You're entitled to your opinions, but without supporting facts it's just fantasy, so maybe you could try a root cause exposition of what makes the planet to warm. I'll help you with one to start you off. Reduced spring/summer snow cover on the Northern Hemisphere and more dark ocean in the Arctic region due disappearance of ice cover, both of high albedo. Opposed to clouds that move (4% more vapor content in atmosphere, residency ~9 days, used to be ~10), those are static changes... the sun always sneaks in-between.

Looking forward to a root cause list (not "we don't know enough" escape clauses)

--//--

P.S. Through August 25, SORCE shows the sun to have been 0,00849836% below 2003. I'd say that's not far from the mean constant [data supported], regardless of lacking sunspots, so far 41.6 for 2011, 63.6 for 2003.

today the wind peaked at 33 1/3 mph

LP speed

Absolutely right Gerald

Only Politics not Science

I can place as many reasons in front of Sek and his ilk as to why the Climate warmed throughout the 20th Century and it is dismissed as just "fantasy" and yet it is claimed that the change we have seen so far and will onward in to the future will be caused by the gas that makes up 1/2551 of the atmosphere.

That part of the atmosphere that feeds us and makes up our physical being - the fundamental part of all Organic Chemistry.

And I am the fantasist

To expand the ''ilk'' reference, this is how it's understood in modern talk: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ilk


"bad or questionable character"... sits well on the tongue, and could illicit a retort, but it's one not to get wasted.

--//--

May I be so bold as to suggest that the root causes might be deduced from the following historical reports...

For at least 115 years, climate experts have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us - but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming.

* 1895 - Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again - New York Times, February 1895
* 1902 - "Disappearing Glaciers .. deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation .. scientific fact .. surely disappearing." Los Angeles Times
* 1912 - Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age - New York Times, October 1912
* 1922 - "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish And Icebergs Melt" The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulafft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Washington Post Nov 2 1922
* 1923 - "Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada" - Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, - Chicago Tribune
* 1923 - "The discoveries of changes in the sun's heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age" - Washington Post
* 1924 - MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age - New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
* 1929 - "Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer" - Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
* 1932 - "If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age" - The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
* 1933 - America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise - New York Times, March 27th, 1933
* 1933 " .. wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather .. Is our climate changing?" - Federal Weather Bureau "Monthly Weather Review."
* 1938 - Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. - Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
* 1938 - "Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise .. Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities throughout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades" - Chicago Tribune
* 1939 - "Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right .. weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer" - Washington Post
* 1952 - " .. we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century" - New York Times, August 10th, 1962
* 1954 - " .. winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing" - U.S. News and World Report
* 1954 - Climate - The Heat May Be Off - Fortune Magazine
* 1959 - "Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures" - New York Times
* 1969 - " .. the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two" - New York Times, February 20th, 1969
* 1970 - " .. get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters - the worst may be yet to come .. there's no relief in sight" - Washington Post
* 1974 - Global cooling for the past forty years - Time Magazine
* 1974 - "Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age" - Washington Post
* 1974 - "As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed" - Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
* 1974 - " .. the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure, mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence" - New York Times
* 1975 - Scientists Ponder Why World's Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable - New York Times, May 21st, 1975
* 1975 - "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind" - Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
* 1976 - "Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend." - U.S. News and World Report
* 1981 - Global Warming .. "of an almost unprecedented magnitud" - New York Times
* 1988 - I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that the greenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. - Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, (see His later quote and His superior's objection for context)
* 1989 - "On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This "double ethical bind" we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.â" - Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
* 1990 - "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy" - Senator Timothy Wirth
* 1993 - "Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture." - U.S. News and World Report
* 1998 - "No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world." - Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
* 2001 - "Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible." - Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
* 2003 - Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as synthetic fuels, shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration" - Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
* 2006 - "I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis." - Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006

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Seems to me that historically humans have absolutely no ability to accurately predict natural climate variation.
However I do suspect that the root cause is indicated particularly in the 1989, 1990, 1998 & 2006 entries.

I make special note of the rather warm 1922 entry. If super tankers/bulk carriers existed then they would have clearly sailed the Northern Passage in ice free blue seas - just as they do now. 81degN is a very long way north of the land mass.(Reference the shipping debate a few pages back..)

Cheers
Toss

Dear oh dear Sek

Now we are nit picking


for ilk read type

as for causes and cause this is a bulletin board not a peer reviewed paper


As for peer reviewed papers I'll leave you with this

something to mull over

http://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/3/9/2002/pdf

Why has the paper mentioned in the paper caused an editor to resign when the scientific process is one of refining our knowledge

On Climate I'm with toss it's a science in it's infancy and the science is far from settled


As well as minute changes in concentration of a trace gas responsible for the entire food chain.

(Just add water sunlight and a very special group of molecules collectively called Chlorophyll http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorophyll

and what do you get have read here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthesis)

Other cause(s) of climate changes include

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/30/earths-...with-draft-link-tutorial/

possibly the best single page for broadening your horizons while observing the earths climate

Night folks from a distinctly Autumnal UK

Dave