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Some of you may have heard of a pack of paid shills called The Heartland Institute.

These are the people whom Walmart paid to publish articles supporting Walmart's treatment of workers, and whom Philip Morris paid to bring into question any link between second hand smoking and health risks.

They are also being paid by Exxon Mobile, so it is not a surprise that one of their number, Roy Spencer, has just published a paper:

Spencer, R.W.; Braswell, W.D. On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613 (link to full PDF)

which he is heralding in press releases as disproving Global Climate Change.

Those of you who remember polynomial graphs from school will know that the more variables you're allowed to change in an equation, the easier it is to make your equation fit closely to a set of data points.  In fact, if you have the same number of variables as datapoints, you can always get an exact fit.  This is why legitimate scientists, if they use regression analysis upon a bunch of data to come up with a curve that fits it, then carry out a confirmatory analysis using different data, to double check that the fit wasn't just coincidence.

Spencer, apparently, is fond of skipping this step.  He specialises in taking the inputs he wants to be the cause of temperature records (for instance: cloud cover), then using lots and lots of free variables to combine these inputs to produce a a result that is something similar to what's been observed.

To quote one reviewer:


For those who enjoy reading incredulous scientists writing in full spate, I heartily recommend reading any of the following destructions of Roy's work:

by on Jul. 29, 2011 at 11:23 AM
Replies (11-20):
by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 11:22 AM
Quoting Jane161:

I would suggest that you plot the rate of warming in the early 20th century to the rate of warming in the late 20th century.  You will see that statistically the rate is the same.

It has been claimed that the early 20th century was not anthorpogenic in nature, but only the late 20th century is.  Interesting don't  you think?

Claimed by whom?

As you see from the diagram I gave above, there are multiple forcing components, several of which are affected by human activity, and not all of which force in the upwards direction.

Also some have a short term effect, and some have a long term effect.  Nothing is permanent - even CO2 in the atmosphere will eventually be reabsorbed by the oceans.

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 11:29 AM
Quoting Jane161:

One other item to note is that we have just left a solar grand maximum.  The rate of increase has slowed to point that it looks negative on the whole.

The difference between the peak and trough is about 1.3 W/m2

That can only account for a difference of  0.18°C  in the Earth's global average surface temperature.


by Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 11:35 AM

Claimed by Prof Hansen, Prof Trenbeth, IPCC, to name a few that are recognizeable to most.


Your chart is a nice chart.  The depth of the interaction between the forceings, the timeing of the forceings etc are all imperative to the reaction of said forceings.

One thing that seems to go over AGW advocates heads entirely is that our climate is never stable.  5,000 years before present, Greenlands north shore was affected by waves.  That indicates that the Actic Ice area/intensity was much smaller than today.  That period is called the Holocene Optimum for a reason in that humans advanced at a rapid pace. 

The other thing to take away from that evidence is that the temp was much warmer than present.  Approx 2.2C according to proxy data.  Humans handled that temperature quit well wouldn't you say?

Druing the Roman Warm Period, sea levels were approx 2 meters greater than present.  This is documented also from proxy data such as where the Roman empire mined salts etc.

The alarmism put forth by AGW folks is resulting in deafness, as the projections have not materialized.  As I have stated, there is much to learn about the interaction of forces in climate and the results of those interactions.  That is why there is such a variety of outcomes to the major models used by the IPCC.  Who knows which one is correct, or are any of them correct?  The reason for the large uncertainty is the error bars which must be taken into account.  To not do so leads one to make blind assumptions.

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 12:06 PM
Quoting Jane161:




To help people follow along...

GISS is NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.   They keep available online all their climate models and datasets.

ERBE is Earth Radiation Budget Experiment and refers to instruments aboard some NOAA satellites.

Argo is an international collaborative project to monitor ocean climate and weather data using floating robotic probes.  Their data can also be browsed online.

HadCRUT is the dataset of monthly Temperature records formed by combining the sea surface temperature records compiled by the Hadley Centre of the UK Government Meterological Office and the land surface temperature records compiled by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia.  It is available from the MetOffice website.

They pretty much agree:

NCDC is America's National Climate Data Center.

DMI is the Danish Meteorological Institute who monitor the arctic.

