My comments to this thread have not appeared or have been deleted. My email via contact form received no reply.

Any particular reason for this?

... was pitiful. "if you put a ruler on the curve it goes up at about a 45 degree angle." What? Are you serious? What a bunch of alarmist crap and mathematically incorrect! That angle all depends on the SCALE of the X and Y axis!! What is important in a data set is the regression of the line Y = mX+b. That's the true measure of the relationship between X and Y values plotted on a graph. How could you make such a FUNDIMENTAL blunder! Oh, but you see if you say 45 degrees that makes the public more alarmed doesn't it!

Why was England insulted with the comment "legal in YOUR country" from Richard on Roy Green. England has some of the best and worst Global Warming/Climate Change advocates, so I don't see why you had to make a point against Monkton by suggesting that Britain has inferior laws. Insulting Monkton's country is not an argument. But "the left will eat their young" rears its ugly head when Desmog insults Britain.

Aug 19, 2008
IPPC’s Case form Anthropgenic Global Warming
By Dr. Roger Cohen for SPPI

I have been involved in climate change for nearly 30 years. In 1980, a few of us in the research organization of a large multinational energy corporation realized that the climate issue was likely to affect our future business environment.We subsequently started the only industrial research activity in the basic science of climate change. The move was justified by the fact that the best way to really understand a complex technical issue is to actually work in the area, interacting with other scientists. I have supervised climate scientists working in the area of climate change and have followed the area closely. Over the years our researchers have served as authors of key IPCC report chapters. I would like to share some perspectives with you.

I retired four years ago, and at the time of my retirement I was well convinced, as were most technically trained people, that the IPCC’s case for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is very tight. However, upon taking the time to get into the details of the science, I was appalled at how flimsy the case really is. I was also appalled at the behavior of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it. In particular I am referring to the arrogance; the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defense of bogus science, and the politicization of the IPCC process and the science process itself.

As contrary evidence has accumulated, proponents of strong AGW have begun to display signs of cognitive dissonance. The famed social psychologist Leon Festinger, developer of the concept of cognitive dissonance, conducted early studies of the phenomenon. One study looked at people who bought bomb shelters during the cold war. It was found that such people tended to exaggerate the threat of nuclear war, and nothing could dissuade them. Good news about relaxed tensions and peace initiatives was rejected. Such developments brought about cognitive dissonance, bizarrely almost as if they were invested in nuclear war. The psychological model is that their belief system became part of their identity, their self, and information at odds with that belief system became an attack on the self. This helps explain why such people can be resistant to information that would be judged positive on a rational basis.

Having said all this, it does not mean that there is no threat or that we should not debate some kind of action to control atmospheric CO2. It does mean that the case for immediate draconian measures that will have the effect or restricting world economic growth is poor. It does mean that the climate is unpredictable, even with modern tools, and this implies that continuing to load the atmosphere poses imponderable risks to terrestrial life. I believe that the way to a solution lies with new technology for both energy supply and for directly controlling net emissions. In this regard the role of governments is not to enact restrictive economic measures via market interventions, or to choose the winners in a technology race. Its proper role is to encourage the development and deployment of new technology through direct funding of R&D and through tax incentives for industries that research, develop, and deploy such technology.Read more here.

Dr. Roger Cohen is an APS Fellow

I was shocked when I heard the accusation from Lord Monckton that your funding comes from a convicted money laundering crook.
I am wondering if a libel suite is pending
Unless that is the accusations are true

...it's as simple as that. He didn't have to tell a single lie. Just one mistake... happens to the best.

I say, put up the annotated transcript. On-line mendacity is always worth documenting.

In my experience most warming fanatics are like watermelons, green on the outside but red inside. Sorry if I mistakenly grouped you and desmogblog with these leftists whose ultimate goal is the onward march of socialism and who use the climate change as a rubric for the advancement of their foolish tyrannical aims.

As to a citation regarding historically warm periods, start here: Grootes, P.M., M. Stuiver, J.W.C. White, S.J. Johnsen, and J. Jouzel. 1993. Comparison of oxygen isotope records from the GISP2 and GRIP Greenland ice cores. Nature 366:552-554.

