Rather than use others' data to determine if the climate is warming, I can use my own.

I've been keeping weather records since 1976. Taking the average temperature of the winter months of Dec, Jan and Feb for the first 15 years as being zero, the period 1993-2007 was 0.89°C warmer.

Although 15 years is not long enough to indicate any kind on long term climate change, the increase is significant. I also ahve records on hand for my local 'official' station which go back to 1883. They also confirm the trend above and shown in a graph a few pages back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ&NR=1&feature=fvwp

this has some fairly good logical conclusions imo.

You know Mumble's, when someone links to a site while mentioning the contents, that usually means they know about it.  I'd watch the video response, but you appear to have hosed the link.

Being a climatologist is not a requirement for checking monitoring stations to see if they are indeed properly maintained.  Most of them aren't, his information is factually accurate, backed up by proof, and accepted by the agencies running them.  Your source check didn't dispute this, just that the NOAA decided there wasn't any error in their information.  When the NOAA tells me there's nothing wrong with their readings, despite there being over two degrees difference in change between the eroneous stations and the satellite records, I don't need to be a climatologist to call bullshit.  You've already linked the source, so you shouldn't need me to tell you how to get the relevant information on the paint study, they do publish their results after all.  When they've finished, they'll even tell everyone else how they tested it, and how to duplicate the results.  Anyone that wants to can debunk it any time they feel like it, unless they're right.

Your trusted references, while claiming that global warming is significant and man made, also have the exact same information in them, just as I linked it.  The unkept surface stations show alarming increases over the last thirty years, the satellites do not.  Instead they show a minor, gradual shift in the lower atmosphere, comparable to the downward shift that had been recorded earlier in the century.  I don't really like calling thousands of scientists liars, but that's just what they are when they persist in making claims that their evidence refutes.  It doesn't exist, never did.  We've already passed the high point in the cycle and are on our way down again.  When they stop proving themselves wrong with their own supporting evidence, I'll stop calling it bullshit and at least agree that the planet is warming in a non-negligible way.

I'd also like to point out that Source Watch doesn't seem to have a problem with government funding.  If I were a slimey fucking bastard that wanted money and power, I'd get myself into congress, not Exxon Mobile.  I could spend a few billion here, a few billion there, and make sure I got my cut of it.  Anyone that bothers to pay attention already knows how rich the people in government are getting.  Even the ones that never had a real job in their life end up retiring as multi millionaires when they leave office and do "consulting" jobs for all the people they paid off.  That's assuming they aren't one of the many that skip the whole waiting to get out of office bit and just go straight for the graft.  Hastert made millions buying land and then using our tax dollars to improve the value.  Between someone funded by a corporation, and someone funded by the assholes writing laws to get themselves rich, I don't see any particular reason to get excited over corporate sponsorship.

As long as you exclude the prison population(to be fair we can discount all the politicians in jail as well), you'd be really hard pressed to find a group less disreputable than politicians.  They're looking at trillions of dollars to dip into, far more money than Exxon Mobile can ever dream of aquiring for their own operation expenses.

If it is indeed complex, why are laypeople so certain that their stance is the objective reality?

I personally do most of my own judgment based on the ski season in the northeast. While I would expect most of these things to correlate reasonably well just because they may not doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot.

These days in winter every time it goes below 32F people say "whatever happened to global warming." I played varsity hockey at MIT from 1971 to 1975 and we skated in an outdoor rink generally at night and it was very common for the temperature to be below 0F and we thought nothing of it. I still live in the same general area where just below freezing is now considered cold.

However all of this is really not much more than anecdotal information. Interesting, but doesn't really prove much.

Just today I think they had record cold and snow in Austin, TX while two days earlier we hit a record of 69F in Boston. One of the implications of global warming is that the extremes in *both* directions both hot and cold get greater. In some way that's counter intuitive but it's true.

I've definitely watched *every* video link that I've posted in this thread and in fact checked the last 8 or so links that I've posted and they all work for me, but again tell me which one doesn't work for you and I'll see what I can do.

There was certainly a lot more to the video that what I mentioned above so it's still a worthwhile view and I did just check it and it worked for me. You might also try to enter the link directly it's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_0-gX7aUKk. You might also try a different browser, IE if you use FF or vice versa, I've seen that make a difference particularly for an embeded video.

You'll have to stomach a fair amount of what you will undoubtedly consider propaganda but if you can get past that to the basic science I do think video is informative.

The point is even if a particular station has some kind of error as long as it's a constant error it doesn't matter. Clearly the absolute temperature of any particular station will be different than the absolute temperature at some other station. That's why you cannot combined data from different stations. Each station should generate it's own curve that will be offset by some arbitrary constant. It's the addition or subtraction of this arbitrary constant from each of the individual curves that generates the final data.

