Today's story from my home state of Louisiana--"earliest snowfall since 1938". Houston "earliest snowfall ever recorded", but "the science is settled".
Do you notice anything interesting in this plot? If you wait a few days, I can show you November. I expect a similar pattern.
Moving on: did I say the "science was settled"? No. It just seems to me that Dyson is stating opinions about the state of a scientific field he by his own admission doesn't know much about.
The fact remains that the Roman and Medieval Warm periods were warmer than current conditions, were global in extent and that "global warming" has not happened for the last ten years. Even the alarmists themselves admit it.
Part 1: The NAS report evaluating paleoclimate reconstructions indicated that there is no way to quantitatively make your first statement above. Part 2: After this year, the only year not in the Top 10 warmest since the 1880s will be 1998. (And that includes last year, 2008, with a potent La Nina operating.) This entire decade has been warmer than the 1990s, and the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s. That's how you evaluate climate change, not with year-to-year connect-the-dots plots of interannual variability.
My position is this. It is WAY too early to try to impose the type of draconian solutions proposed, so shitcan Copenhagen. Get the fraud out of the science that is being done. Require that ALL data and ALL models be openly and fully posted on the internet. Get some REAL science done that everyone can agree on, and THEN think about "fixes".
Copenhagen is a non-starter anyway, so it doesn't concern me. I'm all for eliminating any proven fraud that is found in climate change science. More openness -- clearly a good thing if it can be accomplished. Your last sentence: there will never be something that everyone can agree on in a predictive science.
I've expected that there will be nothing substantive done until there is a truly major climate-change related catastrophe. I thought the 2003 European heat wave might be that thing. Maybe that's why they're so motivated. But the Australians are losing their most important river system to drought, and they can't even get their act together.
I suspect that another five years will tell conclusively whether the solar physicists or the climate modelers are right as to the direction of the globe's temperature.
We could know by the end of next year, particularly if sunspot numbers stay low.
"Moving on: did I say the "science was settled"? You don't need to. Everybody on your side of the aisle has been spouting nothing else for the last couple of years. Fortunately, the discovery of the CRU fraud has shown "beyond reasonable doubt" that the science is indeed quite unsettled.
"No. It just seems to me that Dyson is stating opinions about the state of a scientific field he by his own admission doesn't know much about.
What Dyson said was that he didn't know what the CURRENT STATE of the field was. You chose to ignore the fact that Dyson HAD done work in global climate modelling. His statment was that is in depth knowledge of the current SOTA is stale, not that he "didn't know much about it".
"I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.
"Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant."
"I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste."
"Part 1: The NAS report evaluating paleoclimate reconstructions indicated that there is no way to quantitatively make your first statement above."
Nice weasel-word..."quantitatively". Perhaps not, but we can certainly know it qualitativly from the historical record, both archealogical and written.
"Part 2: After this year, the only year not in the Top 10 warmest since the 1880s will be 1998. (And that includes last year, 2008, with a potent La Nina operating.) This entire decade has been warmer than the 1990s, and the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s. That's how you evaluate climate change, not with year-to-year connect-the-dots plots of interannual variability."
So what?? The question is not whether the globe is warmer than 1880, it is whether it has been warmer in recent history, and the answer is yes. See above-referenced Medieval Warm periods.
"Your last sentence: there will never be something that everyone can agree on in a predictive science."
Special relativity.
When you've done science as long as I have, you begin to recognize the symptoms of people who don't have a case, and global warming fits the bill completely. The constantly-escalating doomsday scenarios from models, one ever higher than the next, is a tactic of desperation, and reeks of propaganda.