HL Mencken said it best: "Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. "
Let's see what global average temperature would have been if we hadn't been adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. As you can see from here, if we had not been burning fossil fuels, global average temperature would have been close to what they were in 1924.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp...
So the amount of warming since 1924 is the approximately the amount that Earth has warmed because of fossil fuels.
The global average temperature anomaly in 1924 was -0.24C and it 2013, it was 0.61C, a difference of 0.85C. That difference could make a significant difference when it is hot enough that people die.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-23/he...
And denialists call us anti-human.
edit
From the link
"But the Californian drought was too close to call. While heatwaves depend only on how hot the temperature is, heavy rains, floods and dry spells are more complex events, relying on mix of factors including atmospheric patterns, sea surface temperatures and rainfall. That makes it harder to tease out the role of climate change from natural variations in the climate. Studies of these types of events were less conclusive, and three studies of different factors in California's 2013-2014 drought found little or no role for global warming."
If scientists were being paid to ignore the scientific method and blame everything on global warming, you would think that they would blame the California drought on global warming. But, since they don't, that tells us two things.
1. The scientists know what they are doing.
2. They are telling the truth.
The denier answers are pretty amusing. You have to wonder how qualified they are to judge how "scientific" something is, when not one of them even addresses the actual journal articles. Look at Zippi62's answer, he talks about the reporter rather than the actual research.
Can he even distinguish between the two?
EDIT: Let me help you out Sagebrush, since you seem to have a difficulty that many "true scientists" like yourself have--you can't distinguish between scientific literature and the popular media. New Scientist is a popular magazine, not a scientific journal, and the scientific validity of any work can't be judged by a magazine account. If you and your fellow "true scientists" want to examine the actual work, you'll need to read the supplement to BAMS, not some magazine you can find in your local mall.
You'll find that most of your "climate change" driven articles are written by 'bleeding-heart' liberals who use emotions to drive their message. They don't understand the science, but they will believe what other 'bleeding-heart' scientists are concluding.
Catherine Brahic has always been a bleeding-heart liberal. All you have to do is research her past writings. It seems that they still believe in the "runaway effect" of CO2. That was "debunked" by science many years ago, but it doesn't stop them from publishing articles that implicate this through their "liberal-leaning" media outlets.
"It's my party and I'll cry, if I want to" - It's a good thing that real science isn't built on an emotional curve.
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Pegminer - There isn't any science that quantifies CO2 warming in any form in her article. It's a bunch of "alarming" bs (blown science).
Not scientific at all. In fact, the Australian BOM was recently busted for falsifying ('adjusting') temperature station data. Their credibility.....is non-existent.
They use CMIP5 models, there you go, they find out what is man-made from natural by using climate models and we all know how accurate climate models are, 97% of climate models failed to predict the pause, but we don't let that faze us.
If you endorse it. Not at all.If you dispute it it must be accurate
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26287-blame-climate-change-for-heatwaves-that-struck-in-2013.html
