Yes, flat-out denials have been back for several years now. We have numerous examples of them right here on your comment threads, as well as throughout the MSM.

All rightwingstan is hopping about everything. There's more than civil liberties that were affected by Dems cave. The Right thinks the worse is over.

Then that morphed into, sure, warming is real and it's probably manmade, but policywise there's nothing much we can do about it.

I thought denialism had stalled somewhere around, "What's so bad about warm weather, anyway?"

AGW proponents: "The science is settled! There's a consensus! You can't say anything about the science because everybody agrees!"
Skeptic: "But..."
AGW proponents: "You're a holocaust denier, er, global warming denier! You mst get paid by Exxon and therefore everything you say is a lie! The science is settled and everyone who doesn't get paid by Exxon Mobil agrees on the science!"
Skeptic: "But the science is wrong."
AGW: "Well, the science was wrong. But the science is NOW settled! And there's a consensus. And anyone who claims the science is wrong and there isn't a consensus is a denier and gets paid by Exxon Mobil! Denier!"

*snicker*

Now Kevin's adding to the confusion!
Y2K had nothing to do with the error which was not even statistically significant.
see realclimate.org

No, it is making a comeback. I'm hearing it all the time from wingnuts. "Global warming is a myth!!"

They're dumber than a box of rocks.

Well, ever since CNN-FauxLite started airing Glenn Beck, it seems to be cooler in Portland. If only we could lease out those 70 days to the Windy City.

It had also morphed into, "Yeah, it's real, and it's probably manmade, but ... it means there'll be MORE cultivation." How they arrive at that conclusion is a bit murky, but I've now encountered it from several smart-but-deranged rightwingers of my acquaintance. Seems to me, also, that bdr above may have hit another true point: given how Congressional Democrats aren't even trying to fight many vital battles, there may be a new blast of virulent energy on the right starting to show up.

Gee, right on cue, there's Al.

Still too stupid to live.

I've taken to watching CNN in the mornings again this summer, after a 5 year hiatus - and I noticed that they're really pushing this freak-out attitude over how hot it is this summer. But when I look at the temperatures, they're not really that high, or even unusual.

105 in Phoenix?
95 in Chicago?

Give me a break. I'm familiar with these two cities, these temperatures were normal mid-summer temps in the 1970's when I was growing up.

What's unusual though - at least in the case of Chicago - is that they don't get any snow coverage in winter anymore. When I was a kid, the snow would come, and stay on the ground for weeks and weeks. It does not do that anymore. I think *that* is how we can tell there's global warming. Not this transparent hype about peak summer temps that aren't any higher than past summer peaks. It's not the peaks that are going to be warmer. It's the overall averages, and the volatility.

The denialists have been around for a while, but I think they are losing ground. The August 13 Newsweek cover-story was on this very issue and I just read it. Worth a look anyway.

Being a real skeptic, I am unimpressed by the bland assertions made by Al's skeptic. A real skeptic would either ask for confirmation of the theory, or would point to specific reasons why the science is wrong.

While it is true that denial of global warming doesn't prove that Exxon-Mobil is funding the skeptic, the fact remains that all the skeptics that have come forth so far have been funded by Exxon-Mobil. As a real skeptic, I think that ought to count for something when weighing their claims.

Just sick of skeptic poseurs, is all. Either be skeptical or stop marketing yourself as a "skeptic".

"And while we're on the subject of desperate wingnuts, is it just me or is the "global warming is a hoax" crowd making a comeback?"

Alongside this, the "we're winning in Iraq" crowd is also making a comeback. It seemed like for a while all the conservative talk was about Bush's mistakes, but now thanks to the O'Pollahan op-ed and Churchill W. Petraeus being in command the wingnuts think we're about to win this thing.

Gee, it would be fun to stake them out in my front yard about now. I hear the heat index is supposed to hit 117 today -- and it's humid as an added bonus!

On local (Baltimore) talk radio, I heard the author of "Unstoppable: Global Warming Every 1500 Years" taking the straight denial approach last spring (Avery, not Singer). On the same show a few weeks later, I heard Patrick Michaels taking the "yes it's warming due in part to people, but it won't be that bad" approach. In each case, the host (same guy) agreed with every word they said, although their stated views contradict.

The mainstream press completely ignores this sort of thing. Millions of people hear this stuff all the time without a word of challenge or comment. Darlings, it's just the proles, after all.

Not sure it ever left but it is certainly here now. I think it is a symptom of what Alvin Toffler called Future Shock. Trying to understand the issue is too hard, thinking it's fake is the easier path. The alternative to denying it is to admit you don't understand what is going on in the world.

How long has Kevin been following the wingnuts, and he's still looking for consistency, or at least a pattern in the inconsistency?

Osama_bin_forgotten, the model predictions are that the warming will be more marked for winters than for summers, and for nights than for days. (It won't get a great deal hotter in the daytime, but there'll be less of that blessed cool breeze after sundown.)

Which makes sense. The whole point of the greenhouse effect is that, once the ground or sea warms up from the sun, the heat will take longer to escape back to space. So the cooling effects of that escape will be pushed further into the wee hours, or further into the winter, with the results you noticed for Chicago.

What is interesting is WHY this has become a signature issue for the tinfoil brigade. They could easily take the view that global warming means more jobs because there will be different lands to plow and new houses to build on top of wildlife, and so on. Lots of business opportunities in global warming for people who already have money.

My best guess is that it is the same dynamic that leads conservatives to oppose energy efficiency. First, their view of manhood requires that you destroy and plow under and generally "conquer" nature, and both energy efficiency and changes to mitigate warming are imply that you will be listening and responding to the needs of the environment rather than bulldozing it.

Secondly, I think they suspect that concern about global warming is a stalking horse for an anti-capitalist view of the world. Global warming is a concern of people who have, in the past, also been concerned about animal rights, poor people, Palestinians, and the like; people who suggest that you can live happily on less rather than more, more, more and people who are unlikely to become day-traders. These are not people who like capitalism, or at the minimum, not people who worship capitalism. Thus, if THIS crowd supports concern about global warming, the wing nuts have to be against it.

"Wingnut Warming" is Mr. Drum's best headline in quite some time.

I love the arrogance of the "it won't be that bad because it'll make our growing season longer" crowd. The rest of the world just flat does not exist for these people, does it?

(But it's our freedom them furriners hate, ain't it? Certainly not our blind arrogance or anything like that!)

I keep running into people who say: “Yah, it’s probably real, but we shouldn’t do anything about it because you people are just too shrill�. Talk about irrational arguments.

The problem is that their tinfoil hats are too tight, cutting off circulation.

Kevin: that's aluminum foil, not tinfoil, on their heads. Since WWII anyway.

Reading the original article, I find it interesting that the error that's got them all atwitter is a difference of .03 degrees. On any other day, you could get any given wingnut to say that a temperature difference measured in 100ths of a degree can't possibly be significant. Now, it's huge.

A good read is Storm World by Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science. In Storm World, Mooney looks into the still open scientific question of whether hurricanes are influenced (particularly in peak intensity) by global warming. A figure that keeps recurring is Dr. William Gray of Colorado State, whose group produces the hurricane number and severity forecasts at the beginning of each Atlantic hurricane season. Gray (and a number of his students) are total warming deniers, mostly it seems from the culture clash the seat-of-the-pants synoptic meteorologists have with the cilmate modellers.

So there has always been a strong core total denier community.

See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/ for an analysis of this minor flap. It was not a Y2k problem.

"Last Saturday, Steve McIntyre wrote an email to NASA GISS pointing out that for some North American stations in the GISTEMP analysis, there was an odd jump in going from 1999 to 2000. On Monday, the people who work on the temperature analysis (not me), looked into it and found that this coincided with the switch between two sources of US temperature data. There had been a faulty assumption that these two sources matched, but that turned out not to be the case. There were in fact a number of small offsets (of both sign) between the same stations in the two different data sets. The obvious fix was to make an adjustment based on a period of overlap so that these offsets disappear."

