You want a Scientific debate on Global Warming.
On what part.
That the earth is warming up, or that man is causing it, or that it is caused by large emissions of CO2 and that we can stop it with a cap and trade system that excluded the Worlds 1st and 4th largest polluter.
Because there is no conclusive proof that the earth is heating up past its highest point in history. This is based on the fact that most of the recorded world temperatures that are used in the NASA models are from after 1934 the warmest year in America. Canada didn't start measuring national temperatures until 1948 and now many of those same weatherstations are out of service.
http://www.msc-smc.ec.gc.ca/ccrm/bulletin/national_e.cfm
The national average temperature for the spring of 2009 was 0.4°C below normal, based on preliminary data, ranking it as the eighteenth coolest since nationwide records began in 1948.
There is no conclusive proof that a small raise in CO2 will affect global temperatures.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5804831/Climate-change-The-sun-and-the-oceans-do-not-lie.html
It will be impossible to cut CO2 emissions world wide if the developing nations are not involved.
1. One year plucked does not constitute a trend. You can`t just measure one year and proclaim there is no trend. It does not make any sense whatsoever.
This argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between weather and climate. Climate is generally defined as the weather conditions averaged over a long period, usually around 30 years. One can not discern a trend in climate change by looking at small numbers of years, much less a single one. On top of that, this fallacious objection is using global temperatures in a single month, not even an entire year! An even cursory look at the graph above reveals the very noisy nature of monthly temperatures, even when averaged over the entire globe. The particular Jan07 to Jan08 drop used for this argument is indeed large, but it is by no means the only place you could pick to draw a steep line, either up or down. Look at the huge leap up from month 219 to month 231 or the sudden drop from month 152 to month 164 (I am only using intervals of 12 months to avoid seasonal bias). This is very noisy data and those dramatic flucuations turned out to be just that: noise.
Discerning a trend from noisy data is one of the most basic processes in scientifc research, so even though this argument has a naive appeal to the majority of us with no statistical training, you can be sure that any scientifically trained individual trying to make a case for cooling out of this graph is not being intellectually honest. Please consider any source of this argument as very unreliable, either by being very uninformed about basic scientific processes, or very dishonest, hoping to tke advantage of less informed people.So what do we see when we step back and look at the whole picture?
(image taken from this page)
Clearly the last few years, far from erasing the entire warming of the 20th century, have remained far above the global baseline (1951-1990 average). We can also see that even in globally and seasonally averaged and smoothed data, there are still numerous peaks and troughs that are irrelevant to the long term trends. On this graph, the last 4 or 5 years do look as though the trend has paused and even reversed but this is actually a misleading artifact of how the graph was produced. If you look at the page on the Hadley site that describes the smoothing method used, you will see that it is actually too soon to know what the real 2007 trend direction is. The smoothing they use requires 10 years of data on either side of the year in question. So though the trend today may in fact be down, we will not know this for sure until ten years from now. Hadley centre made the decision to continue the line until 2007 to avoid the appearance of incomplete data despite the fact that the last 10 years are less and less meaningful.
There is no convincing reason to think that the well established and attributed long term trend has reversed nor that it is likely to for many years to come, even if effective global actions were taken today to stop emissions of greenhouse enhancing gases like CO2 and CH4 (methane). Short term influences like La Nina and volcanic interruptions may cause dips and slow downs but the elevated levels of greenhouse gases already in the air will eventually overwelm the long term.
And before you let anyone argue that the uncertainty about today I just described just means we need to wait ten more years, please recall that we have done that and more already. 20 years ago James Hansen was telling the US senate that warming was real, significant and anthropogenic (human caused) and the projections he provided have been largely borne out by what has been observed. The skeptics have already made us wait, and the three IPCC assessments that came out in the meantime have been more and more emphatic in their conclusions. The wait is over, the trend is clear and the casue is well understood.
It is a telling and egregious double standard for those voices that for the past twenty years have told us to wait and see are now claiming the trend is over based on such a small blip in the mountain of data.
