"cherry picked parts"
Errrrrrrr
For an accusation of "cherry picking" to not be nonsensical, there needs to be more than one cherry to pick from, my not so clever friend.
> How about a link to that dataset
Why, yes. Yes, my not so clever friend, I can certainly help you there.
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=CET+temperature+record
Nope; the CET temperature record, our longest instrumental record, shows that the beginning of the 1700s had a steeper slope than the last couple decades. So even that position doesn't hold up soundly. We're somewhat unusually higher than the 350-year trendline right now yes, but that'll have to continue for another 18 years and top the ending in 1730ish warming cycle before unprecedented in magnitude and length is a true statement.
Well, that's it for this exchange.
"Instrumental measurements of the Sun alone already tell us that solar changes don't line up with the recent period of warming."
Anyone who claims this is either
A) Unaware of the Svensmark theories and the support the CLOUD experiments provide, which makes them not worth engaging because of their demonstrated ignorance of the field; or
B) Denying actual, physical, science in favor of unfalsifiable theory; which makes them not worth engaging because they are actively attempting deceit.
For those who wish to follow up and make their own decisions on this or the other issues mentioned, wattsupwiththat.com is a decent source to find discussion of a wide variety of contrarian issues and positions that the government-dependent cliques attempt to deny.
Both reproduce just fine on land as well as ice. That we think of them as ice breeding now is due to mankind's predation. See Farley Mowat's 'Sea of Slaughter' for a good rundown on how it's us that pushed their remnants into the areas we think of as native today.
The correct scale on which to consider the evolution of their Arctic adaptations in general is the 2.58 million years since the current Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation started. Which puts us in the only about 27% or so of geological record in which there's been permanent ice at the poles. Just to put this global warming hysteria over a handful of degrees into a proper context.
> First, it is still hotly debated when the next glacial period is due, and most geological studies I've read actually put it at closer to 50,000 years from now.
You're misremembering that I'm pretty sure. Quick google shows this at the BBC couple weeks ago:
"The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear...In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not..."
Everything I've read is that the average is about 11,000 years before the next one starts, which means if we were on average track the Little Ice Age would have been the start of the next one. If the Modern Warm Period recovery is due to us, well then good for us I say!
> But even if the next ice age were imminent, and you actually cared about preventing it, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels and doling them out slowly to stabilize against the gradual cooling, when we need them, rather than using them all up now and overshooting, when we don't.
A clever argument, but no: I'd argue for throwing up nuclear power stations now so they can pump out water vapor when the need arises. Water vapor is a way more effective GHG than CO2 is. Indeed, it's not actually clear that water vapor leaves enough stray IR around in the appropriate wavelengths for CO2 to have anywhere near the effect that IPCC models assume. That we're not seeing temperatures rise under clouded conditions as much as under clear conditions is a fairly sound piece of evidence that it doesn't, and the Modern Warming Period is likelier to be due to historically low cloud cover, pace the Svensmark cloud seeding theory; all the 20th C. warming can be explained by a 2% decrease in cloud cover without having to invoke GHG at all.
But since we only have 30 years of reliable (ie, satellite) cloud cover measurements, anything before being deduced from ship's logs and the like, and being able to measure the Sun's activity in any kind of quantitative fashion is of similar lack of vintage, we have no idea what changes in cloud cover there's been; nor how the models should account for them. Currently accepted models assume, with absolutely no supporting evidence for that assumption whatsoever, that they are a positive feedback. Actual measurements are unclear but support more the idea that they're actually a negative feedback. Should have a pretty good clue either way in another five-ten years or so.
> Uh, an Ice Age would not kill off the entire world's population.
Pretty much it would, as a matter of fact.
Thing is, there's two things about Ice Ages; first the ice thing, but more importantly, they're *dry* in the parts that aren't covered by ice. Which means biomass plummets even more than you'd expect from the temperature. And cereal crops are particularly hard hit, which cuts out the foundation of basically everything except fishing that feeds people.
After you account for these knockon effects, the estimates for how many people could be fed in an Ice Age range from 400 million worldwide down to a few tens of millions.
"Catastrophic" AGW has that beat all to hell. So go global warming go!
> Then, WHY is there global warming?
Short scale: We're climbing out of the Little Ice Age, just a hair above the three-century trendline right now, but not unprecedentedly so; early 1700s had quicker warming than the last half-century.
Long scale: We're approaching the end of an interglacial period, and that's when it's warmest.
> Regardless of the cause, that change must be stopped,
No, we should do our damnedest to speed it up, and hope to God the alarmists are right in everything they say. The wildest forecasts I've heard are that a billion, maybe a billion and a quarter, will be killed off by AGW. Beats the hell out of the six and a half billion or so that would be killed off by the next Ice Age, which we're a bit overdue for already; and if they are right than we can get the average temperature up 6, hey that's just about the amount than an Ice Age lowers it. How convenient!
> What was it like
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
>
Good bit warmer than it was just before 1300. We can tell because receding glaciers in the Alps are exposing Roman trading routes through passes that were considered permanently glaciated until the last few years; and unknown in the records extant at the time of moderate climate in Greenland, evidenced above.
>
It is generally suspected that the Minoan Warm Period was warmer than both the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period because of descriptions of crops grown, but there's no "go look for yourself" smoking guns like the above.
> let us remember all the Chinese workers who commited suicide
Let us remember that the suicide rate of the 1 million+ workers at Foxconn is less than a third of Chinese as a whole.
Reducing suicide rate by two-thirds is a pretty decent accomplishment.
> My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.
One note here, it seems from initial reports that your $25 gets you 20k songs max. I would suspect that's probably a licensing limitation, along the lines of iTunes allowing you to only burn 5 copies of a playlist to CD back in the day.
Still, I'm with you, $25/yr to keep more music than I can plausibly listen to in adequate for mobile quality handy in the cloud sure strikes me as a massively worthwhile deal for time saved compared to backing up and syncing to my half-dozen iDevices myself; and I'm pretty darn sure it's likely to strike a lot of other iDevice users the same way. Even leaving completely aside the whole amnesty debate.
Many pages make a thick book.