"This was duly done by Tuesday, an email thanking McIntyre was sent and the data analysis (which had been due in any case for the processing of the July numbers) was updated accordingly along with an acknowledgment to McIntyre and update of the methodology."

"The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area)."

that's aluminum foil, not tinfoil, on their heads. Since WWII anyway.

I got mine at a surplus store and the guy told me it was a pre-War model. Was he lying?

This is just a part of one day of a long debate in comments at our local paper, the North County Times, in right-wing land (nctimes.com) ( I'm rwc) :
rwc wrote on Aug 12, 2007 11:48 PM:
" Global warming skeptics think citing other planets warming as some sort of proof of something - that alone is a stretch. They apparently think that is they can prove that other warming happens somewhere else, then what? It isn't here? Or we're not at fault? That's it - we're not at fault. Case closed. Wrong! Even if the heat is external, as they so desperately desire, we still have too much of it, and we can't get rid of it. Getting rid of it - that's the problem. That's the problem with CO2, it keeps the heat in. Mars is heating up, because its atmosphere is almost all CO2. Its thin atmosphere has as much CO2 as our atmosphere. Look at Venus; its atmosphere is almost all CO2, and it is super hot. It is hotter than Mercury, which is quite a bit closer to the Sun. Explain that. I can. It's CO2. "

rwc wrote on Aug 13, 2007 12:05 AM:
" One skeptic wanted to know what is the correct amount of CO2. The science has it that around 250-275 parts per million (ppm)(by volume), will be part of a stable heat regulation environment. It has been much higher in ancient times, some of those times were before plants. The vast deposits of coal, oil, and gas are long term storage (sequestering) of the carbon component of CO2. Peat, and wood are short term storage. The oceans have also captured a lot of carbon and CO2. Even with Mother Nature, mankind has been flooding our atmosphere, digging up the million year storage and returning it to the atmosphere literally overnight. Our atmosphere is now about 385 ppm and climbing. There is a direct correlation to the retention of atmospheric heat. Think of that number, 385 ppm; that's .000385, that's .0385 %. A really small part. Easy to alter. Think about that. "
***********************
to rwc wrote on Aug 13, 2007 8:03 AM:
" 1)Is the Earth warming? Yes, there does appear to be a slight warming over the last century. 2) Why has this occured? Big argument there, but probably several factors at work, one of which is man made CO2. 3) Is this warming bad? The Earth's temperature is always trending either warmer or cooler and in the past warming has generally been good for humanity. 4) Are we in a position to stop it? Ha Ha Ha. 5) Why do we laugh? Assign a portion of responsibilty for Global Warming to human activity. Calculate the degree of CO2 reduction needed to take man out of the loop. Calculate the reduction in economic activity due to that action. Calculate the time it would take voters to get rid of any idiot that voted to stab our economy in the back. We are at 4.6% unemployment and the Libs are screaming bad economy. What happens to them when unemployment is 12%? Everyone knows what will happen. They will be crucified at the polls - which is why they won't really do anything. "
*********************** rwc response :

When you overload the camel, put that last straw on, and it breaks the camels back, which straw do you blame? We are piling on a Global Warming cause agent, something that can overheat us without any external heating, and some people are arguing about that last straw. It could have been the first straw, but anyone should know to take a look at the big ones. Or, if you have automated lawn sprinklers, you lower them in the rainy season, or turn them off during a deluge. You don't blame the soggy lawn on the rain if you ran the sprinklers on a wet lawn. Intelligent people compensate for the reality, the real world outside their dreams of how it should be. Is Global Warming bad? You won't hear me talking of man's end, or huge tidal waves; this is skeptic hyperbole. The arguments that they voice back and forth amongst themselves. Man will persevere, as will the farmed animals and the pests. Whether you believe a god made this Earth, or just have a natural love of Nature, one should be concerned at the wholesale limitation of the diversity and beauty. A person that believes in evolution will see the tools, the raw material of evolution reduced to a few building blocks. It's all sad, whether you are religious or secular. The human impact will be large. The agricultural industry will have big changes, including change of growing areas, what grows, how much, etc. Most of these changes will be bad, with water problems. There will probably be big people problems, with poverty and starvation causing refugee situations and diaspora. More people crossing our borders. This Global Warming is happening at the same time that we are running out of oil. We face big infrastructure choices right now, and it is also a late chance to get active on GW actions. What can we do? We certainly can moderate the coming warming, and we could build products that use energy better, and take the lead in developing and selling these, bringing new economic health to this country, while reducing oil import/balance of cash outflow issues, at the same time! A win/win for the USA, if we would wake up and face reality.

I heard flat earth advocacy, creationism, gravity denial and Easter Bunny worship are all on the upswing too!

Without ruining the economy.

'cuz rising sea levels won't have any negative effect at all.

fwiw, the National Review has gone from a. denialism (a couple years ago) to b. "its real and some of it's man-made but it's overblown and we need to be "practical" on how to deal with it"

But now it seems like straight-up denialism is back in vogue. Is this true? Or am I just re-noticing it lately?

It never went away. GW "skeptics" have always used a mishmash of often mutually exclusive arguments, and that includes claiming that the Earth isn't warming while at the same time saying that the observed warming is natural. Like other purveyors of pseudoscience, they employ a shot-gun approach: scatter as much shot as you can and hope that something sticks. It doesn't matter what, just something. They're not terribly interested in advancing our understanding of climatology after all, they just want to stick it to the environmentalists.

To TruthPolitik:

Continuation of the course we're on will ruin the economy. Consider that there are hundreds of trillions of dollars already invested in waterfront property, and remember that the US GDP is only 15 trillion or so. A sea level rise of one foot (very very likely this century) will basically render these properties worthless. What happens then to insurance, banks, and the stock markets?

Humans put positive economic value on what they perceive to be "good", which is wholly subjective. Most nations around the world perceive countering global warming to be good. So there will be new industries and fortunes to be made by those individuals, companies, and countries that get on the leading edge of this new human need. This includes everything from solar power to carbon sequestration to architecture, new transportation technologies, and energy storage devices and many many more things. Think of the global warming challenge as a huge opportunity to both do good and do well.

It's appropriate to criticize those who deny that global warming is taking place. But, it's also fair to point a finger at those who deny that we don't know how to fix the problem. Agreements to cut CO2 won't do the trick.

No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming. Still, politicians want to show they're "doing something." The result is grandstanding. Consider the Kyoto Protocol. It allowed countries that joined to castigate those that didn't. But it hasn't reduced carbon dioxide emissions (up about 25 percent since 1990), and many signatories didn't adopt tough enough policies to hit their 2008-2012 targets. By some estimates, Europe may overshoot by 15 percent and Japan by 25 percent.

Ambitious U.S. politicians also practice this self-serving hypocrisy. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a global warming program. Gore counts 221 cities that have "ratified" Kyoto. Some pledge to curb their greenhouse emissions. None of these programs will reduce global warming. They're public relations exercises...

The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/04/AR2006070400789.html

Al: "snicker"

You really ought to clean the snot off your face before you make your idiotic posts.

ex-lib, what is your point?

What can we do? We certainly can moderate the coming warming, and we could build products that use energy better, and take the lead in developing and selling these, bringing new economic health to this country, while reducing oil import/balance of cash outflow issues, at the same time! A win/win for the USA, if we would wake up and face reality.

Posted by: Richard W. Crews

Good posting! It seems to me that one way is to somehow educate the 946 billionaires who can control so much of the economic activity of the planet. Together they could quickly get things moving in a more sustainable direction. Their grandchildren's well being depends on it.

That's 945 billionaires, Merv Griffin just died the other day.

