rationalskepticism.org

bit_pattern wrote
It's called physics. Sea level is a mean, and localised sea level can be influenced by the gravitational pull from the Earth's orbit, differences in temperature (war water expands), tides, atmospheric pressures etc. etc. etc.

Indeed. But sea-level is at sea-level. If sea-level rises there will be no part of the sea immune to the rise. Local variations, land sinking, land rising, storm surges, tides etc. But if the world sea-level rises it will rise in the English Channel as well. It hasn't.

And that is only recent up until 2004, as I've already shown, the Greenland ice melt has nearly doubled in that time.

And it may well have done but twice a trivial amount is still trivial. I don't know if it is trivial or not, but I should be amazed if Greenland ice melt did not vary a lot year by year and decade by decade. Measurements over a decade tell us practically nothing about long term climate trends and nothing at all about what happens next.

It is raising sea level, you just refuse to accept the evidence. That's why I'm surprised people like you exist on a forum like this, because that isn't scepticism, its denial.

Perhaps if I stayed away from the sea I'd find it easier to believe that sea-level is rising.

Well, it's not that hard, the are four major forcings in the Earth's climate:

-- Insolation...

-- Albedo...

-- Greenhouse gasses...

-- Feedbacks...

Thank you for that.

So there is no known forcing that could possibly explain the lat-20th century warming other than the near 40% rise in CO2, which should cause exactly the sort of event we are witnessing.

No known forcing eh? So a lot of unknowns still. That probably explains why there is still no rise in sea-level and why there has still been no exceptionally bad weather beyond perfectly normal variation.

Phil Jones merely said that a decade wasn't enough time to see a statistically significant trend. Weren't you rabitting on about short term trends earlier? Well, that's exactly what he was getting at before the Daily Mail got hold of it and selectively quoted him.

Ah, the Daily Mail. I share your contempt.

And, no, if you actually look at climate model projections, there is a great deal of natural variability (what us common folk call "weather"), there are plenty of runs that show multi-decades of variability, where temps can go up and down even while the planet continues to accumulate heat.

It seems to me there are several threads to this:

1. The historical record of what has happened in the past.
2. What happened recently, i.e. the late 20th century warming.
3. The cause of that warming.
4. The consequences of that warming.
5. What happens next.
6. What if anything to do about it.

Reference 1: It has been a lot warmer than this before and we are still here.

Reference 2: A short term trend reaching a peak in 1998 but not much happening thereafter.

Reference 3: I am not persuaded that it is due to the extra CO2 in the atmosphere. Looks to be a non-exceptional warming trend much the same as many natural events in the past.

Reference 4: Potential sea-level rise is the big one but nothing to see yet. Efforts to link just about every single bad weather event in the world to global warming has done a lot to discredit the whole idea. There will always be droughts, floods, hurricanes etc. There is no evidence that any bad weather is because of the late 20th century warming.

Reference 5: Nobody can be sure of that. There are widely divergent predictions out there but nobody knows. Climate models have a very poor record of prediction. Let us wait and see. No need to panic.

Reference 6: In my view nothing. There is no crisis. If things change they will change slowly. It is better to tackle things that actually happen rather than things that might never happen.

And, it's interesting that you have to use words like "believe", belief needn't come into it, I don't "believe" in global warming, I look at the evidence and make a judgment based on the evidence. Whereas you seem not to have looked at the evidence at all.

The evidence that I have seen and my own memory and observations have not persuaded me that there is any crisis at all.

Yeah, well, since Nostradamus died we developed a little thing called the scientific method, it's done wonders for the world, in case you hadn't noticed.

You are quite right. But not all science stands the test of time. Please see my reference to Lord Kelvin. We continue to question and we don't take things on trust.