I mean everytime there is an earthquake, a flood, an oil spill – there’s always a group of heartless people who rip off tax payers.

This is in response to reading that 4 of Oprah Winfreys “angels” got busted ripping off the system. Shame on them!
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/08/19/crimesider/entry5251471.shtml

I mean everytime there is an earthquake, a flood, an oil spill – there’s always a group of heartless people who rip off tax payers.

This is in response to reading that 4 of Oprah Winfreys “angels” got busted ripping off the system. Shame on them!
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/08/19/crimesider/entry5251471.shtml

Certainly not. However, energy can disappear into the oceans for a looong time. CO2 effects can be muted by saturation, etc or short cutted by albedo. Do you really expect the planet to still be burning fossil fuels at this rate in a century? The population is expected to begin declining in 50 years globally.

“The most likely cause of that thirty-year “blip” is the contemporaneous CO2 increase.”

Because the flawed models say so? What was the cause of the warming then peaked in the ’30s and ’40s? What was the cause of the cooling up to the ’70s that led to the whole “global cooling” scare in the media? Why has statistically significant warming stopped since ’95?

Good for you for keeping things in perspective. That would be a disaster and we should never become desensitized to that.

However, there are some potential concerns beyond comfortable or discomfortable temperatures, for example, significant flooding could displace large populations since a number of major cities are coastal and low-lying.

“Thirty years is a blip. What you have is a conjecture and a coincidence without a little better proof. It was warmer 6k years ago, it was warmer 2k years ago, and it was probably warmer 1k years ago. Why can’t the temps go up again? Ever hear of a “drunkards walk”, or think about Brownian motion? ”

Whether or not a system is complex or chaotic, energy conservation is not violated. If total temperature rises, energy must be somehow injected into or captured by the system. Whether or not we’ll ever be able to determine the historical causes for temperature changes on those timescales seems difficult at best. However, these days we have space-based and other instrumentation that can make the relevant & comprehensive measurements and we can collect much better evidence for cause and effect. The most likely cause of that thirty-year “blip” is the contemporaneous CO2 increase.

If I take a ruler and draw a line through the TIROS-N temperature graph, I get a line that increases 1.5C per century. If this continues as is, that will amount to 3C in two centuries. The historical temperature graph (fig 2c) in the Vinther et. al. Nat. letter (2009) that you pointed out above shows a maximum of 2C that occurred 8-9 thousand years ago. To me that says, in a few hundred years, we can expect temperature increases that equal or exceed the holocene warming.

But if there is a nuclear war anywhere, no matter how small, that will be a disaster for humanity.

The whole tangent was based on your doubt about the warming that occurred in Greenland 6 to 9 ka. A warming that was greater than anything we see now. Yet still the Greenland ice shelf remains. Nothing more, nothing less. There was a triple witching hour at that time in the NH, and it shows up in the temp records from the GRIP core.

It was a reply you your “back of the envelope” calculation that Greenland could melt in 700 years, when it did not in three thousand warm years, many of them very warm.

Thirty years is a blip. What you have is a conjecture and a coincidence without a little better proof. It was warmer 6k years ago, it was warmer 2k years ago, and it was probably warmer 1k years ago. Why can’t the temps go up again? Ever hear of a “drunkards walk”, or think about Brownian motion?

Yes CO2 causes warming. According to Phil Jones in the climategate emails, it is a warming of 1.2C per doubling. Lots of other people agree by the way. Due to the logarithmic nature of the greenhouse effect, and the linear nature of the increase in CO2, we have seen the majority of that doubling already, and still we are within the bounds of natural variability. During the Holocene Optimum, no “tipping points” were reached to send the planet into an extinction episode. Nor did that happen during the Eemian interglacial.

The whole house of cards comes down to the models predicting some kind of unusual warming, so it would be comforting if they were not so “flawed”, as Chris Mooney averred. It really comes down to your faith in models that basically assign all warming that they cannot explain to AGW. Argument from ignorance is one way to put that.

