Yes, we know about the models, we just don't believe them. Why? Because

a) they do not agree between themselves
b) their error bars are large enough to account for any changes in temperature to date
c) they fail to explain temperature changes in the past
d) they fail to explain the flatlining global temperatures since about 1998.

Yes, the world is probably warmer than it has been for about 700 years. Yes, CO2 levels are probably higher than they have been for some thousands of years. But is there an established connection? Only in your 'models' and the minds of the grant-hungry scientists who created them.

When Tony Abbott suggested the reafforestation carbon sequestration solution he was howled down by your lot , Abbotts trees would be 1.2 meters high by now and chewing up increasing amounts of carbon every time the Sun rises , every time the Great Rudd fluttered off overseas he burnt 300 Tonns of Jet fuel and what did he achieve ?

Your one of these people what did you achieve ?

I must admit you have made a departure from the "Cash COW Philosophy".
The mind boggles thinking about what Rudd would have done with that money,Carbon Tax what was he proposing 6% remember the Storage Dam he didn't build , part of a strategy designed to mitigate flooding near Brisbane as a result all those People died and all that infrastructure destroyed .What did he do with that money? And where is Rudd now , he's overseas !

The public are with you on carbon sequestration so why don't you concentrate positively on harnessing the Energy and Enthusiasm of the People , engage the service clubs Rotary , Apex , Lions and Sporting Clubs , Schools lets be real anybody can plant a tree even Jesus did ,(I think). Seedlings can be struck in the Burbs in a couple of years they will be starters. Abbott would run with you on sequestration why not mesh him into the effort ' get something to the start line the ALP are impotent , you see it as a positive step so lets get on with it!

Jon J, Friday, 11 February 2011 6:36:55 AM

HEAR HEAR Jon J I agree !!

This is just a re-run of the superstitious belief that adverse natural events are caused by our sins.

Is there an established connection? Depends on how pedantic you are. Pollutants of all sorts have been found to lead to trouble, sometimes subtle, but almost always not counter to first principles. For instance, acid rain may not be formed directly from the sulphur in coal smoke, but the acids that *do* form do so as a result of the presence of sulphur.

A container of air left in the sun gets warmed a given amount, one containing extra carbon dioxide (or a variety of other gases, also common pollutants) gets warmed more so. Hence, there is extra "heat" in a system containing a higher concentration of CO2. indisputably.

A system of fluids (gas and liquid) including ice will *absorb* and hence *contain* "heat" without displaying a great change in "temperature".

These are first principles. The indicator of heat retention is not immediate temperature rise, but depletion of reserves of "coolth". Thinning ice caps, evaporating water, expanding gases etc.

Human activity in releasing lots of pollutants is not unique. The proper class of events is "biogenic". Biogenic changes have had profound effects on our atmosphere, and preceded geologically apparant climate changes. Human activities are approaching this scale of impact and cannot trivially be dismissed without modelling a lot more stringent than current best and strangely absent from the discussion.

The processes that might "correct for" warming activities have not been conclusively shown to be immediate, adequate, or benign. There is no guarantee being given by the oh-so-extensive modelling of climate-change objectors that corrective reactions in the atmosphere will not overshoot, not be violent, or even merely be not ruinously expensive for agriculture as-we-know-it already buffeted by much more minor issues in the weather.

Stopping all emissions would be none-too prudent. Just because the possum has not yet woken is any guarantee that it will not.

I wonder what economic advantages pollution-justifiers gain from being unwilling to clean up? Surely not as great as those greedy scientists.

Rusty

Bravo Andrew Glikson for providing the facts about global warming in the face of 'obdurate stupidity' on the part of the denialists. the situation is indeed alarming and we must act now. Those who call for 'business-as-usual' are condemning us to an appalling future, perhaps the end of civilisation as we know it. We have seen the evidence of climate change in Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia in the past month and can only assume it will get worse. Perhaps the one bit of 'good news' on the horizon is that we face an imminent liquid fuel crisis as we pass peak conventional oil. That might force us to turn to renewables (geothermal electricity, solar thermal etc) and slow the process of global warming. It might buy us some time to be responsible global citizens - at last.

Somegood leads here ; http://www.thebioenergysite.com/news/8099/jatropha-green-biodiesel-from-african-tree

Interesting to see Jon J and his blind followers rejecting such detailed information by simply denying the models. If we don't use models, what do we use? Jon J's strategy seems to be a combination of pointing to error bars and hoping for the best. This is just not good enough.

