I'm sorry for still being alive. Think carefully about context, and you'll realize your accusations of dishonesty are baseless. Once again.

As I stated to you before, my position on the physics from long past may not necessarily be related to my current position... but your insistence on persistently dragging up bullshit from 5 years ago only serves to muddy the waters, and makes me not want to discuss it with you.

Jane, you repeated your incorrect position on the physics just last month. Again, were you lying when you insisted you DO have a reply to that physics problem?

I concede that nucleation via cosmic rays is at this time theoretical, but heck... so is warming via CO2.

I've already told you that the NAS calls it a "settled fact" but you still seem unable to retract your claims about warming via CO2. Were you lying when you insisted you DO have a reply to that physics problem?

Yes, what you're saying matches my conclusions.

Of course, the link between clouds and temperature is even less straightforward. As I recall the research suggests there is only a very small effect on average temperatures, though there is a dramatic effect on the diurnal variation - cloud cover tends to stabilize temperatures, causing slower heating during the day, but also slower cooling at night.

Yes. Another complication is that high, thin clouds warm the surface while "low, thick clouds primarily reflect solar radiation and cool the surface of the Earth."

Hold on there mister, the Laschamp event only lasted less than 500 years, and occurred in the middle of an ice age, over 41,000 years ago. I don't know about you, but I see a whole lot of unknowns that make it very difficult to conclude that "the climate didn't change". ... I would prefer to not draw any conclusions from what little data we have of this event.

So your preferences are different than Richard Alley's. He concluded at 43:01 that "We had a big cosmic ray signal, and the climate ignores it. And it's just about that simple. These cosmic rays didn't do enough that you can see it."

Maybe this is because Richard Alley's estimate that the Laschamp anomaly lasted "for a millenium or so" matches other estimates that are longer than 500 years.

We have the technology to measure GCR's, and we have the technology to measure cloud cover. Let's verify the theory of GCR's and cloud formation, let's quantify it, and then let's see if we can accurately predict cloud cover and irradiance fluctuations based on this data.

I've explained that the maximum impact of this mechanism has been estimated to be responsible for no more than 23% of the 11-year cyclical variation of cloud cover. Furthermore, there’s no long term trend in Svensmark’s data, which would be necessary to explain the long term warming trend that’s been observed. For more information, see chapter 7.10 of this textbook.

Update: Other relevant papers include Kristjansson 2002 and Laut 2003, followed by Svensmark’s response and Laut’s rebuttal. More recently, Erlykin et al. suggest that the apparent correlation is due to direct solar activity, while Pierce and Adams state: “In our simulations, changes in CCN [cloud condensation nuclei concentrations] from changes in cosmic rays during a solar cycle are two orders of magnitude too small to account for the observed changes in cloud properties; consequently, we conclude that the hypothesized effect is too small to play a significant role in current climate change.”

Another update: Snow-Kropla et al. 2011 makes similar points.

There is no scenario in which the problems of solar outweigh the problems of nuclear enough to sway the pendulum into nuclear's favor.

Scenario: Yellowstone erupts, dimming sunlight all over the world and continually dumping dust onto solar panels and into wind turbine gears.

Monocultures are vulnerable. A diverse energy portfolio is more resilient, and nuclear power has a low carbon footprint. That might be why the national academies of 13 nations called for the "development of nuclear power plants that are safe and secure, and ensure the secure long-term management and disposal of waste. International collaboration in development of the next generation of nuclear reactors and in reducing the risk of proliferation is essential."

... high sunspot activity generally means fewer clouds, which in turn means it gets hotter. When "solar storm" activity is low, more cosmic rays leak in, forming more clouds, cooling the weather.

When more cosmic rays leaked in, the climate didn't change. Richard Alley mentioned (at 42:00 in his 2009 AGU talk) that beryllium proxy data reveal a spike in cosmic ray intensity during the "Laschamp anomaly" ~40,000 years ago, but the corresponding oxygen isotope proxy for temperature didn't change unusually during that time period.

Solar farms are already observed to fry birds and blind pilots. Not to mention the huge amount of landscape they consume. And in high latitudes, not only to they take up even more (and more ecologically sensitive) area, they aren't even usable a good part of the year.

Concentrated solar thermal plants can fry birds or blind pilots, but solar PV panels don't. They don't take up ecologically sensitive landscapes when they're mounted on roofs, and that distributed nature can be more resilient than putting all our eggs in a large centralized power plant. We need to build more nuclear power plants, but we also need more renewables like solar, wind/wave, tidal, geothermal, and maybe even osmotic power.

