This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
Objection:
A few glaciers receding today is not proof of Global Warming, glaciers have grown and receded differently in many times and places.
Answer:
Firstly, it is more than “a few glaciers” that are receding, it is a pervasive, sustained and accelerating global trend. The National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) maintains a chart of global glacier mass balance, and for as far back as their data allows us to look, all but a few years have shown a loss in ice volume of subpolar and mountain glaciers. Further, annual losses are increasing.
But no one claims that melting glaciers are proof of Global Warming. Proof is a mathematical concept. In climate science one needs to look at the balance of evidence and in that light, the above data is just one piece of evidence that is consistent with Global Warming.
So what do we find if we look to the other aspects of the cryosphere?. It turns out what we find is lots more evidence that is indicative of world wide and sustained temperature increases:
- Sea ice in the arctic is reaching new record declines as the year 2006 continues the pattern of sharply decreasing Arctic sea ice.
- Recent measurements by NASA have found that Greenland’s massive ice sheet has been losing nearly 100 gigatons of ice annually in recent years.
- Glaciers in Greenland are receding and calving at record rates
- Ancient permafrost is also thawing, (which represents its own dangers)
And of course, this is all consistent with all the other evidence of warming that there is out there. Clearly we are dealing with much more than a few receding glaciers.
This is just one of dozens of responses to common climate change denial arguments, which can all be found at How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic.
“Glaciers have always grown and receded” was first published here, where you can still find the original comment thread. This updated version is also posted on the Grist website, where additional comments can be found, though the author, Coby Beck, does not monitor or respond there.
A Few Things Illconsidered 
Glacier recession is a suggestion of warming (global? meh). It is not necessarily of a suggestion of anthropogenic warming.
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Nice graph. Too bad you’re cheating. Why not show the full data? Back to the 1700s? Our current retreat is nothing new in the context of the past two hundred years or so. The trend simply continues. So much for the big bad humans doing it.
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Duh, why don’t you provide us with this misssing data, back to the 1700’s? Because it does not exist of course. There is not enough global coverage prior to the 60’s to construct such a graph.
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Coby, that was the point, you are drawing a massive conclusion from a tiny shred of data. Bad. Unless someone can show evidence that glaciers do not retreat without interference this is not evidence of anything.
As for me I believe this planet experienced an ice age, and all those glaciers retreated. Man had nothing to do with it; the planet is better off for it. Also true that some small villages rely on melting glaciers for their precious water. Melting glaciers is therefore good. If they retreat a lot then some villages have to move. Oh, well, they must have done that before, so here goes again.
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RS, I believe what I said was it is consistent with all the other evidence of warming, so no I did not draw a massive conclusion from a tiny shred of data. Please provide the quote you had in mind.
As for the retreating ice age, check this article. That retreat ended 10-8000 years ago.
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If you conclude that a tiny shred of evidence is consistent with anything I believe you must give significant weight to that shred.
As for the 10-8000 years ago, what caused that? Seems like growth and retreat has been happening for a long time. And whatever it was that caused the retreat, aren’t we pleased?
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The last glacial period ended because of a combination of orbital forcing, CO2 rising and albedo changes as ice sheets shrank.
Yes, it was fabulous news for me, my apartment might still have been under 2 km of ice.
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Coby you consistently miss the point that the sea level 18,000 years ago was 400 feet below where it is today! With no human input, the sea level came to its present level (but for about 2-3 feet) about 3000 years ago.
In other words, the sea level is about where it was 30,000 years ago, before the last ice age. Earth cooled, with no human input, then it warmed with no human input.
John
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Hi John,
Please see this article:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/03/global-warming-is-nothing-new.php
BTW, your chronology is a bit off. Going back from 18ky bp you have to get to about 120K yrs before sea levels were as high as today, actually about 4 to 6 metres higher, 30K yr bp it was still very cold!
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And, of course, before guns were invented, no one died of gunshot wounds, which proves that no one died from machine gun fire in WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I, Iraq II …
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Come on dhogaza, i can accept a little drift off topic but for christs sake that is just c@#p. If you cant think of anything intelligent to say then say nothing at all.
Anyway guns were invented before the wars of conquest you mentioned above so people could have died from gunshot wounds.
Looks like that “itchin for a fight” needs to be scratched again, consider it scratched ok.
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crakar, he is trying to make the point that just because X caused Y in the past does not prove that Z is not causing y now.