Consider that there are hundreds of trillions of dollars already invested in waterfront property, and remember that the US GDP is only 15 trillion or so. A sea level rise of one foot (very very likely this century) will basically render these properties worthless. What happens then to insurance, banks, and the stock markets?
Posted by: Greg in FL on August 13, 2007 at 2:09 PM
------
If the politicians and pundits can't agree on global warming I don't think the actuaries with the insurance companies are failing to take it into account. What will happen first is a steep ramp-up in insurance premiums and deductibles for folks living on the shoreline (storm surges with a higher sea level will be more damaging). That will leave only the very very rich willing to take the risk to live so close. Then the Federal Reserve will bail them out later (hehe couldn't resist ;)

TP: It's not a question if you don't put a question mark at the end of the sentence.

Wearing a tinfoil hat will raise the temperature of your brain by 1 degree. Or is that .97 degrees?

****They're dumber than a box of rocks.****

Which is why they need to pay for your health care.
And your education.
And your retirement.

Because you're the smart one and can't be bothered with frilly stuff like actually taking care of yourself. Or wait on Jerome to read the stars.....

Based on these forum posts, I would gather that you cannot be both a Democrat and a global warming skeptic at the same time.

That would imply that all global warming skeptics need to affiliate with either the Republicans or Independents?

Not sure if that is an official Democratic party position on this issue.

Ex-liberals point - We shouldn't bother learning to crawl until we know how to run.

fafner - that's a succinct summation.

The economics of combating anthropogenic climate change have been addressed in a number of studies.
Results have varied from "It will kill our economy, we can't possibly dare to try!" to "Net positive, and US takes the lead in alternative and renewable energy generation and efficiency." More will come, and better no doubt, as the data on costs of NOT doing something accrue.

Major insurers and re-insurers are already working the increased risks into their calculations, and are working to improve them.
DOD is beginning to assess likely risks to US Security of climate change.

I think it's an appropriate time to start the discussion on who is going to bear the brunt of the costs for repairing damage and mitigating future damage.

TruthPolitik

First off, most importantly, go read at http://www.realclimate.org . Some of it can get difficult, but there are many well written articles that explain the state of the science is easily digestible ways. They are scientists, not advocates (they let the science speak for itself) and there is a good deal of hemming and hawing about the exact significance of this or that, and like real science there is a lot of revisions being made to previous assertions due to new data or insights, but the 'main points' as the BBC says are crystal clear. AGW (anthropomorphic global warming, as they abbreviate) is here, it's not going away anytime soon, it's going to get worse and there are many adverse consequences as a result. I've never seen them (though I'm no expert on their site) get into solution-mode (I guess they are leaving the policy ramifications to others). All in all, though, an excellent source to use in gaining an understanding of the facts of this subject.

That said, I will say based on my reading at realclimate.org that permitting global warming will be worse than fixing it, by far, if the measure is several hundred million people (maybe billions) dying of starvation on the one hand and huge economic adjustment on the other but where there isn't pandemic starvation. Really, you ask, why are these people going to starve?

Because it is clear that agriculture world-wide will be severely changed. Why? Two reasons. First, where the rain falls will change (thus making drought for people who so far have been able to grow crops without irrigation). Sure, you can say that the new places that the rain falls will just become the new farms, but generally, the good soil is where people are currently farming, so it is not certain that they can just pick and move to the new rainy ares. Very questionable if it can be successful.

Second, because glaciers, where the rain is stored, in the form of snow that turns into ice, are gradually melting away. For example, the major rivers in the Indian sub-continent are fed by runoff from glaciers in the Himalayas which, like most glaciers in the world, are getting smaller. If those glaciers go, as is predicted (but who knows exactly when) there goes a reliable water supply for several hundred million people. The rivers may still run, but it would be seasonal flood and drought. Maybe the Indians will build dams and retain the flood for the drought, maybe not. If they do, there is some hope for their subsistence farmers. If not, well ... not so good.

Even the U.S. will be affected, albeit to a lesser degree initially. The "Great American Desert" of historical fame will become a reality. Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, western Texas and Oklahoma, Eastern Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska - all will become very, very dry. What will happen to L.A. when there is no snow pack in Colorado and no water in Lake Mead? (Lake Powell already is at record lows.) Not a pretty picture.

This doesn't even get into the whole rising sea level problem (it really could come up some 20 or so feet, this century - and don't say it can't happen there is irrefutable evidence that the seas once were several HUNDRED feet deeper than they are now - just look at the oil fields in West Texas, aka the Permian Basin) or the issue of peak oil, ANOTHER really, really nasty problem that is just over the horizon. It could very easily be a double whammy that only the very few lucky and/or rich escape.

So, either way there are going to be colossal changes. To me the question is, are we going to try and have some influence on future events in the hope that we can avoid the worst outcomes and hopefully secure a least unfavorable one or are we going to sit around and wait until it is too late and then console ourselves by saying it is God's will? We may be screwed regardless, but at least I'm going to try in my own little way to get some change going. (Now, just what /I/ can do is the next problem ...

Nice response Larry - and thanks.

I do notice you haven't mentioned any of the social problems that may arise.
Specifically how groups of people, notably nation-states, will be likely to respond to resource shortages. Or conflicts with neighbors over shortages of say, drinking water.(I'm looking at you, India/Pakistan ...)

TruthPolitik >"...Without ruining the economy."

If there was an economy that was worth not "ruining" I would agree with you but there isn`t. The one we have is mostly fun house mirrors & smoke (does the term "voodoo economics" enlighten anyone ?)

Dealing with global climate "set point hunting" (which, in cybernetic terms, is actually what it is) affords us the opportunity to build a reasonable economic system that actually rewards intelligent behavior & punishes stupidity. The first step is to decide to not have any significant EXTERNALITIES and apply the knowledge of folks such as the Odums.

I do know I`m yelling into the wind on this but sanity demands I gotta keep tryin.

"Democracy is made of knowledge." - Carlo Bonini

Maybe you all missed the story today from some Wisconsin (where else?) TV station that claimed that the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was causing an outbreak of extraordinarily virulent poison ivy? Honestly, this is not from The Onion.

As for the NASA story, I believe that their corrected numbers show that five of the hottest years on record in the US occurred before WWII, including the hottest, 1934. http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html. What the impact of NASA's corrected numbers on the global temperature calculations, I don't know.

I love the arrogance of the "it won't be that bad because it'll make our growing season longer" crowd. The rest of the world just flat does not exist for these people, does it?

I'd love to see them try that line on the drought-stricken farmers here in Indiana.

I'd like to see a map that correlates global warming denialists with Sunbelt residents, especially in the Western region (Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Western Texas).

That their cherished lifestyle of suburban air-conditioned McMansions on super-green lawns, two SUVs in the driveway, miles from any city center or even shopping area (let alone their workplaces), will just wither up and vanish when both the oil and the water go away, is too awful to contemplate.

The subdivisions with the green lawns, and the irrigated farms, are are isolated in the middle of the desert, as you see from the air. The fields look like giant green polka dots.

In the East, the country has been whacked by one hurricane after another. More denialists?

These Denialists are dead serious when they make unbelievable claims that a super-secret cabal of Freemasons and Communists are working with Al Gore to create this climate change “hoax.”

Whenever I run into these reality-challenged persons of Republican persuasion I ask them, “Exactly how do these communists and Freemasons plan on ‘destroying’ America by reducing the amount of industrial pollution in our water and air?”

They never have a good answer (or any answer at all on how this “plan” in supposed to destroy America).

Here’s the kicker:

When it is explicitly made plain to them that industrial pollutions and emission CAUSE CANCER AND BIRTH DEFECTS and need to be reduced anyway --- they never directly admit to that either!

“Waitaminute,” I say. ‘So what if you’re correct and all the world’s scientists, except for those working for Exxon, have been bribed by a secret cabal controlled by Al Gore and climate change is a hoax. All of the industrial pollutants Al Gore’s wants to reduce cause cancer and need to be reduced anyway, don’t they?”

