Just popping in to remind people that the various predictions on seas level rise, temperature change and so on are generally based on expectations for 2025, 2050, 2100. As it’s only 2011, don’t be surprised if not much has been seen.
Other than that, carry on as you were.
Sorry but we are being told that the sea levels are rising at least three millimeters per year and have been doing so for quite some time (1979 or 1982 depending on the "benchmark). We should be seeing sinking islands like the Maldives and Tuvalu but we are not. We have been subjected to dire forecasts for 20 years or more and they are NOT panning out. The date of disaster keeps getting pushed out another few years when the panic moment comes and nothing has changed. What it is it about this climate change debate and the latest millenarian disaster (Mayan calendar 2012) that will result in the world’s end? Equally laughably paranoid and full of scaremongering but make no mistake. Lots of people and their very livelihoods depend on the cash cow that is climate change and the need to “deal with it.” The real deal is that never have so many stupid useless poseurs been able to travel first-class to exotic destinations to participate in discussions about the “need to do something” while doing very little indeed.
Actually no, the “date of disaster” doesn’t get pushed out into the future, at least not by the scientists in the field. It’s always been out at those dates, at least since the early days of the IPCC. The media on the other hand usually do get it wrong and embark on scare campaigns saying we’re all doomed today.
EDIT. Here’s a projection graph from CSIRO. You can see that it’s towards the mid-century and later that the biggest effect is predicted.
Gosh so the 0.4 meters that the sea levels may rise is an awful lot lower than that predicted by Al Gore and given that sea levels rose a similar amount in the 19th and 20th centuries, I guess I fail to see where disaster lies. Thanks for the chart. Perhaps, you would find it more interesting to compare that with sea level rises in actuality since 1850? Just a thought… but then it apparently is the thinking that is so dangerous. Believe or be damned!
I wasn’t aware Al Gore was a climate scientist. My advice would be to pay as much attention to him as you would any of the talking heads at CNN or Fox.
Nice to see CFI flesh out the predictable half truths in this post, but I would certainly agree that there is no shortage of shamsters winging their way around the globe supping forum coffee in a paper cup.
For your amusement, a new website based on carbon offsets.
[quote]What is Cheat Offsetting?
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere.
Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and NOT cheat. This neutralises the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.
Can I offset all my cheating?
First you should look at ways of reducing your cheating. Once you’ve done this you can use Cheatneutral to offset the remaining, unavoidable cheating [/quote]
HG
Cheat offsetting? Yes, that was amusing. It is sad (sniff sniff) though that the very notion of such offsets is amusing because of the ridiculous nature of the climate change offsets. It is almost as bad as riot tourism and cause junkies. But … while the excess was yesterday called phrenology today climate science and perhaps tomorrow feeling divides (with others to be compensated by those who are emotionally richer), the ability to laugh exists all the same. Given that others are clearly able to feel much more strongly than I, I suggest and demand that a fund be set up to compensate me for the unfairness that exists between those who have so many many MANY emotions (and by very connection so few thoughts). Perhaps, I could be flown to Bermuda once every three months to stare at the ocean over a glass of Drappier or perhaps a stiff gin martini to “reflect” upon the unfairness of not feeling so much as others while feeling (deliberate) better because I know that others have not only cared but also acted upon those cares? So, Al Gore and the rest of you? are you up for making me “feel” better and more often about myself? hahahahahaahahahah
How graphs can be visually misleading and misused …
The most upfront solution to prevent global warming is to eliminate about 5 billion people … back to the level of early 1800’s …
gosh even jimmy carter on bbc admits efforts to fight global warming are going no where. He failed to discuss why the Korean nuclear deal fell through. something about the bush administration of course rather than the discovery of the second nuke site but to say global warming aint going anywhere and from carter? sign of the times?
Yea!!! Everything is ok guys, lets go burn some petrol and throw loads of plastic stuff in the ground. It will be great fun! FFS. Any of you scientists specialising in these areas? Or just gleaning shite off the internet and spewing it out here? Maybe some of you don’t like change? I really can’t believe what I’m reading! It’s like a bunch of dinosaurs not believing they will be wiped out. I totally think all of you gas guzzling junkies are missing the point.
It’s amazing how many right-wing deniaists believe in the rapture.