Godo, the denialists - in their attitude to mainstream science - are very much like those who cling to a belief in homeopathy where it does not fit medical science.

Andrew - go back and look at your own article.. you talk about increases in CO2 and, in particular, note that it is increasing at around 2ppm a year. Quite right. That's been the trend for a decade now (up a bit last year). But 2ppm times 90 years is 180 ppm, so we are looking at an increase of 50 per cent in CO2 by the turn of the century.. assuming the trend holds of course.. but that level is well under that required by earlier warnings of apocylpse.. so what's going on.. aren't the goalposts moving here..

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100075232/realclimategate-hits-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-peer-review/

Some light applied to peer review .

I was lucky. I went to read Andrews credentials, before the article, as I often do.

Then I glanced at the map above, then the first sentence of the paragraph below, the one claiming against all recent research, that hurricanes & floods have increased by a factor of 2 since 1980.

I did not bother reading the rest, as I guessed it would be full of just such misinformation.

Are we still in grant application time?

I think that we can safely hold the premise that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that more CO2 has gone into the atmosphere. Combined with deforestation, and bulk use of fossil fuels we can expect that there has been change in the earth's atmosphere.

There were probably nah sayers in relation to man's impact on the ozone layer by relatively small amounts of CFCs. If there were nah sayers in relation to the ozone layer, they have been proven to be terribly wrong.

I read the supplied background notes in relation to Dr Glikson, and believe that arguments that he is a Climate Scientist; and so, has a vested interest, are meaningless statements. Dr Glikson would appear to be involved in quite a spectrum of related subject areas to make his opinion quite a weighty one.
Dr Glikson talks about time scales in relation to millions of years, not 700 hundred years or 10-12 years.

Although Andrew's statistics about the production of CO2 seem impressive, what he does not tell you is that they amount to 2 per cent or so of natural flows. That is, the human addition is tiny. No one disputes this.

But CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been going up. Quite right, so to make the 2 per cent flow account for that increase, scientists have pushed and shoved the computer models to point of claiming that about half the human increase disappears somewhere (the mystery sink we hear about) and the rest hangs around in the atmosphere for decades.

Sounds bizaare but its the only way to make the 2 per cent figure match the increases we can see.

A distinquished academic in Norway, a Tom Segalstad, has been telling anyone who would listen for years that before the global warming story took hold, the time CO2 hung around in the atmosphere had been measured (by tracking fall out in the atmosphere among other methods) at 5-7 years. From memory he can point to more than 30 refereed papers confirming this - all published before the global warming crowd came to town.

I have been unable to find any refutation, or even mention, of this material in the global warming literature. Perhaps Andrew would care to step up to the plate, and point out where the problem is in the refereed literature?

With unusual lucidity for a scientist Dr Glikson provides a compelling warning of the risks associated with a business as usual approach to continued emission of CO2. In so doing he invites attention not only to rising atmospheric CO2 concentration but, importantly, the affect of all greenhouse gases (CO2-e).

It has been argued that radiative forcing of greenhouse gases other than CO2 are negated by the effect of aerosol emissions and land use. This, it is argued, justifies placing emphasis on anthropomorphic CO2 emissions and action to limit it to no more than 450 ppm, in a bid to limit temperature increase to 2C by 2100.

The problem with this emphasis is that it ignores the effect of increased temperature on feebacks, particularly those causing further emission of greenhouse gases such as melting of clathrates and permafrost in polar regions.

This leads to under estimating the effects of rising CO2 on temperature and raises the questions: why is emphasis not placed on concentration of CO2-e and are we further along the road to catastrophic climates change than we think?

What Dr Glikson makes abundantly clear is that the speed with which we are polluting the atmosphere is unprecedented, uncontrolled and likely to result in unstoppable climate change threatening environment if not our ability to survive. A timely warning!

Adams, Maslin and Thomas in a 1999 publication in Progress in Geography postulate that there is a 100 000 year oscillation between glaciation and warmer periods. They suggest the cause is interaction between Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, ocean and atmosphere. One hypothesis is the oscillation acts independantly of any forcings, the other is that orbital oscillations may trigger initial warmings that lead to C02 increses and all the then feedbacks leading to more warmings until overflows disrupt the ocean conveyor which transfer warm water between different latitudes. When the conveyor switches off ice forms and the albedo effect leads to cooling and ice sheets reform. Alley has shown both warming and sudden cooling can occur in less than a decade. The question is are we in this type of global warming upswing, if so will changing human c02 emission change anything

Global warming causes more snow and cooling. So say the warmists when they are having problems explaining weather patterns. They also usually say that more CO2 causes ocean acidification. But now we have Andrew Glikson saying the opposite, quote ‘further release of CO2 from the oceans ..... warms the oceans and induces ocean acidification’. Wow!

