Do you realize what you are saying with that? What do you think the Bush-Cheney was? What did they try? And they did it in the interests of the “private sector and it’s allies and dependents”.

We know the existing energy companies are following the tobacco companies in their denial of this matter. We know the money comes from not facing the cause of this problem but continuing the status quo. All to the detriment of the Earth as we know it, society as we know it, life as we know it. The misery tobacco has caused will be as a pinprick for the trials and tribulations global warming will cause. And tobacco was an individual choice. Warming is being imposed upon everyone by those unconcerned with you, me, or our families.

There are more important things in life than profits. Now, profits are an important part, but not worthy of the worship you bestow upon them, the idolization of them.

You take a broken thread of reason and turn it into a highway of denial.

For the record, the scientist is -now shooting for 2016.-

Dummy. One of the major rules of scientific climate prediction is that “All Predictions Shall be Dated After My Death or Retirement.”

Your final paragraph betrays your error, the validity of my scientific opinions is not necessarily a function of my political preferences. A lot of Liberals are into New Age nonsense, but I don’t believe in that either.

And if you’ve been “watching the data so much longer than I have”, why haven’t you bothered to mention it in your frequent attacks on the idea of global warming over the years? You seem to be mighty selective in your use of evidence, TB. There’s more lawyer than engineer to your analysis.

As for the Antarctic, there are differences, pointed out in the same article you use as evidence but neglect to discuss in detail.
The Antarctic contains much more ice than the Arctic, it is also surrounded by water. This tends to smooth out, rather than exaggerate global temperature variation. It acts like a flywheel, damping out the variations that are so much more noticeable in the Arctic. And most of the sea ice in Antarctica is ice shelves, it hasn’t frozen there in place, its been shoved out there by the continental glacier covering the continent.

http://nsidc.org/icelights/2012/01/11/sea-ice-down-under-antarctic-ice-and-climate/

“The two polar regions are essentially geographic opposites,” said Sharon Stammerjohn, a sea ice expert at the University of Colorado Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). “Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean is land-locked, while sea ice in the Southern Ocean is surrounded by open ocean.” That means that while Arctic sea ice is confined in a given space, Antarctic sea ice can spread out across the ocean, pushed by winds and waves. That also means that ice extent varies much more in the Southern Hemisphere than it does in the North.

Overall, Antarctic sea ice has grown slightly over the past thirty years of the satellite record, but the trends are very small, and the ice extent varies a lot from year to year. In Southern Hemisphere winter months, ice extent has increased by around one percent per decade. In the summer, ice has increased by two to three percent per decade, but the variation is larger than the trend.

Although Antarctic sea ice is increasing overall, certain regions around Antarctica are losing ice at a rapid pace. In the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas, west of the Antarctic Peninsula, the sea ice cover has declined dramatically in the last thirty years, with the winter sea ice cover lasting three months less in 2010 than it did in 1979. The main areas where ice extent is growing are the Ross Sea (north of the largest U.S. base, McMurdo) and the eastern Weddell Sea (south of Africa), although there is a lot of variability.

Those who care to read the entire article in NSIDC about Antarctica will see that it does not necessarily negate any of the comments on global warming made anywhere else on the website. I’m sure you read it, but you neglected to mention that. You’re free to disagree with the overall conclusions, but not to select those that support your case while simply ingoring the rest.

A linear regression is a rigorous, statistical trend line drawn through a set of scattered data points to try and detect if there is a tendency for those points to rise or fall, and by how much. It’s a linear regression because the line is straight, although there is no reason why some other curve can’t be used to model the general trend of data. There are logarithmic, exponential, power and geometric regressions, too, even trigonometric ones, although for the most part, a line gives a decent fit for most data sets. And of course, if you fiddle long enough, you’re bound to find some kind of regression that will give you a plausible fit to any data you like, even random points.

The human eye is pretty good at drawing a line through a data, but there are mathematical procedures that do this too, to try and minimize bias. BTW, you cannot eliminate bias entirely, you can only make it less likely, or harder to spot. The old saw about ‘figures don’t lie but liars can figure’ is proven true every day. I’m sure you’re also familiar with ‘there are lies, damn lies, and statistics’. By picking data, making assumptions, and selecting the right procedure and the right data, you can make the stats work for you, instead of the truth. This even happens subconsciouly, with the statistician sincerely not aware he is doing it.

The mathematical procdeure called a linear regression takes scattered data points and generates the equation of a line that tries to show the general trend of that data. The value of the resulting line is sometimes greater, sometimes less, than the value of the nearest point, but the idea is that these “residuals” tend to average out and approach zero. To put it in mathematical terms, “the root mean square of the sum of the residuals is minimized.” BTW, this number, the RMS, is a clue as to how realistic your regression is, how accurately it has modeled the data. The smaller it is, the better.

So why bother? Why not just eyeball a line? It will probably be close enough for most analyses. Because we simply cannot trust ourselves to tell the truth, even if we are totally honest and sincere, we can always subconsciously inject bias into an analysis. All we can do is use impersonal procedures that rely less on the human mind’s uncanny ability to impose order on chaos, even if there is no order there to begin with. And hopefully, those “impersonal procedures” will be more convincing to our critics than our own private passions.

Beware of science. It is our best tool, but it is not foolproof.

(Try -this site- too.)

I don’t deny that the earth has been warming for a long time now.

What I oppose is the level of certainty on the rates and causes measured against the drastic crackdowns on economies and liberties that are proposed as the only plausible solutions to a problem that may or may not be as serious as these proposers advertise.

This is where the conversation is never allowed to go. When James Hansen proposes a planetary tax on emissions, nobody will touch the subject of the kind of authority that would be required to impose and collect it.

Ice is melting in some places, and forming in others. Go to that same NASA site and click on the Antarctic sea ice charts.

There have been attempts to explain this discrepancy. Some plausible. But nobody knows for sure. Maybe I’ll wait a while to sell my children into a world of artificially-generated poverty and state slavery.

If you marshalled a tenth of the skepticism of the motives of power-hungry governments and their allies and dependents as you do of the private sector and its allies and dependents, you would be a completely different person.