UPDATE: CRU apparently been hacked – ..AGW HOAX revealed...

[x-y-no]

Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of that too, although clearly I'm rather more completely convinced of the severity of the AGW problem.

Well said.

[Evil Jeremy]

Wow, amazingly, I only heard about this scandal today. I have been busy lately, but this has just not been on the news, which does not surprise me. While this is major news, I doubt it will change much in the long run unfortunally. Many people have already made up their minds that GW is man made and won't see the truth, even if it is right in front of them.

[x-y-no]

Wow, amazingly, I only heard about this scandal today. I have been busy lately, but this has just not been on the news, which does not surprise me. While this is major news, I doubt it will change much in the long run unfortunally. Many people have already made up their minds that GW is man made and won't see the truth, even if it is right in front of them.

Well ... I'd say "Many people have already made up their minds that GW is not man made and won't see the truth, even if it is right in front of them."

[Evil Jeremy]

Well ... I'd say "Many people have already made up their minds that GW is not man made and won't see the truth, even if it is right in front of them."

Yes, that is a fair statement. However, would it be fair to say that there are many more people out there convinced that GW is man made than otherwise?

Also, someone brought up "The Great Global Warming Swindle". On Earth Day about 2 years ago, my school had us watch Inconvenient Truth as well as Swindle. That was a surprise to me, but it did bring about GW debates in school, which was interesting.

[Ptarmigan]

Short of altering Earth's orbital and axial geometry and the perturbation to both, I seriously doubt that we could avoid another glacial period. In the meantime, we need to be aware of other trends that could crop up courtesy of Nature. I have no doubt that some of the current warming is AGW but I also have no doubt that some serious hanky-panky has been going on in certain climate research circles and that some of the big names have been outed as big phonies.

Steve

You cannot change the climate. Also, let's not forget continental drifts. If we were living in Pangaea today, it would be very hot. If we got rid of water vapors, we would get rid warming, but kill all life.

[Sanibel]

Climate Crock does a pretty good job of showing how the e-mail scandal was used as obstructionist propaganda. Its timing with the Copenhagen summit would make me suspect a covert operation. When you slow down and back away from the immediate propaganda effect and its successful intended result from the usual outlets you can see the hacked e-mail scandal is contrived and doesn't have merit. (Hey, isn't hacking e-mails against the law? I wonder what we would find if we had a fair playing field and could see the e-mails of the other side?)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P70SlEqX7oY

[aerology]

Get on twitter and do some searching about the total implications of the data manipulation on all fronts, MSM has been bought, and paid to stay quiet, as damage control, while this scandal unfolds.

The whole process of peer review needs looked into and reassessed, funding trends need to be reviewed to say the least. New areas of research should be given opportunity for expansion.

UN IPCC corruption deeper than it looks, lies and falsification of data, is not good for reputation of science in general, damage needs to be contained, by doing good valid work at all times.

If you want to see the letters and ideas of the "Other side try http://wattsupwiththat.com/
best consolidated source of unbiased blogging.

[Sanibel]

I disagree with that because it serves the purposes of those trying to obfuscate or deny obvious climate change evidence to attack the credibility of those doing the science instead of looking at what we can reasonably conclude is enough evidence to make the case. I feel that 'skeptics' are using tactics trying to justify lowering the debate to the level of "anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else's". When you make overly-general attacks on funding sources and motives you aid that process. What gets to me is how people try to impugn funding motives while ignoring the same vested interests in fossil fuel-based lobbies and how they affect our present trillion dollar economic mainstream 'motives'. If you compare budgets, it strikes me as a speck in the eye vs a log.

If you watch the Crock videos there's no doubt the media person is suggesting the interpretation of the word 'trick' is to deceive. However some people looked into this claim and found the scientist who used it often used it as the common calculus word meaning 'process' or to trick out the solution. Those people found other instances of the scientist using the word 'trick' in that context. The media outlet's emphasis and context was clearly to impress upon the viewers that the intended context was to deceive. That in itself is a deception and a violation of what they were accusing the e-mailers of. And it's not the only case as the Crock video shows. I didn't see any high-powered pumping of the true context from any outlet.