Andrew doesn’t overuse the words ‘tipping points’ but they are a clear implication from the words he does use, in particular the implied extinction of plant and animal species due to increasing temperatures. What parts of the planet have the greatest biological diversity? The wet tropics of course, and that diversity decreases towards the poles. He implies that it was the cooling of the late Eocene that allowed the survival of large mammals and he is previously on record as talking about extinctions in the earlier,very warm PETM. But he doesn’t mention that three new families of mammals appeared during that brief, 170,000 year long period of high CO2 and high temperature and, that later periods of warming and cooling in the Eocene coincided with increasing and decreasing diversity respectively. Indeed research (R Erwin and others) concludes that over the last half billion years rates of evolutionary innovation and diversification are higher in high-energy climates than in low energy climates.

Another alleged dangerous tipping point is claimed to be the release of CO2 and methane from melting permafrost. But the area of permafrost at the end of the Pleistocene was much greater than the area of permafrost now. What were the effects of methane release when that melted? Summer melting of the Arctic sea ice is commonly touted as a tipping point. The latest research from the Max Planck institute published only last month concludes that that fear is unfounded. And what would an alarmist contribution be without quoting Jim Hanson /NASA/GISS and their prognostications for polar temperatures. No matter that NASA doesn’t have recording stations in that part of the world; and no matter that many previous rapid short term temperature fluctuations in polar regions are well-documented.

Ant, the ozone hole is growing again, & new research is suggesting that CFCs had nothing to do with it, in the first place.

WE really should insist that all these theories have to mature for at least a generation, say 50 years minimum, before we take them seriously.

Oh dear, Ant. I don’t think your mention of the ozone layer was a good idea. The theory of the effect of CFCs on the ozone hole is looking increasingly shaky, and possibly another example of where the scientific consensus got it all wrong. The ban on CFCs started in 1989. So why was the biggest ozone hole on record in 2005 and then big ones again in 2008-2009? Clearly the ban on CFCs has not had the intended effect. Indeed the CFC theory has failed to predict the behaviour of the ozone hole during the last 15 years. But, since the ozone hole became noticed there have now been two full cosmic ray cycles and these do correlate with ozone hole behaviour. This theory did predict the large hole in 2009, the CFC theory did not. Expect another big one in 2019. http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v102/i11/e118501

There's big moves away from carbon in vic; before any tax comes about.
A truck just went past with Carbon free building materials advertised on the tarps.
Some people are not with the trend for their own agenda. Victoria will lead the way again.

cfcs break down ozone proven fact so please lets not cloud debate with unrelated conjecture

So I have 'followers' now? Gosh! I just thought they were independent thinkers who had considered the facts. But if they're blind, how can they see to follow me? Please explain.

And just to catch up -- the 'weather getting weirder' meme takes another body blow:

http://tinyurl.com/4rj2c5j

Jon J … “CO2 levels are probably higher than they have been for some thousands of years. But is there an established connection?”

Yes Jon, there is, an established connection which has been known and demonstrated for over 100 years. http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-Scientific-Guide-to-Global-Warming-Skepticism.html provides a useful explanation of how this happens and the empirical evidence showing that it does and is occurring.

Climate models are not intended to explain the past. They are meant to predict the future. The belief that the world has not been warming since 1998 is of course nonsense since every decade since 1960 has been warmer than the one before it and the year 2010 was the warmest on record.

Cumudgeon … “Although Andrew's statistics about the production of CO2 seem impressive, what he does not tell you is that they amount to 2 per cent or so of natural flows. That is, the human addition is tiny. No one disputes this.”

Every climate scientist disputes it and so does every Academy of Science in the world because they know the difference between CO2 from a volcano and from burning fossil fuel? How do they know? Simple.

The isotope of each is different so it is possible to see how much CO2 in the atmosphere came from burning fossil fuels and from “natural” sources. And the answer is that volcanoes do indeed emit 150-250 million tonnes of CO2 a year.

This is a drop in the ocean compared to the 31 BILLION tonnes of CO2 which is now being pumped into the atmosphere every year by burning fossil fuels. I you are interested, Professor Mandias explains this at
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/smoking_gun_humans_climate_change.html

If the IPCC hadn't been such deceptive liars and not tried to cook the books,then perhaps Andrew more us would listen.

