A Reliable Negative Relation Between Intelligence and Religiosity

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@T2Bruno: Scientists have been wrong in the past of course, and consensus is nothing more than an indicator - it's not conclusive, and i didn't claim it was. Some of those examples you mentioned were from times when religious beliefs cause significant confirmation bias. The Scientific Method had not been devised yet. Most importantly the part that a good scientist should (let others) try to disprove his conclusions, instead of working to prove them with confirmation bias. The other example about mars, was just an educated guess based on little information proven to be wrong later. With the advent of the scientific method, scientists rarely get major theories wrong. They are usually tweaked a little, but never completely turned upside down. I don't expect major theories like global warming or evolution to be proven completely wrong.

@ pplr: Yes, i was happy to call myself an agnostic. I also predicted that the more we discuss the topic of religion, the less i can actually maintain a position in the middle (debating against theists, i'll often strongly defend an opposing viewpoint), and the more it appears that I'm contradicting my earlier claims of 'live and let live' and neutrality. In everyday life i'm a very amicable person, and I would be more careful discussing religion face-to-face, if at all.
And Stalin killed people in the name of communism, not atheism. In reality, he was consolidating his power, and blaming it on the communist ideology is a bit unfair. Stalin was an iron-fisted dictator, and they come in all breeds and kinds, religious or not.

@ Blackthorne TA: Well, you obviously didn't look at the links I sent you, so we both end up accusing each other of being unscientific and lazy. And we're both right. We both have our views on global warming, and we're convinced the opponent has nothing but nonsense to offer on the matter.
I know that websites like wattsupwiththat do on occasion have real scientific articles, that have been conducted impartially without a global-warming-denial confirmation bias. Unfortunately, the site has been shown to manufacture data, tilt graphs, fudge numbers, cherrypick information to fit their world view. You cannot deny that it's a site that overwhelmingly believes that global warming is a myth, and you'd be hard pressed to find anything on the site that contradicts it. You want to believe that it's a whistleblower site waging a war against the biased majority of science, and there's nothing I can think of to convince you otherwise.

 

It's not just attacking the person's credibility to weaken the points - the person in question is extremely untrustworthy, from past transgressions.
Watts Interview – Denial and Reality Mix like Oil and Water

Denial Strategy #1: Self-Contradictory Arguments are Welcome
Denial Strategy #2: Rewriting History
Denial Strategy #3: Damage Control by Misrepresenting Data
Denial Strategy #4: Exaggerate Uncertainty
Denial Strategy #5: Peddling Blog "Science"
Denial Strategy #6: Downplay Climate Impacts
Denial Strategy #7: Misrepresent Successful Climate Predictions
Denial Strategy #8: Misrepresent Basic Economics
Denial Strategy #9: Misrepresent Climate Solutions
Denial Strategy #10: Cherrypick the Noise

And that's just from checking up on the lies in one interview with him. Can you imagine how much effort it would take to unravel the tapestry he has woven on his website? It's entirely valid to disconsider this person's website, not a fallacy.

 

*Ahem*

To re-post my statement from post #122...

"The Scientific Method", as you want to label that particular problem solving approach, has been around for a very long time. At least since the Greeks and probably the Egyptians. There is nothing special or sacred about being able to tackle an issue in a logical manner to come up with a solution -- it may well be "magic" for people who do not possess logical minds (a few people I know in RL coming to mind here) but for most of us there is no magic, only hard work.

No one likes to have their work trashed. So I disagree that a "good scientist" (whatever that is) would want someone to disprove their work. But that is the point of peer review (as long as the peers are not biased -- which does happen).

 

Okay, this isn't so much a response as it is a blatant copy-paste from wikipedia, but at least I admit it!

1. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the scientific method as: "a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."

2. The concern with falsifiability gained attention around 1930 by way of philosopher of science Karl Popper's scientific epistemology "falsificationism". Popper stresses the problem of demarcation—distinguishing the scientific from the unscientific—and makes falsifiability the demarcation criterion, such that what is unfalsifiable is classified as unscientific, and the practice of declaring an unfalsifiable theory to be scientifically true is pseudoscience.

---------- Added 16 hours, 47 minutes and 37 seconds later... ----------

This is far too conclusive for a scientific statement about weather. If the study is legit, then I'm guessing you (or wattsupwiththat) drew the wrong conclusions about what exactly was said. Not unlike the OP topic's article misrepresenting the conclusions of that religion/INT study. Long term patterns are often more easily discernable than short term weather, because the chaotic weather patterns balance eachother out over time, leaving a discernable trend.