I make that point a little clearer in this post:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/01/climate-is-always-changing.php
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re: Recent measurements by NASA have found that Greenland’s massive ice sheet has been losing nearly 100 gigatons of ice annually in recent years.
How long would it take for all the Greenland ice to melt at this rate? My “back of a fag packet” calc came out at approx 22,000 years. But I suspect that must be wrong. Anyone?
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I don’t know but is that even the issue?
As I understand it the problem of Greenland’s ice retreat is not the prospect of it all being gone but a whole *lot* of it being gone and the resultant effects on sea levels and the positive feedback of less snow reflecting sunlight back to space. Also Greenland’s ice sheet retreat is a gauge of where we are. I mean, Jesus, its melting. Regardless of where we stand on the overall AGW hypothesis, does anyone dispute it?
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Skip, thanks for your reply.
I guess my question is “is there an issue”? 100 Gigatons sounds awfully impresive, however –
100 Gigatons of ice melting is about 0.00452632% of the total Greenland ice sheet, which will put the sea levels up about 0.0003546 of a metre. (Someone please verify my figures).
And the reduced reflectiveness of this small difference – does it amount to anything?
BTW – I am agnostic regarding AGW, I’m just seeking answers to niggles I have. Thanks
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Those numbers sound about right – for the recent melt rate. Changing units, that’s 0.35 mm/y. Current annual sea level rise is almost 10 times that (about 3mm/y) but more than half is from the expansion of warming water, the rest is from Greenland, Antarctica and other glaciers around the world.
Here’s the trouble with 0.3 mm/y from Greenland. A mere decade ago it was basically 0. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/Why-is-Greenlands-ice-loss-accelerating.html (particularly the second graph). That’s an accelerating loss. It’s accelerating for probably two reasons: (1) It’s still getting warmer (2) Greenland is a hollow basin, ringed by mountain ranges, filled with ice. As the outlet glaciers retreat, the area exposed to warming ocean water increases, so the basal melt rate increases, with positive feedback.
So, while I certainly can’t guarantee it, the mass loss rate of Greenland could double in another decade, double again in the decade after that, etc. until leveling off at a rate that would melt the whole thing in ~500 years. That would contribute over 1m/century. A slightly different accelerating dynamic is affecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Taking all sources into account, we are likely looking at 1.4m sea level rise by 2100, with 2-3m/century for several centuries after that. That’s if we don’t get our act together on mitigation.
1.4 meters is huge. It doesn’t seem that big if you live near a rocky shore, or don’t live near a shore at all, but the first 1 meter of sea level rise will wipe out half the agriculture in Bangladesh, and have similar effects on other low coastlines around the world. The population of Bangladesh is 160 million.
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GFW – thanks for the comprehensive reply. I’ll checkout the link etc over the next few days.
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You guys are so far scientifically over my head that it is impossible for me to participate in this conversation. But consider that most people are like me, stupid consumers. It might even be said from the contacts I have in daily life that most people are even below my abyssmal scientific comprehension level. We think about things like sports and fashion and entertainment and bills. The lame list goes on. But we vote, sometimes with disastrous results. Imagine trying to explain .0003546 meter sea level rise at a tea party meeting. The simple question I have is what I saw in an above headline. If it is so warm, why is it so damn cold, with record breaking snowfall in certain parts of the US right now. Nothing in the subsequent text answered the question, at least not on my level. And it seems to me that somebody MUST dumb down this conversation to communicate to the public. Right now I am freezing my tail in lower than normal temps in TX and worrying over the increase in my energy bill with my fixed income. I can only imagine what people in Baltimore are feeling. Also, how do you get disaster relief into an earthquake or tsunami affected area without producing large amounts of carbon exhaust?
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gsp, sorry for the long wait, but I have a bit of an answer for you here:
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2010/03/a_chilling_effect_on_a_warming.php
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gsp,
As a former teacher I think I can make understand the missing connection between daily experience and largely intangible scientific theory. And I think analogy, at the risk of creating new misunderstandings, can clear things up very well.
Without taking time to look up specific figures, here are two things I’m confident can be said about our world that bear some resemblance to the situation you’re describing:
(1) The value of the stock market is on a long-term upward trend. This is regardless of the fact that there have been huge momentary dips and dives, like this most recent recession and the years-long Great Depression. Living in that moment, it’s easy to assume that now is different, that the long-term trend isn’t still heading up, but any economist will tell you this will all recover and go back to that gradual upward slope as it did after the Great Depression and every other market slump.
