Tell Me What's Wrong With This

[Vladimir]

So is Europe getting warmer or colder?

Warmer: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4532344.stm

or

Colder: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4485840.stm

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Colder, though this is probably cyclical. Temperatures during the warm period gaps between glaciation ebb and flow.

Note: proponents of the "mankind induced global warming" theory would argue that this is symptomatic of the planet desparately trying to re-establish a balance to fight against the melting of the arctic engendered by green-house gasses. The argument would extend further to note that the creation of green-house gasses by mankind might push the natural cylce past any homeostatic effort at recovery.

Note the data points referenced in both pieces however, and you will have the source of "anti-global warming" folk's skepticism. 1960-1990 is the measurement baseline for temperature? Why? No measurements using the same scale older than 1857? So, no measurements from the pre-industrial/low-population end of history at all. How good is the comparative use of ice cores for temperature to provide "older" data? Do we really have enough good evidence to make pronouncements about global climatalogical changes when we can't even predict the local weather with considerable accuracy when it's more than 3 days into the future?

Questions abound.

[Blodrast]

Do we really have enough good evidence to make pronouncements about global climatalogical changes when we can't even predict the local weather with considerable accuracy when it's more than 3 days into the future?

3 days ?! My local weather forecast is blatantly lying to my face when showing the current weather...

Seriously, though, we can't say "colder" or "warmer". Colder or warmer than what/when ?
Than last year ? Than 100 years ago ? Than the little mini-ice age roughly 1000 years ago ?
Than the average over the last 50000 years ? We certainly don't have enough data to do any of these properly, seeing as even data covering a couple of hundred years is insufficient to make estimates on geologically-significant periods of time... (ok, maybe "geologically" isn't the word I was looking for, what I wanted to say was "a period of time long enough for the weather to actually change"... and, of course, not referring to seasonal changes).

[Uesugi Kenshin]

The current weather forecasts here are generally extremely accurate because of doppler radar. Unfortunately their predictions for later on often are correct for everyone around my town, but my town often ends up in a pocket "eye of the storm" type area in the clouds and ends up getting little of the bad weather in time for a snow day....It's extremely disheartening to see a roiling mass of green covering most of the area and then a small pocket of clear skies right over my town.

On the topic of global warming I think we should clean up our industries because there is enough evidence of warming to make it quite likely, though it is true that we don't have enough evidence to say exactly what is happening in the grand scheme of things.

[Rodion Romanovich]

They do make sense and don't contradict each other, even though it might seem so judging from the headlines. What they say is the following: global warming causes increase in average temperature. However, past a certain point it *might* make ocean currents change, and as ocean currents affect the temperature of Europe a lot, this might result in a temperature drop. If global warming is increased extremely much the increased average temperature will outbalance this effect and make Europe approximately as warm as it is today, but that requires making Africa and southern Asia impossible to live in. Reduced global warming stops the ocean current problem, and lowers the average temperature increase in Europe, giving us approximately the same temperatures as we had a few decades ago.