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The point all along has been that humans are the primary reason for global warming. And not just after 1976, but for the entire 20th century.

Well at least you've accepted the .2C figure. Ok, this is true. But I'm referring to the warming, not the cooling. Throughout the 20th century, warming of the planet has been primarily caused by greenhouse gases. This is significant because it illustrates that the reason the planet has gotten warmer is mostly because of human activity. The warming was clearly dominated by greenhouse gases. The largest portion of warming at any time after 1900 that could have not been caused by human activity is 36%. (Stott et al, 2003) The point is that humans are responsible for the majority of the warming sense 1900. It is true that before 1950, the sun has a much larger effect then it did today, but even in the highest range of 36%, I don't think this constitutes a majority. The effects of ghgs on the climate are clearest after 1976 (ahem, 1950), but this does not mean that before 1950 they were relatively unimportant compared to other factors (such as the sun). If you think it's obvious that human ghg emissions have not been the primary driver of global warming, then why don't you point it out to the scientists? This has been a consensus for a very long time and I doubt you've found anything that they havn't already thought about.

Are you joking? It's called a scientific consensus. We have a scientific consensus that tells us humans have been the primary driver of global warming sense at least 1900, if not early, and you say "I do not believe there is a general agreement." Isn't a general agreement, almost by definition, what a consensus is? Wow I've explained all of this to you before, a couple times actually, and maybe you forgot or didn't understand, but that's ok because we're here to learn. CO2 isn't the only force in the climate -- this is an extremely simplified version of climate science. There are other factors, one which is the aerosol effect (from particulates). Particulates have the effect that they block out sunlight. The reason for the decrease in temperate after 1940 is largely because of increased particulate pollution. Another source of particulate pollution comes from volcanoes. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 for instance, we saw a decrease in temperature. So there's a lot going on besides CO2 -- no scientist has ever claimed that CO2 is the only factor in our climate. It is, however, one of the largest factors. This is apparent because the entire period from 1900 to today shows a very strong correlation between CO2 and temperature. Of relevance is the fact that scientists include the sun in their models. Although today the sun contributes a very small portion of warming, historically it has been much greater. Between 1900 and 1950, for instance, the sun had an effect of 16% to 36%. This is still not nearly as high as the human impact during this period, but it is still large enough to be looked at. In order to understand climate science, you can't try to simplify things because the climate is inherently very complex. I think this is your main problem. In climate science, factors that play into heating up or cooling down the Earth are known as radiative forcings. Radiative forcing "is a measure of the influence that a factor has in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in the Earth-atmosphere system and is an index of the importance of the factor as a potential climate change mechanism. Positive forcing tends to warm the surface while negative forcing tends to cool it." (feb 2007) The main factors are: greenhouse gases, solar, ozone, volcanic and aerosol (of course there are a few more but combined they have a very small effect). What scientists do is take all the different radiative forcing components, add them together, and from this they get the total influence that all the factors have on the planet. Using this number, they can predict what the climate is going to do. This is of course only the basics, but all you really need to understand is the basics. When you add all of the different factors together, you find that climate models agree with the way the temperature behaved not just between 1910 and 1940, or 1941 and 1976, but they agree with the entire period between 1900 and today. And when you break down all of the components, you find that the largest factors between 1900 and today have been human in nature. Even the cooling after 1940 was mostly caused by humans, so using that example only further illustrates how large of an effect humans have had on the climate.

How many times do I have to tell you that this isn't the opinion of the scientific community? Scientists do agree that it's not going to be a good thing, but they're not telling us that it's going to be necessarily horrific or anything. You're arguing against science with a straw man, and this will not do. Official temperature readings from both ground temperature recording stations and satalite temperature readings show a rise of .19 and .22C per decade sense the latter part of the 1970s. So yes, the .19C is rounded up to .2, and the .22C is rounded down to .2, but I can assure you that .16 is off by a great deal. It might be true that if you take it from 1970, it is an average .16, but the point of the .2C figure is to illustrate what's been happening sense CO2 levels greatly increased during the 1970s. This is why, de facto, .2C is the figure that everyone uses. It's not a matter of rounding .16 up. I gave you four sources for this. You can read NASA's GISS is you want to verify that .2C is the figure used by most people. However, you provided no sources for .16C. I think this alone shows the difference in credibility between the two figures. If I understand your position correctly, you do not think that sense 1900 humans have been the primary driver of global warming? If this is the case, then you are unequivocally contradicted by the scientific community. I have provided references from peer-review in the past that shows only a 16% to 36% contribution from non-human sources between 1900 and 1950. You have refused to accept this data. Be careful, SkepticLance.

The least you could do is keep your facts strait. The Earth has been warming at .2C (up to .22C depending on the study) per decade for around 30 years. This is significant because the rate that the Earth is warming has been increasing. Between 1900 and 2000, we had warming of only .06~.08C per decade, much smaller then the latest trends. I believe I've told you all of this before. Sources (all peer-review btw): 1. IPCC (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. 2. NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute. (2005). GISS Surface Temperature Analysis, 2005: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/ 3. Jones and Moberg, 2003 data set. Hemispheric and large-scale surface air temperature variations: An extensive revision and an update to 2001. (ground temperatures) 4. Cristy and others. (2006). Error estimates of version 5.0 of MSU/AMSU bulk atmospheric temperatures. (satellite) Hey, I use mostly peer-review references in my posts. I have used a lot of references outside of the scientific academy, but even here most of these sources were just summarizing other references that were published in peer-review. I think it's funny that you say this because the scientific community unequivocally agrees that humans have been causing global warming. So if we only use peer-review, then your position is completely thrown out of the window, SkepticLance. If I were you, I'd embrace non-scientific sources. Also of relevance is the fact that good sites, like realclimate, cite peer-review. So although a reference may not be published itself, if it references published scientific articles, then it is a good reference as well. This is uninformed' date=' I can see very easily why they use this criteria (well I don't understand the third, but the other two make perfect sense. I havn't read it yet, either.). Many studies are now outdated by more recent information. Most of climate science is relatively new and most of the body of knowledge about it has been published after 2000. But more to the point, stopping at 1990 shows an incompletely picture. This is obvious. Anything less then 20 years is relatively useless as well because it just shows one little tree in the forest. Most trends under 30 years, even, deal more with weather then they do with climate. Reference? We know that the published conclusions weren't manipulated by the "intergovernmental panel" simply because these conclusions are supported by every other scientific institution on the planet. I never understood why people seem to think there's some sort of illuminati conspiracy because the magnitude of information control across the entire scientific community would be far too hard to contain. Covering up things in government, even, seems to be rather hard, but keeping thousands upon thousands of scientists hushed up seems, to me anyway, close to impossible. You just make yourself sound less credible by tooting about conspiracies and such.