Hans,
Has cap and trade worked? Look at the EU systems. They flooded the systems with free credits for big firms that sold them without passing the savings on to the consumer. That’s corporate welfarism and not free trade. That’s why I am always entertained when socialists call cap and trade a free market solution. 
Even the Guardian questions the EU system:
[quote]Given the system’s inherent flaws, it comes as little surprise that the ETS didn’t quite work as intended. According to European Commission figures, emissions from the 27 member states rose by 1.9% in the first three years of the regime. Following criticism, the caps for the period to 2012 were reduced for the majority of member states, but only to a little lower than actual emissions in 2005.
Despite the system’s questionable results, the costs are considerable. In 2006, individual business and sectors had to pay €24.9 billion for over one billion tones’ worth of permits. The WorldWatch Institute estimates that the costs of running a trading system designed to meet the EU’s Kyoto obligations at about $5 billion. The estimated costs of a trading system to meet the EU’s own and far more demanding commitments of a 20% reduction (against a 1990 baseline) by 2020 are around $80 billion annually. [/quote]
Now if it costs more to run the bureaucracy that tracks carbon trading/offsets than is being paid into the trading scheme, can you tell me what the benefit of the program are?
What entertains me is people calling such a ill-thought system an example of progressive thinking and market based solutions for climate change. If that’s the calibre of brainstorming, call me a big-time denier
I don’t believe in man made global warming, and even if it does exist, I don’t think it is the foremost threat to this planet. I’m just outlining a fact that it seems like most denialists (and I use the term unwillingly) seem to be nutters who have some corporate or God interest, sorry, god interest, which certainly rubs off on the way people like me try and fight their corner in an argument.
Anyway, don’t mind me. Carry on… 
[quote=“Super Hans”]I don’t believe in man made global warming, and even if it does exist, I don’t think it is the foremost threat to this planet. I’m just outlining a fact that it seems like most denialists (and I use the term unwillingly) seem to be nutters who have some corporate or God interest, sorry, god interest, which certainly rubs off on the way people like me try and fight their corner in an argument.
Anyway, don’t mind me. Carry on… [/quote]
So you think a majority of denialists are fundamentalists? I would disagree. If anything, I would argue the people that have bought into global warming do so with a green fundamentalism that is akin to something you’d find on the streets in Tehran.
These eco-fascists believe in global warming and man made solutions such as cap and trade that clearly benefit unaccountable bureaucrats rather than the environment. They believe that science can not be questioned in any way which reminds me of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition.
And then they have the audacity to call deniers fundamentalists? No sir. 
It has been my experience that the deniers include some of the best and brightest realists with “useful” life experiences, not of the ivory tower kind. 
Oh deary me! Ok here goes my rant,
Eco-facists and Eco-naysayers are extremes at each end of the bell curve of society, possibly some truth comes from both sides and it really doesn’t matter. Show me graphs, show me charts, sinking islands, rising islands, glacier melt and moving ice fields…
All of it misses the point spectacularly. We [as in the planet] have a growing population, that growing population needs energy and it f@*king obvious where energy comes from. It’s not even about the amount [of energy] we have at our disposal, but a means to that resource. The power we currently consume is reaching the the limit of the infrastructure in place. I think we all know that. The solution comes not only in building more energy stations but, in a reduction in energy use - so crudely pointed out by the video that sparked this post - and that comes down to the individual. I think it is a fair ask, that you look, at what you consume and if you can cut back on it. Most of the time it is possible, but the outcome is often one of selfish righteousness on why it’s all bollocks and no need to do anything and the rest of you can piss off for being lefty liberals. Childish.
You can blame governments but, it’s humans that breed humans! So therefor we as humans have to be responsible for the situation. I know I want to be. If we reduce our output then our immediate environment will improve, carbon monoxide levels drop, children breathe better and therefor improve their ability (yes the brain needs oxygen). Is it that hard to see? Less plastic used means smaller waste sites? Less car or motorbike journeys make less noise pollution and so on. I find it hard to believe that ‘certain’ people can’t see the benefit of energy reduction. Instead they are focusing on the wrongs of others!
