Mark Lawson a science writer? - well,I suppose we can all write about anything we like without having any knowledge about it whatsoever - and it helps if you also have an agenda,possibly one that you are being paid to follow.

Apparently the precautionary principle doesn't apply in global heating denier circles.I wonder if they apply the same thinking to their own personal welfare.

Mark,you keep cool,old son,and make sure you enjoy the payoff for your exercises in propaganda.

Isn't it strange that AGW people are happy to believe their own unqualified alarmists such as George Monbiot etc but when a journalist from the other side has an opinion its all wrong.

Maybe, Manorina you you check the qualifications of the Head of the IPCC whose information you so readily swallow. He's Railway Engineer with an economics degree.

I love it.

Lawson's belated discovery that the Earth is in an interglacial period - something that those of us who were undergraduate science students back in the 1980s learnt routinely - provides him with some positive, if very tenuous, spin to trot out when he eventually has to acknowledge that AGW is real.

What a shill.

Mark Lawson here.
CJ Morgan. If you read the article you will see that the real question is not that we are in an intergalacial but what is causing it. I'm glad you were paying some attention in lectures as an undergraduate. Now its time to move up to the next level of understanding.

Manorina - thanks for the completely uncalled for and unjustified slur that I must be paid to write this stuff. I shall use that as an example of how AGWers throw around whatever insults they can think of. In fact there is never any money in scepticism. None! It is much more rewarding to scare people. One of the scientists who researches the now emerging solar magnetic theory says that he cannot get research funding for any of his proposals. The grant application has to mention CO2 or no go. In contrast, the Department of Climate Change in Australia alone has a budget of $80 million. Yet the AGWers fantisise that money is going to the sceptics. The exact opposite is occuring.

If Mother Nature has programmed us for another Ice Age she must try harder. Globally March 2010 was the warmest month of March ever recorded. In my neck of the woods I suspect April 2010 will be the warmest April ever recorded. If there is an Ice Age waiting in the wings bring it on.

"Apparently the precautionary principle doesn't apply in global heating denier circles.I wonder if they apply the same thinking to their own personal welfare."

Yes the precautionary principle applies. We should be cautious before accepting a whole lot of panic-mongering 'sky-is-a-falling' hysteria calling for world governmental control of everything, that has nothing to support it but entire industries of parasitic rent-seekers pointing to government-funded computer models every single one of which has proved wrong, at the same time the globe has been cooling.

You keep doing it Peter, why?

>> pointing to government-funded computer models every single one of which has proved wrong, at the same time the globe has been cooling. <<

How can you "prove" the future wrong?

"Every single" model. Really? I'm interested - pick one, and link to it.

I know it might be hard for you to understand time series analysis, Peter - but repeating the cherry picked boundary condition cooling meme over and over again does not make it so.

I think we can all accept that the earth will cycle back to an ice-age at some point - I can;t see any evdience to suggest it will occur in time to stop the effects of the current warming though.

I don't know of any evidence that sunspot activity can be linked to the current climate trends. My understanding is that the current warming trend of at least the kast 100 years has been occurring independently of this eleven year cycle.

About the only sensible thing Mark writes in this article is 'Scientists have no real idea '. When your modeling is based on mythology you can draw any conclusion you like. More fairytales for adults.

Mark Lawson here
Phil Matimein - I don't say anything about the supposed affect industrial gases are having on climate. Although it is becoming increasingly apparent that the effect is smaller than the AGWers had hoped for. What I do say right at the end is that the supposed warming may well be entirely overshadowed by natural cooling - if the solar mag theory is right and if the sun continues more or less spotless. Note the ifs. Unlike the AGWers I'm not saying anything is settled.
For even if industrial gases are shown to have had an effect in one period, it most certainly does not follow that it will have an effect in another. Its a natural system. The only direct evidence we hav e for cause and effect is the solar mag stuff and that's not even in the much trumpeted models.

Mark/Curmudgeon

While this is one of your ‘better’ articles, it is still a non-sequitur – to sow the seeds of doubt (intentional or not, it doesn’t matter).

Satellite measurements since 1978 have been monitoring solar output. The radiative forcing amplitude is under 0.2 W/m2. After averaging over the solar cycle, it is even smaller.

