Absolutely, I fully support limiting pollution as best we can.  I just define "as best we can" as something that doesn't cripple our economic competitiveness, which is what Cap'N'Trade will do if its done right...if its done wrong we won't even be that lucky.

There is actually significant work being done on reducing electrical requirements for the average home - one such device is supposed to remove the need to freeze air in an AC unit to remove moisture so that instead of going from 90 degrees to 32 back up to 70-72 we can passively remove moisture and just cool from 90 to 70-72.  This is being tested in Austrailia this upcoming summer iirc and could reduce home energy usage substantially.

I don't know why anyone would be against this - in fact businesses least of all.  There is a ton of money to be made in reselling appliances people already own but more efficient versions.

FUD is sort of one of those non-specific things though - what specifically do they get wrong? 

This is the issue with the pro-AGW side of the debate recently - they work harder to discredit the source than they do to actually address the points being made.  I mean your own assessment admits that you are going from "appearances" from the "surface".  I mean I appreciate that you might no have the time to read a nearly 900 page document but to just call it FUD and be done is itself just that. FUD.

See this depends on what you want to do to prepare...

If you want to prepare by massively cutting carbon emissions and thus reducing the productive output of the major industrialized nations ..well then you're insane and this is frankly a terrible idea.

If you want to focus on reducing energy consumption by increasing the efficiency of appliances, switching to nuclear power to supplement our coal addiction, and in general maintain and continue to boost our productivity to use that productivity as a tool then I'm on board.  My objection to the use of the precautionary principle by AGW advocates is when it is used to advance the idea that we should cripple ourselves and demand that others do so as well.  If we truly are facing a crisis I would much rather have the productive engine of our society well oiled and at full power to combat the problem than to get rid of it and hope its enough.

People seem to forget that they don't instanly melt on a hot summer day.  Every analysis I have seen says that adapting to a changing climate is significantly cheaper (as in like 1/100th or 1/20th the cost) than trying to stop it.  It also has the additional benefit of not halting the world's economic engine.

Either way this is phase 3 of the debate.

• Phase 1 - Is the earth warming? And to what degree?  Is it signficant enough to be a concern for human existance?
• Phase 2 - Are humans causing it?
• Phase 3 - What should we do about it?
• Phase 4 - How do you dole out the responsibilities once we decide what to do?

Doing something in step 3 or 4 now is fine so long as it doesn't cut off other options. This is the precautionary principle applied correctly.  The way many try to use it in this debate is essentially like walking through a jungle - getting a large gash while on your hike and returning to town to have it amputated just in case it got infected....maybe we should take some steps to reduce the chances of infection, clean the wound, and bandage it....BEFORE we simply lop the thing off "just to be safe".  Similarly we should produce more efficient appliances, move to nuclear power instead of coal, and wait to see if "the infection" is even there.

"It's not happening -- well, even if it is we aren't causing it -- well, even if we are, warming is good!"  You wouldn't be tempted to see that sort of thing as a shotgun attempt to cast as much doubt as possible over as much stuff as possible?  

It sounds like you may be aware of the following and just using my post to point out a fault of others, but just to make sure:  you are bearing in mind that I'm not saying it necessarily is FUD, even if the characterization is fair, which I also do not state as a fact?  (It's not like I'm writing a news piece titled "Do Republicans Eat Babies?" after all.)

Also, does FUD have to be untrue?   

Actually to me it is a thorough approach to addressing their points: 

Have you never told someone "Not only are you wrong, but even if you're right your solution is ill-concieved."? 

Actually the fact that you weren't saying it was necessarily FUD is part of what bugged me. So not only was it casting doubt on the report without substantiation but it was a non-statement as well...you didn't even commit to it.  Do you see what I mean by this?

Finally, I don't think FUD is inherantly false but to me it implies a deliberate intent to mislead or to be dishonest. This is kind of why I threw it back - I wanted to make the point that it doesn't feel nice to have it thrown in your face - especially when you are truly sincere.