Regardless if global warming is real or not. The situation of pollution is not good enough and I personally do not want a world, country, city, town, street full of shit - people think they have a right to just throw away without any consequences. Just think about it folks.
I’m all for conservation. I don’t have a car, I use public transit, and we recycle. But who is doing the most for alternative energy/cleaner energy? I’d say the energy companies themselves are. They often want to diversify and also want to have cleaner production methods. Look at the oil sands and the way they recycle water.
My problem with the global warming folk is that they lie so much or are just too stupid to fully see the big picture. Does eating organic food improve the environment? I’d say hell no. Big farms have super efficient production methods with great big haulers that ship cargo loads of products to market. Contrast this with hippy organic farmers that ship small amounts of produce to numerous fairs in their old VW van. Where are the greater GHG’s coming from relative to the size of the load? If more land was grazed for organic farming, what would the impacts be for methane gas? independent.co.uk/environmen … 18585.html
The same goes for carbon trading? All that spending and has it resulted in reduced emissions in Europe. No. If anything the recession has caused them to be reduced in some places, but not the army of bureaucrats needed to implement.
I think most people can decide on the merits of conservation and living within one’s means. However, it’s the zeal of the Gore-type of green fundamentalist that creeps me out.
[quote=“Cornpone Hercules”]
My problem with the global warming folk is that they lie so much or are just too stupid to fully see the big picture.[/quote]
Really? Perhaps you might grace us with illuminating some basic “myths”. 1. Do you accept the planet is warming. 2. Do you accept certain gasses cause greenhouse warming.
No charts, or fancy pictures as you seem FAR to smart to fall for any of the science crap.
Yes first scientists were telling us we were descended from apemen, now this! I trust the scientists on this and there are thousands of scientists working on this problem, some for many decades. Yes we don’t know everything but CO2 and methane are proven to be insulating gases, there’s bound to be an effect, the amount of the effect is the only question. It’s best to err on the side of caution when you have the potential to destroy civilisation as we know it.
Oooooops! When GW denialism comes back to bite the Koch Bros. in the ass:
[quote]Physicists are notorious for believing that other scientists are mathematically incompetent. And University of California-Berkeley physicist Richard Muller is notorious for believing that conventional wisdom is often wrong. For example, the conventional wisdom about climate change. Muller has criticized Al Gore in the past as an “exaggerator,” has spoken warmly of climate skeptic Anthony Watts, and has said that Steve McIntyre’s famous takedown of the “hockey stick” climate graph made him “uncomfortable” with the paper the hockey stick was originally based on.
So in 2010 he started up the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) to show the world how to do climate analysis right. Who better after all? “Muller’s views on climate have made him a darling of skeptics,” said Scientific American, “and newly elected Republicans in the House of Representatives, who invited him to testify to the Committee on Science, Space and Technology about his preliminary results.” The Koch Foundation, founded by the billionaire oil brothers who have been major funders of the climate-denial machine, gave BEST a $150,000 grant.
But Muller’s congressional testimony last March didn’t go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures. (Ocean studies will come later.) Using a novel statistical methodology that incorporates more data than other climate models and requires less human judgment about how to handle it (summarized by the Economist here), the BEST team drew several conclusions:
■The earth is indeed getting warmer. Global average land temperatures have risen 0.91 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years. This is “on the high end of the existing range of reconstructions.”
■The rate of increase on land is accelerating. Warming for the entire 20th century clocks in at 0.73 degrees C per century. But over the most recent 40 years, the globe has warmed at a rate of 2.76 degrees C per century.
■Warming has not abated since 1998. The rise in average temperature over the period 1998-2010 is 2.84 degrees C per century.
■The BEST data significantly reduces the uncertainty of the temperature reconstructions. Their estimate of the temperature increase over the past 50 years has an uncertainty of only 0.04 degrees C, compared to a reported uncertainty of 0.13 degrees C in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
■Although many of the temperature measuring stations around the world have large individual uncertainties, taken as a whole the data is quite reliable. The difference in reported averages between stations ranked “okay” and stations ranked “poor” is very small.
■The urban heat island effect—i.e., the theory that rising temperatures around cities might be corrupting the global data—is very small.
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.[/quote]
So, can those still running around refusing to face facts at least admit that Global Warming is happening, and that climatologists are right?