A little bit? lol, I don't think you understand what the Golf current does.. It raises the temperature of vast territories in Europe.. And by several degrees. And if it is stopped, well, you can guess what will happen.

LOL there is a difference between not being able to "fucking read", and not agreeing with you just because there are some skeptical scientists that say global warming is made up by the American government or something like this (and every data in the world is fake).

If you were so kind to point out what I missed I would be so happy.

So far none of you provided enough proof to even question the existence of global warming, as this recent small decline is not that strong proof.. And that faking the whole world's data is a true conspiracy theory and I always hated those..

I find this to be offensive against myself, calling me moron several times in a comment.. Calling others bad names will just make your viewpoint even less credible, and I think is against the forum rules of not attacking the other person, in other words, it is plain rude.

I don't really like to quote whole pages worth of comments (I really like to spare space), it's a bad habit, I thought it was obvious that my reply was about that paragraph and the topics in it. Sorry if it caused confusion.

Calling the other side of people morons just because they don't share your beliefs is not a good thing to do, as global warming does have strong evidence (you just try to deny it), no matter how you want to call it to be nothing. And again, judging the whole thing based on the data of a single decade or some colder years is everything but scientifical. You should view the century, but I guess the fake data and other things you said makes this impossible. I will never believe this whole world has fake data on temperatures thing unless it is proven by a world wide committee of scientists.

EDIT: I messed up quotes so I had to relocate some sentences.

Is several degrees that much during winter?

I don't think much will happen. Winters will get a few degrees colder, summers won't make much of a difference. But we already have warmer winters than 100 years ago. At worst we'll get back to pre-industrial winters. Maybe I can skate again in the winter!!! That's been a while ago!!! Well actually there was a cold 2 months last year, but it wasn't as cold as 30 years ago when I was young and could skate on the big canal in winter during my birthdays.

The mechanism for stopping the Gulf Stream is a large influx of melt-water, but there are not many reservoirs for melt-water around anymore, there's really only the Greenland ice-sheet and compared to ice-age ice-sheets that one is very, very small. Also, it won't melt all at once or will it? Will that really stop the Gulf Stream?

Also consider that the summer time melting of the arctic sea-based ice-shelf didn't stop the Gulf Stream, while that accounts for a lot of sweet water.

And finally, I doubt it'll start an ice age. The European ice-sheets were an extension from huuuuge ice-sheets in Siberia. There are no such ice-sheets. The summers are too warm for ice to persist. We're only witnessing more and more retreat of ice and permafrost.

That goes contrary to an ice age. I think that an ice age can only start when temperatures are already abnormally low in the northern hemisphere, so that ice sheets can form in Siberia and Canada. When the Gulf Stream stops, it could help form large ice-sheets in Europe and over the North Sea. But the circumstances are no favorable for such a set of events.

After all... a winter in Siberia can have temperatures of -60 degrees celcius in some parts. It is very cold and cold air can carry little moisture (in the form of snow), so every year little ice accumulates. Maybe a few meters at best. In the summer temperatures are 20 degrees or even higher. A few meters of ice are easily melted away in those circumstances. It is very hard to have hundreds of years of sustained cold weather to create a thick layer of ice that can create its own self-maintaining cold climate.

Is hasn't, really. It's just a freak set of circumstances that would normally have led to even LOWER temperatures than we experience today.

Also, the effect of the El Nino is something that's having a cooling effect at the surface of the earth. It transports warmer water down and colder water up. As a result the temperature deeper in the ocean RISES. As a result, there's still a consistent trend of heating of the ocean during the last 15 years, which has NOT stopped but is just going on and on and on.

If you think ahead, what this means is that the NEXT El Nino will have less of a cooling effect, because the deeper waters are warmer than they used to be.

All of this is perfectly consistent with a pattern of global warming. You fail to take these things into account.

Really psychoak, a scientist tries to understand EVERYTHING before making a statement. That's really difficult (almost impossible) so I can understand that you don't do that... but at least give it a serious try. Try to approach the problem from every angle, use as many data as you can and DON'T limit yourself to a few incidents. To get a robus result, it's best to follow long-term trends or averages, so that you don't get sidetracked by freak combinations of factors (on long term those cancel out, but on short term they can give noisy spikes in data).

