Deryck wrote: “It amazes me that they can't seem to accurately predict the weather 7 days from now, and yet people are willing to drop everything when the same people predict the weather 7 or even 70 years from now.”

Meteorology and Climatology are two very different fields.

The comparison is ridiculous.

Australian experts will tell us that clearance of the extensive forests of the basin accompanied European settlement. Large tracts of forest and native grasslands in the basin were converted to sheep and cattle grazing from mid-1800s onwards. Soils quickly succumbed to trampling and compaction by these grazing animals.

The clearance of native forests and conversion of native grasslands to pasture disturbed the delicate water table, and set in train a process which would result in the wide-spread problem of dryland salinity.

Prior to extensive water regulation, the natural nutrient load of the water bodies had already been significantly increased from paddle steamer debris, man-made sources of nutrients such as human and livestock sewage, chemicals, etc etc.

Algal blooms can lie dormant for years but will often re-emerge as a different algal species.

The boom and bust ecology of inland rivers does not equate with the economic gains and regular flows needed for irrigation. Now river regulation has affected the flow patterns of Australia’s rivers, reducing flow variability and often distorting seasonal events. For example, on the upper Murray River, we’ve captured snow-melt in spring and released it in the summer for irrigation, rather than leaving the water to flow through the system in the high spring flows needed for healthy animal and plant breeding cycles to be triggered.

For over half a century, man has polluted his life-sustaining waterways with toxic runoff from vast amounts of synthetic agricultural chemicals – many of these gender benders, which biomagnify in nature, so what can one expect now with the additional problem of a heated planet from centuries of man's indiscriminate emissions of ecologically fouling fossil fuels which kills thousands of humans every year?

And so with few regulatory endeavours to remediate past human errors, I expect, by moving on and leaving a mess, we will see similar consequences for marine life from man's necessity for water, extracted from an ever increasing ocean desalination industry around the globe to provide for an ever increasing human population.

How can human fouling of the planet's ecosystems be attributed to natural causes?

examinator - I know about the papers purporting to show warming at the poles and, sorry, my point still stands. The global temperatue tracks show temperatuers till declining, irrespective of what may be happening at the poles.
But in case the papers you refer to are not about extraordinary warming as such. The one in particular you are probably thinking of is 'Attribution of polar warming to human influence' (Nature Geoscience Online, October 30, 2008). It has nine authors led by Nathan P. Gillett of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglica. The paper's main purpose is to show that industrial activity has had some influence on temperatues changes at the pole, and is a classic example of the use of models to try to prove a scientific proposition. It has been very strongly criticised both for its approach and use of data but, in any case, mostly certainly does not counter the problem (for AGWs) that global temperatures have been declining this century, not increasing..

"....mostly certainly does not counter the problem (for AGWs) that global temperatures have been declining this century, not increasing.."

Curmudgeon

Please provide the charts for the global annual combined land and ocean temperatures (and the source) relevant to the last say, fifty years.

Thank you

It is obvious that some critics of global warming have no expertise in climate-change time series or trend analysis; otherwise they wouldn’t be making such vacuous or outrageous claims.

I can only surmise they are genuinely ignorant of the science, or they are intentionally distorting and misrepresenting what has been published in reputable journals or recognised data-sets.

It would not surprise me if those making such outlandish claims have not even read the Keenlyside et al paper, let alone understood it.

Keenlyside, N. S., M. Latif, J. Jungclaus, L. Kornblueh, and E. Roeckner, 2008: Advancing Decadal-Scale Climate Prediction in the North Atlantic Sector. Nature, 453, 84-88.

The authors have said:

“Just to make things clear, we are not stating that anthropogenic climate change won’t be as bad as previously thought.”

Rache has made the obvious point here.

The following link is to an annex to a report by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It lists all of the authors to the 4th IPCC report, along with their university or government affiliations and the countries where these are located.

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-annexes.pdf

Most of the names are from the USA and Western Europe because that is where most of the science is being done, but there are a huge number of names from other countries as well. We are talking about a large number of scientists from different countries with different national interests, including countries like Finland, Russia, and Canada that would likely benefit from global warming. The scientists have different cultures, different religions, different political views, but the denialists are implying that some mastermind has got Srikanthan Ramachandran (India), Anna V. Mescherskaya (Russia), Daniel Olago (Kenya), G. Hilmar Gudmundsson (UK and Iceland), Chiu-Ying Lam (China), Ricardo Villalba (Argentina), and Fatemeh Rahimzadeh (Iran) (just to take some names selected at random) all singing from the same songbook.

Similarly, if governments want to frighten people to gain more power, they will, of course, select the most economically disruptive and damaging issue they can find, one that will seriously hurt the interests of their corporate elites, instead of just scaring people with bird flu or terrorism.

See also this report on a survey conducted by the earth science journal Eos last January, if some denialist wants to claim the preceding scientists were cherry-picked

http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf