im a Quackiologist..I study scientists banquished by the collective.

Global Warming: We'll freeze to death or die trying.

Seriously, now, it's time for war. Why is there so much CO2, so much oil being used? PEOPLE! How do we reduce the number of people? Famine, too cruel. Genocide, to punishable. How about another world war? I vote yes, which is likely an insult to any of our armed forces.

I don't really get how poeple on the side against changing energy policy get so much wind in their sails. First off it's outrageous to think that we have absolutely zero impact on our environment or that the results of our actions are immediately perceptible. Even if there were no theory about man-made global warming I would still be concerned about the impact of any changes to our environment.

Second it's clear that enivornmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction and usage seem plenty detrimental to me, global warming or no. Ripping up the landscape for coal mines, massive coal ash spills, oil slicks wiping out wildlife and poisoning the water, acid rain, and so on... all those things suck a pretty big dick on their own without even worrying about the temperature of the earth.

Then you have the potential to get the fuck out of the middle east and let that place implode when the oil money stops coming, I would think most conservatives would like the idea of that... I just don't really see on any level why leading the world towards a green economy would be a bad thing, especially when our bigger political/economic adversaries tend to still be manufacturing countries who will be more adversely impacted than us.

What precisely is it that I've said is bullshit since at this point I've yet to make a claim other than to point out a number of sources and to point out the lack of proof in psycho's claims?

Lots of graphs with squiggly lines all over them. The first thing they do is make reference to the NIWA's website and claim to have registered and thereby been able to download "raw data" that then showed no upward trend. It then goes on to show the "adjustments" and basically claim some nefarious manipulation.

First off I have no access to the same raw data and even if I did would not know what to do with it.

Secondly there are no references whatsoever, no peer review, no publishing by a reputable journal, basically nothing whatsoever to document these claims.

Thirdly the so-called "analysis" abruptly cut off the data at 2000 even though the article itself mentions that data through 2008 was available. What's wrong? Did the data from 2000 to 2008 contradict what they were trying to show?

Fourthly the only names the article lists are that of Terry Dunleavy and Richard Treadgold, neither of which have any credentials in any related scientific field that I could discover. Please correct me if I'm wrong and supply what education and experience either of these folks have that warrents accepting their totally undocumented findings.

Fifthly, and most importantly, why don't *you* take a look the following article New Zealand Climate Science Coalition caught lying about temperature trends that adresses your specific article and contains a number of links to corroborating evidence.

Your so called proof is a total fabrication of lies put out by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition which contains no actual climate scientists. Basically what they did was to combine all the data from different sites as if they were all from a single site.

Here's more evidence of their lies you should take a look at.

http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-sceptics-lie-about-temp-records-try-to-smear-top-scientist/

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise

http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/3101449/Climate-scientists-attack-criticism

http://hot-topic.co.nz/nz-temps-warming-real-record-robust-sceptics-wrong/

http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/nz-temperature-rise-clear

I'm sorry but the bullshit is yours.

Also I'm not even going to bother to address your reference to Inhofe's so-called debunking of the scientific consensus from 2007. It was crap then and it smells even worse 2 years later.

Finally this doesn't mean that I'm going to bother going into this much detail to refute every piece of drivel that someone posts. It's awful easy to say "Look here" and give a link and then place the burden of proof on the other guy. In the future you need to put a little more effort into your posts, I'm not going to do all your work for you.

It's a cost and control issue, really.

I think that nearly all Americans (namely, everyone other than those employed by old energy interests, such as employees of oil companies) would love to have clean, affordable, and self-sufficient energy solutions. However, the proposed "green" solutions (wind turbines, geothermal energy, solar, hydroelectric) are limited and costly. The two big green energy sources, wind and solar, are significantly more expensive than fossil fuels per unit energy. So, from a cost perspective, there is no benefit to consumers in switching now, as increased energy costs would lower the standard of living for millions of lower and middle class Americans.

As for other sources of pollution (particularly of the personal nature), people dislike directives on how to live their lives. CFLs, for example, are an inconvenience to many people because the quality of light produced is inferior (or rather, users dislike the more sterile light of CFLs) to that produced by incandescent bulbs (particularly for reading use). Additionally, many of these "green" solutions have a high initial investment. While CFLs may save homeowners money over decades, it is difficult for lower-income families to transition to the newer bulbs. Of course, the irony of CFLs is that they pose an environmental cost greater than that of incandescent bulbs: mercury pollution. Fluorescent bulbs use mercury vapor, and heavy CFL usage guarantees that many careless residents will dispose of the bulbs incorrectly and they will end up in landfills, broken and leaking.

So, what of businesses? Simply, added restrictions and penalties will contribute to operating cost, thereby cutting profits. Reduced profits mean fewer jobs and increased costs to consumers (when government presses a company, it passes this pressure to the consumer), thereby hurting average Americans.

There are reasonable, non-dogmatic explanations as to why opposition to many environmental reforms is strong. Not everyone who opposes sweeping environmental legislation is anti-science or anti-environment. Commercial/industrial production and economic prosperity impact lives more directly than carbon emissions.

