Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

has warming taken place? Yes
is it going to continue? maybe, maybe not since the world is cooling since 1998 and the sun is entering a low activity cycle
whats causing it?

Man + sun and nobody knows for sure which does what
how much hotter? Most likely range 1 to 11°C (!)
Does it matter? Yes, but much less than debt, poverty, malaria, immigration, lack of drinking water...
Why does it matter? Because the mass media said so
Should we care? Yes, but much less than debt, poverty, malaria, immigration, lack of drinking water...

What should we do? nothing as yet accept being well informed.

is it going to continue? maybe, maybe not since the world is cooling since 1998 and the sun is entering a low activity cycle
whats causing it? Man + sun and nobody knows for sure which does what
how much hotter? Most likely range 1 to 11°C (!)

Okay, again The Guardian ...

Arctic meltdown is speeding up... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before... polar bears face extinction... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet

Quote:

... polar bears face extinction...

THE world's polar bear population is on the increase despite global warming, which scientists had believed was pushing the animal towards extinction.

According to new research, the numbers of the giant predator have grown by between 15 and 25 per cent over the last decade.

Please help me understand how you can believe at the same time in the first line and the last line of this quote. Obviously "the most likely range is 1 to 11 °C of warming" is a little stronger than "maybe [warming is going to continue], maybe not".

Global warming: Will the Sun come to our rescue?

We may have one last chance to tackle climate change, and it comes from the unlikeliest source, as New Scientist discovers

It is known as the Little Ice Age. Bitter winters blighted much of the northern hemisphere for decades in the second half of the 17th century. The French army used frozen rivers as thoroughfares to invade the Netherlands. New Yorkers walked from Manhattan to Staten Island across the frozen harbour. Sea ice surrounded Iceland for miles and the island's population halved. It wasn't the first time temperatures had plunged: a couple of hundred years earlier, between 1420 and 1570, a climatic downturn claimed the Viking colonies on Greenland, turning them from fertile farmlands into arctic wastelands.

Could the sun have been to blame? We now know that, curiously, both these mini ice ages coincided with prolonged lulls in the sun's activity - the sunspots and dramatic flares that are driven by its powerful magnetic field.

Now some astronomers are predicting that the sun is about to enter another quiet period.

Global cooling could develop on Earth in 50 years and have serious consequences before it is replaced by a period of warming in the early 22nd century, a Russian Academy of Sciences' astronomical observatory's report says, the RIA Novosti news agency reported Friday.

The denial industry

The oil giant ExxonMobil gives money to scores of organisations that claim the science on global warming is inconclusive - which it isn't. It's a strategy that has set back action on climate change by a decade, and it involves the same people who insist that passive smoking is harmless, reveals George Monbiot in the first of three extracts from his new book

ExxonMobil is the world's most profitable corporation. Its sales now amount to more than $1bn a day. It makes most of this money from oil, and has more to lose than any other company from efforts to tackle climate change. To safeguard its profits, ExxonMobil needs to sow doubt about whether serious action needs to be taken on climate change. But there are difficulties: it must confront a scientific consensus as strong as that which maintains that smoking causes lung cancer or that HIV causes Aids. So what's its strategy?

The website Exxonsecrets.org, using data found in the company's official documents, lists 124 organisations that have taken money from the company or work closely with those that have. These organisations take a consistent line on climate change: that the science is contradictory, the scientists are split, environmentalists are charlatans, liars or lunatics, and if governments took action to prevent global warming, they would be endangering the global economy for no good reason. The findings these organisations dislike are labelled "junk science". The findings they welcome are labelled "sound science".
Among the organisations that have been funded by Exxon are such well-known websites and lobby groups as TechCentralStation, the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. Some of those on the list have names that make them look like grassroots citizens' organisations or academic bodies: the Centre for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, for example. One or two of them, such as the Congress of Racial Equality, are citizens' organisations or academic bodies, but the line they take on climate change is very much like that of the other sponsored groups. While all these groups are based in America, their publications are read and cited, and their staff are interviewed and quoted, all over the world.

Nice book cover, though.

And why I think it may or may not be warming ? Because of this:

New Scientist

None of this means that we can stop worrying about global warming caused by emissions into the atmospher. "The temperature of the earth in the past few decades does not correlate with solar activity at all" Solanki says. He estimates that solar activity is responsible for only 30 percent at most, of the warming since 1970. The rest must be the result of man made greenhouse gasses, and a crash in solar activity wont do anything to get rid of them.....

There is a dangerous flip side to this coin. I global warming does slow down or partially reverse with a sunspot crash, industrial polluters and reluctant nations could use it as a justification for turning their backs on pollution controls altogether, making matters worse in the long run. There is no room for complacency, Svalgaard warns: "If the earth does cool during the next sunspot crash and we do nothing, when the suns magnetic activity returns, global warming will return with a vengeance.

[Is that your policy minitax? To do nothing about global warming on the assumption that sunspot activity will crash and offset some of it...by a mechanism which is still not fully understood? Supposing it doesnt crash? Supposing it does but it has no affect?

Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

The scientists also strongly criticise the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as "inaccurate and misleading".

The Royal Society now gets tough with EXXON:

Royal Society tells Exxon: stop funding climate change denial

Quote:

Britain's leading scientists have challenged the US oil company ExxonMobil to stop funding groups that attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.

In an unprecedented step, the Royal Society, Britain's premier scientific academy, has written to the oil giant to demand that the company withdraws support for dozens of groups that have "misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence".

The scientists also strongly criticise the company's public statements on global warming, which they describe as "inaccurate and misleading".

Steve 41oo wrote:

[Is that your policy minitax? To do nothing about global warming on the assumption that sunspot activity will crash and offset some of it...by a mechanism which is still not fully understood? Supposing it doesnt crash? Supposing it does but it has no affect?

Is that your policy Steve? To do "things" about global warming on the asumption that it would be catastrophic by a mechanism not fully understood and by disastrous in theory but never observed consequences? Suppose it doesn't warm? Suppose the models have it wrong like they had it wrong (see graph) Suppose that it cools like during the little ice age ?

Global warming is true, but humans arent causing it. Science has proven this.