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ORIGINAL: Rule
That is the Milenkovitch lie. In fact there have been drastic rises in average global temperatures of at least five degrees occurring in less than a year. (The climatologists are scared by that as they do not understand how that is possible; I do.) Also there have been significant drops in global temperatures due to volcanic activity (like that of Santorini in 1649 BC).[/size]

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You are trying to pick nits off the back of a single ground-truthing node in an enormous universe of data that has been carefully processed and appropriately adjusted by a huge field of trained scientists. Scientists who enjoy nothing better than catching one of their peers in a slip-up of an actual unaccounted-for confound.

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ORIGINAL: SuzanneKneeling

Popeye, are you illiterate, or just so consumed by your fear of the other 95% of humanity that you can't get past the fact that the United Nations (insert scary rightwing radio music here) agrees with all of OUR scientific organizations on this issue? Did you look at that wikipedia link?

I suggest to you that you may want to put as much weight on what is said by all of the major national and international scientific organizations as by your 1 biochemist friend at Tufts who is bitter because he isn't getting funding. (Could that possibly have anything to do with the quality of his prior work? Judging from how uninformed he is about the major scientific issue of our time - albeit almost completely unrelated to his field - I think it a distinct possibility.)

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ORIGINAL: SuzanneKneeling

Pollux, I don't really have time (or inclination) to research the monetary and political motivations (let alone publication record in climatology)

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of all of these persons, but here's a smattering (mostly names I'm familiar with because they are among the "usual suspects" regularly trotted out for this purpose). Keep in mind that there are thousands of published climatologists, and the organizations that represent them are all firmly convinced of anthropogenic climate change. The work of 2,000 experts went into the IPCC report alone.

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He has published papers on Hadley circulation, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, hydrodynamic instability, mid-latitude weather, global heat transport, the water cycle, and their roles in climate change, ice ages, seasonal atmospheric effects.[2]

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Science and Economic Advisory Council of the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy.[3] He previously held positions at the University of Chicago and Harvard University, and was a contributor to Chapter 4 of the "IPCC Second Assessment", "Climate Change 1995". He is known for pioneering the study of ozone photochemistry,[4] and advised several student theses on the subject.[5]

Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the American Meteorological Society's Meisinger and Charney Awards, and American Geophysical Union's Macelwane Medal. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, and a Fellow of the AAAS1. He is a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60, Harvard University)

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ORIGINAL: SuzanneKneeling

Wow. Again back on the UN, despite this having next to nothing to do with them. I didn't realize you struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder. My sympathies. Fortunately, there's help.

http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/clomipr_ids.htm

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ORIGINAL: pollux

And what's worse, people who have looked critically and objectively into the methodology by which the consensus thinking on #1 was arrived at have found errors in the data and have been stonewalled by the gatekeepers of that data.

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The latest wrinkle in the global-warming controversy finds the National Aeronautics and Space Administration quietly correcting its historical data to compensate for an earlier error, a correction that should deflate some of the recent panic-mongering about an apparently warming Earth.

   The correction reduced the average temperatures for 2000-2006 in the continental United States by about 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit (with many stations showing lower readings and many showing readings much above average). That dethroned 1998 as the hottest year on record, a distinction in the NASA data set that now belongs to 1934 (by an insignificant margin over 1998). Several other recent hot years were moved down in the rankings, and the 1930s now account for four of the top 10.

   The number changes don’t greatly affect worldwide averages - but they reveal a disturbing arrogance among scientists in the community of global-warming true believers.

   The data-handling error - the assumption that one set of numbers was identical to another when it was not - was discovered by Canadian researcher Steve McIntyre, who notified NASA on Aug. 4. NASA almost immediately corrected its Web site, but without any notice of the changes. You can bet that if the correction had shifted the data the other way, there would have been press releases, news conferences and lugubrious music on the TV news. As it was, it was left to the conservative blogosphere to spread the word; the mainstream media ignored the episode.

   That’s not the worst of it. NASA refused to release to McIntyre the computer codes it used to make the correction, though a huge amount of the agency’s other climate codes are online. McIntyre believes there are “real and interesting statistical issues” involved in the records of the observing stations on which NASA relies, issues of whether the proper corrections have been made for the well-known “heat island” effects of urban areas. Most warming believers take it on faith that they have; McIntyre says he knows of too many instances where a thermometer has been placed closer than 100 feet to a paved surface.

   Science is not supposed to work by secrecy. Stonewalling by NASA will only increase the number and fervor of the skeptics.