"Climate models are not intended to explain the past. They are meant to predict the future. The belief that the world has not been warming since 1998 is of course nonsense since every decade since 1960 has been warmer than the one before it and the year 2010 was the warmest on record."

What can I say? The first sentence goes in the draw for 'silliest alarmist comment of the week'. (Don't get your hopes up, though -- there's always plenty of competition.) If a model can't accurately reproduce what we know has happened already, what reason do we have to believe that it will accurately predict what will happen in the future?

As for the second, you do realise that this is not incompatible with temperature flatlining in 1998? If temperature was going up in the 1990s but stopped going up around 1998, then all we need is one slightly warm year in the next decade to show a 'rise' -- albeit a statistically insignificant, utterly trivial one, probably due to weather stations in remote areas being situated near to air conditioners or taxi-ing aircraft?

And who says 2010 was the warmest year on record? See http://tinyurl.com/459ngkb for some alternative views.

The author does not inspire confidence, as he relies heavily on assertions. For example, he asserts: "Because CO2 is cumulative, with atmospheric residence time on the scale of centuries to millennia, stabilisation of the climate through only small incremental reduction in emissions may not be sufficient to avoid runaway climate change and possible tipping points."

The above CO2 residence times contrast vastly with the measurements of 5 to 10 years reported in the 1990s by Tom Segalstad and by 35 other refereed papers ( see http://www.co2web.info/ESEF3VO2.pdf). The IPCC asserts 50 to 200 years. Furthermore, Segalstad concludes that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is 4% maximum, not the 21% claimed by the IPCC.

Atmosphere effects will be highly noticeable well before the 50 years you mentioned Hasbeen, by which time, you and I may well have departed this world.

What do the following have in common?

The effects of passive smoking.
Acid rain caused by industries.
The hole in the ozone layer.
The attempted reintroduction of DDT into the environment.
The introduction of GM food and patenting of crops.
Human induced global warming?

They have all had their official science strategically blurred by self-interest groups directed by think-tanks and funded by those industries who don't want further government regulation and want the free market to flourish.

For example, if Philip Morris could kick off their "passive smoking is harmless" campaign with $45Million for "their" scientists all those years ago, how much backing can the oil and coal industries scrape together?

Despite what people may think, the scientific proof behind the dangers of passive smoking is officially unproven and was thrown out of the US Supreme Court when an attempt at introducing Federal Laws was made.
All subsequent legislation is local or regional and based on controlling behaviour, rather than officially improving public health.
Is this a reasonable outcome for society?

The global warming debate is just another installment in the same ongoing strategy.

It seems a number of commenters here don't understand the concept of "residence time".

In the atmosphere, it refers to the average time before a molecule is reabsorbed into the top ocean layer. The top ocean layer equilibrates quickly to the atmospheric concentration, but has a very slow equilibration time with the deep ocean. Therefore, any anomaly between the atmosphere and mixed ocean layer takes a long time to disappear. This time is > 100 yrs.

This is the time that some people simply don't understand (unintentionally) or distort and misrepresent (intentionally).

Just to be clear (Curmudgeon et al), the mixing time for the atmosphere and ocean layer to come into equilibrium is short (around 5 years) as you suggest (there is nothing to dispute Curmudgeon). However, the longer time-scales of 50-200 years are for the mixing into the deep ocean. Furthermore, there is a long 'tail' of the response (>1000 years) due to the slow mixing of very deep ocean waters.

AoM
Skeptical Science has a post on it here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-residence-time.htm

malrob
You may have missed it:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=11572#197610

Would you please tell how you think Professor Karoly should respond to your list of questions and assertions.

Bonmot

Thank you for the reference which may be of more interest to Curmudgeon et al ?

My concern is that use of anthropomorphic CO2 concentration as an indicator of future temperature is misleading since it excludes the effects of feedbacks induced by global warming. I argue that CO2-e would be a more appropriate indicator since it takes into account the effects of all greenhouse gases, including those emitted by feedbacks.

I would further argue that as temperature continues to rise in polar regions, melting of seabed and land based clathrates and permafrost will accelerate. That could result in significant and relatively sudden emission of methane and other greenhouse gases resulting in a surge in average global temperature. This would accelerate melting and collapse of Greenland and WAIS.

My concern is that CO2 concentration only results in under-estimation of its effect on temperature. A reference arguing for preference of CO2 rather than CO2-e would be most welcome.

Well said, John J. Thanks.

