I generally don't respond to rude ACs, so if you want another response, you can either be less rude or post as non-AC (yes, you can be a rude non-AC :)

Obviously. There are a lot more trees that lives for "hundreds" of years than trees that live for "thousands" of years, however.

I have very few assumptions, because I know very little! From the little that I know, tree ring growth is NOT a simple issue.

See, e.g., http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/07/tree-rings-and-climate-some-recent-developments/

You can accuse me of providing a (in your view, at least!) flawed interpretation, but I copied the detailed numbers right from the paper and put them in post and provided my take on their meaning, so you can't accuse me of not reading them (or "reading into")!

These are pretty amazing claims to make considering that accurate, global instrumental records cover less than the last 100 years!

It's my understanding that most "paleo" records can indicate greater climate shifts, but with nothing like 20 year granularity.

I viewed the BBC page you linked to. It's a perfect example of why I find myself sickeningly torn when it comes to AGW. I'm a big, big believer in protecting lands, reducing pollution, and generally more sustainable living. Like a good 21st century American yuppie I compost my trash and have an organic garden (see, the $65 tomato :-P). However, when I see graphics like the map on the 3rd page, I get irritated! AGW is going to do so much damage--and there's NO potential good? I instantly become--excuse the phrase--skeptical when I see laundry lists of negatives and not even one positive. That just doesn't seem likely.

I find the tree ring cores fascinating, and am sympathetic to the inherent difficulties that paleoclimatologists have to deal with (natural variation being the least of them).

The one thing I've never seen answered about tree ring growth though is how do you separate the temperature signal from:

1) amount of CO2 in atmosphere
2) amount of rainfall
3) amount of sunshine
4) changing nutrient levels in the soil (the soil must change for trees that lives hundreds of years, right?)

I agree with you that it's totally obvious to see "good times" vs "bad times" in tree ring growth, but what exactly makes up good times versus bad times? I would really love to read more, if anybody knows of any good resources.

I'm curious with these models, do they work with backtesting? How accurate have they been with predicting the last 10 years? The last 20 years?

Wow, what a hostile response to a good point. You weren't one of those people yelling about rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina (stupid location, stupid city!), were you? If you're going to live in a 30-year, 100-year, or 500-year flood plain, eventually you're going to get hit by a flood! If you live in a coastal region that has been hit by many hurricanes in the past, eventually you're going to get hit by a hurricane! That's that.

The trade-off is of course how much money do you spend on precautions.

You're crazy; 97% of people parrot back talking points. You're clearly just a shill.

I completely agree with you. I think there's an entire new strand of luddites emerging today. This is party with good cause--we've learned a lot about chemicals, pollution, and health, that we simply didn't know 50 years ago. We SHOULD be cautious going forward.

But there's such a strand of "anything that has plastic is bad" and "anything that isn't all 'natural' is bad" that are followed by a belief that humans cannot possibly affect POSITIVE climate change, that I'm somewhat baffled.

Humans have in the last 100 years brought about a lot of positive environmental change. Let's going with what we can do, rather than what we're not able to do.

Look, nobody is stupid enough to believe that climate is static. It never has been in the past, and it certainly won't be so going forward. The big questions are what are the driving forces, what are the positives and negatives of climate change as it is currently occurring, what ought to be done, and what can be done. None of these questions are nearly settled.

As an aside, it's always interesting to me when the stereotypical political orthodoxy gets flipped. Republican doves and Democrat hawks on Syria? Likewise, liberals lampoon conservatives as being stuck in the past and afraid of change. Yet for many liberals, climate change is a great fear, a purely negative outcome, and has no conceivable positive results. ~shrug~

What's most interesting about your post is that you apparently find it wise to chastise your father for his foolish beliefs--and gosh darn it, the man just won't listen to facts! At the same time, it's pretty obvious you're throwing around statistics that you can't have read anything about.

I'm assuming the 97% statistic you are referring to is from Cook et al., Quantifying the Consensus on AGW. Cook et al. took two approaches to find the consensus number. The author team first searched databases for papers that had terms such as "global warming" and "global climate change" (I'm not a statistician, but I would think these terms would introduce some pretty intense selection bias right off the bat). Finding 12,465 match papers in the ISI Web of Science database, they tossed 520 (4%) and analyzed the results:

34.8% of these papers endorsed AGW
64.6% took no position on AGW
0.4% rejected AGW
0.2% were uncertain on AGW

Amongst ONLY those papers (34.8% of the total) that took a position on AGW, 97.1% "endorsed the scientific consensus."

The second approach was to mail out a survey to certain selected paper authors. The response rate of the survey was 14%. Again, I'm not a statistician, so I have no idea how good a result this is. Of these 1200 (14%) responses:

62.7% endorsed AGW
35.5% took no position on AGW
1.8% rejected AGW

This is all in the paper, so if I'm misinterpreted anything, or misrepresented anything, let me know.

I think perhaps the surprising thing is that given the search parameters (such as terms that are now highly politically tinged like "global warming") and given AGW is absolutely the easiest way to get funding today as an kind of academic who remotely deals with environmental issues, is that there were as many "no stand on AGW" responses as there were.

It's like asking the Pentagon and the CIA to write papers on the threat to the US from Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea. Regardless of whether there really are threats (or the magnitudes), you can bet when their jobs are on the line, they'll find something!

You can in theory set up a system and throw the key (root password) away: the sys admins could manage the machine, but could not grant access rights to new users and would not have free reign in all the data (logs for example), that would be done by a different set of people (with no root capabilities whatsoever).

The technology exists, but it is used in very few instances.

Snowden does have credibility (the fact that people describe him as either a whistle-blower or a traitor proves this beyond question).

As for being used by somebody else, well, scrambling so publicly to be let in anywhere and ranting against the US government for closing his asylum options would tend to indicate that he was not being handled by anybody.

This chap did us all a great service, thanks to him we will need to make the internet secure, not keep pretending that it is.

I just don't get how anybody with decent intentions can fail to see this.

3 fails:

- You needing passwords from other people.
- They giving you those passwords.
-The password been shared and unique.

2 Questions:

- Did you leave?
- Did you technology that didn't require sharing passwords (or was it that you lacked knowledge, perhaps you may not know even now!).

The BBC is obliged by its internal rules not to be biased.

People do complain and the BBC occasionally has to apologize when the standards that apply to it aren't met.

The empirical way to gauge this is to read how many people of all political stripes complain about the BBC being biased: when lefties and right wingers, establishment and anti-establishment all complain bitterly about BBC bias one knows bias doesn't exist.

What you are proposing is called a positive feedback system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback ) and as the article notes "Positive feedback tends to cause system instability. When the loop gain is positive and above 1, there will typically be exponential growth, increasing oscillations or divergences from equilibrium".

The Weimar Republic, the Brazilian Real and Zimbabwean currency should dispel this nonsense you are talking about.

That is why economists need to know a bit about maths, so they don't end sprouting bullshit.

The CAs' public keys come with your browser (or SSL client, it could be a web server or other piece of software). If you sign your own the problem becomes to distribute the keys.

Also it is trivial to stop the server with your private keys serving authentication requests. Governments will say terrorism, national security or one of those scary words and no judge will try to defend you rights, as shown in the UK they will even widen a narrow law to suit the needs of the security and/or intelligence bodies.

We are really fucked.