Putting money in welfare is putting money in the economy. People on welfare generally have to spend all of the money they have and they would be spending less if they didn't get that welfare.

He's talking about Federal taxes paid by a State, not the internal State budget. For instance in 2014 Californians paid about $369,193,000,000 in Federal taxes and received about $236,560,000,000 in Federal spending. Federal taxation and spending by State

Exactly. This is why States in the United States don't fall into the same sort of problems Greece is having. The higher earning States generally send more money to the Federal Government than they receive back and the lower earning States get more back than they send. That doesn't happen in the loose confederation that is the Euro monetary union.

I don't think that anyone expects that number to be exactly correct. The calculation has to be weighted by area as some areas have much different station densities than others (Europe vs. Siberia for example). There are some different techniques used for doing that. But if the number is derived consistently for each iteration it should give a reasonable indication of how temperature is changing over time which after all is what we really care about the most.

I'm not sure what assumptions you think go into deriving a worldwide temperature. It's a pretty mechanical thing to calculate once you get the math set up.

As I said for climate purposes the repeatable accuracy is more important than the absolute accuracy. Most liquid based thermometers (mercury or alcohol) are very good at repeatable accuracy even if their calibration is a bit off. When you care more about the rate of change then repeatable accuracy is more important than absolute accuracy.

You're the one who keeps bringing up Nazis. It's not something I equate climate science deniers with. And if you look at my posting history I think you'll find it's not a term I use a lot unless the subject was already a part of the conversation. I'll admit that my snarky reply to the OP on this thread was the first to bring it up but as I said I was just responding in kind.

When you combine a large number of measurements you can easily cite higher precision than the measurement itself. The easiest example of this is baseball batting averages. The measurement is either a 1 or 0, you either get a hit or you don't but batting averages are commonly reported to 3 decimal places and a change of 1/100th in a batting average is pretty significant.

I think it's likely that thermometers used for meteorology are better calibrated than your home thermometers. Accurate thermometers have been available for more than 200 years. What's more important than the absolute accuracy is the repeatable accuracy. If a thermometer always gives the same reading for a given temperature the data is usable for studying how temperatures are changing over time even if it's a bit off in the absolute accuracy.

Not by me. As I said I believe equating climate science deniers with holocaust deniers is an attempt by climate science deniers to redefine the word "denier". If climate science deniers showed as much skepticism for science that appears to support their positions as they do for main stream climate science I'd be more willing to call them skeptics but they usually don't.

You're side may be temporarily winning the political battle but that doesn't matter one bit to the science. The objective reality that science studies will continue to do what it does regardless of any political struggles. As objective observations pile up they continue to mostly support the reality that the Earth is warming due to anthropogenic causes. You can try to ignore that reality but sooner or later it will become impossible to do so.

I have no problem changing my mind once I see real science that contradicts the current science. In the mean time I have a hard time believing that thousand of scientists worldwide would be able to maintain a conspiracy for decades that distorts the science for political reasons.

If by "any of those things" you mean adjustments to temperature data I haven't seen any serious challenges to the way it is done. Perhaps you could cite one or two. And I don't mean something that refers to a single or just a few stations. It needs to be something that addresses the totality of the adjustments.

I have confidence in the adjustments because different groups using different techniques come up with essentially the same answer. For instance NOAA and BEST.

One other thing is if you plot the raw data against the adjusted data the raw data actually shows a steeper slope than the adjusted data. Do you think if they were trying to game the data they would have done that?

Climate science deniers that don't like being called deniers are the ones that equate the term to holocaust deniers. It's a word that has a long history and co opting it to refer only to holocaust deniers is not warranted. Now-a-days I always write it out as climate science deniers to make the distinction clear.

Skeptic implies someone willing to change their mind upon new evidence. Also someone who is not disposed to infer dishonest intent when there is no real evidence of it. A climate science denier often is ideologically unable to accept the implied solutions to the issue and so gins up a conspiracy to explain why the science is against them.

If there's a conspiracy then it's got to be the biggest and longest running conspriracy of all time. It had to have been running for over 50 years and involve governments and scientists around the world. If they're that good you might as well give up.

I think it's impossible to say that models contradict observations especially since observations are still within the uncertainty ranges of the models.

Observations are objective reality and so far 2015 is the hottest year on record. With the developing El Nino likely to be a strong one it's likely this year will set an unequivocal new temperature record.

Talking about data and the well documented reasons and techniques for adjusting it is science which if you look at my history is mostly what I talk about. The GP invoked some worn out climate science denier memes and I was responding in kind.

Care to elaborate?

I suspect it has more to do with ideology than it does with education.

So someone needs to build one of those Gen IV reactors and show that it can compete economically with current sources of power.

AAAS = American Association for the Advancement of Science

Regarding sensitivity the IPCC AR5 Summary for Policy Makers says:

The range given is 1.5C to 4.5C so your statement that it was "currently at around less than 1C" is wrong. Even the page you cited at landshape didn't show anything less than about 1.5C.

Of course the last sentence of that quote implies that the warming since 1951 is around 100% due to human causes.

Figure SPM.5 from the SPM gives the forcings found for different causes of radiative forcing. Notice most of the change in forcing is due to anthropogenic causes.

No scientist (that I'm aware of) has said the warming will be a runaway. The fact that each increment of greenhouse gases (including water vapor) causes slightly less warming than the previous increment implies the warming will stop eventually when the level of greenhouse gases quits rising.

You stated in a reply to Geoffrey Landis that you have indeed read the IPCC reports. If that is true then cite where you saw the following statements in them because I don't believe you.

There are a couple of different kinds of climate sensitivity but I've never heard any sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 being less than about 1.75C.

CO2 has always had an effect on climate over nearly the whole history of the Earth. It's probably true that before the 2nd half of the 20th Century that human caused increases in CO2 didn't have much of an effect.

Since the known natural climate forcings are trending in tending in the negative direction lately it's likely than over 100% of the warming is due to human caused increases in greenhouse gases and the feedbacks that causes.