Poirot it always ends up in a fight.
Be content you and I are on the winning side, truth can not be buried.
Man, from the start of the industrial revolution, has impacted on the climate/environment/ planet.
And Science has not lent its good name to a fraud.
Flat earther,s aside time is on our side.
That by the way was a great song!

I was not trying to be a 'spoiler' with my last post, but posing what I see to be genuine areas of inquiry. I see the factors mentioned to be directly relevant to any meaningful comparisons of past and current events. And, I think it realistic that some future event may make the whole question academic, but at least we could have opportunity to better evaluate our options if there were reliable forecasts of the potential for such future events - volcanic, sunspot/solar-wind or magnetic field variations. But, I guess many may feel this is all cut and dried, or else just more hypothetical gesticulating?

Temperature variation taken out of context of surrounding natural events is fairly meaningless, and no basis for sound judgment of future progression.

That said, the recent obvious rapid upward temperature trend, can only be seen as startling, and is not explained by any unusual natural occurrences in this relevant recent period. Therefore, by exclusion, the only remaining gross determining factor is the massive combustion of fossil fuels in this period. I say again, millions of years of fossil fuel generation (and that generated in periods of prolific growth of forests/plants and marine fauna) dug up and combusted in a mere 200 years - one has merely to do the math. Resultant: CO2 and other greenhouse gas concentrations at levels one would equate with very significant volcanic activity. Only the most obtuse could disregard this trend.

However, with some others I must agree that it is the overall trend of human activity which is the major worry - upward population and consumption - and the increasing difficulty in balancing demand and supply of natural and increasingly scarce resources.

Japan, Germany, and possibly others, may wish to discontinue nuclear energy, but is there any reasonable alternative over the long haul, irrespective of AGW? Any viable technological alternative will take time to develop and implement. When should this need be taken seriously? To me the answer is obvious.

Lyn Bender's article on the psychology of 'disbelief' (Climate Change: our willful blindness) is quite possibly portentous.

Saltpetre,

You might be interested in this article by Clive Hamilton.

http://theconversation.edu.au/nature-v-technology-climate-belief-is-politics-not-science-12611

Thanks Belly : )

It seems that this thread has run its course. But for the sake of good order, I just thought I make a few notes on the subject paper now that we've had a chance to look at it rather than the initial headlines.

Just a couple of pertinent points will do:

* it seems, in the tradition of all good hockey sticks(HS) , the authors intend to keep their data and methods secret. And they call this science!

* Like most other HS they just paste the thermometre record onto the proxy data and hope that they are compatible. At least the don't try to hide this, unlike Mann who sought to "hide the decline".

* although they agree that, with the data being so fragmented, the data resolution is 120yrs at best and 2000yrs at worst (“…our temperature stack does not fully resolve variability at periods shorter than 2000 years…”) they nonetheless assert that they can make claims about the last century and even more absurdly, the last decade. If your data (at best) has a 120yr resolution how can you assert that the last decade is unusual? Being a climate scientists means never having to be logical.

* even so they admit that over the last 11300 yrs, temps have been higher than the last century for fully one quarter of the time and higher than now for more than 18% of the time ie in the last 10000 yrs, there have been almost 2000 yrs hotter than now! So why the alarm.

There's much more that makes this paper worse than useless but these are the highlights.

What Mark said. Haven't had time to contribute to this debate, but the ability of the IPCC cheer squad to be completely unscientific never fails to amaze me.

Coincidentally, today is the 200th anniversary of the birthday of John Snow who invented epidemiology by following the facts and for his trouble was excoriated and shunned by the scientific "consensus".

Of course, they said, cholera is caused by fumes rising from the Thames, because people closer to the Thames are more likely to contract it than those further away - correlation equals causation. Snow delved deeper and found it was actually a function of water supply, and where the various suppliers were drawing their water.

Ooooh, someone hasn't read the supplementary materials. Nice fail.

Thanks for the irrelevant history lesson Graham, most interesting.

Also born today was American conservationist, George Perkins Marsh, whose book Man and Nature, or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864) was one of the 19th century's classic influences on geography, ecology, and resource management. Marsh demonstrated a remarkably wide range expertise in philology, etymology, the study of reptiles, engravings, music, the artificial propagation of fish, comparative grammar, physiognomy, and geography. In his extensive touring of the Mediterranean world, Marsh became convinced that human civilization had remade the natural world but reshaped the face of nature with disastrous consequences.
http://todayinsci.com/3/3_15.htm