Really. Really? Really now. So when a large landmass warms up by more than enough to melt quite a large proportion of its copious freshwater ice coverage and dumps that into the north Atlantic, it's not going to have any effect on the rest of the world?

I'm done. Find someone else to tie your shoelaces, simpleton.

Have you got a link to that, I hadn't heard shopping centres had started linking security camera footage to facebook accounts?

The link in your sig is dead.

I can read both the AC's comment and yours just fine, because I browse at -1. Slashdot is one of the very few remaining sites that practices almost zero censorship, unless forced to by legal action, for which I'm grateful.

In response to the point being made, I believe morbid obesity should certainly not be celebrated or pedestalised, but neither should it be mocked for its own sake. Suggesting it's a good or healthy way to go through life however is putting lives at risk in no uncertain terms.

The section you're tellingly not quoting is as follows:

Emphasis mine. When temperatures spike up by twenty two degrees and then down by twenty degrees, on average there's been a two degree change in temperature over the period, which is what you appear to imagine happened in a smooth gradient over the last twenty thousand years. They were even nice enough to break it into different eras for you - note for example that the disastrous Dryas stadials all occurred within the cited ten thousand year average temperature change.

That this needs to be explained gives me the sads.

The last 150 years haven't been a period of unique climatological equilibrium, they've been part of a warming process that's been jumping and stuttering along for the past twenty millennia, following in the footsteps of other warming periods which are followed by cooling periods, all of which had exactly zero to do with humanity.

I hope I don't need to explain the implications of this observation, especially vis the scientific validity of comparisons being made between barely a century of intense observations and ten thousand years of evidence being averaged out.

If you say so.

Yes I appreciate these might be difficult questions to answer,

Ahahaha did you even bother to read the linked text? That zipping noise was your credibility exiting stage left. You're a moron.

Spoken like a true with us or against us dyed in the wool partisan leftist.

So you lack self awareness on top of everything else.

I'm not the one peddling partisan politics here friend.

Yeah you do. Your previous comments clearly indicate that you do. I'm sure the children of future generations will have choice words for you, not that you'll be around to hear them. Which is of course your severance clause.

Dude just enjoy the buttered popcorn and watch the stupid parade, it beats tracking down law professor Anupam Chander and smacking his head with the nearest engineering book until we're forced to flee by the incoming police sirens by a long shot as far as effort goes.

Give that a little thought.

By that bizarre logic the earth itself is an infection.

Given that the earth has never had a stable climate, your notions are entirely alien to nature itself.

No, you refer to watermelons, the leftist interpretation of environmentalism - which has very firm roots among the monied classes of the 19th century, to say nothing of conservationism whose earliest manifestations can be tracked back a full thousand years earlier. Much like social welfare systems and every other ostensible social good Marxists have latched onto since Karl hoisted the first of many, many alcoholic beverages, this stuff has been around for a very long time.

You'd think you people would learn, I mean Russia has wound up somewhere to the right of Genghis Khan and China's busily returning to its imperial roots, complete with caste system. What you do is create reactions which eventually end up consuming any gains you might have made, a process which will inevitably end up being replicated even in the enlightened and much reviled (by the left) west.

Leftists believe me to be a conservative reationary, conservatives call me a progressive swine, I'm quite content to watch all of you idiots get hoisted by your own petards.

Have a good un.

Dry fact sadly. The reality is that the information I linked to above comes as a major shock to many anthropogenic global warming proponents when it should already be widely known, one fellow I was discussing it with lately proudly declared that we're going through the quickest global warming in 45 million years while earnestly claiming the imprimatur of science. Ask yourself why that might be the case.

The problem is people who regard this notion as a good thing and refer to human civilisation as an infection.

Who do you refer to when you say "our"?

Your weak link here is the assumption that science is in any way clear about what caused relatively recent drastic climate adjustments. Which leads us inevitably to the conclusion that we can't really go making any definitive statements about the comparitively placid warming we're currently experiencing.