For completeness, white we're doing acronyms, there the IPCC who are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They provide a synthesis report, with error bars, based upon all the data sources:

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 12:28 PM
Quoting Jane161:


Yes, the climate is a complex subject.  The Economist did a good summary last year:


Absorb and reflect




The serious disagreements start when discussion turns to the level of warming associated with that rise in carbon dioxide. For various reasons, scientists would not expect temperatures simply to rise in step with the carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases). The climate is a noisy thing, with ups and downs of its own that can make trends hard to detect. What’s more, the oceans can absorb a great deal of heat—and there is evidence that they have done so—and in storing heat away, they add inertia to the system. This means that the atmosphere will warm more slowly than a given level of greenhouse gas would lead you to expect.

There are three records of land-surface temperature put together from thermometer readings in common use by climatologists, one of which is compiled at the Climatic Research Unit of e-mail infamy. They all show warming, and, within academia, their reliability is widely accepted. Various industrious bloggers are not so convinced. They think that adjustments made to the raw data introduce a warming bias. They also think the effects of urbanisation have confused the data because towns, which are sources of heat, have grown up near weather stations. Anthony Watts, a retired weather forecaster who blogs on climate, has set up a site,, where volunteers can help record the actual sites of weather instruments used to provide climate data, showing whether they are situated close to asphalt or affected by sources of bias.

Those who compile the data are aware of this urban heat-island effect, and try in various ways to compensate for it. Their efforts may be insufficient, but various lines of evidence suggest that any errors it is inserting are not too bad. The heat-island effect is likely to be strongest on still nights, for example, yet trends from data recorded on still nights are not that different from those from windy ones. And the temperature of waters at the surface of the seas shows similar trends to that on land over the past century, as does the record of air temperature over the oceans as measured at night (see chart 1).

A recent analysis by Matthew Menne and his colleagues at America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, argued that trends calculated from climate stations that found to be poorly sited and from those it found well sited were more or less indistinguishable. Mr Watts has problems with that analysis, and promises a thorough study of the project’s findings later.

There is undoubtedly room for improvement in the surface-temperature record—not least because, at the moment, it provides only monthly mean temperatures, and there are other things people would like to know about. (When worrying about future heatwaves, for example, hot days and nights, not hot months, are the figures of most interest.) In February Britain’s Met (ie, meteorological) Office called for the creation of a new set of temperature databases compiled in rigorously transparent ways and open to analysis and interpretation by all and sundry. Such an initiative would serve science well, help restore the credibility of land-surface records, and demonstrate an openness on the part of climate science which has not always been evident in the past.

Simplify and amplify

For many, the facts that an increase in carbon dioxide should produce warming, and that warming is observed in a number of different indicators and measurements, add up to a primafacie case for accepting that greenhouse gases are warming the Earth and that the higher levels of greenhouse gases that business as usual would bring over the course of this century would warm it a lot further.

The warming caused by a given increase in carbon dioxide can be calculated on the basis of laboratory measurements which show how much infra-red radiation at which specific wavelengths carbon dioxide molecules absorb. This sort of work shows that if you double the carbon dioxide level you get about 1ºC of warming. So the shift from the pre-industrial 280ppm to 560ppm, a level which on current trends might be reached around 2070, makes the world a degree warmer. If the level were to double again, to 1,100ppm, which seems unlikely, you would get another degree.

The amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide has become known as the “climate sensitivity”—and a climate sensitivity of one degree would be small enough to end most climate-related worries. But carbon dioxide’s direct effect is not the only thing to worry about. Several types of feedback can amplify its effect. The most important involve water vapour, which is now quite well understood, and clouds, which are not. It is on these areas that academic doubters tend to focus.

As carbon dioxide warms the air it also moistens it, and because water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, that will provide further warming. Other things people do—such as clearing land for farms, and irrigating them—also change water vapour levels, and these can be significant on a regional level. But the effects are not as large.

Climate doubters raise various questions about water vapour, some trivial, some serious. A trivial one is to argue that because water vapour is such a powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is unimportant. But this ignores the fact that the level of water vapour depends on temperature. A higher level of carbon dioxide, by contrast, governs temperature, and can endure for centuries.