In the Netherlands, the dikes are built a meter above high tide sealevel, strong enough to withstand severe storms. According to estimations, only a catastrophic storm that's likely to occur once every 1000 years could cause real damage. But there would need to be a 1/10,000 year event to actually cause lifethreatening flooding in the country.

Within this context, NOAA may have drawn the conclusion that Sandy's advance so far north was a rare, but not necessarily abnormal event. Considering Sandy alone, of course you can't definitively link it to global warming - but that's not the same as saying it's definitively NOT linked to global warming, which is the willful misinterpretation I think is being made. There isn't really much to say about it unlesss it happens twice in a short time. Then it's so in-your-face, that the denial propaganda machine will have to work overtime.

But when we consider weather patterns all over the world, then we CAN state that there is abnormal weather. Ask people in Greenland, Bangladesh or the Sahel if they noticed any abnormal weather. Linking the abnormal weather conclusively to global warming is another story. Then it seems that the public needs more evidence than the scientific community to be convinced of a pattern. Since when is the public better at being skeptical than the scientific community?

And "Blog Science" is not offered for peer review in any journal, just presented to the public, and it's up to them to decide whether it's believable or not. This protects it from the professonal scrutiny that is practically the definition of science nowadays, and lends the subject open to biases, misconceptions, spindoctors, and market interests. When bloggers just pull findings out of their backsides, and don't offer up materials, methodologies or sources for double-checking, then it's just as scientific as the Bible. Unfalsifiable. So YES, that does invalidate the science! And if anyone actually volunteers to peer-review Watts' articles, their findings are dismissed, and they are labeled climate alarmists. An airtight system that works for the spindoctor community.

Watts' methods are not scientific, he has an obvious anti-climate change bias, he doesn't attempt to publish any of his research in peer-reviewed journals, he's been misconducting science so many times (technically, he'd have to attempt publication to actually commit fraud. Airtight lies, like I said). What more evidence do you need?

Scientific opinion on climate change
Merchants of Doubt

Have a look at the List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming. Do you understand why Watts isn't even on that list?

 

Since you obviously don't read the links, I'll force you to acknowledge them by posting NASA's links:

1 - The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.

IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5

B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46

Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306

V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141

B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.

2 - The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.

In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth's natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.


3 - Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.

National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.

4 - Sea level rise: Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.

Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded from the CSIRO website.

5 - Global temperature rise: All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ anomalies/index.html

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

6 - Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.

T.C. Peterson et.al., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.

7 - Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.
I. Allison et.al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm

8 - Warming oceans: The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.

Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).

9 - Shrinking ice sheets: The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005. Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.

L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7

R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009

10 - Glacial retreat: Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.

National Snow and Ice Data Center

World Glacier Monitoring Service

11 - Extreme events: The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.

C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371

12 - Ocean acidification: Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent.

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification?

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification

14 - This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.

C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol.

305 (16 July 2004), 367-371

Copenhagen Diagnosis, p. 36.

That makes sense. The occurrence of cyclones has more to do with temperature *gradients*, the lunar cycle, and so on. So their FREQUENCY won't change! Yay, you proved me wrong... except that we weren't talking about FREQUENCY here. Read your own info carefully. Let's reread NASA:
"Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century. The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events."
Higher sea levels mean larger storm surges, warmer oceans mean stronger hurricanes, and more moisture in the atmosphere means more rainfall and thus more flooding.

Peer review is performed by scientific journals in order to screen the quality of papers sent to them for publication. Once published, your paper has entered the records. If your findings turn out to be wrong, then the journal must issue a retraction. Just take a look at the extent of research on the subject conducted in the list above. You and Anthony Watts claim to know better, of course.
No scientist wants their paper retracted. If 90% of the relevant scientists agree that anthropogenic global warming is a real phenomenon, and base their works on that assumption, then 90% of scientists are putting themselves at risk. "You're kidding right?"

Look at your own quote above for an example of cherrypicked information. Data presentation can be manipulated to give a false impression to the public. Only scientists specialized in processing the data in question can evaluate it objectively. But your opinion is that 90% of them are biased.

Oh, for crying out loud! The evidence is all around you. I posted everything from NASA's resource list already. How much handholding do you need to find this elusive evidence? Just open your eyes and read it. Have a look at that greenman3610 youtube page, too. He lists links to the evidence he presents, and usually mentions it in the videos too.

