[Scotty]

Well, if that's the question, why would it necessarily be a bad thing?

Can we at least establish WHY it would be bad first?

polar and glacial melt causing a rise in sea levels.  a huge amount of the world's population lives close enough to the water for that to be a serious disaster, should it occur.

rapid acidification of ocean water causing a pH decrease.  if it throws things off enough, fish won't be able to adapt fast enough and could die in massive amounts.

changes in wind currents, leading to changes in moisture levels and thus fertility for lots of areas.  it's not a matter of there being more or less fertile land, but its distribution would be changed, which could cause some real problems.


it's not that it would be good or bad specifically, it's that the change itself would **** over a ton of people.

Water has a lower density than water, correct?  So why wouldn't the ice caps melting actually decrease water levels, or at least keep them the same?

And how does global warming lead to acidification of water?

[Goober5000]

I decided to browse the discussion backwards and guess what this all relates to?:

First some bit older emails from the same discussion.

The unfortunate fact is that the 'secret science' meme is an extremely
powerful rallying call to people who have no idea about what is going
on. Claiming (rightly or wrongly) that information is being hidden has a
huge amount of resonance (as you know), much more so than whether
Douglass et al know their statistical elbow from a hole in the ground.

Thus any increase in publicity on this - whether in the pages of Nature
or elsewhere - is much more likely to bring further negative fallout
despite your desire to clear the air. Whatever you say, it will still be
presented as you hiding data.

The contrarians have found that there is actually no limit to what you
can ask people for (raw data, intermediate steps, additional
calculations, residuals, sensitivity calculations, all the code, a
workable version of the code on any platform etc.), and like Somali
pirates they have found that once someone has paid up, they can always
shake them down again.

blaa blaa blaa.

Uh huh.  You'll notice that this quote doesn't actually say anything of substance; it's basically complaining at how random people can claim you're withholding data and get a great deal of mileage out of it.  Nothing new there.  It doesn't address or attempt to refute the fact that the agency was actually withholding data, as admitted by the emails themselves.

This, although very useful to remember in this highly focused and nitpicky debate, has little practical value to arguments at hand. What then, hmm? Let's browse backwards a little. These guys started to talk about McIntyre, big surprise, and how he has demanded some data. Data that is apparently completely available to him.

[...]

Seems like certain Someone wants to issue FOI for... some reason, even though the data is apparently freely available, and these guys seem to be pretty pissed off about it.  Hey, I just wonder - and these are honest questions, because I do not know at all - are FOI requests handled individually?

So?  If someone files a lot of FOI requests, it stands to reason that he might file some duplicates, whether by accident or by double-checking.

I personally do not know how FOI requests are handled, nor does it really matter.

I don't know why Keith chose to withhold data but COME ON, you could read the conversation you linked to:

[...]

That exchange seems to work like Phil is actually encouragind Keith to release something.

You'll have to elaborate because I'm not following your train of conclusions here.  It sounds more like Phil is asking Keith to send his stuff to Tom, so that Tom can have a look over it before it gets released.  That is consistent with "vetting" the data (and perhaps withholding some of it) before it's released.

...
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008
shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.
...

Data has been wrong before, though! (And then someone does similar measurements with different tools and gets results that are roughly similar or have no significance at all) Saying that a particular dataset is in contradiction with another dataset could very well mean that, yes, this set of data is wrong. That does not mean it should be discounted completely, or that is a fraud. Satellites have been calibrated wrong before. The calculations do not work. When some data does not fit the larger empirical evidence (=more data) you should take a closer look. Mind you, I am taking all of these emails at face value, assuming they are completely true.

Exactly: data has been wrong before.  The problem is that global warming is being presented as a proven, validated, take-it-to-the-bank "global warming is unequivocally happening" conclusion based on the data that has been gathered.  And now we find out that - whoops, "the data are surely wrong", which means the conclusion isn't so cut-and-dried as we've been led to believe.  The reason it's a "travesty" they can't account for the warming is that it means their models -- the very models that have been used to predict disaster if immediate action isn't taken -- are incorrect.

However, the overall theme is clear: you are taking some emails from one institution and assuming that it means everything about climate science is bogus, though. This is cherrypicking.

No, I (and not only I, many other people on the Internet) am taking a huge number of emails and characterizing the institution based on what it revealed about itself through its emails.  That's not cherrypicking; it's establishing a pattern.

