It is a fact that the planet is heating up. The ice caps are receding and there is more CO2 in the atmosphere.

However, that planet is MARS. (And of course there is more CO2 in the atmosphere as it heats up — Martian ice caps are made of CO2.)

Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of space research at St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.

But don’t expect any Eco-Indulgences (ie, Carbon Credits) to be refunded…

Evan,
Are you sure about them ice proportions?
I hear it’s more like 90/9/1%

I remember the story from 2003. We had to confiscate the empty barrels from the Iraqis (who were using them for water) on account of the contamination.

The media mentioned it once, commented on how it proved nothing, and ignored the story from that point forward.

I, however, did not forget it. But I find it surprising that it has come up again. (I predict it will again sink into obscurity.)

Yes. At least the experts do. But for such a small amount to have a big effect, there has to be a “domino effect” of positive feedback loops. But the recent Aqua Satellite data indicates it’s just a lone domino. No positive feedback.

Glaciers – why are they melting and when did it start. Was there not a period when there were none? Same for the ice-caps (Polar ones)

Rather steadily, ever since the end of the little ice age (c. 1850). There have been a few time-outs (e.g., 1951-1976) and a few accelerated periods (e.g., 1920 – 1940).

Remember the proportions:

Antarctica: c. 80% of land ice
Greenland: c. 20% of land ice.
Everything else: c. 0%

Let’s end the religion and science commentary please, I have nothing against either, but they are way off topic.

Jeff Alberts (16:19:31) :

Puh-leeeze, spare us. If we want to preached at, we’ll go to church. Religion and science just don’t mix.

“Thanks Bruce, my thoughts exactly. Trading one fairy tale for another isn’t the answer.”

Ahem.

Puh-leeeze, spare us. If we want to preached at, we’ll go to church. Religion and science just don’t mix.

Thanks Bruce, my thoughts exactly. Trading one fairy tale for another isn’t the answer.

Attributing the flooding of Tuvalua to rising sea levels is just untrue (less politely it’s a lie). The reason for the islands flooding is well understood. It’s because the undersea volcano the attol sits on is settling over time. The land underneath the attol is sinking and any contribution from rising sea levels is minor.

It’s also due to erosion of the protective reefs due to construction. The islanders have created their own problem.

Well, Penn, you should listen to your really smart friends. Maybe this one. At the 58th Nobel Laureate Meetings at Lindau, July 1, 2008, from a panel discussion, Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Prize in physics, 1996, said the following:
“As you look at the CO2 level going up, temperatures rising, ice melting all over the world, you can say is this just an aberration of our climate and the answer is no”.
or
“If you look at the huge floods in the United States Midwest that is an example of what we can expect to happen over and over again”

Talk about narrow vision. That’s like looking only at one day’s data and saying “OMG! It’s getting hotter as we approach noon! Quick! Destroy all the clocks before we fry!” It completely ignores all the ups and downs in temperatures and climate events throughout history and calls a small snapshot in time “unprecedented”.

I sympathize somewhat with Penn. Here he is a professional skeptic so to speak, consorting with the likes of James Randi (an alleged paranormal skeptic) and a big algore supporter as well as an AGW acolyte.
I imagine he got beat on by Randi & Co. to drink the Kool Aid.

Randi’s not that bad. I’ve had personal correspondence with him in the last year, and he’s hardly an AGW acolyte. He could rightly say “I don’t know”, since he takes the word of his friend Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy..) for it.

I keep wondering about the analogy with having a search party out looking for someone lost in a forest: if you know the size of the forest, then you wouldn’t give up searching until you’d covered every foot… and once you had, you could say with certainty, either that they are not here, or, we found them.

Or they moved to an already searched area while the search was ongoing…

That stash of yellow cake was known to exist for decades and had been verified by UN inspectors to be in Iraq. This yellow cake was there and was part of the shut-down operation completed by UN inspectors prior to the lead-up to the invasion. After the invasion, it was guarded by troops till it could be safely removed. And by the way, it can’t be used in dirty bombs other than a scare tactic and it has to be enriched in order to be used as a high grade product in nuclear programs (either bombs or reactors). Troops were not looking for this stuff in their search for WMD’s. They already knew about it.

Not to completely derail the discussion, but does it bother you that we just got 550 tons of uranium ore safely out of Iraq and into Canada? (link)

That’s 550 TONS.

Containing enough U-235 to construct about 70 atomic bombs (550,000 kg * 0.0072 (isotopic fraction) / 57 kg (critical mass)).

No, no.

Clearly, believing that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear weapon is an embarassingly silly view.

However, I too used to say “I don’t know” about AGW, until I became frustrated by my lack of knowledge. So I did what we all should do; research! It isn’t hard now we have the internet. One link lead to another, new contacts would send me to other sources of information. And so I found out that AGW is an unproven hypothesis with no empirical scientific evidence to back it up.

Am I mad about the AGW hype and lies? You bet I am!

Sue.

http://stuffwhitedbagslike.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/dictionary-of-national-d-bags-penn-jillette/

I under stand that there is around 0.04% CO2 in our atmosphere. What do AGWers believe is the correct amount?

Glaciers – why are they melting and when did it start. Was there not a period when there were none? Same for the ice-caps (Polar ones)

Is CO2 not vital to plant growth (aka the Kalvin cycle)

I agree with you on Skeptic.com and have given up on them. Being a skeptic makes it hard for me to take them seriously when they seem so entrenched.

The only vote I feel I have is my buck. Get the feeling the Economist magazine is Pro- AGW too.

Many thanks for this website. I feel I have been alone with my wits and confidence challenged too often by the licenced media and friends(with no science training).

Anyway, I’m an attorney and I’m a “denier.” People lie to me all day long and CAGW has all the red flags of a hoax. I’ve studied the “science” carefully and satisfied myself of this.

When you cut through all the BS, the only evidence for the CAGW hypothesis is that it’s possible to construct a computer simulation which is (1) consistent with some aspects of climate history; and (2) consistent with future CAGW. A very slender reed.

Yes. The point was that at the precise time Hansen made his speech (July 1988 ) was an upswing and the precise time he made it this year, the temperatures are on a downswing. The result is that when he actually made the first speech, it was warmer than when he actually made the second speech.

The overall first-order flat trend, however, over the entire 20 years was, as you say, c. 0.2C to the warm.