Do you believe Greenland's glaciers are melting?

@Frank52 The common mistake is that we think we can completely control our environment. News Flash! We can't control the weather or the climate or the Sun or the Earth's magnetosphere or the amount of plant food in the atmosphere. The only constant is change. Always has and always will.

@hippyjoe1955 Let's not exaggerate.

[quote]...we think we can completely control our environment.[/quote]

Of course we can't. We can, however, and do have an effect. Look at the smog over cities on some days. It is the reduction of harmful activity in our atmosphere that is under discussion not trying to affect the Sun.

@Frank52 Let me ask you a question. If you were going to measure the CO2 in the atmosphere where would you do it?

@hippyjoe1955 Personally I wouldn't. I am not a scientist.

@Frank52 Well pretend you are one. How would you measure the CO2 levels in the atmosphere? Would you take a reading on the freeways of LA? Would you take the reading in the boreal forest in northern Canada? Would you expect the two readings to be the same?

@hippyjoe1955 In my ignorance I would say that above a certain height because of the movement of air mass the atmosphere blends across the globe, so what's underneath becomes immaterial. I would be happy to be instructed otherwise by a qualified person.

@Frank52 Hippy is right in so far as expecting different local CO2 levels, but weather systems are very large and move vast amounts of the lower atmosphere over huge distances. For example, even a typical, relatively benign, North Atlantic [i]weather[/i]-system drive n by the present [i]climate[/i], will cover the British Isles in one go.

So for world-wide climate-change research the atmosphere would be examined by taking very many measurements over the years, in the Canadian forests, in Los Angeles, but also in very many other situations world-wide; comparing them with reliable past records, and analysing both the regional and the overall trends.

At the same time, a lot of other scientists are studying the recent geological record to establish what the Earth's climate actually has been doing over the past million years or so, to estimate as far as possible what we might expect it to be doing in this millennium if left to its own devices. These studies include deep ice-cores, stalagmite and sediment deposits in caves, and sea-floor silt (natural archives [i]par excellence[/i]).

'

I have not seen it mentioned much anywhere but I wonder if some people dismiss climate-change because they are mystified by why the concern over an apparently insignificant [i]temperature[/i] rise and its adjectives - [i]mean[/i], [i]world-wide [/i], [i]<2ºC[/i].

Temperature and Heat: parallel to your pointing out the confusion between climate and weather.

A tiny [i]temperature [/i]rise, but representing a vast amount of extra [i]heat[/i] held by the land and sea. As this energy drives the climate, increasing it increases extremes of weather on top of sufficient regional warming to hasten ice-retreat.

@ArishMell I don't know if you noticed it or not but all the elevated heat registered is well within the margin of error so what they do is assign temperatures to regions where there is no actual measurement being taken. Sub Saharan Africa is a prime location. No thermometers but temperatures recorded and surprise surprise surprise all those temperatures are higher than the recorded ones. Hmmmm

@hippyjoe1955 So you are saying the world's meteorological organisations, including the UK's Met. Office and the USA's NASA, are colluding in dishonesty?

@ArishMell Pretty much. I have much more evidence of that than I do for climate change. There was a law suit launched here in Canada. One of the big name 'changers' was suing one of the big name 'deniers'. The denier asked the court to order the 'changer' to provide his raw data so the case could be settled. The 'changer' refused the court order and lost the court case. The settlement ordered by the court is going to cost the 'changer' millions of dollars. Now what reputable scientist would refuse to provide his raw data? BTW you did hear about the email scandal of a number of years ago that showed the 'changers' in a very very bad light. They were emailing each other about how to alter the data.

@hippyjoe1955 I didn't know about that case, nor do I know its details, so I don't know why the scientist concerned would not submit his data. All I can think is that he considered making one researcher present only his raw data (not peer-reviewed results) would be very unfair and likely to bias the trial - and I would agree with that principle. I assume his opponent had a stack of his own data to present?

I vaguely recall something about the e-mail scandal.

Oh I am sure there are cheats on both sides, driven by commerce or politics presumably; but you can't tar an entire case, for or against, with the same brush.

Unfortunately the word "denier" has become so loaded and devalued it has become a term of abuse in a very binary For/Against division at risk of being exploited by vested interests, that must make rational debate among scientists themselves very hard.

@ArishMell No. His data is widely cited and was at the root of the lawsuit. He started the lawsuit and when forced to back up his assertions - refused. If I were to sue you for misrepresenting my data and you asked for my data I would gladly give the court the data in order to win the law suit. If I failed to produce the data and so lost the case and the millions of dollars needed to cover my adversary's legal costs...... Yeah data is being fudged big time.

@hippyjoe1955 If we don't know what the data were we can't judge them, and I can understand that scientist's reluctance swaying the case even if his findings were actually all correct and impartial.

@ArishMell And if his data is all fake and easily proved as such therefore he is hiding it from other scientists equally qualified to examine the data..... Sorry but in science you don't hide your data. You release your data so others can examine and try to replicate your findings. One of the big knocks on physiology is the test can not be replicated therefore the theory is much more supposition than fact. Imagine if you will someone saying I created a vacuum at sea level and I dropped a steel ball inside of it and measured its acceleration. It is 6.2 M/S2. (Meters per second squared) When questioned about how he did his measurements and other aspects of his experiment he refused to release his data or methodology. Is he an actual scientist or just some sort of crank? When I went to school dropping a steel ball in a vacuum at sea level gave you an acceleration of 9.8 M/S2.