At present, I'm damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he
requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre's initial request for climate model data, I'm
convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would
have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from
McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for
further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: "You
see - he's guilty as charged!" on his website.

Huh?  Providing McIntyre, or anyone else, with data in response to a FOIA request is the law.  Doesn't matter if you want to; doesn't matter if you like the guy or not; you're obligated to provide the information.

This is like saying "If I had complied with the law here, I'm convinced I would have spent years of my scientific career complying with the law.  So I had to refuse to follow the law up front so the guy wouldn't bug me anymore."

This whole Hadley Centre deal is not really all that relevant to the overall issue of manmade global warming; it's more of a sideshow.

This is true; however if such systemic corruption is present in the Hadley Center, it begs the question of why it took being hacked to reveal it.

Yeah, the question is whether it's man-made or not.

The question now is whether or not it is man-made. Twenty years ago quite a few of the people arguing against man-made global warming were vehemently arguing that the Earth wasn't getting warmer at all, pointing at their dodgy data and claiming it was proof that the Earth wasn't getting warmer and if anything was actually getting slightly colder.

No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming.  Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.

Now people will say that the recent temperature drop is only a temporary dip in the face of a long-term trend, but the problem is that if climate models keep needing to be revised every time new data arrives, then they're not reliable enough yet to make any firm prediction about the future.

[General Battuta]

I'm really not comfortable with the use of the term 'warmist'. This should be a scientific debate, not a political one. The only -ist we should need is 'scientist'.

I'm not saying this is a problem with those using the term, but if the debate as a whole is politicized to that degree, I think I'm just going to listen to the scientists.

In any case, we'll all know for sure by 2070 whether the current models are panning out. Looking at that graph of the low point of arctic ice recession each year, however, it seems like something funny is going on.

[karajorma]

No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming.  Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.

Asked by whom?

Cause the position most scientists have been taking is that the Earth definitely is warming/coming out of an ice age/being warmed by mankind's actions. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone still arguing against warming as far as I know. In fact every anti-global warming argument here on HLP has focused on whether the warming is man-made or not rather than whether or not there is any warming.

Are there still any serious scientific publications by people who say it isn't warming?

[General Battuta]

Yeah, the graphs I'd seen showed temperatures increasing, I think. I'm open to correction, but cite?

[Janos]

Nope, not one. Except the last few. You can get the gist of the thread from the last few posts. Besides, I can read a post in five seconds anyway, even the long ones.

you are a good poster

[Turambar]

Well, if that's the question, why would it necessarily be a bad thing?

Can we at least establish WHY it would be bad first?

polar and glacial melt causing a rise in sea levels.  a huge amount of the world's population lives close enough to the water for that to be a serious disaster, should it occur.

rapid acidification of ocean water causing a pH decrease.  if it throws things off enough, fish won't be able to adapt fast enough and could die in massive amounts.

changes in wind currents, leading to changes in moisture levels and thus fertility for lots of areas.  it's not a matter of there being more or less fertile land, but its distribution would be changed, which could cause some real problems.


it's not that it would be good or bad specifically, it's that the change itself would **** over a ton of people.

Water has a lower density than water, correct?  So why wouldn't the ice caps melting actually decrease water levels, or at least keep them the same?

And how does global warming lead to acidification of water?

glacial ice is on land, moving into water.  when it's locked up on land, it isnt contributing to sea levels, but when it melts, it flows into the oceans.

the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we think may cause global warming is being soaked up by the ocean water, which is a giant carbon sink.  this forms carbonic acid which lowers the pH of the water.

[Mongoose]

There's your answer, then: just unwrap a massive pack of Alka-Seltzer and drop them in.  Plop plop, fizz fizz, problem solved.

[Goober5000]

No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming.  Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.

Asked by whom?

Cause the position most scientists have been taking is that the Earth definitely is warming/coming out of an ice age/being warmed by mankind's actions. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone still arguing against warming as far as I know.

Then I'm sorry but you haven't been looking very hard.  There are lot of people out there who are arguing that supposed warming "trends" are errors caused by "heat islands" or other phenomena, and there are plenty of others who will cite the fact that the warmest year on record was back in 1998.

Here's an article from the BBC written by a climate correspondent:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.  And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

[...]

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.  The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).  For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.  But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.  These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.  Professor Easterbrook says: "The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling."

[...]

To confuse the issue even further, last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.  Professor Latif is based at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany and is one of the world's top climate modellers.  But he makes it clear that he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man-made global warming reasserts itself.