 

Climategate... I guess I can squeeze another half hour of handholding into my work schedule. Here goes:
Have you ever checked the IPCC's side of the story? They were screaming bloody murder trying to get an ounce of publicity to defend themselves, but the media wouldn't give them the time of day. Because the intended result - suckering you so you form your pigheaded opinion on the matter - was achieved, and giving the IPCC people any airtime would only lessen the potency of the 'scandal'.

Climategate was carefully engineered. They hacked IPCC e-mails, cherrypicked a quote with "hide the decline" in it, and on the worldwide news the impression was given that this meant the IPCC was hiding a decline in temperature (actually, 'drop' would be the colloquial prase for lowering temperature, but the spindoctors didn't let it bother them).
Only a small part of the hacked e-mail was presented to the public via the media, but if you had read the entire thing, you'd know that they were referring to masking a decline in tree-ring data reliability, using other temperature records.

Tree ring data has always been one of the most reliable indicators of temperature, up until the last 50 or so years, when something unknown caused tree rings to no longer accurately represent the CO2 level and temperature of the local environment - tree rings are now thinner than to be expected in warm weather. This could be due to the sudden CO2 surge, or all manner of environmental variables - we simply don't know yet. This has been well documented. Using tree ring data to depict recent temperature would give a false cooling trend (decline in data accuracy, not real temperature), due to the thin rings. But real temperature measurements, oceanic temperature, paleopalynology, ice cores, and all the other methods we use, *do* all show the warming trend and rising CO2.

So, IPCC staff wanted to mask the inaccurate tree ring data of the last 50 years with other measurements. This must be done very carefully, because this method would be under a lot of scrutiny [and if the climate denial thinktank kept up-to-date, they might even have anticipated that IPCC staff would be talking about masking bad data, and a 'decline'. maybe they chose exactly the right moment to hack the e-mails, and release the scandal just before a major international climate summit]. And in an internal e-mail, the staff member used careless wording to talk about what he was doing. He has been sharply critisized for his careless choice of words, but how could he have known that words in an internal e-mail would be cherrypicked to engender distrust towards the IPCC?

Nowadays, every idiot and their little brother are convinced that the IPCC are frauds, because of the hoax. I get condescending looks when I talk about global warming, and everyone much prefers the story they heard from a trustworthy-looking man in a suit on the evening news over whatever it is scientists want to say. Nobody is listening. Unless it's a 'trustworthy' website, claiming global warming is a myth. This has become like a minor religion, the way people worship the truthsayers.

90% is a bogus number. It's more like 99% of scientists agree that global warming is man-made and real. The list of real scientists questioning global warming in any way, shape or form is actually very small. Websites like wattsupwiththat concoct stories to make you believe otherwise.

Don't lecture me about reading and comprehension. I already linked to a report of Anthony Watts interview, and NASA's website has all the info you need to check the facts for yourself. The evidence is like a needle in a needle-stack: The only way you won't find any, is if you're deliberately not trying. I don't think you're fooling anybody - not even yourself.

Half hour is up. More butting heads... tomorrow at the earliest!

 

Is it just me or is this thread dripping with arrogance?

Drop all of these websites you are looking at and look for groups that present evidence, possibly geologists can help out here? Ice and sediment core drilling has revealed that the earth goes through periods of warming and cooling, they reveal both long term and short term warming and cooling trends lasting from thousands of years to hundreds of thousands of years long, there is a period between global warming and global cooling called the "interglacial period" we are currently in one of those periods, called 'holocene' this period began roughly 11,500 years ago. The simple fact is that the Earth has gradually been cooling for 50million years and is 6-7'c cooler on average now than when the process began, and 2.6millions years ago was at one of its coolest, the ice sheets were at their largest and the earth experiences an ice age. since then the earth has been warming.
The Sun warms the Earth, heating the tropics most and the poles least. Seasons come and go as the Earth orbits the Sun on its tilted axis. Many factors, interacting on a variety of time scales, drive climate change by altering the amount of the Sun’s heat retained at the Earth’s surface and the distribution of that heat around the planet. Over millions of years the continents move, ocean basins open and close, and mountains rise and fall. All of these changes affect the circulation of the oceans and of the atmosphere. Major volcanic eruptions eject gas and dust high into the atmosphere, causing temporary cooling. Changes in the abundance in the atmosphere of gases such as water vapour, carbon dioxide and methane affect climate through the Greenhouse Effect.
Small but predictable changes in the Earth’s orbit and in the tilt of the Earth’s axis exasberate climate changes, those predictable changes set the pace for the glacial-interglacial cycles of the ice age of the past 2.6 million years. In addition, the heat emitted by the Sun varies with time. Most notably, the 11-year sunspot cycle causes the Earth to warm very slightly when there are more sunspots and cool very slightly when there are few. Complex patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation cause the El Nino events (anomalously warm ocean water temperatures) and related climatic oscillations on the scale of a few years.

