The Tobacco Industry would have us debating cigarette smoking's relationship to lung cancer: there's uncertainty of the causality of lung cancer from cigarette smoking. But, of course, at this point, there's not very much uncertainty.

Just so with AGW. You can debate it if you want; sure, there's uncertainty. But, in this world of all things uncertain, there's really isn't that much uncertainty about AGW, the data is just overwhelming.

The leak revealed something that I was surprised to learn when I was in college: of all the professions, academia is among the most aggressive and competitive. These scientists are smacking their opponents and each other with vicious blows, many of them underhanded.

“Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice. Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.” — Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety of climate studies were in the cache¹

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“Real environmentalists live in cities, and they visit what's left of the wilderness as gently and respectfully as possible.” — Donna Moulton, letter to the editor, Tucson Weekly, published on August 23, 2001

No, actually it's not.

The story that got buried by this dump of info, was that what was going on with the world climate just didn't match up with what the AGW crowd was telling us was (going) to happen.

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

No, the data is NOT overwhelming

Not even the article you cite about a recent world temperature plateau challenges AGW evidence; it reminds us how difficult it is to predicate the weather.

Let's face it most AGW challenges don't have a basis in science, but, rather, it's a political thing.

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“Real environmentalists live in cities, and they visit what's left of the wilderness as gently and respectfully as possible.” — Donna Moulton, letter to the editor, Tucson Weekly, published on August 23, 2001

Chappy, a quick aside...what happened to Whistlestopper?

Which would by appropriate, as we can clearly see, AGW is itself a political thing.

It is the challenge of those backing AGW to prove it, not that of the rest of us to disprove.

The fact is it is still not clear that GW is happening at all and even less clear that man is (would be) the cause

Bear in mind when I say this, I try very hard to stay neutral on the whole GW debate, period. I just don't know enough about the subject matter. That being said...

Doesn't this quote, if true, kind of render the whole AGW debate moot as far as immediate influence on policy decisions, then? If we can't use the science to predict the weather, then why are we acting as though we are on the threshold of armageddon and constantly predicting doomsday around the corner? It's kind of an alarmist position if this is the case, isn't it?

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He's come to save the day!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFdAJRVm94

AGW is not about the weather per se; it's about a observed long term warming trend overall.

I think there's a legitimate debate about what we should do about AGW, ranging from doing nothing to tearing down all the chimneys and crushing all the cars and learning to live without.

I think we need to do more than nothing and I'm not prepared to eliminate all uncertainty about global warming and its causes to get started.

The Hadley e-mails don't alter any of that.

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“Real environmentalists live in cities, and they visit what's left of the wilderness as gently and respectfully as possible.” — Donna Moulton, letter to the editor, Tucson Weekly, published on August 23, 2001

More or less agreed, on my end. I won't turn my life upside down to reduce my footprint, but I drive a fuel efficient car and I run around on foot instead of driving sometimes if I feel a trip in the car would be wasteful.

I was referring more to things like cap and trade legislation or drastically increasing CAFE standards, though; things with ruinous short term consequences. If we can't accurately predict what's coming, I think these programs might be just a little bit overblown.

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He's come to save the day!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVFdAJRVm94

Dude... no way.

Welcome back.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

If I want to know what?

Sounds very James Bond!

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

30 - 40 years is a long enough time to conclude there is a human induced warming trend?

I think there is a legitimate debate concerning the science of AGW as well as the politics of wealth redistribution that are tied to it.

And before we talk about doing nothing to dismantling western economies, we need to discuss the credibility of the science of AGW and for this to happen, ALL of the data, code, and correspondence of the scientists need to be opened for review by non-partisian climate specialists in a pubic arena.

This peek into CRU shows that a full public audit is needed.

Fair enough. Let's open ALL data, code, and correspondence of ALL climate centers (ex. CRU, GISS, NOAA, IPCC, GRIDA, etc) for review by other climate scientists in a public forum. If it turns out the AGW scientists were correct, then I'll stop being a skeptic.

They show that ALL of the emails, data, and code at CRU need to be opened to the public for review. Why? Because some of those emails suggest the deleting of data and emails which looks as if they were trying to cover their tracks. The obstruction that Steve McIntyre got from Mann et al while he was trying to replicate the 1st hockey stick comes to mind.

The bottom line is, we need to have access to all climate work and communications by all organizations before we sign on to AGW schemes that are designed to force convergence of GDPs among nations and redistribute wealth among and within nations.

Kramer

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“We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. … The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism.”

TheNation, June 7, 2007

Of course they do! They call the entire case for AGW into question. It appears that there has been a conspiracy to make the evidence say what the proponents want it to say.
Let's imagine a criminal case where the prosecution plants evidence of a suspect at a crime scene and suppresses exculpatory evidence. Do you not want the case to be overturned on appeal?
OK so now you'll argue that "the preponderance of evidence" supports AGW. Not any more. Going back to my hypothetical case, suppose a search warrant was issued based on falsified evidence. Once it's established that the evidence was false, the warrant is void and subsequent evidence gathered from that warrant is excluded. ("fruits of the poison tree") The only way out is for a new trial with untainted evidence.
I believe that anyone shown to have falsified data or conspired to "trick" the system should be discredited and all their work removed from the body of evidence.

One of the most telling aspects of this is that it appears that skeptics of AGW have been excluded from the peer review process. Liken this to a poll worker on election day who sees that you are a registered Republican and throws a hidden switch to exclude your vote when you get to the machine.

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I'm sick and tired of my brothers and sisters dying to preserve Americans' right to drive like assholes.

Uncertainty is a feature of every science, it has to be by definition. Some sciences are more certain than others, for sure.

Yes, and physical and chemical interactions form a large part of the backbone of climate science. The properties of GHGs are physical and chemical, reproducible, and verifiable.

Sure. Currently within climate science the debate is centered around forecasting, our understanding of feedback loops, models, short term variation, ice melt dynamics, etc...

The fact that the earth is currently warming due to anthropogenic causes is not being debated within climate science, the theory currently stands until someone at some point can invalidate it. Skeptics have yet to produce any original research that in any way invalidates the theory.

The real debate the public should be having is what to do about it.

Andrew

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“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen

Mix theory with fact much? This is what we mean by junk science.

By the way, the Earth is not currently warming at all.

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

The fact is that the theory of AGW currently holds, and there has been no serious challenge to it. It has not been invalidated, and continuing research into it keeps strengthening the theory. This is the current state of the science.

That is what denialists who have no credentials and have done no research would have us believe, but the science indicates quite the opposite. The most that can be said from the data is that the earth is currently not warming as fast as it was 10-15 years ago, but that would only be true about surface temps, the oceans are warming as fast as ever.

Is global warming still happening?

Andrew

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“...corporations and those who run them cannot stop exploiting resources and amassing wealth until they have... .I cannot finish this sentence, because the truth is that can never stop; like cancer, they can only continue to expand until they kill the host.”

-- Derrick Jensen