This is an order of magnitude smaller in comparison to the radiative forcing arising from long-lived greenhouse gases.

You fail to understand that there is nothing in atmospheric physics to suggest that the sensitivity of climate to solar irradiance variation differs substantially from the sensitivity to infrared radiative forcing arising from greenhouse gas emissions.

A Watt is a Watt, regardless whether it comes from changes in the incoming solar energy, or GHG induced changes in the infrared radiation loss.

Therefore, if your opinion/article is to have any substance, you need to invoke something else about the way the Sun affects climate – and you try (anything to find another culprit).

Guess what, even the real experts are trying – and guess what again? Zilch, zippo, nada, yada yada.

_______

Onlookers

“Professor Curmudgeon” is doggedly trying to show a correlation between temperature and magnetic field variations over a period when temperature, greenhouse gas forcing, and some magnetic field index are all going up using (by inference) a statistical attribution technique which ignores greenhouse gases AND considers only the magnetic field index.

If we knew zilch about how CO2 affects climate, Mark's article would be interesting. However, we know a lot about GHG’s and their effect. No amount of fiddling by Mark (or any of the real climate sceptics, will make the physics disappear.

qanda

You've got the onus of proof back to front.

The entire warmist belief system depends on the proposition that the globe is warming. But it is common ground that since 1998 it hasn't been warming but has been cooling.

Do you agree with that?

That being so all the computer models relied on by the warmists to predict that the globe was going to warm in that period were wrong; and any consensus that it was going to warm in that period was also wrong.

The appeal to time series is an appeal to a temporal baseline that is not supplied by the positive science, that requires subjective interpretation, and is therefore arbitrary.

And even if it were true that the globe is warming, it still wouldn't follow that any governmental action is warranted.

Now:
a) please admit that climatology does not supply value judgments and therefore the argument that it justifies policy action is invalid, and
b) who is this "we" you keep talking about? You speak on behalf of everyone in the whole world do you? Including everyone who disagrees with you?
c) your snivelling personal arguments only demonstrate your intellectual impotence and irrelevance.

Oh dear, oh dear, Mark is at it again. Reading abstracts and pretending to understand the papers, except apparently he doesn't even understand abstracts either in this article. Go check that Lowell Scott reference again Mark.

I think you'll find that it says: "Deep-sea temperatures warmed by 2°C between 19 and 17 thousand years before the present (ky B.P.), leading the rise in atmospheric CO2 and tropical–surface-ocean warming by 1000 years. The cause of this deglacial deep-water warming does not lie within the tropics, nor can its early onset between 19 and 17 ky B.P. be attributed to CO2 forcing. Increasing austral-spring insolation combined with sea-ice albedo feedbacks appear to be the key factors responsible for this warming"

That is, the deep-sea warming (but only the deep-sea temps, not the surface or atmospheric temps) pre-dated the CO2 output, which apparently drives the sea surface warming. This means that something else is happening pre-dating the CO2 output and the associated ATMOSPHERIC and sea-surface warming caused by 1000 years. OK, I can accept this, but this is not what you said or even interpreted. Because apparently the authors say that CO2 is quite well associated with tropical sea-surface warming. I think I'll have to give you a C+ on this one.

By the way, has the latest round of deep-sea warming been noticed from the last 1000 years that could give rise to this supposedly natural CO2 increase and subsequent warming have recently experienced? I'd love to see a reference on that. I'll review your mark if you can get one. I'd also like to find out how this deep-sea warming fits in with the solar magnetic theory. Or is that total solar output "model" (oh how you love models!). A good reference on the "solar-magnetic theory" would be nice too BTW.

"Perry and Hsu’s work also indicates that the present intergalacial, which has proved so comfortable for humans, will last another 10,000 years with occasional bouts of colder climate which may happen from now thanks to the fall of in solar activity."

How odd to be so critical of climate predictions for the next century by many hundreds of scientists, yet to accept without question a prediction for the next 100 centuries by two scientists.