[aerology]

Breaking news
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/21/e ... more-15502

[Sanibel]

I disagree and think there's a real job creation market out there in green technology. I also think some are trying to defeat it by questioning Global Warming all together.


The link above is a totally political link. I think it says all you need to know when answers to the original poster's points are responded to with a political link and no direct answer. I think you are seeing the source of Global Warming 'skepticism' right there.

[vbhoutex]

:uarrow: I disagree and think there's a real job creation market out there in green technology. I also think some are trying to defeat it by questioning Global Warming all together.


The link above is a totally political link. I think it says all you need to know when answers to the original poster's points are responded to with a political link and no direct answer. I think you are seeing the source of Global Warming 'skepticism' right there.

The link is a news story about political doings concerning the EPA, etc., not a totally political link.

[Sanibel]

I'd be interested in Air Force Met's reply. The shouting proof he protested over was debunked. It smells to me like an intel op with the timing in relation to Copenhagen. FOX News now teams up with "anonymous hackers from Russia calling themselves 'FOIA' (Freedom Of Information Act)" (you know how dedicated the Russians are to that. Russia now has a large oil economy by the way). I suppose the wiretappers are being tracked down because they broke the law?

There seems to be good support from a certain quarter in this thread but scant reply to the real facts here.


PS - There's a lot of moisture in that mid-Atlantic snow storm.

[Sanibel]

IMO, it's a bad idea to link GW information from FOX News:

The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. Sometimes it is asserted that 1998 was the warmest year. The origin of this confusion is discussed below. There is a high degree of interannual (year‐to‐year) and decadal variability in both global and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long‐term warming trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades. The long‐term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several years. The 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures are shown in Figure 2 for the globe and the hemispheres. The 5‐year mean is sufficient to reduce the effect of the El Niño – La Niña cycles of tropical climate. The 11‐year mean minimizes the effect of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot cycle, which is typically of 10‐12 year duration.
There is a contradiction between the observed continued warming trend and popular perceptions about climate trends. Frequent statements include: “There has been global cooling over the past decade.” “Global warming stopped in 1998.” “1998 is the warmest year in the record.” Such statements have been repeated so often that most of the public seems to accept them as being true. However, based on our data, such statements are not correct. The origin of this contradiction probably lies in part in differences between the GISS and HadCRUT temperature analyses (HadCRUT is the joint Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit temperature analysis). Indeed, HadCRUT finds 1998 to be the warmest year in their record. In addition, popular belief that the world is cooling is reinforced by cold weather anomalies in the United States in the summer of 2009 and cold anomalies in much of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009. Here we first show the main reason for the difference between the GISS and HadCRUT analyses. Then we examine the 2009 regional temperature anomalies in the context of global temperatures."
What about the claim that the Earth’s surface has been cooling over the past decade? That issue can be addressed with a far higher degree of confidence, because the error due to incomplete spatial coverage of measurements becomes much smaller when averaged over several years. The 2‐sigma error in the 5‐year running‐mean temperature anomaly shown in Figure 2, is about a factor of two smaller than the annual mean uncertainty, thus 0.02‐0.03°C. Given that the change of 5‐year‐mean global temperature anomaly is about 0.2°C over the past decade, we can conclude that the world has become warmer over the past decade, not cooler.

Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short‐term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. Yet many lay people do understand the distinction between regional short‐term anomalies and global trends."
**full article here-
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... im-hansen/

[brunota2003]

I don't think a lot of us here disagree that the earth is warming...it is what is causing that warming that we disagree about. Duh, the earth has warmed up...I mean, we did JUST come out of a small ice age, what would you expect? The earth to just roll over and fall to pieces? No, it is going to warm, it is going to warm a lot!

