So if the Summer season is around the corner

[woodchip]

Why will there be frost and feel like winter is here over the memorial day weekend? I thought global warming was turning us into a barbecue pit. Seems you will need ice skates to cross that pit. So here in MI, temps are going down in mid 30's both tonight and tomorrow night. Long live Jack Frost !

[Sergeant Thorne]

Chipper, "global warming" is so last year (or further). Now it's "climate change", and this new phrase cannot be disputed because it's a terrestrial constant (with or without these assholes trying to institute a global carbon tax).

[Krom]

I guess I'm the only one who remembers how unusually hot it was for the bulk of spring, summer and fall last year? For that matter, even winter was pretty mild.

But at any rate, you as asking for an awful lot from something like barely 1 degree higher than whatever passes for normal.

[Tunnelcat]

You're forgetting woody, it's not global warming, it's climate change. When more energy is added to the system, ie, heating due to more added CO2, things don't necessarily have to heat up initially. What you DO get is more extreme weather conditions because there's more energy to fuel it. Only time will prove if this is the case, and by then it may be too late for us.

[Top Gun]

You know it's an astounding thing how averages work, isn't it?

[woodchip]

You know it's an astounding thing how averages work, isn't it?

Yes it is astounding:

"Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/wor ... 62092.html

So let me get this straight. Warming has stalled because of a lack of sunspots and/or ocean currents. Funny how I don't read anything about man diminishing the trend. So I guess when the trend does start rising because of sunspot activity, the Algore crowd will come back and start spouting carbon taxes so poor old Al can make a bundle.

[CUDA]

Actually its stalled because there is less methane being produced over the last 10 years.








My wife has me on a better diet

[Krom]

And yet any and every glacier you can find are all retreating at ever increasing rates. If it isn't warming up, why is all the ice melting?

[woodchip]

Krom I suggest you google glaciers not melting before you make the blanket statement you did:


"Some Himalayan glaciers are advancing rather than melting, study finds
Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking."

[Top Gun]

The bottom line here is that the significant increase in the Earth's temperature over the past 150 years or so is established fact, and the attribution of that increase to anthropogenic greenhouse gas releases has a broad scientific consensus behind it (backed up among other things by isotopic analysis of prior warming periods), and while there may be regional variations, or a few years where things hold steady, the overall trend has progressed and frankly does not look very good. We've basically reached the point where we're going to need to figure out how to artificially sequester carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere in order to meet the current long-term goals for output reduction, and this is not an easy problem to solve.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Problems are never easy to solve, when their existence is a political expedient. From school shootings, to immigration, to "climate change".

Government: "We're in trouble! Quick! Give me your rights and your money!"

[MD-1118]

Rising global temperatures actually mean lowering local temperatures in some cases, and surprisingly enough, putting sulfates into the atmosphere can actually counteract the effect of greenhouse gases.

And it's not our doing. Direct impact of human emissions is only a drop in the multimillenial bucket.

That being said, our pollutants aren't helping matters. It has been hot here during the day and cold at night and I hate it.

[Sergeant Thorne]

And it's not our doing. Direct impact of human emissions is only a drop in the multimillenial bucket.

That being said, our pollutants aren't helping matters. ...

The second statement directly contradicts the first... My bull****-o-meter is burying the needle. Way to drink that kool-aid.

[Top Gun]

The first statement's dead wrong anyway. This current upswing is steeper and more significant than what we've seen over the past tens of thousands of years, and if you don't think the fact that it exactly corresponds with a period when we've been pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere means something, I have a few bridges I'd love to sell you.

[Sergeant Thorne]

We haven't seen the past tens of thousands of years. Way to drink that kool-aid.

[MD-1118]

And it's not our doing. Direct impact of human emissions is only a drop in the multimillenial bucket.

That being said, our pollutants aren't helping matters. ...

The second statement directly contradicts the first... My bull****-o-meter is burying the needle. Way to drink that kool-aid.

Clarification required. Which statements specifically?

The first statement's dead wrong anyway. This current upswing is steeper and more significant than what we've seen over the past tens of thousands of years, and if you don't think the fact that it exactly corresponds with a period when we've been pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere means something, I have a few bridges I'd love to sell you.

