The idea that the world is now cooling has been repeated in opinion columns, talk radio, pundit television and more. After a poll was released last week indicating that only 57 percent of Americans now believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, which is down from 77 percent in 2006, Seth Borenstein [...]

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It's good that a journalist got professionals to actually check the numbers, but I would have to say that anyone who looks at a graph of global temperature over time:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/...emp_change.jpg

And concludes that the earth is cooling, is someone who is exceptionally incompetent at interpreting graphical information.

Interesting. However, given that the Roman Period and Medieval Period were both, most likely, several degrees warmer than current temperatures, this gives us a bit of room yet.

You seem misinformed about the Roman period and medieval warm period. You might want to check out the wikipedia article on the medieval warm period:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

A change of several degrees centigrade in average global temperatures results in large scale climate change. The difference between a glacial period and an interglacial can be as little as four degrees.

Yeah {rolls eyes} wikipedia.com as the final truth in paleoweather.

(1000-1991): P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett, and S.F.B. Tett (1998). , The Holocene, 8: 455-471. doi:10.1191/095968398667194956

(1000-1980): M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes (1999). , Geophysical Research Letters, 26(6): 759-762.

(1000-1965): Crowley and Lowery (2000). , Ambio, 29: 51-54. Modified as published in Crowley (2000). , Science, 289: 270-277. doi:10.1126/science.289.5477.270

(1402-1960): K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov (2001). , J. Geophys. Res., 106: 2929-2941.

(831-1992): J. Esper, E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber (2002). , Science, 295(5563): 2250-2253. doi:10.1126/science.1066208.

(200-1980): M.E. Mann and P.D. Jones (2003). , Geophysical Research Letters, 30(15): 1820. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814.

(200-1995): P.D. Jones and M.E. Mann (2004). , Reviews of Geophysics, 42: RG2002. doi:10.1029/2003RG000143

(1500-1980): S. Huang (2004). , Geophys. Res Lett., 31: L13205. doi:10.1029/2004GL019781

(1-1979): A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén (2005). , Nature, 443: 613-617. doi:10.1038/nature03265

(1600-1990): J.H. Oerlemans (2005). , Science, 308: 675-677. doi:10.1126/science.1107046

(1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the w:Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v [2] was used.


There you go. Enjoy your final truthiness.

There is no doubt that there is a general warming trend globally. And what people don't seem to understand is that in the early stages of global warming, regional weather becomes very erratic. It's not a gradual, uniform warming of the planet. In any given region you could have below freezing temperatures one day and temperatures in the 70's the next. Storms tend to be more frequent and more violent.

As a result of having studied the Jurassic period in great depth, during which the supercontinent Pangaea was divided by a rift which we now call the mid-Atlantic ridge and unimaginable volcanic activity ensued as a result, pouring equally unimaginable amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn warmed the planet enough to allow methane to be extricated from its frozen form of methane hydrate in the oceans, I know that each and every day, violent thunderstorms occurred around the globe as a result of this volcanically induced global warming during this period. And I'm not talking about the kind of thunderstorms that any of us have ever experienced. I'm talking about thunderstorms so powerful that they were comparable in energy to a category 5 hurricane today. I'd also be willing to bet that more dinosaurs were killed by lightning strikes than any other cause. This is the greenhouse effect in its latter stages. And at this time, our global climate was on the verge of a runaway process or galloping greenhouse effect and was in danger of becoming like that of our sister planet, Venus. It was so warm that you could swim in the then tepid waters of Antarctica.

But, that's not what we're talking about here. What we're experiencing is the early stages of global warming, which has been steadily increasing since the advent of the industrial revolution as the graph, graciously provided by Ronald Brak, shows.

Now, because our sun is a little late in its 11 year cycle, it is true that this will have a cooling effect which will to some degree mitigate the warming effects of greenhouse gas emissions temporarily. But, the net effect of this has merely bought us a little bit more time, and that is all.

We still don't really understand the natural rhythms of our own planet over very long periods of time, and I'm talking over billions of years. We still don't know very much about what happened during the Hadean. And yet we are quite dramatically influencing these rhythms with very little understanding of them. At best, that is a very foolish and dangerous thing to do.

Eric

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Thank you for the links.