Eco-Guilt

While this site is primarily an evolution/Creationism site, the thread is global warming.If you are going to use Creationist arguments can you please keep them on a Creationist thread.

Not just that. They LITERALLY changed scientific reports to REMOVE evidence for/conclusion of global warming.Yet somehow it's the independent, no access, liberal media that's sneaking up to glaciers and stealing the ice.

As your own graph above shows, sunspots are a component of solar variation, which itself results from changes in solar radiation. So it's not really that unimportant, I don't think. And the 14C graph (which you did not mention) is also considered a proxy for solar activity.As far as I know, solar activity is a significant contributor to climate change. I have learned not to discount any possibility or place complete trust in the integrity/validity of data compiled, manipulated, and anylyzed by any other scientist. Obviously, we are forced to trust other people's work on many occasions, but I am always skeptical of data I have not personally analyzed.In addition, I know it's hard for some to understand, by I simply cannot accept and draw any conclusions from 30 years worth of data. That is an exercise in futility, as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps that is not your intention.What do those graphs look like when displaying several hundred to thousand years worth of data? And is this not possible in your opinion?

Yes, I can now see how my pointing out the political hue of the climate reports equates to blindly following dogma and ideology.Having seen the error of my ways, I shall now go and study the gospel (IPCC report) and the teachings of the prophet (Al Gore) just like you suggest oh wise Nuggin!P.S: if anyone else dares to question man-made-global warming should I warn them they're going to ozone-filled hell before firebombing their SUV, superglueing their eyelids open and forcing them to watch 'An Inconvenient Truth' 65 times ?

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"We must respect the law, not let it blind us away from the basic principles of fairness, justice and freedom"

That's basically the point that I was making, but you can see it for 30 years, not just 5.Regarding your sunspot confusion, I've pasted a post that I made in an old thread a while back about this. The long and short of it is that this is a non-issue for climate change purposes except in the sense that there tend to be more sunspots when the sun is hotter. The numbers that really matter are the number of watts per square meter hitting the earth's surface (irradiance) from the sun, which has been changing by about 0.1% between recent solar maxima and minima, as I showed in a plot earlier in this thread.======================
(Ignore if you don't care about sunspots/cosmic rays/cloud interactions)
======================Sunspots happen more when the sun's magnetic field is strong and this magnetic field tends to drive away the electrically charged cosmic rays that bombard our atmosphere. These cosmic rays produce ions in our atmosphere that could in theory precipitate cloud formation, which could have a net cooling effect depending on the cloud's height and density. This is a favorite argument of some global warming skeptics: the sunspots drive away cosmic rays which reduce cloud formation. There are just two problems with this.a) I don't think there is any evidence of cosmic rays increasing cloud density. They form clouds in cloud chambers because before the cosmic rays pass through there is nothing for condensation to stick to. The atmosphere, on the other hand, has plenty of dust in it already that clouds can form around. Cosmic rays may not help.b) We can measure both the rate of sunspots and of cosmic rays. Both follow the solar cycles as one would expect, but there is no trend consistent with our observed warming over the last 30 years. Here is a crappy plot showing this from the University of Chicago Climax neutron monitor. It shows the rate of incidence of neutrons produced from cosmic rays overlaid with sunspot #s:Based on this evidence, I see no reason to link sunspots or cosmic rays in any way to the warming that has been observed recently. Maybe they are indicative of future sun behavior that could be relevant. But you're better off looking at the actual flux of solar energy reaching us on the earth if you're trying to understand how the sun could have influenced the current climate.

I'm glad you posted that and not me. lolThanks, I do remember that now. That site had some great graphs that I'll be posting in a bit.

That would be an inconvenient truth... Now, infidel, you will be cast for all eternity to an ozone-filled hell for daring to challenge me!

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"The problem with Socialism is you eventually run out of other people's money." --Margaret Thatcher--

Sunspots are an indirect way of getting at the total irradiance (Watts/m2) that reaches the earth's surface, which is what you care about. They are usually correlated, but not always, I think. I am also skeptical of other people's work. Not because I think they are lying (as some people on here are essentially alleging), but because I know how easy it is to make mistakes. I think it is quite possible that the IPCC has screwed up, but since I am not an expert I think I am better off trusting what they say until I find time to dig into the papers themselves, which I may never have. I am always open to the possibility of mistakes. We discussed this at some length in an old thread. I can't remember the details anymore, but here is a plot that someone found going back several hundred years. It seems quite unlikely to me that we can see no evidence of any influence of regular solar cycles on the earth's temperature, and that we can see the temperature showing a dramatic rise over the last thirty years of nearly constant solar activity, but that the ~0.12% rise in the sun's heat over the last 100 years could be responsible for this warming. That's just intuition talking, of course, but it is also in line with the findings of the IPCC, which concluded that the increase in solar activity has had an almost negligible impact on the increase in global temperatures with a very high certainty.

Your argument is:Since the FACTS and scientific CONSENSUS are against me, it's because there scientific community has been tricked/persuaded into supporting something which I disagree with.That's the EXACT same argument used by Evolution denies, Global Warming deniers and Holocaust deniers.We get it. You are right and EVERYONE ELSE, no matter how educated, is wrong because YOU'RE just soooooooo much smarter than everyone else, you've seen through the trick.It's not hotter. It's actually colder. The ice isn't melting, it's just invisible.

