You said it's a fact. 

All that chart show is that swings in temperature can occur naturally.

Oh come on - you're going to nitpick his wording? Mercury has a tenuous, light atmosphere - compared to Venus it is nothing. His point you're ignoring is that the thick atmosphere (with high levels of CO2) of Venus is the main reason it is so much hotter than Mercury, despite being farther from the Sun.

Oh, I knew this one was coming. Guess what they compared the regrowth with? THE ALL TIME LOW RECORD. Of course the regrowth is going to be huge. What does that prove? Nothing. Nice deflection by the way. 

I have purposely not gone into details about the reason for the warming. It does not matter, what matter is that it is happening. Feel free to open your own thread about CO2 and global warming, it could be interesting to discuss on it's own. Another deflection. (yes I will be calling you out if you keep doing this)

I would love for you to provide some proof of this "fact" instead of randomly quoting details that is but a tiny part of the big picture. Hope you will surprise me in a good way.  

Meh, actual science generally isn't that cut and dried and is more about context.  For all intents and purposes, Mercury doesn't really have an atmosphere.  Anybody interested in what is generally called atmospheric science will usually say that Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere because what Mercury does have is so close to a vacuum.  Basically, the vast majority of science can be safely done while assuming that Mercury has no atmosphere.

Now, technically Mercury does have something very tenuous that is some kind of atmosphere.  But its more of a curiosity than anything else, so it gets ignored in most contexts. 

Yeah, this insistence that global warming must predict monotonic decreases is Arctic ice levels is pure silliness.

Nature is hugely stochastic.  There will be ups and downs in the overall trends.  Thats how the real world works, and thats why no reasonable person claims that one year "trends" mean anything one way or the other.  What matter are 15+ year trends, which are quite clear.

But the 2013 rebound occurred, didn't it?  I didn't claim it was the start of anything.  Just made an observation.

Speaking of which, we need more observations.  We need to continue aggressively collecting data.  We just don't yet have a reliable model to plug the data into.  Maybe someday we'll have one.  It's possible.

You say AGW is the theory 'that makes the most sense with what we currently know' - If a theory fails to conform with or explain reality, and provides no reliable predictive capability, the theory is incorrect.  The best polish I could put on AGW theory is that it's incomplete but I'm not sure that's really a fair description.  The argument for me is not about GW/AGW it's about what is proposed to do about it - betting the farm on AGW models seems far from prudent when the Farmers Almanac predicts about as well, if not better.

1)The IPCC is not scrambling to explain anything at this point. The full report will be released in due time. What everyone is buzzing about is a leaked summary (leaked by a climate change denier, by the way named Alex Rawls, who is/was part of the IPCC), not the full report. The summary of the first part of the four part report will be released on Sept 27th. The fourth and final part of the study, the Synthesis Report is due to be released in October 2014

What is being left out of this media frenzy about the IPCC eating crow is their UPWARD revision of the likelihood that humans are responsible for the overall upward increase in the Earth's temperature from "Very Likely" to "Extremely Likely".

“There is consistent evidence from observations of a net energy uptake of the earth system due to an imbalance in the energy budget. It is virtually certain that this is caused by human activities, primarily by the increase in CO2 concentrations. There is very high confidence that natural forcing contributes only a small fraction to this imbalance.”

2)The ice sheet is NOT getting larger on the whole.

It also had the earliest minimum date.  You are missing the forest for the trees.

As I showed in links about a few month ago (which you largely ignored because they were inconvenient to your argument), various models (from decades ago) based on our current theories of Climate Change have been successful in predicting current climate change.

As I also showed in links a while back, current models are overwhelmingly successful in predicting climate changes when given initial conditions from decades ago.

So, to put it bluntly, our best models appear to have tremendous predictive capabilities given the inherent difficulties in modeling a fundamentally stochastic process.  Sure, many of the fine details are beyond our current capabilities to predict.  There is absolutely a lot of refinement work to be done.

But anybody who doesn't acknowledge that it is overwhelmingly likely that worldwide temperatures will increase by a substantial amount over the medium term future is being willfully obstinant.  The details may need filling in, but the broad details are well understood.

Wether Mercury had an atmosphere or not was actually contentuous amongst scientists. It wasn't known for fact one way or another until a probe physically tested it. 

There is a tie in here considering our factual measurements of things like temperature and atmosphere are limited to recent history. If you use measurements like tree rings the earth should be cooler in the last 50 years even though we know it's not. Point is we make a lot of  assumptions about the past that may not be fully accurate. 

I guess the absence of (predicted) warming for 2 decades is just one of those 'fine details'.  So be it.

Yeah, go ahead and go back to my previous posts in this thread from a while back.  You seem to have ignored them once again because they aren't convenient to your argument.  You are good at this.

I linked multiple well regarded scientific sources that indicated that there has been measurable warming over the last few decades that is in line with what was predicted by climate change models.  That is, of course, assuming that you don't cherry pick your end points.

You are welcome to deny data all you want because it doesn't fit with your arguments.  But I suggest that that is a poor basis for public or scientific policy.

Let's go to a neutral party in the debate: the insurance industry.  After all, climate change is a massive deal to them, and they have to get it right or they lose many billions of dollars.  And they overwhelmingly side with professional scientists:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/09/how-the-insurance-industry-is-dealing-with-climate-change/

They're insurance companies.  They make more money by charging more based on mythical future events.  They get corn holed by Uncle if they go bankrupt for ignoring something Uncle claims is real.  If you were a risk assessment company, you'd be taking the bullshit into account too.