(2) The population of the earth is on a long-term upward trend. There is at least one point in history when the population decreased markedly over a period of a few decades: The Plague. Living in this time it would be easy to assume that everyone was going to die and the world would end. But on the whole, since thousands of years ago, the population is still rising. The long-term trend is still upward.
Regarding climate change, then: scientists almost completely agree that until this last decade there has been a decades-long warming trend. They largely agree that this recent leveling-off of the trend is just one of those dips and dives, and that it will soon continue upward. They largely agree that if it continues that way, it will eventually have a profound negative effect on our ecosystem, which would affect our own habitat, health, food supply, land use, economy, and practically every other element of our lives. And they *generally* agree, with confidence (but not certainty), that man’s activity has some measurable effect on this.
Therefore, the best guess is that it’s worth our effort to take strong steps to lessen our contribution to the long-term warming trend.
A cold day or even year in one city, state, or even the whole globe, is just a blip on the radar. Scientists believe the forces driving temperatures slowly upward are still at work.
How’s that, gsp?
Keywords that often get lost in the debate and the media’s coverage of it: “generally agree,” “not certain,” “believe.” The scientific facts and measurements may be (at least mostly) accurate, but the theory based around them is just a theory. There’s simply enough evidence to make *most* scientists *pretty* sure that it’s the right one.
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A few glaciers receding today is not proof of Global Warming, glaciers have grown and receded differently in many times and places.
AND
Glaciers have always grown and receded
TWO different questions. i like the way you smoothly changed one question into the other. that should certainly fool THE STUPID people. well done coby. keep blurring the issues.
SUN go HOT , planet GO hot.
sun GO cold, PLANET go COLD.
quick get me some graph paper and let me draw lines , then i can call it MATHEMATICAL SCIENTIFIC CERTAINTY…………………………. oh wait scientisits make up data and tell lies.
University of East Anglia emails: the most contentious quotes …23 Nov 2009 … Here are a selection of quotes from the emails stolen from computers at the University of East Anglia. Many involve Phil Jones, head of the …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/globalwarming/…/University-of-East-Anglia-emails-the-most-contentious-quotes.html – Similar
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“A few glaciers receding today is not proof of Global Warming”
Yes it is. Ice melts when it warms up over what it was before to above the melting point.
“University of East Anglia emails”
Produced no corruption or evidence of malpractice and only showed how desperate denier idiots like yourself go to pretend there’s a pony. Climategate is for science what pizzagate was for politics: proof of how far insane the right are in their denial for ideology.
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I love how you’re still clinging desperately to your faith, wow.
Keep hangin’ in there!
“A few glaciers receding today is not proof of Global Warming”
Yes it is. Ice melts when it warms up over what it was before to above the melting point.”
Corellation does not equal causation, wow.
Evidence of global warming is not evidence of human-caused global warming.
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Awww, socks three, are you till bleating the same tired bollocks of “it’s all not real because people haven’t said it’s not yet”? Try reading the material rather than blogrolls. Ask an adult with the longer words. Ask a child about the shorter ones.
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Hey, if correlation is not causation, then explain the graph of stress vs strain that the kids who attended school were taught (and later did an experiment themselves to prove). After all, if the stretching being correlated to the force placed on the wire doesn’t mean it’s correlated, how did Stokes’ Law become a thing?
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Haha!
Always snarky but never actually even attempting to explain your faith, hey wow.
It’ll be interesting to see what develops in the Pizzagate stuff.
I reckon there’s more to come.
(which will cause you to admit that “climategate” is actually a real scandal that proves you are a mindless leftist sheep, wow.)
The AGW debate is politics, not science.
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“The AGW debate is politics, not science”
But AGW is science. And it is you who demand it become politics.
And still in deep deep denial of reality too. Sad.
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You’re nothing but a leftist-thinking dumbass, wow.
You’ve fallen hook line and sinker for the AGW hoax.
If it’s actually backed by real and solid science, how come you and I are the only ones talking about it on this page?
Remember the good ol’ days back in 2009 when this page was full of vigorous debate?
Your faith is strong, wow. (seemingly stronger than pretty much everyone’s!)
I can tell you are a very religious person.
Hail the holy IPCC!
Hail the almighty Al Gore (ALGorehu akbar!)
