I see high volatility and a forced conclusion.

I live in a place that was getting torrential rains when I was a little kid.  Ten inches in a few hours, that sort of rain.  25 years ago I got several in the same year when I was living here for a year at the age of 4.  Rain so thick you can't see your hand in front of your face.  Thunderstorms were common, I played in mud puddles for much of the summer, the spring saw roads being washed out.  The 70's and 80's were like that in this area.  I've been back here for several years now, haven't seen dick for serious rain.  A couple five inch rains, ones that came over a day or more.  During the worst of it, you can still see a good eighth of a mile.  Rain like this place had frequently when I was a kid hasn't been seen yet.  In the 30's, this entire area died off and most of it's inhabitants moved to the west coast.  It's on the edge of what was the dust bowl at the time.  If I didn't know this, my conclusion would be that the rain storms I remember are a thing of the past.  Reality is probably that in another 10 years here, I'm going to severely regret ever complaining about the lack of rain.

You're wrong on whether that information is changing, it's compliments of the CRU.  I tried to dig up the history, but all of the previous data sets have had their access removed.  You can still find out when, but not what the changes made were.  I suspect they were similar to the ones made in the US.  A pruning of stations in massive quantities, and not because they were poorly sited.  Most of the better sited stations have been pruned, worldwide.

The yearly rainfall and seasonal changes show extremely small and potentially non-existent trends.  If you looked at the station records for Vancouver, you should have noticed a huge variation in results just from different stations in the same city.  Only one of those stations would have been used in making a page like the one you've got.

When the "official" Vancouver station data ended in the late 1930's, which one was selected to replace it for the remainder of that decade could have varied the results by more than 20%, a massive change in trend.  Sadly for Ekko, even the lowest still beat the pants off his view, but that's still a great deal of change.  284mm could be just 25% below the record, with the difference over the decade being similar.  284mm could also be a laughably small amount of rainfall, dwarfed by a record nearly twice as high in a decade that saw almost as much rainfall in January as the last two put together.

If you can find a wonderful place like that one the Canadians still have up(ours is gone), a deeper look probably shows wildly varied results from stations that have simply been left out of that conclusion.  If you check that against GHCN's qualified record lists, it might even explain it away entirely.  If they simply stopped using station data from a particularly heavy rainfall area, say right next to that huge ass lake, and switched to one just a few miles off that sees radically less? That orange area could just be an artifact of selection and your country hasn't seen reduced rainfall over the century.  Vancouver's station data wasn't even replaced from what I can find, it simply ends around 1940 and they use that wonderful 1200km smoothing to fill in the blanks from other places before then.

I'd find an additional 50 years to be highly informative of where the precipitation trends actually go beyond the turn of the century as well, that doesn't really look like a progression, more like a few lumps in the first half.

Here come the Germans ....

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-15/steag-starts-germany-s-first-coal-fired-power-plant-in-8-years.html

That's crap too.

This is what happens when you stop clear cutting, and put out forest fires in an environment that burns to the ground frequently.  It's basic tree management, we've known it for a long time.  Old, sick trees get bug infested.  When you're running an orchard, you cut out sick trees to avoid attracting disease and infestation into your environment.

Bark beetles pose no threat to healthy trees normally.  They exist in small numbers, spreading out from singular sources to hunt for new ones, only occasionally managing to infest healthy trees.  Typically they get eaten instead.  What you've done to your wonderful forests, is prevent the natural controls or the alternative man made controls, from taking place.

There were massive bark beetle infestations in the 60's in California, ones that tried to rival the dust bowl era.  Yes, there were bark beetles everywhere in the 30's too.  They usually explode in populations during drought.  I say usually, but usually they don't keep going for very long because people that aren't around to put out forest fires don't let them stay drought stricken trees for very long.  Most of the trees they like to eat happen to go up like a match when they're dry.

In the 60's, they managed them by logging the dry forests.  These days, they take care of the problem by running around with a bunch of geeks finding sick trees to prune.  This stupidity is wide spread and a phenomenon of the recent idea that old growth forests are anything but dead wood with few inhabitants besides tree boring bugs.  Your typical pine tree doesn't live to be thousands of years old, it gets to around 30 before it goes up like a match.  You don't hear anyone complaining about the redwood forests dying off because they do.

It is not a matter of quibbling over the end of a line.  It's that the line doesn't keep going in the same direction and your trend doesn't exist.  Turchany may actually have one in Hungary, nothing anywhere near so severe as his own life history would suggest as he's lived through the height of a cycle but not previous highs, but still a trend perhaps.  Vancouver has no such trend, your records show no such trend.  Bark beetle infestations are nothing new, their extended growing seasons are nothing new.

What is new is that clear cutting and burning have been largely eliminated and no one seems to be able to figure out why they don't live forever.

Your trees are old, clear cut them, burn the slash.  The seeds need a fire to grow anyway.

They don't just kill normal trees.  Do you just not bother learning about a subject at all before you respond to a challenge?

The bark beetle is in a race with the tree.  It bores a hole, the tree bleeds sap.  The sap encases and kills the beetle.  An old or sick tree that doesn't have much sap loses the race.  The beetle infects the tree with a fungus, the fungus grows, and stops the sap from leaking.  A single beetle can successfully infest an already nearly dead tree.  If they're attacking healthy trees, they die by the thousands and get nothing beyond sap filled holes outside of the rare trees that get massive numbers.  This is a species that comes with it's own population control.

