-A bunch of smart people said so.-

TB, I really don’t need to win this argument. I don’t have a personal stake in it, but you do. We may have our first ice-free Arctic summer before the middle of this century. Not in our lifetime, but in your kids’ lifetime for sure.

Did you ever stop to think about what kind of massaging you need to do to temperature readings to measure global temperature in half-degree units?

There are many methods of attempting to calculate old temperatures without the benefit of actual measurements onsite. Ice cores are one. Tree rings, another. Some scientists use calcium deposits in shells.

What you’re looking at in my graph is actual temperatures. That’s what they do over time.

We don’t know how much of the current trend is natural cycles, and how much is related to human activity. It’s obvious that natural cycles exist at these ranges. Ice core data going back hundreds of thousands of years show even larger ones.

In the southern oceans, the Antarctic sea ice is steadily expanding. Why? A lot of questions need answering before we blow our industrial civilization to hell.

I understand these people are slavering to take control of all industrial activity on a planetary scale, and tax the living shit out of it all (re: James Hansen), but maybe it’s a little soon.

Ever notice that solutions that don’t involve statism aren’t even put on the table? The same people (not all of them, to be fair) who scream the loudest about emissions also can’t stand the ideas of nuclear and hydroelectric power, and as we’ve seen recently, they don’t think that much of big solar plants either.

Again, the “hostility” is a natural suspicion of people who address every issue, not just this one, with the hammer of powerful centralized authority and wealth confiscation. If McDonalds claimed their french fries were the cure for all known diseases, wouldn’t you be just a little skeptical?

The rest of it I do not understand at all. What incriminating emails? What are you talking about? What we are interested in is the last centimeter on the extreme right of that graph, oh, and by the way, I do see all that colored sphagetti leaping upward after they started burning coal. The slope is near vertical and they appear to be in agreement. Even this data shows a degree C rise in the average in a century, making allowances for the coarse resolution. And although its hard to tell at this rez, that doesn’t look like a linear increase. That may not be enough to melt the glaciers and the permafrost this weekend,
but its doing a number on the N polar icecap, and if it continues it means changes in rainfall patterns, ocean currents, growing seasons, it means famine and economic collapse and war. We don’t need to flood Florida with polar melt, all we need is drought in the MidWest.

As for your paranoid delusions of mad scientists and greedy bureaucrats, I cannot possibly comment. If you are convinced that the scientific community and some government agencies are more likely to lie or even misinterpret data than the energy industry and the industial companies that would like to produce and consume as much energy as possible, preferably from the cheapest fossil fuels they can find, then there is nothing I can do to stop you. And if you think these academics and civil servants have the financial and propaganda resources of their noble opponents in free enterprise, then there is nothing I can say.

If your political obsessions color your scientific judgement and have to be consulted before you can evaluate a purely climatological problem, then I simply don’t know how to reach you.

Greenhouse gases don’t know what political system produced them, and the atmosphere and oceans don’t care. And to be honest, neither do I.

if the only damn solution the proponents kept offering wasn’t massive increases in state power and wealth confiscation. “Make us dictators and we’ll lower the oceans.”

In your mind, the only possible motive for self-interest in this issue is private profit, since you’ve somehow managed to annihilate the entire concept of power-lust and political greed, the drivers for much of human history. So there we are, I guess.

Here’s another well-known chart, with sources, showing a number of different methods of calculation. Odds are good the actual temperatures are somewhere among these groupings.

That black line? That’s the outfit we got the incriminating e-mails from. Eliminate that, and the cycle seems to indicate, at worst, a return to the previous warm period. Note the zero point.

Finding plants and artifacts under recently-melted ice that has been there for centuries is proof that these areas were ice-free when these things were laid down.

What TB’s ideology blinds him to is the delta. A change of 1 degree per century is exactly the same as 1 degree a decade, except that a change of 10 degrees a century is different than a change of 1 degree a century.

When people start to ignore reality it gets harder and harder to face reality, and the slimmest of straws become a highway for denial.

This is only one in a long, long string of denials of reality, and will be maintained long, long after it’s even more clear it’s wrong. It’s a case of mind over matter.

If it had been rising uniformly at that rate due to natural processes from 1350 to 1850 at 2.8 dF/yr, that means that from the 14th century to the start of the Industrial Revolution the temperature would have gone up 1400 degrees F, clearly an unrealistic figure.

What this does suggest is that what we are seeing here is a rapid pulse in temperature, superimposed on whatever the temperature has been doing due to normal and natural long-term cycles. I personally suspect it is rougly correlated with human industrial, agricultural, and land use activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps modified by a time lag due to buffering processes in the global climate moderation feedback system.

Perhaps this graphic from the NOAA website, concentrating on temperature anomalies relative to an arbitrary 20th century average, might give us a better look at what is happening now. You will note it suggests a roughly 1 degree CELSIUS rise in temperature over a century, a figure which greatly exceeds the normal year to year fluctuation due to “noise” in the system.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php

You do realize, TB, that your rigid hostility to these results, and many others like them proposed by competent and sober authorities, far exceeds normal, healthy scientific skepticism on your part. The only reasonable explanation for it is that it is of purely ideological origin. I think the burden of proof is on the denialists, their political sponsors and their corporate patrons.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201001-201012.gif

The satellite polar ice cover stats I frequently post here from NSIDC only corroborate these figures, in a part of the world where they are magnified.

If this is natural, this may be no more significant than declaring a day in June to be the warmest day since January.

There are news stories about retreating glaciers in Switzerland or melting ice in Greenland exposing human artifacts, plant remains, or even fragments of old settlements, that had been under the ice for centuries.

Has anybody ever really thought about that? I mean, completely through?