The frightening almost religious trust I've raised in scientists here is not just about abdicating our own judgement to others, but utterly unfounded.

Oddly enough the slight rise in sea level rate has coincided with the introduction of satellite measurements, on top of temperature rises when most land stations were removed and replaced in 1979. Cause or effect one may wonder. The latest analysis from NASA has discovered the entire satellite data since the beginning of taking sea level measurements may well have been measuring the wrong points, causing a potential doubling in figures. This means (and corresponds with the negligible rise in temperature) the rise has not increased in rate but is steady at well under 8 inches a century, no more than the 1900s.

Besides the implications for all the predictions in sea level rises made in the last 30 years which have unanimously been hundreds of times higher than present, on the large picture then how can we trust any of their old data when they keep discovering the old methods were inadequate? Can you imagine your annual taxes being messed around with like that? Except they are, as ours include a large portion of climate tax, which wouldn't exist had they not overestimated a growing number of figures way above the likely reality. Once these corrections are made the new sea level graphs are going to drop. How will the politicians react to that once it's clear they aren't doing anything new for hundreds of years after all? (nothing)

Error after error after error etc

The significance of climate stories is only as good as the people reading them, and the media have clearly dismissed many as it doesn't fit with their agenda. Therefore earlier this year yet another long term study of proxy data (tree rings in this case) for the last 2000 years claims the past temperature estimates were far too low and we are indeed in a cooling trend, at least in Europe. Regardless of the rest of the world there is so much uncertainty in the area governments have no place making policies on it while it is.

Tree rings show Europe is cooling

Meanwhile, after five years, it turns out that another major temperature diagram had to be adjusted after errors were found, again showing the 1930s were the warmest overall, but for reasons unknown to me they are still using the old diagrams today despite everyone knowing they were way out. That is sheer negligence, or worse.

"1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century. This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards."

Errors corrected

So again, errors have been picked up which shift the entire foundations of the argument, which is bad enough, but again, they are still using the old diagrams today.

Can you see a pattern forming?

Generally it's best to take the evidence here as a whole, but every now and then a leading diagram tends to overshadow all the lesser data, and here is one of the best I've come across. Solar cycles/temperature. The fit is incredible. Unlike the one with CO2.

Far more pressing is why aren't the world aware of it, this was found 11 years ago?

Yes, it's really the sun.

After a summer of absolute media overload, the Grace satellite has just refined its findings and found the loss of Arctic ice to be many times less than previously thought, as the spurious data was so great it took them this long to filter it out. The loss is now within the error margin, ie negligible. Which is logical going by the lack of warming for over 15 years now.

New science

" While overall ice loss on Greenland consistently increased between 2003 and 2010, Harig and Simons found that it was in fact very patchy from region to region.

In addition, the enhanced detail of where and how much ice melted allowed the researchers to estimate that the annual acceleration in ice loss is much lower than previous research has suggested, roughly increasing by 8 billion tons every year. Previous estimates were as high as 30 billion tons more per year.

The rate of loss of ice from Greenland is estimated at 199.72 plus-or-minus 6.28 gigatonnes per year. So the possible acceleration of losses is only barely larger than the margin of error in the readings: it's very difficult to tell the supposed loss curve from a straight line."

I'm sure both the IPCC and media will take this on board and change their approaches accordingly </sarc>

The 1998 el nino temperature peak is very familiar to any climate investigators, and recently (as it takes a while for the new material to filter through) it has been overtaken by the one in 2010. I was surprised as these have only recently begun arriving, but only in half the diagrams.

There are two world temperature measurements, the absolute (around 14C) and relative (anomaly). Both are the same. You have some sites displaying both with the peak at 2010, while an equal number is still in 1998.

Imagine a hospital measuring the temperatures of the patients, and having two different diagrams. Which one would be the right one for the doctor to treat? I don't know the answer, any more than I do for the world's temperature.

I've gone to the trouble of saving it here, I could do with another final long term temperature diagram to complete the set but so far none go beyond 2010, but the short term ones all do so quite clear regardless.

Here it is.