In my area, they don't even come close to competing with other sources for cost.

Does that cost include the damages caused by the CO2 emissions of those other sources? If we're going to include damages caused by solar thermal plants, shouldn't we also include the damages we learned about from studying the effects of rapid CO2 emissions during the end-Permian, PETM, etc.?

You might be interested to know that the Butterfly Effect has made a profound contribution to weather and climate modeling. Without it, we would not know even the relatively small amount that we do know.

Does the "relatively small amount that we do know" include how adding CO2 warms the Earth's surface? You've been vigorously disputing these fundamental physics for years. Can you finally admit that mainstream scientists know how adding CO2 warms the Earth's surface?

they predicted that Antarctic sea ice would increase in a warming world

But they DIDN'T predict growing sea ice in a world that is NOT warming, did they? [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

Good grief, Jane. They also didn't predict growing sea ice in a world that's infested with leprechauns. But neither of those silly objections are relevant, because the real world is warming. Remember?

"We know the Earth is warming, you idiot. That's not the issue here." [Lonny Eachus, 2010-07-01]

Since these conditions are not the conditions presumed in the model, in fact they have not predicted anything. You are just a master at inappropriately shifting contexts, as I have pointed out many time. You don't get to say that they predicted a result given THESE conditions, then say the same result under OTHER conditions constitutes a "prediction". Especially given the uncertainties involved. That's bullshit. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

Nonsense, Jane. Manabe et al. 1991 predicted that increasing atmospheric CO2 warms the planet and causes a slight increase in Antarctic sea ice. This certainly constitutes a prediction because these conditions are happening. After all, as you've said, nobody is denying it's warming.

The next time you want to keep ignoring the predictions of Manabe et al. 1991 and all these other confirmed predictions, it might be more honest to just say that you reject all those confirmed predictions, rather than trying to pretend that they never happened.

You aren't using "all the available data". Once again, you are using the data that is convenient to you. ... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

That's absurd, Jane. I've repeatedly linked to Polyak et al. 2010 and Kinnard et al. 2011. Polyak et al. reconstructs Arctic sea ice back to 1870, and Kinnard et al. goes back 1,450 years.

... I will ask you again: would the slope be the same if you chose 2000 for a starting point, or 1850? No, it would not. I made a simple comment based on a simple fact: 1981 was at or near a local maximum, and using it for a starting point of your "average" is questionable at best. That is an accurate statement. If you chose 1930 instead, as another local maximum you would again have to justify that as a starting point. You don't get to weasel out of that. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

I don't have to "weasel out" of anything, because despite your baseless accusation I've always advocated using all the available data. In the context of using a single dataset, that means not cherry-picking the starting point, and instead using the entire dataset.

That's why it was so baffling when Jane baselessly accused Layzej of cherry-picking when he loaded the entire UAH dataset, then Jane suggested only using data since 1998. Jane was the only person in that conversation who suggested cherry-picking a starting point, rather than simply loading all the data in the dataset. Then Jane did it again.

And now Jane keeps asking what starting point I would use. Again, I wouldn't cherry-pick a starting point. I'd load the entire dataset into the trend analysis code I've already shared with Jane. Here's that example. The black line on the second page shows the UAH trend ending in 2012, for different starting years. The error bars are shown in red; they're 95% confidence uncertainty bounds.

Note that my analysis uses the entire dataset, and allows one to immediately see the calculated trends and uncertainties for many starting points at once, going all the way back to the first value in the dataset.

If you'd like, I could modify that code to load Arctic sea ice extent data, then share the new code and results with you. Or maybe you'd like to show off your programming skills instead? Either way, just let me know what dataset you'd like to investigate and we could actually start analyzing that entire dataset, with no cherry-picking of starting points at all.

But I doubt we'd find much support for Jane's claim, because neither this graph of the NSIDC Arctic sea ice index or Polyak et al.'s Fig. 2(a) show a clear local maximum in 1981 or 1979, either for the minimum or maximum sea ice extent.

