Arctic sea ice settles at second-lowest, underscores accelerating decline

While I realize one data point does not a trend make, isn't it a little silly to predict the disappearance of summer ice when there was MORE of it this year than last year?

jscroft has it right. "Accelerating..." is such a crock. The world temperature peaked in 1998 and in the last 24 months crashed so hard it wiped out 100 years of warming. Winter sea ice is significantly greater year-for-year currently and will build up over the next decade so that during summer melts, the coverage will slowly but surely increase. Duh!

..isn't it a little silly to predict the disappearance of summer ice..

Nope, because the temperature of ocean is still raising and it drives the Arctic ice melting due its high thermal capacity.

http://environmen...998.html

Notice that they didn't include the 1920s and 1930s in that graph (when the Arctic ice cap really retreated.) Looks like cherry picking their dates.

I woud have to agree with jscroft, if there's more ice this year than last, that would indicate the trend is decelerating. In response to Alizee, the termprature of the ocean is not rising. JPL's analysis of the argo probe data indicates an insignificent cooling since 2003.

Let me repeat myself here like you all seem to repeat yourself.

The overwelming majority of climate scientists agree on lots of things.
Virtually all aruments are either anti-science or cherrypicked facts taken out of context.

Not one argument will prove or debunk the current theory of climate.

If this is all a hoax show how it done, many have tried to discredit science as a whole but noone has succeeded.

Anti-science on the other hand is easy to dismiss as there is nothing coherent in it, but it keeps popping up in different forms.Its like an annoying weed that needs to be kept short before it start to hurt the good plants.

That isn't how it works, Bazz.

If we all had to scramble the jets to debunk every silly notion that pops up on the fringe, none of us would ever get any useful work done. That's why the onus is traditionally on the person MAKING an extraordinary claim to establish a strong argument, support it with lots of evidence, and defend it against aggressive criticism.

I think it's also fair to point out that, while Academy Awards, Nobel Peace Prizes, and lucrative carbon-credit concerns are impressive in their way, they do NOT constitute a compelling hypothesis test.

On the other hand, there are plenty of assertions regarding anthropogenic climate change that ARE falsifiable. And I must admit that I--along with a lot of others who care about good science--find it rather disingenuous to have our pointed, TOPICAL criticism answered with PERSONAL abuse.

It makes us wonder who stands to gain if that kind of argument wins the day... and who will foot the bill.

It is a very emotional topic and peole ofen resort to tactics that arent valid.

Sometimes i get pretty upset and get a little harsh in my replies, i suppose its needed at times.

There are a lot of silly and obvious wrong assertions, but there are some that arent easily discarded.

For instance there are mayor scienticic organisations representing many scientists that have made statements regarding climate change that sound pretty serious to me.

"A Growing Threat to Society"

AAAS Board of Directors Statement on Climate Change: "The scientific evidence is clear," the AAAS Board says in a new statement. "Global climate change caused by human activities...is a growing threat to society." The statement was approved on 9 December 2006 and released on 18 February at the AAAS Annual Meeting in San Francisco.

NAS-The task of mitigating and preparing for the impacts of climate change will require worldwide collaborative inputs from a wide range of experts, including natural scientists, engineers, social scientists, medical scientists, those in government at all levels, business leaders and economists. Although the scientific understanding of climate change has advanced significantly in the last several decades, there are still many unanswered questions. Society faces increasing pressure to decide how best to respond to climate change and associated global changes, and applied research in direct support of decision making is needed.

From-http://www7.natio...view.asp

This alone makes me pretty confident that its real and serious.

Well the original broadcast of War of the Worlds sounded pretty real and serious to the people who heard it too.

Issue is, it was complete fantasy.

So how to differentiate between reality and fantasy? What about taking expert knowledge more serious than any joe`s knowledge, or would that be elitist?

The people who took it serious were pretty naive to listen to the radio and not checking tv and internet,oh wait wasnt that before the internet and television was in every house.So the only source of information pretended there was an alien invasion and there were people who thought it was real.

Bazz, let's make a distinction between expert KNOWLEDGE and expert OPINION.

Knowledge has its basis in fact. Most epistemologists would agree that the scientific method is--among other things--a machine that refines raw facts into generalized, structured knowledge. With respect to knowledge, the difference between experts and laypeople isn't that theirs is BETTER. It's that the experts generally get their hands on it FIRST... more often than not, because they tend to produce the stuff.

The point is that the quality of a piece of knowledge has nothing to do with who articulates it... a true statement is true whether spoken by an expert, an idiot, or the union of the two. All that matters is that the knowledge in question was produced by a rigorous and repeatable METHOD, which included testing its assertions against the ground truth provided by the Universe.

Opinions, on the other hand, are like a**holes... everybody has one, and they all stink.

Sorry about my last post i stopped halfway, but dont be dissappointed there wouldnt have been anything good anyway.

Jscroft ,i am not sure what you are arguing against but dont you think the source of the facts tell something about the validity of the fact, especially in controversial cases where there is a lot of known distortion?

Wouldnt you rather go with the knowledge of experts than with the knowledge of laymen?Experts have much to lose compared to laymen, as a wrong assertion would hurt their careers where laymen at worst get ridiculed.