I will add in my conclusions having read a partial explanation since posting it. The general reason was the data had been reassessed and added new Arctic measurements taken since the 1998 peak which shoved the angle downwards. That as may be, but what does that tell you on the meaning of this alteration? The only available conclusion is they had been using incorrect data for some years and treated it as correct. This is not an isolated example, I have pages of them saved, and many posted here. Extend the scenario to other professions. A team of engineers are building a massive bridge across a river taking traffic and trains, and depending how they did it the measurements for weight tolerances and the like varied greatly. Would you even walk across it, let alone drive, if you'd seen the data they used before they built it?

Until the climate, which other field could use such widely differing figures, which then were 'revised' from time to time, one by one dismissing the medieval warm period (it's still in every book written before it was removed), 1938 and then 1998 as the peaks, and if a shop gives you the wrong change by accident the error will tend to zero over time, but every single alteration I have has been upwards. That means every error and new finding meant their figures were reading too high then, including believe it or not the adjustment for urban heat islands where most current weather stations are located.

If you (like quite a number here have been or are) were doing a science degree, and offered three different sets of data depending what you used to measure them you know what would happen. If you were qualified and produced similar variations in the lab you also know exactly what would happen. If you did it in a lab and also advised governments to collect money on the basis of it you only need to look at Enron and will see what happened to them for doing what is today called 'carbon trading' and is compulsory in the EU and Australia. You don't need a science degree, a degree, or a single exam pass to get this (just like jury members who decide if someone loses their liberty), just eyes and ears and a mind to process what they see and hear. How can a single field function using such blatantly inadequate and worse material, and both collect the praise of most of the world and be relied on to make world policy via the UN?

One thing about writing things down with dates means is I can refer to claims I made earlier and then refer to new results which suprise surprise appear to confirm they were accurate.

Oddly despite the complexity of the underlying equations, like the machine code used for websites we all use happily, the final results are primary school level. CO2 rose 50% from 260-400ppm, and the temperature (minus natural causes) rose 0.8C.

Therefore with no unknown new influences we have observed the increase of half a doubling to imply a doubling will be no more than 1.6C (minus natural causes).

And now the IPCC drafts seem to have worked it out as well.

IPCC reviewer explains the figures

Of course it's a year before the actual final effort by then which is likely to have been altered the same way the temperature figures were to make them rise in the 80s (see recent post), but it won't change the existing relationship and look less and less credible if they do try and introduce an unsupported mystery cause of a greater rise for the remaining 50%, especially since their end point is 2100 which none of us can be alive to know either way.

Have the facts finally overtaken the politics?

In a twist to the debate over global warming, melting Arctic sea ice is making it easier to transport the fossil fuels that produce the planet-warming gases, which appear to be causing it to thaw in the first place.

Arctic sea ice melted to a record low in September, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, when ice covered just 24 percent of the Arctic Ocean, compared with at least twice that amount three decades ago.

The link includes an image of the newly opened Northern Sea Route.

The author of the article has been promoted to the Washington, D.C. bureau, but is from Alaska.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2012/12/26/2734944/economic-wave-may-course-through.html#storylink=cpy

National Snow and Ice Data Center. Another conspiratorial science organisation eh Satguru. Did a scientist steal your lunch money or what?

Yes, they did actually, our fuel and energy are among the most expensive in the world due to said scientists, as they quite openly and happily drive government policy.

The Arctic melts however are thoroughly misleading, one, because they are cyclic and have shipping records going back hundreds of years showing they do it every few decades and then freeze again as long as records are kept, and secondly like temperatures the full records only go back to 1979 when there were satellites to view it all from above.

This is the clearest diagram I can find covering that era. But it doesn't make good news material so you won't see that sort of thing blasted around the papers. Had they shown you this instead (the recent melt will not make much of a dent come the spring when the winter freeze is added) I don't think it would have caught your attention.

Satellite ice 1979-2010

Full history

It's essential to know these basics before trying to use local and short term incidents to try and claim something unusual is happening. Especially as in order to melt (not locally but worldwide, which it isn't) it needs to be driven by temperature, which has not done so for at least 15 years. How can the ice melt if the average temperature hasn't risen sufficiently for it to do so?

20th century history

Long term history

"Numerous sites have been surveyed along the length of the Northwest Passage. The eastern and western approaches have become reliably ice-free in summer under historical climatic conditions, whereas in the central part summer sea ice has been persistent. The radiocarbon-dated bowhead whale remains indicate that the whales were able to range along the length of the Passage during two intervals (centered on 9000 years ago and 1000 years ago) and that they were able to access the central part from the east about 4000 years ago. During the first of these intervals (9000 before present) ice cores indicate that summer temperatures were about 3°C warmer than mid 20th Century. Therefore, a warming of 3°C exceeds the opening threshold. Medieval Warm Period temperatures were probably about 1°C warmer than mid-20th Century, which is likely close to threshold conditions for an opening of the passage."