... I will ask you again: would the slope be the same if you chose 2000 for a starting point, or 1850? No, it would not. I made a simple comment based on a simple fact: 1981 was at or near a local maximum, and using it for a starting point of your "average" is questionable at best. That is an accurate statement. If you chose 1930 instead, as another local maximum you would again have to justify that as a starting point. You don't get to weasel out of that. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

Jane introduced "1981" here which seems to be a reference to this NSIDC Arctic sea ice extent plot. Once again, Jane hasn't actually presented any evidence that 1981 was at or near a local maximum. But let's humor Jane and pretend that 1981 was a really huge local maximum for Arctic sea ice extent. NSIDC calculated the average Arctic sea ice extent from 1981-2010. As Jane asks, would the slope be the same if the NSIDC chose 2000 for a starting point for their average? (*)

If the NSIDC chose to use a 2000-2010 average, that wouldn't change the calculated trends/slopes like these on page 2 here. That's because the NSIDC isn't cherry-picking data starting points when they use a 1981-2010 average. They're still using all the data, but just comparing that data to an average over 30 years.

Sadly, many people seem to be confused about calculating an average and using it as a baseline.

That's why I've said that confusion regarding baselines makes me think that plotting the trends and error bars is better than plotting the timeseries with an "ideal" baseline. Since the trend is the time derivative of the original timeseries, the constant baseline is irrelevant.

Another way of appreciating this point would be to notice that absolutely nothing would change on this NSIDC Arctic sea ice extent plot if that hypothetical really huge local maximum happened in 2010 rather than 1981. Again, that's because the NSIDC isn't cherry-picking data starting points when they use a 1981-2010 average. They're just calculating an average, so whether the maximum occurs in 1981 or 2010 is irrelevant.

Once you realize that the NSIDC is just calculating an average, it should be clear that the most important criterion is how long a timespan that average covers. That way, a hypothetical really huge local maximum gets averaged together with other years. I've said that I like plots with 30 year baselines because that's long enough to define the climate. Since that NSIDC plot uses a 30 year long baseline, it seems okay to me.

Jane, can we agree that a 30 year baseline is better than a 10 year baseline (like 2000-2010) or even a ~1 year baseline because longer baselines average out more weather noise? Can we agree that any choice of baseline is irrelevant to calculating trends/slopes like these on page 2 here?

(*) Obviously the NSIDC couldn't choose a starting point of 1850 on their satellite data plot because the modern satellites were launched in ~1979, but it seems unlikely that Jane will ever concede that he was wrong to insist that "your precious warmism sources consistently start THEIR charts in 1979, and if that isn't cherry-picking, nothing is."

Once again, this is completely backwards. In the context of using a single dataset, loading that entire dataset isn't cherry-picking. Arbitrarily cherry-picking a starting point of 1998 is cherry-picking. This isn't complicated, Jane.

If you should ever start actually using "all the available data", and were honest with yourself, I think you might start softening your tone. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

Once again, Jane's concern about my tone is incredibly ironic. And Jane, keep in mind that you were cussing and insulting me while defending your Latour nonsense... which you finally admitted violates "kindergarten-level physics".

But you obviously can't admit your "silly gradeschool-level" mistake, even after defending it while calling me a goddamned stupid dumbshit despicable human being fraudulent dishonest lying fucking moron idiot asshole malicious lying sonofabitch.

After all that, don't you see even the tiniest bit of irony when you criticize my tone and repeatedly claim to be happy to admit your mistakes?

That doesn't explain record sea ice extents at a time when it is claimed that ocean, not particularly land, temperature is increasing. I'm not trying to claim it's irrelevant. But it certainly does not seem sufficient. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

There are reasons to doubt the land ice melting connection to Antarctic sea ice, but I don't think that's one of them. I mentioned real reasons by citing Swart and Fyfe 2013, Polvani and Smith 2013 and referencing fig. 2 and fig. 4(e) from Parkinson and Cavalieri 2012 (PDF).

But ocean warming is sufficient to thin West Antarctic ice sheets, as I've explained:

"West Antarctica is among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth, with an ice sheet that's vulnerable to the warming oceans because it's mainly grounded below sealevel."

"Because West Antarctica juts out into the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC), those warming waters are thinning its ice sheet at an accelerating rate. ... Its ice sheet is also mainly grounded below sealevel, making it more vulnerable to the warming oceans than the East's which is mainly grounded above sealevel."

The fact that West Antarctica is mainly grounded below sealevel means that ocean warming causes rapid land ice thinning there. Also, the fact that the bedrock is deeper farther inland from the grounding line has "interesting" consequences. See Rignot et al. 2014 and Joughin et al. 2014.