Well the issue was, We do know exactly what's causing the problem. This undermines the whole wave-collapse quantum/newtonian discussion because global warming is caused by greenhouse gases.

You're just playing with colloquial terminology. The term ice age and "glacial period" are interchangeable depending on what definition you're talking about. You're just talking about the big ones, which is really strange because these are completely irrelevant to global warming, but we have much shorter temperature variations called glacial and interglacial periods. The last glacial period ended about 10,000 years ago and this is what I was referring to as an ice age. You know that as much as I and everyone else does so there's no reason to try to straw man me. These ice ages come about every 25, 40, and 100 thousand years, because of solar cycles, and the point was that contrary to what people seem to think, the Earth has been getting cooler for 8 thousand years, following a 650k+ pattern, and turned completely around. So my point is still valid even if you do want to argue about something as childish as what defines an "ice age" (even though what I was talking about was very obvious). It was a cooler then average period. You can call it whatever you prefer. This is a difference of scales. We can't use millions of years when talking about the current climate simply because the climate even 50 million years ago was a lot different then the climate today. (and just forget about 550!) One thing a lot of people don't realize is how important the continents are in our climate. This is even apparent today in the difference between the northern and southern hemisphere, and is reflective in the medieval warm period/little ice age because the two hemisphere's experienced the events differently. There are actually proposals to turn the Panama Canal into a sort of channel to move water from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The different salt concentrations could negate warming to an extent. When testing something in science you have to keep all but one variable constant. If you alter more then one variable its hard to tell what is causing what. On scales like this we're altering a whole magnitude of variables. And we're only looking at one or two dependent variable. The previous 650,000 years have very little variability in this regard so we can accurately see all the relationships that should be true for the current climate. What the climate was like so many million years ago is actually relatively unimportant when used equivocally, because we have perfectly good data about the past 650k years. Not only do we know a lot more about this period, but the information is much more accurate. When we go back this far, many things become unclear and turn into speculation as well. We guess about the temperature for instance from fossils found, nowhere else but my own state of West Virginia (through co2 and oxygen levels). But even if we're talking about 550million years, it's still just as inaccurate to "draw the line" and make conclusions from it. You actually went entirely in the wrong direction! To see what's going on today, you have to look at how we're diverging from historic trends. Instead of going into another ice age (ahem, glacial period), we've actually turned around 180 degrees and started getting unusually warmer -- and at a rate more then ten times faster then we've ever seen in 65+ million years (and possibly the entire history of the planet)! As for the troposphere, the latest information I can find claims that there aren't any problems. From your earlier posts, I assumed you had some information that claimed otherwise, which is why instead of telling you it wasn't a problem, I clarified that it could be a minor problem. "New analyses of balloon-borne and satellite measurements of lower- and mid-tropospheric temperature show warming rates that are similar to those of the surface temperature record and are consistent within their respective uncertainties, largely reconciling a discrepancy noted in the TAR. {3.2, 3.4}" Unless you have some more recent data retrieved after Feb 2007, then there really isn't any problem with the models. I assume you have a more recent reference like you claimed earlier? But at least you understand now that greenhouse gases have been the primary driver of warming sense 1900, so we're starting to get somewhere. Even if tropospheric predictions are wrong, these relationships are still correct. It just means we're missing something but whatever we havn't found isn't going to turn climate science up on its head.

I have clearly provided data earlier in this thread that demonstrates CO2 has been the driving force for global warming sense at least 1900. Saying that it has been for the past 30 years is also correct, just like saying it has been for the past five years or even 50, but an even less discriminatory look shows that this has been occurring for over 100 years. Most of the data that shows that the models incorrectly predicted changes in the troposphere are outdated. The most recent data from Feb 2007 shows that nothing (or very little) is really wrong. This is in contrast to 2001's TAR which is where most people get their obsolete information from (either directly or indirectly). There may still be some problems with model predictions for the troposphere, but they aren't huge discrepancies that threat to overturn the theory. "New analyses of balloon-borne and satellite measurements of lower- and mid-tropospheric temperature show warming rates that are similar to those of the surface temperature record and are consistent within their respective uncertainties, largely reconciling a discrepancy noted in the TAR. {3.2, 3.4}" "Warming of the climate system has been detected in changes of surface and atmospheric temperatures, temperatures in the upper several hundred metres of the ocean and in contributions to sea level rise. Attribution studies have established anthropogenic contributions to all of these changes. The observed pattern of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling is very likely due to the combined influences of greenhouse gas increases and stratospheric ozone depletion. {3.2, 3.4, 9.4, 9.5}" This is really a minor problem, if it's even a problem at all. If you want to go back to 2001 to see what all the fuse was about originally, you can look through this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aunofficial&hs=o8p&q=troposphere+warming+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.grida.no%2Fclimate%2Fipcc_tar%2Fwg1&btnG=Search There are probably going to be little details like this changed in the future as well. This is just how science works.

Now we've successfully found where the "debate" is that I was talking about above. Posting nonsense about peak oil not being real doesn't get you anywhere. Posting that maybe the peak of conventional oil won't be a bad thing (because the economy will wisen up or because we'll be able to use tar sands) is something that you can talk about. But be careful that you actually understand what's going on first before you go on about tar sands "nullifying" any peak. It might be able to nullify the effects of the peak, but it's not going to nullify the peak itself. The problem with tar sands is that it's expensive to extract. Because oil prices are so high right now, some companies have been able to make a profit off tar sands, but the vast majority of these "trillions of barrels" are still too expensive to tap. As oil prices go up, so will the utilization of tar sands. But how high do we want prices to go? Unless there's going to be some sort of technological breakthrough that's going to allow us to get to these trillions of barrels of oil, the existence of this oil doesn't do us much good. A lot of people don't understand that the problem isn't that we're going to run out of oil. People like to quote estimates of oil in tar/shell thinking "wow, that's a lot," but then they fail to overlook the 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil, as well as another 2 or so (not sure how much) that is found further north and in hard to reach places. Running out of oil isn't the problem. We have plenty of the stuff. A lot of it, however, is expensive to get to. The problem then lies in the fact that we've already used up the majority of the cheap stuff. Companies found the cheap stuff first, cause if they didn't (obviously), another company would have. So because tar is so expensive to produce, companies have left it alone. But now oil is getting harder and harder to produce so we're moving up on the price of production. And we're just going to keep going up. What we really need to do is just abandon oil and gas completely (gas in north America is peaking as well, which is actually a bigger problem then oil). If we run our electric grid off nuclear and whatever else, instead of gas, we can use this energy to run our "hydrogen vehicles." Personally, I don't think anyone's going to do anything. And if nobody does anything, our economy is going to head nowhere but down. Maybe market incentives will lead to change, but by the time people start noticing the problem, it's going to be too late. We're already feeling the problems right now, so if we're going to utilize tar sands or move to hydrogen, then we need to start now.

