Jerry is now on my banned senders list

Thats appalling, the only value in considering 30 years of data would be to show how meaningless it is when looking for a trend over say a 1000 or 10000 years.

Cheers, Simon

Hoist on their own petard. Anywhere you look.

Perhaps, but bet you wouldnt be very happy if you lived in the Sahara and the government told you that you had to buy several pairs of those gloves.

Cheers, Simon

I am under the impression that through ice cores, sea bed cores, fossilised tree ring counts and such, the average temperatures over the last x million years are fairly well established - cyclic ice ages and all that.

I have my thoughts on global warming, but they are just that. Unfortunately, "science" has allowed itself to be bastardised on so many issues over the last 30 or so years in the name of political expediency (i.e. funding) that the likely motivation of a paper's authors is at least as important as the actual report itself. The media quoting non peer-reviewed, and often dubious, reports hasn't been helped by "science" not opposing their publication or use. Cheers Richard

For a global scale you need global measurements and there arent enough samples available - localities, let alone tested ones. Not sure what the accuracy is. Theres no point in going back more than a few thousand or million years as the environment was different.

The classic big recent scandal being MMR link to Autism. Originator getting paid by interested parties, very poor research, totally unscientific analysis yet backed by eminent colleagues who later recanted. Plus if remember correctly a peer reviewer or journal editor pilloried for questioning the interpretation.

Cheers, Simon

Things like this don't help either

"The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies"

MBQ

I would have thought that these types of slow rate data inputs would be more usfully treated by correlation techniques rather then fourier analysis. Sun noise level frequencies of a repetative or persistant nature are readily identified in this manner. Statistical manipuation driven by external often erronious factors is not a valid method but a fudge.

Peter A

Well it's been interesting that over the Christmas period a number articles have appeared emphasising the generally accepted cyclic ice-age theory, massive eruptions and the like, with regard to global warning/ cooling. Please note that the following is pure speculation, but on other issues, MMR being a good example, the media started drip-feeding stories for a while before retraction/drastic alteration (either way!) - it will be interesting to see if any start arriving with key words like "overstating the effect". I don't know either way, that's for sure, but media watching, and the manipulation of the media, has become something of a sport in our household. This year's big thing looks like being alcohol - according a Parliamentary report on the Beeb site today the streets are littered with bodies and the country is going bust, all down to the demon drink. Being a non-drinker now, the reaction to such reports is pure joy to behold after being on the receiving end of the anti's for so long ;-)

Cheers Richard

"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote

But that doesn't negate my point that historically we've had ice ages where significant parts of the globe have cooled substantially and then laster the world has warmed up again.

It's just cyclical and in goodness knows how many tens, hundreds or even thousands of years that cooling process will start again. We just happen to be going through a warming stage, and who knows, we might be able to grow grape vines here again.

John.

"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote

Except governments are using the MMGW thing as an excuse for hyping taxation.

John.

"Just zis Guy, you know?" wrote

It's the cost to us of subsidising the third world that we cannot afford with the present state of our economy. If the vast sums of money we're talking about end up being pi##ed up against the wall (as it's extremely likely to be) then our economy may never recover.

John.

"LDosser" wrote

So? How long is it since most of Europe was covered in ice?

Climate (we're constantly been told) is something that can only be studied over tens of thousands of years, and we don't have records going back that far to be able to do that.

John.

"Greg.Procter" wrote

Do you REALLY think that would make a difference? Both major UK parties are hell-bent on increasing taxation to help reduce our budget deficit? Do you REALLY think either will abandon the theory of global warming when so many lemmings are happy to see taxes raise to cure it?

John.

[...]

Quite. I used FFT because everyone who uses current electronic entertainment and communication devices is using FFT, so I figured it was an easy to digest example of "data manipulation."

OTOH, as I understand it, if we had really fine-grained, long-term data sets for the climate, we might find FFT useful to tease out various climatic cycles, which are apparently caused by towards strong and weak couplings of climate-changing parameters. It's because we can't do that that we don't really know how fast the climate is changing, nor whether it's simply a short-range cyclic variation on the present regime, or a flip into another regime. (I agree with L Dosser's comment that there are other uncertainties, too.)

The problem IMO isn't data manipulation as such. It's knowing the how, why, and wherefore. The most blatant manipulation occurs in sports headlines. Somehow when the home team loses 1-nil it's a close call after a heroic battle, but when the visitors lose, they've been crushed. ;-)

In any case, when we see a CO2 concentration that as far as we know is unprecedented in "recent" geological history, it seems reasonable to conclude that the current shifts in the weather patterns are probably not mere blips. Even if it turns out that it was all merely a blip, the shift in energy production/consumption will have mostly good effects.

That there will be waste and inefficiencies along the way to a new energy economy, as well as chicanery and fraud, is to be expected. This always happens when there's a major shift in technology. For on-topic examples, study the history of railways. We modellers have a far too rosy an image of railways as economic and social endeavours, if we think about them that way at all. In the nineteenth century, there were many people who claimed we couldn't afford to build railways, that the effects would be 'orrible in the extreme, and so on. There's no question that many lines were built that according to "generally accepted accounting principles" would never return their investment, or merely to siphon money from naive (but greedy) investors, and so forth. So what? Companies went bankrupt, the debts were expunged, and the lines operated usefully and usually profitably for decades. (FWIW, there have been a few economists who've argued that cancelling debt should a be a regular feature of financing. Debt acts like sand in the gears.)

cheers, wolf k.

Oh yes? And who is going to lend money if they know that they'll never get it back again?

American banks?

"Global Warming" is a popular phrase, but the emphasis in recent studies and summit conferences has been "Climate Change" which is not necessarily the same thing. The average global temperature may be on the increase but, as already noted, due to changing patterns in atmospheric and ocean currents, some locations may well end up being colder, e.g. the British Isles and Scandinavia if the Gulf stream is disrupted.

The current cold snaps in Europe and North America (as far south as the Gulf of Mexico) are due to large stationary high pressure areas funnelling Arctic air southwards. They are probably not indicative of a trend.

Aren't Yorkshire Tea actually growing tea in Yorkshire?

Grape growing is increasingly popular here in Southern Ontario; I don't think it's so much because of a warming climate as the development of grape hybrids that can stand the cold winters. A fairly recent Canadian phenomenon has been the production of ice wine, made from grapes left to freeze on the vines and picked when the temperature falls below -8°C.

Banks. Who don't lend money, they create it. Every time they write a loan, the create the money. Really. (And that's elementary economics, BTW, not some wild-eyed crank claim.)

As I said, money is just a method of tracking the flow of wealth. Another way of putting it is, money is a system of IOUs. That's all it is. It ain't stuff. In fact, most of the money flowing round the world these days isn't even cash. It's just electronic blips.