Manabe was 14 years ago. Conditions have changed rather significantly in that time, as has our understanding of the geology. It may be that Manabe is still correct. On the other hand, it may not. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

No, Jane. Manabe et al. 1991 was 24 years ago. The fact that Manabe was 24 years ago is exactly why I've repeatedly showed it to you. They predicted that Antarctic sea ice would increase in a warming world, but you keep insisting that "The science is faulty at its roots. The models haven’t predicted one thing, in 30+ years. ... You don’t really need to know anything about the science except that IT HASN’T PREDICTED ANYTHING. That makes it bad theory. ... CO2 warming theory has predicted NOTHING."

In addition to the other 17 reasons I gave you, don't you think this is another reason you should reconsider making these baseless accusations?

I've told Jane and economart that Fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010 shows that the reconstructed Arctic sea ice extent in the 1930s was comparable to that in 1979, and the modern decline is quite clear.

You seem to feel that what "you told people" is necessarily truth. That's an interesting point of view. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

Huh? Jane, I just gave you links to peer-reviewed long-term reconstructions of Arctic sea ice extent in response to your insinuations that scientists are deliberately misleading. In response, Jane tries to guess at my feelings about what I "told people".

Instead, you might find it more productive to click on those links and learn about peer-reviewed long-term reconstructions of Arctic sea ice extent. Then maybe you'll be in a better position to judge whether you should dare to accuse scientists of deliberately misleading.

I've also repeatedly explained that Jane's accusations of deliberately misleading cherry-picking are completely backwards. As usual.

You are implying that my statement that 1981 was near a temporal local maximum is incorrect? You would rather use 1930 as your starting point? As opposed to, say, 2000 or 1850? [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

Good grief, Jane. Once again, I'd rather use all the available data. In the context of using a single dataset, that means using all the data in that dataset. That's why it's so ironic that Jane baselessly accused Layzej of cherry-picking when he loaded the entire UAH dataset, then Jane suggested only using data since 1998. But Jane obviously won't ever be able to grasp this irony, because he just did the same thing again.

In a broader context, a single dataset is just part of the picture. That's why I linked to longer-term reconstructions like Polyak et al. 2010 and Kinnard et al. 2011. In both papers, the modern decline in Arctic sea ice is quite clear. It's not clear that 1981 was near a temporal local maximum in Polyak et al.'s Fig. 2(a), either for the minimum or maximum sea ice extent. It's not even clear that this changes if we instead take seriously Jane's previous accusations that scientists "cherry-picked" data from 1979 instead of 1981.

...antarctic sea ice is at or near a record high... [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

I've repeatedly told you this is consistent with Manabe et al. 1991 page 811: "... sea surface temperature hardly changes and sea ice slightly increases near the Antarctic Continent in response to the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide."

... it's a bit of a mystery to me how they can claim that ice is melting due to unusual ocean warming, when we know that ocean surface ice has been at record levels. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

I've explained that Manabe et al. attributed the slight Antarctic sea ice increase to increased precipitation in the area. This freshens the frigid surface water and reduces mixing with the warmer water below. Other possibilities include stronger winds which spread out the ice and expose more surface water to be frozen.

Correction: arctic ice is below 1 standard deviation from 1981-2010 average, but within 2 std. deviations. Still, remember that 1981 is a (dare I say deliberately chosen?) high point from which to start measurements, so going by the 1981-2010 average is probably a bit misleading. And the total global ocean ice is still well above normal, because of the record high Antarctic ice right now. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-05-22]

I've told Jane and economart that Fig. 2(a) from Polyak et al. 2010 shows that the reconstructed Arctic sea ice extent in the 1930s was comparable to that in 1979, and the modern decline is quite clear.

I've also repeatedly explained that Jane's accusations of deliberately misleading cherry-picking are completely backwards. As usual.

No, that's actually why the U.S. patent office stopped accepting applications for perpetual motion machine patents. They wasted uncountable hours debunking experiments that seemed plausible at first glance but always just ended up wasting everyone's time.

It's not just that Shawyer's claims violate conservation of momentum. The Alcubierre and Natario drives also violate conservation of momentum, but at least they explain that violation in the context of Noether's theorem. In contrast, Shawyer just made a ridiculous mistake by forgetting that the normal force a microwave photon exerts on a surface is always normal to that surface. Sadly, Shawyer seems to have duped a lot of otherwise skeptical people into uncritically cheerleading his absurd claims.