Hail the holy prophet, James Hanson!
Hail the apostle, St Michael Mann.
Hail the most sciencey of all……… St. Bill Nye!
Yayyy!
(bahahahahaha!)
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And by proclaiming this entirely in political terms, you’re proving that the AGW deniers are all wrong. Thank you for so clearly demonstrating how badly your side are losing…Sock number four.
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Hey Wow!
AlGorhu Akbar, matey!!
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So you’re playing the part of a muslim terrorist, or are you really someone who wants to kill infidels who do not believe what you do? Or both?
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No, I’m using Algorhu Akbar! as the “religious war cry” for AGW believers like you.
Hail holy Al Gore! He’s the Greatest!
I also use it as a reference to islam, being yet another silly (and far more destructive) religion, which is usually supported and defended by leftists like you.
Are you an islamic supremacist, wow?
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The only believers waging holy war are you moron idiot deniers, waging war against reality because your ideology hates, loathes, detests whatever the left accepts and cannot budge from partisanship and idiocy.
Hell your moniker is entirely a trollidiot who has to keep changing their account because it gets banned and rather than strain to think of a different moniker (like, say, kai) because of the extreme risk of using the wrong name (say, boris) would out your sockpuppetry, so you stick with the same beginning and just add one to the number at the end (asking a grown up what the next number is).
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I wonder what National Geographic explorer Eddie Kisfaludy would have reporter if he could have flew his helicopter over Glacier Bay back when Captain George Vancouver found Icy Strait, at the south end of Glacier Bay, choked with ice in 1794?
Coby Beck; Don’t you think that glaciers would be retreating after the LIA ended?
This applies to your dire warnings regarding melting glaciers. Keep in mind that Geo. Vancouver’s ships were wind powered; therefore, he wasn’t spewing out any diesel smoke to start this massive retreat of these glaciers.
“The explorer Captain George Vancouver found Icy Strait, at the south end of Glacier Bay, choked with ice in 1794. Glacier Bay itself was almost entirely iced over. In 1879 naturalist John Muir found that the ice had retreated almost all the way up the bay. By 1916 the Grand Pacific Glacier was at the head of Tarr Inlet about 65 miles from Glacier Bay’s mouth. This is the fastest documented glacier retreat ever. Scientists are hoping to learn how glacial activity relates to climate changes and global warming from these retreating giants.
Glacier Bay was first surveyed in detail in 1794 by a team from the H.M.S. Discovery, captained by George Vancouver. At the time the survey produced showed a mere indentation in the shoreline. That massive glacier was more than 4,000 feet thick in places, up to 20 miles wide, and extended more than 100 miles to the St. Elias mountain range.
By 1879, however, naturalist John Muir discovered that the ice had retreated more than 30 miles forming an actual bay. By 1916, the Grand Pacific Glacier – the main glacier credited with carving the bay – had melted back 60 miles to the head of what is now Tarr Inlet.
http://www.glacierbay.org/geography.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/04/eddie-amanda-kisfaludy-fly-helicopter-over-atlantic-greenland-melting-ice-climate/
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“I wonder what National Geographic explorer Eddie Kisfaludy would have reporter”
I wonder what it would mean if AGW denial trolls were able to spell correctly. But I also wonder what some report would mean if the reports of hundreds of people in the same field for thousands of glaciers rather than one field can be ignored by idiots like yourself. If the reports of hundreds can be ignored, then one definitely can, and be done so hundreds of times more rationally.
But rationality doesn’t matter to AGW deniers, does it. It just gets in the way of ideology.
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Hi John,
I have to point out up front that the original post above is pretty much spot on as an answer to your question, which stripped of snark is pretty thin gruel. You are pitting the record of one glacier one hundred years ago to challenge the significance of the current “pervasive, sustained and accelerating global trend” (see above original post). You are also wanting to ignore the context of other changes in the cryosphere and global climate indicators.
Much of your quoted material does not appear in the links you provide, and in fact the second is completely unrelated,but I am not interested in disputing the accuracy of the statements. I will note that you are silent on what has happened to that particular glacier since. Is it still retreating? Is the global temperature still just “recovering” from the Little Ice Age even as it rises to levels not seen since at least 5000 years ago? To understand global and modern trends you really need global and modern data.
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“Are you an islamic supremacist, wow?”
You’re the one screaming about allah and holy wars, kaiboristrollsock4.
