Have they? I get the feeling that the post I made above puts in doubt the accuracy of the surface temperature data base ... suggests it is heavily biased towards warmer temperatures.
If by "the post [you] made above" you mean the climategate site, I'm not going to wade through the emissions of propagandists. Consider this for a moment : if there were no doubt about the temperature measurements that site would still say there was. That's what it's
for.
The data isn't biased. It shows warming because there's been warming. Those who wish this not to be so, and also care little for reality, will persuade themselves that it
isn't so, by claiming bias in the message.
Even if the temperature data
were biased it would make no difference to the physical effects that are already evident. It would just mean that the impact of surface temperature change is greater than previously thought. The
temperature to a degree or so isn't really what we care about in daily life. We care about food prices, or whether there's a river running through the living-room.
Half the world looking outside today might disagree.
Some stupid people
do disagree. They see snow and think "more snow means the weather is colder" since they make a simple correlation (they don't see snow when it's hot outside). I knew as a child, because my father told me, that when the weather is
really cold you don't get snow.
The real measure of how cold the weather is is how long the snow lies. Inhofe's Igloo melted in less than three days, and the December snow in England, Wales and the Lowlands was gone a week after Christmas. The rapid melt in mainland Europe led to flooding. The recent snow in the US will be gone in a week or two, and what will you have to talk about then? Arctic sea-ice recovery? February is the usual month for that talking point, but perhaps we won't hear much of it this year.
NONSENSE. Who says that there has to be an immediate correlation between GCR and temperature? You allow (or is it ignore) the lag between CO2 levels and temperature. And I'm not arguing that temperature is SOLELY affected by GCR, but there does seem to be a very strong correlation between GCR flux and temperature increases/decreases the last 1000 years.
In support of which you show a picture which ends in about 1980. No wonder it includes a "30-year lag". Is that the best you could find?
Your faith in the reconstructions is encouraging, at least you don't suggest any bias in
which reconstructions are chosen to demonstrate the correlation (there are no canonical texts in such new science). There's also a correlation betwen vulcanism and global temperatures, equally as strong (or weak). So
maybe GCR proxies are affected by atmospheric conditions?
How you can simply ignore that is baffling. And troubling. It suggests you have more of an agenda than mere science and understanding. If a study by a reputable scientist (I posted above) suggests that 40% of the warming effect is due to GCR effects, that is definitely something which should be accounted for in the decision of what to do.
One scientist who has failed to persuade any others of the validity of his study. There'll always be
some scientists claiming that they have the overturning result for any theory.
In the recent past there have been reputable scientists finding correlations between increasing solar activity and climate variation,
decreasing solar activity ditto, the PDO, AMO, ENSO and no doubt others. What's common to them all is that they are either post-facto or plucked from a well-deserved obscurity in Annals of Non-Referenced Results.
AGW was
predicted and lo, it has come to pass. It also requires no new and mysterious physics, unlike the GCR-effect.
You can take comfort in the fact that
politicians (particularly in the US and Australia) have taken great account of outlier scientists when it comes to AGW. Not when it came to building The Bomb during the Pacific War, though, and aren't you glad of that? Quite a few reputable scientists were rubbishing the idea at the time (along with pretty much anything that Einstein was involved in, but that's another odd story in science).
It certainly suggests we should wait a bit before doing anything too drastic ... something that will severely damage our economy.
You'll find out how good an idea that turns out to be.
But surely not earth temperatures ... because how in the world could earth temperatures influence cosmic ray flux?
You have to follow cause-and-effect, and remember that in the historical record we only have
proxies for temperatures and GCR's. (Over the last thousand years we also have documentary evidence regarding weather to cross-check with, which of course is not the case with GCR's.) Some influence which affects
both may be the cause of correlation. No doubt it's being looked into by reputable scientists.
What it might mean, however, is that there is a stellar related reason for the temperature changes ... which is what a great many scientists have been suggesting.
Nobody disputes that there's probably a solar influence on climate - who would? - but reaching for the stars? That's a real stretch.
By the way, do you know that the historical record shows that rises in CO2 lag behind temperature rises by hundreds of years? So why do you insist that the effect of GCR be instantaneous?
Now your "historical record" becomes
hundreds of thousands of years, not just the last thousand. That lag is due to CO
2 acting as a feedback, not a forcing, but you've been told that many times already. Milankovich cycles, ask 3bodyproblem, he can expain how it works.
In the historical record of the last thousand years, is there a lag between temperatures and CO
2 levels on the order of a few centuries? Is the
current rapid rise in CO
2 the result of temperature increases a few hundred years ago? That would be a bit tricky to explain by any physical system. Even my imagination balks a little. Not only would it have to explain where the CO
2 is coming from and why, but it would also have to explain why the CO
2 we're creating from fossil-fuels is vanishing.
With luck we can meet again in thirty years and see how recent GCR variations are correlating with climate change, and have been in-between.
