That is one hypothesis, and an unproven one.

No, almost all of it comes from freezing seawater.

Right, it never snows in Antarctica...the miles-thick sheets of ice appeared by magic. Got it.

That of course remains to be seen. Also be clear on sea ice versus landlocked ice. Some parts of the antarctic icecap are growing.

No, it's an objective look at polar sea ice based on the only directly measurable metric. Your interpretation of that is exactly that - one interpretation. Furthermore, you should reflect (oops, bad pun) on the fact that the additional antarctic sea ice increases albedo and thus has a net cooling effect - the same argument used to say that arctic sea ice loss is increasing arctic ocean heating.

No, the science is not clear. What is clear is the desperation of those shouting "the science is settled" while stubborn reality continues to contradict the beautiful theories and models. :-)

Nothing in particular. Here's the last 10 years (you know, the 10 years with the highest CO2 levels in history) of UAH data, showing a dead flat temperature trend. The point being, warming has definitely paused on around a decadal time scale. Will it last longer? That's a very interesting question. Solar activity, despite being near a maximum in the 11 year cycle, is low. The interesting thing is that the next cycle (forecast to begin roughly around 2020) is predicted to be extremely low - so low that a sunspot will be a rare event for 12-15 years (weak solar cycles are also longer). Such low cycles have historically been associated with quite significant temperature drops. So, we may in fact see flat or declining temperatures through 2035 or longer. That will be quite a shock for the alarmists if it works out that way. :-)

BTW, it may not be only lower solar irradiance that's responsible for lower temperatures, there may be other effects having to do with the solar wind and/or the solar magnetic field.

Citation? My understanding is that RSS and UAH are two independent analyses of the same data. The relevant Wikipedia article contains no mention of such a thing...

At any rate, this chart shows the close agreement between the two datasets.

It can't be "trending near" if the trend is up from the low. Right now it's 15% higher than it was in 2012, or 810,000 km^2 in absolute terms. It's perilously ;) close to 1995 levels.

As I pointed out to someone else, almost all of that is well north of the region where hurricanes form - and hurricane formation is what the summary addressed. There is also something called "natural variability" which can cause quite large anomalies at times, and which has nothing to do with humans. Finally, as I said before, the baseline for the SST anomalies is completely arbitrary - there is nothing to say it's "normal".

Reality. What's yours?

FWIW, I do support a large scale conversion of coal electric generation to nuclear - I think that's a reasonable point of compromise for the alarmists. :-)

Well, putting it in bold clearly means you're right...not.

Try looking at actual data. That's the RSS data, which is inherently better than spotty surface station coverage in that it directly integrates the entire lower troposphere. That's a slightly negative trend that's going hard on twenty years...all with CO2 levels worth panicking over according to some.

2012 was the lowest (due mainly to a weather phenomenon, not climate in particular. 2013 was the rebound year, and this year looks to be continuing the trend. Will the long-term decline resume? Personally, I doubt it based on solar activity, but we'll see...

I'll leave it to the readers to decide who's ignorant (or brainwashed:).

As for your Slate link, it's addressing one specific article. It makes the tired "the heat is hiding in the ocean" claim, which has not been verified whatsoever. How has the ocean been heating (imperceptibly) for almost 20 years while the atmosphere stays the same temperature, pray tell?

You might also want to reflect on the fact that while the Arctic ice has been generally on the decline, Antarctic sea ice has been at record extent this year, and global ice as a whole is around average...

The preceding 100 years have not been a "steady upward trend", furthermore by all accounts CO2 was not a significant contributor in the early part of that period when temperatures rose fastest.

From basic physics it's clear CO2 will produce some warming. The important question is how much, and the jury is still very much out on that. It's highly dependent on water vapor feedback and cloud formation. The current trend seems to indicate lower sensitivity to CO2 levels than previously thought.

There's no realistic scenario where we won't see 500 PPM CO2 at least. It's encouraging that things aren't looking worse.

It's very close to average, with the main development region flat or below normal. The highest anomalies are well north of hurricane formation territory.

Regardless, the temperatures on that map are well within natural variability, not "abnormally warm". Also bear in mind that the "anomalies" are versus an arbitrarily chosen baseline in the first place.

Nope. 2012 was a record low minimum, but 2013 was a significant rebound. This year is slightly above 2013 levels so far, contrary to the summary's alarmism.

Actually the summary is fairly untainted by facts. For instance:

Arctic sea ice is trending near record lows for this time of year, abnormally warm ocean water helped spawn the earliest hurricane ever recorded to make landfall in North Carolina, and a rash of heat waves have plagued cities from India to California to the Middle East.

Yikes, that all sounds alarming right?

Except...

1) Arctic sea ice is actually currently above last year's level, which was already a rebound of over 25 million square km more than the previous year at the minimum extents.

2) The ocean waters in the North Atlantic hurricane region are right around average for this time of year, by no means "abnormally warm".

3) "Rashes of heat waves plague" various places every summer, and always have. NOAA recently reinstated 1934 as the hottest year in the US on record.

The article attacking the Heartland data does have a minor point, but it is absolutely true that temperatures have been essentially flat for around 17 years, while CO2 has been at the highest levels in history. There have been quite a few peer reviewed papers trying to explain this pause, so it's clearly a real phenomena. We'll see if it continues, the El Nino this year is now expected to be a fairly minor event.

At this time, the forecasters anticipate El Niño will peak at weak-to-moderate strength during the late fall and early winter (3-month values of the Niño-3.4 index between 0.5oC and 1.4oC).

Those links are dated, and don't do a thing to refute the plots being discussed.

Again, all that data is publicly available. It is absolutely a fact that things haven't warmed appreciably in around 16 years...all while CO2 has been at the highest levels so far. So yes, the vast majority of climate models had predicted higher temperatures versus what we've been seeing.

This district is strongly Republican, nothing's "in play". Your list missed one very important "wedge" issue, amnesty for illegal aliens. Cantor's support for that was deeply unpopular, just as amnesty generally is across the country.

You should work on converting your "liberal" tendencies to "libertarian" tendencies. The liberal/progressive direction in this country is clearly towards huge government, oppression, socialism, and a grim future. What we need is a strong dose of freedom and capitalism, the things that made America great in the first place.

I'm pretty optimistic things will take a turn for the better in 2016. At least we won't have to keep enduring the endless abuses of power from 0bama. Perhaps he'll even finally be impeached in the meantime!

Your comment is poorly phrased (at first I thought you meant that Swift has GC where ObjC doesn't).

At any rate, the "peculiarity" of no GC is a feature not a bug. GC based languages have yet to solve the deterministic timing problem, and it's significant for a wide range of applications. GC is also wasteful of memory. ARC provides much the same painless experience, while avoiding the shortcomings.

Apple provided optional GC for ObjC code for a while, but has now deprecated it.

For many applications, and most interactive applications, it will kick C# all over the parking lot...

• - It's AOT compiled to highly optimized native code using LLVM. (I see that Mono allows this to some extent...)
• - It uses ARC instead of GC. That also allows deterministic timing, no semi-random GC pauses and more efficient memory use.

It'll be interesting seeing some Xamarin versus Swift benchmarks...

Exactly. Julia will eat R for lunch soon enough, I think. It's an elegant, well designed and efficient language. It's only been around for a couple of years, and has a very vibrant and rapidly growing community.

Check it out for yourself: The Julia Language Homepage. It's got a lot to offer anyone with an interest in mathematics, including statisticians. It's based on the LLVM, and interfaces trivially with C libraries - plus it's a very fast language in it's own right, unlike R or Python.