Global warming exists.

The instigator has set the rules of the debate. I thank him for that. Please allow me to recapitulate. "Pro may use their first round, but not round 5. Pro has BoP. Pro has to prove the topic right. I will argue (as con) that global warming does not exist." The topic is "Global Warming Exists." Since this, so formulated, is totally open-ended I will state some definitions. It is open-ended because "Global warming" is left undefined. Left the way it is, I only need show that the Earth has had a hotter year than a previous year to show that "global warming exists." Thus the debate would end here. I do not believe that was the intention of the instigator even if he framed the debate this way. However, since the term "Anthropogenic" is not included, I will not include it here. I only need show that "Global Warming" (see below) exists now, and NOT that is a consequence of making's action under the rules of this debate. I would like to address one issue up front, this is the issue of intellectual authority. Authority au"thor"i"ty [uh-thawr-i-tee, uh-thor-] noun, plural au"thor"i"ties. [1-4] redacted 5.an accepted source of information, advice, etc. We will reference the definition (5) here. "An accepted source of information" In the 21st Century, it is recognized that science and technology have reached a stage where educational specialization is necessary for technical disciplines. No longer can just anyone hang up a shingle and practice medicine. Now, a degree from an accredited university is necessary. In addition, we recognize that people with medical degrees, have an intellectual authority in the field of medicine. This means specifically, their opinion in the matters of medicine carry more weight than the opinions of those who have not obtained the same degree. Climate Science is also such field. The conclusion here is that people with advanced degrees in Climate Sciences have more authority in when discussing "Global Warming" than does the non-climate scientist. "Climate change skeptics regularly denounce me as a disgrace to journalism for declining to accept their dogma, which is mostly received wisdom from sources that I'd trust to evaluate the published science about as much as I'd trust a plumber to perform open heart surgery. Nothing against plumbers, mind you. They're just not heart surgeons. And the economists, statisticians and agenda-driven politicians routinely cited by the skeptics aren't glaciologists, botanists, biologists, oceanographers, atmospheric physicists or computer modelling specialists." -James Hoggan For a working definition of "Global Warming," I suggest we use "Global warming is the unequivocal and continuing rise in the average temperature of Earth's climate system." Climate VS Weather The discussion here is about climate vs weather. I have included a video to show the difference. Since It is hard to add to the arguments in this video, I'll allow it to stand on its own. This debate is about CLIMATE not Weather. Global Warming Introduction We are in the midst of a warning trend. Various fluctuations happen, in climate, over time, However, the current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years (see) IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5 " B.D. Santer et.al., "A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere," Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46 Gabriele C. Hegerl, "Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method," Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306 V. Ramaswamy et.al., "Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling," Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141 B.D. Santer et.al., "Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes," Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483. Physical realities 1 Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades - NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. 2 Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade is nearly double that of the last century. - Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602 3 The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.-Levitus, et al, "Global ocean heat content 1955"2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems," Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009). 4 Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.- L. Polyak, et.al., "History of Sea Ice in the Arctic," in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7 - R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, "Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008," Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009 - http://nsidc.org... 5 Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world " including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa. -National Snow and Ice Data Center - World Glacier Monitoring Service 6 Temperature data from 4 separate international science institutions show rapid warming in the past few decades and that the last decade has been the warmest on record. -http://climate.nasa.gov... Subjective Realities - English speaking Nations James Powell searched the Web of Science for peer-reviewed scientific articles published between 1 January 1991 and 12 November 2012 that had the keyword phrases "global warming" or "global climate change." The search produced 13,950 articles. See methodology http://www.jamespowell.org... By Mr. Powell's definition 24 of the 13,950 articles, 0.17% or 1 in 581, clearly reject human-caused global warming or endorse a cause other than CO2 emissions for observed warming. The articles have a total of 33,690 individual authors (rounded to 33,700 in the figure). The 24 rejecting papers have a total of 34 authors, about 1 in 1,000. What we MINIMALLY see here is there were 13,950 and 580 out of every 581 peer-reviewed scientific articles were about AGW or AGW effects, mitigation, adaptation, methods of detecting, climate modeling, and paleoclimatology. Since AGW is dependent of "Global Warming" a priori, we deduce those papers endorse the idea of global warming. Here is Mr. Powell"s interpretation of his study: "When a new scientific theory is first proposed, scientists often go out of their way to state explicitly that they reject it, or that they accept it. This was the case with continental drift in the 1920s, with plate tectonics in the 1960s, and with the Alvarez theory of dinosaur extinction in the 1980s. One reading the literature in these fields can usually tell from the title of an article alone whether an author rejects the new theory. But after a theory achieves maturity and becomes the ruling paradigm, scientists no longer see any point in stating explicitly that they accept the now-no-longer-new theory. They take it as a given, often as an observational fact"like the measured movement of tectonic plates and the measured global temperature rise. To explicitly endorse the ruling theory would have the counter-effect of suggesting that the theory is in doubt. It is obvious that global warming has achieved the status of the ruling paradigm of climate science. Thus it is reasonable to assume that publishing scientists who today reject human-caused global warming would make it clear that they do so, while publishing scientists who accept the theory would not feel the need to say so explicitly. As a practical matter, virtually all of the global warming papers that Oreskes and I separately reviewed can be classified as about effects, mitigation, adaptation, methods of detecting, climate modeling, and paleoclimatology. Authors of these papers would hardly be likely to deny the existence of the very thing they are writing about. It is theoretically possible that a paper on paleoclimatology could be the exception, dealing with the lack of evidence for CO2-driven global warming in the geologic past, say, leading the author to question the seriousness of modern, human-caused global warming. I did not find such papers. What we know for a fact is that among the authors of peer-reviewed articles, only a tiny fraction, which I estimate as about 1 author in 1,000, rejects human-caused global warming. In my opinion, based on my understanding of the history of science, it is reasonable to conclude that nearly all publishing climate scientists accept that human activities are causing the Earth to warm. Polls of scientists reinforce this conclusion, but polls are no substitute for the primary, peer-reviewed literature, the ground truth of science." http://www.jamespowell.org... The International Community (All of the world is NOT the United States) Science and global warming affects all of us. Global Warming is not a US ONLY issue, yet climate change denial, to a very large extent is. It is at least almost limited to the English speaking world with over 80% of it being in the US. The issue of "global warming" is not a political controversy in most countries. How is that possible is Global Warming is not really happening?