And very often if there is even a small advantage to doing so. The plus side of having a national policy and laws is you can have some sort of a framework governing the use of the retained data. The downside is that most of these laws just encourage big brotherish behavior

Its a pure appeal to emotionalism and its playing with the data the way a magician plays with expectations. Whats worse when you think about it 98 was the hottest year on record, and we have had 13 years of ever increasing levels of CO2 production you would think 2011 should be hotter ?

Wow a data point which is at best not impressive has been transformed into a brickbat. God forbid you question the common sense of trying fuel our automobiles with corn, the power grid with wind because that brickbat and whole bunch of equally specious will be thrown at you.

"It's long past time to face facts: the Earth is getting hotter, and to deny it is an exercise in fantasy."

Seriously not much ideological bias. I can't imagine a more anti science, more anti reason way to try and beat down people you disagree with than the above. The fact that it has managed to gain a foothold in political circles and the wider world is a great indictment of democracy, and the best argument imaginable for not giving government more power to try and solve our problems.

All that is competition for a resource. Tragedy of the commons involves a resource that has to be managed, to maintain its usefulness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_generation#List_of_countries_with_Source_of_Electricity_2008

Because this chart in the wiki doesn't have any that aren't getting power from coal, gas, or nuclear.

Its 2011 I remember perfectly well when climatologists were saying I would be under a glacier by now because people were burning fossil fuel.

I also remember how we got more global warming because people cleaned up the emissions from burning fossil fuels.

I guess the future isn't what it used to be.

I have to think you are trolling.

Because there is no way anyone could read.

you are picking a hundred year window, and saying anyone that uses a different window is wrong. If we were to take a 1000 year window we would be in decline.

and fail to graph that the person making that comment understood there were longer term and shorter term cycles and was pointing them out.

If you haven't subtracted out the natural cyclic variance from the signal you don't have anything that you can actually attribute to CO2.

The old saw is "A scientist is someone who has a very good understanding of how much they don't know about a subject"

What do you call people that keep insisting that disaster is going to happen some time in the future, and everytime the future arrives they push back the date ?

Yeesh

There are four lines in that graph representing reported temperature. All of them are consistently tracking below the 2.5 degree sensitivity, The 1.5 degree sensitivity has 1 of the four reported temp graphs having a good fit. Admittedly its GISS arguably the best of them.