For Every and Any presentation of new information, meant to indicate a change in Anything, you absolutely have to compare the new info with existing known info. If it's a change in something that has a lot of variation then it can be difficult to say when there is a difference and how big the difference is. Global Cooling used to be a promoted media buzzword of concern not too long ago! Remember that?? According to tv shows ive seen :) the earth has been completely frozen over at points in its history.

> Former US Vice President Al Gore cited Professor Maslowski's analysis on Monday in his acceptance speech at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7139797.stm

'MY thoughts are that this is such a complex and contested issue'

Contested by whom? None of the scientists working in the area for certain; there are corporations who have pumped money into a public campaign because they didn't want to lose their income - just like the tobacco companies produced 'evidence' for years that smoking didn't cause cancer; eventually the public was convinced by the science.

As for 'the wikipedia' you're missing some source.
1) conservapedia: "The global warming theory is the liberal hoax that the world is becoming dangerously warmer due to the emission of greenhouse gases"

2) rationalwiki: "Global warming...is the rising average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans and its related effects."

Wiki-projects clearly can't be wrong...

Words mean nothing unless they are correct logical statements.

look who's talking . . .

It **amazes** me how many fucking morons there are around here. If I told all of you idiots that I modeled the light of day, and determined that we were headed to an era of eternal darkness, because from Noon until Midnight I saw a trend in light and I exptrapolated that to determine that eternal darkness was unavoidable, you would call me a fucking idiot, because REALITY DEMONSTRATED that after midnight, it started to get lighter...and it turns out the light cylce is a NATURAL CYCLE.


And yet all you fucking IDIOTS sit around and buy into a bunch of COMPUTER SIMULATIONS THAT ARE........******wait for it******CONTRADICTED BY REALITY.



There is NO FUCKING GLOBAL WARMING.



The fucking COMPUTER MODELS ARE WRONG.


After midnight, it starts to get light.

And after a *natural* period of "warming" the cycle....as cycles do....has caused termperatures to change course.

WE LEFT AND ICE AGE without humanity....We have ENTERED warming and cooling period in teh absence of signifcant human intervention. huh....OH MY GOD....THERE MUST BE SOMEHTING MORE POWERFUL THEN HUMANS IN THE UNVIERSE.....you fucking arrogant stupid pricks...

Who let him out of his box?

Krelly, please tell us how you really feel. Hehe

krellin - you are correct. The earth does go through warming and cooling periods. This can be incredibly easy to observe in ice cores. We also recently came out of a cooling period (I believe the mini ice age, or whatever they called it officially ended in the 1800s).

However, these cycles took place over centuries, if not millenia. The extensive warming we are seeing is being done over mere decades. A blink of the eye in terms of climate cycles.

Do you understand? Yes, we may naturally be entering a warming period, but this is the quickest temperature change recorded in Earth's history.

Thank you krellin for enlightening me. I always thought I caused the light in my living room at night by turning on some lamps. Now, thanks to you, I realize that since there is a natural cycle of darkness and light, it follows that therefore I can have no influence on it and my flipping those light switches, however much it may coincide with my living room being light, is in fact just folly having no effect whatsoever.

30 years ago it was global cooling.
5 years ago it was global warming.
Now it's global climate change.
I just don't know what to believe anymore. It may just be my cynicism in humanity, but when I look at the motives for the global climate change craze, I see some deceitful and corrupt ones.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

Thanks for the link YHN, but why would I listen to the shared opinion of all scientific bodies of national or international standing when I can just as well take Fluminator's word for it?

The models were indeed wrong - FACT.

To see the self interested reaction to this I suggest that one examines the climategate emails. That is, of course, unless global warming is a matter of personal faith.

@fulhamish - not sure what you mean by that, as to me its a bit unclear. Are you suggesting the climategate emails - written by four researchers at a lone institution - are evidence that global warming is a myth? Or are you with the rest of us in trying to convince krellin of seeing the light.

Your take on the climategate emails is very different from mine. These were written by the leading researchers in the field. Read for example what they say about peer review and making raw data available. Look into the tree ring disconuity and seethe hoops they tried to jump through to keep the hockey stick moving upwards. Try the Roman and medieval warm periods and how they try to minimise them. And yes I almost forgot the models were wrong - FACT.

@Oscar: Take my word for what? I don't understand.

But why male models?

Thoughts about model accuracy - we cant predict the weather more than a few days from now. Look at the predicted tracks they show for hurricanes, meteorologists show tracks from several different models and they can be completely different! I think the key is averaging over time - knowing a percentage of time they go this way or that. But the key is data over a long time and understanding of how all the influencing factors are changing and knowing their effects accurately.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climategate-CRU-emails-hacked.htm

If man-made climate change is true, it's too late to do anything about it anyhow, and impossible to organize the international industrial cooperation necessary to stop it even if it were not too late.

I think i read vehicle fuel accounts for around half of oil consumption - that is - conversion of oil to CO2 and H2O. So CO2 generation from vehicles has probably been cut in half or more since the 60s in the US because of CAFE standards, so i argue that industrial cooperation has been successful for the automotive industry. Alternative energy accounts for 40% of Germany's electric power? I believe there will be a peak in CO2, the only question will it be soon enough.

Invictus: It's too late to stop climate change, but if we don't stop spewing greenhouse gases, the climate change is going to be a hell of a lot worse.

fulhamish: You claimed at the end of the first page of this thread that NSIDC data disproved Arctic sea ice melting. Here is the real NSIDC data:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_01.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_02.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_03.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_04.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_05.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_06.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_07.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_08.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_09.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_10.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_11.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_12.png

Does technological progress make humanity better? Yes or no.

Wow, that's annoying. Use these URL's until I find the rest:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_09.png
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/12/monthly_ice_NH_11.png

Alright, so here they are:
Jan.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2000/02/Fig3_Jan2014_trend.png
Feb.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/03/Figure3.png
Mar.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/04/Figure3.png
Apr.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/05/Figure3.png
May: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/06/Figure31.png
Jun.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/07/Fig3_June2014_trend.png
Jul.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/08/Figure3.png
Aug.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/1999/09/Figure3.png
Sep.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/10/monthly_ice_NH_09.png
Oct.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/11/Figure3.png
Nov.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/12/monthly_ice_NH_11.png
Dec.: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/files/2014/01/Figure3.png

What we have to balance is the net negative consequence of certain levels of climate change with the net negative consequence of the actions we'd have to take to achieve those levels. We could, if we really wanted to, stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow. This would have the best possible impact on climate change, however the negative consequences to humanity would outstrip even those of the most extreme climate forecasts.

Sadly we have no consensus on what the best balance is.

Octavious: The IPCC worked on that in its latest report. The economic impact to changing is minimal.