On climate models, Journal of Climate, volume 23, page 2740:

"The degree of confidence we place on model results essentially depends on whether we can quantify the uncertainty of the prediction, and demonstrate that the results do not depend strongly on modeling assumptions. Since there is no direct verification of future changes' forecasts, model performance and uncertainties need to be assessed indirectly through process understanding and model evaluation on PAST and PRESENT climate."

Alice (in Warmerland)

A very nice sermon ... for the converted. And no, I’m not a denialist -- I just mislike argumentum ad verecundiam. Glickson does a nice summary of some very good science. Pity he’s not above doing equally nice summaries of some alarmist, extreme, or outright dodgy positions. There’s no downside to reducing CO2 emissions, but there’s a very big downside to representing as certain what is clearly in dispute.

For instance, there is zero credible science to support the assertion that extreme weather events are a consequence of high atmospheric CO2 levels. That’s alarmist propaganda, and it demeans science to claim otherwise. The concept of a ‘tipping point’ is also pure speculation; the hypothesis is inconsistent what we claim to know about climate in earlier epochs, and no evidence suggests its relevance to earth’s climate. The claim that Antarctic ice thickness is decreasing by 30 ft a year is simply false. Estimates of Antarctic temperature in particular are highly controversial (there’s a strong tendency for the highest observed temperatures to be recorded near manned base stations); the number of weather stations is tiny, and standard deviations are huge. Assertions that 2010 set some sort of record for high temperatures lacks statistical significance, and climate scientists are apparently unwilling to acknowledge recent adjustments to the urban heat island effect on reported temperature averages.

And so on. What really convinces me that Glickson isn’t fair dinkum, though, is his list of technologies which he asserts we should adopt to reduce CO2 emission. Of his suggestions, only geothermal is a credible candidate for generation of base-load power. Carbon sequestration and nuclear are not mentioned. The former may or may not be a credible alternative — we have yet to do the requisite research & testing. The latter, however, is Europe’s technology of choice, and probably the only technology sufficiently developed to replace coal, gas and oil for humankind in the near term.

Climate Science isn’t settled because climate scientists have caught in flagrante delicto in recent years. We need less cheerleading and ideology, more impartial (and yes, sceptical) science to reach a decision.

Greenland's ice sheet holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 7 metres. Ice melting at the surface and breaking off at the margins of the ice sheet is already adding up to about 300 gigatonnes each year. That accounts for about 25 per cent of the annual, global rise in sea levels.

Last month's meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco highlighted the situation. Jason Box of Ohio State University in Columbus and colleagues listed Greenland's "biggest losers": the five glaciers and ice streams that lost the greatest area of ice in the past decade. The Petermann glacier topped the chart, with 500 square kilometres.

But not all ice is created equal. Glaciers in the north like Petermann and Humboldt lost a lot of thin, floating ice that does not impede the outward flow of ice behind. That means the glaciers did not immediately surge seaward. But thicker ice was exposed to the ocean. Thicker ice acts like a cork in a bottle: take it away and the glaciers accelerate. "If we continue to lose ice, we'll start losing important ice," says team member Ian Howat, also at Ohio State University. "If these glaciers were to accelerate and mobilise the large amount of ice up in northern Greenland, it has the potential for a huge change."

If (only) we continue to lose ice, yada yada

If (only) these glaciers were to yada yada

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride - the climate is not going as some climate scientists and alarmists want it to .. to rightly punish unbelievers.

donkeygod nails it .. well said

AoM: Curmudgeon et al interested in Skeptical Science? Obviously not.

Future temperature for a doubling of [CO2] is used as an ‘indicator’ by convention, there is much literature (and on-going research) on this. Indeed, it is a common distortion of “the science is settled” meme trotted out in the denialosphere that confuses many a layperson. As for feedbacks, much work is being done on that too, including that by Roy Spencer whom Jon J linked to at WUWT. But typically, his own WUWT followers misrepresent and distort even his comments. For example;

“... The most recent decade averaged somewhat warmer than the previous two decades, the anomaly values will be about 0.1 deg. C lower than they used to be. This does NOT affect the long-term trend of the data…it only reflects a change in the zero-level, which is somewhat arbitrary...

And;

... As far as the race for warmest year goes, 1998 (+0.424 deg. C) barely edged out 2010 (+0.411 deg. C), but the difference (0.01 deg. C) is nowhere near statistically significant. So feel free to use or misuse those statistics to your heart’s content...”

And they do.

