Give me a break Q&A,

<<Maybe it is hard to contemplate, that is why you should ask CDIAC before you distort or misrepresent them.>>

I’m trying to remove the mandatory (embedded atmospheric carbon} as “the” cause in the AGW debate, in order to open up to other possibilities whilst still entertaining the proposal of AGW. That is what I was referring to as “hard to contemplate”. Nothing to do with CDIAC, I posted their raw data, listed their link and offered rationale for disconnecting the embedded “show stopper”, that of embedded ACC as an unconditional cause.

Why on earth you had to jump in with “take it with embedded ACC” or not at all is nothing short of vindictive. Are you so blinded by your passion for your and only your answer that you won’t entertain any debate that offers something you don’t like or can’t control?

May be you now need to look for a nexus breaker of your own, or is that too “hard to contemplate?”

Q&A: "Not one scientist has been able to explain the warming trend over the last 200 years without factoring for GHG, not one."

Fine. Isn't everything linked in Gaia if you measure it finely enough? Storms caused by butterfly wings flapping. But climate changed, temperatures changed, sea levels changed by greater degrees before this, due to other factors which are still present. Why the focus on GHGs and neglect of other factors?

More importantly, why the extrapolation of this particular minor human influence to "The collapse of civilized society and human population..." [kulu]? This is the hysterical part where psychiatry may have more valuable contributions to make than climate science.

PS. kulu: "lest you prove to all that ...you are desperately trying to protects vested interests regardless of the consequences to the rest of humanity."

Not great business practice, mate. Hard to have vested interests without a market.

"If the scientists are wrong, which they are not..."

If you're smarter than the scientists in order to judge, why do you need the scientists' authority? (OK, I'm really stuffing with your head now - I don't want to blow what few neurons you have)

"...what will be the absolute worst consequences for us? A slow down, stalling or even reversal of economic growth perhaps?"

Well, what you see as the little words "reversal of economic growth" may translate into fewer funds for things like health, medical research, education, emergency services, and environmental protection etc. Naive people want less tax, more spending, and think money grows on trees. Only when they're on the operating table do they start to value medical research or bemoan the lack of funding. Naive people here want to "tackle" climate change "whatever the cost", ie. even if it costs the earth.

But to think about these things, you need more than two neurons rattling around in your head: one that flashes "good/right", the other "wrong/evil". ie. more than the moral reasoning of a 4-year old

Spindoc,

Do you (or people like fungochumley) seriously think biogeochemists (any scientist for that matter) don’t apply null hypothesis testing or ‘significance’ investigations in climate attribution studies? Or that they haven’t looked, or are not looking, for other causes to the global warming we have experienced over the last 200 years?

To repeat what I have tried to explain before, if you remove GHG (atmospheric carbon) as a significant contributor to our ‘current’ global warming, nothing else can explain it – NOT Milankovitch Cycles, NOT sun spots, NOT cosmic rays, NOT magnetic flux, NOT total solar irradiance, NOT volcanos, NOR any other natural variability. Really, this is not that hard to understand.

That is NOT to say we shouldn’t try to find other reasons/causes – we are, really. But nobody, no one, has been able to come up trumps. If they do they will become rich, famous and be able to add a Nobel or Fields to their trophy collection. This does NOT mean we should start looking for little green people on space ships bombarding our planet with some unknown unknown to explain what we HAVE known for quite some time:
http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8792#139793

Again, human activity (primarily energy and land management practices) over the last 200 years has resulted in a net gain of CO2-e in the atmosphere; so much so that the oceans and terrestrial biosphere cannot absorb quickly enough to at least maintain equilibrium. The rest is physics, chemistry and the like. Again, this really is not that hard.

Now, if we can get back on-topic (notwithstanding the naysayers) ... I can’t disagree with the author (Peter McMahon). The nuances of any science will always be debated in the scientific community (mil-observer can do his own wiki homework on +’ve AND –‘ve feedback loops). However, the debate about how to adapt, grow and develop in a more sustainable way is crux of the matter. Don’t you think?