Hubbert's Peak is real, this is not something you can argue against. The "debate" usually revolves around when it's going to happen and what we should do about it. It will happen eventually for conventional cheap oil. "It's not a matter of if or how, but when." Tar sands and the like may get cheaper or they may not. We don't know. But the fact that Hubbert's Peak is happening for the world's oil supply is apparent when you look at production growth. According to wikipedia, "World oil production growth trends, in the short term, have been flat over the last 18 months." You can read all about tar sands, oil shell, ethanol (which is the biggest loser out of all of them), etc, in Beyond Oil: A View From Hubbert's peak by Kenneth S. Deffeys. We had a good thread about this recently, which you'd probably like, CPL.Luke. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?p=317507 I'm not sure about coal. I always heard it would last a long time, but PeakOilMan has some information that claims otherwise, so I don't know. There's a really interesting documentary called The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (download w/ bt). It's actually a rather informative documentary but it is a video, not a book, so take what you like from it. I don't agree with absolutely everything it says but what would be interesting in this film to any of you who are "doubting" the idea that peak oil is real, is the geologists meetings and what the actual scientists are saying. Around 33:15. "Peaking is not the equivalent of ruining out. Everyone in this room knows this. But the lack of the people outside of this room understanding that is a problem." And it is a problem. It's bad that many people go uninformed, especially people who are currently living in "suburbia." The video interviews a lot of authors, and the first time I watched it I wrote them all down, so here are some sources you can weed through. I've only read a couple of these books so I can't recommend them all. Not all of them are about the science itself, either. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of Amerca's Man-Madecape The next American metropolis Resource Wars: The new Landscape of Global Conflict The Part's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World High Noon for Natural Gas Crossing the Rubicon: America's Descent into Fascism at the end of the age of oil Home from Nowhere: Remaking our Everyday Workd for the 21st Century Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (good book, by Deffeys) Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict The Coming oil Crisis edit to add--In post #7 of the thread I linked, I sadi " I'm pretty sure the area under the curve would be qtotal but I havn't found anybody to claim that. It probably is though nevertheless." If you take the integral of the function, you do indeed get the total amount of oil under the function, so it is a true statement.

This is a straw man. The hockey stick graph is really fairly unimportant to climate science. It might be true that the first hockey stick graph is inaccurate. It's a very technical argument though and I never felt the need to read through it all. There are rebuttals and rebuttals of rebuttals from different scientists in peer review and people from both sides have their opinions that they're willing to write about in layman's terms, but the fact of the matter is that the jury is still out. But why does it matter? There are numerous other reconstructions that show the same general conclusion. Some aren't as "hockey-looking" but they all point to the same conclusion that current warming (after 1750) is very unusual and that it is happening very rapidly. So it's not really a matter of this one study being incorrect; you have to look at the bigger picture. The area around the medieval warm period and little ice age is still not completely understood and this is probably where the biggest area of controversy around the hockey graph is. We do know that the medieval warm period mostly affected the northern hemisphere and was largest during the summer, but that it also probably had a more limited effect elsewhere. Of course it wasn't nearly as warm then as it is today. This last fact is something that cannot be disputed, even if the hockey stick graph is found to be wrong. Here's a graph of several temperature records from that time period, and as you can see, they all support the same general conclusion. It is this conclusion that's important, not necessarily which particular study is most correct. So taking pokes at the hockey stick graph wont get you anywhere. I agree that it probably is a little to "strait" where the medieval warm period and little ice age are, which is why it looks so much like a hockey stick, but this really doesn't matter all that much. This study is ancient, and Mann has sense done some new studies that actually contradict his first. It just received a lot of publicity when it first came out, which is why it seems so popular, but science has moved on sense then and has created more accurate reconstructions (like those above).

The study published in Journal of Climate by Stott et al, "Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change?" This data shows that only 16% to 36% of the temperature increase between 1900 and 1950 was caused by non-human factors. And thus we see how you always like to simplify the climate to support your position. Of particular interest, 1940 to 1976 Btw the 1976 number is slightly ambiguous. This is the year that we first started getting satellite temperature data and ever sense these instruments were turned on, we've had a rapid climb in temperature. The trend may have started a couple years earlier, as indicated by other sources, but the exact date really doesn't matter. Mid-to-late-1970s is good enough. The cooling only lasted a few years, also, like Bascue said. These years are ironically tied into "global cooling" that we were talking about earlier. The 1940s saw a huge increase in particulate pollution that sort of lulled temperature gain for a while. When Mount Pinatubo erupted, likewise, we saw a drop in temperature because of the same sort of pollution. Things like this happen, and it's really not evidence against climate science sense the science has done a very good job explaining all of this. CO2 isn't the only force in the atmosphere. I think it's funny that most arguments against climate science rely on simplifications of what climate science actually is. When you explain to someone what is actually going on, these sorts of arguments tend to break down. The key feature here is that the temperature drops were temporary. I'm sure we're all aware of the difference between climate and weather, so I wont go over this. The overall 100 or so year trend is one of warming, so we can't just pick out specific years and say, "hey, the Earth didn't get warmer. Therefore, global warming isn't real!." I don't see why you're posting all these specifics dealing with short-term changes when the graph I posted clearly shows a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature, regardless of what you're saying. Nobody is saying that CO2 directly and completely correlates with temperature. More specifically, if you combine CO2 w/ other greenhouse gases and the sun, you get a very very strong correlation, as indicated by this graph: You cannot deny that this isn't a strong correlation. It is a stronger correlation then the sun alone, and likewise, it is a stronger correlation then just CO2 alone. (btw these come directly from TAR, they just happen to be on this website.) There are more recent models that show even more accurate results. So if this isn't proof of modern climate science, along with the nifty "Climate Change Attricution" graph, then I don't know what is, really. Let me say this again. Nobody is denying that historically, the sun has been the primary factor for climate change. The sun, all by itself, of course, wouldn't cause the climate vary anywhere near as much as it has, but it is what tends to start all the feedback chains and such. I think I've quoted myself about this already, from post 84, "Well I think from my other responses you already know the motif. Historically it is true that the sun has drove warming/cooling. Volcanoes and other factors have had effects as well, like the little ice age for instance[5]. However, modern warming is very different. I could quote literally thousands of peer-reviews science articles that claim global warming is caused by humans. However, there are no peer-reviewed references that claim otherwise. The entire body of information against global warming is found outside of science. This video is a good example of one." Your GISS study is funny because it talks about these historical trends. It also talks about the solar cycles which nobody is disputing. It's funny though that this particular factor is very small according to your article. This study is actually outdated (most climate research is "bleeding edge") and is contradicted by latter GISS research, http://data.giss.nasa.gov/ (NASA GISS is in fact on the climate scientists side). And even from the abstract of your study, it only claims 50% and 33% after 1970, which latter research has found to be wrong. Your study is actually referenced by Stott. A broader look at the climate with updated data shows that the difference between 1900 and 1950 is 16% to 36%. These figures have not been disputed sense this publication. What has been disputed sense it's publication, however, is your 1998 Lean and Rind study where some of the conclusions have been shown to be wrong within the scientific academe. Even if it were completely accurate, this still doesn't support your position that the sun was the primary driver "before 1976." (and nobody is saying that they're wrong; the data from Lean and Rind are actually used by Stott to support the 16% to 36% figure, among some of the other conclusions)