I didn't say we weren't having an impact. I said our contribution is a fraction of the total. Which it is. And, might I add (again) largely negatable (sulfates, which coincidentally are a byproduct of volcanic activity). On top of which, we are on the upper end of a long-term upswing already, even discounting all human factors. Did you check the links provided, or just answer first without doing so? Because glacials can last for - surprise! - tens of thousands of years, and so can interglacials.



Would you look at that. Around 125,000 years ago it started getting really cold really fast. Around 25,000 years ago it started getting really hot really fast. And it's still going up. Big surprise, given the track record.

How's your drinks, boys?

[Top Gun]

We haven't seen the past tens of thousands of years. Way to drink that kool-aid.

Um, ice cores. We can get direct samples of the atmosphere from tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago, depending on where we're digging the core, and the composition of gases in these samples gives us direct information about the temperature at that time. There are more indirect methods, too, including looking at the growth patterns of ancient tree remains: trees grow more quickly in warmer periods, so they'll create thicker "rings." We have a large amount of information on the planet's climate over the past few hundred thousand years, which a bit of research will show you.

I didn't say we weren't having an impact. I said our contribution is a fraction of the total. Which it is. And, might I add (again) largely negatable (sulfates, which coincidentally are a byproduct of volcanic activity). On top of which, we are on the upper end of a long-term upswing already, even discounting all human factors. Did you check the links provided, or just answer first without doing so? Because glacials can last for - surprise! - tens of thousands of years.

Of course human activity is always going to be a fraction of the total output of greenhouse gases, but what that simplification ignores is how that affects the various natural cycles of these gases, specifically the carbon cycle. There are built-in mechanisms that affect how carbon is distributed throughout the biosphere: for instance, higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere lead to warmer temperatures, which encourages increased plant growth, which absorb higher amounts of CO2. Likewise, warmer temperatures enable the oceans to contain more dissolved CO2, which helps keep things in balance. But for the past 150 years or so, we humans have been burning fossil fuels, which themselves are formed from ancient organic material that contains sequestered carbon, at a rate far faster than the natural carbon cycle can keep up with: it may be only a fraction of the total carbon content in the atmosphere, but it's a fraction that the planet simply can't handle on such a small time-scale. This graph is extremely telling: based on direct evidence, current atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are significantly higher than they've been over the past 650,000 years, and by some more indirect methods, it's estimated that the last time they were this high was twenty million years ago. That's a pretty big smoking gun.

And yes, I looked at the graphs you posted, and they do show the cyclical patterns of the Earth's climate, which I'm well aware of. But the problem with them is the scale that they're showing. Those graphs cover tens of thousands of years, and if you look at them, you can see that the warming periods on them cover a few thousand years each. But if you take a look at a graph like this instead, you see that our current warming period is taking place over a mere two centuries, with the steepest portion only within the last 50. This is a far more drastic change than anything we've ever observed before, and we're responsible for it.

[Tunnelcat]

2012 was our warmest year on record. Not proof of climate change in and itself, but nonetheless a bad trend if it continues.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/ncdc-anno ... tiguous-us

[MD-1118]

But if you take a look at a graph like this instead, you see that our current warming period is taking place over a mere two centuries, with the steepest portion only within the last 50.

From your link:

An instrumental history of temperature is also shown in black.

We aren't that far off base, so far. Let us continue.

From this link:

Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods" (or alternatively "glacials" or "glaciations" or colloquially as "ice age"), and intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres. By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sheets still exist.

[...]

Within the ice ages (or at least within the current one), more temperate and more severe periods occur. The colder periods are called glacial periods, the warmer periods interglacials, such as the Eemian Stage.

Glacials are characterized by cooler and drier climates over most of the Earth and large land and sea ice masses extending outward from the poles. Mountain glaciers in otherwise unglaciated areas extend to lower elevations due to a lower snow line. Sea levels drop due to the removal of large volumes of water above sea level in the icecaps. There is evidence that ocean circulation patterns are disrupted by glaciations. Since the Earth has significant continental glaciation in the Arctic and Antarctic, we are currently in a glacial minimum of a glaciation. Such a period between glacial maxima is known as an interglacial. The glacials and interglacials also coincided with changes in the Earth’s orbit called Milankovitch cycles.