In this interview of climatologist Tim Flannery by Tony Jones on Lateline, the climatologist actually admits the cooling trend:

Tony Jones: Just take one of these published emails because it goes to one of the hottest skeptic arguments, which is that since 1998, the hottest year on record, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continued to increase after that, but the temperature did not keep going up.  So, the argument of the skeptics is therefore the theory, as they put it, of global warming is not actually working like it should.

Tim Flannery: Well, the thing is, we’re dealing with an incomplete understanding of the way the earth system works.  We know enough to be able to say as the IPCC has said, that greenhouse gases cause warming.  And they're 90%-plus sure that the warming is caused by humans.  Now we can go that far.  When we come to the last few years where we haven’t seen a continuation of that warming trend, we just don’t understand all of the factors that create earth’s climate.  So there are some things we don't understand, and that's what the scientists were emailing each other about.  We just don’t understand the way the whole system works, and we've got to find out.

Jones: The published email that made the front pages in the papers here was from a respected U.S. climatologist called Kevin Trenberth, and he says "We can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it's a travesty that we can't."  He does appear to be worried that science is not doing the right things, or that the climate is not doing what he expected it to do.

Flannery: No it's not what he expected it to do.  See, these people work with models, computer modeling. So when the computer modeling and the real world data disagree you’ve got a very interesting problem. And that's when science really gets engaged.  So what Kevin Trenberth - who's one of the most respected climate scientists in the world - is saying is that guys, we've got to get on our horses and find out what we don't know about that system.  We have to actually understand why this cooling is occurring, because the current modeling doesn't predict it. And that's just the way science progresses.  We can't pretend we've got perfect knowledge; we don't.  We've got to go forward and formulate policy on the basis of what we actually know now.

Jones: Is that right that cooling is occurring?  I mean, 1998 was the hottest year, and there are many other of the hottest years since recorded history in that 10 year period.  So am I right to say that it's cooling, or not?

Flannery: Well Tony, we had a huge cooling event here in Sydney between yesterday and today.  The time scales are all important.  If you take too short a time scale, you won't get a climate signal.  You'll get a regional weather signal or whatever else.  The scales that climate scientists use to look at the overall warming trend on the planet are a century long.  And on a century long trend we are still warming.  Sure for the last few years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.  We saw it in the 1940s, the same sort of thing.  But that does not negate the overall warming trend.

Now naturally, Flannery couches it in a lot of circumlocution, and tries to qualify it by saying that the century-long trend is toward warming.  But climate models don't fit that conclusion, as asserted in this paper published by the International Association of Hydrological Sciences:

(from the abstract)

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

The whole paper is 14 pages long, so too long to post here, but well worth reading.

[Spicious]

There's your answer, then: just unwrap a massive pack of Alka-Seltzer and drop them in.  Plop plop, fizz fizz, problem solved.

If only neutralisation wasn't exothermic.

How about a compromise? If global warming happens, we get to kill all the sceptics hence mitigating the food, water and energy shortages.

[Aardwolf]

Yay, I'll be dead before we get a runaway greenhouse effect on earth like what Venus has.

Suckers.

[watsisname]

There's your answer, then: just unwrap a massive pack of Alka-Seltzer and drop them in.  Plop plop, fizz fizz, problem solved.

If only neutralisation wasn't exothermic.

How about a compromise? If global warming happens, we get to kill all the sceptics hence mitigating the food, water and energy shortages.

Ah, but to make that compromise worthwile, what if it turns out to be a cooling trend? =P

[Spicious]

The other side of the compromise was to allow big polluters to continue driving us headlong into an energy crisis.

[Janos]

So?  If someone files a lot of FOI requests, it stands to reason that he might file some duplicates, whether by accident or by double-checking.

McIntyre admitted in having this data all along unless I' m completely off the rails.

I personally do not know how FOI requests are handled, nor does it really matter.

It does, if you use the phrase

"When the FOI requests began here, the FOI person said we had to abide
by the requests. It took a couple of half hour sessions - one at a screen, to convince
them otherwise showing them what CA was all about."

as an indication of some kind of conspiracy.

You'll have to elaborate because I'm not following your train of conclusions here.  It sounds more like Phil is asking Keith to send his stuff to Tom, so that Tom can have a look over it before it gets released.  That is consistent with "vetting" the data (and perhaps withholding some of it) before it's released.

