http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/04/02/meet_the_new_climate_deniers_117759.html By Rich Lowry - April 2, 2013 There are few things sadder than the “climate denier.” He ignores the data and neglects the latest science. His rhetoric and policy proposals are dangerously disconnected from reality. He can’t recalibrate to take account of the latest evidence because, well, he’s a denier. The new climate deniers are the liberals who, despite their obsession with climate change, have managed to miss the biggest story in climate science, which is that there hasn’t been any global warming for about a decade and a half. “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,” The Economist writes. “The world added roughly 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, no more warming. The Economist has been decidedly alarmist on global warming through the years, so it deserves credit for pausing to consider why the warming trend it expected to continue has mysteriously stalled out. The deniers feel no such compunction. They speak as if it is still the late 1990s, when measurements of global temperature had been rising for two decades. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.” In a passage devoted to global warming, though, he didn’t mention the latest trend in global warming. A denier feels the same righteous sense of certitude now, when warming has stopped, as he did a decade ago. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently opined that “sensible people accept the fact of warming” — but apparently not the fact of no-warming. He scorned those “who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course.” Does he include James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, among these dastardly manipulators? No one this side of Al Gore has warned as persistently about global warming as Hansen. He nonetheless admits that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.” None of this means that the Earth didn’t get hotter in the 20th century, or that carbon emissions don’t tend to create a warmer planet, or that warming won’t necessarily begin again. It does mean that we know less about the fantastically complex global climate system than global-warming alarmists have been willing to admit. The Economist notes the work of Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Britain. He has found that if global temperatures stay the same for a few more years, they will fall below the range of 20 climate models. In other words, the scientific “consensus” will have been proven wrong. Why the stall in warming? According to The Economist, maybe we’ve overestimated the warming impact of clouds. Or maybe some clouds cool instead of warm the planet. Or maybe the oceans are absorbing heat from the atmosphere. Although the surface temperature of the oceans hasn’t been rising, perhaps the warming is happening deep down. James Hansen thinks new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures. Hansen writes that knowing more about the effect of aerosols on the climate “requires accurate knowledge of changes in aerosol amount, size distribution, absorption and vertical distribution on a global basis — as well as simultaneous data on changes in cloud properties to allow inference of the indirect aerosol forcing via induced cloud changes.” Is that all? He ruefully notes that the launch of a satellite with a sensor to measure all of this failed, with no follow-up mission planned. Hey, but don’t worry. The science is all “settled.” What is beginning to seem more likely is that the “sensitivity” of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated. If so, the deniers will be the last to admit it.
Granted, Rich Lowry knows as much about climate science as Al Gore does. Which isn't much. But he is commenting on an article by main stream climate change supporting newspaper "The Economist" http://www.economist.com/news/leade...e-slowly-scientists-thought-world-still-needs Apocalypse perhaps a little later Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years. It is not clear why climate change has “plateaued” (see article). It could be because of greater natural variability in the climate, because clouds dampen warming or because of some other little-understood mechanism in the almost infinitely complex climate system. But whatever the reason, some of the really ghastly scenarios—where the planet heated up by 4°C or more this century—are coming to look mercifully unlikely. Does that mean the world no longer has to worry? No, for two reasons. The first is uncertainty. The science that points towards a sensitivity lower than models have previously predicted is still tentative. The error bars are still there. The risk of severe warming—an increase of 3°C, say—though diminished, remains real. There is also uncertainty over what that warming will actually do to the planet. The sharp reduction in Arctic ice is not something scientists expected would happen at today’s temperatures. What other effects of even modest temperature rise remain unknown? The second reason is more practical. If the world had based its climate policies on previous predictions of a high sensitivity, then there would be a case for relaxing those policies, now that the most hell-on-Earth-ish changes look less likely. But although climate rhetoric has been based on fears of high sensitivity, climate policy has not been. On carbon emissions and on adaptation to protect the vulnerable it has fallen far short of what would be needed even in a low-sensitivity world. Industrial carbon-dioxide emissions have risen by 50% since 1997. Any emissions reductions have tended to come from things beyond climate policy—such as the economic downturn following the global financial crisis, or the cheap shale gas which has displaced American coal. If climate policy continues to be this impotent, then carbon-dioxide levels could easily rise so far that even a low-sensitivity planet will risk seeing changes that people would sorely regret. There is no plausible scenario in which carbon emissions continue unchecked and the climate does not warm above today’s temperatures. Good news we must use Bad climate policies, such as backing renewable energy with no thought for the cost, or insisting on biofuels despite the damage they do, are bad whatever the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases. Good policies—strategies for adapting to higher sea levels and changing weather patterns, investment in agricultural resilience, research into fossil-fuel-free ways of generating and storing energy—are wise precautions even in a world where sensitivity is low. So is putting a price on carbon and ensuring that, slowly but surely, it gets ratcheted up for decades to come. If the world has a bit more breathing space to deal with global warming, that will be good. But breathing space helps only if you actually do something with it.
And another in the Economist http://www.economist.com/news/scien...ing-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.” Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years. The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.
Fine. But what was the human cause of the melting of the glaciers that covered the great lakes 10,000 years ago?
I'm sorry there weren't any cameras. This lack of cameras and your suggestion that glaciers being in higher abundance does not change the current rising sea levels impacting the world.
No it doesn't change any rising sea levels currently. What is in question is that the sea levels have been rising since 10,000 B.C. "Currently" is a continuation of what's been going on long before man was industrialized or burned fossil fuels or existed in populations in the hundreds of millions even.
Natural variation might explain all the climate change we've experienced in recent centuries. But, it's also just as valid to argue that natural variation might mask genuine long term harm we're inflicting upon the earth by tweaking the atmosphere a little more each year. Cool-headed, reasoned certainty that man isn't causing long term climate change seems to me to be just as foolish a position as feverish certainty that we are.
Ah, but I'm not certain we're not causing long term harm. What I am certain of is that nobody's shown we are. The global temperature graphs track CO2, right? Well, they also track world population, the USA's GDP, and LeBron's PER.
