Science it seems, IS a contact sport

There is a book out just now of the same name as I have said above. It's coming to me from "Santa", so I'll let you know what it's like. 

What is unseasonally uncharitable, and gets my f'ing goat is dirt being used to fight a climate battle. It's an old pattern. In AFL here in aus there is the saying go the ball, not the man. Saying - you should always try and get the football, get the possession and then do something to score points. NOT hit the other guy. It's a negative way to win a game, and it damages you, the game, them. Nobody really wins. 

So too it seems is the hacking of the CRU and spreading emails of Phil Jones. Check this open letter from Ben Santer (realclimate.org) for more:

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/details/ben_santer_open_letter/&nbsp;<br>

Stop the nonsense. The planet is warming and the copenhagen thing is just the icing on the cake. It seems my grandkids will be MUCH worse off than me.

'The Inconvenient Fact' - really?

I just read an article in "The Age" here in melbourne that showed senator fielding with a graph of 'the inconvenient fact' showing that the last decade has shown no change in temperature and yet there has been a change in CO2.

The graph - available  here shows the senators point.

RealClimate.org discussess global mean tempature and the anomoly here:

I don't understand all of it. But what I wanted to see was more than a decades worth of data of temperature. My understanding is - there's been 55 million years or so of temperature rise. Is the last decade indicative? Is there a lag in CO2/temperature etc.

Apparently a guy called hansen presented to the US congress and then revised predictions in 2006. Here's the graph I like and believe shows that temperature has changed over the last 40 years at least, along with CO2 and so IS NOT an inconvenient fact.

See the CO2 emissions one from the report from Garnaut:

To be really conclusive, I would like to see the temperature data before 1960 to see how it rose or not.

Let me know what you think

Climate Change - how to understand it?

I've been trying to decide my opinion on Climate Change. My instinct says that yes the climate is being altered by man made processes and we need to go towards sustainable least environmental impact business practices.

But what does the science and data say? What is the right policy decision? I'm trying to read various reports to get a sense of it. Why does Tony Abbot think it's "Crap"? What did Garnaut originally propose? What does the "intergovernmental panel on climate change" do? What is AR4 and AR5? and what were the East Anglia emails all about?

I haven't read enough. that's for sure. But - here's the deal as I understand it. Firstly, there are a bunch of gases - carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide ( see p26 of the garnaut final report). these gases cause the effect of warming the average global temperature which causes changes in the climate - longer hot spells, more extreme events.

If the parts per million of these gases is not held at a certain level we will have more than 2 degrees change in the temperature by 2015. The increase in ocean height from more water will be to go up enough to put bangladesh and the maldives underwater.

Wow.

The argument is about how much each country should reduce their emissions by, and, if you're developing and can't afford the bigger price for cleaner tech, then the developed world should pay for you.

That's hard and I'm not going to address it here.

In fact it's too late - I need to go to bed. I'll come back to this and address my thought issues later.