Are you saying that because methane is renewable that natural gas is a bio-fuel? This seems to be the implication of your argument. Methane from land fill etc can jackets for men | winter coats for women | bolero jacket | flak jacket | be harvested but bio ethanol is distilled specifically as a bio fuel and is commercially available. I'm not sure there's commercially available bio methane. Natural gas is not distilled but mined from natural gas wells, shale or coal seams. Natural gas while mailnly methane is not bio methane. Holden produces vehicles that can operate on bio fuels.

Sulphur dioxide is a pollutant that reduces temperature. Some of the geo engineering persuasion think it, or something like it could be used to counter global warming.

This gas, other pollutants and dust are the reason that volcanos have a net cooling effect despite the CO2 they emit.

I doubt there is a coherent (scientific) explanation for the effect of Big Bertha on the weather and would not waste too much time on it.

We do have good measurements of the interaction of many gases including CO2 and SO2 with solar radiation; much more interest here for the truly skeptical to be informed and to be able to debunk odd theories on climate change.

Central England temperature records may be interesting, but we're talking about global averages.  

We're also talking about heat storage away from where it directly affects atmosphere temperature - oceans, and ice caps.  CSIRO's John Church is lead author on recently published paper "Revisiting the Earth's sea level and energy budgets from 1961 to 2008", Geophysical Research Letters, v.38, L18601 (downloadable via link from http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/sl_pubs_peer.html).

I'm perfectly aware that sea ice melting doesn't directly affect sea levels, but the disappearance of fringing pack ice allows terrestrial glaciers to accelerate.  It also allows absorbtion of solar radiation by polar oceans where pack ice previously reflected it away.

Further, terrestrial icecaps are now net losers of ice - all of them, even East Antarctica.  

The ensuing sea level rise will make losers of many of us, especially owners of Gold Coast real estate, island residents and Bangladeshis.

BTW, I'm not rewriting climate history, it's just that there are aspects of the same of which you seem unaware.

Ian. Can I point out that Central England is not the globe.

There is a reason why science is not done by anecdote but by rigorous examination of the data. 

I am surprised that you did not mention the "bloke on the beach" much loved by the editors of The Australian as refutation of sea level rise.

Before you re-write the earth's climatic history, have a look at the Central England temperature record, 1659-2010 (you can find it on the net). Download the data and do your own assessment. You will find that the little ice age you mistakenly think I mean, ended around 1700, short term rises and falls occur intermittently and temps generally began rising, about 1 deg  through to present day. That warming all due to man made CO2? - ridiculous.

As for SO2 emissions - reminds me of the stories my parents related about WW1 - the very heavy and extended rain through that time was all due to the Germans' Big Bertha guns!

Re polar ice melting inundating coastal regions - sea ice is irrelevant, Greenland's losses are not severe and in the Antarctic, Western Peninsula ice  is decreasing and is underlain by an active volcanic chain, whilst in Central and Eastern Antarctica ice is increasing at a faster rate. Again why the fuss?

I hope this helps alleviate your confusion.

Denis Frith, do you propose that we keep burning fossil fuels and spend our money on getting ready for climate change?

If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.

We have to do both. Switch to much lower dependance on fossil fuels, that allows us to stabilise the CO2 concentration at a low enough level that we don't have runaway climate change either way. AND we need to be preparing for the climate change that is already in train. Any slacking on the former will only make the latter even more expensive. The cost of the former pales in comparison to the cost of the latter.

All the greenhouse gases we emit from now on make the problem bigger, and push us into more risk of even worse climate change.

Homo sapiens devised the means to let the fossil fuel genie out of its box in order to sup on its energy. The powerful in society did not understand that an unintended consequence was the initiation of irreversibble rapid global warming. They did not hear the warnings from climatologists above the rustling of dollars for decades. Now the politicians are trying to convince the public that they are able to come up with realsitic policies. It is a con. Australia cutting back on emissions will not slow climate change down one iota. The global rate of emissions is increasing rapidly despite the rhetoric. Yet, even if the grobal rate were to decreas rapidly, all that would do is slow down the increase in atmosphereic temperature and the acidification of the ocean. Irrevocable climate change is under way and the public should be warned of this stark reality so they will support sound meadures to adapt to what is bound to happen. We do not want future generations to wonder how it was that our current leaders were so stupid as to suggest the could propose policies that would stop the unstopable.