A more serious doubting point has to do with the manner of the moistening. In the 1990s Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out that there were ways in which moistening might not greatly enhance warming. The subsequent two decades have seen much observational and theoretical work aimed at this problem. New satellites can now track water vapour in the atmosphere far better than before (see chart 2). As a result preliminary estimates based on simplifications have been shown to be reasonably robust, with water-vapour feedbacks increasing the warming to be expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide from 1ºC without water vapour to about 1.7ºC. Dr Lindzen agrees that for parts of the atmosphere without clouds this is probably about right.

This moistening offers a helpful way to see what sort of climate change is going on. When water vapour condenses into cloud droplets it gives up energy and warms the surrounding air. This means that in a world where greenhouse warming is wetting the atmosphere, the lower parts of the atmosphere should warm at a greater rate than the surface, most notably in the tropics. At the same time, in an effect that does not depend on water vapour, an increase in carbon dioxide will cause the upper stratosphere to cool. This pattern of warming down below and cooling up on top is expected from greenhouse warming, but would not be expected if something other than the greenhouse effect was warming the world: a hotter sun would heat the stratosphere more, not less.

During the 1990s this was a point on which doubters laid considerable weight, because satellite measurements did not show the warming in the lower atmosphere that theory would predict. Over the past ten years, though, this picture has changed. To begin with, only one team was turning data from the relevant instruments that have flown on weather satellites since the 1970s into a temperature record resolved by altitude. Now others have joined them, and identified errors in the way that the calculations (which are complex and depend on a number of finicky details) were carried out. Though different teams still get different amounts and rates of warming in the lower atmosphere, there is no longer any denying that warming is seen. Stratospheric cooling is complicated by the effects of ozone depletion, but those do not seem large enough to account for the degree of cooling that has been seen there, further strengthening the case for warming by the greenhouse effect and not some other form of climate perturbation.

On top of the effect of water vapour, though, the clouds that form from it provide a further and greater source of uncertainty. On the one hand, the droplets of water of which these are made also have a strong greenhouse effect. On the other, water vapour is transparent, whereas clouds reflect light. In particular, they reflect sunlight back into space, stopping it from being absorbed by the Earth. Clouds can thus have a marked cooling effect and also a marked warming effect. Which will grow more in a greenhouse world?

Model maze

It is at this point that detailed computer models of the climate need to be called into play. These models slice the atmosphere and oceans into stacks of three-dimensional cells. The state of the air (temperature, pressure, etc) within each cell is continuously updated on the basis of what its state used to be, what is going on in adjacent cells and the greenhousing and other properties of its contents.

These models are phenomenally complex. They are also gross oversimplifications. The size of the cells stops them from explicitly capturing processes that take place at scales smaller than a hundred kilometres or so, which includes the processes that create clouds.

Despite their limitations, climate models do capture various aspects of the real world’s climate: seasons, trade winds, monsoons and the like. They also put clouds in the places where they are seen. When used to explore the effect of an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases on the climate these models, which have been developed by different teams, all predict more warming than greenhouse gases and water-vapour feedback can supply unaided. The models assessed for the IPCC’s fourth report had sensitivities ranging from 2.1ºC to 4.4ºC. The IPCC estimated that if clouds were not included, the range would be more like 1.7ºC to 2.1ºC. So in all the models clouds amplify warming, and in some the amplification is large.

However, there are so far no compelling data on how clouds are affecting warming in fact, as opposed to in models. Ray Pierrehumbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago who generally has a strong way with sceptics, is happy to agree that there might be processes by which clouds rein in, rather than exaggerate, greenhouse-warming effects, but adds that, so far, few have been suggested in any way that makes sense.

Dr Lindzen and a colleague suggested a plausible mechanism in 2001. They proposed that tropical clouds in an atmosphere with more greenhouse gas might dry out neighbouring parts of the sky, making them more transparent to outgoing infra-red. The evidence Dr Lindzen brought to bear in support of this was criticised in ways convincing enough to discourage other scientists from taking the idea further. A subsequent paper by Dr Lindzen on observations that would be compatible with his ideas about low sensitivity has also suffered significant criticisms, and he accepts many of them. But having taken them on board has not, he thinks, invalidated his line of research.

Arguments based on past climates also suggest that sensitivity is unlikely to be low. Much of the cooling during the ice ages was maintained by the presence of a large northern hemisphere ice cap reflecting away a lot of sunlight, but carbon dioxide levels were lower, too. To account for all of the cooling, especially in the southern hemisphere, is most easily done with a sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide higher than Dr Lindzen would have it.