Which takes the most energy to sustain, the Truth or a Lie?
If hundreds of scientists are saying it's true it's probably bulldust.
A handful of people said the world was a globe and orbited the sun, everyone else said they were wrong.
Everyone believed in eugenics a century ago and a only handful of people disagreed.
We can't predict the future but we can sees the past, on these big issues the people being pilloried are always telling the truth, only lies need a massive industry of "experts" and tome writers to support them.
Obvious frauds and crackpots are ignored by the PC establishment, only true Heretics are challenged.
PC is a tool oppression, Climatism is backed by PC, so Climatism is a tool of subjugation.
We've gone beyond the point where it matters whether AGW it's true or not, Climatism is being used to oppress people so it's bad, bad, bad...bigger and badder than Fascism and Communism combined.
Warming is the next (Genocide)Holocaust.
Anyone who questions is a denier(Heretic).
A holocaust denier.
Andrew Bolt, bless his little zionist socks called Todd Sampson on this very point on the 7PM project the other night, Sampson looked like he'd swallowed a Wasp and changed the subject.

"on these big issues the people being pilloried are always telling the truth"

And almost everyone believes that the earth is basically spherical so that must be false, it's really the flat earth'ers who are telling the truth. Most people believe that abusing children is wrong but a small number disagree (and don't they get criticised for it) so they must be the ones telling the truth. The list could just go on and on and on.

R0bert

Indeed, the list does go on:
Pederasty was widespread and ignored if not condoned outright in many institutions and in society more generally,it was covered up by spin, indoctrination and outright threats of violence. It took a small group of people in the 80's and 90's to come out and speak the truth about what happened to them, then more truths started came out.
There is still resistance to further enquiries and many institutions will not co operate unless backed into a corner.
The Genocide of Indigenous Australians was accepted and condoned by Australians because of government spin and indoctrination, it took a small group of individuals to get the ball rolling and start telling the truth of the matter.
There is still massive institutional resistance to Reconciliation and recognition of genocide, there is an ongoing program of indoctrination and spin to support this uncompromising position.
Rinse and repeat for, domestic violence,police corruption,weapons of mass destruction, 9/11, the "war" on Drugs...it never ends.
The common link:VESTED POWERS, RED FRONTS AND MASS REACTIONS, the State, the Plantation owners, the globalists, Petro Barons, the Churches and the Leftists, rightists and Centrists.
Climatism equals money,Anti Racism equals money, AGW equals money, Leftism and Rightism equal money.
NO ONE MAKES MONEY FROM HERESY.

"We can't predict the future but we can sees the past"

Too right, Jay. So what is the right answer, then? I dont know, nor do I think I could distinguish between the Nostradamuses and narcissists who think they know what the future will bring. I wonder what opinions were proffered by the Easter Islanders as the tree population rapidly declined? Perhaps there was a prophesy that when the last tree was cut down, the Gods would give them the miracle of a new forest?

The prophesy that we can continue with business as usual and everything will be hunky dory is an appealing one. It's ten more millennia of sun and surf before the next ice age claim the great prophets Bib and Bub, and who can argue with that?

"Mark Lawson here.
CJ Morgan. If you read the article you will see that the real question is not that we are in an intergalacial but what is causing it. I'm glad you were paying some attention in lectures as an undergraduate. Now its time to move up to the next level of understanding."

Good one! ROFL

But, I think you're asking the impossible!

Where did you acquire your vast knowledge of science, Horus?

Fester.
No doubt about the Easter Islanders, Africans think the same way now, they're blaming God or their neigbours poor land management practices for poor harvests, drought and soil erosion.
Deeply religious people tend to stand there shaking their fists at the sky and blaming their Neighbours or Witchcraft for things that are beyond their control.
Africans will most likely never move from that position, just like the Easter Islanders, we see it now, everywhere a group of Africans are living with drought every blade of grass is pulled up, every strip of bark and every twig is gone within staggering radius and they're sitting in the dust waiting for the Hercules.
So Africans will never be environmentalists, give them a fish and they'll eat for a day, give them a fishing rod and they'll sell it and give the money to a Priest or a Shaman who'll pray for divine intervention.
Europeans will wait until the Gates Of Vienna are threatened before they'll move, they'll submit the High Priests of the Religion of Political Correctness and labour for the Robber Barons until their children are about to starve then they'll rise up and start taking out their angst on their neighbours.
It is the way of things, the Robber Barons and Theologians will flee and mutate to yet another form, when the Berlin Wall came down all the Commies became Anti Racists and Climate experts and the capitalists became Respectable Conservatives.