I'm sure Monckton would be happy to supply you with his references if asked. And nobody here is in the pocket for big oil. Give up that old cannard and try to focus on the science. It would help you in these debates.

hm. lots of denialist traffic, all in some cheery mood.

loks like it dodesn t make sense to be realistic, when dealing with them.

not a single excuse for Monckton starting with an attack on the finance of this site.

and instead they are spreading your honest assessment, that they consider debate as proof of the existence of an argument.
it is rather funny to see them all pretend that this was a defeat and that the denialist side "won" in some serious way.

Yep..Just making it up

See this for one of the many articles on the Volcanism and the previous for one of the many on the Ice growth. If you would like more I can send many for your general education and growth.

Antarctica and Volcanism
Thanks to John McLean for a link to this site tracking Antarctic temperatures since 1955 by Ole Humlum, UNIS, Department of Geology, Svalbard, Norway. They conclude the existing Antarctic surface air temperature records 1960-1998 reveal periods of persistent (multi-year) and geographically extensive temperature trends towards cooling in the interior and warming in the coastal regions. The spatial and seasonal patterns of these trends are, however, not quite simple and appear to change with time; that is, the temperature relationship between specific locations is not temporally consistent. Within the Antarctic Peninsula a warming trend has, however, persisted, with exception of the spring season. The cooling has been modest in coastal East Antarctic regions, but more pronounced at the Amundsen-Scott Base and at the South Pole.

The observed temperature changes since 1957 has been difficult to simulate by Global Climate Models (Connolley and O’Farrell 1998) and is not yet fully understood. The observed spatial pattern of temperature variations may, however, indicate that the consecutive warming and cooling throughout the decades was part of a large-scale circulation pattern that exhibits long-term persistence. There is some observational evidence suggesting that under present conditions cooler conditions on the Antarctic Plateau are associated with stronger zonal westerlies around the Antarctic continent, causing warmer conditions in the Peninsula regions penetrating north into the zone of enhanced westerlies.

5 Year running annual mean temperatures 1988 to 2002. See full size image here

Western Antarctica and the peninsula is also a region of volcanic activity which may be contributing at times to upwelling of warmed water and icemelt. That was confirmed this week in an article in Nature Geoscience and in the National Science Foundation site.

Thanks to Alan Siddons for this image of Antarctic volcanoes. See full size image here. See this spectacular image of the hot spots and the cold continent from satellite from 1982 to 2004 here.

By the way, the Gakkel ridge under the Arctic is volcanically active right now and together with the recent inflow of warm water from the Pacific and Atlantic in their multidecadal warm modes may be contributing factors to recent icemelt there as well in recent years.

Has it really come down this now?
Your argument is now that the latest warming cycle was marginally quicker or a hundredth of a degree more than a previous one?

This is a bit of a stretch since our measuring capability (current or historical) is in no way able determine such small differences.
There is serious doubt that current temperature measurements are even accurate enough to confirm the .6 degree change that happened last century.
The best that can be said is that it got fairly warm several time in recent history and it got fairly warm at the end of the 20th century as well.

Littlemore suggests in this debate that we need to worry about the rate of increase in temperature and suggests that we google some really scary graph he's seen in support of this notion. A little more science for the greenies.

Neither from an historic nor geologic perspective is there anything unusual about todays temperatures nor in the rate of change in temperature in the modern era.

16,000 years ago we were in the middle of the last ice age. The ice was one mile thick over much of North America. This is the way the planet looks 90 percent of the time puncutated as I mentioned before by short periods of interglacial warming. Whether the temperatures are increasing or not depends on the points in time one chooses to examine. Over the last 16,000 years the planet has warmed. During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years) it cooled slightly. Over the last 2000 years since the Roman period, it has cooled. Since the little ice age 700 years ago it has warmed. Over the last hundred, about 1 degree warming, and in the last 10 years esentially stasis. In historical times, temperatures were warmer or equally warm during the Egyptian, Minoan, Roman, Medieval periods.

From a larger geologic view, over the last 4 million years the planet has cooled: about 3 degrees from the Minocene, Pleocene and Pleistocene eras.

