Poirot,

<<Exxon and the Koch Brothers are amongst the biggest financial supporters of climate "skepticism"...and it's not so surprising that an oil company would be looking at profiting from all that algae caused by chemical fertilizer run>>

In the inimical words of Sheldore the Conqueror : “There’s just no pleasing you, is there, Poirot?”
http://bigbangtrans.wordpress.com/series-3-episode-03-the-gothowitz-deviation/

Talking of good lines, loved this one from Loudmouth:
“As Poirot put it so characteristically, and with all the sophistication and depth of the current student left, 'Whoopy-do !”

Have a good weekend!

Any progress on that link to the voodoo doll, SPQR?

Loudmouth, you have apparently still failed to get my original point. But it may not be worth going over again. The second point I made was the reason so many climate scientists hold the same view is because that is where the evidence points. I spelt out some of the more obvious pieces of evidence in my earliest post.

I am surprised that an average sea level rise of 18 cm and an average temperature rise of 0.8 C in the last century does not worry you. You must live divorced from the real world. The averages may not sound much, but it is the variation on top of the averages that is going to cause the problems. An extra 1 C on a 29C day when wheat is flowering is going to reduce food production. An extra 18 cm on a storm surge could be the difference between life and death.

Leo Lane, yes lots of the people who signed the Oregon Petition had less expertise than the head of the IPCC. At least one of them was dead when they signed. But that comparison is largely irrelevant. The people signing the Oregon Petition were not relying on climate expertise to inform their judgement. Rajenda Pachauri relied on the advice of the hundreds of authors and reviewers of the IPCC documents all experts in climate science.

So Leo, tell me. Why should I listen to an astronaut about climate science? Why should their opinion be better than that of a climate researcher who has published extensively on the topic in the peer review literature? Or indeed be better than my own opinion? What important expertise do they have that I don’t? Other than agreeing with your poorly formed opinion.

Of course there has been warming in the last 14 years http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif but if you pick the right starting and ending points and squint in just the right way you can pretend it hasn’t happened.

Hi Agronomist,

Thank you for your advice. I checked out that graph you referred to and although I squinted and strained, I couldn't get it to go up. Then I rotated it (well, actually, I leaned my head at 90 degrees, looking like a village idiot) and guess what ! It went up ! Yes, if you rotate the page 90 degrees, the average temperature goes up !

Isn't science wonderful ?!

Sea-levels have risen eight inches ? Really ? Or only eight cm ? Different systems of measurement are so confusing, aren't they ?

Hi Poirot,

"It's the increased frequency of extreme events that is the signifier here, not your fanciful straw men."

I wonder how you measure the 'frequency of extreme events', like storms, flash-floods, etc. I wonder if anything like extreme events ever happened in Australia before the 1990s, or were ever recorded in Aboriginal folklore or early settler literature, like Banjo Paterson's or Henry Lawson's stories. Has Australia ever had droughts, like the recent one ? Hmm, that's a hard one.

Gosh, it probably has: 1892-1899, 1901-1904, etc., etc. Isn't that in one of our national songs, 'for flood and fire and famine, she pays us back three-fold' .... 'of droughts and flooding rains .... ' etc. etc.

Poirot, we're the continent par excellence of extreme weather events and always have been.

Cheers,

Joe

:)

Loudmouth,

What part of the term "increased frequency" don't you understand?

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2012/20120803_DicePopSci.pdf

Thank you, Poirot, for James Hansen's article, in which he maintains his earlier reputation.

Correct me please if I'm wrong but I must comment on his focus on wildfires in western US as evidence of AGW: they could have been correlated with the depletion of ground-water, standard summer heat-waves and - as in Australia - the build-up of understorey: a fairly incendiary combination, I'm sure you would agree. Just ask the people who experienced the 2009 fires in Victoria. Associating wildfires and AGW directly is a bit of a stretch.

See ? It's possible to put forward arguments without resorting to backhanded ad hominems, Poirot, which don't actually refute anything :) I may be wrong but like many contributors here, I am honestly trying to tease out issues and any possible defects in the arguments of people like Hansen.

Now you can tell us about sea-level rise along the Bangla Deshi and Egyptian coasts ?

Cheers,

Joe

:)