Bark beetles also exist over a wide range of climates.  They don't go through hard freezes and die off everywhere, it doesn't even get cold enough where you're at.  You're blaming one local factor that barely registered outside of the higher elevations, on a problem that is widespread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinus_contorta

These are your trees.  They're dying, the beetles are a product of the conditions, not the cause.  It's supposed to take around -40 to start killing them off.  You don't get temperatures that low in a coastal location well south of the Arctic circle.  It's a bullshit excuse.  Minor reductions in populations in the mountains is the only thing you'd be able to expect, global warming or not.

They cut back logging, and they stopping doing regular burns 30-40 years back.  Very few of those pines will even sprout unless the damned place burns.  You have an aging, overpopulated forest filled with nutrient starved trees.  The beetles don't even need drought to explode in these conditions.

The best part is, they even know they screwed the pooch and started changing direction.

http://bcwildfire.ca/Prevention/PrescribedFire/

They do still pretend it's a product of global warming when they go touting their environmentalism, but they don't believe it any more than I do.

I've been laughing at the morons complaining about bark beetles for 20 years.  I wasn't going to respond to it because the claim is so stupefyingly bad that it's just too easy and too pointless.  You owe your further shredding to the fact that you're unable to accept that the purveyor of crap you posted earlier was just some asshole spewing his shit after I clearly demonstrated that he had no idea what he was talking about with regards to rainfall.

I was in grade school when I first discovered there are morons that don't understand trees get old and die.  My fifth grade teacher convinced me of this fact when she spent the entire school year failing miserably to indoctrinate me in the most hilarious of ideas while she was supposed to be teaching geography and science.  Perhaps you had her too.

If you want to believe that being a couple hundred miles inland makes you have an arid, extreme climate, go for it. 

If you want to believe that global warming is the cause of a larva that nests inside trees and produces it's own anti-freeze not dying at temperatures 40 degrees too high to kill it, go for it.

You just keep pretending I don't know what I'm talking about, and I'll just add you to the list GeomanNL is on.  Anyone that can't accept simple realities like this is not worth my time.  This isn't some disagreement over whether information has been manipulated, it's a physical impossibility.  They range from Mexico to Alaska, and none of the areas they currently infest have ever been frequently cold enough to control their populations since white man set foot on the continent.

These have been their habitats since the interglacial got up and running and it is entirely a product of the lack of regular renewal in the arboreal forests.  They don't handle fire prevention, period.

So which is worse? The "deniers" or the people who truly believe but do nothing about it?

I've had this same debate for years and the only consistent trend I've seen is that the motivation to believe comes less from the evidence but more a desire to feel good about themselves.

i rarely meet a true believer who has even bothered to install a solar panel or upgraded their insulation. Not that any of those things would matter, they're all futile gestures but it would at least provide some remotely material reason for them behaving so uppity in e issue.

if climate changed is tangibly caused by humans then it's unavoidable. We won't be reducing our co2 any time soon. Developing countries are only now starting to contribute to co2 production. China and India are just getting started. 

The problem with the debate is that it's a non issue. it May or may not be real but either way is irrelevant. 

The deniers....because they do so to feel good about their doing nothing at all to 'attempt' to counter it.

Some [most] people are so conditioned to our consumer society they cannot allow even the possibility of 'we're fucking the world' to exist as they change their cellphones/tablets/computers/clothes/cars/houses ad nauseum as frequently as fashion 'demands' of them.

Perhaps we've reached the 'bling generation' ...

It's all about whether 'it' is, isn't it?  Even if you accept 'it' is, the 'noble' failure is no less a failure.

I posit that we're too ignorant (in the academic sense) to know WTF to do.  Or not to do.

Many people lack the imagination to extrapolate our collective behaviour into the future.

After all, it is a very abstract problem and many people are having trouble with simpler things like managing their money account.

To most people, the problems of "today" are more important than the problems of "tomorrow" and as poverty grows, this will get just worse.

I've read an article that there could be as many as 11 billion people by the year 2100. That means that poverty (and indifference) will just keep growing.

In our democratic system, this will mean that governments will also be indifferent and unwilling to take decisive action. This is already really difficult in rich countries like the US and European countries, which have plenty of wealth.

So I wonder, even if temperatures rise by the year 2100, even if sea level rises, even if there are more crop failures... these things may just add to poverty and may just be seen as more "problems of today" and may just trigger more and more stopgap measures.

Like the Netherlands... maybe my country will just build higher dikes to keep the ocean out. We might even make a profit by exporting our expertise to other threatened regions. And farmers, maybe they'll just grow more heat-resistent crop varieties.

Agree!

You mean the system is self correcting then? Exactly what should happen 

CO2 has a logarithmic effect on a very narrow infrared band. Whilst it has some notable effect from 0 to X it has none from X to infinity. So technically it is a GHG but in reality it plays a very minor part.

People will try to survive by any means possible, no matter the cost. Genetically altered crops, underground cities, megacities at the poles, food rationing, artificial foods ... things like that and all of that will be really expensive. I think the cost of survival will be higher than the cost of prevention...

Yes, but the economy will be the least of our worries - people will think back to the good old days that people were worried about things like money, instead of the fight for survival of billions of people.

They aren't that old, they were nearly wiped out because of the ice ages. But your point is valid, it's a complete waste to destroy them. And where do we get our wood for building houses and furniture? Wood will become very expensive when there are more people, and less trees.

I care!

I care.