You could take a step and just look for it there.
re ice issue: " in 1840 an English ship recorded sailing around a 50 x 140 mile ice island near Australia. There is nothing recent about that."
1. Evidence?
2. Relevance?
ocean levels: "they are actually draining. They came up hundreds of feet over the past 20K years, but we are cooling."
Wow, you didn't even check what the peer-reviewed science says about this and just lapped it all up? I actually have to sit back and shake my head in amazement at your country. I didn't want to have a bit of a political rant, but I think this thread has earned it. What, with the disgusting behaviour of your Tea Party in the government shut down recently, I guess you guys have earned it.
This is so typical of right-wing, Tea-Party denialism that is popular with right-wing, Tea-Party, anti-science media. They're just appealing to their uninformed audience, and you're lapping it up as 'truth'. I actually feel a bit sorry for you, living in America as you do and trying to understand this issue. It's just not an issue in European countries. But because of the American Tea-Party and rabid paranoia about anything 'communist' interfering in the 'free market' of energy systems, you guys go just plain nuts over this! It really is mind-bogglingly amazing how many mental Denialist memes are just picked up and run with by the American population!
What's sadder is the American political hypocrisy over this. They pretend, in name only, to have a 'free energy market' on the one hand, but on the other hand offer tax cuts and hundreds of billions of dollars of 'free' revenue to fossil fuel companies. That's tinkering with the 'free energy market' in a big way! Big oil and king coal and goddess gas? Your government made them. They enjoy around 500 billion dollars of concessions and kickbacks (worldwide). Figures on my blog are a bit old: I source 300 million annually here. I'll have to update my blog.
Remove subsidies to fossil fuels! | Eclipse Now
Anyway, they enjoy privileged status and all manner of concessions and kickbacks and tax cuts in your 'free market' while being guilty of not paying for the sheer damage they do. Forget the reality of global warming for a moment. There are all sorts of other costs they *should* pay for but don't. They should at least compensate society for the many lung and throat cancers and other health issues they cause. But they don't. Let alone all the environmental damage they should pay for, such as destroyed rivers and mountaintops and wildernesses. But who picks up the health bill? Why, your health system, of course! And the public at large. Coal kills, and gets away with it, scott-free. But hey? It's a free market. Yeah, right. Start selling widgets that kill tens of thousands of people a year and see where that gets you. The torts would just roll in! But when it's the sacrosanct American coal industry, government turns a blind eye. All when this is *utterly* preventable through a mix of clean, non-polluting energy solutions and public transport solutions. If you believe you live in a free-energy market, well, there's really no hope for you. You're utterly gullible: just *so* easily had!
Now, on to the 'sciencey' matters you hint at but hardly unpack or source.
Sea levels
1. Milankovitch cycles over the last million years have triggered the ice ages (with
locked up CO2 contributing about 40% of the freeze, and
re-thawing CO2 contributing about 40% of the warming. Page 144:
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1990/1990_Lorius_etal.pdf ).
2. of COURSE the sea levels came up hundreds of feet over the last 20k years! That's what happens when thousands of kilometres of ice on land melt. That illustrates our point! The ice on greenland is melting. This will raise sea-levels! Get it?
3. We're not cooling: who on earth told you that? What, did they measure background climate by cherry-picking the temperatures from 1998 did they? Even the Denialist's are warning you not to do that! Stay with me here, because you've been HAD, yet again! We'll discuss 1998 in a bit more depth.
Of the top 3 climate monitoring units on the planet only Hadley says 1998 was the warmest, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has pointed to a cooling bias with the Hadley data.
What has global warming done since 1998?
Two of the three most powerful temperature databases on the planet confirm 1998 as the THIRD warmest year on record, even when 1998 had one of the most frighteningly powerful El Nino's we've ever seen. Check it out NOAA, NASA, then Hadley's CRU.
The NCDC at NOAA says:
///For 2010, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature tied with 2005 as the warmest such period on record, at 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). 1998 is the third warmest year-to-date on record, at 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average."
Global Analysis - Annual 2010 | State of the Climate | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
NASA GISTEMP confirms the same thing and says:
"Global surface temperatures in 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest on record, according to an analysis released Wednesday by researchers at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.///
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110112/
And now Phil Jones at the CRU, but don't forget the ECMWF has had a go at this particular dataset.
///The time series shows the combined global land and marine surface temperature record from 1850 to 2010. According to the method of calculation used by CRU, the year 2010 was the equal third (see footnote) warmest on record (with 2003), exceeded by 1998 and 2005. The years 2003, 2005 and 2010 are only distinguishable in the third decimal place. The error estimate for individual years (two standard errors is about ±0.1°C, see Brohan et al., 2006) is at least ten times larger than the differences between these three years.
