KAEP, I can appreciate you have a lot of points to make. However, the tone and language you have chosen can be a turn off to people who would otherwise listen.

Personal attacks and being dismissive of others in this forum is not helpful.

KAEP - thanks for the 'sajoesque' bit - almost as good as having a new species or star named after you! Not sure what it means though. I happen to think you have some interesting ideas (although badly presented) so I can't believe it would be at all patronising.....?? Then again, it seems you don't have a lot of time for a female scientist and mother of three whose PhD is unfortunately not in Applied Mathematics.

1.I am with you Alan Grey.The IPCC (2001)may be the only document we have but it is very inadequate. For a start the Castles and Henderson critiques underscored by the UK House of Lord Report makes it almost certain that the projections for future Co2 emmissions, and temperature, are hopelessly over stated.

2.In the context of the debate over the extent of increasing storms etc, or no, the IPCC itself says:“Changes globally in tropical and extra-tropical storm intensity and frequency are dominated by inter-decadal to multi-decadal variations". Similarly cyclical variations in the AMO are also drivng the variations in artcic sea ice.

3. Mike M has a real problem with the source of one my links (to demonstarte the above) because he says it is from a right wing lobby group connected with the Republican party. This is the same bloke who tries to rebuke others for ad hominems,when,in this case the Author is a climatologist and researcher who has prepared and published a document that is totally based upon both peer reviewed science and government data( ie both the figures included and which clearly demonstrate the point are taken from published data). But no,he cannot possibly have any thing sensible to say. The word hypocrite comes to mind.

4. Fig 1 in the offending link shows the relationship between Atlantic SST and Atlantic Multidecadel Oscillation. They are not the authors plots. Fig 2 is a temperature history from the southern portion of Greenland since 1900. Again, from other sources. These tend to show that the doom and gloom merchants are wrong..yet again.

5. Returning to the theme of this article. On the basis of current knowledge, terrorism and the antics of the Islamacists are already doing more damage than any marginal variation in temperature. One is now, and real word driven, the other may or may not happen sometime in the future, and if it did, it can be ameliorated.

I am still interested in any reasons why methane that is set to be released from permafrost due to global warming cannot be harnessed and used as fuel. If in doing so it becomes twenty times less harmful as a greenhouse gas by converting into CO2 (according to dobermanmacledo), reduces the reliance on middle-eastern oil and extends our fuel reserves considerably isn't it worth considering? Maybe it is a stupid question but as we have so many experts here maybe someone can tell me why not? To me (no engineer I admit), it doesn't sound any more crazy than sequestration of CO2 underground or even drilling for oil in the middle of the North Sea. Should I be buying up large tracts of land in Siberia?

bigmal wrote, "Mike M has a real problem with the source of one my links (to demonstarte the above) because he says it is from a right wing lobby group connected with the Republican party."

TCSDaily itself says, "TCSDaily.com is published by Tech Central Station, a division of DCI Group, L.L.C.", http://www.tcsdaily.com/about.aspx and DCI makes no effort to conceal its connections with the Republican Party, http://www.dcigroup.com/leadership/

Since bigmal pays so little attention to provenance of his sources it's not surprising that he clings to ideas from cranks, weirdos and vested interests connected with Big Energy.

Good idea, sajo.

The question though is whether methane hydrate exists in sufficiently large deposits to be worth extracting. There is a lot of it, but if it is thinly spread, it may not be cost-effective to extract for fuel. Some current research on the topic is reported at http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/oil-gas/FutureSupply/MethaneHydrates/maincontent.htm

I also have problems with the source presented here in an attempt to push a profit motivated lobbyist agenda. The critique presented against the IPCC in this forum does not tackle nor diminish the central findings of the 2001 IPCC report. The critique against the IPCC findings are based on peripheral and selective findings which fail to mount a credible case against the compelling consensus among the thousands of the most competent experts on the three key findings.
1. Global warming is happening.
2. The strongest contributor to this global warming is human greenhouse gas pollution.
3. If we don’t change our current trajectory of atmospheric pollution we will produce a temperature change of between 2 and 6 degrees C.

The real scientific questions and debates are about how these fundamental changes will ultimately impact the earths systems. And how we can abate as much dangerous climate change as possible.

The science related to these three findings is well accepted. We have records that show robust correlation between atmospheric Greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature over hundreds of millennia. We understand the association between greenhouse gas concentrations and temperature through observations of other planets. We know there are also natural climate forcing factors which have produced climate change in the past. We have learned that these factors are producing smaller scale forcing than the far stronger forcing currently produced by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas.

Our understanding of climate is growing. As we observe the impacts of global warming we are increasing are understanding of positive feedback tipping points Yesterday it was revealed that the upper limited of temperature in the 2006 IPCC report has been removed. The most competent science can not put a limit on how hot the earth will get if we continue polluting the atmosphere as usual.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1719607,00.html