Janama: "I suggest you keep up to date."

I try to Janama but for the life of me, try as I might, I can't find any direct evidence that consensus of practising climate scientists is that AGW is wrong. Perhaps you can help me out? The best I can do is the study of Peiser, 2005. Its the best because it is the most recent I know of.

Benny Peiser set out to prove that there were published climate scientists who disagreed with AGW. He did a survey of 1,247 peer reviewed papers on the climate, and after reviewing them claimed 34 of them disagreed. If anything 34 in 1,247 would of disproved his point, but sadly for Peiser it went from bad to worse. After he published his paper in the journal of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists AGW supporters started crawling all over it - as you might expect, knowing how the politics is played in this game. They said Peiser was wrong, only one of the papers he reviewed disagreed with AGW. It took a year or so, but eventually Peiser publicly conceded that was the case. The final dagger in the heart is that one paper wasn't peer reviewed. So the final tally: Peiser has done the second study showing that no practising climate scientists disagree with AGW. It wasn't the result he was after. You can read about the whole sorry saga here:

http://www.logicalscience.com/skeptics/BPeiser.html

Anyway, now you tell me I am out of date, and there has been a major shift in the thinking of at least some climate scientists in the interviewing 3 years. Please, I want to know more. Point me to where I can find out more about this great change of heart.

Over the past few years it appears that many observations show that the warming rate that was evident in the 1980's & 1990's, has stalled. Some argue that this is only temporary, flat or negative trends are not rare (see below for a view contrary to this), & the previous rate will re-establish itself.

On Lucia's climate blog (linked below) she monitors the trend of a composite of 5 temperature time series: GISSTEMP, HADCRUT, NCDC & the two satellite lower troposphere temperature series, UAH & RSS. Lucia's main purpose is to test, with monthly data, from Jan 01 to present, the IPPC's statement that the early decades of this century will see temperatures increase at a rate of about .2C per decade. Now with another 6 months she will have 8 years or 96 months of data & at this stage, unless the temperatures start warming quickly, the trend will most likely be negative over these 8 years.

http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/do-short-time-series-neglect-energy-at-large-time-scales/

One commenter (see comment 4122 in the link) has pointed that if you look at 8 year periods, from 1900 to the present, in the surface temperature data, the only ones where you have had negative trends are associated with volcanoes near the end of the series (1900's, 1960's, 1970's, 1980's & 1990's), except for a series in the 1940's during a period of cooling. Those volcanoes which pump large amounts of SO2 into the stratosphere, such as Mount Pinatubo in the early 1990's, have a significant cooling effect on all these series.

The evidence appears to be accumulating that climate sensitivity, as communicated by the IPPC, is exaggerated. This evidence includes flat or cooling surface & troposphere temperatures, flat or cooling ocean temperatures down to 2,000 m. (recently commissioned ARGO buoys) and tropical mid troposphere temperature observations from radiosondes & satellites, which differ markedly from model predictions.

Last but not least is Roy Spencer's work suggesting that the IPPC's climate sensitivity of 3C +/- 1.5C may be overstated by as much X 6. Roy is presenting a PP presentation on this at the University of Alabama at Huntsville tomorrow, Thursday.

Don Aitken,

I appreciate your response ... we are all busy. However, I can only reiterate: societies, economies and businesses the world over are trying to come to terms with the issues connected with ‘climate change’. Despite its flaws and the difficulties they are presented with, we have an international framework convention dealing with this. It would seem prudent to constructively engage in this process.

To this end, I would be interested to know if you will be making a submission in response to the government’s ‘green paper’,

http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/greenpaper/index.html

either of yourself or in alliance with vested interest groups, particularly since you have adopted a very public stance as a political scientist of stature on the issue.

I realise it requires time and effort to respond to contributors here, and sometimes we have to prioritise our life accordingly. Nevertheless and in terms of your article I would like to ask again, why don’t you make some brief constructive suggestions as to;

“How to set it right, who should do it, what scale would it require, when to do it and who should pay for it?”

Whether you reply or not, I agree with you in that humanity has serious problems. I contend that AGW is compelling – in this we differ.

As to the statistics,

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/giss-ncdc-hadcru/

Extracting: there hasn’t been any 'cooling' since 1998, not according to GISS, HadCRU, or NCDC ... AGW isn't some new theory that hasn't stood the tests of time and intense scrutiny. The basic physics was worked out over a century ago; the details ... have been the focus of some of the most intense scrutiny in the history of science. As the scrutiny has become more intense, confidence in the basic hypothesis has gotten ever stronger. In my opinion, the confidence which should rightly be assigned to this conclusion is far greater than is required to justify not only action, but extreme action.

What if the sceptic side is right? Then we'll have devoted considerable resources to a cleaner environment and a sane, sustainable energy policy.

What if the sceptic side is wrong?

Q&A,while we wring our hands in guilt and self flagellation,China and India will make merry in buying our coal/gas,enjoying better lifestyles.Be it AGW or cooling,our present policy without the major players is economic suicide.Kevin Rudd is just grandstanding at our expense.

Arjay, you just "popped" up, it is getting late, but I will respond - good night.

Don Aitkin: "your GISS links supports my statement"

Nonsense, its clear they don't. Are you are so grossly incompetent that you can't read a technical article, or a graph, or are you just a bald-faced liar who hopes people won't go and read the sources?

From the link, (again: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/) they state with much clarity: "'Global warming stopped in 1998,' has become a recent mantra of those who wish to deny the reality of human-caused global warming. The continued rapid increase of the five-year running mean temperature exposes this assertion as nonsense."

Couldn't have said it better: the entire premise of your article is nonsense.