Big scientific organisations even more so, they depend on their reputation to exist.Therefore i would argue that statements that warn us cannot just be discarded for being just an opinion.

ARE you saying i cant trust those statements?

Bazz, I'm not sure I could state my point much more clearly than I did. Is it possible that we are experiencing a language difficulty?

Jscroft ,i am not sure what you are arguing against but dont you think the source of the facts tell something about the validity of the fact, especially in controversial cases where there is a lot of known distortion?

Yes but AGW is a controversial case where there is a lot of known distortion performed by people who claim to be experts. Not people who are laymen.

Wouldnt you rather go with the knowledge of experts than with the knowledge of laymen?Experts have much to lose compared to laymen, as a wrong assertion would hurt their careers where laymen at worst get ridiculed.

Big scientific organisations even more so, they depend on their reputation to exist.Therefore i would argue that statements that warn us cannot just be discarded for being just an opinion.

I disagree. Big scientific organizations depend on funding from government and financial entities. Typically a big scientific organization will side with whoever is writing the biggest check, in this case the Green movement and the AGW crowd, who have a vested interest in disabling the economies of competing marketplaces that are heralded as "the worst polluters of the planet. Like India, China, and the expatriated businesses that shelter their economic wellbeing in these and other Asian coountries.

ARE you saying i cant trust those statements?

Truth is you can't trust anything that you don't fact check. A lie, told often enough, by enough people, is taken as truth.

Jscroft, i think its a perception problem, altough english is not my first language i understand clearly what you are saying.

I do have a different opinion based on the most convincing information i can find.

Vellanarris, so you are saying that the biggest scientific organisations cannot be trusted? Sounds almost like a conspiracy.

Read the NSA report i linked to and consider its relevance.

Jscroft, i think its a perception problem, altough english is not my first language i understand clearly what you are saying.

I do have a different opinion based on the most convincing information i can find.

Vellanarris, so you are saying that the biggest scientific organisations cannot be trusted? Sounds almost like a conspiracy.

No I look at the facts. The master of the AGW movement, Al Gore, recently bought a $100,000 house boat and consumes more electricity per day than 10 normal American family's homes. He affords these things by owning a little website that sell "Carbon Credits" to offset the CO2 emissions that green guilted people create.

The scientists generating AGW papers are receiving large sums of money to invest in their own design while the scientists who did volunteer their time to the original IPCC reviews were shunned and run under, receiving no funding, but being credited on a paper that their research staunchly opposed.

Read the NSA report i linked to and consider its relevance.

I don't debate relevance of scientific method put to paper. I do disagree with this "paper's" interpretation of another's paper.

Velanarris, yes you are right the NAS does not base its statements on all relevant scientific knowledge, it does not report for the last 150 years to congress, and Abraham Lincoln was wrong to have created it.

Damn liberal hippies they have taken over and everyone is too stupid to see it its all a big CONSPIRACY!

Yes i agree, you have me convinced me with your logic, how do we get rid of THEM?

Velanarris, yes you are right the NAS does not base its statements on all relevant scientific knowledge, it does not report for the last 150 years to congress, and Abraham Lincoln was wrong to have created it.

Damn liberal hippies they have taken over and everyone is too stupid to see it its all a big CONSPIRACY!

Yes i agree, you have me convinced me with your logic, how do we get rid of THEM?

Let's take a look at what's being said about groups like the NAS by the US government's elected environmental comittee members.

http://epw.senate...Releases&ContentRecord_id=9a6b3e3d-802a-23ad-4b28-ace55e0cc516

You'll have to copy and paste. Physorg mangles this link.


epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=9a6b3e3d-802a-23ad-4b28-ace55e0cc516

I suppose you meant to link to a minority page like- http://epw.senate...Releases&ContentRecord_id=9a6b3e3d-802a-23ad-4b28-ace55e0cc516

or http://epw.senate...om.Facts&ContentRecord_id=8f5c9829-c459-4d17-89bb-3e3b04d8d444&Region_id=&Issue_id=

But om the majority they seem to have a different view.
If you think this is an organisation thats like the National Academy of Science you are clearly wrong, go ahead but i suggest you at least read up on the two and understand what is what, then i like to hear whats the difference and whats "like an organisation as NAS" means, i suspect you wont say much, i mean you will talk but without saying anything specific, without getting caught up in your web of misconceptions.

The links dont seem to work but i can recommend everyone to have a good look at the site and its intended purpose and compare it to NAS and its intended purpose, its interesting stuff if you like to get to understand politics.Make sure you read majority and minority and compare substance and form.

Intended purposes and actual purpose are not the same thing.

Look at the EPA, their intended purpose was to protect American natural resources through promoting sustainable and renewable resources. Instead they shut down the logging industry and called it a success, leaving tens of thousands jobless and starting a brutal recession in the late 70's early 80's when the price of building materials shot through the roof. They were not solely responsible, it would be wrong of me to say that, but, they were a big part of it.

The government is only good at doing one thing, spending my money.

what are the intended purposes of NAS and EWP and how do they not serve their purpose as intended?

What is the difference between the two and why?