How can the ice melt if the average temperature hasn't risen sufficiently for it to do so?

That's a really good question. The Arctic sea ice has melted, according to your information, more than it had for 4000 years.

(The eastern and western approaches have become reliably ice-free in summer under historical climatic conditions, whereas in the central part summer sea ice has been persistent. The radiocarbon-dated bowhead whale remains indicate that the whales were able to range along the length of the Passage during two intervals (centered on 9000 years ago and 1000 years ago) and that they were able to access the central part from the east about 4000 years ago.)

The 1930s had a greater passage free though so can't quite work that out, and it showed 1C higher in the 1500s. I do wonder how much interpretation is subjective if not trained (on both sides, including me, I am not a scientist), but the point stands that even 4000 years ago man was spread worldwide, it was around 3C higher, there was very little Arctic ice, and people continued their lives as always. So regardless of the historic details which are patchy at best, the one thing history does tell us is mankind didn't appear to suffer any bad effects 3C above today's average temperature. I'd say that was pretty good news.

The Arctic ice issue is tremendously complex- the biggest clue being that it's completely different from the Antarctic as nearly all sea ice. Half of the melts are not due to temperature but weather conditions, mainly wind. The storms break up the ice and warm water rises to the top causing melting of the remainder. This detailed analysis covers the 20th century onwards and shows the measurements were so patchy before satellites you can only use local direct reports reliably as there was no universal direct figure, and extrapolate from them.

Arctic ice reports

"Arctic Ice Changes in past 3 years due to 'shifting winds' - 2009 - Oceanographer and Arctic researcher Jane Eert said “dramatic [Arctic ice] changes in the past three years are the result of shifting winds.” “Enormous amounts of ice have 'been exported from the Arctic,' driven by winds that are shifting,”

A series of similar studies follows all saying it was mainly from the wind, not the temperature, which is entirely logical following the lack of any increase in temperature.

I am also an amateur.

Your life would be vastly different if the temperature rises another 2 degrees; you would have to relocate, and that would be far more complicated than picking up your spear, rolling up your tent and finding a happier hunting ground.

The average temperatures during the last glacial maximum 18,000 years ago were only 5 degrees C. cooler than now, according to a textbook I'm studying. (See Q #12 on this quiz.)

All the major coastal cities would flood. We would have a building boom farther inland if we were able to build new port cities to receive raw materials.

See this article by the BBC.

Also, the graphs in this one, which demonstrates a common fallacy of skeptics: looking at too short a record. Ironically, the top photo does exactly the same thing, showing glacial retreat since 1992 without acknowledging the Athabasca Glacier has been in retreat for 125 years.

Here's the best available Arctic temperature data, and the best Arctic sea ice data.

How much human actions influence all this is very much open to debate, but the facts of higher temperatures and less sea ice are clear.

Hi, Satguru,

Hoping not to sound (or be!) pedantic, I'm going to make a recommendation. You seem to be sincerely interested in this subject, but mostly quote from skeptic sites. I suggest studying the most neutral sources possible. My rule of thumb is that if the person's career depends on proving or disproving AWG, he will not be as reliable as someone who is just after the facts. While I recognize the ideal of dispassionate research is never fully achieved since all researchers are human, those who are attempting to prove a point rather than investigate the facts have a huge bias.

In a brief correspondence with Michael E. Mann (a few short emails) it was obvious he is willing to exaggerate some claims. But Anthony Watts is hardly unbiased, either, and he has a position to defend.

I find the "conversion" story of Richard Muller quite convincing. Here it is in the BBC.

I read the lot actually, and like a jury member have seen the holes in the case for the prosecution. Of course the defendant (you and me here) is innocent until proven guilty, and the prosecution are not allowed to play the same tricks as the defence as one penalises an innocent person while the other may just get them off either way.