My reply #83 shows full well why reputable scientists are reluctant to give their data to people unqualified in the field of climatology that also happen to have a documented agenda. Apparently both Terry Dunleavy and Richard Treadgold are well known bloggers with an AGW denial agenda with absolutely no climatology credentials whatsoever.

Why should scientists give their data to uneducated fools that are only going to "publish" some bullshit whose only point is to cause noise. It doesn't have to be true it only has to provide a smoke screen sufficient to claim that there is some kind of controversy.

Then the real scientists have to spend their time debunking this crap. Heck, I'm certainly sick of having to put in this kind of effort and I'm certainly no qualified climate scientist. I don't blame any of the CRU scientists for not wanting to respond to FOIA requests in the least.

If some nimrod blogger is competent enough to do their own analysis of "real" scientists data then let them go and do the actual legwork of getting their own original data from which to work. But no that would be far too much to ask of a pair of bloggers.

99 times out of 100 these straight "analysis" papers that take someone else's data and use that to come to an entirely different conclusion than the conclusion that credentialed and experienced scientists in the field have arrived at are precisely and exactly total bullshit.

What about ethanol as a fuel source? Certainly, using corn production as fuel for example, would be extremely inefficient, but plants such as hemp and switchgrass could make a more efficient and cheaper fuel, or at least for the United States. And nuclear power would be far cheaper than 'green' energy, while still remaining fairly clean.

The "not in my backyard" attitude is what keeps many potential nuclear plants from opening, but I agree, it would be a great start. Wasn't nuclear energy part of John McCain's platform in 2008? I am not sure why it is even a partisan issue, as it is affordable and cleaner than fossil fuels, with the added bonus of independence from the Saudis (we have Yucca Mountain for waste, after all).

As for ethanol, studies have generally concluded that in order to acquire the necessary amounts of biofuel to fuel millions of motor vehicles, food crops would need be replaced by ethanol crops. This would reduce the profits of farmers (food crops sell at a much higher premium than fuel crops) and/or dramatically increase the cost of food (different studies have reached different conclusions). I believe that a few recent meta-analyses have determined that ethanol would not serve as a desirable primary fuel source for transportation.

Wind, water, and solar energy are our best bets. It is time for america to be proactive instead of reactive...wait we recently just started making hybrid cars.....its too late.....

There are really two separate issues here. The first is what's really happening in a qualitative sense. In other words termperature is going up and we are a large part of it. That is what the consensus is about and what the deniers tend to deny.

The second part has to with the actual magnitude of the effect and what if anything can be done about it. This is something about which pretty much *every* climate scientist disagrees with at least some other climate scientists.

Denying the first issue is stupid. Arguing about the second issue is not.

Basically what I take to be a reasonable stance is that AGW is occuring. That simply means that the planet is warming on average and that human activity is a meaningful contributor. But that's all AGW really says.

Beyond that there are a wide range of reasonable stances to take. For one there are a wide range of models that predict a similar wide range of temperature increases for a specific level of CO2. It's perfectly reasonable to argue that these estimates may in fact be higher than reality or that they might not occur as fast as some predict or that for any particular increase how great the effect to the environment will be. And on top of all that you can also argue about what we can actually do to stop or mitigate it. People can have a wide range of opinion on all of these things and still hold an opinion that's not unreasonable.

It's only when someone sticks their head in the sand and claims there is no such thing as global warming or that even if there is that humans have nothing to do with it that I would consider someone to be a denier. Otherwise all the other things are fair game.

In reality my preference is to plop down a couple of hundred or even thousand nuclear plants and that in conjunction with a decent electric car would be the end of the strangle hold the middle east has on this country. It would be a huge economic boom in this country to stop the negative balance of payments that our oil fix costs us.

The problem is that ExxonMobil, Texaco/Chevron and Saudi Arabia wouldn't like that very much and in this and every other country on the planet money gets what money wants. However peak oil is not all that far off and when it occurs there will be no other choice. The good news is that we pretty much have all the technical capability we need to pull it off although because we lack the balls we'll have to wait until it really starts to hurt before we start down that road and due to the long lead time of nuclear there will be a very painful transistion.

Depopulation, even radical depopulation, is becoming more popular an idea than you may think.   A guy gave a talk down at the University of Texas advocating radical planet depopulation.  He got a standing ovation at the end.   Personally, IMHO the idea merits some serious thought.  Don't get me wrong:  it doesn't change what I think of it in the end--it's absolutely diabolical.  I'm just keeping an open mind.   The problem I have with it is, depopulation constitutes failure.   What's the point of fighting global warming?   To save the human species.   What is depopulation doing?  Destroying the human species.

And these people who say, "Okay, so there might be global warming.  But it isn't man-made."   Global cooling wasn't man-made either when the dinosaurs went extinct.  And that matters...how??   What are you going to do...tell me it's all just part of some natural global cycle that happens every 65 million years, so just roll over and die?

