How many stations did we have gathering CO2 levels and various other atmospheric gasses 100 years ago? How detailed were stations measuring temperatures 100 years ago?

Yes we were collecting data then, but no where as detailed or as accurately as we are currently, and the data collection just gets worse the farther back you go.

Quote: Original post by Talroth
How many stations did we have gathering CO2 levels and various other atmospheric gasses 100 years ago? How detailed were stations measuring temperatures 100 years ago?

Yes we were collecting data then, but no where as detailed or as accurately as we are currently, and the data collection just gets worse the farther back you go.

Yes. This is entirely true, however, your argument does not affect temp estimates based on tree ring and ice core samples.

Their conclusion: Recent warmth appears anomalous for at least the past 1,300 years whether or not tree-ring data are used.
Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia

And just in case you didn't think they looked at possible errors in their data:
Clicky
Conclusion: Data can be off as much as 5%, but that doesn't account for the trend in warming.

Quote: Original post by d000hg

Quote: Original post by Dreddnafious Maelstrom
I think it's healthy to entertain dissenting views, especially when it's considered taboo.

Absolutely. The climate-change brigade's biggest victory is not in how good their science is, but in getting everyone to believe that it's so obviously right, that only cranks would think otherwise. Phrases like "climate change deniers" are routinely used to ridicule those who don't share the prevailing view, in a clear attempt to discredit their arguments so that they can be dismissed without response. In the UK election, one candidate even accused another of "associating with climate change deniers" as if he were saying "holocaust deniers".

When the "skeptics" are unable to offer competing theories capable of explaining observations and continually dismiss the piles of gathering evidence and climate change predictions that bear out, they are behaving like holocaust deniers so labeling them in like manner is fitting.

Quote: Original post by d000hg

Quote: Original post by ddn3
It's so obvious that man made climate change is occurring

And there we go. The old "it's obvious, any fool can see it" argument. What is obvious and why? Because your local weather isn't nice, or because you've listened to people repeat it on TV, or because you've analysed the raw data, or because you've verified the raw data isn't adjusted to look good?

Melting glaciers, melting ice caps, disrupted rain patterns, increase floods, increase droughts, record breaking heat waves, increased forest fires, increased ocean acidity, increased ocean temperatures, expanding ranges of insects and diseases, ...

Quote: Original post by Binomine
your argument does not affect temp estimates based on tree ring and ice core samples.

And yet this still goes back to making millions of years of estimates based on less than a few hundred years of hard data. Trees and glaciers don't etch the temperature on themselves for us to read centuries later, and we can only make estimates based on what we can see without knowing all the factors with 100% certainty. Most detailed data on the subject I've seen has an ever increasing 'feathering' effect as we go back as we become less and less certain. In many of these cases we have more than enough room in the margin of error to allow similar spikes as the one we see going on in the last few hundred years.


My problem is with people who claim that this 'spike' is without a doubt a spike, that it is unique in history, and that it is without a doubt caused by humans.

Quote: Original post by Talroth

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
For half-a-century we've known that we're pumping an unprecedented amount of "greenhouse-gasses" into the air.
For decades we've recorded the effects of the changing composition of the atmosphere, and we've compared these measurements with the predicted changes due to the "greenhouse effect" - the predictions and observations line up.

I've always wondered about this, as I've never found a single paper that detailed comparisons between what humans put out, and what is added by nature (Forest fires, natural venting, volcanoes, etc.) through out history.

The baseline is 280 ppm of C02 (1 ppm ~= 1 mg/L). The historical turning point is the industrial revolution and the large scale burning of coal and oil. The assumption is that the natural contribution prior to then remained consistent.

The proxy temperature data goes back 2000 years (Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia)

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Melting glaciers, melting ice caps, disrupted rain patterns, increase floods, increase droughts, record breaking heat waves, increased forest fires, increased ocean acidity, increased ocean temperatures, expanding ranges of insects and diseases, ...

A quick google gave this. I didn't read them, but I've read similar things in the past and this was the first one I saw on google.

The best part about climate and evolution debates is that universe simply doesn't care.

If theory of evolution turns out to be false, then Darwinists will become extinct, since their position will no longer offer any benefit to humanity and might even be harmful. Ironically, they will become extinct via the process of evolution, where humanity will evolve into society that doesn't recognize evolution.

If global warming turns out to be true, then humanity will grow extinct and Earth will become barren rock. Earth will keep rotating around Sun for the next few billion years before evaporating. So at least in this regard warming is justified, just the scale might be a bit off.

Either way, universe doesn't care. Copernican principle and all that.

Quote: Original post by way2lazy2care

Quote: Original post by LessBread
Melting glaciers, melting ice caps, disrupted rain patterns, increase floods, increase droughts, record breaking heat waves, increased forest fires, increased ocean acidity, increased ocean temperatures, expanding ranges of insects and diseases, ...

A quick google gave this. I didn't read them, but I've read similar things in the past and this was the first one I saw on google.

Only one of the references on that page links to an outside source, all of the others link to pages on that site. Moreover that site doesn't even have an "about" page explaining who Robert Felix is, what credentials he has and why anyone should take him seriously. Per the title of the Oreskes extract, "Global Warming Deniers Aren't "Experts" At All". According to Monbiot, Junk science (2005), Robert Felix is a former architect and his site relies on claims made in a magazine published by Lyndon LaRouche. So don't be taken in by claims on that page that the mainstream media is ignoring the supposedly growing glaciers. Pointing to that page in this context is like pointing to stormfront in a discussion of the Holocaust.

Climate change: The facts of life

Quote:
...
Does it matter? The answer is, clearly, yes. Worldwide, June was the hottest June since records began; July was the second hottest ever recorded. Pakistan has just experienced both extreme heat and catastrophic floods; Russia has been scorched by heatwave and its forests incinerated. None of these events should be linked directly to global warming: they might well have happened anyway. However, both are consistent with predictions by the IPCC that in a warming world, extreme events may be more frequent, more intense. So the floods in Swat and the Indus valley are, like the yellow fever mosquitoes of the Netherlands, an indication that things could get worse.

But here is the bad news: things will get worse. The same thermal inertia that delays by minutes the warming of water in a kettle applies to the planet's oceans, too. If all nations stopped burning fossil fuels immediately, the planet's oceans would still go on warming, sea levels would continue to rise, heat waves would kill thousands in the temperate zones and windstorms and floods would kill tens of thousands in the tropics. To have prevented the very modest levels of warming the world has seen so far, governments should have taken decisive action 30 years ago. But in 1980 nobody – and that included most climate scientists – appreciated how swiftly climate might change; how alarmingly a planet's temperature could begin to climb.
...

It's trickier than just "warming" part in

Quote: July was the second hottest ever recorded. Pakistan has just experienced both extreme heat and catastrophic floods; Russia has been scorched by heatwave and its forests incinerated.

Historical cold in South America.

This is the tricky part - temperatures on global average change by a fraction of degree, but local extremes appear to be getting worse.

The impact of .5 degree change is not enough for anyone to notice.

But climate is a dynamic and chaotic system. Individual contributions are known to have disproportionate effect. And perturbing a chaotic system is highly unlikely to stabilize it over long term - at least as per thermodynamics, everything tends to move towards disarray, the stability is an anomaly. It's these very fluctuations that have some people worried.

All this furor makes me wonder what the debate would be like if, instead of global warming, we had an ice age coming. Would there still be deniers telling us that nothing bad is going to happen? What would the environmentalists be telling us to do, instead of cutting back on fossil fuel burning? Increase it?