I'm more struck by the similarities, Jay. "Things will always be the same." is part of the human psyche. The advantage we have in our modern society is the objective view of science. Without science to identify and hopefully solve the world's problems, what could we do other than blame angry gods, witchcraft, or our neighbours? And unlike gods and witchcraft, scientific ideas are based on testable parameters.

Jay of Melbourne:
<Africans think the same way now, they're blaming God or their neigbours poor land management practices for poor harvests, drought and soil erosion.>

Quite right, Jay; they should be blaming colonial exploitation rather than God!

Why shucks CJ, one taint need much science to whoop you.
Why I reckon I’d have more science in my teensy-weensy toe nail, than you’d have in the whole of your big, achebreaky head

Peter Hume

>> The entire warmist belief system depends on the proposition that the globe is warming. But it is common ground that since 1998 it hasn't been warming but has been cooling. Do you agree with that? <<

No.

>> That being so all the computer models relied on by the warmists to predict that the globe was going to warm in that period were wrong; and any consensus that it was going to warm in that period was also wrong. <<

No, it is NOT so. See my comment about models here:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=10363#169648

My explanation about time series analysis has gone way over your head, as your next comment in response demonstrates.

>> The appeal to time series is an appeal to a temporal baseline that is not supplied by the positive science, that requires subjective interpretation, and is therefore arbitrary. <<

What a gem!

But, um ... er ... no, that’s not how science works.

>> And even if it were true that the globe is warming, it still wouldn't follow that any governmental action is warranted. <<

True, but they would be making a big kahuna of a dum-dum.

>> Now:
a) please admit that climatology does not supply value judgments and therefore the argument that it justifies policy action is invalid, and
b) who is this "we" you keep talking about? You speak on behalf of everyone in the whole world do you? Including everyone who disagrees with you?
c) your snivelling personal arguments only demonstrate your intellectual impotence and irrelevance. <<

a) Ok, I admit ‘climate scientists’ do not supply value judgments. And policies to address their objective judgment should reflect them.

b) If you can’t figure out who “we” are by now, there is little left to talk about.

c) Yeah right. I asked if you could pick a single model and link to it after you asserted “every model is wrong”. You won’t because you can’t and just won’t acknowledge that, and I’m the one getting testy – I wonder why.

Fester.
We're not talking about science, Climatism has nothing to do with science or climate and everything to do with superstition, oppression and control.
As I said whether the world is warming or not doesn't matter because the Commies are all now Climatists, the new class struggle is between the climate aggressors and climate victims.
Commies only see Victims and Victimisers.
Look at the way people respond to my posts, Climatism is about Racism.
Africans Always suffer because of White Colonialism not because of their own cultural or racial shortcomings and inability to understand their own situation or their own environment.
Every crisis in Africa has the same beginning and end, every place that is settled by Africans is the same pitiful mess, every African fleeing persecution is fleeing other Africans, every African society is corrupt, dysfunctional and on the verge of collapse.
Africans are in trouble because of other Africans but the only time they really starve or really suffer is when White people can't get there in time to help them.
We give money to Africa, the African elite steal it, the people go hungry and Whites get the blame while the cash gets funneled straight back into the Western Banking system.
If we have to compensate the Third world for Emissions it'll only cause more suffering, more war, more corruption and misery and the only people to profit will be the Climate Commies and the Robber Barons.
Climatism is about Greed, Corruption and Power, it's backed by a Religion called Political correctness which controls Western knowledge and science generated in universities like the monastic orders of old.
This is the way of things.
Non believers and heretics are persecuted and the people are oppressed.
More on the religion of PC
:http://natalt.org/2009/10/16/the-theology-of-political-correctness-original-sin/

Qanda and Bugsy - only just saw your not very constructive response, but I enjoy exchanging words with you guys.