Wait a minute, I try to parse this again.
Tom sends Phil a message, complaining that Keith has done something. Phil sends Keith a message, proposing Keith to send information to Tom.
Ok, actually I retract my previous statement. I still don't see the discussion particularly condemning, perhaps you could rephrase the reasons to me.

No, I (and not only I, many other people on the Internet) am taking a huge number of emails and characterizing the institution based on what it revealed about itself through its emails.  That's not cherrypicking; it's establishing a pattern.

Ridiculous. If the skeptics are establishing a pattern, then how come it's one email today, after it's debunked - such as the "trick" email which was apparently a huge deal - they move on to next.

There has been no evidence of falsifying evidence. No evidence of fraudulent studies. All you have a series of completely OOC and misunderstood emails - maybe 10 which are in wider internet ciruclation right now - from 15 years from one institution and you think this is evidence of something? Right now the big deal seems to be about the "travesty" quote, before that we were dealing with the entire "can scientists withhold data" - when people realized that yes, they can, for example when the primary data is someone else's, people moved onwards.

Seriously, I could right now dig through your post history, rip some sentences out of the context and then claim this represents HLP as whole. The entire argument is just that ridiculous.

I hate to break it out to you, but this entire debate tactic is way too similar to "rip small things out of context, ignore everything else, think one people = all them, just moved on when challenged" tactic employed by a very special group that has been dimishing in power during the last decade. I do not name that one.

At present, I'm damned and publicly vilified because I refused to provide McIntyre with the data he
requested. But had I acceded to McIntyre's initial request for climate model data, I'm
convinced (based on the past experiences of Mike Mann, Phil, and Gavin) that I would
have spent years of my scientific career dealing with demands for further explanations,
additional data, Fortran code, etc. (Phil has been complying with FOIA requests from
McIntyre and his cronies for over two years). And if I ever denied a single request for
further information, McIntyre would have rubbed his hands gleefully and written: "You
see - he's guilty as charged!" on his website.

Huh?  Providing McIntyre, or anyone else, with data in response to a FOIA request is the law.  Doesn't matter if you want to; doesn't matter if you like the guy or not; you're obligated to provide the information.
This is like saying "If I had complied with the law here, I'm convinced I would have spent years of my scientific career complying with the law.  So I had to refuse to follow the law up front so the guy wouldn't bug me anymore."[/quote]

No you aren't, if A) the requests are handled on a need-to-know basis (which you already glossed over as insignificant before!) and B) if the data isn't yours to hand out freely (sometimes the organizations, for example, sell primary data and then it's definitely not in particular scientist's bussiness to do it). If FOI actually demanded people would give out even the data they hadn't access to, then British science society's funding would collapse overnight. Somehow I think this is not the case.

Besides, is a private exchange between two people about some asshole they hate really indicative of what they did?

This is true; however if such systemic corruption is present in the Hadley Center, it begs the question of why it took being hacked to reveal it.

What corruption?

No, there's still the question of whether the earth is actually warming.  Temperatures have been dropping for the last ten years, which belies the "inexorable warming trend" that the warmists have been promoting.

This is ridiculous. This works if your 10 year period starts in 1998 and you ignore context. And of course this is the only 10-year period that matters to skeptics: starting in 1997 or 1999 both trend warming.

Whaddaya know.

Now people will say that the recent temperature drop is only a temporary dip in the face of a long-term trend, but the problem is that if climate models keep needing to be revised every time new data arrives, then they're not reliable enough yet to make any firm prediction about the future.

i

i don't even know how to respond to this. you see this boils down to as.

"all trends show warming, all effects show warming, look at all what has happened and how well - if sometimes underestimated - our predictions have held true but these ****ING SCIENTISTS REVISE AND FINETUNE THEIR HYPOTHESISES WHEN THEY GET MORE DATA"

i have no words. Seriously, I have no words.

[Flipside]

I find there's more to learn from the reaction to the Emails being released than from the Emails themselves. In some ways, I was never happy with the closed system where it was very difficult to get data, but on the other hand, I feel this does more to expose scientists as real human beings, with egos, personalities and hang-ups.

I cannot say I've seen any 'smoking gun' evidence so far, at least, not of what people seem to claim, but I do see evidence of egos and conflicts developing in the team. I do see evidence of data that conflicts with their findings being severely questioned in so far as validity is concerned, but then, in truth, that data is doing exactly the same to their research, that's not really bad science, just normal, everyday science, that's where peer review is supposed to do it's job.

Imagine a comment like 'We need to process these figures more before they are released', that can be read two ways, depending on your initial assumptions regarding the author, it's easy to assume the worst of someone you want to be wrong, especially with typed text.

