longweekend58 wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2013 at 6:33pm:


How have I been proven wrong, Longy. We both have an interpretation of what a 17 year statistical pause means in reality. Have a look at global temperatures around 1998, the beginning of your 17 year pause. Now look at the temperatures over the last decade. Of course the planet has got warmer. When an outlier becomes the norm there has certainly been some underlying warming.

http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/global/decadal-global-temps-1881s-2001s.g...

MOTR wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2013 at 6:22pm:


you dont have to get toey because you got proven wrong on the 17 year pause thing. just use your undoubted intelligence but disconnect it from the orthodoxy and get your OWN opinion.

MOTR wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2013 at 6:22pm:




dont you love em longy?... they always come back to insulting the poster....its pitiful.. it really is.

Maqqa wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2013 at 6:49pm:


I certainly am. The physics haven't changed, so we know the earth is accumulating heat somewhere. We also know that the temperatures of 1998, an extremely hot outlier fuelled by a massive El Niño has become the norm. We also know that this is to be expected from time to time. Between 1957 and 1978 we can identify a 21 year long cooling trend. Did that mean the long term warming trend had stopped?



My argument has never been that you can't create a statistical warming pause by cherry picking 1998. My argument has always been that it doesn't prove that the long term warming trend has stopped.

MOTR wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2013 at 7:02pm:


well thats not quite right, is it. your argument up until this week has been quite unequivocally that there has been no pause in temperature rises. we never even got to the point of discussing what it means as you simply denied that it had happened. To be frank, the term CLIMATE DENIER  is one you should wear. I had hoped we could have robust debate on the topic but unfortunately, unless the IPCC conclave tells you what to think, nothing ever changes.

progressiveslol wrote on Jan 24^th, 2013 at 11:26pm:


If you pick an outlier like 1998 you can create a statistical pause or low upward trend that lasts 15 years.  But as Phil Jones and Mike Lockward state in their email it doesn't have any real meaning. If the trend continues out till 2019, then we may have a real hole in either our understanding of natural variations or the influence of atmospheric CO2.

During the 20th Century the sea level rose about 8inches, do the arithmetic it's about 2mm a year. Is that a huge change. No. Can we deal with it? Yes. Did we? Yes. Was it a big deal? No. O.K. That's cool. But what's going to happen in the future. Well, what's going to happen in the future, we're already up to 3, 3 and a half millimetres. Yeah it doesn't sound like that much, but you know again, do the arithmetic that's a 50% increase in what the rate of rise was we saw in the Twentieth Century. Why is that? Well, as the water warms, and 85 to 90% of the heat, the excess heat that has gone into the oceans, it goes to warm the water. What do warm things do compared to cold thing? They expand, they get bigger, the oceans getting bigger, so that's part of the sea level rise. The glaciers are melting, like around in the mountains and stuff like that. Yes they melting in the Himalayas. Yes they are melting in Glacier National Park.

But where's the real water. With apologies to Billy Sutton. Billy Sutton, why do you rob banks? it's where the money is. Why do we study these glaciers in Greenland? It's where the ice is, it's where the water is. And these glaciers are starting to fall apart much faster than anybody, even two years ago, thought they were going to do. So this is going to be a huge issue, and potentially we can see the seas coming up somewhere between 3 and 6 feet in the 21st Century. 8 inches in the 20th Century, 3 to 6 feet in the 21st Century. Is that in the IPCC? No. Why? Because if you read the report they say we just don't understand the ice sheet dynamics, so all we're going to do is just figure out what the expansion of the ocean is and melt a little bit off the top. It's been shown in a variety of ways there that that is a gross gross underestimate.