re: #159 lostlakehiker

Just a couple of small questions:

“Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade, in every good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases.”

Is this written in English? What does “in every good agreement” mean? Are there some “not-so-good” agreements, or some “bad” agreements?

“Natural, short- term fluctuations are occurring as usual but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.”

Is this a reference to the fact that cooling has been occuring over the past two years?

“Satellites show great global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years)”

Wouldn’t that be 2 inches in 15 years, or about 1/8 inch per year?

You’ve never proofread anything, evidently, or you’d see that “every good agreement” is a typo away from “very good agreement”, which means, well, very good agreement.

“Natural, short-term fluctuations” means, well, natural short term ups and downs. Amazingly, AGW is not the only influence on the weather. Solar forcing increases during times of intense sunspot activity and decreases during times of low sunspot activity, such as the last several years. A chance volcanic eruption can cool the climate for a few years. A chance big snowstorm late in winter can lay down a blanket of snow that delays spring for another week. The climate has never, ever, moved along a nice straight clean trend-line. It never will. Not if you measure day by day, or even year by year. You have to look at 25-year running averages if you want the trend line to emerge clearly from the noise in the signal.

The 25-year running averages are running uphill pretty convincingly.

As to 3.4 mm per year, that’s today’s rate. Within this century, rates of 5, 7, or 10 mm per year are not out of the question. But let’s stick with 3.4 mm per year. That’s 34 cm per century. More than a foot. Laugh if you will, but many areas of the world are at quite modest levels above the sea. Half of Bangladesh lies less than 1 meter up. So 16 percent of Bangladesh goes under as a result of that laughable 34 centimeters. With a population of 160 million, that’s 20 million people flooded out. Real funny, eh? These are subsistence farmers. With no land to farm, they’ll starve. Either that, or riot or something. Don’t think that what happens there makes no difference here. And Bangladesh isn’t the only place that will be hurt, and hurt badly. Nor is rising sea level the only problem with AGW.

Who’s laughing? I asked a few questions, and I found your tone rather defensive and insulting.

Wouldn’t you think that these folks would have proofread the paper? Pretty pathetic, wouldn’t you say?

I certainly agree that a 25 year average is more reliable than a 2 year average. But the 2 years just happen to be the last 2 years, so how can that be so easily dismissed?
Also, I would have thought that 1000 year or at least 500 year averages would be better than 25 years. 25 years seems like a drop in the bucket to me, especially considering what is at stake. What do the longer averages show? Do folks cherry-pick their time frames to suit their agendas?

As far as the sea-level rise goes, I think we better get to work on storing a whole lot of fresh water from the melting ice in inland reservoirs. For starters, let’s capture the fresh water from the melting icebergs. Maybe that can help to slow down the sea-level problem and green some deserts too.