The Denailists never directly acknowledge that industrial pollution is harmful to human health and needs to be reduced.

The invariably ignore my statements about the overall undisputed toxicity of industrial pollutions and keep babbling on and on about how the Freemasons and the Illuminati are trying to “fool” the world in an attempt to destroy the US.

These folks are gone, baby, gone!

[trolling deleted]

Have you hugged a Republican today to thank them for your tumors?

Thank you Mr. Republican!

Thank you for working tirelessly for Exxon to keep industrial pollution standards as weak as possible!

Thank you for standing up the Dems and their extreme Leftists nanny-state government that tried to force poor Mom and Pop businesses like Shell and Exxon into bankruptcy by asking them to please spend $100,000 out of their 6 Billion in profits updating their pollution control systems!

You guys are American heroes!

My son wants to give you a hug too just as soon as he gets out of surgery having another Freedom Tumor removed!

You know you’re living in a free market paradise when you not only have tumors but get to go bankrupt in the process thanks to corrupt insurance industry practices that deny all care on the basis that they are unnecessary.

Thanks Republicans!

….their corrected numbers show that five of the hottest years on record in the US occurred before WWII, including the hottest, 1934. … DBL at 4:18 PM

…NASA's data about 1998 being the warmest in the US was not "much-ballyhooed". Because NASA actually reported that it wasn't as warm as 1934. In 2001, NASA's James Hansen wrote:
The U.S. annual (January-December) mean temperature is slightly warmer in 1934 than in 1998 ...
In comparing temperatures of years separated by 60 or 70 years the uncertainties in various adjustments (urban warming, station history adjustments, etc.) lead to an uncertainty of at least 0.1°C. Thus it is not possible to declare a record U.S. temperature with confidence until a result is obtained that exceeds the temperature of 1934 by more than 0.1°C.
Because the 1998 and 1934 numbers were so close, minor adjustments could easily change their ordering. This is what happened with the GISS numbers released this year. In that data set, 1998 was a tiny amount warmer than 1934. This change was not much ballyhooed. Nor was it a little ballyhooed. In fact, it wasn't mentioned by anyone at all. Because it didn't matter….
As this graph showsthe years after 2000 are warmer than 1934.

…Not much difference. The right hand end of the red curve has moved down a little bit, but this decade is still the warmest ever recorded in the US. The change to the global temperature series is imperceptible….

http://www.geo.unizh.ch/wgms/

She blinded me with Science:

"The average mass balance of the reference mountain glaciers around the world continues to decrease, with tentative figures indicating a further thickness reduction of 0.7 m and 0.6 m during 2004 and 2005, respectively. This continues the trend in accelerated ice loss during the past two and a half decades and brings the total loss since 1980 at about 9.6 m."

Question

Does not believing in climate change magically transform the toxicity of industrial pollutants being spewed into our environment?

So if enough Republicans plug their fingers into their ears and chant “Its not real! Its not real!� over and over again does that somehow transform toxic/cancerous Super Fund sites into green family friendly parks?

No?

What if a million Republicans all shout out “I hate Al Gore!� would that suddenly transmogrify the 100 metric tons of pig manure that a factory farm dumps into our drinking water into something totally benign and harmless?

Because if this stuff is still toxic whether or not we believe in climate change – the end result is we have to reduce it anyway.

Or are the Republicans simply Pro-cancerous tumors?

I don’t recall seeing that as one of their platforms, but let me double check with the RNC website.

"What the impact of NASA's corrected numbers on the global temperature calculations, I don't know."

But we do. It's none. Zero. Zilch. The trivial error only affected U.S. temperature calculations.

What if a million Republicans all shout out “I hate Al Gore!� would that suddenly transmogrify the 100 metric tons of pig manure that a factory farm dumps into our drinking water into something totally benign and harmless?

Well, actually, yes. If they can shout it in unison. It's called faith-based reasoning.

DBL and Mike

It's nice to know that the US had a really hot 1934.

You'll be interested to know the record temperatures for the UK and Europe have all come in the last 6 years (2003, and this year).

We have longer temperature data, consistently recorded, than anyone else-- running back to the 17th century in the UK's case.

And of course there is Asia, and Africa, where AFAIK this is also the case.

It's a global problem.

The truth of the matter is we are fools to bet the future of the planet on the mid point of a series of computer models, that say 'double the CO2, 2.5 to 3 degrees centigrade temperature rise'.

It could just as well be 6 degrees: there are known positive feedback effects (like Arctic ice melt, or methane release from permafrost) which the IPCC specifically excludes from its forecasts.

James Hansen has a piece in last week's New Scientist, also

http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1748-9326/2/2/024002/

here, about the IPCC's underestimate of the likely sea level rise. It might be 20' by 2100.

A world 6 degrees centigrade than the world now is straining human habitability, at least at the current level of civilisation. The lost agricultural output in the equatorial and temperate regions (where most of the people live) would not be offset by the gains in Canada north of the existing frontier of cultivation (where the soil is not that great, anyways). And as the Colony Bee disorder is showing, we cannot be sanguine about mass extinction of plants and animals that we depend upon.

The symmetric case (undershooting) is irrelevant, because we're not worried about the risk of that. If the world isn't as hot as we think, hooray!

Credit markets are blowing up because we have a '1 in 10,000' series of events. Imagine what happens to our climate if we have one of those?

chris >"...Because if this stuff is still toxic whether or not we believe in climate change – the end result is we have to reduce it anyway..."

"About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people..." David Pimentel - Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences

*sigh*

"If you don't deal with reality, reality will deal with you" - C.J. Campbell

But now it seems like straight-up denialism is back in vogue. Is this true? Or am I just re-noticing it lately?

No, it’s back, I’ve noticed the same thing, and it’s not just the wing nuts.

The amazing thing is how all Republicans say the same thing, begin using the same phrases overnight, including Republicans that you know are intelligent. The current most common global warming phrase among Republicans is, “sure, there’s a warming trend, but is it manmade?�

This is delivered as though the science is totally inconclusive.

The thing they can't rap there little minds around is the fact GLOBAL WARMING does not mean it is always hotter.You will have bouts of very cold Blizzards, snow where you haven't had snow in decades.We need to get the Warming out of Global Warming.

Actually, the fact that 1998 was NOT the hottest year on record backfires on wingnuts, because it means we have a even more linear progression toward getting a bit hotter year after year.

I think one angle that ought to be stressed a lot more by proponents of greenhouse gas restrictions is the truly minor cost of such policies. I'm quoting from memory here, but I believe the figures I've seen indicate that taking decisive action to combat climate change would barely touch economic growth (3.5% global GDP expansion over the next century vs., say, 3.7% if we do nothing; and of course that slightly greater growth would get us to a point where, eventually, growth would plummet, along with every other index of human well-being, if human-induced climate change is real). The point is, the average person in a rich country would not experience a decrease in living standards because of emmissions restraints -- just a very minor slow down in the pace with which living standards increase. Rather than scare tactics, which have the potential to backfire, the pitch to the public should be something along the lines of: "These modest measures -- which will have little impact on your quality of life -- are the prudent course of action. Doing nothing is dangerous, and reckless, and risks the chance of leaving a damaged environment to your children and grandchildren. Since the cost of dealing with the possibility of global warming is so negligible, why not take the prudent course of action?"

In fact, the science is settled. The recent extraordinarily small recalculation of the temp record is irrelevant. A spike in temps in the 30s has zip to do with the persistent increase in temps from the 70s to the present. There are reasons for temperature changes. When the changes are persistent, the causes can be isolated from the array of possible causes. The persistent increase in atmospheric CO2, CH4, and NO2 -- all supplied by man -- has driven temps higher and will continue to do so.

The deniers aren't just asses anymore.

Chris nailed it earlier. Do these people also deny pollution is getting worse? And they want to do nothing about it? Are they suicidal???

Sara and others:

"I'd like to see a map that correlates global warming denialists with Sunbelt residents, especially in the Western region (Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, Western Texas).