I can tell you that I hold my views honestly and with conviction, and from interaction with others (like Anthony Watts) I have no reason to doubt his sincerity or the sincerity of those who produced the report we are discussing.  This lack of reason to suspect their sincerity is at the heart of this exchange actually.  What reason is there to suspect them?

Well, to be honest, some of it was probably just based on not thinking about the scale involved.  As you say, when it's a massive 900-page whatever, it's going to be pretty thorough, and there's time to cover a lot of ground (even if the first part would, if correct, make it not strictly necessary), etc. etc.  A short article that flew from subject to subject, staying just long enough to throw some counterpoint or other like throwing a can of paint at a fence, would be quite a different thing.  

Another thing was that the paper seems to have been produced by some organization that (going by the name) seems to have been set up for the sole purpose of rebutting the IPCC, which would make me go in with a skeptical eye as to their own potential bias.  But that name is, frankly, literally all I know about them right now, so I'm well aware it would be foolish to say they actually DO have bias coloring their response.   

However, I remain deeply skeptical of any claim that significant warming would benefit in the short term.  Even if a stable ecology at higher temp. might be better, I'm pretty confident (despite admitted lack of expertise) that there would be serious rearranging of arable land, water resources, etc. that would hurt us for some time, and human response to the changes might be destructive of what good might supposedly happen.  I suppose I ought to do the research (I'm willing to be shown wrong) ... but I'm lazy sometimes.  

I don't really get the preoccupation with the who wrote it - rubbish is rubbish - science is science.  I gauruntee you there is a little of both in the paper as it is nearly 900 pages and I doubt any human(or group thereof)  is that perfectly unbiased as to be perfect - which of course is also true of AR4.  I'm still working my way through this report - slower than I'd like thanks to a busy schedule and trying to keep up with regular reading outside of this larger reading project.  But the idea is you should read it, compare to what you know, revise your views as you see fit, and search out new information to add to your knowledge or to use in assessing the paper.

As for the benefits - we would first have to know what kind of warming we are assuming and then what levels of C02 we are assuming to be associated with that warming before we can talk about the benefits and detriments. 

The problem I have is that to in order to get to the kind of catastrophic warming scenarios where detrimental warming is valid we have to believe that the climate is dominated by positive feedbacks.  To understand what this means I can give the example of a nuclear explosion as the epitome of a process dominated by massive positive feedback,  It gets more and more unstable until it is out of control - with a nuke this takes far less than a second.  As opposed to something that is dominated by negative feedbacks like throwing a baseball, no matter how hard you throw it (unless you're superman) this process is dominated by the negative feedback of gravity bringing the ball back down and your throwing motion is completely overshadowed by this negative feedback in no time at all.

Our climate is constantly struggling for equilibrium which implies negative dominance..this is a basic premise of meteorology and weather prediction.  The dance of high and low pressure, warm and cold air, east and west currents, high and low tide, etc.. - but the climate has not increased in instability as was claimed (this is why we were told we would have more hurricanes, tornados, floods, etc...) but has remained in line with what we've always seen going about its natural cycles like those of the PDO and ENSO as usual.  This is inherantly the behavior of a system dominated by negative feedbacks.   

This feedback value (the assumed positive feedback value that is) is what they are using to multiply the climate sensitivity agreed to be between 0.8-1.2C up to 3C to 6C - climate sensitivity being the amount of warming expected from a doubling of atmospheric C02 (the basic range being agreed on because it is so easy to just test it in a lab).  Without that multiplier from the assumed dominant positive feedback you simply don't get catastrophic warming at all, you get gradual climate change like we've always had striving for an equilibrium it fails to reach due to constant input from lunar gravity and solar irradiance.

In addition to that is the data these models are using which is, to put it mildly, atrocious.  Stations are, as a matter of policy, used to "correct" data of other stations at distances up to 1,000km (~621 miles) away from them.  The top 100 such "influential" stations are used to "influence" more than 100 other stations, with the top ten all influencing at least 235.  Three of the top 4 of these "influential" stations are located at airports, and most on the list have MOEs of >2C. 