For christ sake, look at satellite images about huge clouds of smog hanging over China, crossing the Pacific and creating smog in places like LA. If you call that part of natural fluctuations and negligible or whatever you call it ... well I just don't know what normal is in your dictionary. It's a fucking huge event that's there to stay as long as billions of people keep pumping all kinds of waste products into the air. When India, Indonesia etcetera (which have significant coal reserves) follow suit, those clouds will only get bigger and bigger.

Actually that smog helps to keep the planet cooler than it otherwise would've been... and it might even help the formation of clouds by supplying many condensation cores. What some researchers suspect is that, as soon as those coal plants get "cleaner", the world will instantly warm up by a fraction of a degree. Actually cleaner coal plants require more coal because it costs energy to clean up the exhaust fumes.

I seriously doubt that. Norway gets its warmth from the western winds from the ocean. Unless the ocean completely freezes over all the way down to the North Sea, Norway will stay relatively warm because of the warm sea water.

The other ingredient necessary I think is low levels of CO2, and already-low temperatures especially during the summer.

I think it would take a long time, and especially that it would require at least a few years of very very cold summers so that ice sheets can say, grow bigger (and not melt away). Maybe because of a period of intense volcanism.

There were many in the last few million years.

It's associated with low levels of CO2 (below 300 ppm, and hence low global temperatures).

Earlier in history, CO2 levels were generally higher.

They're not permanent because... well I think that a CO2 build-up increases temperatures slowly, until a tipping-point is reached and ice-sheets start to melt rapidly, setting a feedback in motion.

I'm not sure why the CO2 would rise. I suspect a disruption of the carbon cycle.
Water levels are lower, exposing (and eroding) swamps and peat, which are decomposed into CO2.
Also, less plant life means less CO2 that can be buried, thus naturally released CO2 from volcanism could stay in the atmosphere longer.
Also, CO2 could be released from the oceans as temperature rises, which could provide a sort of feedback effect.
Also, Milankovitch cycles could assist this process by making the summers in the North warmer, just like they assist in triggering an ice age by making the summers in the North colder. Maybe it's a combination of things.

Yes that was freaky.

It's amazing that life survived under such conditions!

That's our current situation. We're experiencing low levels of CO2 during our era, compared to much of the time before. Temperatures are simply much lower than they used to be.

That one was probably triggered by an extreme drop in CO2 levels (and hence, global temperatures) due to the formation of the Appalachian mountains.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=appalachians-triggered-an

The Karoo Ice Age.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoo_Ice_Age

It looks like that was also taking place during a period of low CO2 levels and fairly cool global temperatures (comparable to pre-industrial levels).

It's now official.

To be more specific, for the 2013 season, the NOAA predicted 13-17 named storms (13 were actual) and 7-10 hurricanes (2 were actual).

So?

Actually, for the 2012 season the NOAA (as well as the roughly 1 dozen other organizations that prepare forecasts/predictions) under predicted the activity fairly significantly. Skill is determined in averages over decades though, not single year forecasts. Hopefully they'll get more accurate over time - it's definitely a complex thing to be attempting to predict. I'm not sure how you make the leap from predicting the future of storms in one area of the world to what has been (present perfect) observed to date with the entirety of AGW though. Emotions and ideology (politics) might be interfering with your analysis there but I can't be sure.

Okay, for one, take your "emotions and ideology" nonsense and stick it up your ass.  How's that for emotion? 

That's just typical progressive bull shit to pretend you're rational and scientific while anyone who disagrees with you is an ideologue and emotional as a way to delegitimize whatever they might say without having to actually discuss their points.  It's a childish debating tactic that's been tried over and over in this thread.  So how about we just admit you have no idea what my motivations are and I'll agree the same about you, we'll take each other's comments at face value and we can continue a discussion that should be enjoyable rather than playing dumb-fuck superiority games, huh?

Now, back to the point.  

You're telling me that inability to accurately and reliably predict the behavior of a subset of the global climate system in the short term doesn't imply anything about the reliability of those same people to predict the behavior of the entire system over the long term?  

Your point about 2012 doesn't help your cause.  It reinforces my point.  If you, general you, not you Ekko_Tek specifically, don't understand the system well enough, or have it modeled well enough, to make reasonably accurate predictions over the short time horizon why on earth should we upset the global economy based on your predictions about the same system over the long term?  Especially given that the long term predictions involve even more complex inputs than the short term version?  