To qualify my point, I was fascinated by the original stories in the 90s, and just thought it was a scientific curiosity with no special significance, but interested enough to follow. A few years later the original numbers I'd seen had shrunk, I thought at that point that normally when a scare story peters out the press move on to something else, but they didn't. Come the internet as well as a few newspapers and other sources I started checking up the claims on the large and small scale and found the same sort of problems you find when interviewing an unreliable witness. Changes in evidence, contradictions, all the things which alert the judge to a possible dismissal (I'm the son of a judge so only too familiar). Using scientific principles, you can't have a case which can't be proved, repeated or observed. The warming Mann is speaking of as well as the entire UN is in 2050-2100. That is not observable. It can never be and no experiment should even be attempted without a conclusion.

I won't list the individual data here (I have a site for that which is now up to the draft material on my summary) and most is on this thread already, but a slightly warmer (as in today) climate is within parameters we always experience, the only weird thing is the high CO2. Take that away and look again. The temperature has risen slightly over around a 30 year period up to around 2000 which is also related to a 60 year cycle where you have a regular 30 years warming and cooling. At least we don't have to wait till we're 90 plus to see this likely cooling phase complete in around 20 years, but it's a third completed already and fits past graphs.

As for the evidence you speak of I have sorted it into three main categories to be simple.

1) Induction- local and short term phenomena like the Arctic melt, glacier melts, hot summers, extreme weather events etc, which alone indicate nothing, as we are told when we dare to mention freezing winters which are quite rightly called weather.

2) Errors and adjustments- I am collecting these religiously, many posted here, and examples such as the 30 billion tons of ice coming off the Himalayan glaciers every year, which turned out to be made up, is only one of many like it but easily the worst. Then the pre and post adjustments. Ramping up recent temperatures or dropping the old ones to make the current look high are the usual, and then going back and 'fixing' ones they'd used for years when they found ways to fill the gaps in the old ones. Where else in science does that happen?

3) Predictions- climate models are the lion's share of the climate studies, most set 20-100 years ahead, meaning people will forget them a month, year or decade ahead and will only occasionally be called to task when one is so widely used the present can be held against it and seen to be wrong. Like the UN predictions made in the 90s for 2010. Anyone with a BSc can make them, and no one with any qualification on earth can get them right, the further ahead outside a linear system the wider the error compared to the range. Where the error margin (it widens like a funnel) becomes wider than the range then they are meant to stop at or before that point, but they keep on.

Shaky foundations form no buildings. Everything else they claim based on this trio of inadequacy collapses as it is raised. The very fact the temperatures haven't risen steadily as all models claimed is a poor start. The sea level can't swing wildly like temperature unless we're leaving an ice age, and that is almost linear again with a reasonably likely range of a few inches this century already, exactly the same as the last one. Unfortunately it's impossible to keep trying to find material to support a theory when everything before it has failed to reach the mark.

The only issue everyone agrees is in question is whether doubling CO2 (we're half way there) will add more than the lab measurement of 1C or something will make it rise more by releasing major amounts of water vapour. Unlike the 2050 onward predictions we have a result already, the temperature rise for a 50% rise is 0.8-0.4C (actual less natural), meaning even if it was all from CO2 which no one is claiming, it couldn't surpass far beyond 1C, and 2C is the UN's figure where the benefits (it lists the same ones as I always did, like increased food production and fewer deaths) may be outweighed by the problems (despite it being 3C higher 4000 years ago, and around 1C in 1500). The UN IPCC had that figure on their graph and it vanished around 2000, which doesn't make it go away, it just either means they don't want it, or they were so wrong for decades of measurements none are reliable enough to use ever again. How can we have confidence in that?

Although this diagram was published over a year ago no one knows about it. A few more will now.

Temperature vs CO2 from 1960, red line (temperature) is followed by the black line (CO2), around 6 months after it changes. The claim from numerous scientists that CO2 rises after temperature, meaning the slight variations warm the sea which gives off more CO2, is both logical and observable, and corroborated by the equally unknown Ibuki satellite which found the least populated areas gave off CO2 and vice versa. All this points to the current rise in CO2 being entirely natural, as if not then it would rise and then the temperature would, and the satellite findings would not have shown nearly all highly populated areas absorbing CO2 overall.

Put these together and I can't see how the rest stands up. Neither are fabricated, adjusted or otherwise unreliable, and why haven't the scientists included these findings into the latest announcements? I have had a sneak preview of the latest IPCC report, and can say the draft does appear to defuse pretty much everything from the previous four, and even if altered for the final work the draft has been saved by many people and will need even more explaining if the original statements differ greatly as they can't both be right.

