Possibly not. The man in the street that has been scared into thinking the world will end and it's his fault, yes.

Dear Sir,

My name is Pushtupma Butt. I am the son of late Al Gore. Before my father died, my late father was limited liability saviour of the world and failed politician.

Two months after he came back from saving world at Copenhagen, he got frozen to death in blizzard and ice storm in the coldest winter for 50 years. I didn't know that my father was going to leave me covered in icicles. I stuck broom up ass and he look like Peters icecream.

But before he died he my father, MAY HIS SOUL REST IN PERFECT PEACE he disclosed to me that the great Kevin07 had promised him great wealth from new warming taxes.

I have located this great wealth, but it is still in taxpayers pockets in strange brown land.

I want you to do me a favour to assist me transfer the money to my pocket as my Guardian and Investor. This is my reason for writing to you. I need you to vote for Extreme Tax Stupidity, which will make me greatly rich man.

Please if you are willing to assist me, kindly contact me by replying to my email, so that i will have more confidence in your gullibility and stupidness.

Finally if you have any question as regards this transaction, please don’t fail to ask me. I have much data from some man I met in bar which he says proves warming. I must go now. My ink is freezing in my pen.

Rev Pushtupma Butt.

I did avoid it because I don't know the figures. but the link you put up is for a pressure group, Greenpiece. Not generally known as being a reliable source of information in my book.

I think it's high time that pressure groups were made illegal. We elect politicians to parliament to make these decsions not people who have got nothing better to do than think of something that upsets them. Politicians have a hard enough job as it is what with their limited interlect and dubious morals.

Keel

I was referring to your comment on the changeability of "weather".

Nitpicking perhaps, but all too often "climate" and "weather" are used interchangeably, and they are entirely different things.

I have written this for another site, however some here may find it interesting. It explains why I am undecided on the global warming issue.


The real problem with proving climate warming is this:

Climate change needs to be measured over a long incidence, due to the outlying peaks and troughs that occur due to unusual and unexplainable weather patterns that sometimes take place. One hot summer is just one hot summer, and does not provide evidence of global warming or anything else. We need to be able to see hundreds of years of data to find any evidence.

To obtain the long incidence we need to use data obtained by processes other than direct measurement. Put simply, we don’t have a 2000 year history of daily thermometer readings at over (say) 500 global sites. The most common alternatives to direct measure are Tree Rings and Ice Cores.

Both tree rings and ice cores suffer from one major problem. The nearer we get to today the more inaccurate they become. In simple terms, the last 10 years of an ice core (2000-2010) is packed snow at the top of the core. It is simply blown off prior to drilling.

Tree rings provide us with even more problems. The process involves measuring each annual bark ring, and assuming that the larger the ring, the warmer the weather. This actually isn’t very reliable, as many other factors can lead to changes in a trees growth pattern. Higher rainfall, disease, changes to water tables etc all result in increased or decreased growth patterns.

Even worse, the rings don’t actually provide any idea of temperature at all, and only serve as a relative comparison year to year. You can for instance surmise that if a tree has a 2.5mm bark ring one year and a 5mm ring the next, the tree was more “happy” with its conditions in the second year. It doesn’t tell us anything about temperature.

And to compound the problem, trees follow the Darwinian pattern of evolution. They adapt themselves to suit hanging conditions. Unlike mammals who adapt generationally, trees adapt within their own lifetime. Anyone who has seen a tree grow around an obstacle will see this in action. In the same way, a tree will continue to adapt over periods of climate change until it reaches its optimum growth rate again.

Briffa stated in his paper Northern Hemisphere Summer Temperatures of the Last Six Centuries; “the tree-ring density records become de-coupled from temperature after 1950, possibly due to some large-scale human influence that caused wood densities to decline”.

It is worth noting at this juncture that if we accept the tree rings post 1950 to accurately portray seasonal conditions (concentrating on ring size and ignoring density) then there is no evidence at all of global warming to be deduced from tree rings. Hantemirov and Shiyatov demonstrated this when they analysed some 2000 Yamal tree cores for their paper “A continuous multimillennial ring-width chronology in Yamal, northwestern Siberia”.

However Briffa, Mann and many other proponents of Climate Warming decided that the decreased density of the tree rings post 1950 made their evidence questionable, and so they discarded the later rings. It was a reasonable call, however note that they are now analysing (and thus discounting on the basis of) not bark ring growth, but bark ring density.

The problem then became how to create a continuous long incidence that takes us up to today. The Climate Warming proponents did this by concatenating the inferred tree ring seasonal growth rates to actual measured temperatures from 1960s forwards. The entire dispute over global warming hangs on the way this was done.

Firstly they were concatenating two very different pieces of data. One was actual temperature measurements, day by day, year by year, at hundreds of locations worldwide. The other was a series of seasonal growth rates of a limited number of trees from the Yamal forest area of Siberia. This alone would ring warning bells in any data analysts mind. The two data sets are two wildly different to be successfully concatenated. They are completely different dimensions and are unsuited to merging.