Gday Bill, you note that the record increase in greenhouse gas emissions in recent times is not highly correlated with the current temperature trends, and ask why?  

The answer, Bill, is that it's due to a combination of a number of factors.

1.  Increase in reflection of incoming solar radiation due to Chinese SO2 emissions.  The Good News is that China is now desulphurising its flue gases to ameliorate its acid rain problem, so we'll start to see the full warming effect of CO2 emitted to date.

2.  Heat storage in oceans and in accelerating melting of icecaps.  Google the former, and have a read of Rignot et al, "Acceleration of the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise", Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 38, L05503, doi:10.1029/2011GL046583, 2011, for the latter.

Perhaps your biometry lecturer could read and comment on this also?. 

Gday John Goldsworthy, the science of gravity isn't settled; despite Einstein's advance on Newton, we don't actually understand what gravity IS, and nor has an adequate description of gravity been developed in the context of quantum mechanics.  

Because the science isn't settled, your logic argues that we could all jump off cliffs.  I encourage you to be the first to demonstrate the unsettlement of the pertinent science.

"The planet is coming out of an ice age ..."  No, it isn't.  It came out of the last Ice Age at the start of this Holocene warm period, 11,000-14,000 years ago.  The 'Little Ice Age' you're probably thinking of was the cold period from 16th-19th centuries.  If anything, it is more likely that the Little Ice WOULD HAVE BEEN the start of the next real Ice Age, except that humans invented the Industrial Age, and warmed the planet back up.  

Our problem is that we have taken that reheating too far, and need to get atmospheric CO2 back to less than 350 ppm ASAP, else polar ice melting will inundate much coastal infrastructure. 

After that, we would be wise to maintain atmospheric CO2 above 300 ppm so as to avoid refreezing to another Ice Age.

The period of stable temperature from WW2 to 1970's is explained by use of high-sulfur fossil fuel - SO2 emissions created sunlight reflecting sulfate aerosols.  The same thing has occurred since 2000 thanks to Chinese SO2 emissions (recall how polluted China's air is?).    Trouble is, this leads to acid rain; that's why the Western world cut its SO2 emissions in the 1980's, leaving skies clear enough for rapid heating due to elevated CO2 content.  

I hope this helps alleviate your confusion.

Thanks for the link. I like it.

Had a look at your chart link - I noice it uses GISS data edited by Dr James Hansen of curious predictions in the past. I see that the chart shows a warming trend of approx 0.4 degrees from the 1910s' to the early 1940s', a slight cooling of 0.1 degrees to the mid 1970s', a warming again of c0.5 degrees to late 1990s' (at the same rate as earlier, CO2 notwithstanding) and then a stillstand to present. Roughly 30 year cycles presently - if that continues,  we can look forward to another 20 years of similar to the 2000s'

What;s all the fuss about? The planet is coming out of an ice age and has a couple of degrees or more to go to get to the long term planetary temperature. Correlation over the last 50 years with CO2 is just that, and not causation.

John Goldsworthy, your posts are a good example of why I am quite happy going to experts for surgery for me and my farm machinery. We have to live with self opinionated lay people in a democracy, and I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, only that for important scientific matters I prefer to rely on educated experts (and a 97%+ majority of them is fine by me) rather than mere bloggers, no matter how self rightously correct the bloggers seem to think they are.

Thanks for your posts Bernard Walsh, I always enjoy reading them.

Which only goes to show that the science is far from settled.  The human race only occupies 1.5% of the planet's land mass.  70% is sea and the other 18.5% is either desert or otherwise uninhabitable.  Then we get told that there is proof that there is no 'Heat Island Effect'.  There is photographic proof that many temperature sites are extremely suspect and what about the temperature gradients over the sea.  There are those who will never be persuaded because they don't want to be.  By being selective the temperature gatherers can produce whatever trend that suits them; a bit like statistics Eh? 

Of all the 'skeptic' claims, the one that the world isn't warming is the most ridiculous. Some will forever say that the world stopped warming in [fill in the latest temperature peak here] and that there is now a cooling trend.