Just FYI, no scientist is really saying that global warming is going to cause the world to end anytime soon. I think Al Gore has said this before, but he's not a scientist. Global warming is extremely exaggerated outside of science. I'm sure if you look at the tactics of evolution deniers, holocaust deniers, smoking-health risk deniers, and global warming deniers, you'll find that their tactics are all very similar. It pretty much amounts to an attack on the science itself, without actually talking about what their model is. They make uncertainties seem much larger then they actually are. Your quotes from these couple scientists are an excellent example of how to properly argue in this manner. Yes, there are uncertainties, but that doesn't mean we don't know anything. It is a similar style of arguing that every "denial" group uses. Michael Shermer (founder of Skeptic and author of the "Skeptic" column in Scientific American) writes a lot about this in his books, for instance Why People Believe Weird Things. I am a skeptic through and through at heart. As Michael Shermer would put it, I'm not skeptical about global warming, but I am skeptical about the global warming deniers. "Skepticism is a method leading to provisional conclusions...embodied in the scientific method." The scientific method has lead to the development of modern climate science. Being a skeptic means that when shown a claim, you always ask for the evidence. Global warming is a claim that is backed by the evidence. So if you were a true skeptic, you would have already accepted modern climate science based on the data that supports it. To be honest, at one time I didn't even believe in global warming. I think one of my early posts is still documented on these forums somewhere. I used to have the "show me the evidence" mentality for global warming until one day I researched the topic for myself and found out that, sure enough, global warming does have the evidence to back it up. Skepticism itself is really a fine line to walk on. "The key to skepticism is to navigate the treacherous straits between 'know nothing' skepticism and 'anything goes' credulity by continuously and vigorously applying the methods of science. The flaw in pure skepticism is that when taken to an extreme, the position itself cannot stand. If you are skeptical about everything, you must be skeptical of your own skepticism." This is exactly why I consider you a denier. I clearly provide references to back up what I say. I don't think I've said much of anything concrete without a peer-reviewed reference that you could go to and verify for yourself. On some posts, I even provide these neatly at the end in a nice orderly, numbered manner. What you guys just don't seem to understand is how well established climate science really is. Scientists have taken a very strong position on global warming. The only other science I can think of (beyond the physical sciences, of course), where scientists have such a strong bold position on, is evolution. It's ironic that the two most controversial areas of science, outside of the scientific community, are actually two of the most well established and supported areas of science. The editor-in-chief of Science Donald Kennedy even said, "Consensus as strong as the one that has developed around this topic is rare in science." Climate change isn't any less of a science then evolution, relativity, or quantum mechanics. You can take courses on climate change at your university, even, just like anything else. We just had a link to this study not to long ago. Fortunately, it was submitted to peer-review, because scientists have found serious flaws in this study. This is the beauty of peer-review: the ability to find flaws/mistakes in data that the authors missed. It's the whole point of it, really. I brought this up in post #87. The fact of the matter is that solar activity and the temperature of the Earth do not correlate (between 1900 and today, and no, not even before 1976). What does correlate, however, are radiative forcing factors in the climate, and temperature. It is this relationship that climate models use to predict future trends and it is this same relationship that has lead to the extreme accuracy of these models. The climate is a lot more complex then just the sun-temperature relationship that you're trying to make it out to be (which is also contradicted by the data, so it doesn't really work in the first place). If we didn't have an atmosphere, just as an example of the importance of other factors, the planet would be very cold. Some more data that you might be interested in, which I've posted many times and you have ignored, is the Stott et all study, "Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change?" from Journal of Climate, vol. 16, p. 4079-4093. According to this paper, even the period between 1900 and 1950 where the temperature most appears to correlate with solar activity visually, only 16% to 36% of the total warming was actually caused by the increase in solar activity. The rest was caused by greenhouse gases emitted by humans. You seem to be insinuating that the "warming/cooling before 1976 correlates more closely to solar activity variations" but the data clearly shows that greenhouse gases have been the primary driver of global warming sense at least 1900, and probably much longer (in 1750 it might not have been the primary driver). So here we have another case where the data directly contradicts one of your statements. Warming/cooling before 1976 correlates much better with greenhouse gas emissions then it does with solar forcing. (img) http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/warming_earth/images/Fig2-CO2-Temp.jpg ( http://www.whrc.org/resources/online_publications/warming_earth/scientific_evidence.htm ) Of course to best find the relationship between greenhouse gases, solar variations, and temperature, you have to look at all three. According to the data, sense 1750, radiative forcing has increased by .12 W/m^2 compared to anthropogenic forcings which have increased by 1.6 W/m^2, an entire order of magnitude higher then solar. "A denier refuses to accept data." If you do not accept this data then you are a denier. The ironic thing about your statement is that this issue is addressed in the IPCC. The IPCC is completely honest about what scientists know and do not know -- they don't make things up. This is one area that we aren't completely sure about,"Cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty." (Feb 2007) The scientific community is perfectly open about what we know, so it's not like pointing this out really changes anything. Scientists already knew this. I'm not getting in the middle of you two lovebirds here, but from my interpretation of this discussion, it seems like Bascule believes you have demonstrated a simplistic interpretation of the climate to support your views. Remember, judge a man by his actions, not by his words. Although you make the claim (words) that the climate system is complex, in practice you treat (actions) the climate system as if it were simplistic. You may actually believe and understand that the climate system is complex, but you pick and chose, possibly unconsciously, when to represent the climate simplistically and when to represent it complexly, based on whatever supports your opinion most. And this is exactly why SkepticLance is a denier. He refuses to accept data that supports the scientific consensus of climate change. This data is functionally invisible to him. I'm giving him another chance though. I've posted the appropriate data that addresses some of his complaints with climate science so he can easily see where he is wrong. As a good skeptic who follows the scientific method and has been shown the evidence, he should then change his mind. Assuming he's not one of those "know nothings," that is. But I argue that "know nothing skeptics" really aren't in line with what skepticism stands for, and it is these people who make us legitimate skeptics look bad.