The Earth has been in an interglacial period known as the Holocene for more than 11,000 years. It was conventional wisdom that the typical interglacial period lasts about 12,000 years, but this has been called into question recently. For example, an article in Nature argues that the current interglacial might be most analogous to a previous interglacial that lasted 28,000 years. Predicted changes in orbital forcing suggest that the next glacial period would begin at least 50,000 years from now, even in absence of human-made global warming (see Milankovitch cycles). Moreover, anthropogenic forcing from increased greenhouse gases might outweigh orbital forcing for as long as intensive use of fossil fuels continues.

Bolded text is relevant. And if you look at this chart, you can see that temperatures have been in a slow but steady decline for the better part of six million years. Furthermore:



would clearly indicate that we are nowhere near the biggest heat spikes the earth has ever seen, and there has been a steady decline in global average temperature for close to 100 million years. And:



shows that greenhouse gases only began to rise substantially when we decreased our sulfate emissions. Had we not done so, nature more than likely would have taken its course without any substantial abnormal fluctuations. Further still, solar emissions have been on the rise recently, and volcanic emissions have been declining. All these factors add up. Like I said, a drop in the bucket.

In conclusion, all of this overwhelming evidence points to the majority of the cause being Earth doing its usual hot'n'cold thing, and our contributions would have been negligible if we hadn't gone off half-cocked and tried to fix what wasn't broken by reducing CFC and other sulfate emissions. As it is, we can undo the damage we've done by putting the sulfates back into the atmosphere, preferably in the stratosphere, where a minimal amount will be maximally effective in reducing carbon and other greenhouse gas levels with minimal negative environmental impact. The problem is not an overabundance of GHGs, it is an underabundance of sulfates to counteract them. Which I suppose still makes you right in the sense that we are still the culprits, but not in the manner that was first implied.

[Top Gun]

Okay...you're kind of barking up the wrong tree here, as you're trying to conflate a bunch of related topics and mash them together to reach incorrect conclusions.

Again, this is a question of scales. Yes, of course the Earth as a whole has been much warmer than this in the distant past, and yes, we are currently technically in the trailing period of an ice age. But those events are completely irrelevant to the time scales that are of concern here. We're looking at an unprecedented spike in global average temperatures over a period of a century or so, which is the blink of an eye in geologic time scales. This sort of rapid increase simply isn't supposed to happen, and there haven't been any natural phenomena within this time scale that would account for it. What does account for it is the exact correspondence in the same time-frame of human-produced greenhouse gases since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is not a natural pattern...it's us.

And you're completely misreading what's going on in that second graph. The reduction of sulfate emissions wouldn't magically lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions: they're two separate categories of materials released by industrial processes. The reason greenhouse gas production began to increase more quickly corresponded with large regions of the world (i.e. China and India) beginning to industrialize on a wider scale, and previously-industrialized countries expanding their own outputs. While it's true that sulfates in the atmosphere do help scatter light and produce something of a cooling effect, said effect has been measured, and is several times weaker than the corresponding heating effects produced by greenhouse gases. Sulfates may act as a slight damper on warming, but the idea of starting to spew them into the atmosphere as a solution to warming is a pretty terrible one, seeing as how sulfates are one of the main components of acid rain; the reason they've been cut back over the last few decades is to solve that problem. (Probably the only idea more terrible would be increasing CFC emissions, seeing as how they're responsible for depleting ozone.)

Seriously, when something like 97% of the scientific community who makes their living studying these topics says, "Yeah, we're the ones doing it," maybe you should try listening to what they're saying.

[Spidey]

Humans are a natural function of the planet earth.

[Grendel]

Looks like it's a chaotic function that's started to spin out of control...

[MD-1118]

Okay...you're kind of barking up the wrong tree here, as you're trying to conflate a bunch of related topics and mash them together to reach incorrect conclusions.