Nature always balances herself out...we go from extreme cold to temps warmer than "average". What is that average based on? Honestly? Temp observations from the 1700s, at most? Okay, sure, you could make a claim that we have ice core samples that "show" the past temperatures, but in reality, how exact is that? Without true observations from pre 1700s, who knows. We can only guess at what we *think* they are. You know, at one point it is estimated that the whole earth was a giant snowball...so who is to say at one point there was no ice on the earth at all?

Yes, the earth is warming...oh goody. Next time the temps drop over a century, are we going to start screaming ICE AGE!!! and start blaming each other for it and start claiming the earth is going to totally "freeze over at the rate the temperatures are dropping!!!"? Probably Just wait until another year without a summer occurs, then what is everyone going to be screaming? It has happened once, it WILL happen again.



You know what, I'll bite. Lets hypothetically say that ice core samples are 100% accurate at showing temperatures from the past and we remodel the temperatures for that one specific point on earth (which, by the way, we all know is a "no no" for trends because of microclimates and regions can be totally different from the rest of the world, right? Just like when temperatures for select stations decrease over the course of 50 or 100 years..."oh, you cant use that! That is not indicative of the worldwide climate! It is only regional!!!"). How often are those temperatures plotted? Can we pick out the temps for every month? Year? Decade? Century? I honestly am not sure myself. If you can only pick out the temperatures for every 50 or 100 years, that is not totally reliable. Why not, you ask? The data coverage would not be significant enough, prior to where true obs start to fill in the gaps starting in the 1700s, to determine what kinds of temp swings have occurred before in the past. Perhaps in the past, there has been 50 or 60 years of dramatic warming, followed by 40 or 50 years of cooling. By the time you get the two plots down for the century, it'll only look like the Earth warmed a slight bit, whereas who knows how much warmer it was just prior to the data plot. Not to mention, just because it is warmer there in that particular ice core sample, doesn't mean it was warmer half a world away...

And before people start yelling "Well, it is found in ice cores in both the arctic and antarctic!", did you ever pause to think that perhaps it had to do with changes at the poles that led to those cool downs or warm ups, and that perhaps the rest of the globe was mainly untouched? We just don't have the kinds of data, dating back thousands of years, that we have for the last 300 years.

[Sanibel]

I don't see the microclimate claim as being valid. Science has enough spread samples to determine reasonable trends. I'm worried when I see people who make excuses for everything like seeking microclimate excuses when they don't really apply. I see those people as the types who stick their heads out the door and say "everything's OK, the sky isn't falling". And I think the "cause" is fairly obviously man-made CO2 since world ice is melting right in synch with its introduction. I think there's another 'cause' that is obvious too...

[brunota2003]

The world's ice is also melting in sync with us coming out of a small ice age that froze rivers every winter all the way down to our capitol, if not further!

But, a lot of people nowadays are trying to wipe away the medieval warm period and the following little ice age, because it doesnt "fit in" with what they claim and pretty much erases the "hockey stick". Granted, every time I see the "hockey stick", it only shows the temps from the late 1800s on. Isn't that a relatively small sample choice?

/cannot spell

[Stormavoider]

Did you hear the Washington DC area got nearly 30 inches of "amplitude" ?

[psyclone]

Wow it looks like the wheels are really falling off the global warming "fright train". the pew research center recently released a public policy poll and global warming concerns came in dead last. it's time for this crowd to invent a new crisis. i have no idea what that will be but i'm confident the solution will involve a redistribution of the world's wealth. after sitting on the fence so long, it feels good to become a "denier".

[Stormavoider]

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html

[jinftl]

From what i have read and heard from folks on both side of this debate....the question is not whether or not the earth has in fact warmed, but instead, the question is, has man had a hand in causing/exacerbating that in the past century?

Folks who confuse specific weather events with proof that the climate is warming (or cooling) must keep in mind that climate change is not the same as day to day weather fluctuations. We also need to keep the perspective that the weather in our area of the country may not be the same across the globe.....there are many positive temperature anomalies to be found right now on earth, along with the negative anomalies in eastern north america (although i would argue what we have seen the last week or 2 is not record cold, but record snow events instead. Has New York, Philly, D.C. set record lows in the last 2 weeks? Not even close.)