Co2 really isn't the main cause, historically, for temperature rise. CO2 is actually a feedback agent in our climate. There are lots of them, and there are lots of negative factors as well -- these are called sinks. Warmer temperatures cause more CO2 to be released, from a couple sources. But CO2 also causes temperatures to rise. So you can see how the feedback system is constructed. The 800 years is a period of time after an ice age when we started getting closer to the sun, while sinks in our climate absorb some of the CO2. After a while, though (presumable 800 +/- 200 years), these sinks "fill up" and CO2 starts to accelerate this warming. You can see these transitions; they're very rapid. People mistakenly think that CO2 always follows temperature, but this is only true for 1/6 of the history. -- right after an ice age. Just to clarify this graph, ice ages come about every 25, 40, and 100 thousand years. The big jumps are the 100 year ice ages. swansont of course just addressed this part of your question (it takes me a while sometimes to write posts and then other people come in and respond). And sense we already have threads about this, I dont really see the need to make another big long thread about global warming here... keep things together, but I figured I'd save you the time of reading through everything to find the answer. So the second part is, Yes, there have been a couple that could be relevant here. I'm going to give you the most recent estimation, form Climate Change 2007: The Scientific Basis. The effect on global warming from different sources are measured in W/m^2. Humans have the largest effect on warming, w/ 1.6 W/m^2 (Greenhouse gases such as CO2 actually have a larger effect, but we release pollutants that decrease the temperature of the Earth, so it all adds together at 1.6). The only measurably relevant non-human cause for warming is the sun, at .12 W/m^2, which is an entire order of magnitude smaller then humans. Mirror: http://1veedo.homelinux.com/snapshot.jpg "FIGURE SPM-2. Global-average radiative forcing (RF) estimates and ranges in 2005 for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and other important agents and mechanisms, together with the typical geographical extent (spatial scale) of the forcing and the assessed level of scientific understanding (LOSU). The net anthropogenic radiative forcing and its range are also shown. These require summing asymmetric uncertainty estimates from the component terms, and cannot be obtained by simple addition. Additional forcing factors not included here are considered to have a very low LOSU. Volcanic aerosols contribute an additional natural forcing but are not included in this figure due to their episodic nature. Range for linear contrails does not include other possible effects of aviation on cloudiness. {2.9, Figure 2.20}" You can find a lot of information from the link I provided you. Another relevant study specifically dealt with the percentage of influence that the sun has. Stott, Peter et al. (2003). Journal of Climate, vol. 16, p. 4079-4093. "Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change?" http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fclimate.envsci.rutgers.edu%2Fpdf%2FStottEtAl.pdf&ei=ijwERpTgJonewAL5tOi8CA&usg=__wNo5bWuQKwcxiQLubBB13gA6TYc=&sig2=npEDkLgRjo2rGCfQZTYfsw According to this study, between 1900 and 1950, the sun contributed 16% to 36% of total warming (meaning we did the rest: 64% to 84%). Today, of course, this factor is even less. So yeah, humans, through green house gases, are causing the Earth to get warmer. And our portion of the total warming is a very large factor compared to non-human causes. If you want to do the math, you can compare .12 [.06 to .3] w/ 1.6 [.6 to 2.4]. It would be inaccurate to simply add the two and divide, but that gives you a pretty good indication: 93% [90.91% to 88.89%..?? (I know this is wrong, maybe I'll look up some good math latter. Or maybe we could move this thread to the math section!)] So it's around 90%. I'm not sure I can give you a better percentage then that. Maybe someone else can. edit--Ok I think I know how to do this. Take the low vs. high for each and then you have the entire possible range for what portion of warming is caused by humans. So the lowest influence we have is .6/(.3+.6) and the most is 2.4/(.06+2.4) = 66.67% to 97.6%.

SkepticLance you keep trying to say this but in reality, you are. You have a distorted picture of what climate science really is, either by accident, or on purpose. You constantly sidestep and tiptoe around issues, usually with logical fallacies. You ignore evidence from peer-review that directly contradict statements that you have made, and have to be corrected many times on these issues over and over again. I don't know how many times I've had to post the same response to something stupid that you've said because you just don't seem to understand it. Ever. I don't think you've ever read a single one of my posts because you never seem to learn anything. I remember once you posted an article from junkscience.com about proxy data or something. Did you not know that junkscience.com is actually an example of junk science? Is it not obvious that when a website claims second hand smoke isn't bad for you that it's not a good site to be getting information from? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Milloy http://skepdic.com/refuge/junkscience.html http://environment.guardian.co.uk/cl...875762,00.html So keep telling yourself that you're not a denier. Keep ignoring all of the research that I cite in response to some of your outrageous claims. Keep claiming that there is no scientific consensus. Keep claiming that scientists aren't aware of H20's ghg qualities. Keep talking about Mars as if it were relevant. Keep talking about the fact that CO2 follows temperature, without actually understanding the relationship involved. Keep claiming that there's no evidence for a positive feedback system. Keep claiming that climate models aren't accurate. Keep claiming that the happy little Vikings were growing lots of food on Greenland during the medieval warm period. But you're still wrong no matter what way you look at it. And although foodchain might have had your position a little wrong, you are still a global warming denier. All of these false claims that you routinely make are in fact the same arguments that global warming deniers use. If you are not denying global warming, then why do you keep bringing up these false nonscientific arguments? It seems a little strange to vehemently argue against the scientific consensus of climate change and then tell everyone, "no, I'm not a global warming denier! You guys have me all wrong!" Judge a man by his actions, not by his words.

