The biblical literalists are going to love this one.

We can't analyze data we don't have.

I think this conversation has pretty much reached a dead end.

You're right: when you assume that scientists are all biased, and all the actual analysis and results and data and models can be dismissed without the effort of paying any attention to them because you have already decided they're biased, you can indeed draw any conclusion you like.

First, your death count is wrong-- it's high by roughly a factor of five. Second, the deaths from the nuclear weapons were small compared to the deaths from conventional bombings. War kills people. If you're complaining about bombing, complain about that. Third, the estimated death count from the nuclear weapons was about equal to the death rate from five weeks of the war: if the bombing shortened the war by five weeks, it saved lives. Fourth, the Japanese put every man they had into the war effort-- even the farmers. If they war hadn't ended, the number of Japanese starving would have been millions: there was not enough manpower in the form of women and children left to harvest the fields.

no.

Yes.

You are confusing two different things.

Solar variation is not the cause of the current warming. Got that? Good.

The climate in 1700 is somewhat harder to model. You quoted what I already said, and I see no reason not to just repeat it:

That seems straightforward. Nobody knows if there's a connection.

  Your comment on that post is

I don't understand your logic here. Those "conflating factors" in analyzing climate of the 14-19 centuries don't have anything to do with current climate. For that we have measurements of solar activity.

People have been looking for a solar activity/climate connection for literally hundreds of years*. They haven't found it yet. Understanding the connection between the Maunder minimum and the little ice age, if one exists, would be a huge advance in climate science. But it's not really possible to do science on the basis of "here's something we don't know because the data is poor or non-existent. Maybe there is something we don't understand, but we don't even know if there's anything there."

However, here is something to think about. If it were discovered that the solar variation during the Maunder minimum caused the temperature drop of the Little Ice Age, that would make the climate scientists say "oh my god, the highest estimates of warming due to the greenhouse effect are the right ones; it's a lot worse that the conservative estimates."

Because if the Maunder minimum actually did cause the little ice age, that implies that there must be a big positive feedback loop between radiative forcing and climate. The exact size of the feedback look is the main uncertainty in climate. The short term feedbacks are getting to be well understood. But if there's a large long-term feedback-- one that hasn't really kicked in yet-- then the greenhouse effect is really much worse than the average of current estimates.

But, in either case, whether the Maunder minimum does or doesn't explain all or part of the little ice age isn't really relevant to the question of whether we understand current climate, because we don't need proxies for solar activity to understand current climate: we have measurements. Saying "we haven't found a connection between the Maunder minimum and the climate" isn't bias-- it's just a statement of what we don't know.

--

*mostly in the century-long series of studies trying to understand the cause of ice-age cycles.

http://dilbert.com/strip/1992-...

"every year there are close to 140,000 jobs requiring a CS degree, but only 40,000 U.S. college graduates major in CS, which means that 100,000 positions go unfilled by domestic talent."

And this would be a logical inference if the only people looking for jobs were that year's college graduates.

But, actually, very few job openings are filled by fresh-outs.

Conclusion: mIsleading and false.

But the solar variation is not ten times as much. We measure the solar output. We know that this is not responsible for the current warming because we measure it.

You keep repeating that word "bias." The only bias I've seen you refer to is "every organization that produces a scientific result that confirms climate scientific models is biased." As far as I can tell, the only evidence you have for that purported bias is that you don't want to credit their results.

I have a suggestion: consider the possibility that the people who are telling you that all these institutions are biased might, themselves, be biased.

It isn't.

You just did the numbers.

It isn't.

Now you're talking a completey different subject, which is "what (if anything) shall we do about the warming?"

That's a good question to address... but addressing it by saying "the science is wrong, so we don't need to even think about what to do" doesn't address it.

The question of what we should do about global warming has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the science is correct. People are attacking the science to make political points-- specifically in order to not address the question "what should we do about it", because they are afraid that they would not like the answer.

'cause he sleeps in the cold and the deep R'lyeh. He wouldn't wake unless we warmed the oceans up...
uh, oh. Maybe we better worry.

Excellent-- that's good enough for a back of the envelope calculation. I like back of the envelope calculations.

My calculator says that the fourth root of 1.001 is 1.00025, though. I think you slipped a decimal.

In either case, though, that's not enough to explain the current warming. Does not explain enough of the current warming to really bother with.

..which is about three hundred years before the Maunder minimum.

Sorry-- Phil Plait wrote a detailed analysis of the claims that decreases solar activity means that the Earth is likely to slip into a mini ice age.

The new model of the solar dynamo is new, but doesn't mention a "mini ice age". The part Plait analysed is not new.

Ah, I thought you were a skeptic, but turns out you're a denier. My mistake. It is quite amazing how deniers will do anything possible to avoid actually doing a calculation.

You asserted, with no evidence, that the change in total solar irradiance between active sun and quiet sun is a plausible explanation of the 20th century warming. A quick back of the envelope analysis would show that this is not the case. But you're not willing to do the calculation, and not willing to look at the calculation from people who have.