Dewi, I provided the link to the IPCC graph only to show the cooling which David denies. Nothing more. What one makes of it - a blip, a dent, a trend - is interpretation and, yes, a matter of scale, but it helps to start with the accepted data.

Continued from above...

These were the kinds of concerns that led the late Professor Rhys Jones of the Division of Archaeology and Natural History at the Australian National University to tell a National Academies Forum on Climate Change in 1996 that:

“From one’s perspective as a pre-historian, the greatest catastrophe that one could possibly imagine for human kind would not be some small degree of ‘global warming’ but rather a return to glacial conditions... Mrs Brundtland’s Norway would be covered with ice, with only the mountains sticking out like Antarctic nunataks. North Germany would be a polar desert, devoid of human population as it was during the period from 23,000 to 13,000 years ago... In north America, there would be ice lobes pushing glacial outwash from New York west to St Louis. Wheat production would not be possible in the prairies of North America, not Europe, the Ukraine nor northern China ... [Some] northern hemisphere OECD countries would be mere shadows of their former selves... One might in this context argue as J M Mitchell (1973, 1977) has done, that a regime of industrially released carbon dioxide into the atmosphere might even be a good thing, in that it might artificially extend the present interglacial by another few thousand years.”

The point at issue here is not whether these assessments were valid but whether they did in fact command the support of a significant minority of expert opinion.

Richard, you are looking at the IPCC graph from the 3rd report. Unfortunately the scientists seem to have moved the goal posts here or cooked the books;)
Looking at the global average temp graph at page 6 of the latest summary for policy makers it looks like the only significant decade for cooling was the '40s. How can they change the "facts" like that in the middle of a good argument?

Sorry Alison but it is past my bedtime, I will try to answer your postings later.

by the way, Richard i think dewi's list is a good one. Plenty of distractions from global warming there. Surely the obvious psychological replacement for the cold war is the War on Terror. That seems a no-brainer to me. You would have to refute its candidacy before your thesis about global warming could fill the void.

Alison, I appreciate your posts but you mistake me. I object to the title (which Richard admits misleads) and his statement: “Average temperatures fell by 0.2 degrees over 30 years, and many scientists believed the trend would continue.” This misleads rather than lies. His thesis is that we were stoical then (whereas now a 0.3 degree rise makes Chicken Littles of us all). I refute this:

1. The 0.2 figure was uncertain then and scientists’ ability to predict was meagre. These uncertainties meant the public needn’t take the issue seriously, stoic or not. Here is John Gribbin, writing in 1988: “(in 1975) estimates of temperature increase for doubling of CO2 varied from 0.7 to 9.6 degrees”. (By the way, if I were the scientist with the 9.6 degree estimate, I would have wonderful grounds to scare about heating not cooling.)

2. I object to “many”. Surely this means more than 10%. It also depends on the rest going along with the “scaremongers.” Here is Gribbin again; saying that, in 1975, Wallace Broeker’s paper in Science let the CO2 problem out of the box: “he came up with the prediction that the runaway exponential growth in the amount of CO2 would take temperatures by 2000 higher than they had been for 1000+ years.” So some were beating up warming while others were scaring with cooling? Others were saying: “we just don’t know?” The World Climate Conference (1979): “Climate will continue to vary and change due to natural causes. The slow cooling trend in parts of the northern hemisphere during the last few decades is similar to others of natural origin, and thus whether it will continue or not is unknown". Yawn! (William Connolley’s site on “globalcooling”.)

In summary, the usual denialist argument: “The scientists tried to scare us with global cooling in the 70s, now they are trying to scare us with warming. Don’t believe them: they are scaremongers,” doesn’t stack up. In the 70s there was “The Great Climate Uncertainty”, which, of course, being about uncertainty of the facts and the predictions, wasn’t scary at all.

S of S, thanks for mentioning the 4th report policy summary. You say: “In the 70s there was “The Great Climate Uncertainty”. But then refer to the adjusted data of this document regarding the 40’s to 60’s (there are other adjustments) and make the relevant remark “How can they change the ‘facts’ like that in the middle of a good argument?” If there is still so much uncertainty about the recorded data, such that it 'changes' in just 7 years, and the IPCC has significantly altered its projections in that time as well, what makes you so much more certain today, and what certainty can there possibly be about temps in 100 years time? The argument about the “primitive” climate science of the past seems nullified. There also seems to be a great danger of the data being adjusted to the theory, which is unscientific. As one commentator at

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1175#comments

says:

"We’ll lose the concept of time soon. It will undoubtedly get warmer in the future, but also past temperatures will get colder in the future."

I do not feel last two summers were much warmer than ten years ago.

Even opposite.