Lol it's not 10%. You hunted up the 2001 third assessment by the IPCC, which I have not read, but I know the forth assessment (2007) clearly shows that humans are the largest factor on the climate. Specifically, (This is image shack, I've never used it before but I've seen these images disappear on forums so I guess we'll wait and see. You can find it on my site as well but I doubt I have enough bandwidth, sense this is hosted at home: http://1veedo.homelinux.com/snapshot.jpg ) "FIGURE SPM-2. Global-average radiative forcing (RF) estimates and ranges in 2005 for anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and other important agents and mechanisms, together with the typical geographical extent (spatial scale) of the forcing and the assessed level of scientific understanding (LOSU). The net anthropogenic radiative forcing and its range are also shown. These require summing asymmetric uncertainty estimates from the component terms, and cannot be obtained by simple addition. Additional forcing factors not included here are considered to have a very low LOSU. Volcanic aerosols contribute an additional natural forcing but are not included in this figure due to their episodic nature. Range for linear contrails does not include other possible effects of aviation on cloudiness. {2.9, Figure 2.20}" Here's a link to Feb 2007: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ipcc.ch%2FSPM2feb07.pdf&ei=BSwDRrXtNIa4wQKey7nJCg&usg=__QnpdvY6CE_Fa6azD9p-hIxU92RA=&sig2=LRqK4jnHq_C8ZC0Kqy_hjQ

edit -- didn't notce foodchain above before I posted this (it took a good half hour to write), so I apologize if I've ignored it or repeated some things. I'll make some changes as soon as I read the post, if absolutely necessary. What we have is a model, a model that is based on very well established laws of physics and that has made very specific predictions about the climate that have been confirmed to be true. It is consistent with a plethora of data that has proved it to be able to very successfully predict the climate's behavior. Climate models are extremely accurate. They have made many predictions that have been verified by actual data and they have also made "predictions" about past climate trends that we have data for and are accurate there for the past two hundred or so years up to hundreds of thousands of years. This is an issue I addressed earlier in this thread. From post 84, "Well I think from my other responses you already know the motif. Historically it is true that the sun has drove warming/cooling. Volcanoes and other factors have had effects as well, like the little ice age for instance[5]. However, modern warming is very different. I could quote literally thousands of peer-reviews science articles that claim global warming is caused by humans. However, there are no peer-reviewed references that claim otherwise. The entire body of information against global warming is found outside of science. This video is a good example of one." However, you introduced something new. This is actually a favorite of mine. "The solar system is getting warmer. Don't blame CO2; blame the sun!" This usually revolves around the argument that Mars is getting warmer. But sense you didn't mention Mars, I wont waste bandwidth discussing this. The sun does, however, have an effect on global warming. This is true. But it's small compared to human influences. Between 1900 and 1950 for instance, it's believed that the sun contributed 16% to 36% of total warming*. Today it's even less. Solar forcing is an entire order of magnitude smaller then anthropomorphic**. *Stott, Peter et al. (2003). Journal of Climate, vol. 16, p. 4079-4093. "Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent Climate Change?" ** 1.6 for humans and .12 for the sun. IPCC (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Water vapor is another feedback agent, but not a radiative force, as CO2 is. The distinction is very important. "Water vapour changes represent the largest feedback affecting climate sensitivity and are now better understood than in the TAR." " Radiative forcing is a measure of the influence that a factor has in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in the Earth-atmosphere system and is an index of the importance of the factor as a potential climate change mechanism. Positive forcing tends to warm the surface while negative forcing tends to cool it. In this report radiative forcing values are for 2005 relative to pre-industrial conditions defined at 1750 and are expressed in watts per square metre (W m-2). See Glossary and Section 2.2 for further details." Water may be a powerful GHG (36-66 w/o clouds, w/ clouds 66-85) but there is a difference between it and something like CO2. H2O concentration in the atmosphere is a direct result of temperature. If you put H2O in the atmosphere, it rains immediately and conversely if you remove water from the atmosphere, more water would quickly evaporate from the ground (mostly over the ocean I would assume). So the interesting thing about water vapor, then, is that because it is a function of temperature, the abundance of the stuff in the atmosphere is a direct result of CO2 emissions. Where CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a very long time, water can come and go very rapidly. So when you increase CO2 levels you also increase the amount of water in the atmosphere. If you reduce CO2 levels, assuming it were possible to just take it out of the atmosphere, water vapor would quickly be removed from the atmosphere which would cause an even further drop in temperature. This is a difference of scales. We cannot use millions of years when talking about the current climate simply because the climate 50 million years ago was a lot different then the climate today. One thing a lot of people don't realize is how important the continents are in our climate. This is even apparent today in the difference between the northern and southern hemisphere, and is reflective in the medieval warm period/little ice age because the two hemisphere's experienced the events differently. There are actually proposals to turn the Panama Canal into a sort of channel to move water from the Pacific to the Atlantic. The different salt concentrations could negate warming to an extent. When testing something in science you have to keep all but one variable constant. If you alter more then one variable its hard to tell what is causing what. On scales like this we're altering a whole magnitude of variables. And we're only looking at one dependent variable -- CO2. The previous 650,000 years have very little variability in this regard so we can accurately see all the relationships that should be true for the current climate. What the climate was like so many million years ago is actually relatively unimportant, because we have perfectly good data about the past 650k years. Not only do we know a lot more about this period, but the information is much more accurate. When we go back this far, many things become unclear and turn into speculation. We guess about the temperature from fossils found, nowhere else but my own state of West Virginia. So yeah, nice graph, but it really tells us very little. We actually know that historically there's very little CO2 in the atmosphere right now. Some 4 billion years ago, there was a lot of the stuff and very little oxygen. So I'm not denying that what you said is true about CO2 levels. CO2 has been higher even w/i the last 600,000 years: We can make some inferences based on this time period, from Feb 2007 " The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4 to 6 metres of sea level rise. {6.4, 6.6}" It is true that some twenty thousand years ago, the Earth was cooler by 8~10C but you cant simply draw a line and say, "There, see, the Earth has been warming for twenty thousand years!" This "line" would be highly oversimplified. Take a look at this graph, The ice age is at the far right and the present the far left. You can clearly see that the rapid warming coming out of the last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago. After around 8000 bp the temperature started to progress downward for the rest of the period. When we hit the industrial revolution, this several thousand year trend ceased and started moving in reverse. So for 8000 years, we have actually been getting cooler, not warmer. This is ironically tied into "global cooling" that we were talking about earlier. The 1940s and 50s saw a huge increase in particulate pollution that sort of lulled temperature gain for a while. After 1970, the temperature started to rise dramatically, because we reduced this form of pollution, through regulations and better technology (and it helps that CO2 levels increased dramatically here as well). When Mount Pinatubo erupted, likewise, we saw a drop in temperature because of the same sort of pollution. CO2 isn't the only force in the atmosphere. I think it's funny that most arguments against climate science rely on simplifications of what climate science actually is. When you explain to someone what is actually going on, these sorts of arguments tend to break down. The key feature here is that the temperature drops were temporary. I'm sure we're all aware of the difference between climate and weather, so I wont go over this. The overall 100 or so year trend is one of warming, so we can't just pick out specific years and say, "hey, the Earth didn't get warmer. Therefore, global warming isn't real!." This is simply not true. Human forcings have a value of 1.6W/m^2 (total, this is after you subtract factors that decrease the temperature of the Earth) while the only non-human force (the sun) has a value of .12. Humans are causing the Earth to warm. This is just a simple fact. "Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years (see Figure SPM-1). The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture. ... The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence 7 that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m-2. (see Figure SPM-2). {2.3. 6.5, 2.9}" (IPCC (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.) Anthropogenic ghgs are much larger then natural ghgs. The natural range for CO2 is 180 to 300 ppm but because of anthropogenic CO2 pollution, current CO2 levels are at 379ppm. Methane has increased from pre-industrial levels of 715ppb all the way up to 1732 ppb! Both levels are much greater then the natural historical variations for the gases. I believe Bascule posted this report in another thread, about volcanic contributions to CO2: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bgs.ac.uk%2Fprogrammes%2Flandres%2Fsegs%2Fdownloads%2FVolcanicContributions.pdf&ei=9QoDRpKUJpHIggSrqPSwCw&usg=__AE80SkYHXD_QU5sD1MH-LF_D0FY=&sig2=HDJJKT45S84ofNMEwtZDIQ "Present day geological emissions of CO2 include both volcanic emissions (both passive, from volcanoes in repose, and those related directly to eruptive activity) and non-volcanic – direct emissions from the Earth’s crust and lithosphere. The contribution to the present day atmospheric CO2 loading from volcanic emissions is, however, relatively insignificant, and it has been estimated that subaerial volcanism releases around 300 Mt/yr CO2, equivalent to just 1 % of anthropogenic emissions (Morner & Etiope, 2002). Nevertheless, understanding and quantification of Earth degassing is still necessary for understanding the longterm global carbon cycle and the implications of the present day atmospheric CO2 budget. This report presents a review of volcanic CO2 emissions in relation to tectonic setting, the different related phenomena, and ultimate source." You can also find this on wikipedia's carbon dioxide article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide#Atmospheric_concentration "Volcanic activity now releases about 130 to 230 teragrams (145 million to 255 million short tons) of carbon dioxide each year.[8] Volcanic releases are about 1% of the amount which is released by human activities." I think it's funny that people post about volcanoes causing more global warming then humans, because in reality volcanoes generally have the effect that they cool down the Earth. They release particulates which, as we've already discussed, contribute to the phenomenon of global dimming.