Again, this is a question of scales. Yes, of course the Earth as a whole has been much warmer than this in the distant past, and yes, we are currently technically in the trailing period of an ice age. But those events are completely irrelevant to the time scales that are of concern here. We're looking at an unprecedented spike in global average temperatures over a period of a century or so, which is the blink of an eye in geologic time scales. This sort of rapid increase simply isn't supposed to happen, and there haven't been any natural phenomena within this time scale that would account for it. What does account for it is the exact correspondence in the same time-frame of human-produced greenhouse gases since the start of the Industrial Revolution. This is not a natural pattern...it's us.

And you're completely misreading what's going on in that second graph. The reduction of sulfate emissions wouldn't magically lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions: they're two separate categories of materials released by industrial processes. The reason greenhouse gas production began to increase more quickly corresponded with large regions of the world (i.e. China and India) beginning to industrialize on a wider scale, and previously-industrialized countries expanding their own outputs. While it's true that sulfates in the atmosphere do help scatter light and produce something of a cooling effect, said effect has been measured, and is several times weaker than the corresponding heating effects produced by greenhouse gases. Sulfates may act as a slight damper on warming, but the idea of starting to spew them into the atmosphere as a solution to warming is a pretty terrible one, seeing as how sulfates are one of the main components of acid rain; the reason they've been cut back over the last few decades is to solve that problem. (Probably the only idea more terrible would be increasing CFC emissions, seeing as how they're responsible for depleting ozone.)

Seriously, when something like 97% of the scientific community who makes their living studying these topics says, "Yeah, we're the ones doing it," maybe you should try listening to what they're saying.

I don't think it's coincidence that GHG saturation started spiking much more in the early nineties, which is when we first got on the "CFCs and other aerosols are bad, stop polluting the air with them" bandwagon.

From this page:

Some scientists have suggested using aerosols to stave off the effects of global warming as an emergency geoengineering measure. In 1974, Mikhail Budyko suggested that if global warming became a problem, the planet could be cooled by burning sulfur in the stratosphere, which would create a haze. An increase in planetary albedo of just 0.5 percent is sufficient to halve the effect of a CO2 doubling.

The simplest solution would be to simply emit more sulfates, which would end up in troposphere - the lowest part of the atmosphere. If this were done, Earth would still face many problems, such as:

Using sulfates causes environmental problems such as acid rain
Using carbon black causes human health problems
Dimming causes ecological problems such as changes in evaporation and rainfall patterns(1)
Droughts and/or increased rainfall cause problems for agriculture(2)
Aerosol has a relatively short lifetime

The solution actually advocated is transporting sulfates into the next higher layer of the atmosphere - stratosphere. Aerosols in the stratosphere last years instead of weeks - so only a relatively smaller (though still large) amount of sulfate emissions would be necessary, and side effects would be less.

(1) and (2) would also further decrease global warming effects. Still, after doing a little more research...

Only 5% of the 35% [of US citizens] who were "disengaged", "doubtful", or "dismissive" of global warming were aware that 97% of publishing US climate scientists agree global warming is happening and is primarily caused by humans.

Seriously, when something like 97% of the scientific community who makes their living studying these topics says, "Yeah, we're the ones doing it," maybe you should try listening to what they're saying.

I was unaware of this, which is no excuse for not looking into it more carefully, of course. It would seem that you are correct in this aspect, and as strongly as I have advocated the human incapacity to influence the environment on such a scale, I feel heavily inclined to agree with you at this point. DNDTR and all that jazz, so I will retract my assertion that we only have a minimal impact on the environment, as well as the assertion that we are not the primary cause of global warming. I value truth and scientific reasoning enough to admit when I am wrong, and it definitely looks like I am wrong. Apologies.

I do still think that we could mitigate the damage we've done, however. That's not me trying to make myself look less bad. That's just personal opinion, and I could very well be wrong there as well. I hope I'm not though, because otherwise... well, I don't want to think of the consequences that would entail.