Before the ice age, the Earth had a little more carbon dioxide and was a good bit warmer than today—which suggests a fairly high sensitivity. More recently, the dip in global temperatures after the eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991, which inserted a layer of sunlight-diffusing sulphur particles into the stratosphere, also bolsters the case for a sensitivity near the centre of the model range—although sensitivity to a transient event and the warming that follows a slow doubling of carbon dioxide are not exactly the same sort of thing.

Logs and blogs

Moving into data from the past, though, brings the argument to one of the areas that blog-based doubters have chosen as a preferred battleground: the temperature record of the past millennium, as construed from natural records that are both sensitive to temperature and capable of precise dating. Tree rings are the obvious, and most controversial, example. Their best known use has been in a reconstruction of temperatures over the past millennium published in Nature in 1998 and widely known as the hockey stick, because it was mostly flat but had a blade sticking up at the 20th-century end. Stephen McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant, was struck by the very clear message of this graph and delved into the science behind it, a process that left him and followers of his blog, Climate Audit, intensely sceptical about its value.

In 2006 a review by America’s National Research Council endorsed points Mr McIntyre and his colleagues made on some methods used to make the hockey stick, and on doubts over a specific set of tree rings. Despite this it sided with the hockey stick’s overall conclusion, which did little to stem the criticism. The fact that tree-ring records do not capture recent warming adds to the scepticism about the value of such records.

For many of Mr McIntyre’s fans (though it is not, he says, his central concern) the important thing about this work is that the hockey stick seemed to abolish the “medieval warm period”. This is a time when temperatures are held to have been as high as or higher than today’s—a warmth associated with the Norse settlement of Greenland and vineyards in England. Many climate scientists suspect this phenomenon was given undue prominence by climatologists of earlier generations with an unduly Eurocentric view of the world. There is evidence for cooling at the time in parts of the Pacific.

Doubters for the most part are big fans of the medieval warm period, and see in the climate scientists’ arguments an attempt to rewrite history so as to maximise the drama of today’s warming and minimise the possibility that natural variation might explain the 20th-century record. The possibility of more climatic variability, though, does not, in itself, mean that greenhouse warming is not happening too. And if the medieval warmth were due to some external factor, such as a slightly brighter sun, that would suggest that the climate was indeed quite sensitive.

Looking at the more recent record, logged as it has been by thermometers, you might hope it could shed light on which of the climate models is closest to being right, and thus what the sensitivity actually is. Unfortunately, other confounding factors make this difficult. Greenhouse gases are not the only climatically active ingredients that industry, farming and land clearance add to the atmosphere. There are also aerosols—particles of pollution floating in the wind. Some aerosols cool the atmosphere. Other, sootier, ones warm it. The aggregate effect, globally, is thought to be a cooling, possibly a quite strong one. But the overall history of aerosols, which are mostly short-lived, is nothing like as well known as that of greenhouse gases, and it is unlikely that any of the models are properly capturing their chemistry or their effects on clouds.

Taking aerosols into account, climate models do a pretty good job of emulating the climate trends of the 20th century. This seems odd, since the models have different sensitivities. In practice, it appears that the way the aerosols are dealt with in the models and the sensitivity of those models tend to go hand in hand; sensitive models also have strong cooling aerosol effects.


Adding the uncertainties about sensitivity to uncertainties about how much greenhouse gas will be emitted, the IPCC expects the temperature to have increased by 1.1ºC to 6.4ºC over the course of the 21st century. That low figure would sit fairly well with the sort of picture that doubters think science is ignoring or covering up. In this account, the climate has natural fluctuations larger in scale and longer in duration (such as that of the medieval warm period) than climate science normally allows, and the Earth’s recent warming is caused mostly by such a fluctuation, the effects of which have been exaggerated by a contaminated surface-temperature record. Greenhouse warming has been comparatively minor, this argument would continue, because the Earth’s sensitivity to increased levels of carbon dioxide is lower than that seen in models, which have an inbuilt bias towards high sensitivities. As a result subsequent warming, even if emissions continue full bore, will be muted too.

