Quote Originally Posted by steelish View Post
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
By JONATHAN PETRE
And this shows just how wrong journalists can get it when they try to translate scientific language into journalese without understanding. (I'm doing Mr. Petre the courtesy of assuming it was an honest mistake and not deliberate distortion.)

If you read the actual text of the interview (which is here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8511670.stm , and I am following normal fair-use practioce, as well as good netiquette, by giving a link rather than cut and paste the whole text) you will find that what he says is that the increase in temperature (which is clear in the figures) is not quite "statistically signignificant". Which is to say that even though it's right there in the data, as a conscientious scientist he has to allow that it might be pure coincidence that every successive reading is higher than the last. That is a completely different thing from saying there has been "no warming", which would obviously be nonsense with the rising figures there for all to see.

The problem seems to be that the media, which wouldn't give the job of football correspondent to someone who never learnt the rules, happily give the job of "science correspondent" to journos who flunked Science 101.
Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
Again, this sounds most impressive if you don't have the actual facts available. If you bother to check:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...t-weather-data
you will find that, after the hooraw suggesting that all the weather records in the world had been somehow deleted by one obscure British scientist, what's actually gone missing is the readings from a bunch of weather stations in northern China. (And if the Chinese don't have copies, they're not the bureaucratic state I take them for.)
Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
Hold the front page! A journalist has just discovered what's in every elementary climatological textbook! World shaking admission!

It's this sort of invincible ignorance that makes the discussion so difficult. One has to educate people from scratch while they try to find a catch in everything one explains.
My conclusion...even the top scientists cannot agree, therefore why can't we take a step back and finish the investigation before spending trillions more on a project that will have profound effect on the country and our children's future?
Because in the meantime the disaster is already happening:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...cts-tajikistan

And while climate change deniers were having lots of fun about the blizzards in Washington, the Winter Olympics have been having to truck in snow so the ski slopes won't be grass.

The investigation is finished, it was finished years ago. It's the political fight that is never going to be finished so long as Big Oil has a million to spare for PR.