Sudden climate change has occured before, About 55 million years ago, at the end of the Paleocene, there was a sudden warming event in which temperatures rose by about 6ºC globally and by 10-20ºC at the poles. Carbon isotopic data show that this warming event was accompanied by a major release of 1500-2000 billion tonnes or more of carbon into the ocean and atmosphere. This injection of carbon may have come mainly from the breakdown of methane hydrates beneath the deep sea floor, perhaps triggered by volcanic activity superimposed on an underlying gradual global warming trend that peaked some 50 million years ago in the early Eocene. CO2 levels were already high at the time, but the additional CO2 injected into the atmosphere and ocean made the ocean even warmer, less well oxygenated and more acidic, and was accompanied by the extinction of many species on the deep sea floor. Similar sudden warming events are known from the more distant past, for example at around 120 and 183 million years ago. In all of these events it took the Earth’s climate around 100,000 years or more to recover, showing that a CO2 release of such magnitude may affect the Earth’s climate for that length of time.
Abrupt shifts in climate can occur over much shorter timescales. Greenland ice cores record that during the last glacial stage (100,000 – 11,500 years ago) the temperature there alternately warmed and cooled several times by more than 10ºC. This was accompanied by major climate change around the northern hemisphere, felt particularly strongly in the North Atlantic region. Each warm and cold episode took just a few decades to develop and lasted for a few hundred years. The climate system in those glacial times was clearly unstable and liable to switch rapidly with little warning between two contrasting states. These changes werealmost certainly caused by changes in the way the oceans transported heat between the hemispheres.

Most estimates agree that there was a significant decrease of CO2 in the atmosphere from more than 1000 ppm at 50 million years ago (during the Eocene) to the range recorded in the ice cores of the past 800,000 years. This decrease in CO2 was probably one of the main causes of the cooling that led to the formation of the great ice sheets on Antarctica. Changes in ocean circulation around Antarctica may also have also played a role in the timing and extent of formation of those ice sheets.
Atmospheric CO2 is currently at a level of 390 ppm. It has increased by one third in the last 200 years. One half of that increase has happened in the last 30 years. This level and rate of increase are unprecedented when compared with the range of CO2 in air bubbles locked in the ice cores (170-300 ppm), it is suggested that the current rate of increase is inline with the rate of increase or the last event of abrupt global warming 183 million years ago.

(This was hand typed from a paper I have from the Geological Society)

So, does man effect global warming? Yes, of course we do, all species do, we more so because of the unnatural pollutants we produce. Is global warming and cooling a natural process? Yes, Ice and sediment core drilling reveales irrefutable evidence that the planet goes through this process naturally.
Will the Co2 levels reach levels required to meet alarmists theories? probably not, for Co2 levels to reach the levels required to raise the planets temperature 6-7'c would take centuries, barring any mitigating factors, our levels will decrease rapidly as fossil fuels dwindle, the human rate of population increase has been dropping since the 50's, the introduction of new incineration techniques vastly decreases the gasses emitted processing waste and heavy industry and recycling technologies have been reducing the overall levels of waste.

I'm not worried about the future, if we all worried about the future we would squander our lives in the present.

 

Thanks for typing all of that out Shoshino.

I have to admit I'd never heard the term alarmist before this thread, I guess because we're really on the front lines of this experiment here in Australia, or as a Dr. from our bureau of meteorology put it, Australia has such a low variability of temperatures, it's a good place to see if temperatures are really changing.

Last year we had to introduce a new colour to our weather maps because temperatures just keep going up. Despite the record flooding in QLD in 2010, 2011 and 2013 (you would have seen it on the news, half the country was underwater, but I'm most familiar with QLD because it's where I live and said floods had me isolated), most of the state is now classified as being in drought.