Secondly, instead of the normal practice of normalising the data to provide a smooth concatenation, it appears the actual temperatures were simply added to the end of the inferred temperatures from the bark ring data. This produced a wild swing in temperatures as the actual measures took over from the inferred ones. It is hardly surprising that the infamous hockey stick graph was created when this un-normalised merging of data took place. When the two sets of data were correctly concatenated by statisticians no global warming was evident.

This doesn’t explain why the Climate Warming lobby broke basic data management rules when they merged the data. Perhaps they simply wanted to prove the theory, or perhaps they didn’t fully understand what they were doing.

What is does do is explain how complicated proving or disproving global warming is, and why bark ring and ice core analysis cannot alone provide evidence either way.

The actual measured temperatures only cover about the last 200 years, and many of the early records are highly inaccurate. Reasonable records (electronically taken and recorded) only exist for the last 20 years, and they show no evidence of warming, which is unsurprising given the short incidence they measure over.

And so at the end of 2009 the scores look like this.

• Bark ring and ice cores: Too inaccurate over the last 50 years to be used.
• Actual measures: Too short an incidence to provide meaningful trends.
• Concatenated data: Too complicated to merge accurately.

And that is why we are still arguing.

Haha hilarious.

I think we should ban all forms of free speech and just jolly well do what ever the politicians tell us.

Why don't we ban human rights while we are at it.

Can someone explain how, if we have global warming, the polar ice fields are actually bigger than they were? Surely they'd be shrinking? Presumably I am extremely naive and just not understanding the deep scientific data that 'proves' me wrong?

Only being able to decide about supposed global warming on the minimal records held is ridiculous. Had records been held for 5 million years, I may have more faith in the cock and bull story.

Just my opinion of course.

Global warming is a blessing in disguide for Australia

It will gradually melt Antartic and send fresh water towards Oz shores. Oz is already uranium enriched, so it can build nuclear water purifiers to convert this saline water into natural water though Reverse Osmosis, etc..

This supply of water can be used to irrigate the deserts and that land will become arable. We just need to build distributary canals and channels from our purifier plants towards the Deserts. More crops, more prosperity.

Please note : Every change has an opportunity in it provided we have great leaders and thinkers to leverage it.

So the fact that it will mean a load of Pacific islands disappear under water is fine, because Australia will have more irrigation? OK.

Thats a sad part I wish something could be done to save those beautiful places. The best we can do is to accomodate the Islanders to our newly prospered Desert lands.

Oh sorry, I didn't realise you were being humorous.

Hi Moneypenny,

I think the Climate Change scientists really do think there is a problem.

The difficulty is trying to prove a trend that occurs in the last 1% of the previous 2000 years. Even if there was an increase since 1980 it could just be another outlying peak. Remember my price of oil per barrel doubling in the last 12 months example. It will probably go back down again, then up, then down etc. Unfortunately average temperatures do the same.

And no one so far has ever proved this theoretical increase since 1980. All we have is a random jumble of numbers. As Mulben showed, some average temperatures have actually fallen across the Murray-Goulbourn Basin in the last 100 years.

The only way we will know if global warming is occurring is to wait about 100 years and see what happens. By then of course it may be too late and some damage may well have been done, hence the “we can’t afford to take the chance” argument. And that might be the right approach.

What really does piddle me off is when a bunch of scientists start fiddling with facts and juggling numbers to hide the truth. Once we accept it as normal scientific practice then we lose the integrity of the very basis of advancement of the world.

So, going back to my initial argument (about a year ago), find more environmentally sustainable ways of doing stuff but do it just because it's a good idea, not because of some so called climate change or global warming crap. People would be more inclined to take such things on board, it's being told we have to do that to save the planet for our children. The powers that be seem to think we are all as stupid as they appear and we're not.

I really think that people are now using global warming as a vehicle to achieve other aims.

• Anti industrialists see it as a means to destroy capitalist factory manufacturing methods.
• Socialists see it as a means to redistribute wealth more equitably between the first and third world.
• Bankers see a new emerging market in carbon credit trading, out of which they will make billions.
• Industrialists see it as a means to restructure manufacturing bases, closing high cost manufacturing in the First world and moving to low lost Chinese and Indian sites. (They already had one good go at this with GAT, and free trade. This is another opportunity, and the can blame climate restrictions to get over union objections.
• Scientists see it as a route to massive research grants and funding. I was working until earlier this year for a university well known for its research. You only had to mention carbon footprint or climate change to get access to funding. We are throwing money at the problem, and every scientist is trying to get on the bandwaggon.
• And finally governments, who can see tax opportunities out of this.

I read the best description of an environmentalist in the UK Telegraph today:
Like a watermelon - green on the outside, red on the inside.

Sounds about right to me.