I think this will muddy up the waters over warming, which is not neccesarily a good thing, because regardless of the degree of impact, I'd be a lot happier if industry took what steps it could to stop pumping **** into the atmosphere, however, the more closely the data is scrutinized, be it by sceptics or supporters, the more certain we can be of what exactly is going on and, more importantly, what can be done about it either from a preventative or protectionist viewpoint.

I think it would be hard to deny that the Ice Caps are shrinking and that sea levels are rising, however, whether that is man-made or simply an ongoing natural process has become the first priority, when, in truth, it should not be.

[Janos]

I find there's more to learn from the reaction to the Emails being released than from the Emails themselves. In some ways, I was never happy with the closed system where it was very difficult to get data, but on the other hand, I feel this does more to expose scientists as real human beings, with egos, personalities and hang-ups.

I cannot say I've seen any 'smoking gun' evidence so far, at least, not of what people seem to claim, but I do see evidence of egos and conflicts developing in the team. I do see evidence of data that conflicts with their findings being severely questioned in so far as validity is concerned, but then, in truth, that data is doing exactly the same to their research, that's not really bad science, just normal, everyday science, that's where peer review is supposed to do it's job.

Imagine a comment like 'We need to process these figures more before they are released', that can be read two ways, depending on your initial assumptions regarding the author, it's easy to assume the worst of someone you want to be wrong, especially with typed text.

I think this will muddy up the waters over warming, which is not neccesarily a good thing, because regardless of the degree of impact, I'd be a lot happier if industry took what steps it could to stop pumping **** into the atmosphere, however, the more closely the data is scrutinized, be it by sceptics or supporters, the more certain we can be of what exactly is going on and, more importantly, what can be done about it either from a preventative or protectionist viewpoint.

I think it would be hard to deny that the Ice Caps are shrinking and that sea levels are rising, however, whether that is man-made or simply an ongoing natural process has become the first priority, when, in truth, it should not be.

Why not? What should be the first priority? Please elaborate.

Also, if it a natural process then why does it coincidence with rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and why is it more rapid than other global temperature changes? Why aren't there any good explanations for natural causes? How would one explain away both anthropogenic increased greenhouse gas emissions with a very good correlation with changes in global temperature and weather patterns?

That aside, I find it a bit weird to say "well, it could be us, but perhaps it isn't, so we better not do anything". That's a really dumb argument, essentially an excuse out of ignorance. If it is not us yet we act like it was, the damage we do from reducing carbon emissions is negligible at best and purely economical - pocket change after a few decades. It's absolutely nothing in global view and on the long run. Even the impact of the prevention costs for single countries is mostly one-shot large-scale adjustments of infrastructure. That's hardly a nightmare.

But if it is us and we refuse to do anything about it, then damage will probably be massive, and even cold monetary calculation shows that for a short-term gain we ****ed up royally in the long run.

[Janos]

Goober, you cited Tim Flannery:

author=Goober5000 link=topic=66681.msg1317739#msg1317739 date=1259133238]In this interview of climatologist Tim Flannery by Tony Jones on Lateline, the climatologist actually admits the cooling trend:

Flannery: Well Tony, we had a huge cooling event here in Sydney between yesterday and today.  The time scales are all important.  If you take too short a time scale, you won't get a climate signal.  You'll get a regional weather signal or whatever else.  The scales that climate scientists use to look at the overall warming trend on the planet are a century long.  And on a century long trend we are still warming.  Sure for the last few years we’ve gone through a slight cooling trend.  We saw it in the 1940s, the same sort of thing.  But that does not negate the overall warming trend.

Now naturally, Flannery couches it in a lot of circumlocution, and tries to qualify it by saying that the century-long trend is toward warming.

Before I dive deeper into the horrendous abyss of statistical method analysis and weird quarrels about Koutsoyiannis article*, could you please explain how you can use someone as scientifically reputable source when he says something about models that are lacking, but when he says something about a clear warming trend in the next paragraph he's suddenly no longer reputable?

Thank you in advance.

edit: removed an obvious falsehood

*This seems to be completely out of my league, I have no idea what this stuff means in this context:

Neither Kiraly et al. (2006) nor Fraedrich & Blender (2003) establish LRD in temperature time series. They find it in the fluctuations of daily temperature. Furthermore, the methods they use remove the long-term trend from the data, so the temperature trend is already gone by the time they find LRD in the fluctuations. Fraedrich & Blender find persistence up to decades, Kiraly et al. find persistence lasting several years, so even if their analysis applied to temperature time series (which it doesn’t) rather than fluctuations (which it does), those time scales aren’t long enough to explain the trend on a century time scale in observed temperature time series. Fraedrich & Blender did find long-range persistence on century time scales, but only for fluctuations (not for temperature), and only in the output of computer model runs.