"That their cherished lifestyle of suburban air-conditioned McMansions on super-green lawns, two SUVs in the driveway, miles from any city center or even shopping area (let alone their workplaces), will just wither up and vanish when both the oil and the water go away, is too awful to contemplate.

"The subdivisions with the green lawns, and the irrigated farms, are are isolated in the middle of the desert, as you see from the air. The fields look like giant green polka dots."

I live in Tucson. I have no doubt that here in the Southwest, there are global climate change denialists. A lot of them.

But you paint with too broad a brush. Your description suits Phoenix far better than Tucson, for example.

I've lived in Tucson for well over 30 years. When I went to college here in the 60s, and when I moved back and established residence in 74, the majority of homes had green lawns and plantings of roses and other flowers. This has gradually faded out. The overwhelming majority of homes have xeroscaping now.

You still see lawns in large public establishments such as the University of Arizona, but even there the areas sodded have decreased. I wish they would totally get rid of them, and replace them with desert ground cover, since any type of planting is cooling.

And people are mostly planting mesquites and paloverdes, trees native to this area, as a means of carbon sequestration.

Yes, there are too many outlying areas remote from the central city. As gas becomes more expensive, these will start to "dry up", I hope.

I myself live just over a mile from downtown, in a stucco house with 12" thick walls, ca. 1200 sq. ft., with a swamp cooler and one window A-C unit. Most of the places I go to regularly are pretty much a mile or two from where I live. My next car will b a hybrid, and the one I drive now gets 27 mpg in the cooler months, and around 33 on the highway. I don't do as well as I could but I do try.

Kevin Drum,

I'll side with the so-called 'denialists' over the hysteria mongering global warming 'catastrophists' any day. You would think someone like yourself who is cautious over fears of terrorism being used to acquire political power might also be sensitive to global warming hysteria being used in a naked grab for power too. I guess it all boils down to WHO is grabbing power, now doesn't it? Some defender of democracy you are.

You are not imagining this. Our good friend(s) at junkscience.com have this little dandy out there.

www.ultimateglobalwarmingchallenge.com

You can win 100,000 if you disprove their stupid play on words.

Talk about desperation.

Ok well exactly what do we have to do to prevent global warming.

Well, maybe nothing. Other scientists argue that we have less than 40 yrs supply of oil left.

http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2656034.ece

So... if the oil runs out that quickly, unless we switch to mostly coal burning, would the earth ever get to the point where global warming causes serious crises?

Jeez, I hate to do this, but for all you non-scientists out there, global warming is an interesting theory that could be a big disaster, might not be. It's definitely worth planning, not so much worth mass hysteria. How it got built up into a liberal do or die is beyond me. If it happens, it will be long after you are all dead and have faced triumphant right-wing yapping because it didn't happen in your lifetimes.

Fun facts for global warming denialsts:

August 13th marked the 34th day in 2007 where the temperature at Reagan National Airport rose to 90 degrees or higher.

It is now warm enough in parts of Alaska to grow apples.

The Ogallala Aquifer is depleting betwen 1-3 feet per year in many places.

A temperature increase of 2 to 4°C could lower the average flow from Lake Ontario by 24% causing a 1-metre drop in water levels along the St. Lawrence River.

Lakes Mead and Powell are only at 54 and 40 percent of capacity, respectively.

pencarrow: So... if the oil runs out that quickly, unless we switch to mostly coal burning, would the earth ever get to the point where global warming causes serious crises?

It still will become warmer due to accumulated heat added to the heat added to the earth at a paticular time. This is similar to the daily high temperatures [in summer] occurring 3 hours after the maximum heat flux from the sun occurring around noon. i.e. the daily high is around 3-4PM, not noon.

The additional problems will be with the increased use of coal for electrical power, especially in the developing world. A lot of countries will try to be like China is right now, with a building boom in coal-fired power plants. Another serious problem will be the increased temperatures in the Arctic regions causing the release of methane - a more powerful heat-trapping gas than CO2. This will likely increase the positive feedback loop of warming causing further warming.

"mostly it seems from the culture clash the seat-of-the-pants synoptic meteorologists have with the climate modellers."
____________________________

This is probably closest to the truth of the issue. I don't see how anyone can deny that the earth is warming - it has been since the end of the Little Ice Age in the middle of the 19th century, except for the period from 1941 to 1972 or thereabouts.

But Al, in his silly way, hits on a point. Since most of the cataclysmic global warming scenarios depend on modeling, which is always subject to debate. If global warming is cyclical (say, caused by increased solar energy), then there might not be much we can do about it. After all, the world was warmer than it is today from about 1000 to 1300, without much help from mankind. If that's the case, the models might very well be making too much about anthropogenic effects.

None of this rebuts the idea that it's a good idea to conserve resources.

i must say, of all the apallingly dumb arguments that i've seen in the interests of denying global warming, the flat out dumbest is the idea that it's a power grab by the WHO. how does our educational system produce people as dumb as Brad?

trashhauler

You are out of date on the solar effects. They've been measured, modelled to death. There is no systematic trend that would account for the observed warming.

Also you are wrong about 1000-1300. The observed warming, if real, doesn't exceed northern Europe now. And it appears to be a Europe-only effect, it hasn't been shown to have taken place anywhere else. The best guess is the Gulf Stream shifted a bit.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/english-vineyards-again/

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/

You're on stronger ground on the Maunder Minimum (look it up) but AFAIK that might have been volcanic activity, *or* it might have been solar flux. But we don't have any observational records in the 20th century for sustained solar flux, and the planet is heating up. Looks like it might be the ever-rising CO2.

You'll need to come up with some stronger arguments. You can try cosmic rays, but that one is in hot water, too.

Pencarrow

James Hansen has published on this, check his webpage at the Goddard.

The short answer is there is more than enough coal, on conservative estimates, to drown us in CO2.

And we will burn that. 90% of Chinese electric power and 50% of US, and 80% of Indian, is coal generated.

I must say, of all the apallingly dumb arguments that i've seen in the interests of promoting global warming, the flat out dumbest is accusing me of claiming a power grab by the WHO.

How does someone mistake the phrase "to who is grabbing power", for meaning the World Health Organization? Hello? Ever heard of reading a sentence in context? Ever consider that "who" was capitalized for emphasis and not meant as an acronym?

Why is the left-wing filled with people as dumb as Howard?

"Tinfoil hats"? Hell, we use TV rabbit ears from the '60s, which are connected by copper wire to where the sun don't shine.

What we're seeing is the pure eejits. Over the last 5-10 years mountains of data have boiled off all the respectable doubts about the reality of warming. The only deniers left are kooks, whores, & idiots.

The fact that they're still getting as much press as when there was an honest dispute says way too much about the state of the press.

After all, the world was warmer than it is today from about 1000 to 1300, without much help from mankind. If that's the case, the models might very well be making too much about anthropogenic effects.

This is quite true.
Now, what do you suppose will happen when the anthropogenic effects are stacked on top of the high end of natural cyclic variation?

I feel safe predicting that it will not make things cooler on average.

Any objections to a motion that folks disputing that we may have problems in the future be encouraged to move to areas most likely to suffer adverse effects?

After all, the world was warmer than it is today from about 1000 to 1300, without much help from mankind.

False, as this graph clearly shows.

Not that Valuethinker hasn't already put the rest of your ill-informed claims to bed.

So now that we know that the world is indeed warmer now than during the Medieval Warm Period, and that there's strong evidence that that was a local phenomenon anyway, and that recent studies have debunked solar radiation as the cause of warming: would you like to revise your position?

Or, as as the point of Kevin's post, would you like to simply be a denier in the face of the evidence?

My guess: denial is still plausible at the geographic locations where most Americans live. Urban people close to oceans or Great Lakes may not experience the changes so obvious to us living inland and spending lots of time outdoors. My region is quite anti-liberal but nobody I know who has lived here more than 15 years questions the reality of global warming.