[Will Robinson]

I find it hard to believe that 97% of all knowledgeable, informed, climate scientists today believe anthropogenic warming is a cause of any dangerous trending rise in global temperatures.
I believe that 97% of those that used the models that have since been proven to be flawed were making those claims but even some of them have had the guts to buck the peer group trend and correct their previous statements...
Perhaps the reason the statistic you offered contains the qualifier "published" is because they were all working for the same 'publisher' for a while and that publisher was working toward a preconceived outcome.

It appears anthropogenic warming is nothing more than a few fleas on the back of the big bad climate change dog.
I've read that it is safe to say anthropogenic warming could be enough to tip the scales earlier than if humans weren't a factor but if the trend is earths natural climate swings the Kyoto protocol would be like the proverbial folly known as 'holding back the tide with a broom'.
And as Spidey says, humans are a part of nature.

Maybe if the beneficiaries of the 'publishers' work were asking for real curbs to human pollution instead of global economic redistribution they could have pulled it off but following the money...and the exemptions to the rules...disclosed the true motives of the publisher.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Humans are a natural function of the planet earth.

Gonna have to disagree with that. Humans are, but industry is another matter altogether. Large concentrations of refined substances are bound to screw up the natural balance. That said, I believe it's been shown that despite the level of industry we still can't compete with natural geological events (volcano eruptions) for sheer volume of greenhouse gases.

[Tunnelcat]

Looks like it's a chaotic function that's started to spin out of control...

I wonder what our strange attractor looks like if it could be modeled for this system?

[Top Gun]

I find it hard to believe that 97% of all knowledgeable, informed, climate scientists today believe anthropogenic warming is a cause of any dangerous trending rise in global temperatures.

Believe it or not, it's true.

I believe that 97% of those that used the models that have since been proven to be flawed were making those claims but even some of them have had the guts to buck the peer group trend and correct their previous statements...

The models aren't flawed, and those who would suggest so are merely spreading FUD.

Perhaps the reason the statistic you offered contains the qualifier "published" is because they were all working for the same 'publisher' for a while and that publisher was working toward a preconceived outcome.

You have absolutely no idea what "published" means in the scientific sense, do you?

It appears anthropogenic warming is nothing more than a few fleas on the back of the big bad climate change dog.
I've read that it is safe to say anthropogenic warming could be enough to tip the scales earlier than if humans weren't a factor but if the trend is earths natural climate swings the Kyoto protocol would be like the proverbial folly known as 'holding back the tide with a broom'.

Refer to my earlier posts to see why you're wrong.

Maybe if the beneficiaries of the 'publishers' work were asking for real curbs to human pollution instead of global economic redistribution they could have pulled it off but following the money...and the exemptions to the rules...disclosed the true motives of the publisher.

Perhaps you should try following the money of most of that 3% who have spoken out against global warming instead. I think you'll find plenty of petrochemical industry ties.

Really, I can do my best to educate you, but in the end, it doesn't make one iota of difference what you believe. It's happening, and we're the main force driving it, and if you want to stick your fingers in your ears and sing LALALA and pretend like it's not, that just makes you the fool.

[Will Robinson]

TopGun I know exactly what 'published' means in the the scientific community. I also know that some of the respected 'published' scientists produced work that was built on flawed data. Your denial of that reality doesn't change it.

The question isn't whether or not there is a warming trend...or even if human activity contributes to warming.
The question is, does the level of human contribution really tip the scales from where they are trending regardless of human activity? And are the changes that the governing bodies empowered by the 'global warming emergency' want to enforce really going to do anything to 'correct' the anthropogenic tipping of the scale?

When you try to get those 'published' scientists to prove a yes answer to those two questions you find your consensus quickly disappears!

So you can stick to the narrow definitions that make your position sound authoritative but in the real world, where those two questions matter, your definitions become smoke screens for a political agenda that is trying to capitalize on a warming trend that isn't going to be stopped by all the grand plans and regulations and peer reviewed piggy backed studies in the world.