Qanda: You have confused solar output (sunlight ect) with the solar magnetic field. Solar output doesn't vary that much, but the magnetic field does and, as the article says, there is now considerable evidence that it affects climate. The evidence is sufficiently strong that even the global warmers (Lockward ect as noted in the article) have grudgingly admitted there must be a case, albeit they also say that it breaks down in 1985. You are hardly alone in confusing the two, as even senior scientists have done so. As for current warming you have inspired me to look more closely at recent results. There most certainly is a correlation between changes in solar magnetic fields and the current pause in warming but I understand its not clear cut. I'll see if I can get an article out of it.

Bugsy - nope. You make an interesting point, but the main pont of paper is that the warming started well before the rise in CO2. The complications you cite are merely complications. As well as reading the paper you should look at the associated announcement by the university. In any case, even if you manage to poke a hole in the paper's argument, there are everal more which I didn't bother to quote saying the same thing. The minimum delay given is a couple of centuries. As this is now very well accepted global warmers have adapted their theories to suit. They now say that the obital cycles trigger warming which causes CO2 levels to rise which takes over the warming, and so on.

Mark, read my post again - particularly this bit:

“Professor Curmudgeon (ok, I'm being facetious) is doggedly trying to show a correlation between temperature and magnetic field variations over a period when temperature, greenhouse gas forcing, and some magnetic field index are all going up using (by inference) a statistical attribution technique which ignores greenhouse gases AND considers only the magnetic field index.

If we knew zilch about how CO2 affects climate, Mark's article would be interesting. However, we know a lot about GHG’s and their effect. No amount of fiddling by Mark (or any of the real climate sceptics, will make the physics disappear."

So Mark, I am not confused - I know exactly what you are talking about. You apparently, haven't got a clue what I am talking about ... or you haven't the attention span to read more than a few paragraphs.

Mark, what they also say, and what you are not saying, is that CO2 concentrations can drive warming after the 'initial warming', especially coming out if an ice age. But we are not living in an age just coming out of an ice age are we? Guess what Mark, we are already warm and chucking tonnes more CO2 into the atmosphere than would naturally happen from ocean desorption. What would these same scientists think happens in this situation Mark?

qanda and bugsy - qanda, no you were citing the wrong set of figures when you were talking about nothing having changed in solar.. you were talking about solar output, and never mind the rest of the post.

Sorry to break this to you guys but we do know a lot about the warming affect of CO2 if the atmosphere is just a pile of air and its quite limited. Doubling CO2 concentrations from now will add 1.2 degrees to warming.. the warming effect is more pronounced at lower levels, and then falls off...this stat is now well accepted, if not widely known. The climate models don't treat it as a pile of air, obviously, and insert a feedback mechanism, hence the extra degrees. It gets stranger. When I first started writing the book I, too, believed that the CO2 in the air was mostly human induced, but part way through I realised that something is seriously wrong with the whole theory and the IPCC had to ignore a major slab of established science saying that CO2 only hangs in the air five to seven years. Read my book when it comes out in the first week in June. Always good to chat with you guys.

Actually, I didn't cite any figures. All I said was that the (solar) magnetic field varies - we know that.

Ok Mark, have to agree to disagree - yet again :(

Am looking forward to reading your book.
Good luck with it.

Mark, I don't understand why "something is seriously wrong with the whole theory and the IPCC had to ignore a major slab of established science saying that CO2 only hangs in the air five to seven years."

Carbon cycles through the biosphere, just like everything else. But if you put more in than comes out, what happens?

Just because most of the cells in your body get replaced in about a year or so, doesn't mean that you can't get fat.

I too will be interested to see this book of yours, should be a ripper read.

I am constantly surprised about the division that this issue causes among bloggers! For me, this appears to be a well reasoned report about what is happening in our solar system - it gets saved in my global warming file - another well reasoned report that tends to make the opposing comments fade into global hystericism. If the global hystericists want to get my attention, please give me some SCIENCE to refute this report

"If the global hystericists want to get my attention, please give me some SCIENCE to refute this report"

http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2010/01/epn20101p27.pdf

"Conclusions
In our view the jury is back and the verdict is that cosmic rays and solar irradiance are not guilty for most of the Global Warming. Nevertheless, they could be responsible for a contribution and we look forward to future experiments such as CLOUD at CERN which should be able to quantify to what extent ionization plays a part in the production of aerosols, the precursors of cloud formation."

CJ

Methinks this was a draft of his failed application for Bolt's job.

examinator