Funny how they mention mercury in coal. Since 1960 designed power plants that hasnt been a problem. What power plants were those results based on?

Strange how wood burning, the pre-cursor and domininate form of energy that is used throughout the developing world to cook breakfast, cook lunch, cook diner and provide warmth while releasing actual harmful and actual noxic gas. Add that to the equation and see how bad coal is. The green industry is everywhere and forests are being subsidised to be cut down and burned. Look at what happened in 1960 when Chairman Mao decided to cut all the forests of china down so they could refine steel for weapons.

But history and logic arent fair to use. Tv says man made global warming is real therefore it is real, and TV is always right ;)

Thats a really well worded find. "Can" is soft-speak for 'we imagined really hard and after alot of debate, we might just mention this because our Sierra club membership requires us to buy into the scare".

So, ignore all the real problems. Plastic in the oceans - gotcha. The birds wont have grand children, so we should be alarmed. Stop making drinks with ice cubes today and you'll be saving the planet tomorrow.

What huberus. Why are these things posted when there is so much going on in the world that isnt to do with man made global cooling and eco-stasis.

Its sad when someone new to computing and unexperienced with the real world switches to a mac and then says 'but it looks like windows'. M$ had to spend a lot of cash to make sure they didnt end up in prison for anti-competitive practices only 15 years ago. When did critical thinking leave /. ?

I'm still hanging for at least 1 bearded happy face icon. Dont care if it's yellow or green. The repression of men must end ;)

Gotta make sure everyone signs upto the anti-plants plans @ paris. The doom sayers cant predict the future weather for 30 years. The rhetoric coming from those humans shows they have not spent enough time on earth. And is essentially another sad tale of people not selling out, but buying in.

2 Real time with Bill Maher's ago, Bill had Prof Mann on. You have to watch it. Not only does the most emminent figure of man made global warming make for a good guest, he also asks what do you want to hear, so he can say it to you: its worse than what we thought.

You cant make the climate agree with elegant theories because the earth doesnt know how to read. As long as the earth continues to be uncooperative with the AGW believer industry, we're all be headed for trouble and all the steps which we could do to adapt are being avoided. Its like winston churchill famously said: "America will try every option and eventually do the right thing."

Sadly we have to cut off our nose to spit our face when we could have used the last 20 years to figure out cancer or heart disease. Instead we have spent alot of money and opportunity on a fake feel-good "science" industry when people are dying today. When someone says 'think of the grand children", they know more things are more important than their pet cause. Who cares about unborn grand children when we're all dying of cancer today?!?!

Maybe these scientists wont be alive to be proven wrong, but the current 30 years of models have all proven to overstate alot of the forcings of reality.

So if you feel alarmed by their claim, dont worry, its just another press release before Paris. All the stories of freezing and no more Greenland or Arctic ice melting has these gravey train rent seekers scared.

I still think these ficticious articles need to be prefixed with 'CLAIM!' otherwise the website operators should explain why we should believe this denier-based faith should be taken seriously when reality hasnt cooporated with anything they have spent our tax dollars on ever.

And where is slashdot's link about the EPA dumping 3 million gallons of acid into the middle of america's water supply? Is that not worth talking about every day for the rest of the year? How many unborn children wont be born because our children are being killed by the agency whos job is to protect us from environmental disasters in the first place??

Or just ignore the AGW conspiracy machine and accept that CO2 is plant food and the sun controls the climate. Which was what 400 years of evidence makes you conclude when you realise that you cant afford $78 trillion dollars to 'fix' the climate. And maybe the weather right now, on average, over time, is the new average - ie be ready for man made global cooling. Time for this theory to go the way of the Ecosystem Theory and Man made global cooling.

We have to keep in mind that this is a generalisation. If you have a technical mind and experience, you'll probably know how all the pieces fit together instinctively. Where the certification provides an advantage is in some situations you are talking to a person with experience with that product, they can give you some insights they have earned through experience, and that increases the value of a certificate for a person who is beginning to learn about information systems.