[MD-1118]

To be honest, one of the biggest reasons I believed we absolutely could not be the cause or even a major influencing factor in climate change or global warming was the nuke scenario... by which I mean, even if you took all the nuclear weaponry we have ever designed over the years as a race, put them all together into one really big bomb, and set them off in one spot, you still wouldn't make a dent in the Earth's surface. Compare this to the Chicxulub impactor, which had an approximate force of 100 teratons of TNT, and compare again to the largest nuke detonated in history - the Tsar Bomba, which only had the force of 57 megatons of TNT. Humankind tends to exaggerate its potential, and of course I took this reasoning and ran with it, thinking, "We can't even scratch the planet, and even if we tried, Earth would shrug it off and continue on without us". Which it would, in the nuke scenario. Doesn't make my assumption (because, yes, that's what it was) about global warming any less wrong. This, as well as a few other pages linked from there, caused me to change my mind. It was quite eye-opening.

On a side note, I have read quite a few instances where global cooling was linked tentatively to nuclear winter, which I take it to mean if we were to go to all-out nuclear war, we'd probably fix this pickle we put ourselves in. Funny, innit?

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, but we'd all be glowing while we're cold.

[MD-1118]

Artificial bioluminescence! We'd be human fireflies.

[Top Gun]

I suppose nuclear winter would get the job done, in a certain sense.

[snoopy]

I'm still curious to see what some expert would come up with with regard to the expected temperature increase due to all the heat we're sinking into the environment with our energy generation.

With modernization, we're generating more and more energy - and a lot of it is releasing stored energy; not capturing incoming energy from the sun. The vast majority of this energy produced ends up becoming heat; which has to ultimately be radiated out into space. So, if you consider the ~15+ terawatts of energy we're producing, how much hotter does our atmosphere-heat-sink need to get in order to successfully sink the extra energy out to space?

(I.E. what is the thermal resistance of the earth considered to be? - it's probably a very small number, but it isn't zero...)

[Tunnelcat]

Think about all the myriad server farms out there, dumping their waste heat into the atmosphere as well. Maybe we can blame Google, Facebook and Amazon.

[Will Robinson]

Winter is coming...

[Top Gun]

I'm still curious to see what some expert would come up with with regard to the expected temperature increase due to all the heat we're sinking into the environment with our energy generation.

With modernization, we're generating more and more energy - and a lot of it is releasing stored energy; not capturing incoming energy from the sun. The vast majority of this energy produced ends up becoming heat; which has to ultimately be radiated out into space. So, if you consider the ~15+ terawatts of energy we're producing, how much hotter does our atmosphere-heat-sink need to get in order to successfully sink the extra energy out to space?

(I.E. what is the thermal resistance of the earth considered to be? - it's probably a very small number, but it isn't zero...)

I'd never looked into this before, but apparently a recent study has shown that waste heat can have pretty significant climate effects on a regional scale, and suggests that the reason that some regions seem to be outpacing current warming models might be because this isn't being taken into account. However, it looks like the raw heating effect across the entire planet is fairly miniscule.

[woodchip]

From the NYT's:

"The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace. "

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/scien ... .html?_r=0

So it would appear the much vaunted and much feared greenhouse gases have absolutely nothing to do with the earth warming...or not warming in this case. Furthermore the article then points out how the climatologists don't have a clue as to why this is happening. Perhaps if they weren't fixated on trying to establish Algores pocket enriching scheme of carbon credits and tried to do real science, they might actually find some answers.

[Top Gun]

It's always fun when you don't even read the whole article that you're linking. But do go on.

[woodchip]

I did read it. Care to point out what you think disprove what is posted? I hope you are not referring about former plateaus as a rational to pooh pooh things.

[Top Gun]

As you might imagine, those dismissive of climate-change concerns have made much of this warming plateau. They typically argue that “global warming stopped 15 years ago” or some similar statement, and then assert that this disproves the whole notion that greenhouse gases are causing warming.

Rarely do they mention that most of the warmest years in the historical record have occurred recently. Moreover, their claim depends on careful selection of the starting and ending points. The starting point is almost always 1998, a particularly warm year because of a strong El Niño weather pattern.

...

Scientists and statisticians reject this sort of selective use of numbers, and when they calculate the long-term temperature trends for the earth, they conclude that it continues to warm through time. Despite the recent lull, it is an open question whether the pace of that warming has undergone any lasting shift.

Yeah, really looks like you read it all.