Mr Right "The best thing for us to do is ignore the lot of them. We have no control over the forces of nature, and we have much more important things to think about."

I think you are "Right".

The Shaman of primative cultures pretended to make predictions based on inspecting the entrails of chicken and goats.

Nothing changes, except these days some fellows are using computers, with less accuracy than that observed from reading the entrails of a chicken or a goat.

I am not talking about Chapman personally but about the entire scientific community who, for whatever motive or self-interest or ego, parade dubious and erroneous predictions around as if they were fact and then denigrate the opinion of anyone who questions their view.

It is all too much like the discussions between Gallileo and the Church of Rome regarding what orbited what.

After the fall out. little credibility is left to make anything of but the real downside:

we will have all been conned,

Especially if it is used as an excuse for Carbon taxes, which are, afterall, nothing more than "Socialism by Stealth".

I have to agree. No sun spots no ice age. I thought this was going to be a hard one. Normal sun, higher temperatures. Co2! That's why they call it the green house effect. See! its not much point in me giving you the 101, cause most of you have debated it already, and know the answers.

So what the!

EVO

David Karoly in "Warming trend has not been reversed" in The Australian today (29 April)destroys this Phil Chapman puff piece.

http://www.Australian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23612876-7583,00.html

I heard this clown interviewed on radio last week and his sunspot arguments systematically destroyed.

Even the article says "the next descent into an ice age is inevitable but may not happen for another 1,000 years". Well that's pretty definite.

A "50-50 chance" between cooling and heating? Another revelation!

Also his notion that we should be sending MORE methane (carbon on the radio) up into the atmosphere to heat up the planet seems to be a clear admission that there is a direct correlation between greenhouse gases and global warming.

During the last major ice age, the entire planet wasn't under ice. While Europe was frozen, Australia was tropical. A small change in AVERAGE temperature still allows for extreme changes at either end.

Localised decreasing temperatures are an outcome of global warming. Ice melts, ocean salinity decreases, currents change and ocean-carried heat flows are re-routed or stopped. Not a very hard concept and it is being measured now.

As for the effect of sunspots, even the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster implies a link between the decrease in the number of pirates in the world and the increase in global temperatures. Apparently we had the same sunspot conditions 11 years ago and didn't see the same effects.

Voodoo science and attention-seeking, right up there with the moon landing hoax and Elvis sightings.

Sorry, Phil: There is no strong correlation between sunspots and warming: http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change/dn11650

The colder weather in 2007 is largely explained by the shift from el nino to la nina: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080114085128.htm

And as an astronaut, you never got off the ground: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Chapman

Yes, he worked for NASA between 1967 and 1972, but now he's just a businessman working in space and aeronautical related fields.

Rule of thumb, if someone quotes Oliver Cromwell AND suggests a geo-engineering solution involving all the world's bulldozers, they're probably a fully paid-up member of the lunatic fringe.

I may be wrong but wouldn't dirtying-up the snow in Siberia and Canada make it more likely to absorb heat from the sun and increase melting?