Lol this particular graph was the same one that proved global cooling in the 1970s? There really weren't many people talking about a new ice age back in the 70s. This appears to be an urban legend propagated by global warming denier websites. It is true that there were some warnings back then, but this is different. Today, there is a scientific consensus about climate change supported by many institutions and universities. They warn us that temperatures are rising and that we are to blame. Back in the 70s, there was no large fluctuation of scientific articles about global cooling. There were no big news stories about UN treaties, no weather channel programming about global warming, and no documentaries about what all the fuss is about. To put it simply, there is no comparison between the 1970s and today. And behind it all, they had just discovered that ice ages usually come in patterns and therefore we could predict the next one. Some people thought aerosol cans would escalate this process because aerosol cans cause what's known as global dimming. So there actually is some sort of truth behind what they thought, meaning they really weren't even completely wrong (not that it matters). Sense then we have successful reduced aerosol emissions. Human forcings have a value of 1.6W/m^2 while the only non-human force (the sun) has a value of .12. Humans are causing the Earth to warm. This is just a simple fact. "Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years (see Figure SPM-1). The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture. ... The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the Third Assessment Report (TAR), leading to very high confidence 7 that the globally averaged net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m-2. (see Figure SPM-2). {2.3. 6.5, 2.9}" (IPCC (2007), Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.) Anthropogenic ghgs are much larger then natural ghgs. The natural range for CO2 is 180 to 300 ppm but because of anthropogenic CO2 pollution, current CO2 levels are at 379ppm. Methane has increased from pre-industrial levels of 715ppb all the way up to 1732 ppb! Both levels are much greater then the natural historical variations for the gases. PS: ".045 CO2" -- try .0379% of the atmosphere.

You have said this before, SkepticLance, and people have shown you (including me, many times, and swansont right above) that in reality, the relationship is consistent with positive feedback. Coming out of an ice age is a very rapid process that can be seen here: Again, you can read all about this in Understanding Climate Change Feedbacks, available here: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10850