At the end of the day, they're information systems. With marketing you can tip the intangible assets side of the balance sheet and look like an 'enterprise', but that then leads to the argument of morals and morality, for which Harvard made the decision 20+ years ago that morals arent worth teaching.

Which is what I would rather debate. If closed minded thinking rules the business world, then why be a slave and give up? Whenever I go for job interviews I make a point to explain the difference between a over-night certified person vs a technically minded person who loves IT. Which one would you hire if you were a slave trader... I mean, 21st century 'entrepenure'?

I think this is a topic of those obsessed with their own divine right to everybody elses money understand that free people still exist, and there are more 'free' people in IT than their other pet investments. Thusly they want IT to be simple - be a single skilled slave, like those in California who are 'too old' to code.

2012 Sierra club said it wouldnt happen:
http://blogs.sierraclub.org/co...

Same Phil person provided that logic back then. so this is his word against all of science.

I think nature is going to win in the end. Einstein was ridiculed for the first 6 months after his bombshells which have yet to be disproven ;)

So Why is Slashdot acting as the voice for this lone activist and saying he is an authority or expert is really like going through the filo of Sierra Club members to find out if someone can try and create a wedge issue out of this 330 year body of evidence to gate keep "the science" from reality.

Why is the sierra club and it's members treated like authority when they are just a hobby organisation with alot of rich members? With a history of terrorism from the 70's and 80's is anybodys guess.

lol, wouldnt that be upsetting.

It goes to show that the land and sea based measurement is as reliable as each other. Once heat islands are identified, language is written to say what an should algorithm do to correct this (drop temps after 1960 for land, for example). The output of the algorithms always seem to demonstrate that we cant measure temperature in the past, but we're 99% confident we can measure them now.

Its a shame we could send a man to the moon but cant measure temperature "properly".

The RSS and UAH satalite data agree with the weather balloon data. So as long as the warmists don't find a reason why satalite and balloon data is unreliable, its hard to prove AGW is happening at all while we don't adapt to both warm and cold, dry and wet conditions. Isnt that what a modern society would do?

A recent study which actually looked at the climate concluded that the maximum the climate can change is about 1.45 degrees.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/201...

Don't expect it to be quoted in AR6 because it effectively puts a verification now on climate models. If the climate model says >2 degrees, then it's within the 99% error range, therefore the author has some entropy problems with their code ;)

Indeed!

$200 billion tax payer dollars later, the consensus scientists still have not figured out the climate sensitivity of the atmosphere. Apparently it'll take another $200 billion to peursuade them to do basic science.

For the last 13 years the Earths temperature has dropped and it looks like the planet continues to cool.

CO2 continues to raise.

I think this whole article is stupid. Irreversable? Please. The Earth's climate has been in flux for thousands of years. If the planet wanted to stay at one temperature it would be ice-age like temperatures.

And what period are we in anyways? An Iceage!! Does the IEA want the planet to be in an iceage forever?

This is another example of climate change hysteria and Slashdot, again, has taken the walk down the Primerose path to Alarmism when there is absolutely nothing to worry about.

The "polluters" give much more money to Climate Alarmists than skeptics - why isnt that front page news? ...

Excerpts from http://climate-change-theory.com/ ...