This is actually what  Mr. Watt's current project (the one that has him being branded a "kook") is all about.  He has the audacity to systamtically visit (as well as several volunteers) and photographically document all of the 1221 climate stations in the USHCN, while also updating the network database to include greater GPS accuracy of their locations (most of the current locations are very bad estimates and hard to find - thus he makes it easier for others to go visit these stations later).  Furthermore he makes all of this data and photographic evidence available online.  He then has the gall to use the objective siting criteria used by NOAA to evaluate these stations and assign ratings which can be verified by anyone who wants to go to the site and see why a station was given its rating.  What they have found, and what anyone can go see for themselves, is that more than 90% of the stations in the network that have been surveyed so far (and they have surveyed over 1000 now) have a MOE greater than the anthropogenic warming that has been alleged to have already occurred.

The IPCC claims that 60% of the warming in the last century is anthropogenic. Based on the above graph that would be ~0.36C or ~8.39 times smaller than the aproximate average station MOE of ~3.02 (aproximate because a given rating is a range not a fixed number, in all cases the difference was split with the exception of the final category which was offset by the same amount as the previous category).

edit: Adding this since it is an important footnote, the majority of the station siting problems are human-added bias caused by development that has built up around stations in the past 30+ years.  This could be a coincidense but it is an important fact to have in relating this to the record.

Here is the most recent graph I could find :

Or if you prefer it geographically:

And if all of that wasn't bad enough here is what happens when you take the final data set produced by NOAA from USHCN and subtract it from the raw data:

Note that I focus on the models because outside of models and their data there is nothing that suggests catastrophic warming is in our future.

Does that show that only 10% of stations are accurate to within 1 degree C?

Do you know whether its an inaccuracy which would average out or does it skew data one particular way?

Yes, it shows that only 10% are accurate to better than 1 degree C.  90% are less accurate than 1 degree C.

edit: sorry late night~

As for the bias anyone can look at this on a station by station basis for themselves, but I know from having perused the data extensively that it is far and away skewed towards a warming bias thanks to positioning near things such as asphalt, exhaust vents, tarmacs where jet wash flows over the station, on top of buildings, and so many other blatant problems.

I feel beyond confident in stating that the bias is overwhelmingly a warm one.  In fact I am struggling to think of a single instance I've come across where a bias produced a negative temperature bias.....The only possible exception I can think of is in the case of lost/moved stations -  sometimes the stations are moved and their geographic location isn't updated in the DB - this movement may have, in some cases, been a cooling bias. 

Yeah, NASA and NOAA disagree with your caps locked bit:

Source

...

“It’s been as dead as a doornail,” David Hathaway, a solar physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., said a couple of months ago.

The Sun perked up in June and July, with a sizeable clump of 20 sunspots earlier this month.

Now it is blank again, consistent with expectations that this solar cycle will be smaller and calmer, and the maximum of activity, expected to arrive in May 2013 will not be all that maximum.

For operators of satellites and power grids, that is good news. The same roiling magnetic fields that generate sunspot blotches also accelerate a devastating rain of particles that can overload and wreck electronic equipment in orbit or on Earth.

A panel of 12 scientists assembled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now predicts that the May 2013 peak will average 90 sunspots during that month. That would make it the weakest solar maximum since 1928, which peaked at 78 sunspots. During an average solar maximum, the Sun is covered with an average of 120 sunspots.

...

Still, something like the Dalton Minimum — two solar cycles in the early 1800s that peaked at about an average of 50 sunspots — lies in the realm of the possible, Dr. Hathaway said. (The minimums are named after scientists who helped identify them: Edward W. Maunder and John Dalton.)

Follow the link above to read in full.

Solar Cycles are something I've been reading up on lately and it is kind of a guessing game when it comes to predicting future cycles with any accuracy.  However, once they get going on a path, they seem to follow a pretty regular pattern throughout their cycle. Additionally there appear to be multi-cycle patterns as well - but with the usual potential for spikes and variance these are much harder to identify in any statisitically meaningful way.