The democrats are in control of congress now. Why don't put up their global warming bill.

The Republicans will just faux-filibuster it anyway.

sego, I agree with what you said. I live in a semi-rural area and all of my family were raised on farms at least part of their life and none of them are doubters. The milder winters are the most obvious change (as mentioned above), along with migration timings of birds, insects, etc. I used to help my father cut firewood in the winter and the ground was frozen hard most of the winter which made it easy to get in and out of pastures without getting stuck. Now you have to be careful sometimes about getting stuck in the mud in February (when the ground thaws in late winter it's particularly bad because it isn't warm enough yet to dry it out fast enough).

I think the doubters are primarily urban conservatives. Oh, and just as an interesting side note-they are all checking to see if their toothpaste (and other stuff) is made in China when they go to Wal-Mart.

Global Warming Is A Hoax, because this morning I had to get up at about 4:30 and close the window.

Your Truthtelling Pal,
Rush

Yes, denialism certainly has made a comeback, at least as well as I can tell from a popular blog for such types. Look at this link: Watts Up With That?
The original post by Steve McIntyre (posted by an associate) is relatively reasonable, and I can't fault many of the questions and points he raises (but note that the overall temp. graph is still on an upward trend.) Yet the commenters are rather rough. I tried to gently reason with some, and got mostly dopey or slanderous (about the conventional climatologists) replies . Have fun there if you want.

Sego and Doc

It has been wisely said, I think, that one problem is the natural variation in North America (Continental Climate) is so great, that the trend is masked. There are always ridiculously cold winters and ridiculously hot summers in North America (most of) so how would we know the difference?

Note thought Lake Superior is over 1' below its normal level: boats are grounding, docks are having to be extended, Lake freighters are running with reduced load.

Surveys show Americans are concerned about global warming, but 45%+ think there is scientific doubt about the cause (the denialists have used the same tactics as the tobacco industry was so successful in using, from the 1950s to the 1970s). And they have no feeling for what global warming means for *them*.

Remember the movie 'The Day After' about a nuclear war and the town of Lawrence, Kansas? What was striking about that movie was not its realism (effects were massively understated) but that it connected ordinary Americans to the problem of nuclear war.

In Europe we are pounded by successively hotter summers. 2003 killed thousands of people. This summer, Greece and Italy went over 45 degrees centigrade. Meanwhile England had the worst floods in over a century.

The real dangers of global warming are not the ones the IPCC forecasts for us. That's mostly Bangladeshis drowning and Africans starving-- what else is new?

The real dangers are the ones we can't imagine, that are out there in the scientific papers, but no one is focusing on. And which could be much worse than we predict, since our science is so inexact.

The Colony Bee disorder is probably *not* global warming related. But it is a marker of the sort of truly terrifying changes we might face. The bees are dying, our agriculture is critically dependent on them, and we have no idea why.

What percent chance do we want to take that we make the world uninhabitable, or significantly less habitable? 1%, 1/2%? 10%?

Conservatives love to recycle lame and intellectually dishonest rationalizations for why facts antithetical to their own financial, social, political, and psychological interests do not exist, because those rationalizations are so easily puntured.

You can throw sh*t (lame and intellectually dishonest rationalizations ) at a wall and hope that it sticks, but regardless whether it sticks or not, it's still sh*t.

This is not so difficult to understand. Things are not a "crisis" until it affects your life directly in a drastic, negative, way. We're not good at prevention--and frankly, depending on the risks, one has to pick and choose what to prevent since there aren't resources to prevent everything.

People have known there would be a major disaster if New Orleans were hit by a hurricane. The bridge in Minneapolis had been cited in inspections. People have known that there were not early tsunami warning devices in the part of the Indian Ocean affected by the 2005 tsunami. People have known that many Chinese companies had unsafe practices. Add this to the list of dangers we know about, but can't or won't prevent. You can hear stories about dire things happening to the arctic ice, but today, tomorrow, and next week, it has next to no effect on you.

I think there has been another effect too, from the "shrillness" of the global warming abatement advocates. When the apocalyptic pronouncements being made were not immediately backed up by, say, an immediate 30 degree rise in temperatures, the apocalyptic version lost credibility, unless something weird was happening to the weather right outside your door. And it's been a fairly cool summer here in the northeast this year...

The "industrialized" world has managed to make improvements with regard to pollution, for example,--so things can be done. The first step is to figure out what should be done, stagger goals so that they are achievable, and maybe tone down some of the "sky is falling" stuff unless you actually see bits of sky coming down...

Skeptic/deniers often claim, (like at link given above) that climate scientists (like Hanson) won't release their algorithms/SW (should see a joke in there...) I doubt that, and if not so, where can I find evidence of the algorithms/SW to show around?

Brad,

Your implicit argument- that you would literally prefer a civilization-threatening event to having to admit you were wrong- is an amusing display of denialist pathology.

That said, just WHO do you think this "fear-mongering" is supposed to benefit, and to what ends? The nefarious Alternative Energy lobby? Al Gore, aka Victor von Doom, evil superscientist-ruler of Latveria? Dirty, smelly hippies?

from Valuethinker...The short answer is there is more than enough coal, on conservative estimates, to drown us in CO2. And we will burn that. 90% of Chinese electric power and 50% of US, and 80% of Indian, is coal generated.

Possibly, but I would suggest a weakness to this argument is that over the next 20-30 years, technology will have advanced to the extent that coal-burning will no longer be a preferred or even cheaper way of generating power. Alternative sources will be cost-effective and likely mandated more to control breathable air pollution.

Consequently, as my earlier argument stated "unless we switch mostly to coal burning...", an event that seems like a much lower liklihood of happening.

trashhauler: there is strong scientific consensus that the behavior of humans is the primary contributor to current global warming.

Do your own research with an open mind and you will likely acknowledge that consensus.

pencarrow

I hope. You hope. We hope.

Wind is sort of there but you have the interruptibility problem. It's not 'despatchable' in grid operator jargon. And at least on-shore wind is fiercely fought by local communities.

(interesting sidelight. The British government has been told by its advisors, that in light of Scottish Devolution, it would be impossible to build really massive wind resources in the UK. The wind power is in Scotland and Wales, and the demand is in England. The Scots will not litter their countryside with 5MW, 350' behemoths and power lines, to power Sassenach cities).

Solar is a long way from there. 20 cents+/Kwhr v. 5 cents for a coal station.

And neither works all the time. Maybe Carbon Sequestration will work, if we can get around the NIMBY/ legal problems and actually build the plants.

Transport the problems are even more entrenched: we have no good substitutes for liquid petroleum fuels. Our 'solution' to higher oil prices is to mine Canadian tar sands (as much oil as Saudi Arabia, and over twice as much CO2 per barrel).

I think we can solve the problems posed by global warming. But we are running out of time, and purely techno-optimistic solutions (nuclear power advocates are the worst in this regard) are not likely to be the end of the problem.

The best thing we could do is pure and simple energy conservation.

JMS

Softly softly hasn't worked. Science has known we are in a crisis since at least 1990. But politicians have achieved nothing (although Kyoto was not nothing).

The blunt truth is by the time we know whether global warming is at the more extreme end of forecasts, or beyond them, it will be much much too late.

CO2 emitted now will be in the atmosphere 100 years from now. Given the heating lag in the oceans, the climate we have now is very much the product of emissions from the early 1980s.

450ppm CO2 is a redline. We'll almost certainly cross it, against all scientific advice (383 now and rising 3ppm pa).

