I mean, they are two digit numbers.

Like Instapundit, I'm unsurprised. The friends of those promoting global warming often do their cause little good.

Rand,
The comparison is 88 verse 59 + the unquanitified contribution of enhanced ice streaming in the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, which the report shows on page 5 has been about 30cm /century between 1993 and 2003.

So yeah - that works out to be similar numbers. I believe the process is called "reading the whole report rather than skimming the tables to try and score points".

Oh, and there is this actual footnote on page 11; refering to the sea level estimates:
"TAR projections were maded for 2100, whereas projections in this Report are for 2090-2099. The TAR would have had similar ranges to those in Table SPM-2 if it had treated the uncertainties in the same way."

So, apples and oranges. Sea level may be worst than the the TAR once ice dynamics are fully considered.

Tim Blair makes an ass of himself again.

It's a huge worldwide conspiracy by all these crappy scientists - that's what you still hear after this report from some conservatives, and I don't include Rand.

I guess if it's true liberals can do conspiracy
extraordinarily well and on a global scale. I'm impressed. ;-)

Sigh. I wish my favorite righties would just take a vow of silence when it comes to climate change. It's like handing a stout stick to people flailing at you with cooked spaghetti and saying here, try this instead. Not everything espoused by fools on the left is ipso facto stupid.

It's like some kind of test to be in the club: unless you think global warming is impossible you can't belong. (The left has its own annoying tests, too: you can't belong to their environmentalist club unless you believe nuclear power is eeeeeeeevil, which, comparing the environmental cost of coal, gas, and even solar and wind versus nuclear is about the most dumbass, self-defeating attitude I can imagine.)

Personally? I believe that climate change is a fact of life. I also happen to believe that most of it results from what that little yellow thing in the sky does. Why is it that history has forgotten the Little Ice Age and its dramatic impact on civilization?

Where I strongly question things is when folks make the claim that *we* are "destroying" the environment. I tend to think we're a lot less significant than they give us credit for, and gimmicks like the hockey stick only reinforce my suspicions. If I can't trust them to play straight with the facts, how can I trust them to correctly assign blame or come up with a proper resolution. And, of course, the fact that said resolutions generally tend to be socialist fantasies that punish this country while letting massive polluters like China off scot free (not that they'd obey any restrictions on them anyways), doesn't help sway me very much.

So, given the background that all this is coming from, I'm going to tend to be more skeptical than I might have if the environmental movement hadn't previously existed.

I'm still waiting for the world to collapse in Malthusian chaos due to overpopulation and then for the glaciers to finish us off.

Why is it that history has forgotten the Little Ice Age and its dramatic impact on civilization?

It has become politically correct recently to deny that the Little Ice Age (and even more so the Medieval Warm) existed - "misinterpretation of data", etc. - primarily, I think, because the hockey-stick graph doesn't show them. Since these fluctuations are not on the hockey stick, they didn't exist. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Googling phrases such as "so-called Medieval Warm" and "so-called Little Ice Age" will turn up some of the arguments.

Googling phrases such as "so-called Medieval Warm" and "so-called Little Ice Age" will turn up some of the arguments.

Heh. Meanwhile those of us who point to the MW and LIA, we're the ones called "denialists."

The irony is so concentrated, U.S. Steel is bidding on the mineral rights.

I wish my favorite righties would just take a vow of silence

I'd rather they take a vow of science -- interpret the data scientifically, rather than coloring judgements with political or philosophical bias (and, no, complaining that you perceive bias on the other side doesn't give you an excuse to do it yourself.)

It has become politically correct recently to deny that the Little Ice Age (and even more so the Medieval Warm) existed

Really. And here we have NOAA saying:

In the early days of paleoclimatology, the sparsely distributed paleoenvironmental records were interpreted to indicate that there was a "Medieval Warm Period" where temperatures were warmer than today. [...] In contrast, the evidence for a global (or at least northern hemisphere) "Little Ice Age" [...] has more or less stood the test of time as paleoclimatic records have become numerous.

But for the MWP, I guess it's just such a sign of poltical correctness when scientific opinions are changed by newer and better data. How dare those scientists chuck out your favorite theory, just because of some pesky observational evidence!