Tim the plumber

The point is that there have been warmer periods in Earths history without the massive heating of +12 degrees leaving lots of the world uninhabitable. Some of these periods of being warmer than today have been since the last ice age. The permafrost that is vulnerable to melting from similar heating clearly has been laid down since the last time it was warm. I found these graphs very quickly. If the information in them is new to you I must ask why it is that you feel so confident discussing this sort of subject.

Not funny but there are more deaths from cold in the UK. I don't know which way around it is in France but I suspect that it is similar. In any case a warming of 2 degrees will not make the UK the same as France. It will still be cooler than France. It worries me that some people cannot understand such a simple idea. That they are so focused on their per-determined conclusion that any warming is BAD! And how many die in the UK from cold related causes? Population, in 2003, of UK 59.57M, Italy 57.6M, Spain 42.72M. https://www.google.co.uk/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=3zpNVI-wDe3H8gfrzIDQCA&gws_rd=ssl#q=population+of+uk

Yes. You have got it.

From http://geology.utah.gov/surveynotes/gladasked/gladice_ages.htm From http://stepwilh.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/hockey-stick-graph.html This may be news here but generally all those who have taken any interest in this subject are aware of the fact that the world's climate has bee warmer in the past. When it warmed to levels higher than today's there was no methane bomb. It seems unlikely that today's temperatures will cause such a thing.

The NHS (Health service, hospitals etc) in the UK has a policy of making sure all of it's beds are available during the winter as admissions go up in the cold weather. Lots of old people come in with cold related conditions. During the summer they are not at capacity. Elective surgery is often maximized during this period. More people die due to cold in the UK than from the very occasional heat wave which would not be considered at all unusual weather in say New York. Yes, there are some deaths due to heat but not many especially after you take out those which happen after 20 pints in the beer garden and a swim in the river. Northern France is not considered difficult to live in due to the heat of the place. Northern France is significantly warmer than 2 degrees above central England. Especially in the summer. Lots of Brits retire to France. Lots more to Spain. Not so many to Iceland. The reason I am a skeptic is due to the presence of papers and claims such as this (+2 degrees = lots of deaths) which is laughable. The public in England will laugh at such things. I understand that the paper has been careful to put in the caveat that this assumes no change in life style. Well, life style would change. It is things like this which color my perception of other claims coming from the ecco warrior types. As has been pointed out all these points have been refuted. Presumably that means that the idea that people from England retire to hot places has been refuted. If you can manage that in your own head you are capable of seeing the sky as pink whenever you want to.

Hans, Go for it. We will do our best to help. I'll be the able to explain the bottom rungs and them pass you on to the more educated. It's sometimes easier to get a slightly simplified explanation even if it's a bit wrong. What is the hardest thing you can do at the moment and what is the next thing you want to have a go at?

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hottest-earths-ever-been Is this actually news to you? Well I fully understood how to use that graph and why he is talking about a 4-5 degree temperature rise. It's because that's what the OP is talking about. Wild Cobra, Where did the basic data for the effects of these gasses come from and why is it a logarithmic effect?

Could an explanation of the Logical fallacy thing be listed please.

Are you aware that the present climate of the Earth is cool by comparison with the average climate for the Earth over say a billion years? I ask because this seems to be very common knowledge in any group of people who are armchair science TV watchers or better. I would like to know at what level I should pitch the answer. OK, that's a reasonable point. But since the endangered deposits are just the edges of the extent of the permafrost I see no undue reason to expect a vast input from the totality of the permafrost zones. It's not all at risk. Don't hold your breath waiting for a reply. It would take an understanding of what forcing is and what a watt is to make sense of such a graph. I'm surprised that the methane line is so low. Is that as a result of it's direct effect being negligible or that the wavelengths it reflects/emits are already covered by other gasses or just that it's not actually effective?

What else is he referring to?

The debate about human induced climate change, it's effects, it's causes and what to do about it seems to be the sort of thing which gets very bitchy and personal. Even more so than the debates between creationists and the rest of us. I may have found out why;- I take it you don't think it good to have dissenters allowed in a discussion. Not a fan of democracy are you.

LOL!!! So the fact that previous periods of much hotter climatic conditions have not resulted in the sudden positive feedback effect adding more heat means nothing??? What is so dramatically different today?? Why does the permafrost care that there are humans living some thousands of miles away? How does the methane ice on the sea bed tell? It's the same argument that creationists make when they say that replicating conditions of the early Earth to see what carbon chemistry does has no bearing on the formation of life. You are denying clear evidence.