It seems unlikely that the errors, misprisions and sloppiness in a number of different types of climate science might all favour such a minimised effect. That said, the doubters tend to assume that climate scientists are not acting in good faith, and so are happy to believe exactly that. Climategate and the IPCC’s problems have reinforced this position.

Using the IPCC’s assessment of probabilities, the sensitivity to a doubling of carbon dioxide of less than 1.5ºC in such a scenario has perhaps one chance in ten of being correct. But if the IPCC were underestimating things by a factor of five or so, that would still leave only a 50:50 chance of such a desirable outcome. The fact that the uncertainties allow you to construct a relatively benign future does not allow you to ignore futures in which climate change is large, and in some of which it is very dangerous indeed. The doubters are right that uncertainties are rife in climate science. They are wrong when they present that as a reason for inaction.

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 12:33 PM

Interesting discussion ladies.  Thank you!

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 12:41 PM

Quoting Jane161:

Quoting Clairwil:

Quoting Jane161:


Claimed by whom?


Can you give a direct link?  Sometimes people say things that are open to misinterpretation.

Here's what Prof Trenbeth has to say about global climate change:

Maybe there is not a crisis in the sense that the world’s weather is falling apart now. But there is a major crisis in the failure to act to prevent potentially catastrophic changes in the future, in the times of our grandchildren, and their children. Changes in the climate are already evident.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has spoken: “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and it is “very likely” due to human activities. Those were the key conclusions approved by 113 nations in Working Group I, which studies the science of climate change and the role of humans in affecting climate. The full report that is the basis for the summary was drafted by 154 lead authors and more than 450 contributing authors and runs to over 1,000 pages. Two other IPCC working groups deal with impacts of climate change, vulnerability, and options for adaptation to such changes, and options for mitigating and slowing the climate change, including possible policy options. In recognition of the stalwart work over 20 years, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore.

Global mean temperatures have increased since the 19th century, and especially since the mid-1970s. Temperatures have increased nearly everywhere over land, and sea temperatures have also increased, reinforcing the evidence from land. However, global warming does not mean that temperatures increase steadily or uniformly because the atmospheric circulation also changes. As Gray suggests, natural variability has always been around and will continue. But we can now clearly demonstrate with climate models (and replicate this in many different countries and groups) that since about 1970 observed climate change is well outside the realm of natural variability.

Some changes arising from global warming may be benign or even beneficial, such as a longer growing season. But warming means increased heat waves and drying that increases risk of drought and reduces snowpack and water resources, a major concern in the West. It also increases water vapor in the atmosphere leading to more intense storms, heavier rains and greater risk of flooding, something observed to be happening in the US and elsewhere. Moreover, as noted by IPCC, there is clear evidence that upper level water vapor is increasing.

The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to show that specific global and regional changes resulting from global warming are already upon us. The future projections are for much more warming, but with rates of change perhaps a hundred times as fast as those experienced in nature over the past 10,000 years. Just how fast depends on how humans as a whole respond to these warnings. There are uncertainties (although these cut both ways). However, the inertia of the climate system and the long life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mean that we are already committed to a significant level of climate change.

Bill Gray suggests that there has been a gross exaggeration and major distortion on climate change. IPCC scientists come from all parts of the political spectrum and dozens of countries; climate “skeptics” can and do participate, some as authors, and their goal is to produce the best scientific statements possible. Yet Gray implies that these scientists somehow no longer act independently, as scientists are wont to do, but instead conspire to mislead the public on climate change for their own selfish reasons. I don’t know anyone who has so profited. Gray’s comments about peer review fail to recognize that scientists are naturally very skeptical. However, it is not “views” that matter but rather evidence and reasoning, the very basis of science. Open discussion based on sound science is widely encouraged.

Gray is correct that global climate models are flawed and are just that, a model of the real world. By design, the resolution of the models can not deal with small-scale (less than about 100 miles) phenomena well. But they are by far the best tool we have for examining the enormously complex weather and climate system, and to replace model results by someone’s belief that has no physical basis does not cut it. The models continue to improve, especially as computers get faster and enable finer structure to be resolved, and many of the observed changes are simulated in climate models run for the past 100 years, adding confidence to understanding of the relationship with the agents that alter the climate and human-induced changes in atmospheric composition, and adding confidence to future projections. It may be impossible to model climate, as Gray suggests, but we are doing it anyway.