The energy balance you mention is a very big deal in climate science and a pitched battle is in full swing following the publication of the ERBE results (Lindzen & Choi, 2009).

Clearly Milankovitch cycles are long term and therefore not a major factor in the temperature rise since 1850.

Ocean effects like El Nino and La Nina have great impact on decadal time scales. For example the high temperatures recorded in 1998. So far this connection seems obvious looking backwards in time but nobody seems able to use it to make convincing forecasts!

The most important area of disagreement right now is on the century scale. The Warmists say that CO2 is dominant and the deniers talk about natural causes such as solar activity being more important.

My hope is that “Climate Science” will be cleansed of secrecy and deception. Only then can an honest review of the data from the bottom up bring these warring factions closer together. In real science (as opposed to junk science) “Consensus” is not needed but open debate is.

If it turns out that the Warmists are right I would not support their “solution” which boils down to trying to make the planet cooler. I like it toasty and would support putting more CO2 into the atmosphere if that would bring us closer to Medieval Warm Period conditions.

One of the most telling accusations levelled against the IPCC’s Hockey Team is that they tried to hide the MWP and LIA in spite of overwhelming historical evidence. “Denial” on steroids!

Looks there’s data available from the Tiros-N Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) from
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_browse.html
the TLT channel samples the lower troposphere where most of the airmass is and it shows a clearly rising background underlying the fluctuations on the yearly timescale. The trend is less for the upper troposphere. (Interestingly, the stratosphere shows cooling profiles, although there’s not a lot of heat associated with that because of the low densities.)

this seques into what moptop said in 61
“…understand that the planet is not uniform, like some idealized blackbody sphere, and so the energy does not necessarily balance out over the whole globe the way you think it might.”

I do understand. The biosphere is incredibly complicated. However, I can step outside the planet and draw a spherical boundary around the planet at a suitable radius and claim that

energy in (from the sun) – energy out (thermal radiation) = heat increase of planet

cause THATs conservation of energy.

The quantities on the left hand side can in principle be measured from space. The first has been monitored
since 1978 and is flat over that period except for 0.1 – 0.2% oscillations due to the Solar cycle.
(http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant). I’m not so knowledable about space missions so I don’t know offhand if satellites have been measuring the thermal output of the planet – I’m trying to find out now. But that should be able to settle it once and for all.

However, in the meantime there IS the TIROS-N microwave observations, which shows a steady temperature increase of 1.5C / century over that same period. What could be causing that, I ask myself? well, the CO2 has been increasing over the same period,
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.html
and that by itself, can cause an increase, although as has been said here, CO2 effects can be offset by things like albedo increases for example. Well, okay then if its not CO2, what is it? The one answer I keep hearing is “oh its natural cycles” or “Milankovitch cycles” – well admittedly I’m not an expert, but these cycles seem to
1) cause climate change by long term variations in the amount of sunlight received at different parts
2) amount to what, say a few degrees change …
3) … on timescales of tens of thousands of years or more

2) and 3) imply temperature change rates of change of a few degrees per 10,000 years or more. If I take
extreme values, say 10 degrees (!) over 10,000 years thats .1 deg / century. Compare that to the 1.5 from TIROS – and BTW thats also echoed by Monckton in the link given above in 63. Furthermore, the two Greenland Ice Core temperature graphs given in comments 43 and 55 both show downwardtrends for the last 10,000 years or so. If there IS a Milankovitch background, which I’m not denying, I don’t see how can be related to the observed increase in the last 30 years which is well over an order of magnitude higher and much much faster. The earths axes and orbit have not noticeably changed in that period.

So far, I have to conclude that the simplest explanation for this data is that the observed temperature increases have been driven by CO2 increases, and other potentially ameliorating effects, like albedo increases, etc have failed to completely compensate for it. Its Occam’s razor.