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Hello readers!
Every now and then I like to check into this page to see how the front line of AGW is going.
I used to hold this page in esteemed regard….. sadly…
I’m a bit disappointed that it’s been almost a year since the last comment.
I just found THIS!
I’d like to know what you think about it.
(it’s from 2013)
What I think is that THIS is what you have fallen for, all these years.
The 97% consensus has always been utter crap.
The AGW “crisis” has always been utter crap too.
I look forward to the inevitable venom from you, wow.
It must be embarrassing to be SO devout, and have the church come crashing down on you.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/06/cooks-97-consensus-study-game-plan.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR2qVZGQMMWlJvLw-NPFlCR31CAzU-P-uaxqvkcVmtfIw8USWagbFSguWCQ
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So now more than half of Americans are convinced AGW is real and is happening and needs something to be done over, and worldwide the denial industry is losing ground, youre still hanging around looking to spread yet more of your bullshit and lies in a desperate attempt to “virtue signal” to your fellow troglodytes that you’re keeping the faith.
Sad
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Oh, and poptart’s list is a complete load of bollocks. Even fellow denier scientists like Roy Spencer and Roger Pielke whose papers appear on that list have publicly stated that poptart is misrepresenting their paper on his list.
Poptart doesn’t care.
He only does it to give fellow morons “ammunition”, even if the powder is just sludge.
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(my comment from yesterday hasn’t appeared here yet, so hopefully, it will soon)
I’d like to ask a follow-up question, Wow.
Totally aside from all arguments about TSI, Radiosondes, Forcings, and CO2….
Do you really believe that paying more money to the UN IPCC and your own government is going to have a positive effect on the earth’s climate?
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JAQing off still? Do you think that your feeble attempts to piss about will stop climate change? Or are you paid by the post for your counter-intelligence interference?
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Well it seems that the comment I posted didn’t get through.
Anyway, wow, please answer the question?
Do you really believe that paying more taxes to the politicians at the UN will change the earth’s climate?
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Hey, answer mine: do you pay the police to protect you or demand they work for free?
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Your post didn’t go through? Nothing of value lost.
Do you want no police, fire, courts and army? Or do you demand that these lifesavers work for free?
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Wow.
Do you actually believe that paying more money to the UN will change the climate of the earth?
(you’re very weak at obfuscation)
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So do you believe the police should work for free, or do you pay them?
Why are you so adamant in your refusal? You prove AGW denial wrong with every post, moron.
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So you really refuse to say whether you want to pay for the police, fire and legal professions, including heathcare workers, you want them to save your lives and do so for free, because you’re selfish.
Got it.
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BAHAHAHAHA!
Oh how I love how weak you are.
You attempt to divert and obfuscate, but you fail dismally.
You’ll never answer my question about the Paris Agreement because you KNOW it bullshit!
You cannot possibly defend the hypothesis of AGW anymore!
You’ve lost the argument!
You are clutching at straws!!
(haha! it’s especially sweet to see, considering how nasty and awful you’ve been to people over all these years.
What a cunt you are wow.
What an absolute mindless, ridiculous cunt.
Go ahead mate.
Please provide some kind of science to support the AGW scare!
What
A
Cunt.
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So you refuse to answer the question: do you want to pay police, army, fire, ambulance and the court system or not?
It’s not hard. Either yes or no will do.
But still you refuse.
Kinda makes your JAQing off rather irrelevant: according to you not answering is fine. And I guess it also proves to your level of “convincing evidence” that your denial is proven utterly wrong since you’ve been unable to support your claims in the least by refusing to answer my question.
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Remember how nasty you were?
Remember how you were SUCH a fuckin bully?
You’ve always been like a schoolyard bully, aged around 10 years old.
Well it turns out that you are fucked in the head.
I think back to the “glory days” of 2009 when the whole AGW issue was up for debate.
You, wow, on the leftist, believers side were SO convinced.
Are you still SO convinced about mankind’s emissions of CO2?
If you are, I think it’s pretty funny.
Tell me.
Do you still believe mankind’s emissions of 3% of total atmospheric CO2 is causing warming of the earth’s climate?
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Remember when you weren’t nuts?
Nah, nobody remembers that, you were always an insane idiot desperately slinging slurs while whining “but you’re MEAN, so you MUST be wrong!!!”.
Yup, you never understood hypocrisy because you rely on it to make your idiotic posts.