If you look at Spencer’s graph of ‘running averages’, you could say global warming stopped in 1981, again in 1988, again in 1991, again in 1998, and again in 2010. However, if you conduct linear trend analysis over this period, you will see a statistically significant upward warming trend. Moreover, if you filter the 1998 El Nino outlier and the La Nina of 2010 the linear trend is clearly positive, and clearly significant.

I wouldn’t be too concerned with release of methane from deep ocean clathrates just yet. Although possible, it is very unlikely to happen any time soon. The melting permafrost is another story, it is happening now.

Donkeygod
There is very credible science about the radiative properties of GHG’s. If you put more energy into a system, the system tries to equilibrate – this is being seen and observed now.

Rather than focusing on “alarmist tipping points”, I suggest you look up “squealing” – also happening now. Your assertion that ‘climate scientists are unwilling to acknowledge recent adjustments to the urban heat island effect’ is stupid. The UHIE has been known about for decades and is accounted for. Oh, and there is more than one way to measure temperature than with thermometers at remote locations. Some have even tweaked to satellites.

I agree, nuclear power should be considered in the mix. Would like to hear the author's response. However, I expect this article is just one that has been on OLO's file for some time.

Rpg
There is much research being conducted in the hope of poking holes in the findings of climate scientists. Unfortunately, the science is becoming more robust.

Of course, people of your ilk typically want to withdraw funding from climate science. Go figure.

bonmot

"There is much research being conducted in the hope of poking holes in the findings of climate scientists. Unfortunately, the science is becoming more robust."

rubbish, nearly all research,being funded by governments is to prop up alarmist climate science .. not to poke holes in it, where do you get such idiocy .. that's 24K gold stupid talk I'm afraid. Who is doing this research into the findings of climate scientists.

"Of course, people of your ilk typically want to withdraw funding from climate science. Go figure."

You have no idea what I "typically" want to do .. go figure.

Of course people of your ilk arrogantly think any skeptic fits into a range of set views .. go figure

honestly you prattle on with your own self importance, telling people what they think .. grow up

bonmot

Agreed that the properties of GHG’s are well understood. Problem is, as you point out, climate is a very big system which, if perturbed, will move towards a new equilibrium. Many complex processes are involved, and none are well understood. This is what climate modellers attempt to do. Good on ‘em, but in addition to the effects of GHG’s, they need to account for solar input, heat transfer to/from oceans, behaviour of clouds ... listing the variables alone would exceed my 350 words. It’s perfectly possible to build a model in which GHG’s cool the planet by increasing cloud cover and reflecting solar energy. I doubt that’d be the case, but we badly need discussion of what assumptions/simplifications were made when constructing these models. That’s not happening. Until it does, scientists are right to be sceptical, i.e., not disposed to uncritical acceptance.

I strongly disagree with you about UHIE calculations, though. That was Phil Jones’ brief — his analysis was based on Chinese temperature records from before 1990. He refused to release his data for many years before finally admitted it was 'lost'. There's also much dispute about the quality of even US and European data — defective weather stations, poor siting, changes in measurement techniques (especially sea surface temparatures). NOAA & GISS have on several occasions adjusted the UHIE correction downwards, with what justification we don’t know (I doubt it’s secret, but the rationale’s not been widely discussed). So it’s important to know which datasets modellers used, and when. We don’t. It doesn’t help when reported results lack statistical significance; as you point out, 3SD is the scientific criterion for significance; it’s both alarmist and bad science to assert that 2010 was ‘the hottest on record’.

Disagree about ‘tipping points’ as well. Available data suggests that, historically, CO2 levels have varied from half to five times current levels. You need positive feedback for runaway warming, and no credible mechanism for that been proposed, even discussed.

Which doesn’t mean we do nothing. It does mean we ask questions. Sceptical? That’s science!

donkeygod

I'll repeat for the benefit of others: "Rather than focusing on alarmist tipping points, I suggest you look up “squealing”.

You didn't, others may.

Warmists misuse the term 'denialist'. In fact, the real denialists are those who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence.

There is no scientific evidence that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a significant cause of global warming. To put this into context, if the highest anthropogenic CO2 per capita emitters in the world, namely we Aussies, were to cut those emissions by 20% by 2020, the number of degrees of warming averted would amount to -- wait for it -- the grand total of less than one one-thousandth of a degree Celsius by 2020. Is this worth incurring the not insignificant extra costs of over $2,000 per family of four per year, counting all the flow-through costs of the Govt imposing its taxation strategy? One would have to be a denialist to answer yes.