Dueling Climate Conferences

There's a climate conference in Copenhagen (International Scientific Congress on Climate Change) this week. Sobering stuff is coming out of it, including this item (I heard on the radio that "four" distinguished scientists had stated this; it appears that the four scientists are John Church, Stefan Rahmstorf, Eric Rignot, and Konrad Steffen, based on reading a few of the articles about this.


Rising Sea Levels Set To Have Major Impacts Around The World

At the same time, there's a skeptical climate conference taking place in New York:

Among the Global
Warming Skeptics:Dispatch from the International Conference on Climate Change in New York

This is the key talking point from the above:

"It will eventually become clear that while there is some warming, and that some of it is caused by man, it is not leading to catastrophe."

"Catastrophic warming" has been the stalking horse of Dark Lord Senator Inhofe and his Mouth of Sauron, Marc Morano.

Got that, skeptics? The greatest and brightest of all the scientists professing to be global warming skeptics says, clearly, that there is some warming and some of it is caused by man. So let's quit this "there is no global warming" nonsense unilaterally, OK?

Now, Lindzen also says: "the global mean temperature has not increased since 1995, even if one includes the anomalous big El Nino year of 1998."

What a big pile of... er, what a large piece of bologna that is. The climate system is warming; otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to have most of the warmest years in the historical global temperature record to have occurred since (and including) the year 2000. It may be that ocean-atmosphere interactions, like the recent (and sort-of current) La Nina, influence the global mean atmospheric
temperature enough to make it look cooler, slightly and briefly, but the climate system is warming, and the climate system is warmer than in the 1990s. Otherwise it wouldn't have been possible to have an essential global temperature tie in 2005 with 1998, where 2005 didn't have an El Nino to help. Skeptics always seem to forget that little data point!

Here's the link to yesterday's skeptical musings-en-masse, which I'll discuss when I get a chance:

What Planetary Emergency?

There is something really, really funny in this. Appalling, but funny. For background, we can read:

Hurricane Expert Reassesses Link to Warming

and

The link between hurricanes and global warming

More later, if you haven't figgered it out alreddy.