It's much ado about not a whole lot anyway, fossil fuels are being scaled back to nothing and will be out of mass usage in a couple of generations, and no economies need be wrecked in the process either.

Except volcanoes don't warm the climate up and there was no large asteroid impact in that period either.

Speaking of which, when you find yourself in a hole, my advice is stop digging. We have records of climate events far more savage than anything predicted by science, in the very recent geological past. Yes the climate is warming up, the question is how much of that are we responsible for.

Either way I expect fossil fuels to be entirely phased out by 2100 (a process which started long before the recent resolution on the matter) so everyone chill out, basically.

Not so. http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...

The central Greenland ice core record (GRIP and GISP2) has a near annual resolution across the entire glacial to Holocene transition, and reveals episodes of very rapid change. The return to the cold conditions of the Younger Dryas from the incipient inter-glacial warming 13,000 years ago took place within a few decades or less (Alley et al., 1993). The warming phase, that took place about 11,500 years ago, at the end of the Younger Dryas was also very abrupt and central Greenland temperatures increased by 7C or more in a few decades (Johnsen et al., 1992; Grootes et al., 1993; Severinghaus et al., 1998). Most of the changes in wind-blown materials and some other climate indicators were accomplished in a few years (Alley et al., 1993; Taylor et al., 1993; Hammer et al., 1997). Broad regions of the Earth experienced almost synchronous changes over periods of 0 to 30 years (Severinghaus et al., 1998), and changes were very abrupt in at least some regions (Bard et al., 1987), e.g. requiring as little as 10 years off Venezuela (Hughen et al., 1996). Fluctuations in ice conductivity indicate that atmospheric circulation was reorganised extremely rapidly (Taylor et al., 1993). A similar, correlated sequence of abrupt deglacial events also occurred in the tropical and temperate North Atlantic (Bard et al., 1987; Hughen et al., 1996) and in Western Europe (von Grafenstein et al., 1999).

The inception of deglacial warming about 14.5 ky BP was also very rapid, leading to the Bölling-Alleröd warm period in less than twenty years (Severinghaus and Brook, 1999). Almost synchronously, major vegetation changes occurred in Europe and North America with a rise in African lake levels (Gasse and van Campo, 1994). There was also a pronounced warming of the North Atlantic and North Pacific (Koç and Janssen, 1994; Sarnthein et al., 1994; Kotilainen and Shackleton, 1995; Thunnell and Mortyn, 1995; Wansaard, 1996; Watts et al., 1996; Webb et al., 1998).

Eh, birch trees come in several colours including white and grey. Betula populifolia is the grey birch.

It's like watching someone trying to argue they're still going in the right direction five seconds after they've sailed over the edge of a cliff.

Listen buddy here's a mental exercise for you: try to imagine what would happen if the temperatures in central Greenland today were to spike by more than 7C between now and 2030. You think maybe someone might notice? Maybe it might have an effect of some sort on the rest of the world? Or maybe the rest of the world had already increased in temperature, contributing to this massive spike?

What we've got here is somebody complaining about how ice cores taken in Greenland only measured temperatures in Greenland(!) (ignoring the rest of the research) and further making out that we're in the midst of a man-made apocalyptic climate event when far more savage events have been observed by science in very recent geological terms. No doubt capitalism makes an appearance somewhere in this scientific theology too.

The Sahara desert was a jungle a few thousand years ago, for all we know it could be a jungle again in a few thousand years, and what little life exists there won't enjoy that much either. Following your train of thought to its logical conclusion people may as well just curl up into a ball and die for fear of harming anything anywhere. Feel free to do so but don't expect many to follow suit. And again, we're talking about an insignificant percentage of the desert, used to illustrate a point - there's no shortage of renewable energy.

No, it isn't. HVDC lines have been around for a while and have been deployed in many locations. That you weren't aware of this fact says all it needs to say.

That's like asking why would anyone build roads, since there's nobody out there right now to maintain them. Wow.