Hopefully we can stop before 500ppm.

http://www.wesjones.com/climate3.htm

[Quote]
All of Socolow’s calculations are based on the notion — clearly hypothetical — that steps to stabilize emissions will be taken immediately, or at least within the next few years. This assumption is key not only because we are constantly pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere but also because we are constantly building infrastructure that, in effect, guarantees that that much additional CO2 will be released in the future. In the U.S., the average new car gets about twenty miles to the gallon; if it is driven a hundred thousand miles, it will produce almost forty-three metric tons of carbon during its lifetime. A thousand-megawatt coal plant built today, meanwhile, is likely to last fifty years; if it is constructed without C.C.S. capability, it will emit some hundred million tons of carbon during its life. The overriding message of Socolow’s wedges is that the longer we wait — and the more infrastructure we build without regard to its impact on emissions — the more daunting the task of keeping CO2 levels below five hundred parts per million will become. Indeed, even if we were to hold emissions steady for the next half century, Socolow’s graphs show that much steeper cuts would be needed in the following half century to keep CO2 concentrations from exceeding that level. After a while, I asked Socolow whether he thought that stabilizing emissions was a politically feasible goal. He frowned.

We said, ‘That’s the trade-off; we don’t want to do this anymore.’ So we may look at this and say, ‘We are tampering with the earth.’ The earth is a twitchy system. It’s clear from the record that it does things that we don’t fully understand. And we’re not going to understand them in the time period we have to make these decisions. We just know they’re there. We may say, ‘We just don’t want to do this to ourselves.’ If it’s a problem like that, then asking whether it’s practical or not is really not going to help very much. Whether it’s practical depends on how much we give a damn.�
[/QUOTE]

Valuethinker wrote: "The real dangers of global warming are not the ones the IPCC forecasts for us. That's mostly Bangladeshis drowning and Africans starving-- what else is new?"

When the vast grain-growing regions of North America turn into desert, there will be a lot more people than just "Africans" starving.

Unlike rising sea levels, which even in the most extreme scenarios (eg. rapid catastropic breakup and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets) will take decades to render heavily populated coast areas uninhabitable, continent-wide megadroughts can start suddenly at any time and wipe out a good part of the world's food production in a single year. And such droughts can just as easily last five or ten years as one year.

Meanwhile, major supplies of fresh water used for irrigation, such as fossil groundwater (eg. the Ogalala acquifer in North America) and glacier-fed rivers (eg. the Himilayan-fed rivers of South Asia) are being depleted or destroyed by global warming meltdown.

Drought, loss of fresh water supplies, the collapse of agriculture, and ensuing global famine are the most imminent danger from global warming.

And given the current levels of irreversible warming, and the additional warming that is already locked in from the fossil fuel CO2 emissions that are already in the atmosphere, and the ample evidence that both self-reinforcing warming feedbacks and saturation of natural carbon sinks are already kicking in and will accelerate the warming, these consequences are almost certainly inevitable, even if we ended all CO2 emissions today (and of course CO2 emssions are not only increasing every year but accelerating).

It is understandable that some people react to this by burying themselves in denial.

Here is an USDA animation showing the changes in plant hardiness zones in the US from 1990 to 2006.

The absolute values of the changes in temperature data which Nasa was forced to make are small (such as .03 degrees) but the effect on trends and on the statistical likelihood of such trends continuing is substantial.

To summarize, as a result of the Nasa changes in data, it has not been unusually warm the last few years. The hottest decade on record is the 1930's. Most recent years have not been unusually hot and most of the hottest years came when the level of CO2 was substantially less than it is today. Rather than living during a hot period of rapidly rising temperatures which were likely to approach catastrophic conditions after 2009, we are living in a period where gradually rising temperatures have reached levels previously seen in the 1930's. Incidentally, the present is no longer hotter than the medieval warm period. Check out the data yourself on the Nasa website or do a Google search on something like "Nasa changes temperature data".

Based on the old data, after an evolution similar to the one Kevin describes, I was convinced we were facing a near term global warming crisis. Based on the new data I think we are probably facing a long term global warming effect which should be addressed together with all the other environmental issues like re-cycling, conservation, waste reduction etc. In other words, we should no longer let our overall environmental policies be distorted by what has proved to be a manufactured crisis in global warming.

Open questions which remain:

- The changed data is for the US only and this data makes up a substantial part of the "global" data which will consequently have to be adjusted. But why does the data from the rest of the world closely match the incorrect US data? Does the rest of the world just follow the US, even when it is wrong?

- The director of Nasa, whose name was on the data, should have known about the mistake as should many of the scientists involved in processing the data. The fact that they said nothing calls into question the validity of the whole data set. At the very least, the accuracy of this data needs to be examined and the data set re-validated.

I am angry that I was led to draw incorrect conclusions based on what looks like politically skewed data presented as scientific evidence. While the changes are essentially good news, this episode has severely damaged the credibility of environmentalists.

A note to Kevin: While the wing nuts are usually out there, it's good to keep an open eye and an open mind for the rare time they catch on to something, even when it is not through their own efforts. Occasionally "deniers" have a point.

Far from being unimportant, as Kevin implies here, the NASA error highlights the uncertainties in the global warming data. The current global warming scenario has become something of an article of faith among the people on the left, same people who can be remarkably skeptical about war on terror, economic statistics, or political polling. I hope that people realize from this NASA mistake how shaky the climate data actually is. The variations from year to year, and from one place on Earth to the other (with US apparently not experiencing any average warming in the last century), are far larger than the average increases in temperature that are used to calculate the doomsday scenarios. Especially when one gets into explaining the causes of global warming, quantitatively, the possibility for reaching unsupported conclusions is quite high. The uncertainties in the amount of CO2 released by human activity, absorbed by biosphere or the ocean, or remaining in the atmosphere are huge, on the order of 50 or even 100%, if you go back to the original technical reports. As the NASA flap demonstrated, even the temperature measurements are far from precise. So let's all take a deep breath, and approach the global warming predictions with the healthy dose of skepticism that they deserve.

To summarize, as a result of the Nasa changes in data, it has not been unusually warm the last few years.

Wrong, we've been breaking records right and left. Hardiness zones have dramatically changed, lakes and reservoirs are drying up, glaciers are melting, icepack is disappearing, species are moving regionally, weather patterns are changing, heat waves are killing people, unheard of flooding is taking place, algae is choking lakes in rivers where before it was unknown, winters are milder and summers are hotter, wildfires are increasing, drought is commonplace and water shortages are beginning to appear, forests are dying as insect pests now have two and three broods a year, the ice is disappearing at the North Pole -- and on and on and on worldwide.

And people who've lived for many years in one place can see the changes taking place around them. It's actually hard not to notice the warming.

While the changes are essentially good news, this episode has severely damaged the credibility of environmentalists.

Not it hasn't, not in the least. You can't even draw that conclusion if you're being wilfully dishonest as it makes no sense. Nice try at starting a meme, though.

Incidentally, the present is no longer hotter than the medieval warm period. Check out the data yourself on the Nasa website or do a Google search on something like "Nasa changes temperature data".

Unlike just about every other search imaginable that's going to net you a couple hundred thousand results, that search yields a grand total of two, neither of which has anything definitive to say about the matter.

On the other hand, googling "Medieval Warm Period" and "warmer" yields a significant number of results from agencies studying climate that, in fact, it is now warmer than it was during that period and that your position is a myth.

In other words, we should no longer let our overall environmental policies be distorted by what has proved to be a manufactured crisis in global warming.

This, like the rest of your post, is just more ill-informed gobbledygook posing as reasoned discourse. Concern troll much?

Oops! Poor Bert, he doesn't realize he has committed the crime of scientific heresy. Look out Bert, here comes trex leading the inquisition!

heh

"That said, just WHO do you think this "fear-mongering" is supposed to benefit, and to what ends?" -- Formerly Wu

Do you know how the global warming catastrophists resemble a watermelon?

"Your implicit argument- that you would literally prefer a civilization-threatening event to having to admit you were wrong- is an amusing display of denialist pathology." -- Formerly Wu

I won't be stampeded like the rest of your mindless herd. So you can take your inquisition and stuff it.

