You deniers are hilarious! Climate change denial is so *1990s* — it’s almost quaint! If you can ever come up with a new argument that hasn’t been refuted a hundred times before, let us know. Good luck with that.

more:

“Cycle 22 certainly provided us with many highlights. Early in the cycle the smoothed sunspot number (determined by the number of sunspots visible on the sun and used as the traditional measure of the cycle) climbed rapidly; in fact more rapidly than for any previously recorded cycle. This caused many to predict that it would eclipse Cycle 19 (peak sunspot number of 201) as the highest cycle on record. This was not to be as the sunspot number ceased climbing in early 1989 and reached a maximum in July of that year. Whilst not of record amplitude, Cycle 22 still rated as 4th of the recorded cycles and continued the run of recent large solar cycles (Cycles 18, 19 and 21 were all exceptional!). A very notable feature of Cycle 22 was that it had the shortest rise from minimum to maximum of any recorded cycle.”
Material Prepared by Richard Thompson. © Copyright IPS – Radio and Space Services.

I’ve wandered into this blog by accident, good to see you here: have been a bit busy of late and found that Mark L’s blog has fossilised on a recent visit. All the old familiar rhetoric going on here though: Peter Foley: Hi there, you’re not Norbert of another blog-life are you? you sound awfully familiar!!

Well, can’t stay I’m afraid, got some trees to hug and I’ve printed of lots of the denialist/disinformationist/whistling-in-the-dark-ist bullsh*t to improve my compost heap. By the Way Dan Kellog’s doing well and we’re exchanging lots of theoretical data on tidal range power generation ready for peakoil/gas/coal and the absence of sufficient generating capacity in the UK for 2014-20. Should be fun!

all the very best

Colin

Oh and just for the record I support getting onto other forms of energy besides fossil fuel, but lying is not the way to do this. Far from it. Simply use economic facts to support it. And instead of throwing away millions of dollars to a “campaign” to get elected as the party representative why not put that wasted money into something useful like building the platform for these other energy sources? Instead of wasting 1 trillion dollars on Kyoto or what ever it is, try spending the money building solar generating stations to begin to help lighten the co2 foot print. But wait that makes sense and would eliminate the income for scam artists like Al Gore. Thanks I prefer to think with my head and not, well I am not sure what you people are thinking with because there doesn’t seem to a whole lot of thought coming from you people.

Also you people want to protect nature so much, well a broken arm is a natural thing. So are Cancer, STD’s, aging, etc…. But I dont see you psycho nut jobs standing up against the treatment of these things. Yeah before you swing you wing to the far side of any topic learn to think.

Thanks for your time come back when you are not being a hypocrite.

“Please post what it would take for you to rethink the need for ending the use of carbon based fuels. What if the global temps stabilise at +0.5 degrees? are we still going to cut off our economic legs to return to a ‘natural’ temp average?”

Seriously Peter, whatever one thinks of the nexus between atmospheric greenhouse gases and global temperature increases, measures to staunch combsution of fossil fuels amply fit the descriptor ‘no regrets measures’. The kind of re-engineering implied are things we ought to do even if there were no reasonable basis for attributing heating to atmospheric GHG inventories. It’s not as if the main fossil fuel — crude oil — is going to be around for very much longer at something like current prices. It is of course, a serious pollutant in its own right, as is coal. Between them directly and indirectly they account for a very substantial part of human morbidity and destruction of the biosphere. In the developing world, this is truer still.

What’s not to like about using energy more efficiently? About redesigning cities around better tailored provision of transport options? About PEVs and PHEVs? About shorter commuting distances?

The era of cheap fossil fuels has contributed to urban sprawl and longer commute times. It has discouraged the design of energy-efficient buildings. The urban landscape is awash with motor vehicles full of angry people who hate nobody quite so much as the person in front of them holding them up. On every day of the week in every place where there is more than one motor vehicle, somebody dies or is maimed for life. And yet the stats tell us that raod trauma is the principal function of the concentration of vehicles on the road. In Africa, the middle east, Russia and Asia, there are few activities as deadly as getting behind the wheel of a car, unless it’s being a pedestrian near one. I’m sorry Peter, but that kind of ‘freedom’ is one I can easily forsake. You talk about ‘cutting off our legs’ but it’s the current organisation of the economy that is doing that each day. High fossil fuel costs will get people out of cars and into trains, or buses or in some cases into car pools driving on less demanding roads breathing in cleaner air and with shorter travel times and distances.

Maybe you like the idea of making our oceans acidic? Maybe you think it a very fine thing that those great CO2 sinks should dissolve those coccolithophores and begin stripping the food chain from the bottom up? Maybe you’re happy for the coral centred ecosystems to vanish as the oceans heat? Maybe you’re happy for predators hitherto prevented from moving towards the Antarctic by cold waters to enter and insert themselves into these ecosystems? Maybe you’re not worried by diminishing biodiversity in the Arctic? Who cares about the health of polar bears, penguins or sea birds more generally?

Reducing fossil fuel usage sharply now is a damn fine thing. As things stand, we can determine the rate and do so in an orderly fashion. We can adapt. If we don’t do it now, the restructure will be chaotic and we’ll get nothing like the advantages we will enjoy if we start now. And of course, by then, with a figurative knife at our throats, we will have little time to contemplate the world we will have lost.

While I find it extraordinary that anyone can, these days, doubt the basic science around climate change and its etiology, I find it even more astonishing that whatever doubts you may harbour should be more important than the here and now cost of existing arrangements. It seems to me that your position cannot be based on anything like general utility. I’d be curious to know what it was based on.

Fran

I still have a good 20 years left in me. I have a good chance of collecting from you.

No, calculated numbers or means don’t cut it. I want directly measured energy balance numbers for the planet, including every aspect from the center of the earth to the end of the atmosphere.

Too bad for you we can’t even do that now, much less could have done it in the past.

Your outrage and passion are commendable, but in the end, it’s just your opinion of what the data means. Give it a rest.