On Jan 17, 7:42*am, delboy wrote:
On 17 Jan, 08:04, Tom Gardner wrote:



After a month in a mini ice age, the UK winter weather has become its
normal mild and moist self, so the Gulf Stream must still be working.
So sorry polar bears, your habitat range won't be extending to the
British Isles yet!

Derek Copeland

I wrote nothing whatsoever that would justify your comment,
nor did I imply it.

Your attempt to associate me with such ignorant concepts
(not knowing the difference between climate and weather)
is offensive. *Please do not do it again*.

Unfortunately this kind of misrepresentation and
cherry-picking data appears to be all too prevalent
in the denialist community. Anybody reading your
comments with an open mind would start to doubt your
sincerity. It does the denialist cause no good whatsoever.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Being a bit touchy aren't we Tom? If you want to present AGW/Climate
Change as a religion (which it seems to have become), then I am
neither a believer or a disbeliever (denialist), but an agnostic. The
latest data on World temperatures, which show a slight cooling, do not
correlate with the theory, so that is why.

Not according to people who actually track that sort of thing:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global#gtemp

Possibly you were thinking of data sets that begin with the El Nino
event of 1998-99?

If you use that as your starting point then it biases the result to
show
fairly flat temperatures from 1998 - 2008, just like you could use it
to exaggerate increasing temperatures from 1989 1999.

I think some people call that 'cherry picking' the data.

For myself, I don't put much stock in the currently available database
of
direct temperature measurements, and less stock in proxies. In both
cases the sampling problem looms large.

I do trust the measurements of atmospheric gases from Mauna Loa and
the measurements of solar activity. Those are much easier to sample.

If one does accept direct temperature measurement and pre-Mauna Loa
atmospheric gas measurements and proxies like these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:In...ure_Record.png

What we see is a temperature rise of ~ 0.7 degrees Celsius during the
20th century.

One can explain that as follows:

Temperatures rose quickly at the end of the 19th century due to
methane
released by oil exploitation (early on there was no market for natural
gas
so gas wells were typically left uncapped). As methane has a fairly
low
half life in the atmosphere (12 years) temperatures dropped quickly
until 1910 or so at which point carbon emissions from industrial
growth
caused a continuous rise through WWII.

Then very rapid industrial growth and coal burning in particular,
especially
to power the world's electrical grids loaded the atmosphere with
aerosols
that offset the increased greenhouse effect of the coincurrently
released
carbon dioxide until pollution abatement came into vogue in the
1970s.
This pollution abatement concentrated on particulates and sulfur
compounds,
but ignored carbon dioxide.

As particulates continued to drop out of the atmosphere and carbon-
dioxide
rose so did temperatures from then until now, with a noted
acceleration after
German reunification produced a cleanup of East German Industry.

Other explanations are possible.


--

FF