Exactly, Seno.

I think we need BATMAN to get to the bottom of this.

Originally Posted by senojekips

My argument in a nutshell. In the mean time I will continue to act in accordance with my own experience.

For all of the accumulated knowledge and scientific papers written by and available to the experts, I find it frustrating that I seem to get it right at least as often as they do, without spending millions,... billions of dollars.

But once again the "politicising" of the issue is the problem, there can be no end to the expenditure when you constantly have to spend your time proving the same point over and over.
Its like politics even if the opposition devises the best policies known to man and can solve all the problems it is the role of the other side to sink them and as such you can never have consensus.

I dunno that the problem is the politicising, so much as hungry groups scrabbling for research money. There's an almost bottomless money pit there, if you can just panic the population enough to force the government to do be seen to do something about it.
Perhaps it's just the pessimist in me, but I feel that if the crisis were as bad as some would have us believe, every major energy corporation and food producer would be out there raising their own venture capital to find solutions. Because if they do succeed, they would have a licence to print their own money.

+1 on that. Then again there's always that urban legend that the oil companies do have a solution and they're hanging on to it until oil really runs out.

Originally Posted by senojekips

I dunno that the problem is the politicising, so much as hungry groups scrabbling for research money. There's an almost bottomless money pit there, if you can just panic the population enough to force the government to do be seen to do something about it.
Perhaps it's just the pessimist in me, but I feel that if the crisis were as bad as some would have us believe, every major energy corporation and food producer would be out there raising their own venture capital to find solutions. Because if they do succeed, they would have a licence to print their own money.

So whats more dangerous panicking people into doing something pointless or lulling them into a false sense of security?

Seems to me that there isn't hell of a lot of good in either approach.

There is a television drama about at the moment, I believe it is called Burn. It concerns the combination of global warming+ high oil problems. The difference is that it is claimed that these very serious concerns are those secretly held by the top oil industry men, the real top cookies. What they just do not want to tell us. It stresses that they really know that we DO NOT have 40 years to side-step - but 10 years! Funnily enough, his conclusion is one of optimism that we may JUST avoid the catastrophe , due to one thing - the coming shortage of oil!

I haven't caught up with it yet, but hope to do so.

Oddly enough most of the geologists I speak to say that technically there is no oil shortage, there are plenty of oil reserves the problem is that what has been tapped to date are the "easy" fields, large pockets that can be easily and economically extracted but what remains untouched are large numbers of smaller pockets in more rugged locations making extraction difficult and expensive as well as the less efficient shales and tar fields.

If you catch that TV programme Burn perhaps you would comment here, I will do likewise.

OK, got it - it is called Burning Up and I haven't seen it yet, but here is the article:-


http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/tvshow...-TV-drama.html

Senojekips/ Monty Not sure what all this complex discussion on Fourier analysis is for (waves). The graph Senojekips posted was for Central England, what relevence is this? As Monty said in one of his other posts the trend since the industrial revolution and particularily for the last few decades has been highly marked on a global level. To dismiss this as a natural trend is crazy, dare I say irresponsible.

Two millennia of mean surface temperatures according to different reconstructions, each smoothed on a decadal scale. The unsmoothed, annual value for 2004 is also plotted for reference.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Originally Posted by senojekips

More Doubts
The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

I have been following climate change on a semi-professional level for a quarter of a decade and it is all too easy to get bogged down in 'rocket science' and overlook the obvious. No-one claims that climate models will predict temperatures accurately at a local level. It is also all too easy to just sift through the literature and pick out anomolies and use these to discredit the main points. If you are looking for a more pragmatic local anomoly just look at the north polar ice cap where (being next to greenland glacier) it is most important. No need for complex measurements there, the ice is literally melting away. We may not even have summer ice at the pole within a few decades.