“The key is a massive implementation of nuclear power. Your friends on the Left may scream, but at least the oceans may still be alive in 2100.”

I am far, far to the left, and I agree with you. Nuclear power is a good stop-gap measure until we manage large-scale solar power generation.

One vision from a couple years ago:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL041188.shtml

Note that the researchers are from NOAA, and therefore they feel they have to defend the idea of AGW. They go to great lengths trying to do so, even though it is contradicted by their own data!

Relevant quote:

“A precipitous drop in North American temperature in 2008, commingled with a decade-long fall in global mean temperatures, are generating opinions contrary to the inferences drawn from the science of climate change.”

Their own data tells them that the earth’s temperature has been dropping for more than a decade now, even as CO2 levels continue to rise, and yet they’re still trying to stay on the AGW bandwagon by saying “okay, fine the earth is actually getting cooler, but just wait — it’ll get warmer again eventually. Really, you’ll see, it will!”.

*sigh*

Why so many scientists are choosing to ignore their own data, withhold their raw data from others, and treat the whole AGW debate as a political rather than scientific issue is beyond me.

Except that Roy Spencer is not a reputable scientist as we can see from this debunking of his erroneous analysis.

“And that’s the way science is supposed to work.”

If the rest of science worked in the same way that you seem to be describing here, then we’d still be debating whether or not the Sun really orbits the Earth, if plate tectonics was a real phenomena, if forces of electricity and magnetism were linked, and whether or not heat was a form of energy, or magnetism has a fluid explanation, etc. We’ve moved on from these arguments because the wider public’s immediate way of life would have been impacted one way or the other. (A layman and contemporary of Faraday or Maxwell didn’t really worry about electro-magnetism effecting his everyday living.) Not so for AGW theory where we have long since passed the threshold of evidence that would convince the rational mind. The irrational rejection of climate science is not scientifically based, and shares much with the irrational rejection of the theory of evolution, in that the denialist belief that it is all a hoax seems to possess the same drive as a dogmatic religion.

Dr. Kirsten Sanford, as a scientist it would be more productive if you instead looked into the psychological explanations for this phenomena of irrational subversion of one’s logical faculties — reasons why otherwise rational people would misapply their logical reasoning to believe the opposite of what the evidence is telling them, are well known in the psychological field: confirmation bias, attitude polarization, Wason’s rule discovery task, availability bias, simulation heuristic, selection bias, clustering illusions, correspondent inferences, Skinner’s pigeon experiments, Milgram’s experiment, social in-groups, cheating and deception, pareidolia, apophenia, inattention blindness, Simpsons paradox, recency effect, representativeness heuristic, etc. It would make great podcast material.

Relevant quotes:

“In an invited talk the week of December 14 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting, Dr. Roy Spencer from The University of Alabama in Huntsville discussed the challenge of answering questions about cause and effect (also known as forcing and feedback) in the climate.”

“Feedbacks will determine whether the manmade portion of global warming ends up being catastrophic or barely measurable,” Spencer said recently.

“we don’t know what the feedbacks are, we are just guessing at how much impact humans will have on climate change.”

“I’m trying to spread the word: Let’s go back to basics and look at what we can and cannot do with measurements of the real climate system to validate both climate models and their predictions.”

Now, I’m not going to keep posting these references, since people who believe in the whole AGW theory are unlikely to listen to anything that doesn’t support their point of view.

Note that Dr. Spencer is *not* arguing that AGW is a myth, simply that we don’t have evidence to support it. Nevertheless, I fully expect he’ll be shouted down the way other scientists have been who strayed from the AGW dogma.

However, the fact that reputable scientists are now coming forward with research that does not support AGW is a very positive sign.

In the wake of climategate, it appears the tide may very well be turning and we will start hearing from both sides of the climate debate instead of just the loudest and most fervent side.

And that’s the way science is supposed to work.

“Basically, people bringing up the “fact” that “scientists claimed there was global cooling in the 1970’s” are conducting a somewhat elaborate ad hominem attack…

That was (clearly, I think) not my intent.

The point I was making is that a common mistake is to look at a small amount of very recent data and try to extrapolate from that. It was a mistake to do that in the 1970’s, and it was a mistake again in the 1990’s.

I was not attacking anyone, simply pointing out a flaw in the approach being taken and the need to look at longer-term data.