"...should this evidence not also be discussed?"
Surely a quote worthy of Ahmadinejad himself.
Those local and minor fluctuations are indeed weighed and discussed ad nauseum by the people doing the real climate work, like NAS. It's a topic not meaningfully illuminated by burnt-out sci-fi authors and the like who'll snap up any factoid that supports a predetermined position.
It's reminiscent the Iranian president's Holocaust denial, or the work of the Tobacco Research Institute. Nobody believes their carp, not for a minute, but if their "debate" can forestall action against their clients, they've succeeded. The goal is no longer to win, but rather to not lose - simply to continue the play as long as possible.

When I see evidence that you are making a bona fide attempt to engage climate scientists re these objections, I'll take you seriously on this stuff.

A guy with your background could advance the debate. Why, instead, do you bring up piecemeal objections with us small fry? Doesn't make sense.

And so, I've wrestled with it, trying to figure it out.

My guess is that you sense the possibility of a serious rupture in our culture's view of the past and present. Instead of celebrating them, we may soon bewail the fossil fuel age and its captains. Even the myth of progress may be scrapped. It's a personal fight.

In a system as large and complex and chaotic as the earth, you are always going to be able to find contradictory evidence for anything that you are trying to prove. Rotating ~24 h/d and orbiting around the sun ~365d/y is just about the only thing that every single molecule on the planet does uniformly and in unison.

(Some wise guy will probably point out that even this isn't strictly speaking true, as there are always molecules that are leaving the earth's atmosphere and escaping into space.)

Absolutely, facts should be discussed. And an awareness that whatever framework we construct may be wrong is a necessary part - after all, I did mention peer review among those collecting and analyzing data compared to the decisive life long experience of a TV weatherman.

The debate currently is pretty much centered on only a couple areas of the globe - temperature/precipitation fluctuations in Europe and North America are pretty well established within certain tolerances, for various time frames. Ice cores add another element (pretty useless in the Amazon basin, though) as do seabed cores (pretty worthless in the Gobi, though).

I do realize that have a factually based debate seems to have become impossible, but in part, that is because for the last 30 or so years, we have been clearly following the wrong path - increased CO2 emissions are extremely unlikely to bring about a colder period - there is no support for this in any data over geological time scales.

But we are not interested very much in geologic time scales - even the few centuries between a 'mini' ice age and today seems extremely long term.

This is part of the real problem, especially in the U.S. - people see weather, and then extrapolate the weather to a cause - drought=global warming, mild hurricane season<>global warming. This is pretty stupid, to be honest.

But speaking broadly, those working with data studying climate are getting increasingly concerned at what they are witnessing, in part because even their frightening extrapolations do not match real time satellite data - Greenland's revving glaciers come to mind, along with ever exapanding amounts of ice free Arctic seawater - these are planetary scale feedback loops in action, ones predicted for decades in the future, if they were to occur at all.

Like with peak oil, for climate change, the future is now. And if there is one thing that seems clear about the U.S. - paying their bills is something no one wants to actually comtemplate. Better to whip out the credit card, and maybe take a drive to mall to calm one's nerves, or just watch some more TV.

The science of climate change remains open and is still fairly new, and facts are welcome. Some guy ranting that because he has presented weather information on TV over his life time he knows what he is talking about is about par for the course in a nation where the majority of citizens apparently dismiss the 'theory' of evolution.

Heading Out,

All right, I'll bite. It's fine that the Patagonian icefields are fluctuating and have fluctuated in the past. It's not fine that on average glaciers and ice sheets are losing mass. More than that, they are losing mass more rapidly than any of the proxies have shown in the past. So it's fine for you to trump up your Medieval Warm Period, but its wavelength is something like 500 years. We're changing the climate much more quickly than that right now. How quickly? Well if you don't believe the abundant proxies out there, or the photos of glaciers taken in the past compared to the present, look on this: This guy is about 5k years old. He was buring in an advancing ice sheet. Ötzi is not the only old thing to be found out of glaciers though. Lonnie Thompson has been going around pulling a whole bunch of things out of melting glaciers that are around the same age, with some outliers. We didn't use to pull all this old stuff out of the glaciers, it's likely that they have melted more in this century then at any time since these items were covered up, 5-6k years ago.


I suppose next you'll say that well if the climate were warm then, we'll be fine with it warm now. The only problem: billions of very poor people live near the coasts that didn't live there then. If sea level rises appreciably, and those people start migrating, the costs of dealing with that could make your $100 barrel/oil look like a walk in the park. It's possible we're already paying for it with more damaging chaotic weather, e.g. hurricanes, but it's hard to tell because the hurricane records don't go back so far and the data isn't as good.


Apologies to the other posters who rightly pointed out that this is not a climate change forum, but once in a while I'll respond to climate trolls who whip out their one glacier as proof that the climate isn't changing.

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Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!