You have dismissed it. You say you have easily refuted it. OK fine. The idea that in the fable of the Emperor's new cloths there would have been (today) all the fashion magazines congratulating the designer of the non-cloths would have given you the ammunition to also easily refute and dismiss with a laugh the point that the man was naked. Sometimes pointing out the bleeding obvious that old people like to retire to warmer places rather than cold places like where live in Sheffield in the UK does not have supporting peer reviewed journals. It's far too bleedingly obvious to have any sort of funding for a paper. You will not convince me that a 2 degree warming will cause England to be less hospitable for humans and I will not convince you that it will be nicer. Those others who read this exchange might have the capacity to make up their own minds though. I urge such people to have a holiday in the UK. It's a great place full of history culture and all the world's landscapes in miniature, except deserts. Get beyond London and Stratford though. They are the worst bits, well except for Barnsley.... Now now, you'll be banned. Pointing out the obvious is a logical fallacy.

Yes that about sums up my position. If it gets to be a real problem then the sales of conditioning systems will increase. I see lots of older people (the ones said to be in trouble due to warming in the study) retiring to places like Tenerife. They often say that they are going because of the climate. Florida is also full of retired folks. Iceland is not a destination for such people generally. There are obviously exceptions. SINCE THIS THREAD IS ASKING WHO IS A SKEPTIC EXPLAINING MY REASONS IS HARDLY OUT OF ORDER!

Eh?? Are you saying that there is no real possibility/likelihood of a 12 degree rise? If that is the case why is this being discussed at all? Just scarey hype?

What not a skeptic? When I am told that a 2 degree rise in temperature will cause mass death in Britain and that suggesting that it is bollocks is wrong because it's been peer reviewed and thus is sacred and that the world will have a 12 degree temperature rise due to another peer reviewed piece of drivel which flies in the face of all other physics I get to the point of believing that something is up with the peer review process.

I didn't say anything about humans. In previous times when the planet was often much hotter than 5 degrees warmer than now there was not a sudden massive shift to such a temperature. Why expect that to happen now?

Good job that didn't happen in any of the previous warm periods that Earth has been through.

Yes, we have studied the workings of Antarctica for so long now that we are 100% confident that we fully understand it all. Or maybe not. This is why I'm a skeptic.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/33/13268.full Yes, we humans have reduced the amount of decent agricultural land on the planet. Mostly by over grazing as well as plowing. The impact of events such as the Arab conquest where nomads conquered area which relied upon irrigation and did not react well to the land being converted into pasture for goats and camels. Carthage harbor silted up in one season after the conquest. The appliance of science will allow us to rebuild such landscapes eventually. The use of crops which do not rely upon the plow will help a lot. Genetic engineering is likely to be the most effective tool to produce such plant species.

The correct scientific answer is "I don't know".

You can attack me for being off topic if you want but then to defend a graph as good when it's clearly either way off topic or misleading and in fact both is disingenuous. In the context of global warming the reduction in death rate due to warmer winters is directly relevant to the supposed deadliness of slightly warmer summers. The cost of aircon is less than the increase in cost of the heating required in other times of year. Not that aircon will be needed, just sayin'.

Those sort of signals tend to be obvious to all. Smoke signals can be understood as a signal without knowing what they say. It's the modern digital signals which I think would be very difficult to identify if your reception equipment was not set up to receive at the correct frequency rate. If ET talks too fast for us to distinguish separate signals we might be mistaking all that white noise for random nothingness when in fact it's all there for the listening.

And we have not had a heat wave since the article either. There are a lot more deaths in the UK from cold than heat. Old people like to retire to France or hotter places. We don't have domestic air-con. If it gets to be significant issue we will. Problem sorted. I get attacked for stating things in a normal English way where "heat is not a killer in the UK". Which is generally understood to be in a 99.9% way. Yes there are some exceptions. Those who post about 200m or 60m sea level rises or 9 degree temperature rises do not. THERE IS NO SCIENCE TO SUGGEST THAT SUCH THINGS ARE AT ALL ON THE CARDS. Why are my statements which are 99% OK attacked when such clearly grossly exaggerated numbers are left to float happily about? At what point does an exaggeration become a lie? I am wrong by a factor of 1% or so, maybe. When people put out claims that are misleading by a factor of 200 (1m becomes 200m) why no response?

Good one! I can see a lot of cost of building a lot of walls before any slight reduction in risk happens. Perhaps take 5% of the money you were going to spend on walls and make the buildings stronger. Build them out of concrete if required. Is the idea of having deliberate warm zones where coal slag is spread out over a hill side or something which will get hotter and thus create a thermal on a small localized scale. This will allow a small cloud to form resulting in a small rain storm rather than having the wider landscape create a uniform heat which then causes a huge thunderstorm, with attendant tornadoes, but less often. Sort of a pressure relief valve.