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Coby, this page used to be where it was all happenin!
The Australian Greens Party recommended this website to me bac in 2009.
Lemme ask you coby;
Do you still believe the IPCC?
Do you still trust them?
Do you still think the current climate is somehow outside natural variations?
It’s a bit of a shame that this page has gone so quiet.
I remember the glory days!
Anyway…
I guess the sceptics won in the end.
The mindless believers in AGW lost.
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Hey, let me ask you: are you willing to pay the police for their work? Remember when you were all demanding questions be answered and leapt to unconnected assertions if they were not?
Well seems like you are proven wrong because you refuse to say whether you will pay the police for protecting you.
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Wow!
You seem obsessive about your question about the Police and fire brigade and army, etc…
YES!
I want to pay them for the service they provide to the community.
They are exceedingly important to the functioning of free, western society.
Now.
Could you please answer my question about the Paris Agreement?
Do you truly believe that paying more money to politicians will change the climate of the earth?
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So deniers whine about people being mean while slinging insults and refuse to acknowledge their failure.
They demand irrelevant questions while proclaiming that being asked “irrelevant quesitons” is obfuscation of the real answers and refuse to acknowledge their failure.
And every single prediction of theirs has failed, whilst they latch onto any echo-chamber claims of the IPCC being wrong as proof AGW doesn’t exist, and still refuse to acknowledge their failure.
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Haha!
It seems you are truly deluded!
Predictions, hey?
How many climate alarmist predictions have come true?
NONE!
‘the children born today are not going to know what snow is’ – some British fuckhead.
‘the rain that falls will evaporate before it hits the ground’ – Prof. Tim Flannery
Oh wow.
I absolutely LOVE that you have not evolved your thinking in the slightest.
You are the MOST devout follower of the marxist climate religion that I know!
(you should be proud of yourself)
Even Coby doesn’t seem to write here any more.
I think you are amazing, wow.
Your ability to lap up utter bullshit is unbeatable!!
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“Predictions, hey?
How many climate alarmist predictions have come true?
NONE!”
Wrong.
HAnsen’s 1988 paper was 100% on the money.
Meanwhile which denier predictions came true?
ABSOLUTELY none.
PS He was right too: there’s chaos now because we don’t know how to deal with snow. See your asshole country for a recent example. He did predict that. But your echo chamber did not bother to add that in, so you aren’t talking from your own knowledge, only your indoctrination.
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Potholer54 has a series with tony heller in a fact check. tony started with a long laundry list of problems potholer got “wrong” and it took two episodes to get it down to just one he still insists (appeal to authority, which requires appealing to the authority that claims the appeal to authority is a fallacy for it to be fallacious, making its incorrect use, as tony and every denier does, self defeating: they can’t cite the appeal to authority as a fallacy because to do so requires using that fallacy).
He still insists he doesn’t get feedbacks greater than 1, though. And I do put the blame at potholer for this, however, even though he’s using the same argument and logic as climatologists use, cribbed from mathematics field experts, because his explanation is against the wrong point.
Heller ignorantly insists that if CO2’s effect is 1c/doubling and that feedbacks increase that to 3.5c/doubling, this means a feedback of 2.5, greater than one. And potholer et al’s explanation is how heat loss means that there is no runaway effect.
WRONG.
Heller is wrong. It IS NOT 2.5 (or 3.5, depending on how you define it) feedback, as can be seen by simple junior school maths: the sum of an infinite series.
sum of the series 1/r^n where n goes from 1 to infinity is what feedback is, when heller and all other deniers who follow this “argument” are complaining.
The sum is 1/(1-r). Which goes to infinity if r=1, the limit of a converging series being less than 1.
However, if the feedback figure (r) is 0.5, then the sum to infinity is 2, if r=0.75 then the sum to infinity is 4.
So to get a sum to infinity (the steady state of a feedback loop a la op amp theory) of 3.5 when you input a 1 you need a feedback parameter, r, of between 0.5 and 0.75.
Therefore definitely less than 1.
If the input is 1, you get the sum of 1/(1-r), if the input is 2, you get twice the answer, three times, three times the sum, any value other than 1 as the starting (no feedback) value, V, will make the sum V/(1-r). And require a value for r below 1.
And feedback for the climate, since CO2 is the driver (CO2e, for a real earth climate) and the feedbacks include feedbacks for more of the greenhouse gasses as well as any other thing that changes because of the former change, is between 0.5 and 0.75.
