| Yulegoat said: In the first message you talked about long-term trend and there definitely is one. There are marked annual variations of course, but the overall trend is positive. |
The problem currently is that every claim made about "Global Warming" can generally be disagreed with by a published and peer reviewed paper; this is why I initially said "I don't know whether there is any significant long term warming occuring on the earth and even if there is to what extent it is effected by man's actions."
Much like the videogame sales that this site tracks our global temperature data is an approximation based on a small set of data; this data is then put through a wide assortment of statistical manipulation in order to come with an estimate of the average temperature of the surface of the earth. The problem we have is that the confidence interval around the average temperature supports the claims that the "world is warming" and the "world is cooling" because of how small the change in temperature really is.
Anyways ... My initial point was not to bring various arguments about the science of global warming and I was mainly focusing on the motivations behind the "Global Warming Crysis". No one can deny that the entire debate is heavily political and the motivation for people to choose either side is primarily based on issues unrelated to global warming.