FALLACY IN GREENHOUSE GAS THEORY: The GHG theory appears to consider only heat (actually photons of electromagnetic radiation) coming from space. Some get through the clouds and heat the earth, or get reflected. Others are also sent into the atmosphere. These photons that go up from the surface have varying frequencies and only some of them will be emitted back to earth by COmolecules. There will always be some getting through to space. However, the theory claims that some of those that return will enter the crust and warm it - probably just the first few centimetres. Yes they will, but if the crust gets warmer it will emit more back than it would otherwise have done, and some of those will get through to space. Each time the process is repeated some more photons will escape. So the process is slowed down a bit, but given that the photons travel at the speed of light, there is plenty of time all through each night for lots of return trips. The main point is that, by the end of the night, the top few centimetres will cool down to the same equilibrium temperature that they would otherwise have reached anyway. This is because, as we have seen, there is in fact a lot more heat flowing through from the Earth's core, and it has been escaping to space for the life of the Earth. It is the rate of flow of this heat which determines the equilibrium temperature, and that depends on the core temperature. To draw an analogy, think of a lake with an inlet between it and the ocean. Water from a heavy unending inland storm represents the heat from the Earth's core. The ocean represents space, the inlet is the atmosphere and the lake is the outer few centimetres of the crust, its level representing the temperature of that crust. High tide represents a sunny day, and low tide the night. At high tide (daytime) some water will flow up the inlet, raising the level of the lake, but at low tide (night) both the water from the rain and the extra water that had come in from the ocean will flow back out to sea until the level of the lake lowers to that of the ocean. Adding COmay make the inlet perhaps 1% or 2% narrower, but there is still plenty of time for all the water to escape. What we are adding is a drop in the bucket. The lake will not dry up because of the unending inland storm: if there were no heat coming from the Earth's core there would never have been human life on this planet.

1. THE 60 YEAR CYLE: Nicola Scafetta and John Dodds are not the only ones to have observed the 60 year cycle. Mathematical statistical analysis of the data confirms its existence. John Dodds explained why it is due to variations in the gravitational energy from planets (Footnote 2) leading to irregularities in the pattern. These irregularities help to confirm the existence of the cycle because, when several nodes match with a high statistical probability the evidence is very compelling. Furthermore, application of the 60 year cycle predicted the maximum (1998-2000) above the long term 900 year cyclical trend. The IPCC model did not predict such and, in fact, I believe it will soon be able to be disproved by its failure to do so because there will probably soon be statistically significant variance (from their trend) commencing in 2003.

2. WHY THE PLANETS CAUSE CYCLES: Why are temperatures on Earth apparently following cyclical patterns that correlate with certain orbital events of the moon and the planets, primarily Jupiter, Saturn and to a lesser extent Venus? Consider, firstly, the effect of gravitational energy which the Earth receives from the moon. It pulls ocean waters forming tides and ocean currents. Recent research into wave generators shows that these could easily supply all of Australia's power requirements three or four times over - and that's from just a minute proportion of the waves hitting our shores, let alone the world over. The total energy received from the sun's heat and light is almost insignificant compared with the energy coming from the force of the sun's gravity upon Earth. Whilst much of that gravitational energy is used to keep the Earth in orbit, the Earth also spins and massive currents swirl around in the core being heated by friction as well as nuclear reactions. But the latter are slowly reducing and so unlikely to cause increasing heat. It is the energy from gravitational forces that fluctuates. As you apply the brakes on a car rolling downhill, some of the potential energy which your car had at the top of the hill is converted to heat in the brake pads. In the same way, as the Earth gets closer to the sun it is akin to going downhill in your car: some of the potential energy (which the Earth had when it was further away) is converted to extra heat in the core of the Earth. However, the Earth's distance from the sun does not vary anywhere near as much relatively as its distance from Jupiter in particular. The latter distance varies from about four times the distance of the Earth from the sun to about 6.5 times that distance. So, even though Jupiter is further away and smaller than the sun, the amplitude of the variations magnifies the effect of changes in the gravitational energy it imparts upon the Earth, and it is these changes that cause temperature variations - because the amount of friction varies. Consider what happens when the Earth is furthest from Jupiter and begins to come closer. The potential energy trapped in the Earth's core must be conserved and so most of it must end up as heat. (Even though some potential energy will initially be converted to kinetic energy, that kinetic energy will also be converted to heat as the relative motion towards Jupiter slows down on approaching the closest point - just like a car rolling half way down a hill before the brakes are applied to bring it to a stop at the bottom.) The reverse happens when the Earth moves further from Jupiter and less heat than normal is generated. These fluctuations will affect the amount of heat which eventually reaches the surface. Now, when Saturn is pulling in exactly the opposite direction to Jupiter, its gravity will reduce the effect of that from Jupiter. Then, as they continue in their orbits, there will be less of a reduction until, about 15 years later, Saturn will start to pull together with Jupiter, producing the strongest combined effect another 15 years later. Then, about 30 years later, the Earth will again be aligned between Jupiter and Saturn. This complete cycle is currently happening about every 59.6 years causing our "60-year" cycles which are superimposed on the 900 to 1000 year long term cycle. Note that the gravitational energy from Jupiter is greater than the solar radiation energy (insolation).and nodes in the eccentricity of the orbit of Jupiter correctly indicated the Little Ice Age minimum temperatures in 1696 and can be used to predict the next maximum in 2224.