And you ignored my main point.  I'm sure that if this season had been especially active, well above the predicted amount, you and others wouldn't be jumping up and down about our "dire straits" and telling us how we have even less time than we thought and yadda yadda yadda, right?  Or is this a case of the year to year prediction variance doesn't matter because, in this case, it hurts the AGW argument?  Or what?  Because I can't believe that the AGW industry wouldn't be making mountains of this season had it been more active than expected.  You might not. I don't know you and have no idea, but this industry has a history of cherry picking data based on what it wants the narrative to be (which is part of the reason I don't blindly trust "Well the IPCC said...!!!").  

OK

1:  Chaotic effects canceling out in the long term is a major assumption. 

2:  Some of those short term effects that we, as a species, suck at predicting matter in the long term.  

But really, you're making my point for me by arguing that we can't predict some things beforehand and can only create accurate models after the fact.  Climate is a hugely complex system that we don't fully understand yet.  Even if we did fully understand it we don't have the computational power to accurately model it without making a series of huge assumptions.  Even if there is random walk year to year, those assumptions and those small effects that we can't predict matter to the climate system.  Which means they matter to our long term predictions. If we don't know enough climate factors to predict strong wind shear from Africa or atmospheric patterns that produce exception dry, sinking air six months from now how on earth can we reasonably say that we know enough to predict how the system will react to assumed inputs over the next 50 years? 

if you can't accurately model the smaller problem, then you can't accurately model the bigger problem without making FURTHER ASSUMPTIONS about the inputs you clearly don't understand and about the behavior of the smaller problem which you've already shown an inability to forecast accurately. 

I never said it was you being petty.  I said it was you trying to invalidate my points without having to address them by pretending to be the only one concerned about cold hard logical reality which is what you were doing and what you continue to do in the quoted paragraph.  It is the exact same fucking thing as if I said you are clearly an AGW True Believer who sits at Al Gore's feet licking his toes while spoon feeds you his (money-making) "climate science" and therefore anything you say is akin to religion and can't be taken on a factual basis because you are clearly blinded by the wonderful tasting kool-aid flavored lotion Big Al uses on his feet.  

Now, I didn't say that because for something like this discussion to function there has to be some level of acceptance that the other person is open and honest about their beliefs and motivations.  

You can keep calling it "akin to creationism" and "pure denialism" all you want, but you are either not reading what those "deniers" are writing or you're purposefully missing the point.  Disagree and debate all you want, but stop pretending that nobody but you has a valid point.  

If this is about long term and global trends, then you need to show that you understand the system well enough that your long term outlook can be trusted.  So for climate scientists haven't done that.  Their "models" from a decade ago about where the temperature would be this year were off.  Badly so.  But rather than acknowledge that people scream that anyone who points it out is a denier. 

Likewise, the IPCC is a political arm of the most highly politicized and corrupt international body going.  Pointing that out and saying that it's worth keeping in mind when discussing their "findings" is met with... wait for it... screams of "DENIER!" 

Asking about why some data was faked to make it fit the models over the last 20 years is met with... screams of "DENIER!" 

Asking AGW proponents what they propose to do to fix the problem, assuming they are right (which I don't) is met with sputters of nothing or screams of "DENIER!" or calls for giving some select few group of "experts" the power to do whatever they deem necessary to solve this problem. 

And on and on and on.

As I've said before I'm suspicious of AGW because

• the science isn't settled, but it's proponents will scream to the rooftops that it is regardless of what's pointed out to them.  
• I'm suspicious of anything who's chief argument is a call to get in line with the consensus, as if consensus is its own supporting argument. 
• because anytime someone points out that global warming's chief proponents have made billions off of it proponents either ignore you and simply call you a denier, as if addressing the fact is too difficult.  
• There are NEVER concrete plans to solve it.  They are always murky, fungible plans that involve giving a few experts vast swathes of power over the global economy.
• Finally, I'm just generally suspicious of any progressive cause-de-celeb.  FDR spoke pretty openly about the need for progressive to find a "moral equivalent to war" as a way to control people.  This fits that bill pretty perfectly. 

Now, all that said, I'm skeptical of AGW.  I don't deny that climate changes, because it certainly does.  I don't deny that man contributes to it, because we certainly do.  My problem is with the immediacy of it all (we have barely 100 months to save the world, according to Prince Charles) and the complete willingness to toss actual scientific method out the window in the name of expediency and consensus.  

And finally, as Brad has said a few times:  How do you solve it?  Let's stipulate that everything you, Ekko_Tek, have said and believe about AGW is true.  How do you realistically solve it.  Describe the scenario that can plausibly happen in today's world that solves this problem you think exists.