Clearly if you're taking a continuous data stream from one site and then you do something that changes the offset of that station whether it's to paint it, or move it or whatever there's no problem with doing that but only as long as you do not combine the two data streams. You can consider the data continuous up until the point of the change and that data is useful but once you've made a change it's as if you created a brand new station that now starts it's own data stream. Just as long as the data pre-change is not merged with the data post-change there is no issue.

I think your best argument in this regard is to make the claim that scientists toe the line of the consensus view so that they continue to get grant money. That's probably the most believeable scenario. However my response to that is that I could see how once a huge consensus became established that would be a motivating factor to keep it in place but it would not account for how the consensus came to be in the first place.

But certainly there is money on both sides of the equation it's just how much money are we talking about. The ExxonMobils of the world's financial interest in the outcome far outweighs the potential of easy money from the other side of the table. That doesn't mean that there is no financial incentive on the side of AGW just that the financial incentive against AGW dwarfs it in comparison.

The most likely outcome from global warming is a mini ice age.

In the North Atlantic we benefit from warm water flowing north in the gulf stream. Where I am the average daytime temperature in winter is about 7°C, with out the gulf stream it would be around -20°C.

The gulf stream consists of warm water flowing north, cooling, sinking to lower levels, then returning south. This process is part of a much larger global 'conveyor belt'.

As global warming takes effect, the northern ice sheets will beging to melt. This will release huge amounts of fresh water into the North Atlantic. The effect of this fresh water is to slow or halt the gulf stream. When this happens the warming effect of the gulf stream will cease and temperatures across northern Europe, UK, and northern US will drop sharply. Within as little as ten years we will be in a mini ice age wich may take up to a thousand years to recover.

This has happened before. Ice cores support these changes in climate. The last 10,000 years have been quite stable - this is not normal for our climate. The normal, according to the ice core records, is to swing between warmer and colder periods.

There is a longer 100,000 period for major ice ages to do with the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. That won't impact the planet for another 10,000 years.

A mini ice age implies (to me anyway) a global event whereas the stoppage of the world's ocean "conveyor belt" does not necessarily change the overall global average temperature. Intuitively it would change and limit the exchange of heat from the tropics that could be transported to some temperate regions and so the tropics would get hotter while the temperate latitudes would get colder but I would still expect that the global average would get warmer. But would the lowering of the temperatures in only some selected temperate areas be sufficient to cause a "mini ice age"? That seems rather extreme.

Here's a pretty good article about the process and the concern over how global warming will affect it from the folks at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?

psychoak=north american?

No hoax. I can see the effects of global watming in my back yard each year. Winter today look nothing like the winters when I was a kid. So yes the planet is definately getting warmer. I don't need no scientist to tell me that my own memery can tell me. 2nd glaciers are meltign like crasy and we have photographic evidence of it.

I would also point out that the worlds real climatologis all say global warming is occuring and that the so called "scientist" that say it is not occuring happen to be the same scientist that the tabaco compagnies hired back int he day to try and disprove that tabaco products were bad for you health. Ha you mean to tell me that those psedo health scienty are now climatalogist? Big buisness will stop at nothing to get things goign their way so they can keep making money without a care for anything else.

And for those that will say the planet has changed climate in the pass before you are intierly right. The earth'S climate has always been changing for million of years. Problem is this, we are making it change at a hyper rate. And most important of all if we change the climate we put our selves at a high risk for our survival. A hotter planet for us means more sever wheater phenomenon like hurricaines, fllod and droughts.

We are killing our selves slowly. Humanity has mroe to gain by maintaining the climate as opposed to changing it.

Why don't you provide a link to the company that you're talking about and then make the case that you're trying to make as to "WHY they are even there."

Do your own god damn work, don't just spout off and expect someone else to do all your work for you.

If you actually want to contribute something of meaning then provide a damn link otherwise you're just spouting bullshit. If you want to make a case for a particular argument then do so but *you* provide the links and make your own argument and give folks a *reason* as to why anyone should believe anything that you have to say.

A few good articles on the issue:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/understanding_climategates_hid.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6738111/Climategate-reveals-the-most-influential-tree-in-the-world.html

Here is a relatively straight forward discussion on the topic:

ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.

ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting “peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies”. They owned the peer review process.

ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.

ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.

ClimateGate exposed the “trick” about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:

Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.

1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved.

2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas effect coefficient in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.

3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.

4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.

5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)

I hope that this makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand.

The secondary scandal, emerging this week, has to do with looking at some of the third-party "raw data" (sites like RealClimate.org and such have started posting some of the raw data they have) which is now being scrutinized. The raw data is increasingly appearing to use cherry-picked data.

None of this, in my mind, means that there is no global warming. Nor does it prove that Humans aren't affecting the climate.  But it does, imo, make it pretty obvious that the jury is still out on what, if anything, humans have to do with the earth's temperature. As a result, discussions on "cap and trade" and other such coeresive techniques seem premature.