Peter be nice to Spindoc he is a two pack a day guy cause smoking good for you. He knows it's true cuase the good people at the smoking comapany said so.

Cobber,

Perhaps he has been watching Mad Men and didn't realize the cast are all smoking because the program is set in the 1950's before "the science of smoking causes cancer" was settled :)

Didn't the Heartland Institute work hard on that one too? In the end commonsense prevailed but it might be too late for the climate if the disinformation is allowed to continue.

Peter King, Robert and Cobber,

Isn’t it interesting that you were offered three choices, one was to refute the skeptical science and to quote from the IPCC where the NIPCC are wrong, or you could attack the messengers.

< < You appear to have three choices. You can demonstrate that any warming or climate change is outside the natural variability, good luck as the IPCC’s AR5 can’t.

You can continue to demonstrate you have abandoned rational argument by resorting to abuse and vilification, or having reached rock bottom you can start digging by shooting the messenger and abuse the peer reviewed scientists at the NIPCC.>>

I guess we can all conclude that you cannot, even from the IPCC AR5, refute the skeptical case and instead go for “shooting the messengers”.

Congratulations, no banana but you do resemble fish in a barrel. Unless of course you can muster an argument rather than sixth form abuse?

So now you have concluded venting your collective spleens, perhaps you might offer us some of the IPCC’s science to make your case? Or are we to conclude that as suspected, you don’t have one. Sticks and stones children but I suspect your ammo box is empty and that’s all you have left.

Dear Michael King,

I was wondering what your abuse and vilification was covering up, now we all know, you’re hiding the fact that you never went to school.

<< that the melting Greenland ice cover is going to raise sea levels by x meters without trying to model how much ice will be converted to water >>

My 12 y.o. granddaughter can enlighten you. Greenland is a land mass and has no sea ice on it, it’s land ice. Sea ice, as Archimedes and my granddaughter will confirm is less dense than salt water and does not displace it when it melts.

Try topping up a glass with ice and water, put it with Teddy tonight by your bed. If, as the ice melts overnight, the floor is wet in the morning, my granddaughter and Archimedes are wrong and you will be right.

On the other hand you might have to consider that it is Michael King who is looking really, really silly at the moment

Spindoc,

There is nowhere in my post where I suggest Greenland is covered by sea ice. Greenland is covered with snow and ice and it is melting. Your granddaughter might also explain to you what happens if fresh water ice is melted in one container and added to my glass of water then indeed "my teddy will get very wet"; no displacement required just increased volume of water

OLO does not give much space so pointing out the numerous (deliberate) errors in NIPCC's report is limited and you can easily find out the data if you really wanted to but I will "play the game", so try this for starters...

The 2011 NIPCC report only devoted one sub-section (and one page) to the subject of climate sensitivity, and only referenced four scientific studies on the subject (one of which is the debunked Lindzen and Choi [2009]; a second was specific to high-latitude, not global sensitivity; a third was published in a journal of dubious quality over a decade ago; and the fourth does not support low sensitivity). The IPCC report on the other hand devotes several sections to the subject (i.e. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6.html and http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/tssts-6-4-2.html and http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch1s1-5-2.html) and references dozens of peer-reviewed studies investigating the question of climate sensitivity.

It's a clear difference between comprehensive, unbiased peer review and pejorative, selective reviews.

Leslie: "Is it possible to establish one basic "fact": that the polar caps are melting?"

No, for the simple reason that 'they're' not. In fact there is only one polar ice cap, at the North Pole, the Arctic ice cap; the South Pole is covered by a large land mass which in turn is both covered by ice several kilometres thick, and fringed by sea ice which expands and contracts with the seasons, as does the Arctic ice cap, which is just floating ice. Accurate measurements of these date only from the beginning of the satellite age.

At the moment the Arctic ice cap coverage is well below its long-term average, though significantly higher than previous years, and the Antarctic sea ice is well above its long-term average and heading for a record extent. See

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png

and

http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png

for details (note that the scales on the charts are different).

So... northern hemisphere warming, maybe; global warming, no way.