And several posts before and after that are at least as cryptic.

[Flipside]

Why not? What should be the first priority? Please elaborate.

Also, if it a natural process then why does it coincidence with rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and why is it more rapid than other global temperature changes? Why aren't there any good explanations for natural causes? How would one explain away both anthropogenic increased greenhouse gas emissions with a very good correlation with changes in global temperature and weather patterns?

That aside, I find it a bit weird to say "well, it could be us, but perhaps it isn't, so we better not do anything". That's a really dumb argument, essentially an excuse out of ignorance. If it is not us yet we act like it was, the damage we do from reducing carbon emissions is negligible at best and purely economical - pocket change after a few decades. It's absolutely nothing in global view and on the long run. Even the impact of the prevention costs for single countries is mostly one-shot large-scale adjustments of infrastructure. That's hardly a nightmare.

But if it is us and we refuse to do anything about it, then damage will probably be massive, and even cold monetary calculation shows that for a short-term gain we ****ed up royally in the long run.

As I said in the post you quoted, the first priority is to stop arguing about who started it and started focussing on what we need to do about it, I also stated that I'd like to see Industry cutting emmisions regardless of whether it contributes or not, but at the moment, it's like a huge case of office politics, lots of people trying to find out who made the mistake, and not enough being done about fixing it.

I'm actually wondering whether the rest of your post even refers to mine, it seems to be directed at an entirely different post, since it infers the exact opposite of what I said, so I'm not sure whether to respond or not.

[Janos]

Why not? What should be the first priority? Please elaborate.

Also, if it a natural process then why does it coincidence with rapidly increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and why is it more rapid than other global temperature changes? Why aren't there any good explanations for natural causes? How would one explain away both anthropogenic increased greenhouse gas emissions with a very good correlation with changes in global temperature and weather patterns?

That aside, I find it a bit weird to say "well, it could be us, but perhaps it isn't, so we better not do anything". That's a really dumb argument, essentially an excuse out of ignorance. If it is not us yet we act like it was, the damage we do from reducing carbon emissions is negligible at best and purely economical - pocket change after a few decades. It's absolutely nothing in global view and on the long run. Even the impact of the prevention costs for single countries is mostly one-shot large-scale adjustments of infrastructure. That's hardly a nightmare.

But if it is us and we refuse to do anything about it, then damage will probably be massive, and even cold monetary calculation shows that for a short-term gain we ****ed up royally in the long run.

As I said in the post you quoted, the first priority is to stop arguing about who started it and started focussing on what we need to do about it, I also stated that I'd like to see Industry cutting emmisions regardless of whether it contributes or not, but at the moment, it's like a huge case of office politics, lots of people trying to find out who made the mistake, and not enough being done about fixing it.

I'm actually wondering whether the rest of your post even refers to mine, it seems to be directed at an entirely different post, since it infers the exact opposite of what I said, so I'm not sure whether to respond or not.

Sorry, yeah. Got a little... well. The first question in my post was aimed at you, though - maybe I am becoming paranoid because 90% of the time when I read something like "whether that is man-made or simply an ongoing natural process has become the first priority, when, in truth, it should not be" my alarms immediately go off. Apparently they are too sensitive. My apologies. This is serious bussiness, after all.

I agree with you. As you said, the question "who started it" is intervined with politics today and is, as far as politics are considered, a smokescreen for "do nothing yet and claim nothing happens even though it does." That's pretty much what you argued in this next post as well.

I find this entire e-mail thing so interesting, because it really sheds light just how catty the respectable scientists are when they are communicating privately (or not so privately). That shouldn't be surprising. Neither should one be surprised at the fact that raw data is guarded very hawkishly, which shouldn't be surprising either. What is surprising is that there's precious little of even McIntyre-level "auditioning" in this buzz - mostly it's just lots of noise over precious little content.

[Scotty]

Neither should one be surprised at the fact that raw data is guarded very hawkishly, which shouldn't be surprising either.

Why?  If the results will be as destructive as people are claiming, why can't they show us the data that supports it (or doesn't, as the case may be)?