Below the 1 value heller and his fellow ignorants insist is the maximum.
Potholer’s problem is he doesn’t think heller is dumb enough to get this badly wrong. In that potholer is wrong too.
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Wow!
Keep clinging to it, mate!!
Cling to the AGW HOAX for as long as you can!
The “evidence” for AGW depends entirely on computer model extrapolations.
You are kidding yourself!
Please post all the evidence you have that shows the current climate condition is somehow outside the range of natural variations?
Please show all the evidence you have that does NOT rely solely on computer model predictions.
You’re an excellent example of the type of person who is ALWAYS fooled by political bullshit.
I am convinced that your mind is very firmly closed to new information.
You seem to have decided long ago, that you already know everything.
I bet you also support and defend islam, do you?
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wow..
Haha. just thinking of my favourite devout believer…
You’re the most brainwashed person I’ve come across in the AGW debate.
Even the ol’ days of Mandas, and the other intelligent “believers” had more credibility and respectability than you do right now, in 2019.
At least then it was “up for debate”.
Anti-AGW science is settled.
Settled science.
The science says you’ve fallen for utter bullshit.
I feel comfortable with that assessment of your intellect and political beliefs.
I would even go so far as to say that you have utterly NO WAY of defending the AGW crap with logic and reasoned thought.
You have been fooled by this bullshit for at least ten fucking years!
I don’t think you’ll ever realise that its bullshit.
You decided long ago that you already know everything.
Your mind is most certainly closed to new information.
(and I want you to stay that way)
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More political BS from the denieridiot. Nobody is surprised. Trump is being shat on and you’re therefore desperate to get some feeling of power back now his hatred is not getting you your vicarious thrills.
Go get an education. Then you’ll see the proofs. Until you HAVE an education, no proofs I can provide will help: you are incapable and unequipped to comprehend them.
And since when did you accept science being “settled”? Lame. Very poor attempt. Don’t bother trying.
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Denieridiot says “YES!
I want to pay them for the service they provide to the community.”
You have to pay politicians to work out the taxes and laws and apportion police to the duties. Do you think that police do all the lawmaking and budgeting along with the collection of taxes and apportionment?
If you do claim to want to pay police because they make the community safer, you’re paying politicians to make your community safer. They do the paying of police and making the laws for the police to, well, police.
See why you should have kept your slack jaw shut from the beginning yet, moron?
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Mind you all you did claim the police did was their service to the community. Politicians do that too. As do scientists.
So you should be HAPPY to pay politicians. Why ask anyone else?
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Hmmm. So when the weatherforecast is made, that’s a hoax too, since that’s an extrapolation. Has to be, it’s in the future.
And when your beloved leader claims that there will be deaths from immigrants, that’s a hoax too: extrapolating from his assertions about what is happening.
You apparently LOVE hoaxes, but only when you like the results.
And you never bother to check. That would be work, and wasted anyway:you don’t want to understand, just believe with all your wallet.
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Haha!
Your desperation is evident in your ranting and raving.
You really should be capable of understanding that the climate change hoax is fading.
But you don’t seem to grasp that just yet.
It’s fascinating to watch you both crumble actually.
How come no one writes here anymore about climate science?
How it’s just you and me right now?
Remember when the comments came thick and fast?
It was excellent debate, except that YOU were incredibly nasty to anyone who disagreed with you.
(same as now)
Even Coby doesn’t seem to have written anything for quite some time.
(Coby? If you’re there? Do you think the Paris Agreement will actually change the climate of the eaeth?
You never answered my question about the Paris Agreement.
I know you’ve got no answer.
You MUST be aware that the Paris Agreement will only achieve wealth for the politicians at the IPCC.
It won’t have any effect on the climate of the earth.
Welp! I am very happy that you are the last one left here on AFTIC.
I am very pleased to see that you are still the same and that you have not evolved your thinking at all over the last 10 years.
I want you to keep being nasty to everyone who disagrees with you.
(I hope you’re like that in real life too, actually)
I want you to keep believing that you know everything.
I want you to keep your mind firmly closed to new information.
I want you to keep clinging to this hoax for another 10 years.
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Given your ability to live entirely outside reality and solely within the anal cavity of whatever rightwingnutjob echo chamber you get your programming at, what makes you think your claims about others has any vailidity, moron?