CO2 follows temperature

I have just found another diagram which shows the Arctic temperature following the geomagnetic field (no, I have no idea what it is), but would explain the recent decline in ice, plus only half of sea ice loss is from temperature while the rest is weather related, mainly wind. It's from the cdiac, the US CO2 monitors so definitely genuine, just found the study here.

Original research here

I would say this new study, collecting more datasets than any before, has to be the best news for everyone concerned about global warming on both sides, as it appears to have found it has gone, and probably wasn't ever there at all.

“…We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcing might have had a temporary effect on global temperature.”

“…our rejection of AGW is not absolute; it might be a false positive, and we cannot rule out the possibility that recent global warming has an anthropogenic footprint. However, this possibility is very small, and is not statistically significant at conventional levels.”

How many of these actually need to be done before people take any notice of them?

No significant man made warming found

M. Beenstock1, Y. Reingewertz1, and N. Paldor2
1Department of Economics, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus Campus, Jerusalem, Israel
2Fredy and Nadine Institute of Earth Sciences, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Edmond J. Safra campus, Givat Ram, Jerusalem, Israel

Here are excerpts from a report you'll like:

The overwhelming majority of Alaska is getting colder and has been since 2000, according to a study by researchers with the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. But the authors stop short of saying the lower temperatures contradict that idea that the earth, and Alaska in particular, is warming. Instead, they conclude that the findings show a temporary variation.

The report, produced by a team headed by professor emeritus of geophysics Gerd Wendler, is titled "The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska." It was published in The Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2012.

The authors looked into sunspot activity and determined that it was not related to the trend. They did find a correlation with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, a shift in warm waters from the eastern to the western side of the Pacific Ocean not unlike the El Nino warming pattern. But while El Nino shifts over months, the PDO moves much more slowly, staying put for years or decades.

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2013/01/05/2743379/study-shows-alaska-got-colder.html#storylink=cpy


At the same time, CNN explains why Shell can drill in Alaskan waters--far less sea ice:

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates more than 90 billion barrels of oil and nearly 1,700 trillion cubic feet of natural gas may be recoverable by drilling in the North Slope. And the shrinking of the region's sea ice -- which hit record lows in 2012 -- has created new opportunities for energy exploration in the region.

Climate researchers say that a decrease in sea ice is a symptom of a warming climate, caused largely by the combustion of carbon-rich fossil fuels. The science is politically controversial but generally accepted as fact by most scientists.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/05/us/alaska-drilling-rig/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

It is indeed such a mixed picture people are able to take almost the same material and present it in opposing ways. So far the general requirements of science, observable, repeatable and predictable are yet to be fulfilled, and with the entire complexity of the climate adding a small amount of CO2 to the existing part will probably never be quantifiable, with so many known and unknown drivers of all its aspects.

However, manipulating the new data before and after it arrives does not help their cause one bit, that is illegal outside science and would have expected it to be inside as well although at present a retraction is the worst they can expect (which I've detailed elsewhere).

But back to Alaska, it is a micro representation of the big picture, and deciding how and where it fits in is a fool's errand, as the theories one puts forward are contradicted by another, and pretty much the same whichever events they pick. I keep saying if a doctor or investor had such a wide margin of uncertainty you'd stop using them, so why should the climate be any different just because the losses from errors aren't directly apparent in deaths or financial losses? But I'm very pleased to see something which is showing both sides as very few people on either side acknowledge there is a second at all, which again is far from scientific.

It's a big world. Alaskan land has gotten significantly cooler in the past decade, but its waters have warmed significantly. Meanwhile, on average, the USA has gotten hotter: "2012 is officially in the books as the hottest year on record for the continental United States." http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/08/us/extreme-weather/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

"The average combined global land and ocean surface temperature for November 2012 was 0.67°C (1.21°F) above the 20th century average of 12.9°C (60.4°F). This is the fifth warmest November since records began in 1880. Including this November, the 10 warmest Novembers have occurred in the past 12 years." http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/

You can google the months ("global temperature average 2012") and find August, 2012, was the 4th warmest August since 1880, May was the second warmest May, etc.

