No one would dispute that. At a macro level, we experience periods of significant climate change. The current global climate change is called global warming.
Politically, 'climate change' has come to replace 'global warming' in the popular vernacular, probably because there are way too many yokels who believe that global warming doesn't exist because it is snowing outside.
This is word play and nothing more. Politically, the term "climate change" has been hijacked because there is already considerable scientific literature on natural variations in the global temperature average that use the phrase. That this temperature has gone up following a well-documented climate event called The Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850) should not be too surprising. The period before 1300 is referred to as the Medieval Warm Period (900 to 1300), which was warmer than today. No coal plants then, either.
2005 was either the warmest or second-warmest year on record. Check the IPCC data. So... no?
Second on their record. But why not a new first? Why a drop since?
Maybe satellite data says there hasn't been any warming since 2000 because satellites don't have the ability to measure temperature?
Maybe you are wrong. Satellite measurements of global temperature have been recorded since 1979 and offer up record that is far superior to surface station measurements - which missed things like the oceans, the Arctic, Antarctic, detailed coverage of the developing world and so on.
In case you don't believe me:
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html
Irrelevant. Global warming is about long-term trends. There's been a bunch of years over the past century with slight cooling periods. What's relevant is that the overall trend line shows a significant increase over time
Are you presuming knowledge of a trend about the future? If you want to know something about the past 11,500 years (the Holocene), the trend shows a
cooling ever since the climate optimum of 9,000 to 5,000 years ago, when it was considerably warmer than today. However, even that very warm period was punctuated by a significant cool period some 8,200 years ago. From about 2,750 to 2,200 years ago there was a cool period. Even Roman writers of the time noted long snowy winters and the freezing of the Tiber river. That was followed by yet another significant warm period. How warm did it get then? Consider this: tree trunks from
that period are still being washed out from under the alpine glaciers of today in Europe. Some 1,600 to 1,100 years ago it was cooler, and observers from that period noted the freezing of the Black Sea and the Nile river. What happens then? The Medieval Warm Period. Somewhat warmer than today, that period lasted roughly from 1,100 to 700 years ago, and was followed by the Little Ice age that concluded around the early to mid nineteenth century.
And now the Modern Warm Period. Lucky us, since millions of people probably died during the Little Ice Age.
There is already knowledge of a well-established 1,000 to 1,500 trend in major climate shifts. Within each of these larger shifts are smaller degrees of variation in temperature. These are linked to the sun - as is the present comparatively small shift in temperature (less than 1C in 150 years).
No, they're not. Again, we're concerned with long-term trends. The data point you're referring to indicated that sea ice levels were roughly equal to 1979 levels for ONE day in December.
If you check the actual satellite data you will see that it was more than one day (unfortunately the relevant sensor has malfunctioned since the early new year). Thousands of square kilometres of ice just does not melt in a day.
Since you are making reference to trends, two things are important here: first, ice coverage is up over the last two years. That's acknowledged. The second is that the "historic" drop in Arctic ice coverage was attributed to changes in the arctic ocean circulation. Such ocean shifts are driven by the sun. You can refer to NASA for that information. They published it.
Concerning the Arctic sea Ice:
The NSIDC has of late acknowledged “sensor drift,†that began in early January, and which has caused a growing
underestimation of sea ice extent until late February.
However, the AMSR-E sensor on board Aqua is functioning well, but it's data set only goes back to 2002.
http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/seaice/extent/AMSRE_Sea_Ice_Extent.png
The big problem for those who claim that this warming is a product of human activity - or that it is even calamitous - is that they have failed to separated any proclaimed signal of human activity from natural variations. For example, in all its years publishing, the IPCC report have never accurately predicted one ENSO-La Nina fluctuation. If it can't make even reasonably accurate predictions about natural climate variations, then how can anyone proclaim accurate knowledge about human impact?