Cute.Got any evidence to discuss? No? Didn't think so.
Got any facts to go over? No? Didn't think so.
Got any explanation for the fact that the hottest years on record are all within your lifespan? No? Didn't think so.
Got any opinion not handed to you by Rush Limbaugh? No? Didn't think so.I'll let you go back to playing with photoshop.

These sorts of data are why I am so skeptical at the moment. Just off the top of my head, these data tell me that:1. Global temperatures have been decreasing in general over the last 80 million years since about the Late Cretaceous, with two warming periods during the Eocene (@ ~50 mya) and Miocene (@ ~20 mya).2. Temperature variations increase dramatically with proximity to modern times. Telling me that the integrity of the data is compromised with increasing age. This is evident in the middle three graphs. I believe this results in a 'smoothing' of the data so that we are actually losing the highs and lows. The begs me to ask, at what point in time does the loss of integrity in the proxy dataset begin?3. Arctic (and global?) temperatures have been on the rise for approximately the last 15 to 18 thousand years. Today, we are actually cooler than previous warming periods. That's not relevant to AGW, but perhaps noteworthy.4. In the last graph, we see the last two thousand years of temperature data. All of it except for the last 200 or so years worth is proxy data, which, I believe, has been 'smoothed' naturally in situ and then later smoothed by human manipulation. The black line is real-time data measured by modern instrumentation.It bothers me to compare proxy data to instrumental data. The degree to which temperature varies across time, also bothers me. Today's temps don't really seem all that high compared to years before. It's very hard for me to understand how today's climate scientists are able to decouple AGW from natural GW.Can an AGW proponent tell me what I'm missing?

No it's not. You just made up a strawman to attack, like fundamentalists often do. Never mind, after many debates with creationists and evangelicals I'm quite used to this.Let me put it in black and white. My argument comes down to this question: Why are we being intimidated into accepting as undisputed 'fact' a theory which can't even tell us how much of the global warming -if any at all- is down to us?

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"We must respect the law, not let it blind us away from the basic principles of fairness, justice and freedom"

As I have said, I am not an expert in this field. I will try to make what intelligent comments I can and find time to look into this more later. Can you explain what the "proxy" is? Is this the O18 measurement technique you are talking about? It is not clear to me why you think the data has lost integrity. It looks to me like the temperatures have been about flat since the last ice age ended ~10k years ago. Your plots also support this. You plots make it appear that you would have to go back about 100k years to find a warmer period than today. Well that's why this science is so crazy-hard to get right, and why there's still uncertainty. The IPCC claim that they basically have everything figured out well enough except for the amount of cooling induced by cloud formation from aerosals, and plenty of other (non-government sponsored) science societies support their findings. I'll find some time soon to look into their documentation and find out how it is that they claim to know the other effects so accurately.

I want to repeat this just so that we're clear. There are some environmental wackos, reporters, and politicians out there who try to intimidate/scare people irrationally, just like there are skeptics who are trying to do the same thing. The scientific organizations, however, aren't trying to intimidate anyone. They are simply saying that the data suggests the world is warming and that humans are probably contributing substantially to this effect, and we don't know what the consequences will be. I choose to just not listen to the shrill nutcases on either side.

On your top three charts, the scale is so huge that they are virtually useless for the discussion.Remember, the issue is not whether or not there has been variation. There has been. No one disputes that. What's of concern is the amount and rate of change over time.When you look at a chart where 50 million years = 1 inch, it's simply impossible to examine changes in of the last century. If the temp increased 4 degrees over 25 million years and the temp changed 1 degree in the last 100 years, the 1 degree change is MUCH MORE significant than the 4 degree change because it happens much more rapidly.The 4th chart is slightly better but even still we're reducing 50,000 years to less than an inch. Can you show me the last 50 years on that chart? No.The 5th chart actually deals with temp and over a 2000 year period. It demonstrates a serious spike at the high end and it ends with 2004. That spike has gotten HIGHER in the last 5 years. Significantly higher than the medieval warming period and increasing at a steep rate.THAT'S the issue. Results which are significantly above normal and at a much higher rate coinciding with increased emissions of gasses which we KNOW cause this to happen.If you KNOW that pouring water in a bucket increases the amount of water in the bucket, then pouring water in while it's raining STILL increases the water in the bucket.The AGW deniers have to be dragged kicking and screaming because they are contrarian. They were the same people saying "It's not actually getting hotter". They were the same people saying "The glaciers aren't melting".Now they are saying "Okay, fine. It's getting hotter, but greenhouse gasses have nothing to do with it."Five years from now they'll be saying "Okay, it's being caused by greenhouse gasses but there's nothing we can do about it, so we shouldn't try."Five years after that they'll be saying "Okay, reduced emissions is having an effect on overall CO2, but that doesn't mean we should do more than what's already been done."They will ALWAYS be 5-10 years behind because they are deniers. That's what they do.The thing that pisses me off is that 50 years from now, they'll all be saying "I was always in support of the green movement. I was worried about this from the very beginning."