For a good illustration of this fallacious way of thinking, see here (esp. Fig. 1): http://www.skepticalscience.com/going-down-the-up-escalator-part-1.html

Hi Bernard.  Yup, I should have nailed down my description of "recent times" to the last 10+ years.  This still lies within the memory recall of most punters and voters in my experience.  So you have no need for concern.  Just tell the punters and voters to be patient, as in another 4-7 years (taking your 17 year 'noise' of natural variation time frame into account) this pesky recent divergence will disappear and greenhouse gas concentratins and global temperatures will be highly correlated once again.  But what if .......?

Considering that the accepted, published, peer-reviewed science states that you need at least 17 years worth of climate records to pick the warming signal out of the 'noise' of natural variation, and the last 17 years worth of temperature data shows quite a distinct upward trend, that's faster than at any point during the instrumental record, very likely faster than at any point during the past million years, based on ice core records, and quite likely faster than at any point in the past 60 or 70 million years, based on the geological record.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1993/to:2010/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1993/to:2010

Oh, wait - are you talking about those "no warming since 1998" claims, that fail every significance test under the sun?  And rely on the fact that over short periods (less than 17 years), it's quite possible to get a trend that is flat, or even negative, due to natural climate variability temporarily overwhelming the steady upward climb of global warming?

Or are you relying on the last 10 years of the published BEST data, which only gets a flat or negative trend if you include the last two data points, which are only based on incomplete data from a few stations in Antarctica? (and which really shouldn't have been included in the published data, as the uncertainty in those two data points is nearly thirty times higher than for any other point in the last three decades)

Anyway.  Here's a chart with both  Temperature and CO2.

http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1900/to:2010/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1900/to:2010/normalise 

Hmm...  looks like a fairly good correlation for about the last 50 years, to me.

Yes, thanks Shaun. That was what it should have said. That was my mistake. It is corrected now.

Andrew, please be careful about what you accuse professional people of being "prone" to on this website. And I will be more careful not to mis-paraphrase people. Deal?

What is really scary to me is the fact that the record increase in greenhouse gas emissions in recent times is not highly correlated with the current temperature trends.  Why is this so?  Mind you my biometry lecturer warned us of the dangers of correlation many, many years ago by noting that the number of drunks in a community was highly correlated with the number of Methodist ministers of religion.  Still such a wide and growing divergence in greenhouse gas trends and corresponding temperature trends ought to cause thinking people to take pause.  Or can we ignore this worrying anomaly because "the science is settled"?

'Almost' being the operative word.  Who will be laughing in thirty years time when the frost line has moved to 30 degrees of latitude North and South and the cost of domestic electricity has increased to an average of about $2000+ per month?  Karoly won't be around to suffer will he?  Your children and grandchildren won't be thanking you then.  The Carbon Tax is a non-solution to a non-problem.  Climate scientists like Tim Ball, Ian Plimer, Bob Carter have been revealing the scam for twenty years or more during which time they have proved that the average global temperature has risen 0.06 of a degree C since 1850 and is now either static or reducing slightly.  The average global temperature has not risen measurably since 1998.  Even when (if) it does it wont be caused by puny man.  Julia says the Carbon Tax will save 160 million out of 70 million tonnes of man-made CO2.   They pluck figures out of the 'AIR'!!!  The mind boggles. 

Andrew, I think maybe they are refering to the record increase in Greenhouse gases in the year. This has been widely reported and is very scary. Cheers Shaun

"He says the most alarming news has come this week, that the rate at which global warming is occuring has reached a new record".  Where is he reading this?  his own studies?  No one else is reporting it.  No competently done studies have reported it.  Its not being publicized. 

The article probably meant that 5% reduction by 2020 is no longer on the trajectory that will allow us to contain the warming to the target 2 degrees above pre industrial climate.

"The globally accepted emissions reduction target of 5 per cent by 2020, even if implemented all around the world, will now not be enough to slow global warming"

Isn't that exactly the message prof Karoly said we shouldn't be sending out? If the planned reduction doesn't have any effect, why do it?

Besides, it's false. Any reduction in CO2 emissions will slow warming, even if it only postpones reaching a tipping point when runaway warming starts as a matter of minutes.