And yet again you’ve proven that you are willing to pay politicians to improve law and order. Because if you did not then you would not be so desperate to deflect away from my post regarding the police.
You pay the police and politicians because you “want” law and order (for your needs, you HATE it when they keep the stricture of the law that impacts on you: you’re perenially whining about how the police are after “law abiding” drivers rather than the drug dealers), so your petulant demand about paying politicians to combat climate change is pure idiot screams.
But trump is in deep shit and you no longer feel like you’re going to get “your” voice heard in power any more. So you’re back here screaming at an empty room and try to ensure that you do not ever get countered in your insane rants.
Sad.
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Oh how I LOVE that you identify as a leftist!!
(I knew it long ago, as you would remember.
You see, about ten years ago, having been reading AFTIC for a few months, I had an Ephiny.
I realised that every single believer in AGW was ‘of the left’.
All the regular commenters (you’ll remember there were HEAPS of believers back then) who believed in the hypothesis known as AGW were leftists.
It was an important moment for me as a proud Conservative.
I realised that leftist thinkers (like you) are very easily fooled and led by the elite establishment.
I was kinda alarmed when I first saw An Inconvenient Truth in 2007.
I wanted to learn more and I became a devout scientific sceptic at a particular moment.
I realised that the geological record is the TRUE evidence of climate change,
WOW, it impresses me that you re STILL clinging so desperately to this fucking HOAX.
I gotta give you credit for your closed-mindedness.
Full marks for having decided you already know everything, and STICKING to it for so long!
I love that you are miserable because of President Trump.
(the BEST president of all time)
I love that you support the murder of babies because you pretend to be “PRO-CHOICE!”
I love that you support “racial diversity quotas”, just like the KKK did,
I love the fact that if you were American, you would DEFINITELY be a democrat.
You would be proud to be a member of the party of slavery, the KKK, and Jim Crow.
But!
(haha!)
Your response will be nothing but nastiness.
Nothing but mindless hatred and ad hominem attacks.
You will attempt to use bullying tactics, even though you’ll get nothing in return.
You will definitely prove me correct about that.
(I wonder if Coby is reading this stuff. It’d be interesting to know)
The MAIN thing, wow is that you will NEVER come up with actual measured data to support your foolish faith in the UN politicians.
Gimme evidence from weather balloons.
Gimme evidence from satellites.
show me how measured data proves that the current climate is outside natural variations.
Just now, it occurs to me that we’ve had satellite temperature data for around 30 years now, haven’t we?
You say it’s settled science…
But just think; in 300 years time, we will STILL only have 330 years worth of satellite data.
The earth’s climate changes in far longer time-scales than that.
Surely you’re aware of that?
You understand this of course, but leftist politics is FAR more important to you than science.
Oh wow!
I’m so glad you are the only one left commenting here.
I might check back in a few weeks to see if anyone else has commented in support of you.
(not very likely, is it)
There is no way you can provide actual evidence for AGW.
Your side is fucked.
You have been utterly fooled by the greatest criminal hoax in all history.
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(dammit! *epiphany*)
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You’d need at least simian intelligence to get an epiphany,kid. You’re simply not equipped. That you are the best the denierspere can do is rather nice to see however.
And I love seeing you small government libertards whine on about needing big government to get inside a woman’s womb and force YOUR (lack of) morality on her. You aren’t equipped to see the hypocrisy there, even when pointed out to you.
As well as all that, you’ve just proven that AGW denial is merely political and therefore is an invalid unscientific fraud.
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“I realised that every single believer in AGW was ‘of the left’.”
Then you’re ignorant. Look up Dr Barry Bickmore. Rightwinger. “Believer” in reality (AGW, which is definitely real).
Just thought of debunking your political ideology driven diatribe with this fact. Deniers are rightwingers, but not all rightwingers are deniers.
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Wow!
It’s quiet ’round here!
Hi wow.
Merry New Year for 2020.
Just checking in to see how you’re feeling about the whole AGW thing right now.
Are you still a firm Believer in the UN IPCC, or have you grown sceptical that they’re telling the truth at all?
If you are still a Believer, I’d like to ask;
What are you demanding regarding *action* on AGW?
What sort of action would make you feel safe again?
In other words, what sort of *action!* would make you feel like the climate emergency is under control, and no longer needs worrying about?
I look forward to your reasoned and good-natured reply.
Cheers!
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