I have found that the only scientists who disagree with the IPCC report are those who have not read it and are poorly informed. The IPCC is a body of scientists from around the world convened by the United Nations jointly under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and initiated in 1988. Its mandate is to provide policy makers with an objective assessment of the scientific and technical information available about climate change, its environmental and socio-economic impacts, and possible response options. The IPCC reports on the science of global climate and the effects of human activities on climate in particular. Major assessments were made in 1990, 1995, 2001, and now 2007. Each new IPCC report reviews and assesses the state of knowledge, while trying to reconcile disparate claims and resolve discrepancies, and document uncertainties. The IPCC process is very open.

Two major reviews were carried out in producing each IPCC report. Every one of the thousands of comments submitted, including those by skeptics, are answered and the action taken is documented (in a huge Excel spread-sheet that is publicly available), in a process overseen by independent review editors. Of course, many comments received are in conflict and many are demonstrably wrong. To get the IPCC authors to make changes, there has to be documented evidence and a reason. Opinion alone, such as Gray’s, does not make the grade. Many of the skeptics accept the IPCC report, and their arguments have changed from it is not happening to it is happening but it will be good for us!

The strength of the IPCC report is that it is a consensus report. Far from being a “gross exaggeration” as claimed by Gray, the IPCC report is really solid and conservative. It is not the latest “trendy scientific idea,” Rather it has been widely criticized for underestimating the recent observed changes in the Arctic (record low Arctic sea ice in 2007), and many scientists believe that sea level rise (from melting glaciers) will be much greater than projected by IPCC. Since 1992 when a new satellite was launched that can provide true global measurements, sea level has risen at a rate of one foot per century, confirming the reality of global warming.

Gray goes on to claim, out of the blue, “restricting future greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 20 to 80 percent of current emissions would lead to a large slowdown in the world’s economic development …” On the contrary, saving energy and doing things more efficiently helps the economy substantially while reducing future climate change. It also helps preserve a non-renewable resource, and improves security by cutting dependence on foreign oil.

Gray then goes on to suggest that even if global warming is happening, there is nothing we can do about it because developing countries will continue growth and increase carbon dioxide emissions. Indeed this is a major concern and our government over the past eight years has failed us badly by not negotiating with these countries to protect our global atmosphere through international treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol.

The atmosphere is a global commons. The “Tragedy of the Commons” occurs when it is in everyone’s interest to use and exploit the commons but at the expense of the commons itself. Unfortunately, this is what is happening. In 2007 it is estimated that China will be the largest emitter of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As Americans, we should be outraged that the Chinese are dumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, sharing their emissions with everyone else and changing every one else’s climate! And we should be outraged that our politicians have not represented us well in that way. By the same token, the Chinese ought to be just as outraged that Americans are putting about as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since it is the accumulated amount that matters most, the United States more than any other nation, is responsible for the climate change underway. The United States emissions per capita are two and a half times those in Europe, and emissions per capita in Texas are three times what they are in California, highlighting the scope for major progress. Sixteen US states are keen to follow California into reducing carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles but are prevented from doing so by the EPA and the Bush Administration.



by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 12:58 PM
Quoting Jane161:

Approx 2.2C according to proxy data.  Humans handled that temperature quite well wouldn't you say?

Humans are a wonderful species that can survive in temperatures ranging from Siberia to the Sahara.

Nobody (sane) is claiming that an increasing in the average global temperature will destroy humanity.

But it is true that it is easier for humans to thrive, grow crops and raise animals in some climates than others - both temperature and precipitation.   The more land area covered by these particular local climates, the easier it is for humanity.

Among the problems brought about by global climate change is not only a reduction in land area above sea level, but also changing which crops grow well in which areas.  Which is ok for human farmers who can get seeds from elsewhere (though the yields may be lower), but sucks for animal species whose natural habitat is destroyed.

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 1:13 PM
Quoting Jane161:

I also note tht it looks like you are using GISS as your temperature metric.  The warmth that they recently have attributed to the Arctic is not there according to DMI which uses actual measurements rather than extrapolations on a 1200k radius.

Have you read this analysis?

When you go back to the original data, and run an average, they seem to be pretty much in agreement:

by Ruby Member on Jul. 30, 2011 at 1:19 PM

Dueling geeks! :-) <------- This is said with love!

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