Are you sure it was high compression voice codecs? In my experience you can't get any connection over high compression. What does limit your speed to 28.8 is multiplexing more channels over the limited number of wires. I know as I'm in Canada, perhaps 60 km out of Vancouver and if I'm lucky i can connect at 28.8 with no other choices and it costs $40 + $40 for a phone line.

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

The first Transformers movie sucked badly. Really badly. The first Star Wars movie was considered pretty awesome then, and has weathered the years pretty well (think about how many other special effects laden movies are treated well 45 years later). The second Star Wars movie was awesome, and is still considered good. I don't know about others, but the third movie was a major let down, bordering on the ridiculous, and seemed targeted at an age range half of the previous two movies. The prequels were... unmentionable, other than to hold them up to display how additional experience, wisdom, and financial capacity have exactly 0 bearing on the quality of a movie.

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

Ancient Sumeria the hookers who specialized in fellatio wore lipstick. Before public baths there were rivers, creeks, lakes and oceans to bath in.

No number is larger than any other number. Quantities are larger than other quantities. Numbers are symbolic entities that can represent a quantity, or not.

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.

Oh, do I have to qualify that for you, like the hottest outside of a period of Milankovitch Forcing? Gee, maybe the Earth's orbit changed, like back then, and we just didn't notice.

Let's take a look at one of the references you cited:

A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.

It sounds like we have reason to be alarmed.

Well, I am trying to get through to you. You wrote that the hiatus was widely acknowledged by scientists! It's like talking with someone who believes in god - they have no facts, and no facts will convince them, and they create their own "science" which is nothing of the sort to bolster their viewpoint. So, I tried another another argument. But let's go back to the first. Nobody credible believes in a hiatus.

Calling names isn't going to advance your argument.

Orbital models only have two variables when there are two bodies. In reality we are always dealing with an n-body problem. Regarding atmospheric models, we have weather, which is too chaotic to forecast, and climate, which should not be.

We could sit back 100 years and see what is happening then, so that we have lots of good data points, but potentially at the cost of widespread famine, death, etc.

We have excellent reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon even if we ignore global warming.

If they can pull more people out of poverty, what the U.S. does won't matter to China and India because their domestic markets will be larger than the United States. Currently they have even worse social inequity than we do, and the poor performance of their own markets forces their own people to look elsewhere for work.

Yes, I'm also a solid Democrat. But this has been a long time coming and IMO it's even in line with Obama's recent agenda on the Middle Class! The problem with the guest worker programs is that they devalue the local workers by diluting the market for them. The effect is to create a sort of "disposable worker" from our own citizens.

Now, of course jobs can be sent overseas too, but if the alternatives are to have foreign workers work at home, or in the U.S., neither choice is a win for our own citizens.

It continues to seem silly to have such a thrust on STEM education in the U.S. when the job market for STEM workers consistently goes to overseas hires, whether they are here or in their home nations. We need to work on the job-export issue as well.

The company I work for has fairly good diversity. The company is a chip company with a number of software teams for things like compilers, SDKs, drivers, the Linux kernel, bootloaders, etc. While it isn't 50:50 there are a lot of women developers and while the majority are indian there are a fair number of caucasian and other minorities as well. We hire what we can get. We have positions that have been open for months and the majority of those that we interview are of indian descent. We have a hard time finding good engineers, the key word being good. I have interviewed a lot of engineers of all nationalities who I do not consider competent. The competent ones usually have multiple offers.

The problem with the H1Bs are that they are abused by companies like Infosys and for less skilled engineers and IT people. Some companies also seem to have an inordinate number of H1Bs like Cisco. I'm of the firm belief that we need more good engineers and that we need a lot more people graduating from college with degrees in science and engineering.

Nothing in that article disputes the confidence that the past decade was hottest. It simply disputes which year in that decade was the worst. Nor does it dispute that the trend is increasing temperature per year.

Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.