem for fishers all along the west coast, and while you can try and deal with it local, it isn't going to mean a whole lot if its not a collaborative effect between the states, and assuming you get the states to work together, our fishing is pretty small compared to the Asian fishing fleets in the same ocean. There is absolutely no reason why there shouldn't be larger scale efforts involved, and no matter how hard you stamp your feet and pout, small counties are not going to be able to go to the Japanese government and discuss fishing fleets and salmon runs.

So the alternative to burning naturally processed biomass is to use biomass that hasn't been naturally processed.......

While biomass has a lot of potential, if the AGW theory is correct you are not fixing the problem, you are creating a large amount of CO2 in converting biomass to energy (granted while much of the carbon is from atmospheric CO2, not all is)

If AGW theory is not correct biomass is a great alternative.

In fact I think that the global warming aspect of nuclear power is really only a side benefit. In my opinion the energy independence from imported oil is the big benefit. That leaves oil for more essential needs as a raw material for plastics.

In any case the shift to nuclear is inevitable. Solar and wind are cute but have no chance of ever being a realistic supply of energy. Better to anticipate the need and get there a bit sooner rather than later.

Wow Mumble, something we agree on...

So how come the greenies don't want to have more nuclear plants?  what is their real aim....

But the problem is not 'greenies', the problem is ExxonMobil and Saudi Arabia. They won't like that idea one little bit and if it actually came even close to occurring there would be so much money thrown against it that it wouldn't be funny and you'd see the same organizations that are fighting heathcare reform, global warming and anti-tobacco legislation suddenly up in arms against nuclear power for any real or imagined danger.

Mark my words, the Cato Institute, Heritage Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, etc. ad nauseum would all drop what they were doing and take up arms against any major move towards nuclear power.

"How do I know whom to Believe?" is an interesting question.

Do you accept the basic assumption that Peer Review of data/experiments helps hedge against personal bias and mistakes?

If not, then you don't know whom to believe - in virtually *any* field of study. Including whether the Earth is Flat.

If you do accept it, do you have evidence of particular corruption of this concept (Systemic corruption, not, say, 20 emails evincing frustration from a hacked database containing gigabytes of data.) in the climate change field.

At the end of the day, no one has managed to successfully level such a charge. Since I accept Peer Review, and I see no evidence of corruption of that process, and actual review of the experiments reveals no issues with the data, then the next step is - does the hypothesis presented successfully predict (Within some margin for error x%) the results of new experiments. And it has.

The next step is - has an alternative hypothesis with testable predictions to distinguish it from the AGW hypothesis been presented. Alternate Hypothesis? Oh plenty of those. But those that give testable predictions have not hewn to the data, and the rest have not given predictions you can test.

So, you ask for "bulletproof evidence (int he mould of "Earth is not flat" evidence)" - but the fact is the counter-arguments are remarkably similar to the "Flat-Earth" Arguments. You should read them - they argue that there are these ways in which science has misunderstood the data, the data is more complex than it first appears, and that there are massive conspiracies of government and private organizations that are economically entrenched in the false "Spherical Earth" Paradigm.

Bluntly, if you don't accept the Anthropomorphic Global Warming Hypothesis as 'bullet-proof', I don't see that you have any grounds on the terms you are judging it for saying the argument is closed on the "Flat Earth Hypothesis".

The logic is identical. You can choose to accept the principles of science, or you can choose not to, or you can choose to be inconsistent and accept them when it suits you and ignore them when it turns out you don't like the results. Frankly I respect the first, have a a degree of humor towards the second, and neither for the third. But you need to decide which you are going with.

Jonnan

I am frustrated with people claiming that 1998 is some kind of counterexample that climate change is 'leveling-off'.

Seriously - there were claims *IN THE MEDIA*, that 1998 was evidence of global warming.

News-Flash: Media Mis-represents Science, Story at 11!

Climate change science never tried to represent this as anything but a statistical outlier. To the extent that there is some concern that Global warming may make for stronger/longer-lasting El Nino's (Which are driven by Pacific Temperatures) you can draw a link between climate change science and the 1998 heat wave. This is in the same fashion that warmer Caribbean waters make stronger hurricanes, but climate change science doesn't claim Katrina was 'caused' by global warming.

More to the point - Even Frogboy claims that it's some evidence of 'leveling-off', while looking at a chart higher on the same page that shows *TWO-SEPARATE-YEARS* where we nearly matched 1998 - *WITHOUT* a major El-Nino.

The fact that we're nearly matching a year with a major El-Nino without an actual, y'know, major El-Nino really *ought* to be a concern folks.

Jonnan

There is a lot of good science in climatology. Sometimes you get bad science, or scientist who 'fix' their results. They get found out sooner or later, when the model they've create breaks down.

I haven't read through the documents - there are apparently a lot of them - so I can't make a quality assessment on these particular scientists. It is incorrect to assume that all climate science is bad because of this group. The topic itself if far larger than they are, and likely has many other reputable scientists who are not fixing data.

I guess the coldest winter in 50 years (on record in many places) also *ought* be a concern?

YES. Its called climate change, overall higher temperatures but also more extreme. Cmon dont pretend you  didnt know this already.

The universal escape clause: No matter what the climate does, it's all easily explained by AGW.