What about the rate of change in temperature? Using degrees C/century, we find during the last 16,000 years the rate was as high as 15 degrees/century as we entered the Holocene. Over the last 5000 years, the rate has been about 2.5 degrees C / century. And if you accept the surface records at face value, over the last century 1 degree. Does that sound like an unprecedented scary, run for the hills, wet your pants issue?

Honestly, I think its time for you greenie (reds) to abandon this climate change nonsense and find some other way to fulfill your nanny-state, bolshevic dreams. You look really foolish when you get into these debates anyway.

Most of this website is devoted to slandering people left right and centre about "Big Oil" links. Then you turn out to be funded by a convicted fraud who runs a solar energy company. Just beautiful.

No wonder you lost - PR hacks aren't very smart.

Chris,

You only have to google "Abrupt climate change" to get an idea on the wealth of research on rapid climate change from decadal to millenial time scales. Apply the search criterion to Google Scholar as well.

Good advice Chris. Mainly because you would get slaughtered by the science on that one. I have research the subject and have identified over 30 peer reviewed papers that identify conditions of the MWP as being equal to or greater than conditions today. These papers are from both southern and northern hemisphere studies. Inside and outside NW Europe.

The rate of change argument is a furphy. There are studies that show the rapidity with which the temperature has climbed in the last century is not inconsistent with other climate changes in the past. There is nothing unusual about the pace of climate change at the moment. A study that showed a ten degree change in temperature occurred in a 50yr time span a number of times during the last glacial (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070309103123.htm).

Having dealt with opponents of AGW for some time now, I think I can suggest a few lines of argument that are pretty good to use in a public debate. Remember, the goal of the AGW opponents is obfuscation, not illumination, so if you treat it as a scientific debate (which was your fundamental mistake in this case), you are sure to end up with a mess.

The first and most powerful line of argument is quite simple: simply rattle off the long, long list of scientific institutions that have endorsed the basic AGW hypothesis. Then ask the audience "Whom should you trust: all those scientific institutions or this guy here who doesn't even have a degree in science?"

He has several counters:
1) conspiracy theory, in which case you ask the audience, "Do you believe in conspiracy theories? How could all those scientists in all those different universities, research institutes, and think tanks all over the world organize such a highly complex conspiracy without somebody blowing the whistle?"
2) his experts (Lintzen et al). In this case, you compare his individuals with your organizations. Never trust an individual scientist, you argue; but you can trust large scientific organizations.
3) if he's stupid enough to bring up the Oregon petition, well, then you can have fun demolishing that.

Press the point home. Don't let him change the subject. Just keep hammering away: all the expert organizations support AGW; whom do you trust, the scientists or this guy?

Also, don't fight the Medieval Warming Period fight. Yes, the science there is on your side -- but it's a messy topic and he wants to drag you into messy topics. Fight where you have the easiest time proving your case in twenty minutes. Play ju-jitsu with him: "Yes, and during the Carboniferous Period it was much warmer than it is today. But the damage won't come from the temperature, it's the suddenness of the rise in the temperature that will be so destructive. In the Medieval Warming Period, the temperature rose slowly, but what we're seeing is a much more rapid increase in temperature -- and if we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere, it will speed up!" Then you point out how many trillions of dollars humanity has invested in facilities that are built for the current climate. How much will it cost to replace or retrofit housing, the commercial structures, port facilities, agricultural systems, roads, dams, canals, etc, etc. etc. Sure, we could handle this if it were spread out over a few centuries. But if we are forced to adapt on a time scale of decades rather than centuries, the costs will easily run into many, many trillions of dollars.

Those two arguments are good for starters.

It was great to hear real science in a debate.

It was great to hear real science in a debate.

Did you know that the monoliths on Easter Island were carved during the Medieval Warm Period?

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/715

And the civilization of Rapa Nui died off during the little ice age?

Eh probably not. You would have to be interested in such things.

A vested interest in maintaining that the MWP was an exclusive European phenomena doesn't help either.

ad Hominem is weak.

Actually appears to be expanding. Our numbers got a nice little lift from the denier traffic eager to come and rub my nose in Monckton's fabulous flurry of the fantastic.
By the way, does anyone know where he is today? Surely he must be posting links to all those (wholly imaginary) graphs he was advertising that show the Earth's Medieval Tropical Period ...