Sorry to make you do all the work Mumble... I do like to find out what data people are looking at, and this seems to be the only way.

Thanks for it.

I still would like to pose the question of why we can't get an accurate weather forecast for 2 weeks in the future, but we somehow know all there is to know about the world weather and future of it.

Kind of a blinding flash of the obvious moment...

If someone want to be regarded as a real scientist, the above is a required cost of doing business. Not doing so, for ANY reason, is the equivalent of hanging a big "Not Legitimate" sign on the research, and anything based on it. This is not optional. Anyone who wants to be taken seriously when they question such research must do the same.

To regain even the semblance of legitimacy, CRU must release the original data they collected or compiled from other sources. They must release any and all corrective factors they used to make data agree with each other, or to calibrate one data set with another. They must release the computer code used to do any corrections, compilations, etc. They must release specific rationales for any data they emphasize above other data, and any data they chose to disregard. This must be done for their work to be considered legitimate science - not related to any sort of scandal that has cropped up, this is to be expected of *any* serious research. That such data and analysis methods have not been released when the work was first published reflects a grave failing of the peer review process; none of this research has met the minimum publication criteria for any other hard science, so why is international policy being based on it?

Moreover, the failings of the CRU research casts doubt on any other research based - even in part - on their data or conclusions. Part of the credibility of science is reproducability - an entirely independant person *must* be able to take your starting position (whether that is a set of chemical reagents, a genetic code, a spectrum taken from a distant star, or a collection of temperature data), use the same process to analyse it, and get the same result. The burden of proof is not on the independant tester, it is on the scientist making the original claim. If they won't release their starting data, and won't release their method of analysis, it is entirely impossible for an independant tester to corroborate their findings.

That would be because climatology is, at best, a "soft" science, like sociology. It can't predict what will occur in any particular given situation, but it can tell you something about what you should expect after that situation has occurred many times. It can't tell you whether that particular murderer will kill again, but it can tell you the approximate odds of him doing so, given what is known about his history and particular offense. Likewise, climatology can't tell you anything about what to expext next week, but might be able to give you an idea what to expect to happen 20 years out.

Oppose that to a "hard" science like physics. If you heat a gas to a specific temperature, it will radiate at a specific wavelength. As long as you can maintain the conditions properly, it will always happen exactly the same way. Or chemistry; if you mix compound A with B, you get C.

I support this idea. The opposition to nuclear energy is mostly due to fear and misinformation (thank the Soviets for Chernobyl). It is a shame, because the United States would really benefit from an influx of nuclear power plants.

I ask you all to hail me, your new vegetarian overlord.

Sure, you might have gotten some mildly incriminating data about our worldwide conspiracy. But get this. We pretty much count on the majority of the folks not in on the conspiracy being mind bogglingly stupid. I mean, after all, you aren't scientists. Most of you are folks like the OP, who can barely string two sentences together without hurting himself, his keyboard, or the English language!

So, really, go back to your reality tv and such, and prepare to be assimilated into our healthier, cleaner and safer future. I promise I won't bite -- after all, I'm a vegetarian! What would I want with your delicious brain juice that powers my science filled mind?! 

Mumble's argument:

"I haven't looked at the raw data, and even though everyone on the other side already admitted to adjusting it a long time ago, I'll assume these people are lying without checking for myself."

Instead of googling in a futile effort to be right, use your own trusted site to access the processed satellite data.  Oh look, the outer atmosphere is cooling!  Wait, it hasn't even risen half a degree since 79 at the surface?  Funny how the temperature monitoring stations on the ground are showing such high increases, but those guys that have been surveying them and taking pictures of all the asphalt, air conditioner exhaust vents and other problems are probably funded by big oil, so you don't look there for your explanation.

We were all going to die in the 70's, the ice age was coming.  Temperatures were at record lows.  Some of you idiots buying this bullshit are probably even old enough to remember the nonsense.  Why now, would you get excited over half a degree up from that, only in the lower atmosphere?  You wouldn't, unless you're a complete fucking idiot.  Now the surface stations though, that's something to get excited over.  As long as you measure from the right years, all the disfunctional ones in the mix can give you over twice that, woohoo...

There's a sucker born every minute, and these doom and gloom postulations they come up with every generation take the lot of you.  The only problem is that you morons seem to outnumber thinking individuals by a depressing margin when the craze hits full swing, and by the time you figure it out they've gone and put stupidity into law.

1.  Einstein's theory of relativity fundamentally altered what scientists once agreed to from Euclidean's 'space' to spacetime.  So did the discoveries of many other scientists.  Science isn't always right.

2. The entire purpose of science is to question reality.  Without science questioning reality, we'd have people still believing the world is flat (Which ironically seems to be the same type of argument these global warming believers say).  Science by definition should question anything and not fully trust any theory.

If you cannot question theories, you aren't science minded.  EVERY MAJOR SCIENTIFIC BREAKTHRU WAS DONE BY GENUISES WHO QUESTIONED THE CURRENT THEORIES.  Science is more or less your religion, same as the people who didn't question if the world was flat because of the bible.