Btw, “embedded atmospheric carbon” is not a term I have come across, anywhere – can you give me a citation please?

Q&A, <<“embedded atmospheric carbon”>>. By that I mean the AGW debate comes with an embedded cause, that of atmospheric carbon (GHG}, no other options.

This debate is binary, circular and a zero sum game.

This is no longer about science, let me explain why.

1. To believe that there is no significant body of scientific opposition to GHG induced GW is unsustainable.
2. Public opinion comes from non-scientists, me included. We are either in or out, as I said, it’s binary. There is RAW research data, scientific interpretation, scientific modeling, media, politics, and public commentary.
3. Public views can only come from media, politics and public commentary, because we are not researchers, cannot interpret and cannot model. Therefore public views can only be “adopted”, based upon someone else’s perspective rather than their own; it’s a belief based value system.
4. Were I a qualified environmental scientist, I would interpret and model the data for myself and still end up as either Pro or Anti. This is because the science is inconclusive, still binary.
5. It is science that is unable to make a clear provable hypothesis. In the meantime the debate has been “forced” into the public domain to gain political and economic advantage, where it has been adulterated by politics, ill informed media, intellectual and academic croakers and pseudo-scientific hacks on both sides, still binary.
6. I’ve given up on the science, but like any good analyst, if the content layer only offers a polarized binary result, you move up a layer. Entity Relationship Analysis.
7. The public domain is no place for scientific endeavor; it is toxic, divisive and vulnerable to manipulation and has become a social, moralistic crusade of religious proportions. Very, very dangerous.
8. The origins of the acrimony are self evident. One section of our unqualified community is bullying the other, equally unqualified section of society, with pseudo-science. We have both been party to this though you might be qualified?
9. If the scientists can all agree that this is a very, very complex science, a binary outcome cannot be the correct result

Well said SpinDoc - and Q&A is very well qualified, look at his website, quite the fortress of one thought area, there are even sections on how to deal with skeptics and training material. All skeptics (sorry, deniers - as if anyone denies the climate changes, but I get the drift, it's an insult intended to provoke and belittle) are dealt with in a sneering manner. Q&A has a vested interest as this is where he makes his income and fame in his world from, of course he is going to defend it against the barbarians, I'd expect no less.

Yes Q&A, at the moment, in your opinion there is no other scientific explanation to GW except CO2, but that doesn't mean that today's science is correct - only that it is today's science. My concern is that today's science is being used to bully people to an end that in years to come may be laughable, when we do know what causes climate to change.

Why is it this way? Because you don't have all the answers but can't face that there may be factors unknown, is it ego, I suspect so. Please don't tell me you know everything, you know what science is today and that's all.

Adapt and move on, the idea of shutting down our society in Australia by limiting coal use is wrong, and a reckless pursuit. It may be easier to just fund everyone to move out of Australia to Europe or somewhere else, because if we stay here and also stop coal use, we have to go nuclear, and our dear Greens have so muddied that paddock it is unusable in the near future.

rpg: you flatter that pompous, condescending poseur by referring to "the science". Even in this thread, KenH already called it on its repeat obnoxious and apparently self-indulgent pastime i.e., slagging people off with allegations that it knows to be untrue.

rpg, you seem to forget that it's MODELING and THEORY that these guys depend on. If "science" pertains to "knowledge" and our refinement of understanding (esp. about truth), then it follows that modeling and theory have at best very tenuous claims to such knowledge. That is why the widespread scientific dissent is so important: it reminds us that AGW still inhabits the realm of "pseudo-science". AGW claims scientific authority without it having been proven as fact; indeed, much detail indicates how temperature, ice core and sunspot records - inter alia - disprove AGW. Supporters of the creed make only isolated association of "suggestion" a la "cherry picking" where they seek to claim a parallel with our most recent decades.

Be fair to the many scientists who have a quite different version of "today's science". For example, Ottawa's Dr R Tim Patterson has plenty of detailed research as a prominent case of "today's science". Patterson does not assert firm conclusions except for his disproving many AGW modelers' claims to their own certainties, however outlandish.