Polar bears are disappearing; the low-lying islands are disappearing; the cheque's in the post. There are others - I'll call you back!

Obviously no-one has bothered to tell the bears that they are at risk. Poor, silly deluded bears, reproducing and increasing in numbers while remaining blissfully ignorant of their looming demise! Don't they get The Independent out there?

Maybe they noticed the lack of sunspots and are preparing for the coming ice age?

In the past two to three thousand years, the Earth has been warmer than it is now and yet, there are still polar bears!

Allan is of course talking through his hat. Similarly nothing the National Post writes about climate change is credible unless corroborated elsewhere.

Are polar bears endangered?
Scientists predict that, if current warming trends continue in the Arctic, two-thirds of the world's polar bears could disappear by 2050. At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (held in Seattle in 2005), the world's leading polar bear scientists reported that of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, five were declining, five were stable, two were increasing, and seven had insufficient data to make a determination.

http://www.polarbearsinternational.org/faq/#q2

And here is the bottom line of the recent USGS studies:

Projected changes in future sea ice conditions, if realized, will result in loss of approximately 2/3 of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid 21st century. Because the observed trajectory of Arctic sea ice decline appears to be underestimated by currently available models, this assessment of future polar bear status may be conservative.

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/special/polar_bears/docs/executive_summary.pdf

Frank, in the past two thousand years, has the Earth ever been warmer than it is now?

Allan

The North Pole could be free of sea ice this summer.

Allan, no.

Frank: How do you know if the earth was warmer way back when?

We only started to approximate "global" temperatures in the 1970's; the issues surrounding the measurement of temps. are vast and unresolved today.

We don't even know what the global temp is today, much less 100 years ago.

Patty,

"Frank: How do you know if the earth was warmer way back when?"

Allan is the one who claimed the earth was warmer in the last 2000-3000 years so you should address that question to him.

"We only started to approximate "global" temperatures in the 1970's; the issues surrounding the measurement of temps. are vast and unresolved today."

You are misinformed. The issues aren't vast, the record doesn't start in 1970s, and in any case the information of interest is the trend.

Patty posted:

We only started to approximate "global" temperatures in the 1970's

LOL! For someone who claims to have read up on the subject (as opposed to relying on Rush Limbaugh) you sure drop some howlers.

here is a great website which gives both sides of the AGW debate a fair hearing.

I read some good denialist stuff on it earlier and you denialists should try reading some AGW stuff so we can maybe have a debate instead of a slanging match.

Allan

The North Pole could be free of sea ice this summer.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 05:27PM | Peter

A tautology is a statement which is always true; that is, no matter what happens in the word, no matter what conditions eventually hold, a tautology will be true. Some examples: “Either it will rain tomorrow or it won’t” and “Marxism is a stupid theory or it is not”, and "The North Pole could be free of sea ice this summer or......" (plagiarised from William Briggs)

And using the New Scientist as an 'independent' source is definitely dodgy. That magazine is so committed to MMGW that, if/when it's found to be a crock, they'll have to find some other cult.

Frank, it's the Medieval Warm Period. Yes, that one which 'hockey stick' Deming tried to eliminate. Here's an extract from:

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/APEC-hockey.pdf

The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is an interval from approximately AD1000 to AD1300 during which many places around the world exhibited conditions that seem warm compared to today. In the 1990 First Assessment Report of the IPCC, there was no hockey stick. Instead the millennial climate history contained a MWP and a subsequent Little Ice Age, as shown as in Figure 3. The late 20th century appears to be nothing special by comparison. It is easy to see why this graph was a problem for those pushing the global warming alarm. If the world could warm so much on such a short time scale as a result of natural causes, surely the 20th century climate change could simply be a natural effect as well. And the present climate change could hardly be considered unusually hazardous if even larger climate changes happened in the recent past, and we are simply fluctuating in the middle of what nature regularly dishes out.

Allan,

"Frank, it's the Medieval Warm Period"

No it isn't. It's the European Warm Period.

"many places around the world exhibited conditions that seem warm compared to today"

Many places is not the entire earth.

We are currently at or near the maximum global temperature for the entire Holocene (12,000 years - the period during which human civilisation developed), and will very likely exceed it over the next decades. The previous maximum occured over 7000 years ago. Granted there were humans around then, but we didn't have to feed over 6.6 billion of them (something we are already failing to do).

We are also within about 1C of a peak temperature for the last 1 million years, a peak which will very likely be reached this century, even by 2050, if we continue with BAU. These will be global temperatures never before experienced by the species homo sapiens. Additionally the ocean will be more acidic. This is what you have to look forward to in your old age Allan.

"We are also within about 1C of a peak temperature for the last 1 million years, a peak which will very likely be reached this century, even by 2050, if we continue with BAU. These will be global temperatures never before experienced by the species homo sapiens."

Thank goodness for air conditioning!

Allan

Shoot the messenger, eh?

I take it you didn't bother to read the linked article about North Pole ice. If you had, you would have read that it HAS declined dramatically in the past decade and that unless this trend reverses soon, the North West Passage will be navigable in summer to all shipping in a few years, maybe even this year. And that is something that has not happened before, even in your much-vaunted "medieval warm period".

Also, someone should tell your fellow-denialist Patty amout the MWP. She thinks that we only have global temperature records since 1970.

Frank, I have just looked at the graph of mean global temperature (including Europe) from the IPCC's 1990 report and it clearly shows temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period (for the world) as being higher then than they are now. The 'hockey stick' people made that period disappear - but then it was re-discovered:-)

I found this very interesting link:

http://www.sepp.org/Archive/NewSEPP/KyotoAssessment.htm

(inter alia, it claims that 19,000 American scientists have signed an anti-Kyoto petition)

and the graphs are re-produced here:

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=233

The Holocene maximum occurs about 6,000 years ago and today's temperatures are several degrees away from it. That's why we still have polar bears!

Peter, have you bothered to read what you have written, and carried out a quick sense check on it?

1. "....the North West Passage will be navigable in summer to all shipping in a few years, maybe even this year", and that would be a disaster??
2. And that is something that has not happened before, even in your much-vaunted "medieval warm period". 'Medieval' as in 'a long time ago', so how do you know whether it was navigable or not - who was there to record their navigation of the North-west passage which had only ever been navigated little over 100 years ago?
3. "Much-vaunted medieval warm period". Peter, did it happen or not? Bear in mind that the Holocene Maximum of about 6,000 years ago (so warm that even the IPCC didn't attempt to hide it).

Peter: "global temperature records"

Define your terms, please.

When you say "global" you mean...?

When you say "temperature," you mean....?

When you say "records," you mean...?

Science requires at least this much specificity. Otherwise, your whole argument re: mmgw is meaningless.

Allan,

"the IPCC's 1990 report and it clearly shows temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period (for the world)"

Nope. In your haste to dismiss all published research since 1990 you overlook that it clearly states that some of the illustrated temperature fluctuations may not be global. This text even appears in the link you provided.

Meanwhile there is this, from 2006.

Abstract: Global surface temperature has increased 0.2°C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes. Warming is larger in the Western Equatorial Pacific than in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific over the past century, and we suggest that the increased West–East temperature gradient may have increased the likelihood of strong El Niños, such as those of 1983 and 1998. Comparison of measured sea surface temperatures in the Western Pacific with paleoclimate data suggests that this critical ocean region, and probably the planet as a whole, is approximately as warm now as at the Holocene maximum and within 1°C of the maximum temperature of the past million years. We conclude that global warming of more than 1°C, relative to 2000, will constitute "dangerous" climate change as judged from likely effects on sea level and extermination of species.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/103/39/14288

Patty

I was using your own words. Maybe you should try being more precise, so that I can be more precise in my response?

Better still, why not read up a little and maybe avoid clangers? I posted a good link last night which gives equal space to both sides of the debate.

Allan

I just spent an hour of my time reading your linked article which attacks the statistical method used in the Mann hockey-stick graph. Impressive.

Maybe you can spare five minutes of your time to read a riposte here?

I'd be interested in your response.

Peter: I respect your effort to keep up the debate. I really do.