Our severe weather has been nothing of the sort.  They really enjoy talking about record flooding, record hurricanes, etcetera, but they're completely normal.  There has not been a single historic weather event in the US, everything supposedly historic came with the "since ####" tagline.  Hurricane Sandy is just another footnote in history, not a historic event.  There was a bigger one in 1938, and bigger ones than that came before.  Coast altering hurricanes have been pounding the Manhattan area since before it was Manhattan.

They talk about how many hurricanes there are now compared to before, but they don't mention that they weren't tracking most of the ones that never made landfall.  2005 was the worst year ever, 28 named storms, 15 hurricanes, 7 of them major.  In 1933 it was 21, 10 and 5.  There were no weather satellites in 1933.  How many named storms would there have been if they were tracked by satellites?  1950 had 8 major hurricanes, so 2005 isn't even the top for major hurricanes without factoring in tracking shortcomings.

It's a flawed premise backed up by incomplete data, not proof of global warming, let alone the junk science that is AGW.

That would be a neat trick if you could reproduce it.  However since the IPCC and everyone else has acknowledged that the models DO NOT predict the current climate change (as in the lack thereof), that would also be false.

Try this link: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v3/n9/full/nclimate1972.html?WT.ec_id=NCLIMATE-201309

If you do not like nature, I can give you one from Climate Audit, Climate Etc. or any reputable source you care to choose.

YOu are confusing 2 different points.

point 1: There has been warming in the past 30 years.

Point 2: The models predicted the current warming lull

Point 1 is a given.  As far as I can see, no one is arguing that point.  It has warmed (by about 1.5 degrees Celsius) in the past 30 years.  Just as it did 12 times between 1895 and 1940 (before the 'catastrophic' rise of CO2).

Point 2 is false.  No models predicted a 17 year lull (pause/hiatus/interval/vacation) of warming.

You should read your own paper.

I understand that you probably don't have a Nature subscription, but then you should read an unbiased summary.

Your own article says that temperatures have risen substantially over the last 20 years and that there has not been a lull.  It is just that the measured rise is not as large as most models predict it would have been.  On much shorter time scales there has not been a measureable rise, but that is not completely unexpected since its well known that climate models can't deal with year scale predictions.

In any case, the premise of the paper is controversial at best.  As I posted earlier, other major climate groups maintain that temps have actually gone up beyond what is predicted by models:

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_23590626/un-says-1st-decade-shows-accelerated-warming-trend?source=rss

The issue is that you are working on such small time scales, and the variance due to stochastic effects (weather, volcanoes, solar effects) is so large, that decade scale stuff is very difficult to work with.  Thats why you deal with multi decade data sets, which overwhelmingly show that our models work very well.

In any case, this is just confirming what I wrote above.  There are debates about the details.  You have a group that is saying that is saying that yeah, climate change is happening, but not quite as fast as expected.  I have a group that is saying that is is happening a bit faster than expected.  But you'll notice something here - even though there is debate about the details, EVERYBODY IS AGREEING THAT ITS HAPPENING AND THAT HUMANS ARE TO BLAME.  Your own paper explicitly agrees with human caused climate change - they just say that its not happening as fast as expected due to some unanticipated effects.

No, they're not agreeing with that.  Not at all.  And the fact that AGW true believes keep insisting that everyone really agrees with them when in fact everyone doesn't is what makes this whole thing more akin to religion than science.  

Insisting, capitalizing, jumping up and down and screaming at the top of your lungs that everyone agrees with your point of view doesn't make it so.  It just makes your arguments harder to take seriously.  Real science and real debate are not conducted this way.  

There is no lull as explicitly stated in your own link and as stated in my link.  The "lull" mostly comes from people cherry picking data points to do REALLY shady short term data manipulation (for example, choosing certain 17 year time frames because you know the numbers will work out to give you a result that you want ahead of time).

The rate of temperature increases over the last two decades might be a bit less than predicted, or it might not (depending on who you believe).  But, with non cherry picked data points, essentially everybody who is reputable agrees that there has been substantial increase in global temperatures over the last two decades.

Over the shorter term you can get different trends due to random effects, but that doesn't matter much since its known that climate change models predicts long term patterns, not year to year temps.

This.

Good point.  "Everybody" should be "the overwhelming majority of scientists".  There are a few percent of scientists who disagree.

But the point stands that the cited article explicitly agrees that climate change exists and is caused by humans, as essentially all professional scientific articles do.

And BTW, science does work by consensus.  Otherwise nothing would get done because you need consensus on certain basic issues to make progress in a field.   Read any philosophy of science text.  Scientists will generally change their consensus when presented with evidence suggesting that they should do so, but that has simply not been even remotely presented in this case - the best that climate denier have is basically "NUH UH" and some cherry picked data points, which does not fly in science.

I would consider using tree ring data from 8 trees in a single forest 'cherry picking'.

Yeah, and I'd consider your objections to one very obscure method for measuring climate change to be cherry picking.

Come on now.  There are a huge number of different methods for measuring temperature changes.  Let's not go over whether one use of one method may have been flawed.  I'll give you a spoiler alert - at least one attempt to measure temperatures was flawed.  But it doesn't invalidate the entire field.

And, from the big IPCC report:

"Scientists are 90% sure that 1981-2010 was the warmest such span in the last eight centuries, and there's a 66% chance that it was the warmest 30-year period in the last 1,400 years.

While the last 15 years have not warmed as quickly, we've seen steady warming over most of the globe, and we haven't seen a below-average temperature month since February 1985.

Scientists are also 99% certain that we will see more hot days and nights -- and fewer chilly ones -- as the 21st century progresses.

"Each of the last three decades has been significantly warmer than all preceding decades since 1850," according to the IPCC report."

Hey there is a 1% chance that it will get colder!!! Global warming is a fraud!