The period 2001-2010 (0.44°C above 1961-90 mean) was 0.20°C warmer than the 1991-2000 decade (0.24°C above 1961-90 mean). The warmest year of the entire series has been 1998, with a temperature of 0.55°C above the 1961-90 mean. After 1998, the next nine warmest years in the series are all in the decade 2001-2010. During this decade, only 2008 is not in the ten warmest years. Even though 2008 was the coldest year of the 21st century it was still the 12th warmest year of the whole record.///
Information Sheet 1 redirection
But rather than argue over hundredths of a degree, which is all that seems to separate the temperatures, have a look at the 15 year trend *all* 3 agencies report. Brilliant graphic here.
Climate monitoring - Met Office
Even Denialist's are admitting it. At the 2009 Heartland Institute conference (of global warming sceptics), well known climate denialist Dr Patrick J Michaels (author of the World Climate Report Denialist blog) warned against using the 1998 El Nino super-spike as some sort of 'proof' of a cooling trend. Take the advice of the words of a fellow Denialist.
"You've all seen articles saying that global warming stopped in 1998. Well, with all due respect that's being a little bit unfair to the data. This is 1998 here, and it was a HUGE El Nino year, and the sun was very active in 1998, and so what you're going to have you're going to have a fall
as the consequent La Nina
takes place."
"Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all
If you loose credibility on this issue you lose this issue!"
1998 Revisited - YouTube
He then goes on to explain that when the El Nino cycles return, it's going to get really hot again. Not only that, but Patrick Michaels explains that:
"SO! Global warming IS REAL, and the second warming of the 20th Century, people have something to do with it! Now get over it!"
So while Denialists selectively zoom in on a few data points to try and skew the story any way they want, overall, the trend is clear.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week - Party like it's 1998 - YouTube
The last decade was the hottest on record, and anyone who says otherwise is denying the best data on the planet and pushing an anti-science agenda of their own.
CO2: "Most of Europe has given up on alternatives to fossil fuel. There is enormous damage to grids when trying alternatives over 12% of the total load because when the wind stops, guess what. Germany's Green Party opposes windpower because it kills 35M birds per year... The human production of CO2 into the total is the error factor in estimating how many gigatons there are. All we can do is get to the nearest gigaton, which is in the hundreds, and human production of it is just one of those (ie less than 1%)..."
I actually agree with *some* of what you write here. There are many concerns with renewable energy not being baseload, but scientists have an answer. It's called GenIV nuclear power. GenIV reactors will eat nuclear waste, have passive safety physics even Homer Simpson could not break, can be situated far away from large population centres and can even be built underground for extra safety. Fukushima would NOT have happened with a GenIV reactor! Not only this, but these reliable 24/7 power sources are also essential to back up any large intermittent wind and solar energy system. When the wind stops blowing and the sun goes down at night, the nukes will provide the energy we need. The BEST thing is that GenIV reactors turn the 'problem' of nuclear waste into a SOLUTION. We could run the world for 500 years on just today's nuclear waste! The rest of the land uranium could run the world for 50,000 years, and add in uranium from seawater, and we could run the world for a billion years!
For more see Dr Barry Brook, head of Climate at Adelaide University.
Sustainable Nuclear | BraveNewClimate
Here's is another appearnce by Ball:
Climate Change - Shows - Coast to Coast AM. But it is not last nights.
Oh man! You're quoting Ball? Seriously? Dude, you need to read up on him. You're not helping yourself here.
The thing I noticed most about last night is he never slipped over into the supernatural nonsense; it was just objective fact after objective fact. It is not as though there are no scienctists at all who do not share Gore's conclusions; they are on Prager's show often enough.
What supernatural nonsense? Climate science is science. Have you ever considered the DEMONSTRABLE FACT that CO2 actually does trap heat? Have you ever visited a physics lab to see this proven? That it traps heat, and by how much, is old science. We discovered this in the 1820's, and correct me if I am wrong, but Al Gore wasn't even around then!
How we know what Co2 does.
It's repeatable, demonstrable, verifiable, provable spectrometry that can be done in any decent lab on the planet. Which might just be why every decent National Science Academy on the planet has signed on to support AGW!
As a more technical friend explained it to me:
The simple answer is we know the absorption spectra of CO2 because we can measure it directly, unambiguously and very accurately.
The measurement is conceptually very simple shine a light source of a given wavelength through a sample of CO2 gas in a glass box, and measure the decrease in intensity of the light that passes through. The difference between what goes in and what comes out is the absorption, at that particular wavelength. If you measure the absorption for a range of wavelengths say from infrared through to ultraviolet, thats the absorption spectrum. If you know the dimensions of the box, and the density of the gas, you can then calculate the absorption per molecule, or mole, or whatever. You can then use that to calculate the absorption through any amount of CO2, say, that in the atmosphere above us.
Look up Beers Law on wikipedia.
BeerâLambert law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In the old days we would have used a single wavelength spectrometer, which would split light through a prism and slit arrangement to select a single wavelength. A more modern instrument is the FTIR Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy which illuminates with all wavelengths at once and uses fourier analysis to back out the spectrum. But the spectrum of CO2 is a bit like the boiling point of water. It was established a very long time ago, and if you need it, you look it up.
Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