Lets keep politics separated from the science, shale we? This is how science has always been, regardless of the field. Saying you're being laughed at does not make your correct. Sure, Darwin was ridiculed, the Wright brothers, even, were ridiculed, but these are good stories because people like them. What you don't hear about are all the people who were ridiculed and history has subsequently found them wrong! (see for instance Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer) "For every Galileo shown the instruments of torture for advocating a scientific truth, there are a thousand (or ten thousand) unknowns whose "truths" never pass muster with other scientists" Global warming definitely isn't a religion though. You should probably look the definitions for religion and science. They are inherently very different and I dont see how you could confuse the two. I'm not denying that this conveyer belt exists. I've never heard of it before, but I never actually said it wasn't real. You have created what is known as a straw man. All this article really serves to do is prove that it's real. That's great. What it does not do, however, is claim that global warming is caused by it. You're trying to create an equivocation fallacy. The existence of this conveyor belt and the causation upon global warming are not the same thing. Hence the logical fallacy in trying to say that they are. If you want to claim that the CO2 being released from the ocean is enough to effect the climate, you're going to have to come up with some numbers. And these numbers better be much higher then anthropomorphic levels. If you read this article, you would clearly see in the first paragraph that they're talking about the fact that the oceans have absorbed a lot of carbon from the atmosphere (from nowhere else but the burning of Fossil Fuels). This is of great significance to climate scientists because we don't how much the ocean is going to absorb before it stops. It's what's known as a sink in climate science. Sinks eventually fill up and stop mitigating certain factors within the climate. The IPCC Feb 2007 has a bullet, " Observations since 1961 show that the average temperature of the global ocean has increased to depths of at least 3000 m and that the ocean has been absorbing more than 80% of the heat added to the climate system. Such warming causes seawater to expand, contributing to sea level rise (see Table SPM-1). {5.2, 5.5}" The irony of you posting this article is that the article assumes, as a premise, that anthropomorphic global warming is real. They're talking about the implications of predicting future climate trends based on research about the conveyor belt. "New measurements of carbon in the coastal ocean and of organic particle content or profiles throughout the ocean will be needed to reduce uncertainties in coastal carbon fluxes and to quantify carbon export to the deep ocean. NASA will partner with other agencies to better understand carbon export. In 5-10 years, an intensive Southern Ocean carbon program will be needed to resolve uncertainties in the size, dynamics, and global significance of the Southern Ocean as a carbon sink, the processes controlling this sink, and the response of the sink to climate change in the Southern Hemisphere. In order to improve process characterizations in ecological models, more sophisticated measurement technology than are currently being used will be required." But while we're talking about NASA, why don't you look at NASA's GISS surface temperature analysis? http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2005/ So maybe you should direct your glib and misleading comments towards NASA? Well we already talked about this above, and I am not denying that science tends to marginalize those who go against the consensus, but if you're going to make a specific claim regarding these particular researchers, you should also back it up with a reference. This may be a discussion but it shouldn't be. This is simply because, as has been said many times here at scienceforums.net in this thread and others, CO2 is what's known as a positive feedback agent in our climate. Feedback is a factor in a system that loops back into itself, and it is usually negative or positive. An example of positive feedback is a microphone put close to the speaker. The nose going into the mic comes back out in the speakers, which is then fed back in, causing an amplification of the sound. If you want to read about all the various feedback agents at work in our climate, including CO2, dive into Understanding Climate Change Feedbacks. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10850 This really doesn't deserve being responded to but I just wanted to ask you again to avoid straw man arguments. A straw man argument is when you take a persons position, distort it, and then argue against that version. It is a logical fallacy simply because arguing against a distorted position does not constitute arguing against the position itself. I have never once insinuated that you were saying global warming isn't real. This whole time we've been talking about anthropomorphic global warming.

And btw w/ asperger's, I was diagnosed when I was in the six'd grade, at school. My teachers then put me in gifted special education. At the time I didn't really know what was going on. It's funny though that we talk about a bunch of people being diagnosed with asperger's when people started noticing it, because this is what happens with a lot of mental disorders. Multiple personality disorder (dissociative now) and bipolar are examples of this (some people think both are still overly diagnosed). But the funny thing is that it's related to the autism "epidemic." (which in my opinion is caused mostly by genetics, but this is all off topic. It's not because they're simply diagnosing more people w/ it though. This is a fact that directly contradicts what you're saying.) What's even funnier though is that many people with asperger's syndrome go undiagnosed. A lot of people live their entire life without knowing they have it, or until they're adults and they come in because of depression(don't start about depression...). So while you're saying people are getting diagnosed too often, it's actually diagnosed a lot less often then it should be.

This is what I told you above. If you're talking about complete and total isolation, then we're not talking about the same thing. It is you who posted after me saying that I was wrong. The post where you "put in italics" that you were talking about complete isolation was a response to my post. A post where I had very clearly distinguished exactly what I was talking about (and even italicized the important part). "C'mon you guys do know he's assuming the child is fed and everything. Social isolation is the key word here." What we're looking at here are people stuffed in garages, isolated from the outside world, from spring and fall, isolated from human contact, from care and love, from TV and the media, isolated from school, and ultimately isolated from society itself. They get a bowl of milk shoved under the door every day to keep them alive. They go 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year without a single kiss from a loving parent. These are the cases of child abuse that we're talking about here. This is what you ignored in order to form a straw man against what I had said, for whatever reason... I assume just because you like to argue. I'm talking about the OP. The paramount issue is that everyone was assuming the OP was referring to total isolation -- where the child would (probably) die from lack of food and water. I am merely suggesting that maybe, maybe, he was talking about social isolation (he does use the qualifier human isolation after all). This in and of itself is a completely different issue from the validity of my posts. If you want to argue about the effects of social isolation, you have to do so without bringing up the implications of total and absolute isolation. They are not the same thing and arguing against one does not constitute arguing against the other. I have position X. You presented positing Y, which is not the same thing as X, and attacked it. Therefore, according to your logic, X is false. This is not how logic actually works.

If you just google "the great global warming swindle" you can easily find that it's severely misleading. People like Icemelt innocently watch it and think it makes sense, without actually knowing anything about climate change in the first place. There are pages and pages of "rebuttals" and "swindling the swindle" that respond to the claims made in that show. Wikipedia even has an article now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle These actually come from Carl Wunsch, the professor of oceanography at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He thought the show was going to be honest so agreed for an interview, but is now suing the producers because they misinterpreted what he said to make it sound like he disagreed with global warming. "In the part of The Great Climate Change Swindle where I am describing the fact that the ocean tends to expel carbon dioxide where it is warm, and to absorb it where it is cold, my intent was to explain that warming the ocean could be dangerous - because it is such a gigantic reservoir of carbon. By its placement in the film, it appears that I am saying that since carbon dioxide exists in the ocean in such large quantities, human influence must not be very important—diametrically opposite to the point I was making—which is that global warming is both real and threatening." ( http://ocean.mit.edu/~cwunsch/papersonline/channel4response )

Lol here we go again.

Yes, I understand your point about complete isolation. The question isn't about being in complete isolation though because the child would, quite literally (and obviously), die. Probably because of starvation/dehydration. The question is about social isolation. These studies were studies about being socially isolated and what that does to you. This is exactly what I was talking about above; people we're thinking (and rightly so) "total isolation from right after birth.... I'd like to see a newborn baby survive alone in any environment." (Radical Edward) This is what you're doing too. Well I assumed you knew what I meant. I made it very clear above that the key word was social isolation. I believe this is the only correct thing you thing you've said in this entire thread. If you want to talk about complete isolation, that's fine. I'm assuming complete isolation from birth leads to death. If not... that's possible, but I doubt it. However, it is a straw man to equivocate complete isolation with social isolation. It may be true that the OP really meant complete and total isolation, but I'm assuming he's referring to the sort of isolation that most psychologists and sociologists talk about. If not, then my bad; I'm not always that great at reading between the lines, but I'm pretty sure this is what QuickSilver1024 was talking about. I've never read anything about "complete" isolation before in my life; the only sort of isolation I've ever read about are cases such as Anna.