Heat is not "trapped" by some imaginary insulation blanket of carbon dioxide because it is obviously released in much cooler periods every night and even more so in winter months and in cold regions. Instead, far more heat is generated in the core of the Earth, some of it from the gravitational energy which comes primarily from the sun, but also to a lesser (but variable) extent from the nearby planets. Whilst some direct heat from the sun enters the Earth's crust, the heat from the core also helps to maintain the temperature of the crust and this does not vary by much even just 2 metres below the surface. There is an equilibrium as heat from the core eventually escapes through the crust and into the atmosphere. The more heat that is generated in the core, the higher will be that equilibrium temperature and this must have an effect on surface temperatures. If heat were not coming from the core, then deep mines would be very cold, like the upper atmosphere, but instead they get a little warmer the deeper they go. Insolation could never penetrate the crust and maintain liveable (and near constant) temperatures in mines 3,000 metres underground. In contrast, insolation causes additional temporary heating in a very variable way between day and night, summer and winter, in the lower levels of the atmosphere in which we live. The fact that these temperatures vary so much indicates that there is no cumulative effect due to some imaginary build up of “trapped” heat which somehow supposedly finds its way back to warm the Earth. A greenhouse is warm near its roof whereas the middle and upper troposphere is about -20 to -60 deg.C.

Note that changes in gravity also cause cyclical changes in the Earth's magnetic field because this field is generated in the Earth's core by rotating ions in a (varying) gravitational field. So this leads to variations in the magnetic energy which is transferred from the magnetic field to charged particles in the stratosphere, explaining the current cooling observed there. Thus such cooling does not prove that heat is being "trapped" in the lower troposphere. (For more detail see John Dodds' book.)

SUMMARY: There is nowhere near enough heat energy coming from solar insolation to maintain the observed temperatures not only on the Earth's surface but deep underground. We know from volcanoes that the core is very hot and is heated partly by nuclear reactions (which give out a fairly uniform, though slightly declining level of energy) and partly by friction which is caused by the gravitational force of the sun and planets. Some of this core heat conducts through to the crust where, even 3,000 metres underground, it produces liveable, fairly stable temperatures. The remaining heat escapes from the crust and warms the atmosphere so we see that, at equilibrium, the temperature of the crust must influence that of the lower atmosphere in which we live. However, the potential energy of the huge mass of the Earth's core must vary as its distance varies from the sun and planets. When potential energy is reducing extra friction produces more heat which effectively converts the difference in potential energy into a similar amount of additional heat because energy must be conserved. This is a huge amount of energy, thousands of times that received by insolation and some of it must eventually warm the crust and affect long-term world temperatures. However, the reverse must happen when potential energy is increasing and we can assume less than mean levels of friction contribute lower than average heat to the core, resulting in less heat reaching the surface of the crust and thus a cooling effect. As the potential energy of the core is a direct result of solar and planetary orbits, the resulting cycles in temperature are not only explained but also predictable. The old theory is debunked. The new theory will prevail - eventually - when people study it with open minds.