Oops! Poor Bert, he doesn't realize he has committed the crime of scientific heresy. Look out Bert, here comes trex leading the inquisition!

Both your science education and your knowledge of history must be stuck at the fifth grade level if you think that pointing out empirically disprovable and/or unsupportable claims are the acts of an "inquisition."

In point of fact it is exactly opposite to the approach of questioning people based on hearsay and superstition and demanding their fealty to ideas based on say-so versus evidence.

You are out of your depth here. Best run back to Strategypage to play army men.

trex:

Here is the first heading I get when I do my search on Google:

News results for Nasa changes temperature data
- View today's top stories
NASA Weather Error Provokes Tempest in a Teapot - Wired News - 10 hours ago
NASA weather error sparks global warming debate - Register - 7 hours ago
Red faces at NASA over climate-change blunder - Toronto Star - 19 hours ago

The sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth headings also deal with the issues I raised. I don't know what you looked for - maybe your search is personalized - but, whatever it was, it got you old data. Those references you make are based on the old, wrong data because, if you check the dates when the pages were modified, they will pre-date the Nasa change. When the Nasa changes work their way through all those pages, you'll see how significant they are.

The other anecdotal stuff you mention - glaciers melting, people feeling hot etc. - can be explained by the fact that we are experiencing temperatures as hot as the 1930's which was the dustbowl decade. It was hot then and it is again but the present is not uniquely hot, by definition.

I think we can agree that the changes Nasa has made mean less global warming and later. That's not denial; that's just science and math. To me, the differences are significant - to you they may not be. But why are you so miserable in the face of what can only be good news? Hey, things are not quite as bad as we all thought.

Bert

On the 1934 data

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/08/1934-and-all-that/

[i]The net effect of the change was to reduce mean US anomalies by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000-2006. There were some very minor knock on effects in earlier years due to the GISTEMP adjustments for rural vs. urban trends. In the global or hemispheric mean, the differences were imperceptible (since the US is only a small fraction of the global area).[/i]

[i]Sum total of this change? A couple of hundredths of degrees in the US rankings and no change in anything that could be considered climatically important (specifically long term trends).[/i]

Note this is *US* data. The rest of us live in places which don't show this anomaly.

old sceptic

If you look at the C12/C13 ratios, the amount of carbon in CO2 in the atmosphere coming from geologic sources (to wit: coal, oil and natural gas) keeps rising. That is prima facie evidence of human activity increasing CO2 levels.

There's plenty of other evidence. Go back and read the latest IPCC report, where they deal with this issue.

Bert wrote:

I think we can agree that the changes Nasa has made mean less global warming and later. That's not denial; that's just science and math.

Bert

No, actually the changes NASA has made do no such thing. They don't change the story at all. That's just science and math.

We don't know how bad global warming is going to get, but we do know our models deliberately ignore significant feedback effects: ice cap melt, changes in Arctic albedo, methane release from permafrost, accelerated death of rainforest due to heating, etc.

We won't know the full effect of our actions on the climate of the planet for some time.

But we'd be fools to bet the habitable climate of the Earth on the mid point of our computer models.

What we are in essence, saying, now, is that 450ppm is not doable, so we'll set a limit of 50ppm Co2 and hope that is low enough.

Valuethinker,

I actually spend quite some time looking at the data that proponents of anthropogenic global warming present - and then went to the original technical literature published in Science and other journals and looked some more. Let's just say that I was somewhat less then impressed. The data is all over the place, which is what happens when anybody tries to take measurements of something that is quite complex and varies greatly with both space and time. My conclusions: there is enough evidence that we are in a global warming period right now (although how much global warming, when it started, and future projections are all uncertain), and there is some evidence that there are varying amounts of anthropogenic CO2 in the ocean and in the biosphere (and it would be rather strange if there wasn't). But that is it. How we jump from this into knowing exactly how much to adjust our economic activity to reverse global warming - I have no idea. There simply isn't enough solid data to make such far reaching decisions.

When the Nasa changes work their way through all those pages, you'll see how significant they are.

In fact I won't, as James Hansen of NASA himself has already said "the effect on global temperature was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable."

What will happen is as the hype and misinformation around this story die down you will realize this is not the breakthrough you were hoping for and does not debunk global climate change in the least.

The other anecdotal stuff you mention - glaciers melting, people feeling hot etc. - can be explained by the fact that we are experiencing temperatures as hot as the 1930's which was the dustbowl decade. It was hot then and it is again but the present is not uniquely hot, by definition.

No, that's wrong too, as the years between 2002 and 2006 were hotter than the dustbowl years. In fact, because they are the hottest years on record they are by definition "uniquely hot."

Also, while temps did spike in the 1930's, they also have been steadily trending upward since the late 1800's until now. It's not like it was unusually warm in the '30's and it got cool again and it's "hot" now -- overall it's been getting hotter and hotter and hotter.

Also, regarding the "anecdotal" evidence I referenced which is actually empirical evidence: these things were not happening worldwide in the 1930's.

They are now.

Dolt.

It would seem to be a simple question: Is there global warming and if so what has caused it? If the question was handled purely in a scientific manner we would have various theories put forward with backing data for peer review and debate. This would lead to new or refined theories and eventually we would get as close an answer as our understanding would allow. Instead, this issue has been fought in the political arena where if one side disagrees with what the other puts forward they are subjected to all of the defamation tools of the political animal: name calling (Wingnuts), hyperbole (dumber than a box of rocks), ad hominem (don’t trust those guys, they’re backed by the oil companies), scare tactics (if you don’t start paying for your carbon footprint the icecaps will melt and half the world will be flooded), false causality (temperatures are increasing, therefore it must be caused by man), Stereotyping (aluminum hats), guilt by association (holocaust denier and AGW denier are one in the same), etc. Is this science as seen through the eyes of a political commentator?

From what I can see from all of the literature I’ve read the position of the pro-AGW camp is this: temperatures for the last 3000 years have been relatively constant (+/- 0.5 C) and only recently have shot up to there present day averages (the much touted hockey stick that had to be the worst thing that has been called science that I’ve seen). The increase in temperature can’t be explained by natural causes and must therefore be manmade. A greenhouse is warmer inside than out, therefore it must be greenhouse gases that cause the increase in temperature. CO2 is a greenhouse gas and since there is more CO2 created by man now than there was in the past 3000 years it must be the evil industrial west (especially the US) that has caused global warming.

I’m not certain that there is a “consensus” from the anti-AGW camp, other than CO2 isn’t the cause of anything but greater fertilization to plant life, but the likelihood that the heating is due to the greater solar activity and our proximity to the sun seems to be a pretty convincing argument.

I can understand the skepticism of AGW when the conclusions sound to me a bit like how Monty Python’s Sir Bedevere determines if a person is a witch (since you burn witches they must be made of wood and since wood floats you can tell the person is a witch if they weigh the same as a duck, which also floats). The scientists that questioned the conclusion of global warming prior to 2000 (and even up to 2005) had very valid reasons for doing so. There was enough data available to show a steady-state or even decreasing average global temperature (depending on how you read the various temperature graphs – including the NASA measurements from 1978 to 2000 - and data that indicated that southern hemisphere temperatures were decreasing rather than increasing). When more data was available more scientists concluded that there was global warming.

As to whether or not CO2 has anything to do with global warming has yet to be proven – or even shown to be statistically noticeable compared to the amount produced naturally. I do know that CO2 is released from our oceans in greater quantities when temperatures increase. This is measurable from experimentation and actual readings. This begs the question – if an increase in CO2 causes an increase in temperature and an increase in temperature causes an increase in CO2, why hasn’t the world come to an end before this time?

Why are those scientists that question AGW branded with the mark of Cain and vilified with every epitaph the political machine can come up with? Do they perhaps threaten the manna from heaven that is feeding all of the pro-AGW concerns? Is the emperor really wearing any clothes? (If anyone from Exxon is reading this, please forward my check. I haven’t been paid in weeks.)