I can only observe the material produced as not a scientist, and does look like you may appear to be actively looking for trouble with this latest set. Short term records are firstly not enough to form a trend, and secondly the record is since when exactly? Since we started measuring, since satellite usage, since proxy records began?

This is not science, but media speak. I've waded through over a decade of these shrill headlines, and when you fit them into the total they seem to vanish in the noise of the wider variability. What about the amount of change? If two million people have cancer in an area and a million more have it the next year, that's a heck of a lot of people, and a 50% increase. If one person has a particular form of cancer in an area and the next year two does, that's a 100% increase.

Those are media tricks, and not science. These quotes are meaningless without the sort of context I have mentioned, and for every single one someone can provide I can do exactly the same with the opposites. Neither will be any more meaningful than the other, and if possible means such quotes are not part of any evidential value. Even the IPCC have set the lion's share of global warming in the period 2050-2100, long after most of us will have left the planet and totally unobservable as a result. Even they are not certain of the degree or existence of man made warming, let alone the temperature next year. So unless we have a pretty sharp rise or fall in the next decade or two nothing we have yet indicates a lot as whatever has been claimed is virtually all potential, these are just the foreshocks which require vast amounts of inference to assign any significance to at all, and with a growing period of flat temperatures the likelihood of any significant rise by 2050 or 2100 becomes less and less, and diverges more and more from the models.

NASA have just announced a new set of reports which demonstrate a large correlation between solar variation and climate/temperature

NASA report

This is not a single study, but a complete collaboration required by experts in all areas, as it was acknowledged how hard it was for any single discipline to have enough knowledge alone to contribute enough. As such this is the most comprehensive of all studies into solar activity and NASA have now been compelled to accept the sun does indeed drive the climate in a major way after all.

"One of the participants, Greg Kopp of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, pointed out that while the variations in luminosity over the 11-year solar cycle amount to only a tenth of a percent of the sun's total output, such a small fraction is still important. "Even typical short term variations of 0.1% in incident irradiance exceed all other energy sources (such as natural radioactivity in Earth's core) combined," he says.

Of particular importance is the sun's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) radiation, which peaks during the years around solar maximum. Within the relatively narrow band of EUV wavelengths, the sun’s output varies not by a minuscule 0.1%, but by whopping factors of 10 or more. This can strongly affect the chemistry and thermal structure of the upper atmosphere."

And like buses I just came across a report showing how CO2 levels in the IPCC literature appear to have been basically made up by ignoring everything over 300 (and boy, were there a lot!). I'll dig a little more but this graph alone pretty well kills off the entire debate if correct as it was close to double the official pre-industrial levels during those levels. I always wondered why my 1961 book (when we were still expecting an ice age) had CO2 at 200-400ppm, which the maximum is still below today's 390ppm.

Selective measurements influence world policy

The entire report

I'm in Anchorage right now, where all three of my adult children live.

Last year was one of the coldest Januaries on record, and broke all records for snowfall. (If I remember, the records go back to 1888. Could disremember.) http://www.adn.com/2012/01/27/2287406/anchorage-on-track-to-set-record.html

This year is unseasonably warm and with very little snowfall. Yesterday it was 39 degrees F. and raining! Whoever heard of a flood watch in the middle of January? http://paom.arh.noaa.gov/zonefcst.php?zone=101

I'm just reporting these pertinent facts on wild weather swing. I know I can't see the whole global picture from here. Heck, I can't even see Russia from my back porch!

All reports are welcomed, and you being in Alaska particularly relevant. And also appear to show what our winters do in England, no two are the same, except the ones that are. That's been the same in living memory and two of the coldest were in the last few years.

Meanwhile a study on top of the thorough assessment by Hebrew University has also discovered:

"Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. Changes in atmospheric CO2 are NOT tracking changes in human emissions"

Global and Planetary Change
Volume 100, January 2013, Pages 51–69

Ole Humlum, Kjell Stordahl, Jan-Erik Solheim

The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature

Summary here

I think the rest is a pay service but by some fairly eminent scientists for those who are familiar.

http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/report-global-warming-changing-daily-life-in-u-s-1.111469
Please read the above article which has some up to date pertinent information compiled by app. 200 Scientests

The start of the article "Global warming is already changing America from sea to rising sea and is affecting how Americans live, a massive new federally commissioned report says."

pretty well almost killed it for me from the start, and had to accept it was the poor journalism rather than anything in the study which related to the rising sea, which is rising at a rate of around 7 inches a century as it did the last one. That over, the next hurdle was the same as always, 'in the future'. We only get the future a long time after the present, stating the obvious but one these guys appear to have forgotten. In the early 90s the IPCC combined the best available models and made a graph of potential future temperatures by 2010 with different emissions, come 2010 and we were below the lowest one. And no apologies were made.