But I think the MMGW argument is full of inaccuracies, false assumption, faulty measurement tools as well as faulty mathematical models --

listen, scientists are unable to accurately pinpoint exactly why and when California Oak trees drop their acorns -- scientists hypothesize that the temps. in April have something to do with it - but there are so many variables that scientists admit that they don't really know with any predictable accuracy.

If scientists are humble regarding oak trees and acorns, don't you think the existence of global warming, and the cause (manmade? who knows?) and the cure (biofuels?) are a bit of a stretch.

The fact that the global warming industry changes the "goal posts" whenever new conflicting data comes in (first it was "warming" now it's morphing into global climate "change" -- because apparently it's the coldest it has been in 100 years ) ---this fact makes me unwillingly to expend any analytical brain cells on researching the global warming data.

Long story short -- I honestly do think the warming scare is a questionnable theory, at best, and a hoax, at worst. And I honestly do think that it is a waste of time to argue about the science behind a questionnable theory.

To me, the whole "man-made global warming" scenario is nothing but a scam, a false religion, invented with the aim of keeping people afraid, and thus relying upon governmental schemes of increased taxation. It's a monumental fraud, nothing less.
And even if I'm wrong, so what? How does that change anything? I need oil. My children will need oil, and we're going to burn up every last cent of it, and then when it's all gone, we'll find some other resource to use up. The planet and its resources are here for us, not vice-versa. Maintaining the quality of human life is what matters, not maintaining "the planet". "The planet" exists for us to make full use of, not vice-versa. We are not subservient to the needs of "the planet", but rather, it's "needs" are subservient to ours. It was created to serve OUR needs in the first place; we were not created to fulfil its needs. Mankind comes first.

Patty posted:

The fact that the global warming industry changes the "goal posts" whenever new conflicting data comes in (first it was "warming" now it's morphing into global climate "change" -- because apparently it's the coldest it has been in 100 years )

Check out some temperature data and then have a think about it. Here's a clue:

"As discussed in the Temperature Trends section below, seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, part of a rise in temperatures of more than 0.6°C (1°F) since 1900."

Tom posted:

To me, the whole "man-made global warming" scenario is nothing but a scam, a false religion, invented with the aim of keeping people afraid, and thus relying upon governmental schemes of increased taxation. It's a monumental fraud, nothing less. And even if I'm wrong, so what?

Tom, thanks for being so honest. I've no idea how much you have read on the subject, but you say openly what many in the denialist camp secretly think. "This planet will see me out, who cares about the grandchildren?"

Patty,

"first it was "warming" now it's morphing into global climate "change""

Sure. That's why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - you may have heard of it - has been reporting for about 20 years now. And, no, climate change does not mean it is cooling, it means climate changes including warming, and changes as result of warming (e.g. changes in precipitation and drought patterns).

"-- because apparently it's the coldest it has been in 100 years "

Which planet are you posting from? Here on planet earth it's a lot warmer than that.

Tom,

"Maintaining the quality of human life is what matters, not maintaining "the planet""

Please take a moment to note your nearest planetary emergency exit. There aren't any.

I've just had a look at your jumbled graph Peter, and it is artwork, as it states of its source. The one curve of measured temperatures is clearly wrong as it somehow(?) omits the cooling which occurred between 1940 and 1970. The deviation from the norm is a maximum of 0.2 degC, and I can live with that. So can the polar bears. This link is much better, Peter, and has all that you really need to know:

http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

BTW and FYI, I saw this link:

http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/

It says that-

"During most of the last 1 billion years the earth had no permanent ice. However, sometimes large areas of the globe were covered with vast ice sheets."

Allan

The "jumbled graph" makes it clear that the climate is warmer now than it was in the Medieval Warm Period.

Allan,

"During most of the last 1 billion years the earth had no permanent ice."

And during most of the last 1 billion years the earth had no polar bears, no humans, and no modern configuration of the continents, either. So the polar bears survived all that the same way Bush survived Vietnam - they weren't there.

Frank

LOL!

>>"During most of the last 1 billion years the earth had no permanent ice. However, sometimes large areas of the globe were covered with vast ice sheets."<<

But is the use of the word "sometimes" in the context of one thousand million years not rather cute!

What's with this "1 billion years"? The earth is less than 5000 years old. It says so in the Bible and therefore must be true.

Ask our host if you don't believe me.