Anyway here are some of the 123 temperature records that have been broken over the 2012/2013 summer:

 

This may be unproven/pseudo science but I'll stick it out anyway because I have read about it.

It has been suggested that the major earthquake that caused the tsunami in Japan has altered the earth's tilt on its axis, A BBC meteorologist (can't remember her name) suggested that the tilt change could be as much as 16cm, while that is small enough that it won't cause major changes to our weather patterns, it would explain hotter summers and colder winters in countries that are further from the equator, Aus for example.

 

Dripping with arrogance? Probably. It's a topic for which many of us have strong opinions, and feelings. It's my way of letting out my irritation, but I know it's just a step above shouting "You're an idiot!" to your discussion opponent. I'll try to restrain myself more, but no guarantees. BTA as an opinionated poster is good at sparking up my ire.

The facts BTA presents are at odds with the facts I present. This discussion has become a political one, rather than a scientific one. If the parties involved can't even agree on what the facts are, how can we have any useful debate at all?
It's much like how American political discussions are held. Democrats say one thing, the GOP says another. Both believe strongly in what they say, based on the 'facts' known to them. I'd say one of those two parties is closer to the truth than the other, but in the realm of debates, the truth is of little importance.

But for the record: This unproductive debate only serves one side, because the result is inaction.

Your tale of the past ice ages was refreshing and interesting. I remember when I was 15, I didn't have biology for a year at middle school, so I decided to get library books and take notes myself. I read about dinosaurs and all kinds of related fields, including geology. A friend of my parents once visited, and after looking at my notes, he said I had written down more than he had ever had to learn during his study as a geologist.

The warming trend you describe 55ma came just before an ice age that caused mass extinctions. The entire Paleogene period was one one cooling, which contributed to the rise of warm-blooded mammals and birds becoming the dominant animals instead of reptiles.

I do remember that the longest ice age in phanerozoic history was in the devonian period, and lasted as long as 100 million years. It was brought about by overproduction of oxygen by the first land plants - let's just say that the earth still needed to find its atmospheric balance. A lot of the carbon sequestered during that period turned into the oil we pump up today, and re-release into the atmosphere.

But I must take issue with your take-home-message here. You're using a platitude intended for workaholics and others who live too much in the future to enjoy themselves in the present, and you apply it to a global climate issue, where it definitely does help us if we use a bit of foresight and planning.

Global warming and cooling has happened naturally in the past, that is not in dispute. But just because natural processes caused past changes, doesn't mean we can compare it with the man-made warming we are experiencing today.

 

I'll try to respond to the rest of your post tomorrow, but I'm a bit constrained for time.

Just want to explain why this comparison is invalid. Yes, the earth has gone through major climate changes in the past, and always come out of it again. It's important to note that rapid changes were always paired with mass extinctions, and we are generating just such a rapid change. But look at it from our human perspective. The balance we have on this planet is relied on heavily. If climates change, ecosystems are in turmoil, crop yields suffer, and the average person will feel it. This is the main reason why there are so many civil uprisings in places with changing environments, like North Africa.

We as a civilization don't have the patience to wait out changes, and people are almost as sensitive as ecosystems in this regard. We've become so numerous because we fill lots of niches in different ecosystems, but then the whole ecosystem is harmed by rapid climate change, we will suffer. Underground bunkers won't protect against it.

 

coin, at least one of your references was proven wrong a couple of years ago. It seems the increase in temperature had more to do with the placement of asphalt in the parking lots below the point of measure and the overall increase in concrete used in the area then the actual increase in a large scale warming.

Once these things were accounted for only a few of the highest temperatures were recorded in the past twenty years.

I'm not disagreeing with the postulate that we are affecting the environment only that the issue of "pseudo-science" and misinterpreting data is a problem on both sides of the argument. The unwillingness of the 'climate change' crowd to see other effects which can explain the phenomena we are seeing really causes the overall arguments to be weakened. They're not quite on the Fleishmann/Pons scale of ridiculous research claims but it seems way too close at times.

 

Can you link to the study, please?

What you describe puts into question this study from the list:
T.C. Peterson et.al., "State of the Climate in 2008," Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.

I'd be interested if you could prove that NASA hasn't updated its statements yet. The graph lists temperatures up to July 2013, so this page must be kept well updated. If what you say is true, it would indicate that NASA is biased, ignoring new studies. Let's see what T2 comes up with...