"and climate change is more than hotter temperatures, the report said."

Really? Climate change from global warming is about more than higher temperatures which drive, er, climate change? Poor grammar at best, misleading at worst.

"The report uses the word "threat" or variations of it 198 times and versions of the word "disrupt" another 120 times."

Doesn't mean a single one will happen.

"Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including impacts from increased extreme weather events,"

The current position is extreme weather events are not likely to increase in frequency but possibly in intensity.

"the report details 13 airports that have runways that could be inundated by rising sea level."

7 inches a century?

Before I read this I was expecting a bunch of decent data showing actual causes and effects which would have demonstrated if nothing else there was some uncertainty, with other 2013 reports already presented appearing to be finding things had settled down and may never have even been happening at all. The combination of the alarmist and careless reporting and the lack of physical data makes this a propaganda piece of the worst kind, and as such does exactly the opposite intended, if read by anyone not already convinced of the case.

Al Gore and John Kerry have both said there are no peer reviewed studies disputing any aspect of man made warming. I have a list made of over 1,100 right here.

If you can't trust them on something as important as that, what else can you trust them on?

Where's the consensus?

The great thing about sea ice is its short term nature. This means unlike the sea level or solid land based glaciers the swings are fast and wide. And due to the inherent balance throughout the climate system a fast melt is usually followed by a fast freeze, the latest figures show a record for 2013 already, which most neutral bystanders would say is very good news, much like the halt in temperature rise for the partisan (as I would prefer a rise, as history shows a higher temperature of a couple of degrees causes more food production and fewer deaths from cold). But if people think warmer is worse then both are good news, and certainly if taxes were connected to the temperature rise it would be good news for me as well as it hits me as hard as any.

Record Arctic freeze

Possibly the best news for the world for decades. A new study from the Department of Geology, Western Washington University, has studied 650,000 year's worth of ice cores in more detail than before, and found huge rises in temperature throughout history, totally unrelated to CO2. According to the conclusion any rise in CO2 would be most likely from the rise in temperature releasing it from the ocean, but finds absolutely no connection between the short and minor current temperature rise and the clear rise in CO2.

This is science at the highest level and would need a great deal of errors to be proved wrong in the slightest.

Ice core analysis

In the past century, each of the two warm periods (1915–1945 and 1978–1998) and each of the two cool periods (1880–1915 and 1945–1977) resulted from cyclic changes of Pacific sea surface temperatures (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). In 1999, the NE Pacific changed abruptly from its warm mode to its cool mode, bringing the 1978–1998 warming to a close. Projection of the pattern of cyclic warming and cooling over the past 500 years strongly suggests that the climate will continue to cool for the next several decades.

When I've been accused time and time again of being anti science here, my point is that science has to follow scientific method. Using only weak computer models to imitate a climate as complex as a human mind, and base it purely on assumptions how they think it ought to work, and then project it beyond our lifespans before anything happens is anti science. This study here is real science, I can see the difference at least.

I wonder how long it will take for the asteroids and meteoroids to be blamed on global warming? Meteorology is based on meteor showers, isn't it? Did you see the clouds of Carbon that one over Russia left in its wake? Does Russia have to pay the Carbon Tax on it, I wonder? It was reported to have broken up some of winter's ice cap (on a lake). The asteroid was here last year too. Isn't that a trend to add to the models?

I've read a few pieces already by scientists blaming it for all geological activity- earthquake/tsunamis and volcanic. I am hoping this diversion from what most people have learnt in school may start turning heads of those currently accepting their veracity and capability and realise they are losing it.

Meanwhile CNN have also blamed the meteorite on it so the blame is widening to infinite proportions. I suspect if the USA bomb out of the next World Cup finals a few scientists will say they couldn't train enough as the weather wasn't right. They seem to use every opportunity they can to do so and people just accept it and carry on, but they are going too far now for even the most trusting types.

CNN story