One answer

to my four questions. There is no such thing as the normal, ideal global temperature because it has changed continuously for millenniums but all you will get from the AGW crown is dogma and Al Gore as its oracle. The scream that skeptics have been paid 10 Million dollars for their studies and are willing to sell out their reputations for chump change yet they fail to mentions that AGW proponents have received 50 Billion dollars for their false research which is being disproven brick by brick everyday.

They will not mention that James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing Global Warming, giving money to Kerry etal received $250,000 from Teresa Heinz Kerry through her Heinz Foundation. But don't accuse him of being a political hack just because he screwed up the latest data and refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves. All with public Government funds. But anyone who tries to refute the findings and review the so-called consensus are vilified as "deniers' and threatened if they don't just STFU.

In the meantime, the common people are supposed to change their lifestyles and lower their standard of living while the the priest and priestesses of the Church of Gaia offer to sell the indulgences to the sinners in the form of Carbon Credits or Offsets so that they may continue to sin but feel better about it while telling the rest of us to walk and eat less.

Four Questions.

1. What is the accepted "Normal" temperature of the globe?
2. What is considered the "Ideal" temperature of the globe?
3. Why?
4. According to who based on what "Settled Facts"?

The answer to these questions would do a lot in convincing me to change my opinion. According to some of the AGW crowd, if I am reading it right, it is a damned good thing we killed off all those wretched CO2, methane producing Bison in the 1800s, otherwise we may have cooked long ago.

Wheels coming off of Global Warming Wagon...Updated

There is going to be a lot of egg on faces and crow consumed it seems. First let's take a look at this revealing study. The authors just don't know how really revealing it is.Natural forces offset global warming last two years: study

Natural weather variations have offset the effects of global warming for the past couple of years and will continue to keep temperatures flat through 2008, a study released Thursday said.

But global warming will begin in earnest in 2009, and a couple of the years between 2009 and 2014 will eclipse 1998, the warmest year on record to date [proven to be false just this week-ed. see below], in the heat stakes, British meteorologists said.

Existing global climate computer models tend to underestimate the effects of natural forces on climate change, so for this analysis, Met Office experts tweaked their model to better reflect the impact of weather systems such as La Nina, or fluctuations in ocean heat and circulation.

Instead of using approximations, they used real data on the state of the ocean and the atmosphere to generate forecasts of climate change for the decade beginning in 2005 and running through 2014.

The projections suggested that while man-made greenhouse gases would raise temperatures over the long run, cooler water in the tropical Pacific and a resistance to warming in the Southern Ocean would counteract the effect of global warming in the early years of the decade.

The findings fit with the weather patterns seen so far, said Doug Smith, a research scientist at the UK's national weather service, the Met Office, in Exeter, Devon.

To test the accuracy of their new and improved computer model, Smith and his colleagues decided to run a series of "hindcasts," or forecasts for the years 1982-2001.

The new model yielded far more accurate "projections" for global surface temperatures than the previous model, Smith said.

The paper appears in the journal Science.

The editors write this:

"Stirrings in the North Atlantic Ocean today that have nothing to do with the strengthening greenhouse-just natural jostlings of the climate system-could lead to drought in Africa's Sahel in a decade or two, they recognized. ... until now, climate forecasters who worry about what greenhouse gases could be doing to climate have ignored what's happening naturally. Most looked 100 years ahead, far enough so that they could safely ignore what's happening now. No more. In this week's issue, researchers take their first stab at forecasting climate a decade ahead with current conditions in mind. The result is a bit disquieting. Natural climate variability driven by the ocean appears to have held greenhouse warming at bay the past few years ..."

And then for good measure add this in order to not be excommunicated from the new Church.

"but the warming, according to the forecast, should come roaring back before the end of the decade..." [italics added]

Now about that statement that 1998 was the hottest year recorded. 1998 was not the hottest year; that distinction goes to the year 1934. Here's the nut of the whole thing from Anthony Watts:

Here's a story of scientific investigation and discovery I'm proud to have had a small part in.

Regular readers may remember that I posted about a climate station in Detroit Lakes MN last week, surveyed by volunteer Don Kostuch, and cross posted it to the website http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1828#comments that had two air conditioner units right next to it. It looked like an obvious cause and effect because in 1999 on May 5th, it was determined that the a/c units were moved off the roof of the radio station where this station resides and moved them to the ground where the temperature sensor is close by.

Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the "corrected" data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data..

Here is one of his first posts where he begins to understand what is happening. "This imparts an upward discontinuity of a deg C in wintertime and 0.8 deg C annually. I checked the monthly data and determined that the discontinuity occurred on January 2000 - and, to that extent, appears to be a Y2K problem. I presume that this is a programming error."

He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error, and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem...

He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data which you can see here:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

Steve McIntyre posted this data from NASA's newly published data set from Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) These numbers represent deviation from the mean temperature calculated from temperature measurement stations throughout the USA.

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900. (World rankings of temperature are calculated separately.)

So James Hansen, who claimed Bush was politicizing Global Warming, refused to provide his algorithms to other researchers so they could simply check his work, hiding his own errors from them and distorting the science he claims to care about oh-so-much until some persistent researchers went to the great trouble of reconstructing his algorithms themselves. Need I say read the whole thing?

For even more thoughts on this hoax/scam/dogma/religion/science, try here, here and here. I have much more and am suffering from overload. This just keeps getting better and better. An aside to Al Gore, would you like that crow baked or fried?

Update: Coyote Blog has some more information and several good links in the post. He also points us to two more posts of his that are worth reading.
"For more, please see my Guide to Anthropogenic Global Warming or, if you have less time, my 60-second argument for why one should be skeptical of catastrophic man-made global warming theory." Good information there for all of us heretics and blasphemers.

NYT...Get your terrorist tips here in one handy spot.

Mind Boggling
Blog solicits ideas for terrorists on how to be the most effective. Truly freaking amazing.
Update: Some more mind boggling goodies, this time from the left coast LAT.